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.