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Updated: June 1, 2025
But what concerns us here is the fact that when Shakespeare wrote, although he yielded too much now and then to the passion for gongorism and euphuism which had spread all over Europe, it was against the nature of his genius to be influenced by the contemporary passion for allegory.
Where would then be the place of him who never passes into ratiocination or rhetoric, never passes into excessive word-painting or into euphuism, never speaks so loud as to be heard rather than overheard, but, on the contrary, gives us always clear and simple pictures, and always in musical language?
A little specimen of the conversation may not be out of place, were it but to show young ladies what fine things they have lost by living when Euphuism is out of fashion.
The literary affectation called euphuism was directly based on the precepts of the handbooks on rhetoric; its author, John Lyly, only elaborated and made more precise tricks of phrase and writing, which had been used as exercises in the schools of his youth.
Its name is quaint, for so was its discoverer, Luke Fox, a worthy man, addicted much to euphuism. Fox sailed from London in the same year in which James sailed from Bristol. They were rivals. Meeting in Davis Straits, Fox dined on board his friendly rival's vessel, which was very unfit for the service upon which it went.
The world is so much with us, nowadays, that we need have something that prates to us, albeit even in too fine a euphuism, of the moon and stars. Certes, to Leonard Fairfield, at that period of his intellectual life, the softness of our Helicon descended as healing dews.
The name "Euphuism" became a current description of an artificial way of using words that overflowed out of writing into speech and was in the mouths, while the vogue lasted, of everybody who was anybody in the circle that fluttered round the Queen. The style of Euphues was parodied by Shakespeare and many attempts have been made to imitate it since.
The "Countercuff," published in August, 1589, from Gravesend, shows a great advance in power. The academic Euphuism has been laid aside; images and trains of thought are taken from life and experience instead of from books.
It is hard to imagine the master-dramatist of the world—it is hard to imagine the poet who, by setting his foot upon allegory, saved our poetry from drying up after the invasion of gongorism, euphuism, and allegory—it is, we say, hard to imagine Shakespeare, if he had conceived and written such lovely episodes as those of the ‘Idylls of the King,’ so full of concrete pictures, setting about to turn his flesh-and-blood characters into symbolic abstractions.
Observe the balance of clauses in the following sentence from Kalander's speech, which inclines perhaps towards Euphuism: I am no herald to enquire of mens pedegrees, it sufficeth me if I know their vertues, which, if this young mans face be not a false witnes, doe better apparrell his minde, then you have done his body.
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