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Five authors, John Lyly, George Peele, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, and Thomas Nashe, all graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, were sufficiently versatile to be called "university wits." Amid various other activities, all of them were impelled by the spirit of the age to write plays.
Nor are touches of higher poetic imagination wanting, as when Time is described as Approaching the romance, as we do, from the point of view rather of the development of the pastoral ideal than of the history of prose narrative or of the novel, we may spare ourselves any detailed consideration of the famous work of John Lyly.
Peele died of a disease brought on by his evil courses; Greene, in extreme destitution, from a surfeit of Rhenish wine and pickled herring, and Marlowe was stabbed in a tavern brawl. The Euphuist Lyly produced eight plays between 1584 and 1601. They were written for court entertainments, mostly in prose and on mythological subjects.
I had thought it had been a man," etc. Lyly's service to the drama consisted in his introduction of an easy and sparkling prose as the language of high comedy, and Shakspere's indebtedness to the fashion thus set is seen in such passages as the wit combats between Benedict and Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing, greatly superior as they are to any thing of the kind in Lyly.
Lyly died in 1606, leaving, as he said, but three legacies; "Patience to my creditors, Melancholie without measure to my friends, and Beggarie without shame to my family." The deeper meaning of Lyly's work, which lies beneath the surface of his similes and antitheses, has escaped almost all his critics. It is suggested by the title, "Euphues, The Anatomy of Wit."
Thus Lyly, in his “Euphues,” 1597, addressing the ladies, hopes they will favour his work, “writing their judgments as you do the poesies in your rings, which are always next to the finger, not to be seen of him that holdeth you by the hand, and yet known by you that wear them on your hands.” Such jingling rhymes were in great request, and exerted the ingenuity of poetasters and small wits.
There are exceptions: the earlier plays of Aeschylus are crude in conception, the prose of Gorgias is as fantastic as that of Lyly, the sentences of Thucydides are often awkward and ungrammatical; Aeschylus stands at the origin of drama, Gorgias and Thucydides are the creators of periodic prose, and they have the weaknesses of pioneers.
It is found in nearly all Elizabethan prose writers, and partially accounts for their general tendency to artificiality. Shakespeare satirizes euphuism in the character of Don Adriano of Love's Labour's Lost, but is himself tiresomely euphuistic at times, especially in his early or "Lylian" comedies. Lyly, by the way, did not invent the style, but did more than any other to diffuse it.
Before leaving the school of Lyly, which included a number of more or less famous writers, I may take the opportunity of mentioning two authors usually reckoned among them. One, John Dickenson, left two works of a pastoral nature. His short romance entitled Arisbas appeared in 1594, and may have supplied Daniel with a hint for the kidnapping of Silvia in Hymen's Triumph.
Theobald does not, that Bacon wrote Lyly, pouring into Lyly's comedies the grace and wit, the quips and conceits of his own courtly youth. "What for no?" The hypothesis is as good as the other hypotheses, "Bacon wrote Marlowe," "Bacon wrote Shakespeare."
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