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Updated: June 20, 2025
Some of the greatest lyrics of the period are the songs interspersed in the plays of the dramatists, from Lyly to Beaumont and Fletcher. The plays of Shakespeare, the greatest and most varied of Elizabethan lyrical poets, especially abound in such songs. Two of the best of these occur in his Cymbeline. One is the song "Hark! hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings,"
These were young graduates of the universities, Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Kyd, Lyly, Lodge, and others, who came up to town and led a bohemian life as actors and playwrights. Most of them were wild and dissipated and ended in wretchedness.
Think of the French, who had once had a Villon, intoxicating themselves with somnolent draughts of Richardson. But, then, the French could match the paste euphuisms of Lyly with the novels of Scudery. Every modern literature has been subject to these epidemics and diseases. It is needless to dwell upon them in detail.
Did not Ruskin declare that Miss Edgeworth had made virtue so obnoxious that since her time one hardly dared express the slightest bias in favor of the Ten Commandments? Lyly knew the public for which he acted as literary caterer. They liked sermons, and sermons they should have. Nearly every character in the book preaches, and Euphues is the most gifted of them all.
Finally, at Cupid's intercession her father is relieved of his affliction by the now appeased goddess. This plot is even more crudely distinct from the principal action of the play than is usual with Lyly .
One is more astonished at Lyly's power of endurance as author than at his own power of endurance as reader. For the volume is actually readable even at this day. Did Lyly not grow wearied of perpetually riding these alliterative trick-ponies? Apparently not. The book is 'executed' with a vivacity, a dash, a 'go, that will captivate any reader who is willing to meet the author halfway.
In Euphues, however, the love story serves chiefly as a peg on which to hang discussions on fickleness, youthful follies, friendship, and divers other subjects. Lyly aimed to produce artistic prose, which would render his meaning clear and impressive.
The loosely constructed, rambling prose romances of Lyly of euphuistic fame, the prose pastorals of Lodge from which model Shakspere made his forest drama, "As You Like It," the picaresque, harum-scarum story of adventure, "Jack Wilton," the prototype of later books like "Gil Blas" and "Robinson Crusoe," these were the early attempts to give prose narration a closer knitting, a more organic form.
Perhaps the most that can be said is that the nymphs are already familiar to us from the pastoral tradition, and must have been scarcely less so to a contemporary audience, fresh from the work of Peele and Lyly. In Jupiter and Io, which perhaps made part of the same performance as Amphrissa, Mercury disguises himself as a shepherd, in order to cut off the head of Argus.
Such are the words in which John Lyly, the Euphuist, characterized his own time, and they were the words of one who expressed in his own writings the tendency to fanciful exaggeration, which was so strong among the men about him. It is to the drama that we must look for the most complete literary expression of the social condition of the period.
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