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Updated: June 18, 2025
Lyly's work was a novel experiment in prose, without previous parallel; critical judgments were no very long time in detecting and condemning his extravagances. But the same intellectual motive was soon to find a more chastened and artistic expression in the work of one who was still but a literary experimentalist when he meet his death at Zutphen.
If as much attention were devoted in England to poetry as to oratory, he thinks, poetry would be in as good state as her sister "Rhetoricall Eloquution, as they were by byrth Twyns, by kinde the same, by original of one descent." As an example of the high degree of excellence attained by eloquence, he cites Lyly's Euphues.
Shakespeare read Holinshed, North, Greene, Sidney, and Lodge and turned some of their suggestions into poetry, which we very much prefer to their prose. We are nearly certain that Shakespeare studied Lyly's Euphues, because we can trace the influence of that work in his style. It was the misfortune of Elizabethan prose to be almost completely overshadowed by the poetry.
We have seen that Lyly's Euphues and Sidney's Arcadia contain the germs of romance. Greene's novel Pandosto suggested the plot of The Winter's Tale, and Lodge's Rosalind was the immediate source of the plot of As You Like It. Although Greene died in want at the age of thirty-two, he was the most prolific of the Elizabethan novelists.
An Elizabethan gentleman might be too poor to dress well, but he would squander his last penny in getting his ruff starched. Lyly's style bristles with extravagances of the starched ruff sort, which only serve to call attention to the intellectual deficiencies in the matter of doublet and hose. Of plot or story there is but little.
The educational essays dispersed throughout the book display a good sense which even Lyly's style cannot conceal. Ascham and Lyly were alone in deprecating the excessive use of the rod, and in so doing were far in advance of the age. Cruelty seems to have been a common characteristic of the school-teacher.
The most noteworthy of them were Nash's Piers Penniless's Supplication to the Devil, Lyly's Pap with a Hatchet, and Greene's Groat's Worth of Wit. Of books which were not so much literature as the material of literature, mention may be made of the Chronicle of England, published by Ralph Holinshed in 1580.
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."
In the history of the drama, he is important for finished style, good dialogue, considerable invention in the way he secured interest, by using classical matter in combination with contemporary life, subtle comedy, and influence on Shakespeare. It is doubtful whether Shakespeare could have produced such good early comedies, if he had not received suggestions from Lyly's work in this field.
Excess of alliteration is the most obvious feature of Lyly's style. That style has been carefully analyzed by those who are learned in such things. The study is interesting, with its talk of alliteration and transverse alliteration, antithesis, climax, and assonance.
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