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.