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Updated: June 18, 2025
Lyly's Euphues suffers from overwrought conceits and forced antitheses, but it influenced writers to pay more attention to the manner in which thought was expressed. The flowery prose of Sidney's Arcadia presents a pastoral world of romance. His Apologie for Poetrie is a meritorious piece of early criticism.
In the same way as Euphuism is founded upon a balance of the sentence obtained by antithetical clauses, and the use of intricate alliteration, together with the abuse of simile and metaphor drawn from what has been aptly termed Lyly's 'un-natural history'; so Sidney's style in the Arcadia is based on a balance usually obtained by a repetition of the same word or a jingle of similar ones, together with the abuse of periphrasis, and, it may be added, of the pathetic fallacy.
These selections will give the student a broader grasp of the Elizabethan age. The style and subject matter of Lyly's Euphues, Sidney's Arcadia, Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, and Bacon's Essays should be specially noted. Which one of these authors exerted the strongest influence on his own age? Which one makes the strongest appeal to modern times?
It was made popular by Lyly's success, and was imitated in Shakespeare's first or "Lylian" comedies, such as Love's Labour's Lost, and the complicated Two Gentlemen of Verona.
Many a reader of Euphues, who cared but little for its elaborated style, who was not moved by its orthodoxy, who didn't read books simply because they were fashionable, must have felt his pulse stirred by Lyly's chant of England's greatness. For Euphues is John Lyly, and John Lyly's creed was substantially that of the well-known hero of a now forgotten comic opera, 'I am an Englishman.
The book is not to be found in his sale catalogue; he had Lyly's plays in quarto, seven of them each marked 'rare, and he had two copies of a well-known book called Euphues Golden Legacie, written by Thomas Nash. The Perkins Sale catalogue shows neither of Lyly's novels. List after list of the spoils of mighty book-hunters has only a blank where the Anatomy of Wit ought to be.
Lyly's rascals are generally recognized as the direct ancestors of some of Shakespeare's comic characters, and we not seldom find in them the germ at least of the later poet's irresistible fun. Take such a speech as Robin's: 'Why be they deade that be drownd? I had thought they had beene with the fish, and so by chance beene caught up with them in a Nette againe.
Even that old gentleman of Naples who came first to Euphues because his heart bled to see so noble a youth given to loose living has the tables turned upon him, for Euphues preaches to the preacher upon the sovereign duty of resignation to the will of God. A noteworthy characteristic is the frequency of Lyly's classical allusions.
This defends the poetic art, and shows how necessary such exercise of the imagination is to take us away from the cold, hard facts of life. Lyly's striking contrasts and Sidney's flowery prose do not appeal to Hooker, who uses Latin inversions and parenthetical qualifications, and adds clause after clause whenever he thinks it necessary to amplify the thought or to guard against misunderstanding.
That Shakespeare was the very reverse of a dullard, of the clod of Baconian fancy, is proved by the fact that he was thought capable of his works. For courtly manners he had the literary convention and Lyly's Court Comedies, with what he saw when playing at the Court and in the houses of the great.
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