In 1632 Edmund Blount published "Six Court Comedies," including Endymion (1591) , Sappho and Phao (1584), Alexander and Campaspe (1584), Midas (1592), Mother Bombie
and Gallathea (1592). To these should be added the Woman in the Moone (Lyly's earliest play, to judge from a pass age in the prologue and therefore earlier than 1584, the date of Alexander and Campaspe), and Love's Metamorphosis, first printed in 16o1. Of these, all but the last are in prose. A Warn ing for Faire Women (1599) and The Maid's Metamorphosis (I600) have been attributed to Lyly, but on altogether insufficient grounds. The first editions of all these plays were issued between 1584 and 16o1, and the majority of them between 1584 and 1592, in what were Lyly's most successful and popular years. Lyly's dialogue shows a great advance in rapidity and resource upon anything which had gone before it ; it represents a great step for ward in English dramatic art. His nimbleness, and the wit which struggles with his pedantry, found their full development in the dialogue of Twelfth Night, As You Like It and Much Ado about Nothing, just as "Marlowe's mighty line" led up to and was eclipsed by the majesty and music of Shakespearian passion. One or two of the songs introduced into his plays show a real lyrical gift. These, however, only appear in a posthumous edition, and critics are not unanimous in ascribing them to Lyly. His classical and mythological plots, flavourless and dull as they would be to a modern audience, were interesting enough to the court, who saw in Midas Philip II., Elizabeth in Cynthia and perhaps Lei cester's unwelcome marriage with Lady Sheffield in the love affair between Endymion and Tellus which brings the former under Cynthia's displeasure. Gabriel Harvey dreaded lest Lyly should make a play upon their quarrel ; Meres, as is well known, places him among "the best for comedy"; and Ben Jonson names him among those foremost rivals who were "outshone" and outsung by Shakespeare.
It was not, however, as a dramatist, but as the author of Euphues, that Lyly made his immediate mark upon the Elizabethan world. His plays amused the court circle, but the "new English" of his novel introduced a new sense of form in English prose style, and in English speech Its exaggerations com pelled attention, and in time disappeared; but the conscious pre occupation with the order and selection of words in prose bore solid fruit. The plot of Euphues is extremely simple. The hero, whose name may very possibly have been suggested by a passage in Ascham's Schoolmaster, is introduced to us as still in bondage to the follies of youth, "preferring fancy before friends, and this present humour before honour to come." His travels bring him to Naples (London), where he falls in love with Lucilla, the gov ernor's light-minded daughter. Lucilla is already pledged to Euphues's friend Philautus, but Euphues's passion betrays his friendship, and the old lover finds himself thrown over by both friend and mistress. Euphues himself, however, is very soon for saken for a more attractive suitor. He and Philautus make up their quarrel, and Euphues writes his friend "a cooling card," to be "applied to all lovers," which is so severe upon women that Lyly feels it necessary to balance it by a sort of apology ad dressed "to the grave matrons and honest maidens of Italy" (England). Euphues then leaves Naples (London) for his native Athens (Oxford), where he gives himself up to study, of which the first fruits are two long treatises—the first, "Euphues and his Ephoebus," a disquisition on the art of education addressed to parents, and the second, "Euphues and Atheos," a discussion of the first principles of religion. The remainder of the book is filled up with correspondence between Euphues and his friends. The first Euphues is therefore an attack on the "Italianate" so ciety of London, and on the fickleness of woman. The book aroused violent protests both in Oxford and London, which Lyly hastened to meet by the publication of Euphues and his England, in which criticism is exchanged for flattery. England is all that
is good ; Englishwomen are chaste and virtuous, and Englishmen mirrors of chivalry.
In Euphues and his England Euphues and Philautus travel from Naples to England. They arrive at Dover, halt for the night at Fidus's house at Canterbury, and then proceed to London, where they make acquaintance with Surius, a young English gentleman of great birth and noble blood; Psellus, an Italian nobleman reputed "great in magick"; Martius, an elderly English man; Camilla, a beautiful English girl of insignificant family; Lady Flavia and her niece Fraunces. After endless correspondence and conversation on all kinds of topics, Euphues is recalled to Athens, and from there corresponds with his friends. "Euphues' Glasse for Eiirope" is a flattering description of England sent to Livia at Naples. It is the most interesting portion of the book, and throws light upon one or two points of Lyly's own biography.
Such is a brief outline of the book which for a time set the fashion for English prose. Two editions of each part appeared within the first year after publication, and 13 editions of both are enumerated up to 1636, after which, with the exception of a modernized version in 1718, Euphues was never reprinted until 1868, when Dr. Arber took it in hand. The long disquisitions on love, religion, exile, women or education, on court life and coun try pleasures, handled all the most favourite topics in the secu larized speculation of the time ; the foreign background and travel talk pleased a society of which Lyly himself said "trafic and travel hath woven the nature of all nations into ours and made this land like arras full of device which was broadcloth full of workman ship"; and, although Lyly steered clear in it of the worst classical pedantries of the day, the book was steeped in classical learning, and based upon classical material. A large proportion of its matter indeed was drawn from classical sources, but he always gave to his borrowed material a colouring which is peculiarly his own, the note which is described as eupheuistic.
It was not the matter of Euphues, however, so much as the style which made it famous. (See EUPHUISM.) The source of Lyly's peculiar style has been traced to the influence of Don Antonio de Guevara (q.v.), whose Libro Aureo de Marco Aurelio (1529) was translated by Lord Berners (1531), and, as The Dial for Princes, by North (1557). The sententious and antithetical style of The Dial for Princes is substantially that of Euphues, though Guevara on the whole handles it better than his imitator.
Lyly was not the first to appropriate and develop the Guevar istic style. The earliest book in which it was fully adopted was A petite Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure (1576) by George Pettie. Lyly, however, carried the style to its highest point, and made it the dominant literary fashion. His principal followers in it were Greene, Lodge and Nash, his principal opponent Sir Philip Sidney; the Arcadia in fact supplanted Euphues, and the Euphuistic taste proper may be said to have died out about 1590 after a reign of some I2 years. According to Landmann, Shakespeare's Love's Labour Lost is a caricature of the Italianate and pedantic fashions of the day, not of the peculiar style of Euphues. The only certain allusion in Shakespeare to the characteristics of Lyly's famous book is to be found in Henry IV., where Falstaff, playing the part of the king, says to Prince Hal, "Harry, I do not only marvel where thou spendest thy time, but also how thou art accompanied; for, though the camomile the more it is trodden on the faster it grows, yet youth the more it is wasted the sooner it wears." Here the pompous antithesis is evidently meant to caricature the peculiar Euphuistic sentence of court parlance.