John Lyly

BY JOHN DOVER WILSON, B.A., Late Scholar of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Members' Prizeman, 1902. Harness Prizeman, 1904. Honours in Historical Tripos.
Macmillan and Bowes Cambridge 1905
A MIA DONNA.
The following treatise was awarded the Harness Prize at Cambridge in 1904. I have, however, revised it since then, and in some matters considerably enlarged it.
This book was unfortunately nearing its completion before I was able to avail myself of Mr Martin Hume's Spanish Influence on English Literature . But, though I might have added more had his book been accessible earlier, I was glad to find that his conclusions left the main theory of my chapter on Euphuism untouched.
Much as has been written upon John Lyly, no previous critic has attempted to cover the whole ground, and to sum up in a brief and convenient form the three main literary problems which centre round his name. My solution of these problems may be faulty in detail, but it will I hope be of service to Elizabethan students to have them presented in a single volume and from a single point of view. Furthermore, when I undertook this study, I found several points which seemed to demand closer attention than they had hitherto received. It appeared to me that the last word had not been said even upon the subject of Euphuism, although that topic has usurped the lion's share of critical treatment. And again, while Lyly's claims as a novelist are acknowledged on all hands, I felt that a clear statement of his exact position in the history of our novel was still needed. 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.