=Life.=--John Lyly was born in Kent between October 8, 1553, and
January, 1554. He entered Magdalen College, Oxford, 1569, but was
almost immediately rusticated. Returning in October, 1571, he was
graduated B.A. April 27, 1573. In May, 1574, he wrote unsuccessfully
to Lord Burleigh, begging for a fellowship at Magdalen. He proceeded
M.A. June 1, 1575, and lived mainly at the Universities till 1579.
_Euphues, the Anatomie of Wit_, appeared between December, 1578, and
spring, 1579. Another edition was printed in 1579; twelve others before
1637. In _An Address to the Gentlemen Scholars of Oxford_, prefixed to
the second, the 1579, edition, he answered a charge of having unfairly
criticised Oxford in the _Anatomie of Wit_. A sequel, _Euphues and his
England_, was licensed July 24, 1579, but did not appear for months.
Probably Lyly shared in the disfavour which, from late July, 1579, to
July, 1580, the Queen showed the party of Robert Dudley because of his
secret marriage with the Countess of Essex. _Endimion_, probably the
first of Lyly's extant comedies, was presented between late July and
early November, 1579, as an allegorical treatment of this quarrel. In
or near July, 1580, Lyly was "entertained as servant" by the Queen, and
was advised to aim at the Mastership of the Revels. By July, 1582, he
is to be found in the household of Lord Burleigh. A letter of his was
prefixed to Watson's _Passionate Centurie of Love_, published 1582.
By 1589, possibly earlier, he had become vice-master of St. Paul's
choir school. Before 1584 the Chapel Children and the Paul's Boys,
for whom he had written, ceased to act. During 1584 his _Sapho and
Phao_, written not long after February 6, 1582, and his _Alexander and
Campaspe_ were printed. _Tityrus and Gallathea_, licensed in 1584, was
not printed till 1592. Probably the main plot was written before 1584,
and the sub-plot for a revision of the play in or near 1588. From 1585
Lyly wrote for the Paul's Boys till in or near 1591, when the company
was again silent. The Chapel Children were not acting publicly between
November, 1584, and 1597. His _Mydas_ was acted between August, 1588,
and November, 1589, and printed in 1592. In August or September, 1589,
a pamphlet entitled _Pappe-with-an-Hatchet_, written by him for the
High Church party in the Marprelate controversy, made its appearance.
His _Mother Bombie_ was acted in 1589 or 1590, and printed in 1594.
_Alexander and Campaspe_ and _Sapho and Phao_ were reprinted in 1591,
and in the same year _Endimion_ was printed. _Gallathea_ appeared in
1592. Lyly wrote, in 1590 or 1591, an apparently unsuccessful begging
letter to the Queen, and another in 1593 or 1594. He was married by
1589, and he had two sons and one daughter. He was member of Parliament
for Hindon in 1589; for Aylesbury in 1593 and 1601; and for Appleby in
1597. _The Woman in the Moone_ was licensed in 1595, printed in 1597.
The quality of the blank verse in this play and the absence of marked
Euphuism favour a date of composition in or near 1590. _Lillie's Light_
was licensed June 3, 1596. If printed, it is non-extant. He wrote
prefatory Latin lines for Henry Lock's _Ecclesiastes_, otherwise called
_The Preacher_, in 1597. In 1597-1600 the Chapel Children revived his
plays. The _Maid's Metamorphosis_, incorrectly attributed to Lyly,
was printed in 1600. His _Love's Metamorphosis_ was printed in 1601:
it had been written about the time of the _Gallathea_,--before 1584,
or between 1588 and 1591. The Protea-Petulius part is probably from a
different play, or is a survival in a revision. Lyly died November 30,
1606, and was buried at St. Bartholomew's.[751]
=The Place of Euphues in English Literature.=--John Lyly was poet,
pamphleteer, novelist, and dramatist. As a pamphleteer he is
unimportant. As a poet he can best be studied in his plays. It is,
then, as novelist and dramatist that he is important. The material of
the two parts of the _Euphues_ makes it decidedly significant in its
own time. It is not, like most of the stories of Greene and Lodge,
mere romance, nor, like Nash's _Jack Wilton_, a tale of adventure
phrased with reportorial recklessness. It is a love story in which
romance is subordinated to the inculcation of ideas of high living and
thinking, and the demands of an involved style. It dimly foreshadows
two literary products which reach a development only long after
the days of Elizabeth--the novel with a purpose, and the stylistic
novel. The appearance of the book was epochal. Young writers of the
day--Munday, Greene, Nash, and Lodge--copied its style. Courtiers
patterned their speech upon it. Yet Gabriel Harvey was probably right
when he ill-naturedly wrote: "Young Euphues but hatched the egges that
his elder freendes laide." The _Anatomie_, at least, is such a book as
a recent university graduate of the present day, well read in some of
the classics, and especially susceptible to new literary influences
and cults, might compile. In the division _Euphues and His Ephœbus_
Lyly uses, with a few omissions and additions, Plutarch on _Education_;
in the letter to Botonio he translates Plutarch on _Exile_. In the
part _Euphues and Atheos_ he is indebted to chapters 9, 10, 11, and
12 of the _Dial of Princes_ (1529) by Antonio de Guevara, Bishop of
Guadix and Mendoza. Euphues and Lucilla debate "dubii," or artificial
discussions of set questions, such as one finds in Hortensio Lando
or Castiglione. There is, too, almost constant use of the unnatural
natural history of Pliny. All this material is bound together by a
style which, though it may ultimately be traced to the rounded periods
of Cicero, had developed slowly in writers of the Renaissance and the
years just before _Euphues_ appeared. George Pettie, for instance, in
his _Pettie Palace of Pettie His Pleasure_, published in 1576, has all
the stylistic characteristics of the _Euphues_ except the fabulous
natural history. It is, however, to Guevara in the _Dial of Princes_
that Lyly is thought to be particularly indebted for his style. This
man used "lavishly the well-known figures of pointed antithesis and
parisonic balanced clauses, in connection with a general climactic
structure of the sentence or period, the emphatic or antithetic words
being marked by rhyme or assonance." Lyly substitutes for rhyme
alliteration, and adds persistent play on words. The book is genuinely
Renaissance, then, for, looking to classic literature for much of its
substance, it expresses itself in a style that typifies an intellectual
mood of the hour.
=Lyly's Plays: their Subdivision.=--Just before 1580 the acting of
choir boys was in great favour with the Queen and, as a consequence,
with the public. The boys of Westminster, Windsor, the Chapel Royal,
and St. Paul's were often summoned to court. For the last two
companies, with whom acting became a profession, Lyly wrote his plays.
These divide into four classes. The allegorical comedies, in which what
is alluded to is as important as what is said, are _Endimion_, _Sapho
and Phao_, and _Mydas_. _Endimion_, perhaps the most complete example
of Lyly's allegorical comedy, presents the apology of Leicester to the
Queen for his secret marriage with Lettice, Countess of Essex. _Sapho
and Phao_ is full of allusions to the coquetting of the Queen with
the Duc d'Alençon and his wrathful departure from England in February,
1582. _Mydas_ allegorises--though with less detail than the others--as
to the designs of Philip II. on the English throne, and the Spanish
Armada. _Gallathea_, _Love's Metamorphosis_, and _The Woman in the
Moone_ form a second class--pastoral comedies. They are allegorical
only when some figure is given qualities which the Queen was fond of
hearing praised as hers. _Mother Bombie_, standing alone as a comedy
on the model of Plautus, has a much more involved plot than any of the
other plays. Finally, also in a class by itself, is _Alexander and
Campaspe_.
In this, as in all the comedies except _Mother Bombie_ and _Love's
Metamorphosis_, Lyly used classic myth for his chief material. Yet
he but followed a custom of the day, for most of the plays given at
court between 1570 and 1590 by the children's companies were based
on such material: for instance, _Iphigenia_, _Narcissus_, _Alcmæon_,
_Quintus Fabius_, and _Scipio Africanus_. These subjects seem to have
been treated as pastorals, histories, and possibly allegories. Lyly
rejected in _Alexander and Campaspe_ the allegorical and the pastoral
form, and told rather naïvely, except in style, the story of the love
of Alexander and Apelles for Campaspe, repeating in his sub-plot many
historic retorts of Diogenes. In details of method Lyly seems to
have had a precursor. Richard Edwardes (born 1523, died 1566) in his
_Damon and Pythias_, printed in 1582, but usually assigned to 1564,
wrote in a way very suggestive of Lyly in _Alexander and Campaspe_. He
disclaimed in his prologue intention of referring to any court except
that of Dionysius at Syracuse; introduced lyrics; gave Aristippus
the philosopher an important place; inveighed against flattery at
the court; brought in the comic episode of Grim the collier without
connection with the main plot, just as Lyly often introduces his comic
material; and derived the fun of this scene mainly from two impudent
pages. Certainly it would have been natural for Lyly, early in his
career, to look to the plays of a former prominent master of the Chapel
Children.
=Alexander and Campaspe: Date, Sources.=--The exact date of _Alexander
and Campaspe_ it seems impossible to determine. It was written before
April, 1584, for it was licensed for printing in that month. The facts
that similes and references in _Euphues_ are found in it, and that the
work--here of a kind which Lyly never exactly repeats--resembles the
early _Damon and Pythias_ suggest that _Alexander and Campaspe_ belongs
early in his dramatic career. It has been held that it should precede
_Endimion_, but the allegory in that play; the fact that Blount, who
places _Sapho and Phao_, _Gallathea_, _Mydas_, and _Mother Bombie_ in
the order approved by the most recent criticism, puts it second; and
the better characterization, more natural dialogue, and slightly closer
binding together of the main and the sub-plot, argue for the second
place.
The play, like the _Anatomie of Wit_, is a composite. The main
plot--the story of Apelles and Campaspe--Lyly found in Book 35 of
Pliny's _History of the World_. His setting he took from Plutarch's
_Life of Alexander_. That, too, gave him the siege of Thebes, Timoclea,
some of the philosophers' names, most of their speeches, the generals,
and Hephestion, and probably suggested the possibilities of Diogenes as
a comic figure. The material for the scenes of the Cynic, and the name
Manes, he found in the _Lives of the Philosophers_ by Diogenes Laertius.
=Literary Estimate.=--In the extant plays from 1550 to 1580 love has
but a subordinate part. In _Alexander and Campaspe_, however, as in all
the Lyly comedies, the central idea is that of nearly all the great
plays of the Elizabethan drama--the love of man for woman. Doubtless
the subject appealed to Lyly especially because in the self-abnegation
of Alexander the Queen might choose to see a compliment to her final
position toward Leicester and the Countess of Essex. Diogenes he used
in order to get comic relief. That Lyly's comedies are comparatively
free from vulgarity is probably because they were given by children
before the Queen and her ladies. Possibly the youth of the actors is
the reason for the absence of strong emotional expression, but it
is more probable that the temperament of the author is responsible.
It is hard to believe that a dramatist who felt keenly emotional
possibilities in his material could have passed by Timoclea so rapidly,
for in Plutarch she has all the requisites of the heroine in a Beaumont
and Fletcher play. Nor would such a dramatist have made so little of
the struggle of Alexander between infatuation and the desire to regain
his accustomed self-command. Lyly's position toward his work is like
that of the early writers of chronicle-history plays. He does not
depend on selecting the most characteristic situations and speeches, on
supplying missing motives, on unification of material which history has
passed down in somewhat disordered fashion, but on repeating as many as
possible of the situations and speeches associated with the names. Like
those writers, too, he makes no attempt to get behind his material, to
see its interrelations and its dramatic significance as a whole.
Some allowance, however, must be made for faults in this play, for the
Prologue states that it was hastily written. The comedy itself shows
that Lyly planned as he wrote. The opening scene of the play leaves
one to suppose that Timoclea, who, rather than Campaspe, is the chief
female speaker, is to play an important part. She never appears again,
and is mentioned but once. Later parts of the play call for some
manifestation, in this first scene, of Campaspe's intense fascination
for Alexander, but there is nothing of the kind. Nor does the action in
any later scene really prepare for Alexander's self-reproaches for his
mad infatuation. Until late in the play, when Lyly speaks of Campaspe
as Alexander's concubine, a reader is not even entirely clear as to
their relations. Perhaps some of this lack of clearness and sequence
may result because the Timoclea part, at least, of the first scene is a
survival from an older play. In the _Accounts of the Revels at Court_,
under an entry for expenditures between January and February, 1573(4),
"One Playe showen at Hampton Coorte before her Maᵗⁱᵉ by Mr. Munkester's
Children" (Mulcaster's of the Merchant Taylors' School) is mentioned.
Interlined are the words: "Timoclia at the Sege of Thebes by Alexander."
The movement of the comedy is episodic. The clever little pages bind
the scenes together; Alexander connects the incidents of the main
story; but too often, especially in the sub-plot, the action is not
prepared for, and does not lead to anything. Nor does Lyly care much
for climax. The Diogenes sub-plot does not end; it is dropped just
before the main story closes. The great dramatic possibilities of
the final scene are practically thrown away. It is significant that
they could be developed only by a hand which could paint vividly the
contest of a soul, the gradual reascendency of old motives, and manly
renunciation.
Growth in character Lyly does not understand. As a rule his figures
are types rather than many-sided human beings. Nor are the types
always self-consistent. All the nobility of Alexander's renunciation
disappears when he says: "Go, Apelles, take with you your Campaspe;
Alexander is cloyed with looking on that which thou wond'rest at." In
general, Lyly is too ready to depend on the way in which his figures
speak rather than on truth to life in what they speak. In the retorts
of Apelles as he talks with Alexander of his work, there is, of course,
something of the real artist's pride in his art and irritation at royal
omniscience. There is characterization, too, in many of the speeches
of Diogenes, but in both of these instances Lyly is either quoting or
paraphrasing. Campaspe, it is true, is almost a character, and slightly
anticipates the arch heroines of Shakespeare. Hers are coquettishness,
womanly charm. In her scene with Apelles in the studio (Act IV. scene
2), the underlying passion of both almost breaks through the frigid
medium of expression. The pages may doubtless be traced back to the
witty, graceless slaves of Latin comedy, and more immediately to
precursors in the work of Edwardes, but Lyly adds so much individuality
and humour that they are a real accession in the history of the drama.
Moreover, many of his figures often comment incisively on customs and
follies of the time, preparing for the later comedy of manners.
No preceding play is so full of charming and lasting lyrics. In all
his comedies except _The Woman in the Moone_, Lyly writes neither in
the usual jingling rhymes nor the infrequently used blank verse, but
in prose. He shows the men of his day new possibilities in dialogue;
for though his artificial style prevents easy characterisation, it
does not keep him from effective repartee and a closer representation
of the give and take of real conversation than was possible with the
rhyming lines, or with blank verse as it was handled in his day.
Probably, however, the greatest importance of this play for the student
of Elizabethan drama is the way it shows interest in a romantic story
breaking through classic material and Renaissance expression, thus
anticipating the romantic drama of 1587. Clearly, then, the merits of
_Alexander and Campaspe_ are literary and historical, not dramatic.
=Lyly's Development as a Dramatist.=--That Lyly worked, however,
steadily toward more genuine drama becomes clear if one reads his plays
in order. In all he shows classical influence by his choice of subject,
or by constant allusion, but he is not a scholar in the sense of Jonson
or Chapman. He is well read in certain authors--Ovid, particularly
the _Metamorphoses_, Plutarch, Pliny, perhaps Lucian; he has at his
tongue's end many stock Latin quotations, and delights in misquoting
or paraphrasing for the sake of a pun, sure that the quick-witted
courtiers will recognize the originals. Classical in construction
he certainly is not. His interest is to find a pretty love story
which gives opportunities for dramatic surprises and complications,
effective groupings, graceful dances, and dainty lyrics. He is fertile
in finding interesting figures to bring upon the stage--the fairies of
_Endimion_, the fiddlers of _Mother Bombie_, the shepherds of _Love's
Metamorphosis_. If one examines the only two plays of his which lack
the contrasting comic under-plot,--_Love's Metamorphosis_, and _The
Woman in the Moone_,--it becomes clear that they are pastorals or
masques. Even the other plays owe to their sub-plots the right to be
called comedies. By choice of topics and by temperament, then, Lyly is
a writer of masques.
At first he developed his two plots side by side, as in _Endimion_. One
is used simply to relieve the other, or to fill time-spaces necessary
between incidents of the main plot. Later, he joins the two slightly
by letting figures in the sub-plot refer to incidents of the main
story. In _Mother Bombie_ he brings the groups together formally two
or three times, and closes the play with nearly all the characters on
the stage. In his last comedy, _The Woman in the Moone_, he discards
contrasted plots, and tries to get his effects from one large group
of figures. Even if his success in meeting his problem is not great,
the mere recognition of it is significant. Yet it cannot be said that
he ever becomes a good plotter, for he is always willing to bring in
anywhere new people, new interests, or even, as in _Mydas_, to shift to
a new plot midway. In _Mother Bombie_, when the climax of complication
is reached in the meeting of the disguised Accius and Silena and their
fathers, Lyly is unable to master the difficulties of the situation.
He lets the two reveal themselves tamely, confusingly, before he has
had anything like the potential fun out of the scene. Usually the plays
ramble gently on till Lyly thinks the audience must have enough; then
the _deus ex machina_ appears, and all ends. Climax in closing he seems
not to try for, but is content to end with a telling phrase.
In characterization his work varies. In the allegories he wishes merely
to suggest well-known figures; distinct, final characterization would
be out of place, even dangerous. In the pastoral-masques, the land of
fantasy, the lines of characterization need not be sharply drawn. But
even if one looks at _Mother Bombie_ and the sub-plots of the plays,
one sees that though there is perhaps a slight gain in portraying the
figures, the people are too often significant for the way in which
they talk rather than for action or characterizing speech. When Lyly
attempts strong presentation of crucial moments or pathos, he stammers,
or is particularly conventional.
As he develops, he modifies the eccentricities of his style. Nor is
it probable that the passing of the popular enthusiasm for Euphuism
is wholly responsible for this. He had the good sense to see the
superiority of prose to verse as the expression of comedy, and he
must have felt how much his rigidly artificial style cramped him. In
_Mother Bombie_, 1589-91, Euphuism is well-nigh gone. In its place we
have a style in which characterized dialogue is more possible and more
evident. In _The Woman in the Moone_ the exigencies of verse are too
much for Euphuism, and it practically disappears.
Very slowly, then, Lyly was working toward a drama of simple
characterizing dialogue, more unified, and at the same time more
complex. Even as he worked, however, Kyd, Greene, and Marlowe swept by
to accomplishment impossible for him under any conditions.
=His Place in English Comedy.=--John Lyly is not merely, then, as has
been too often suggested, a scholar "picking fancies out of books
(with) little else to marvel at." He was keenly alive to foreign and
domestic influences at work about him. His use of what other men
offer foreshadows the marvellous assimilative power of Shakespeare.
He seems to retain and apply with freedom all the similes and
illustrations that come in his way; many are not to be hunted down
except in out-of-the-way corners of the books best known to him. Only
a man of poetic feeling would have cared to work in these allegories
and pastorals. Humorous he is in the scenes of the pages. Here and
there, as in some of the replies of Apelles to Alexander, and in the
words of Parmenio on the rising sun (Act I, scene 1), there is caustic
irony. Lyly is a thinker, too, and a critic, as his frequent satire of
existing social customs or follies shows. Now and then he is fearless;
for instance, in his portrayal before the Queen of the artist's
contempt for royal assumption of knowledge (Act III, scene 4), and in
his comment on the impossibility of happy love between a subject and a
monarch (Act IV, scene 4). His allegories show best his ingenuity and
inventiveness. His mastery of involved phrasing is indubitable.
Without doubt, however, his attitude toward his work is more that of
the scholar than the poet or dramatist. His work is imitation of others
who seem to him models, with the main attention on style. He has the
inventiveness of the dramatist, but not his instinct for technique or
recognition of the possibilities of a story and care in working them
out. He never says a thing for himself if he can find it anywhere
in a recognized author. In this, however, he shared in the mood of
Spenser and his group. Indeed, a little comparison of Lyly with Spenser
will show that, though in accomplishment he is far below the poet,
he expresses in his comedies the historical influences, the existing
intellectual conditions, and the literary aspirations which Spenser
phrases in his early work. It is in poetic power, in imaginative sweep,
that the two separate widely.
Yet Lyly, drawing on what preceded and what surrounded him, did more
than express the literary mood and desires of his day. Through him
the lyric in the drama came to Dekker, Jonson, and Shakespeare, more
dainty and more varied. He broke the way for later men to use prose
as the means of expression for comedy. He gave them suggestions for
clever dialogue. At a time of loose and hurried dramatic writing he
showed that literary finish might well accompany such composition. His
pages are the prototypes of the boys and servants in Peele, Chapman,
Jonson, and Shakespeare. In a small way he foreshadowed the comedy of
manners. For as close a relationship between the drama and politics as
we find in his allegories, we must look to the declining days of the
Jacobean drama--to Middleton's _Game of Chess_. The romantic spirit
found expression in him, not in a drama of blood, but in pastorals
and masques which look forward to the masques of Jonson, to _Love's
Labour's Lost_, _Midsummer Night's Dream_, and _As You Like It_. His
influence on the highly sensitized mind of Shakespeare may be traced in
many lines and scenes.
His vogue as a dramatist was short. By 1590 the boisterous, romantic
drama, the often inchoate chronicle history, both frequently
accompanied by scenes of would-be comic horse-play, engrossed public
attention. The great period of experimentation with both old and crude
forms was beginning. It is not surprising that when Lyly's plays
were revived by the Chapel Children in 1597-1600, they could not
stand comparison with the work of Jonson, Dekker, Heywood, and other
dramatists of the day, but were called "musty fopperies of antiquity."
Their work, in bridging from the classic to romantic comedy, as
the Drama of Blood bridged from Seneca to real tragedy, was done.
Thereafter their main interest must be historical.
=Previous Editions and the Present Text.=--The title of the first
quarto (1584) is, "A moste excellent Comedie of Alexander, Campaspe,
and Diogenes, played before the Queene's Maiestie on twelfe day
at night, by her Maiestie's Children, and the Children of Paules.
Imprinted at London, for Thomas Cadman, 1584." In the second edition,
issued the same year by the same publisher, the title is changed to
_Campaspe_, and the play is said to have been given "on new yeares
day at night." The title, _Campaspe_, was retained in the third
quarto, 1591, for William Broome, and in Edward Blount's duodecimo
collective edition, 1632. (Manly.) Both, too, state that the play was
given "on twelfe-day at night." The headlines of all the quartos read
_Alexander and Campaspe_; of Blount, _A tragicall Comedie of Alexander
and Campaspe_. Besides the quartos and Blount's _Sixe Court Comedies_
there are these reprints: in Vol. II., Dodsley's _Select Collection of
Old Plays_, 1825; in Vol. I., _John Lilly's Dramatic Works_, F. W.
Fairholt, 1858; in Vol. II., _Specimens of the Pre-Shaksperean Drama_,
J. M. Manly, 1897. In the footnotes of the present edition the quartos
are indicated by A. B. and C., the other editions by Bl. Do. F. and M.
respectively. Blount's text, mainly, is followed. The variant readings
of the quartos are given on the authority of Fairholt.