''The Parliament of Bees'' is the best-known of the works of the

Elizabethan The Elizabethan era is the epoch in the Tudor period of the history of England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603). Historians often depict it as the golden age in English history. The symbol of Britannia (a female personifi ...

and Jacobean

dramatist A playwright or dramatist is a person who writes plays. Etymology The word "play" is from Middle English pleye, from Old English plæġ, pleġa, plæġa ("play, exercise; sport, game; drama, applause"). The word "wright" is an archaic English ...

John Day. It was probably written some time between 1608 and 1616, but not published until 1641. The poem was entered into the

Stationers' Register The Stationers' Register was a record book maintained by the Stationers' Company of London. The company is a trade guild given a royal charter in 1557 to regulate the various professions associated with the publishing industry, including print ...

on 23 March 1641 and printed later in the year by the bookseller William Lee. The

quarto Quarto (abbreviated Qto, 4to or 4º) is the format of a book or pamphlet produced from full sheets printed with eight pages of text, four to a side, then folded twice to produce four leaves. The leaves are then trimmed along the folds to produc ...

is titled "The Parliament of Bees, with their Proper Characters. Or a beehive furnished with twelve honeycombs, as pleasant as profitable. Being an allegorical description of the actions of good and bad men in these our days. By John Day, sometimes student of

Caius College Gonville and Caius College, often referred to simply as Caius ( ), is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1348, it is the fourth-oldest of the University of Cambridge's 31 colleges and one of th ...

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

". (Spellings modernized.) The quarto is dedicated to George Butler. The poem also exists in manuscript, identified as

Lansdowne MS. The Lansdowne manuscripts are a significant named collection of the British Library, based on the collection of William Petty, 1st Marquess of Lansdowne. The purchase of the collection by the British Museum was in 1807.''Dictionary of National Biog ...

725. The manuscript's title is "An old manuscript containing the Parliament of Bees, found in a hollow tree in a garden in Hibla, in a strange language, and now faithfully translated into easy English verse by John Day, Cantabridg". (Spellings modernized.) The manuscript is prefaced with Epistles to The Reader and to William Augustine. The printed text and the manuscript show significant differences. Some of the twelve characters had been published prior to 1641. Two, nos. 4 and 5, were printed in a volume titled ''The Noble Soldier'' (1634), attributed to "S. R.". Five others, nos. 2, 3, 7, 8 and 9, appeared under different names in ''The Wonder of a Kingdom'' (1636), attributed to Thomas Dekker. ''The Parliament of Bees'' is a series of dialogues on the subject of "the doings, the births, the wars, the wooings" of bees. The bees hold a parliament under Prorex, the Master Bee, and various complaints are preferred against the humble-bee, the

wasp A wasp is any insect of the narrow-waisted suborder Apocrita of the order Hymenoptera which is neither a bee nor an ant; this excludes the broad-waisted sawflies (Symphyta), which look somewhat like wasps, but are in a separate suborder. Th ...

, the

drone Drone most commonly refers to: * Drone (bee), a male bee, from an unfertilized egg * Unmanned aerial vehicle * Unmanned surface vehicle, watercraft * Unmanned underwater vehicle or underwater drone Drone, drones or The Drones may also refer to: ...

and other offenders. This

satirical Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of shaming or e ...

allegory As a literary device or artistic form, an allegory is a narrative or visual representation in which a character, place, or event can be interpreted to represent a hidden meaning with moral or political significance. Authors have used allegory th ...

of affairs ends with a Royal Progress by

Oberon Oberon () is a king of the fairies in medieval and Renaissance literature. He is best known as a character in William Shakespeare's play ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'', in which he is King of the Fairies and spouse of Titania, Queen of the Fair ...

, who distributes justice to all.

References

* Chambers, E. K., ''The Elizabethan Stage.'' 4 Volumes, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1923.

External links

The parliament of bees at Ann Arbor, MI ; Oxford (UK) :: Text Creation Partnership. {{DEFAULTSORT:Parliament of Bees 1641 poems English poems Plays by John Day (dramatist)