SOURCE: Schoenbaum, Samuel. “John Day and the Elizabethan Drama.” In Boston Public Library Quarterly 5, No. 3 (July 1953): 140-52.

In this essay, Schoenbaum argues that Day's reputation as a mediocre hack is undeserved. Although he acknowledges Day's limits as a poet and dramatist, the critic praises his skill in writing to please his audience, and suggests that Day's works are undervalued because these light comedies were written in an era when dark tragedies dominated the stage.

Of all the dramatists of the Elizabethan age, John Day has been perhaps the most neglected. Treated rather poorly by his contemporaries, he has fared even worse in the judgment of posterity. In his earlier career one of Henslowe's industrious and impoverished hacks, in later life “becalmde in a fogg of necessity,”¹ he labored much and received little reward. In later times his name has been almost entirely forgotten. Lamb, it is true, was...