The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare

by J. J. Jusserand

I.

The romance which, at this period, received a new life, and was to come nearer to our novels than anything that had gone before, has many traits in common with the fanciful style of the architecture, costume, and conversation described above. What have we to do, thought men, with things practical, convenient, or of ordinary use? We wish for nothing but what is brilliant, unexpected, extraordinary. What is the good of setting down in writing the incidents of commonplace lives? Are they not sufficiently known to us? does not their triviality sadden us enough every day? If we are told stories of imaginary lives, let them at least be dissimilar from our own; let them offer unforeseen incidents; let the author be free to turn aside from reality provided that he leaves the trivial and the ordinary. Let him lead us to Verona, Athens, into Arcadia, where he will, but as far as possible from Fleet Street! And if by ill-luck he sets foot in Fleet Street, let him at least speak the language of Arcadia!

Authors found this advice excellent, and took good care to relieve themselves of difficult search after the mere truth. 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.

It was written expressly for women, and not only did the author not conceal the circumstance, but he proclaimed it aloud. Their opinion alone interested him, to that of the critics he was indifferent. "It resteth Ladies," he said, "that you take the paines to read it, but at such times, as you spend in playing with your little dogges, and yet will I not pinch you of that pastime, for I am content that your dogges lie in your laps: so 'Euphues' may be in your hands, that when you shall be wearie in reading of the one, you may be ready to sport with the other.... 'Euphues' had rather lye shut in a Ladyes casket, then open in a Schollers studie." Yet after dinner, "Euphues" will still be agreeable to the ladies, adds Lyly, always smiling; if they desire to slumber, it will bring them to sleep which will be far better than beginning to sew and pricking their fingers when they begin to nod.[68]

There is no possibility of error; with Lyly commences in England the literature of the drawing-room, that of which we speak at morning calls, productions which, in spite of vast and many changes, still occupy a favourite place on the little boudoir tables. We must also notice what pains Lyly gives himself to make his innovation a success, and so please his patronesses, and how he ornaments his thoughts and engarlands his speeches, how cunningly he imbues himself with the knowledge of the ancients and of foreigners, and what trouble he gives himself to improve upon the most learned and the most florid of them. His care was not thrown away. He was spoiled, petted, and caressed by the ladies; with an impartial heart they extended to the author the same favour they granted to the book, and to their little dogs. He was proclaimed king of letters by his admirers, and became, in fact, king of the précieux. He created a school, and the name of his hero served to baptize a whole literature. This particular form of bad style was called euphuism.

II.

Euphuism owes to him its name and its diffusion in England; but not, although it is usually so stated, its birth. This strange language, as Dr. Landmann[69] has well demonstrated, was imported from Spain into England, and Lyly was not the first to use it in this country. The works of Guevara, turned into English by five or six different translators, had a considerable vogue and acclimatized this extraordinary style in Great Britain. One of his writings especially, "The golden boke of Marcus Aurelius, emperour," enjoyed a very great popularity; it was translated by Lord Berners in 1532, and by Sir Thomas North in 1557,[70] and went through many editions. The moral dissertations of which it is full enchanted serious minds; the unusual language of Spain delighted frivolous souls. Before Lyly, English authors had already imitated it; but when Lyly appeared and embellished it even more, enthusiasm ran so high that its foreign progenitor was forgotten, and this exotic style was rebaptized as proof of adoption and naturalization in England.

Since it is not a natural product, but the mere result of ingenious artifices, nothing is easier than to reduce it to its component parts, to take it to pieces so to speak. It consists in an immoderate, prodigious, monstrous use of similes, so arranged as to set up antitheses in every limb of the sentence. What is peculiar to the English imitators, is the employment of alliteration, in order to better mark the balance of the sentences written for effect. Finally, the kind of similes even has something peculiar: they are for the most part borrowed from an imaginary ancient history and a fantastical natural history, a sort of mythology of plants and stones to which the most extraordinary virtues are attributed.

In the important parts, when he means to use a noble style, Lyly cannot relate the most trivial incident without setting up parallels between the sentiments of his characters and the virtues of toads, serpents, unicorns, scorpions, and all the fantastical animals mentioned in Pliny or described in the bestiaries of the Middle Ages. His knowledge of zoology resembles that of Richard de Fournival, who, in the thirteenth century, lamented in his "Bestiaire d'Amour,"[71] that he was like the wolf, who, when instead of first noticing the man, allowed the man to see him first, lost all his courage; or like the cricket who loves chirping so much that he forgets to eat and allows himself to be caught. Richard was overcome in like manner by the glances of his mistress, and all his songs only served to accomplish his ruin. The woman he loves resembles the bird called "Kalander," or again, the animal called "cockatrice" or "cocodrille," which is often mentioned by Lyly. "Its nature is such that when it finds a man, then it devours him, and when it has devoured him, then it laments him all the days of its life."[72] Such is the conduct, says Richard, of women too beautiful and too much beloved.