John Lyly

“ CYNTHIA: Belike you cannot speak except you be spiteful. But as good be silent as saucy. Panelion, what punishment were fit for Semele, in whose speech and thoughts is only contempt and sourness?
PANELION: I love not, madam, to give any judgment. Yet sith your Highness commandeth: I think, to commit her tongue close prisoner to her mouth.
CYNTHIA: Agreed. Semele, if thou speak this twelve-month, thou shalt forfeit thy tongue. -- Behold Endymion. Alas, poor gentleman, hast thou spent thy youth in sleep, that once vowed all to my service? Hollow eyes? Grey hairs? Wrinkled cheeks? ”

“ He was frequently in debt and still more frequently in disgrace with the Queen and with his father-in-law. Dilettante, aesthete, and euphuist, he would naturally [87] attract the Oxford fop, and that Lyly attached himself to his clique disposes, in my mind at least, of all theories of his puritanical tendencies. Certainly a Nonconformist conscience could not have flourished in de Vere's household. One bond between the Earl and his secretary was their love of music—an art which played an important part in the beginning of our comedy. ”

“ The drinking song, "Io Bacchus," which occurs in Mother Bombie, is undoubtedly, I think, modelled on one of these earlier student compositions; the reference to the practice of throwing hats into the fire is alone sufficient to suggest it. But it is as a writer of the lyric proper that Lyly is best known. No one but Herrick, perhaps, has given us more graceful love trifles woven about some classical conceit. Mr Palgrave has familiarized us with the best, Cupid and my Campaspe played, but there are others only less charming than this. The same theme is employed in the following ”

“ TELLUS: No comparison, Floscula? And why so? Is not my beauty divine, whose body is decked with fair flowers, and veins are vines, yielding sweet liquor to the dullest spirits? Whose ears are corn to bring strength, and whose hairs are grass to bring abundance? Doth not frankincense and myrrh breathe out of my nostrils, and all the sacrifice of the gods breed in my bowels? Infinite are my creatures, without which neither thou nor Endymion nor any could love or live.
FLOSCULA: But know you not, fair lady, that Cynthia governeth all things? ”

“ Let me alone. [To Sir Tophas.] She is a notable witch, and hath turned her maid Bagoa to an aspen tree for betraying her secrets.
TOPHAS: I honor her for her cunning, for now, when I am weary of walking on two legs, what a pleasure may she do me to turn me to some goodly ass and help me to four!
DARES: Nay then, I must tell you the truth: her husband Geron is come home, who this fifty years hath had her to wife.
TOPHAS: What do I hear? Hath she a husband? Go to the sexton and tell him Desire is dead, and will him to dig his grave. Oh heavens, an husband? What death is agreeable to my fortune? ”

“ Finally, inasmuch as the personality of an author is always more fascinating to me than his writings, I determined to attempt to throw some light, however fitful and uncertain, upon the man Lyly himself. The attempt was not entirely fruitless, for it led to the interesting discovery that the fully-developed euphuism was not the creation of Lyly, or Pettie, or indeed of any one individual, but of a circle of young Oxford men which included Gosson, Watson, Hakluyt, and possibly many others. ”

“ EUMENIDES: Be the faithful lovers so scant?
GERON: It seemeth so, for yet heard I never of any.
EUMENIDES: Ah Eumenides, how art thou perplexed! Call to mind the beauty of thy sweet mistress and the depth of thy never-dying affections. How oft hast thou honored her, not only without spot but suspicion of falsehood! And how hardly hath she rewarded thee without cause or color of despite! How secret hast thou been these seven years, so that hast not, nor once darest not, to name her for discontenting her. Unhappy Eumenides! ”

“ It was to Oxford's patronage, therefore, and not to his subsequent connexion with the "children of Powles," that Lyly owed his first dramatic impulse, and probably also his first dramatic success, for Campaspe and Sapho were produced at Court in 1582 [100] . His [88] appointment at the choir school of course confirmed his resolutions and thus he became the first great Elizabethan dramatist.
But a purely circumstantial explanation of an important departure in a man's life will only appear satisfactory to fatalists who worship the blind god Environment. ”

“ TOPHAS: I will draw out their guts out of their bellies, and tear the flesh with my teeth, so mortal is my hate and so eager my unstaunched stomach.
EPITON: [Aside.] My master thinks himself the valiantest man in the world if he kill a wren, so warlike a thing he accounteth to take away life, though it be from a lark.
TOPHAS: Epiton, I find my thoughts to swell and my spirit to take wings, insomuch that I cannot continue within the compass of so slender combats.
FAVILLA: [Aside.] This passeth!
SCINTILLA: [Aside.] Why, is he not mad? ”

“ On the whole Lyly is most successful when he is drawing women, which was only as it should be, if we allow that the feminine element is the very pivot of true comedy. This he saw, and it is because he was the first to realise it and to grapple with the difficulties it entailed that the title of father of English comedy may be given him without the least reserve or hesitation. ”

“ EPITON: Stay, Master, you forget yourself.
TOPHAS: O, Epiton, even as a dish melteth by the fire, so doth my wit increase by love.
EPITON: Pithily, and to the purpose. But what, begin you to nod?
TOPHAS: Good Epiton, let me take a nap. For as some man may better steal a horse than another look over the hedge, so divers shall be sleepy when they would fainest take rest.
[He sleeps.]
EPITON: Who ever saw such a woodcock? Love Dipsas? Without doubt all the world will now account him valiant, that ventureth on her whom none durst undertake. ”

“ Ay, Tellus. As I would have none partaker of my sweet love, so shall none be the partners of my labors. But I pray thee go at your best leisure, for Cynthia beginneth to rise, and if she discover our love, we both perish, for nothing pleaseth her but the fairness of virginity. All things must be not only without lust but without suspicion of lightness.
TELLUS: I will depart, and go you to Endymion.
CORSITES: I fly, Tellus, being of all men the most fortunate.
[Exit Corsites.]
TELLUS: Simple Corsites! I have set thee about a task, being but a man, that the gods themselves cannot perform. ”

“ Even the master of the ship which conveyed Euphues from Naples to England declaims about Ulysses and Julius Cæsar. This naturally destroys all dramatic effect. Everybody speaks Euphuism, though classical allusion alone is not essentially Euphuistic. 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 ”

“ LYLY (Lilly, or Lylie) , JOHN (1553–1606) , English writer, the famous author of Euphues, was born in Kent in 1553 or 1554. At the age of sixteen, according to Wood, he became a student of Magdalen College, Oxford, where in due time he proceeded to his bachelor’s and master’s degrees (1573 and 1575) , and from whence we find him in 1574 applying to Lord Burghley “for the queen’s letters to Magdalen College to admit him fellow.” The fellowship, however, was not granted, and Lyly shortly after left the university. ”

“ In the domain of style, Euphues was dynamical; the plays were not.
But the true value of Lyly's prose lies not so much in what it achieved as in what it attempted; for the qualities, which euphuism, by its insistence upon design and elegance, really aimed at, were strength, brilliancy, and refinement. For the first time in the history of our literature, men are found to write prose with the purpose of fascinating and enticing the reader, not merely by what is said, but also by the manner of saying it. ”

“ The Place of Euphues in English Literature.—John Lyly was poet, pamphleteer, novelist, and dramatist. As a pamphleteer he is unimportant. As a poet he can best be studied in his plays. It is, then, as novelist and dramatist that he is important. The material of the two parts of the Euphues makes it decidedly significant in its own time. It is not, like most of the stories of Greene and Lodge, mere romance, nor, like Nash's Jack Wilton, a tale of adventure phrased with reportorial recklessness. ”

“ John Lyly.
I recur to him now and tell you more of him, because he did in his time set a sort of fashion in letters. He was an Oxford man, [95] born down in Kent, and at twenty-five, or thereabout, made his fame by a book, which grew out of suggestions (not only of name but largely of intent and purpose) in the Schoolmaster of Roger Ascham; and thus it happens over and over in the fields of literature, that a plodding man will drop from his store a nugget, over which some fellow of lively parts will stumble into renown. ”

“ CYNTHIA: Is it possible, Tellus, that so few years should harbor so many mischiefs? Thy swelling pride have I borne because it is a thing that beauty maketh blameless, which, the more it exceedeth fairness in measure, the more it stretcheth itself in disdain. Thy devices against Corsites I smile at, for that the wits the sharper they are, the shrewder they are. But this unacquainted and most unnatural practice with a vile enchantress against so noble a gentleman as Endymion I abhor as a thing most malicious, and will revenge as a deed most monstrous. [Turning to Dipsas.] ”

“ ENDYMION: [Kneeling happily on the ground with jeweled hands clasped in a prayer while gazing loving upon the Moon.] O fair Cynthia; oh unfortunate Endymion! Why was not thy birth as high as thy thoughts, or her beauty less than heavenly? Or why are not thine honors as rare as her beauty or thy fortunes as great as thy deserts? Sweet Cynthia, how wouldst thou be pleased, how possessed? Will labors, patient of all extremities, obtain thy love? There is no mountain so steep that I will not climb, no monster so cruel that I will not tame, no action so desperate that I will not attempt. ”

“ It is interesting to learn that in 1579, according to the common practice of that day, he proceeded to his [7] degree of M.A. at Cambridge, though there is no evidence of any residence there [10] . Indeed we know from other sources that in 1578, or perhaps earlier, Lyly had taken up his position at the Savoy Hospital. It seems probable that he became again indebted to Burleigh's generosity for the rooms he occupied here—unless they were hired for him by Burleigh's son-in-law Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. ”

“ The public who imposed these laws, this exacting public of women who read Plutarch and Plato, who judged the merits of great men as learnedly as the cut of a ruff, found at the very moment they most wanted him the author who could please them in the person of a novel writer, the famous Lyly. At twenty-five years of age, John Lyly, a protégé of Lord Burghley, who was at this same time busy with his own architectural poem, if one may say so, of Burghley House, wrote "Euphues," [67] a new kind too of "paper-work" with which people were enraptured. ”

“ And moreover Gosson's style does not read like an imitation of Lyly. The same tricks and affectations are employed, but they are employed differently and perhaps more effectively.
Lyly is again found in contact with the Spanish atmosphere, as one of the dependents of the Earl of Oxford, who patronized Robert Baker, George Baker, and Anthony Munday, who were all under the "spell of the peninsula [39] ." ”

“ He shall know the malice of a woman to have neither mean nor end, and of a woman deluded in love to have neither rule nor reason. I can do it, I must; I will. All his virtues will I shadow with vices; his person — ah, sweet person! — shall he deck with such rich robes as he shall forget it is his own person; his sharp wit — ah, wit too sharp, that hath cut off all my joys! — shall he use in flattering of my face and devising sonnets in my favor. The prime of his youth and pride of his time shall be spent in melancholy passions, careless behavior, untamed thoughts, and unbridled affections. ”

“ Approaching the romance, as we do, from the point of view rather of the development of the pastoral ideal than of the history of prose narrative or of the novel, we may spare ourselves any detailed consideration of the famous work of John Lyly. Although in the novel which has made 'Euphuism' a word and a bye-word in the language he supplied the literary medium for the work of subsequent pastoral writers such as Greene and Lodge, his own compositions in this kind are confined entirely to the drama. ”

“ She was accompanied with other damsels, one of which, with a stern countenance, and as it were with a settled malice engraven in her eyes, provoked her to execute mischief. Another with visage sad, and constant only in sorrow, with her arms crossed and watery eyes, seemed to lament my fortune, but durst not offer to prevent the force. I started in my sleep, feeling my very veins to swell and my sinews to stretch with fear, and such a cold sweat bedewed all my body that death itself could not be so terrible as the vision.
CYNTHIA: A strange sight. Gyptes at our better leisure shall expound it. ”