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Updated: June 20, 2025
Against these were the popular playwrights, Lyly, Peele, Greene, Marlowe, and many others, who recognized the English love of action and disregarded the dramatic unities in their endeavor to present life as it is. In the end the native drama prevailed, aided by the popular taste which had been trained by four centuries of Miracles.
Other marks of Sidney's style belong similarly to poetry rather than to prose. In its day the Arcadia was hailed as a reformation by men nauseated by the rhythmical patterns of Lyly.
The Authorized Version of the Bible belongs strictly not to the reign of Elizabeth but to that of James, and we shall have to look at it when we come to discuss the seventeenth century. Lyly and Sidney are worth looking at more closely. The age was intoxicated with language. It went mad of a mere delight in words.
While the story is meant to attract readers, the essays and digressions introduced into the work are intended to inculcate the methods of education which Lyly taught in common with Ascham. It was, however, the manner rather than the matter which gave to "Euphues" its prominence and popularity. The story is but a slender thread.
Elizabethan Prose. Good selections from Ascham, Hakluyt, Raleigh, Holinshed, Stow, Camden, North, Sidney, Foxe, Hooker, Lyly, Greene, Lodge, and Nashe are given in Craik, I. Chambers, I. and Manly, II. also give a number of selections. Deloney's The Gentle Craft may be found in the Clarendon Press edition of his Works. For Bacon, see Craik, II.
For many years Lyly lingered about the court waiting for a promised position to reward his labors and support his declining years. But in vain. "A thousand hopes," he complained, "but all nothing; a hundred promises, but yet nothing."
On the second page of Greene's Arbasto is this sentence: 'He did not so much as vouchsafe to give an eare to my parle, or an eye to my person. Greene learned this trick from Lyly, who was a master of the art.
Whether Lyly got his style from Pettie or Guevara is an important question, but he made it emphatically his own, and it will never be called by any other name than Euphuism. The making of a book on this plan is largely the result of astonishing mental gymnastics. It commands respect in no small degree, because Lyly was able to keep it up so long.
There never, for instance, was an English writer fuller of all the marks which these, our younger critics, desiderate in Scott, and admire in some authors of our own day, than John Lyly, the author of Euphues, of a large handful of very charming and interesting court dramas, and of some delightful lyrics.
Wilson recommended the Proverbs of Heywood as furnishing "allegories" useful in the amplification of a point in a speech. In his Euphues Lyly did use such "allegories" in what his contemporaries generally considered a poem.
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