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John Lyly would be the last man to merit any portion of that fine praise bestowed by Hazlitt upon Shakespeare when he said that Shakespeare's genius 'consisted in the faculty of transforming himself at will into whatever he chose. Lyly's genius was the opposite of this; it consisted in the faculty of transforming everybody into a reduplication of himself.
Greene's best plays are in Mermaid Series. What are the merits of Lyly's dialogue and comedy? What might Shakespeare have learned from Lyly, Peele, Greene, and Kyd? In what different form did these dramatists write? What progress do they show? Marlowe. Read Dr. This play may also be found in Morley's English Plays, pp. 116-128, or in Morley's Universal Library.
In 1579 appeared a book which had a remarkable influence on English prose. This was John Lyly's Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit.
If the only definition of pedantry be 'vain and ostentatious display of learning, I question if we may dismiss Lyly's wealth of classical lore with the word 'pedantry. He was fresh from his university life. If he studied at all when he was at Oxford, he must have studied Latin and Greek, for after these literatures little else was studied.
This prose was, however, far more varied and important than that of any preceding age. The books mentioned on page 123 constitute only a small part of the prose of this period. Lyly, Sidney, Hooker. Much of Lyly's subject matter is borrowed, and his form reflects the artificial style then popular over Europe. Euphues, a young Athenian, goes to Naples, where he falls in love and is jilted.
I take Shakespeare, in London at least, to have read the current Elizabethan light literature Euphues, Lyly's Court comedies, novels full of the classics and of social life; Spenser, Sidney his Defence of Poesy, and Arcadia with scores of tales translated from the Italian, French, and Spanish, all full of foreign society, and discourses of knights and ladies.
The Euphuistic style was not of Lyly's invention. He acquired it from the men about him, and merely gave it, through his writings, a distinct character and individuality.
Richard Hooker's works, edited by Keble, Oxford Press; Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, in Everyman's Library, and in Morley's Universal Library; Life, in Walton's Lives, in Morley's Universal Library; Dowden's Essay, in Puritan and Anglican. Lyly's Euphues, in Arber's Reprints; Endymion, edited by Baker; Campaspe, in Manly's Pre-Shaksperean Drama.
He may or may not have taken a hint from Thackeray on the re-introduction of characters in other books a pleasant device long antedating the nineteenth century, since one finds it in Lyly's "Euphues." Popular Sentiment in "The Warden."
Two months later Lyly's Sapho and Phao was given in the same theater with a cast of seventeen boys. It should be remembered that these plays, so important in the evolution of the drama, were acted by boys under royal patronage.
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