SOURCE: Cocke, William T., III. “Introduction.” In A Critical Edition of John Day's The Parliament of Bees, pp. xi-xxviii. New York: Garland Publishing, 1979.

[In the excerpt below, Cocke offers an overview of Day's life and work, and focuses on issues of dating Day's work.]

I. LIFE AND WORKS

John Day was born about 1574 at Cawston, Norfolk, the son of “Walter, a husbandman.” He attended school at Ely under a Mr. Speight, and on October 24, 1592, when he was eighteen years old, entered Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, as a sizar. After only six months, on May 4, 1593, he was expelled from the college for stealing a book. These facts are from the Cambridge University register and all but exhaust the official records concerning Day's life.¹

When Day began to write for the London theater is impossible to ascertain. The next mention of his name in any sort of document that can be said to have authority is in 1598 in Philip Henslowe's Diary.² There is listed, however, in the Stationer's Register under the date of April 8, 1654, a play Day is said to have written in collaboration with Christopher Marlowe.³ Since Marlowe was killed in 1593, it would mean that the earliest Day could have begun his playwriting career would have been the year he was expelled from Cambridge. This is highly improbable and it is more than likely, as Bullen has suggested, that Day may have “supplied some additions on the revival of Marlowe's play.”⁴ Unfortunately the play, The Maiden's Holiday, was one of the fifty-five plays destroyed by John Warburton's cook in the early 18th century.⁵

Nothing is known of Day's life from the time of his being sent down from Cambridge in 1593 until that first mention of his name in the Diary on July 30, 1598, when he sold The Conquest of Brute to the Admiral's Men. It is more than a year from this date that Day's name appears again in the Diary, November 1, 1599, but from this date on until March 1603, the year the Diary breaks off, Day's name appears with regularity.⁶ During this period of almost four years Day wrote or collaborated on twenty-one or twenty-two plays, seventeen or eighteen for the Admiral's company and four for Worchester's Men.⁷ From this list of plays only one, The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green, the first part written in 1600 and printed in 1659, has come down to us. Most frequently Day collaborated with William Haughton, with whom his name is joined ten times. Five times Day collaborated with Henry Chettle and four times with Thomas Dekker. He was associated with Richard Hathway and Wentworth Smith in five plays.

After his long association with the two companies backed by Henslowe, he wrote for the Children of the Revels three plays and one for the Queen's Men which have all come down to us.⁸ This was during the period 1604-1608. There are notices of three plays, non-extant, of a later period. They were printed in 1620 and 1623, and all are associated with Dekker's name.⁹ After 1623 only two pieces are known: a revision of a prose pamphlet, Peregrinatio Scholastica, and The Parliament of Bees, published posthumously in 1641.¹⁰ Day died about 1640. This date, like his birth date, is arrived at by deduction. In 1640 there appeared an elegy written by John Tatham, “On his loving friend M. John Day,” in a collection called Fancies Theater.¹¹ It is a lame piece, punning on the poet's name, but its appearance does give us an approximate terminal date. The date the book was entered in the Stationer's Register was October 15, 1640.¹²

Ben Jonson had some unflattering remarks to make about Day on the occasion of his famous visit to Hawthornden. He told Drummond in 1619 that “Sharpham, Day, Dicker were all Rogues. And that Minshew was one.” Subsequently we are told that “Markham (who added his English Arcadia) was not one of the number of the Faithfull. j. Poets and but a base fellow. That such were Day and Middleton.”¹³ As M. E. Borish has pointed out regarding these dicta, “Jonson's condemnations are so inclusive as to lose much of their force.”¹⁴

II. DATE OF COMPOSITION

The date of composition of The Parliament of Bees is very difficult to determine.

The problem of dating the work is twofold. First, there are two versions: a contemporary MS. from the Lansdowne collection which is now in the British Museum,¹⁵ and the 1641 quarto which is the copy-text for this edition.¹⁶ The MS. is undated and differs in many particulars from the printed copy. The Dedication in the MS. is different, being directed to Mr. William Augustine, Esq., a well-known and generous patron of the period who died in 1634 and to whom Day had earlier dedicated his revised prose piece, Peregrinatio Scholastica, ca. 1625-1634, to which he refers in the MS. dedication.¹⁷ For this and stylistic reasons it has been assumed that the Quarto represents a revised and later version of the MS.¹⁸ Second, the date of composition is further complicated by the problem of the relation of The Parliament of Bees to Thomas Dekker's The Noble Spanish Soldier printed in 1634, and The Wonder of a Kingdom printed in 1636,¹⁹ but both licensed in 1631.²⁰ These two plays have long been assumed by some critics to be revisions of earlier plays: The Spanish Fig, an unfinished play in which Dekker and Day may or may not have collaborated and for which Henslowe paid an advance on January 6, 1602; and Come See a Wonder, which was licensed as Day's on September 18, 1623.²¹ However, Fredson Bowers, Dekker's most recent editor,²² and Gerald E. Bentley do not wholly endorse these assumptions.²³The Parliament of Bees is inextricably involved with these plays because of the more than passing similarity between several Characters in The Parliament of Bees and several scenes in the plays. These similarities may be divided into these four groups:

• (1) Characters I, XI, and XII which are unquestionably by Day.
• (2) Characters II, III, VII, IX, and X which are related to certain passages in The Wonder of a Kingdom.
• (3) Characters IV and V which are related to certain passages in The Noble Spanish Soldier.
• (4) Characters VI and VIII which are connected to Characters IV and V but which are apparently not related to The Noble Spanish Soldier.

Bullen was the first to notice the similarity to The Wonder of a Kingdom,²⁴ and before his edition was printed he had called to his attention the other similarity.²⁵ He does not, however, conjecture any dates of composition for The Parliament of Bees. He does say that as Dekker and Day are known to have been collaborators on more than one occasion “a generous critic” could assume that either Day or Dekker allows the other to use his work. Bullen would like to think that Day, after the death of Dekker about 1632, used the means of printing The Parliament of Bees as a way of reclaiming his contributions to various plays.²⁶ This seems to me to be overly generous.

E. K. Chambers in dating the composition of The Parliament of Bees finds it “impossible to resist seeing … in the Fenerator or Usuring Bee [X, 45-47]” the character of Philip Henslowe.²⁷ Since Henslowe died in 1616, Chambers would antedate the composition, and he proposes that perhaps Day wrote but did not publish The Parliament of Bees in 1608-1616 and used it as “a quarry of material when he was called upon to work, as a reviser or collaborator, on the plays [i.e., Come See a Wonder and The Spanish Fig].”²⁸

S. R. Golding proposes ca. 1633-1634 as a date more likely and one which would precede both The Noble Spanish Soldier and The Wonder of a Kingdom.²⁹ In his article Golding is the first critic to consider thoroughly the MS. and Quarto variants and their relation to the two plays in question. He concludes “in the absence of any positive knowledge as to the contents of The Spanish Fig and Come See a Wonder, my surmise that Day was indebted to these plays for the MS. copy of nine of the Characters in the Bees must naturally remain a mere theory.”³⁰ The MS. and Quarto passages which parallel the plays are not evidence for Day's collaboration in either play but rather “seem to have been lifted almost bodily—in some cases with only slight modification—from The Noble Soldier and The Wonder of a Kingdom. Where the quarto of the Bees corresponds to the passages in these plays, Dekker's craftsmanship is nearly always distinguishable; where it deviates Day's hand is equally well marked.”³¹

The most exhaustive study of this problem of relations has been done by M. E. Borish. His conclusion is that there is a possibility the MS. was composed before the licensing of the two Dekker plays.³² In addition, his examination of the relation between the readings exclusive to the Quarto and the two plays shows that the Quarto was obligated to the two plays for only some thirty lines, but that these two plays were probably revisions of earlier plays on which Dekker and Day may have collaborated.³³ Borish believes the Quarto to have been written between 1634 and 1640,³⁴ and he would date the MS. between 1623 and 1631.³⁵

A different kind of study of the relation of Day to The Noble Soldier has been done by William Peery.³⁶ He attempts to show through a stylistic examination of the verse of The Noble Spanish Soldier and The Parliament of Bees that the exactness of Day's rhymes indicates Dekker was borrowing and putting the Day couplets into “a free rendition of it [The Parliament of Bees] in blank verse.”³⁷ He believes that the Quarto was written between January 16, 1634, the date of William Augustine's death, and October 15, 1640, the date of Tatham's elegy on Day.³⁸ Peery does not offer any date for the composition of the MS.

Fredson Bowers in his edition of Thomas Dekker maintains, quite naturally, that “the burden of proof should rest with those who would argue that the most characteristic Dekker passages in the play [The Wonder of a Kingdom] are stolen from Day.”³⁹ He prefers Golding's thesis that the MS. should be dated 1633-1634 and that where parallels exist between the Quarto of The Parliament of Bees and the Dekker plays, it is Dekker's hand which is clear.⁴⁰ Bowers rejects along with G. E. Bentley the theory that The Noble Spanish Soldier is a rewording of The Spanish Fig;⁴¹ and he does not consider the possibility that The Wonder of a Kingdom could be the same as Day's Come See a Wonder.

It should be fairly clear from the above that each critic will champion his own man and is able to make a good case that it is the other man who is the thief. Furthermore, it does not seem to be possible to establish any but nugatory arguments in these charges of plagiarism which all hinge on non-extant plays and their relations to plays whose dates of composition are not at all certain. These issues are best avoided here in the absence of established facts. What is at issue here is establishing, as far as is possible, the dates of composition of the MS. version and Quarto of The Parliament of Bees.

The Quarto dates of composition can be easily disposed of. Day's death sometime before October 15, 1640, gives us a satisfactory terminus ad quem. The death of William Augustine, the dedicatee of the MS., in 1634 is a probable terminus a quo. However, it must be kept in mind that it is possible, even if we assume that the change in dedication from Augustine to Butler was due to the former's death, that the MS. had been altered to produce the Quarto version at some previous date.

The dating of the MS. is more difficult to ascertain. The death of Augustine is once again suitable for helping establish a date. Here the terminus ad quem would be 1634. The earliest possible date of the composition of the revised Peregrinatio Scholastica, the dedication of which is referred to in the dedication of the MS. of The Parliament of Bees, would set a possible terminus a quo of 1625. Therefore, it would seem that conservative estimates set the composition of the MS. version between 1625 and 1634, and the Quarto between 1634 and 1640.

Notes

1. Alumni Cantabrigienses, compiled by John and J. A. Venn (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1922), Part I to 1751, Vol. II, 23.

2. Henslowe's Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1961), p. 96.

3. George E. B. Eyre and Charles R. Rivington, eds. A Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers 1640-1708 A.D. (New York: Peter Smith, 1950), I, 445.

4. A. H. Bullen, ed. The Works of John Day (Reprinted from the 1881 Edition with an Introduction by Robin Jeffs, London: Holland Press, 1963), pp. 640-641.

5. For a listing of these plays see Frederick Thornhill “Old Dramas in Mr. Warburton's Collection,” Gentleman's Magazine, LXXXV, ii (September, 1815), 217-222.

6. Diary, pp. 126, 127, 129, etc.

7. See Table II for a full listing of these plays with dates of composition or publication.

8. Edward Arber, ed. A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554-1640 A.D. (New York: Peter Smith, 1950), III, 354, 372, 374.

9. Ibid., 662; and The Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert, ed. Joseph Q. Adams (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1917), pp. 24, 25 and n.

10. Bullen, p. 483; and Eyre and Rivington, I, 17.

11. (London: Printed by John Norton for Richard Best, 1640), signatures F3v, F4.

12. Arber, IV, 523.

13. Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1925-1952), I, 133, 137.

14. Murray Eugene Borish, “John Day” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Department of English, Harvard University, 1931), p. 7.

15. Landsdowne MS. 725.

16. For a complete listing of where the twelve known copies of the Quarto are located, see Section III of this Introduction, p. xxv.

17. See M. E. Borish, “A Second Version of John Day's Peregrinatio Scholastica,” Modern Language Notes, LV (1940), 35-39, for a fuller discussion of this revision.

18. G. E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1956), III, 258.

19. Ibid., pp. 257; 273.

20. Arber, IV, 253.

21. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1923), III, 288; 300.

22. Fredson Bowers, ed. The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1961), IV, 234-235.

23. Bentley, III, 258-259.

24. Bullen, pp. 629-630.

25. Ibid., p. 660.

26. Ibid., p. 630.

27. Chambers, III, 288.

28. Ibid.

29. “The Parliament of Bees,” The Review of English Studies, III (1927), 282.

30. Ibid., 303-304.

31. Ibid., 304.

32. Borish, p. 468.

33. Ibid., pp. 442-443.

34. Ibid., p. 463.

35. Ibid., pp. 468-469.

36. “The Noble Soldier and The Parliament of Bees,” Studies in Philology, XLVIII (1951), 219-233.

37. Ibid., 233.

38. Ibid., 221, nn.

39. Bowers, III, 574.

40. Ibid., IV, 233-234.

41. Ibid., 234-235.

Works Frequently Cited

Adams: Joseph Q. Adams, ed. The Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert. New Haven, 1917.

Arber: Edward Arber, ed. A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554-1640 A.D. New York, 1950.

Bullen: A. H. Bullen, ed. The Works of John Day. Reprinted from the 1881 Edition with an Introduction by Robin Jeffs, London, 1963.

Bentley: Gerald E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage. Oxford, 1941-1956.

Butler: Charles Butler, The Feminine Monarchie, or a Historie of Bees. London, 1623.

Chambers: E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage. Oxford, 1923.

Diary: Henslowe's Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert. Cambridge, 1961.

Eyre and Rivington: George E. B. Eyre and Charles R. Rivington, eds. A Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, 1640-1708 A.D. New York, 1950.

MS.: “The Parliament of Bees.” Lansdowne MS. 725.

OED: Oxford English Dictionary.

Q: The Parliament of Bees, Quarto of 1641.

Symons: Arthur Symons, ed. Nero and Other Plays. London, 1888.

Tilley: Morris Palmer Tilley. A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Ann Arbor, 1950.