While early modern books provide ample evidence of manuscript and printed sheets repurposed for uses far different from those imagined by their original creators, some surviving archival material challenges the idea of “waste paper” as a product of non-authorial agency. Our presentation examines a particularly suggestive example in the theatrical archives of Dulwich College: a letter addressed to Philip Henslowe written on the back of a fragment of dramatic verse in the hand of John Day. Contextualizing this scrap of paper within the Admiral’s Men’s commissioning and performance schedule, we argue that the verses represent Day’s first draft of a speech from a play he was in the process of writing. However, unlike the vast majority of extant authorial dramatic manuscripts, the Day scrap is remarkable for its brevity and its untidy, almost illegible appearance. We propose that Day was composing these verses fully aware that the paper on which he was writing would become waste, as indeed it soon did. In contrast to the recent skeptical accounts of “foul papers” as a distinct category in the English dramatic archive, we argue that the Day scrap constitutes a neglected piece of evidence about the “foulness” of authorial drafts, the status of the paper on which they were inscribed, and the institutional reasons why more examples do not survive today.