Introduction

Robert Parry is one of the many minor Elizabethan authors who left only a handful of works and few traces of their life. In Parry’s case we do have an unusual resource in that he left a diary. This gives an account of life in England and Wales between 1559 and 1613. ¹ In common with a number of texts of this kind from the early modern period the work is not a diary in the modern sense or even a plain journal. It is more an account of public life interspersed with some notes of events in the writer’s immediate circle. We look in vain for any Pepysian exposure of the diarist’s inner life or the rich eye for detail we find in John Evelyn with whose diary Parry’s has more in common. Indeed, if we only had Parry’s diary we would not even know that he had tried his hand as an author. We do glean one very valuable piece of information, however, and that is that, in 1600, Parry was thirty-four years of age. So he was born in 1566. The significance of this in the evaluation of his literary output will be seen below.