John Lyly

Writer, born in the Weald of Kent, SE England, UK. He studied at Oxford and Cambridge, and was MP for a while (1597–1601). He is remembered for the style of his writing, as seen in his two-part prose romance Euphues (1578, 1580). This work gave rise to the term euphuism, referring to an artificial and extremely elegant language, with much use made of complex similes and antithesis. Among his plays are The Woman in the Moone (1597) and Endimion, the Man in the Moone (1591). As a dramatist, he is important as the first English writer of high comedy, and for the use of prose as its medium of expression.

John Lyly (Lilly or Lylie) (c.

He was born in Kent in 1553 or 1554. The fellowship, however, was not granted, and Lyly shortly after left the university. He complains about a sentence of rustication apparently passed on him at some time, in his address to the gentlemen scholars of Oxford affixed to the second edition of the first part of Euphues, but nothing more is known about either its date or its cause. If we are to believe Wood, Lyly never took kindly to the proper studies of the university.

After he left Oxford, where he had the reputation of "a noted wit," Lyly seems to have attached himself to Lord Burghley. "This noble man," he writes in the Glasse for Europe, in the second part of Euphues (1580), "I found so ready being but a straunger to do me good, that neyther I ought to forget him, neyther cease to pray for him, that as he hath the wisdom of Nestor, so he may have the age, that having the policies of Ulysses he may have his honor, worthy to lyve long, by whom so many lyve in quiet, and not unworthy to be advaunced by whose care so many have been preferred."

Two years later a letter from Lyly to the treasurer, dated July 1582, protests against an accusation of dishonesty which had brought him into trouble with his patron, and demands a personal interview in order to clear his name. However, neither from Burghley nor from Queen Elizabeth I did Lyly ever receive any substantial patronage. at the University of Cambridge, and possibly saw his hopes of court advancement dashed by the appointment in July of Edmund Tylney to the office of Master of the Revels, a post at which he had been aiming.

For a time Lyly was the most successful and fashionable of English writers, hailed as the author of "a new English," as a "raffineur de l'Anglois"; After the publication of Euphues Lyly seems to have entirely deserted the novel form, which was much imitated (e.g., by Barnabe Rich in his Second Tome of the Travels and Adventures of Don Simonides, 1584), and to have thrown himself almost exclusively into play-writing, probably still with a view to the mastership of revels. Eight plays by him were probably acted before the queen by the children of the Chapel Royal and the children of St Paul's School between the years 1584 and 1589, one or two of them being repeated before a popular audience at the Blackfriars Theatre.

Lyly sat in parliament as member for Hindon in 1580, for Aylesbury in 1593, for Appleby in 1597 and for Aylesbury a second time in 1601. In 1589 Lyly published a tract in the Martin Marprelate controversy, called Pappe with an hatchet, alias a figge for my Godsonne; The two petitions, transcripts of which are extant among the Harleian manuscripts, are undated, but in the first of them he speaks of having been ten years hanging about the court in hope of preferment, and in the second he extends the period to thirteen years. It may be conjectured with great probability that the ten years date from 1579, when Tylney was appointed master of the revels with a tacit understanding that Lyly was to have the next reversion of the post. But in 1589 or 1590 the mastership of the revels was as far off as ever--Tylney in fact held the post for thirty-one years--and that the evidence for his authorship may be found in Gabriel Harvey's Pierce's Supererogation (written November 1589, published 1593), in Nashe's Have with you to Saffron Walden (1596), and in various allusions in Lyly's own plays.

In the second petition of 1593, Lyly wrote "Thirteen yeres your highnes servant but yet nothing. What may have been Lyly's subsequent fortunes at court we do not know.

Comedies

In 1632 Blount published "Six Court Comedies," including:

Endymion (1591) Sappho and Phao (1584) Alexander and Campaspe (1584) Midas (1592) Mother Bombie (1594) Gallathea (1592)

To these should be added the Woman in the Moone (Lyly's earliest play, to judge from a passage in the prologue and therefore earlier than 1584, the date of Alexander and Campaspe), and Love's Metamorphosis, first printed in 1601. A Warning for Faire Women (1599) and The Maid's Metamorphosis (1600) have been attributed to Lyly, but on altogether insufficient grounds.

The first editions of all these plays were issued between 1584 and 1601, and the majority of them between 1584 and 1592, in what were Lyly's most successful and popular years. Lyly's dialogue is still a long way removed from the dialogue of Shakespeare.

One or two of the songs introduced into his plays are justly famous and show a real lyrical gift. Nor in estimating his dramatic position and his effect upon his time must it be forgotten that his classical and mythological plots, flavourless and dull as they would be to a modern audience, were charged with interest to those courtly hearers who saw in Midas Philip II, Elizabeth in Cynthia and perhaps Leicester's unwelcome marriage with Lady Sheffield in the love affair between Endymion and Tellus which brings the former under Cynthia's displeasure. Harvey dreaded lest Lyly should make a play upon their quarrel;

See Lyly's Complete Works, ed. Fairholt, Dramatic Works of John Lilly (2 vols.)