FOOTNOTES:
[657] moment, time.
[658] A common contraction for master.
[659] 'Broche' and 'spit' are synonymous.
[660] set of people, company; cf. Heywood, Play of the Wether, l. 94.
[661] I am. The rustic dialect in the piece is conventional, but its general peculiarities are those of the southwestern counties; iche = I, reduced to ch in cham, chould, or chwold (I would), chwere, etc. The southwestern v for f is not generally used, but occurs below in vylthy, in vast (I. iv. 8), and in vathers (II. i. 52); glaye for clay is probably not genuine dialect.
[662] Misprinted what.
[663] H. prints 'halse aker,' with the following absurd note: "I believe we should read halse anchor, or anker, as it was anciently spelt; a naval phrase."
[664] Ed. 1575 till.
[665] Printed sayth.
[666] I hold, i.e. 'I wager.'
[667] owed.
[668] 'Pess,' a hassock (Rye's East Anglian Glossary, English Dialect Society).
[669] the ground attached to the house. (Cf. Sc. toun.)
[670] with vigour and speed, promptly.
[671] Commonly supposed to mean St. Osyth.
[672] wager, bet; compare note 2, page 101. Ed. 1575 held.
[673] a fool, jester.
[674] For the older and better form of this song, see Appendix.
[675] A roasted crab-apple was placed in a bowl of ale to give it a flavour and take off the chill. Compare Midsummer Night's Dream, II. i. 48, and Nashe, Summer's Last Will and Testament:—
Sitting in a corner turning crabs,
Or coughing o'er a warmed pot of ale.
[676] Ed. 1575 will.
[677] entrails.
[678] Ed. 1575 Godgs.
[679] Ed. 1575 dogde.
[680] deceived.
[681] Ed. 1575 thonge.
[682] Ed. 1575 syme.
[683] give thee thanks.
[684] offspring, brat.
[685] Ed. 1575 'is'; the reading adopted seems better than is burste.
[686] Ed. 1575 will.
[687] I hope.
[688] room.
[689] first-rate.
[690] spurrier's, harness-maker's.
[691] dear.
[692] Read 'lese,' for the rime.
[693] slip, neglect. Perhaps we should read 'yon' for 'you[r].'
[694] by nature.
[695] Ed. 1575 has thynge.
[696] awl.
[697] Apparently a proverbial phrase, meaning 'to expedite matters.'
[698] abominable.
[699] 'Friar Rush,' the chief personage in a popular story translated from the German, which relates the adventures of a devil in the disguise of a friar.
[700] Ed. 1575 no.
[701] Ed. 1575 on.
[702] leave, permission.
[703] aught.
[704] Ed. 1575 pray.
[705] Probably a misprint for 'chware,' I would be.
[706] we shall.
[707] Chave is either a blunder of the author's in the use of dialect, or a misprint for 'thave' = thou have.
[708] quickly.
[709] tail, backside.
[710] sulking (compare glum, and R. R. D., I. i. 66).
[711] Ed. 1575 Tyb.
[712] Ed. 1575 bauet not i.
[713] Ed. 1575 moned.
[714] (I) make.
[715] t'other, the other.
[716] Ed. 1575 The ii Acte. The iiii Sceane.
[717] anxiety.
[718] In Colwell's edition this scene extends to the end of the act. There should probably be a division after line 63, and again after line 105 (as in Professor Manly's edition), but we have retained the original arrangement.
[719] went.
[720] Ed. 1575, worthe.
[721] ere, before.
[722] M. begins a new scene here; H. says it should begin at line 68.
[723] Brewing trough.
[724] M. begins a new scene here.
[725] H. inserts 'with' before 'them.' But 'beares' means 'support, uphold.'
[726] Printed of, ed. 1575.
[727] This is said to Scapethryft, who is nowhere mentioned in the text. 'Fellow' (equivalent to 'comrade') was originally a courteous mode of addressing a servant, like the French mon ami.
[728] Ill may he thrive; the phrase is common in the fourteenth century. Cf. also "y-the," Hickscorner, l .187.
[729] Ed. 1575 you.
[730] roost.
[731] poultry.
[732] God yield you, God reward you. Compare Good den, God deven = good e'en.
[733] moved, disturbed.
[734] behave.
[735] neck.
[736] Perhaps we should read 'recetter,' for the sake of the rime.
[737] saving your reverence.
[738] as thou.
[739] Toad; the same phrase occurs in Gosson, Ephimerides of Phialo (Arber) 63, "I have neither replyed to the writer of this libel ... nor let him go scot free ... but poynted to the strawe where the padd lurkes."
[740] Ed. 1575 gives this line to Chat.
[741] cloaks or smothers.
[742] what shall I call (it). Compare "nicebecetur," R. D. I. iv. 12.
[743] 'cut' is often used in the sixteenth century as a term of abuse, especially for women.
[744] Printed mery.
[745] spit.
[746] 'stoure,' uproar. Printed scoure.
[747] served out, done for.
[748] to 'leap at a daisy,' to be hanged. The allusion is to a story of a man who, when the noose was adjusted round his neck, leapt off with the words, "Have at yon daisy yonder" (Pasquil's Jests, 1604).
[749] Ed. 1575 where.
[750] Ed. 1575 on.
APPENDIX
The song at the beginning of the second act exists in an older and better version, which was printed by Dyce (from a Ms. in his own possession) in his edition of Skelton's Works, Vol. I, p. vii. It is not likely that the date of the composition is much older than the middle of the sixteenth century, and it may possibly be later. The following copy is taken from Dyce, but the punctuation and the capitals have been adjusted in accordance with the rules elsewhere adopted in the present work.
Backe and syde goo bare, goo bare;
Bothe hande and fote goo colde;
But, belly, God sende the good ale inoughe,
Whether hyt be newe or olde.
But yf that I maye have, trwly,
Goode ale my belly full,
I shall looke lyke one (by swete sainte Johnn)
Were shoron agaynste the woole.
Thowthe I goo bare, take ye no care,
I am nothynge colde.
I stuffe my skynne so full within
Of joly good ale and olde.
I cannot eate but lytyll meate;
My stomacke ys not goode;
But sure I thyncke that I cowde dryncke
With hym that werythe an hoode.
Dryncke ys my lyfe; although my wyfe
Some tyme do chyde and scolde,
Yete spare I not to plye the potte
Of joly goode ale and olde.
Backe and syde, etc.
I love no roste but a browne toste,
Or a crabbe in the fyer;
A lytyll breade shall do me steade,
Mooche breade I never desyer.
Nor froste, nor snowe, nor wynde, I trow,
Canne hurte me yf hyt wolde;
I am so wrapped within, and lapped
With joly goode ale and olde.
Backe and syde, etc.
I care ryte noughte, I take no thowte
For clothes to kepe me warme;
Have I goode dryncke, I surely thyncke
Nothyng can do me harme.
For trwly than I feare no man,
Be he never so bolde,
When I am armed, and throwly warmed
With joly good ale and olde.
Backe and syde, etc.
But nowe and than I curse and banne;
They make ther ale so small!
God geve them care, and evill to fare!
They strye the malte and all.
Soche pevisshe pewe, I tell yowe trwe,
Not for a crowne of golde
There commethe one syppe within my lyppe,
Whether hyt be newe or olde.
Backe and syde, etc.
Good ale and stronge makethe me amonge
Full joconde and full lyte,
That ofte I slepe, and take no kepe
From mornynge untyll nyte.
Then starte I uppe, and fle to the cuppe;
The ryte waye on I holde.
My thurste to staunche I fyll my paunche
With joly goode ale and olde.
Backe and syde, etc.
And Kytte, my wyfe, that as her lyfe
Lovethe well good ale to seke,
Full ofte drynkythe she that ye maye se
The teares ronne downe her cheke.
Then dothe she troule to me the bolle
As a goode malte-worme sholde,
And say, "Swete harte, I have take my parte
Of joly goode ale and olde."
Backe and syde, etc.
They that do dryncke tylle they nodde and wyncke,
Even as good fellowes shulde do,
They shall notte mysse to have the blysse
That good ale hathe browghte them to.
And all poore soules that skoure blacke bolles,
And them hath lustely trowlde,
God save the lyves of them and ther wyves,
Wether they be yonge or olde!
Backe and syde, etc.
John Lyly
ALEXANDER AND CAMPASPE
Edited with Critical Essay and Notes
by George P. Baker, A.B., Asst.
Professor in Harvard University
CRITICAL ESSAY
Life.—John Lyly was born in Kent between October 8, 1553, and January, 1554. He entered Magdalen College, Oxford, 1569, but was almost immediately rusticated. Returning in October, 1571, he was graduated B.A. April 27, 1573. In May, 1574, he wrote unsuccessfully to Lord Burleigh, begging for a fellowship at Magdalen. He proceeded M.A. June 1, 1575, and lived mainly at the Universities till 1579. Euphues, the Anatomie of Wit, appeared between December, 1578, and spring, 1579. Another edition was printed in 1579; twelve others before 1637. In An Address to the Gentlemen Scholars of Oxford, prefixed to the second, the 1579, edition, he answered a charge of having unfairly criticised Oxford in the Anatomie of Wit. A sequel, Euphues and his England, was licensed July 24, 1579, but did not appear for months. Probably Lyly shared in the disfavour which, from late July, 1579, to July, 1580, the Queen showed the party of Robert Dudley because of his secret marriage with the Countess of Essex. Endimion, probably the first of Lyly's extant comedies, was presented between late July and early November, 1579, as an allegorical treatment of this quarrel. In or near July, 1580, Lyly was "entertained as servant" by the Queen, and was advised to aim at the Mastership of the Revels. By July, 1582, he is to be found in the household of Lord Burleigh. A letter of his was prefixed to Watson's Passionate Centurie of Love, published 1582. By 1589, possibly earlier, he had become vice-master of St. Paul's choir school. Before 1584 the Chapel Children and the Paul's Boys, for whom he had written, ceased to act. During 1584 his Sapho and Phao, written not long after February 6, 1582, and his Alexander and Campaspe were printed. Tityrus and Gallathea, licensed in 1584, was not printed till 1592. Probably the main plot was written before 1584, and the sub-plot for a revision of the play in or near 1588. From 1585 Lyly wrote for the Paul's Boys till in or near 1591, when the company was again silent. The Chapel Children were not acting publicly between November, 1584, and 1597. His Mydas was acted between August, 1588, and November, 1589, and printed in 1592. In August or September, 1589, a pamphlet entitled Pappe-with-an-Hatchet, written by him for the High Church party in the Marprelate controversy, made its appearance. His Mother Bombie was acted in 1589 or 1590, and printed in 1594. Alexander and Campaspe and Sapho and Phao were reprinted in 1591, and in the same year Endimion was printed. Gallathea appeared in 1592. Lyly wrote, in 1590 or 1591, an apparently unsuccessful begging letter to the Queen, and another in 1593 or 1594. He was married by 1589, and he had two sons and one daughter. He was member of Parliament for Hindon in 1589; for Aylesbury in 1593 and 1601; and for Appleby in 1597. The Woman in the Moone was licensed in 1595, printed in 1597. The quality of the blank verse in this play and the absence of marked Euphuism favour a date of composition in or near 1590. Lillie's Light was licensed June 3, 1596. If printed, it is non-extant. He wrote prefatory Latin lines for Henry Lock's Ecclesiastes, otherwise called The Preacher, in 1597. In 1597-1600 the Chapel Children revived his plays. The Maid's Metamorphosis, incorrectly attributed to Lyly, was printed in 1600. His Love's Metamorphosis was printed in 1601: it had been written about the time of the Gallathea,—before 1584, or between 1588 and 1591. The Protea-Petulius part is probably from a different play, or is a survival in a revision. Lyly died November 30, 1606, and was buried at St. Bartholomew's.[751]
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. It is a love story in which romance is subordinated to the inculcation of ideas of high living and thinking, and the demands of an involved style. It dimly foreshadows two literary products which reach a development only long after the days of Elizabeth—the novel with a purpose, and the stylistic novel. The appearance of the book was epochal. Young writers of the day—Munday, Greene, Nash, and Lodge—copied its style. Courtiers patterned their speech upon it. Yet Gabriel Harvey was probably right when he ill-naturedly wrote: "Young Euphues but hatched the egges that his elder freendes laide." The Anatomie, at least, is such a book as a recent university graduate of the present day, well read in some of the classics, and especially susceptible to new literary influences and cults, might compile. In the division Euphues and His Ephœbus Lyly uses, with a few omissions and additions, Plutarch on Education; in the letter to Botonio he translates Plutarch on Exile. In the part Euphues and Atheos he is indebted to chapters 9, 10, 11, and 12 of the Dial of Princes (1529) by Antonio de Guevara, Bishop of Guadix and Mendoza. Euphues and Lucilla debate "dubii," or artificial discussions of set questions, such as one finds in Hortensio Lando or Castiglione. There is, too, almost constant use of the unnatural natural history of Pliny. All this material is bound together by a style which, though it may ultimately be traced to the rounded periods of Cicero, had developed slowly in writers of the Renaissance and the years just before Euphues appeared. George Pettie, for instance, in his Pettie Palace of Pettie His Pleasure, published in 1576, has all the stylistic characteristics of the Euphues except the fabulous natural history. It is, however, to Guevara in the Dial of Princes that Lyly is thought to be particularly indebted for his style. This man used "lavishly the well-known figures of pointed antithesis and parisonic balanced clauses, in connection with a general climactic structure of the sentence or period, the emphatic or antithetic words being marked by rhyme or assonance." Lyly substitutes for rhyme alliteration, and adds persistent play on words. The book is genuinely Renaissance, then, for, looking to classic literature for much of its substance, it expresses itself in a style that typifies an intellectual mood of the hour.
Lyly's Plays: their Subdivision.—Just before 1580 the acting of choir boys was in great favour with the Queen and, as a consequence, with the public. The boys of Westminster, Windsor, the Chapel Royal, and St. Paul's were often summoned to court. For the last two companies, with whom acting became a profession, Lyly wrote his plays. These divide into four classes. The allegorical comedies, in which what is alluded to is as important as what is said, are Endimion, Sapho and Phao, and Mydas. Endimion, perhaps the most complete example of Lyly's allegorical comedy, presents the apology of Leicester to the Queen for his secret marriage with Lettice, Countess of Essex. Sapho and Phao is full of allusions to the coquetting of the Queen with the Duc d'Alençon and his wrathful departure from England in February, 1582. Mydas allegorises—though with less detail than the others—as to the designs of Philip II. on the English throne, and the Spanish Armada. Gallathea, Love's Metamorphosis, and The Woman in the Moone form a second class—pastoral comedies. They are allegorical only when some figure is given qualities which the Queen was fond of hearing praised as hers. Mother Bombie, standing alone as a comedy on the model of Plautus, has a much more involved plot than any of the other plays. Finally, also in a class by itself, is Alexander and Campaspe.
In this, as in all the comedies except Mother Bombie and Love's Metamorphosis, Lyly used classic myth for his chief material. Yet he but followed a custom of the day, for most of the plays given at court between 1570 and 1590 by the children's companies were based on such material: for instance, Iphigenia, Narcissus, Alcmæon, Quintus Fabius, and Scipio Africanus. These subjects seem to have been treated as pastorals, histories, and possibly allegories. Lyly rejected in Alexander and Campaspe the allegorical and the pastoral form, and told rather naïvely, except in style, the story of the love of Alexander and Apelles for Campaspe, repeating in his sub-plot many historic retorts of Diogenes. In details of method Lyly seems to have had a precursor. Richard Edwardes (born 1523, died 1566) in his Damon and Pythias, printed in 1582, but usually assigned to 1564, wrote in a way very suggestive of Lyly in Alexander and Campaspe. He disclaimed in his prologue intention of referring to any court except that of Dionysius at Syracuse; introduced lyrics; gave Aristippus the philosopher an important place; inveighed against flattery at the court; brought in the comic episode of Grim the collier without connection with the main plot, just as Lyly often introduces his comic material; and derived the fun of this scene mainly from two impudent pages. Certainly it would have been natural for Lyly, early in his career, to look to the plays of a former prominent master of the Chapel Children.
Alexander and Campaspe: Date, Sources.—The exact date of Alexander and Campaspe it seems impossible to determine. It was written before April, 1584, for it was licensed for printing in that month. The facts that similes and references in Euphues are found in it, and that the work—here of a kind which Lyly never exactly repeats—resembles the early Damon and Pythias suggest that Alexander and Campaspe belongs early in his dramatic career. It has been held that it should precede Endimion, but the allegory in that play; the fact that Blount, who places Sapho and Phao, Gallathea, Mydas, and Mother Bombie in the order approved by the most recent criticism, puts it second; and the better characterization, more natural dialogue, and slightly closer binding together of the main and the sub-plot, argue for the second place.
The play, like the Anatomie of Wit, is a composite. The main plot—the story of Apelles and Campaspe—Lyly found in Book 35 of Pliny's History of the World. His setting he took from Plutarch's Life of Alexander. That, too, gave him the siege of Thebes, Timoclea, some of the philosophers' names, most of their speeches, the generals, and Hephestion, and probably suggested the possibilities of Diogenes as a comic figure. The material for the scenes of the Cynic, and the name Manes, he found in the Lives of the Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius.
Literary Estimate.—In the extant plays from 1550 to 1580 love has but a subordinate part. In Alexander and Campaspe, however, as in all the Lyly comedies, the central idea is that of nearly all the great plays of the Elizabethan drama—the love of man for woman. Doubtless the subject appealed to Lyly especially because in the self-abnegation of Alexander the Queen might choose to see a compliment to her final position toward Leicester and the Countess of Essex. Diogenes he used in order to get comic relief. That Lyly's comedies are comparatively free from vulgarity is probably because they were given by children before the Queen and her ladies. Possibly the youth of the actors is the reason for the absence of strong emotional expression, but it is more probable that the temperament of the author is responsible. It is hard to believe that a dramatist who felt keenly emotional possibilities in his material could have passed by Timoclea so rapidly, for in Plutarch she has all the requisites of the heroine in a Beaumont and Fletcher play. Nor would such a dramatist have made so little of the struggle of Alexander between infatuation and the desire to regain his accustomed self-command. Lyly's position toward his work is like that of the early writers of chronicle-history plays. He does not depend on selecting the most characteristic situations and speeches, on supplying missing motives, on unification of material which history has passed down in somewhat disordered fashion, but on repeating as many as possible of the situations and speeches associated with the names. Like those writers, too, he makes no attempt to get behind his material, to see its interrelations and its dramatic significance as a whole.
Some allowance, however, must be made for faults in this play, for the Prologue states that it was hastily written. The comedy itself shows that Lyly planned as he wrote. The opening scene of the play leaves one to suppose that Timoclea, who, rather than Campaspe, is the chief female speaker, is to play an important part. She never appears again, and is mentioned but once. Later parts of the play call for some manifestation, in this first scene, of Campaspe's intense fascination for Alexander, but there is nothing of the kind. Nor does the action in any later scene really prepare for Alexander's self-reproaches for his mad infatuation. Until late in the play, when Lyly speaks of Campaspe as Alexander's concubine, a reader is not even entirely clear as to their relations. Perhaps some of this lack of clearness and sequence may result because the Timoclea part, at least, of the first scene is a survival from an older play. In the Accounts of the Revels at Court, under an entry for expenditures between January and February, 1573(4), "One Playe showen at Hampton Coorte before her Maᵗⁱᵉ by Mr. Munkester's Children" (Mulcaster's of the Merchant Taylors' School) is mentioned. Interlined are the words: "Timoclia at the Sege of Thebes by Alexander."
The movement of the comedy is episodic. The clever little pages bind the scenes together; Alexander connects the incidents of the main story; but too often, especially in the sub-plot, the action is not prepared for, and does not lead to anything. Nor does Lyly care much for climax. The Diogenes sub-plot does not end; it is dropped just before the main story closes. The great dramatic possibilities of the final scene are practically thrown away. It is significant that they could be developed only by a hand which could paint vividly the contest of a soul, the gradual reascendency of old motives, and manly renunciation.
Growth in character Lyly does not understand. As a rule his figures are types rather than many-sided human beings. Nor are the types always self-consistent. All the nobility of Alexander's renunciation disappears when he says: "Go, Apelles, take with you your Campaspe; Alexander is cloyed with looking on that which thou wond'rest at." In general, Lyly is too ready to depend on the way in which his figures speak rather than on truth to life in what they speak. In the retorts of Apelles as he talks with Alexander of his work, there is, of course, something of the real artist's pride in his art and irritation at royal omniscience. There is characterization, too, in many of the speeches of Diogenes, but in both of these instances Lyly is either quoting or paraphrasing. Campaspe, it is true, is almost a character, and slightly anticipates the arch heroines of Shakespeare. Hers are coquettishness, womanly charm. In her scene with Apelles in the studio (Act IV. scene 2), the underlying passion of both almost breaks through the frigid medium of expression. The pages may doubtless be traced back to the witty, graceless slaves of Latin comedy, and more immediately to precursors in the work of Edwardes, but Lyly adds so much individuality and humour that they are a real accession in the history of the drama. Moreover, many of his figures often comment incisively on customs and follies of the time, preparing for the later comedy of manners.
No preceding play is so full of charming and lasting lyrics. In all his comedies except The Woman in the Moone, Lyly writes neither in the usual jingling rhymes nor the infrequently used blank verse, but in prose. He shows the men of his day new possibilities in dialogue; for though his artificial style prevents easy characterisation, it does not keep him from effective repartee and a closer representation of the give and take of real conversation than was possible with the rhyming lines, or with blank verse as it was handled in his day. Probably, however, the greatest importance of this play for the student of Elizabethan drama is the way it shows interest in a romantic story breaking through classic material and Renaissance expression, thus anticipating the romantic drama of 1587. Clearly, then, the merits of Alexander and Campaspe are literary and historical, not dramatic.
Lyly's Development as a Dramatist.—That Lyly worked, however, steadily toward more genuine drama becomes clear if one reads his plays in order. In all he shows classical influence by his choice of subject, or by constant allusion, but he is not a scholar in the sense of Jonson or Chapman. He is well read in certain authors—Ovid, particularly the Metamorphoses, Plutarch, Pliny, perhaps Lucian; he has at his tongue's end many stock Latin quotations, and delights in misquoting or paraphrasing for the sake of a pun, sure that the quick-witted courtiers will recognize the originals. Classical in construction he certainly is not. His interest is to find a pretty love story which gives opportunities for dramatic surprises and complications, effective groupings, graceful dances, and dainty lyrics. He is fertile in finding interesting figures to bring upon the stage—the fairies of Endimion, the fiddlers of Mother Bombie, the shepherds of Love's Metamorphosis. If one examines the only two plays of his which lack the contrasting comic under-plot,—Love's Metamorphosis, and The Woman in the Moone,—it becomes clear that they are pastorals or masques. Even the other plays owe to their sub-plots the right to be called comedies. By choice of topics and by temperament, then, Lyly is a writer of masques.
At first he developed his two plots side by side, as in Endimion. One is used simply to relieve the other, or to fill time-spaces necessary between incidents of the main plot. Later, he joins the two slightly by letting figures in the sub-plot refer to incidents of the main story. In Mother Bombie he brings the groups together formally two or three times, and closes the play with nearly all the characters on the stage. In his last comedy, The Woman in the Moone, he discards contrasted plots, and tries to get his effects from one large group of figures. Even if his success in meeting his problem is not great, the mere recognition of it is significant. Yet it cannot be said that he ever becomes a good plotter, for he is always willing to bring in anywhere new people, new interests, or even, as in Mydas, to shift to a new plot midway. In Mother Bombie, when the climax of complication is reached in the meeting of the disguised Accius and Silena and their fathers, Lyly is unable to master the difficulties of the situation. He lets the two reveal themselves tamely, confusingly, before he has had anything like the potential fun out of the scene. Usually the plays ramble gently on till Lyly thinks the audience must have enough; then the deus ex machina appears, and all ends. Climax in closing he seems not to try for, but is content to end with a telling phrase.
In characterization his work varies. In the allegories he wishes merely to suggest well-known figures; distinct, final characterization would be out of place, even dangerous. In the pastoral-masques, the land of fantasy, the lines of characterization need not be sharply drawn. But even if one looks at Mother Bombie and the sub-plots of the plays, one sees that though there is perhaps a slight gain in portraying the figures, the people are too often significant for the way in which they talk rather than for action or characterizing speech. When Lyly attempts strong presentation of crucial moments or pathos, he stammers, or is particularly conventional.
As he develops, he modifies the eccentricities of his style. Nor is it probable that the passing of the popular enthusiasm for Euphuism is wholly responsible for this. He had the good sense to see the superiority of prose to verse as the expression of comedy, and he must have felt how much his rigidly artificial style cramped him. In Mother Bombie, 1589-91, Euphuism is well-nigh gone. In its place we have a style in which characterized dialogue is more possible and more evident. In The Woman in the Moone the exigencies of verse are too much for Euphuism, and it practically disappears.
Very slowly, then, Lyly was working toward a drama of simple characterizing dialogue, more unified, and at the same time more complex. Even as he worked, however, Kyd, Greene, and Marlowe swept by to accomplishment impossible for him under any conditions.
His Place in English Comedy.—John Lyly is not merely, then, as has been too often suggested, a scholar "picking fancies out of books (with) little else to marvel at." He was keenly alive to foreign and domestic influences at work about him. His use of what other men offer foreshadows the marvellous assimilative power of Shakespeare. He seems to retain and apply with freedom all the similes and illustrations that come in his way; many are not to be hunted down except in out-of-the-way corners of the books best known to him. Only a man of poetic feeling would have cared to work in these allegories and pastorals. Humorous he is in the scenes of the pages. Here and there, as in some of the replies of Apelles to Alexander, and in the words of Parmenio on the rising sun (Act I, scene 1), there is caustic irony. Lyly is a thinker, too, and a critic, as his frequent satire of existing social customs or follies shows. Now and then he is fearless; for instance, in his portrayal before the Queen of the artist's contempt for royal assumption of knowledge (Act III, scene 4), and in his comment on the impossibility of happy love between a subject and a monarch (Act IV, scene 4). His allegories show best his ingenuity and inventiveness. His mastery of involved phrasing is indubitable.
Without doubt, however, his attitude toward his work is more that of the scholar than the poet or dramatist. His work is imitation of others who seem to him models, with the main attention on style. He has the inventiveness of the dramatist, but not his instinct for technique or recognition of the possibilities of a story and care in working them out. He never says a thing for himself if he can find it anywhere in a recognized author. In this, however, he shared in the mood of Spenser and his group. Indeed, a little comparison of Lyly with Spenser will show that, though in accomplishment he is far below the poet, he expresses in his comedies the historical influences, the existing intellectual conditions, and the literary aspirations which Spenser phrases in his early work. It is in poetic power, in imaginative sweep, that the two separate widely.
Yet Lyly, drawing on what preceded and what surrounded him, did more than express the literary mood and desires of his day. Through him the lyric in the drama came to Dekker, Jonson, and Shakespeare, more dainty and more varied. He broke the way for later men to use prose as the means of expression for comedy. He gave them suggestions for clever dialogue. At a time of loose and hurried dramatic writing he showed that literary finish might well accompany such composition. His pages are the prototypes of the boys and servants in Peele, Chapman, Jonson, and Shakespeare. In a small way he foreshadowed the comedy of manners. For as close a relationship between the drama and politics as we find in his allegories, we must look to the declining days of the Jacobean drama—to Middleton's Game of Chess. The romantic spirit found expression in him, not in a drama of blood, but in pastorals and masques which look forward to the masques of Jonson, to Love's Labour's Lost, Midsummer Night's Dream, and As You Like It. His influence on the highly sensitized mind of Shakespeare may be traced in many lines and scenes.
His vogue as a dramatist was short. By 1590 the boisterous, romantic drama, the often inchoate chronicle history, both frequently accompanied by scenes of would-be comic horse-play, engrossed public attention. The great period of experimentation with both old and crude forms was beginning. It is not surprising that when Lyly's plays were revived by the Chapel Children in 1597-1600, they could not stand comparison with the work of Jonson, Dekker, Heywood, and other dramatists of the day, but were called "musty fopperies of antiquity." Their work, in bridging from the classic to romantic comedy, as the Drama of Blood bridged from Seneca to real tragedy, was done. Thereafter their main interest must be historical.
Previous Editions and the Present Text.—The title of the first quarto (1584) is, "A moste excellent Comedie of Alexander, Campaspe, and Diogenes, played before the Queene's Maiestie on twelfe day at night, by her Maiestie's Children, and the Children of Paules. Imprinted at London, for Thomas Cadman, 1584." In the second edition, issued the same year by the same publisher, the title is changed to Campaspe, and the play is said to have been given "on new yeares day at night." The title, Campaspe, was retained in the third quarto, 1591, for William Broome, and in Edward Blount's duodecimo collective edition, 1632. (Manly.) Both, too, state that the play was given "on twelfe-day at night." The headlines of all the quartos read Alexander and Campaspe; of Blount, A tragicall Comedie of Alexander and Campaspe. Besides the quartos and Blount's Sixe Court Comedies there are these reprints: in Vol. II., Dodsley's Select Collection of Old Plays, 1825; in Vol. I., John Lilly's Dramatic Works, F. W. Fairholt, 1858; in Vol. II., Specimens of the Pre-Shaksperean Drama, J. M. Manly, 1897. In the footnotes of the present edition the quartos are indicated by A. B. and C., the other editions by Bl. Do. F. and M. respectively. Blount's text, mainly, is followed. The variant readings of the quartos are given on the authority of Fairholt.
George P. Baker.