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History of English Literature

Notes Italian authors, to which tales the Italian name ‘novella’ (novel) was applied. Most of the separate
tales are crude or amateurish and have only historical interest; though as a class they furnished the
plots for many Elizabethan dramas, including several of Shakespeare’s. The most important
collection was Painter’s ‘Palace of Pleasure,’ in 1566. The earliest original or partly original,
English prose fictions to appear were handbooks of morals and manners in story form, and here
the beginning was made by John Lyly, who is also of some importance in the history of the
Elizabethan drama. In 1578 Lyly, at the age of twenty-five, came from Oxford to London, full of the
enthusiasm of Renaissance learning, and evidently determined to fix himself as a new and dazzling
star in the literary sky. In this ambition he achieved a remarkable and immediate success, by the
publication of a little book entitled ‘Euphues and His Anatomie of Wit.’ ‘Euphues’ means ‘the well-
bred man,’ and though there is a slight action, the work is mainly a series of moralizing disquisitions
(mostly rearranged from Sir Thomas North’s translation of ‘The Dial of Princes’ of the Spaniard
Guevara) on love, religion, and conduct. Most influential, however, for the time-being, was Lyly’s
style, which is the most conspicuous English example of the later Renaissance craze, then rampant
throughout Western Europe, for refining and beautifying the art of prose expression in a mincingly
affected fashion. Witty, clever, and sparkling at all costs, Lyly takes especial pains to balance his
sentences and clauses antithetically, phrase against phrase and often word against word, sometimes
emphasizing the balance also by an exaggerated use of alliteration and assonance. A representative
sentence is this: ‘Although there be none so ignorant that both not know, neither any so impudent
that will not confesse, friendship to be the jewell of humaine joye; yet who so ever shall see this
amitie grounded upon a little affection, soon will conjecture that it shall be dissolved upon a light
occasion.’ Others of Lyly’s affectations are rhetorical questions, hosts of allusions to classical
history, and literature, and an unfailing succession of similes from all the recondite knowledge
that he can command, especially from the fantastic collection of fables which, coming down
through the Middle Ages from the Roman writer Pliny, went at that time by the name of natural
history and which we have already encountered in the medieval Bestiaries. Preposterous by any
reasonable standard, Lyly’s style, ‘Euphuism,’ precisely hit the Court taste of his age and became
for a decade its most approved conversational dialect.
In literature the imitations of ‘Euphues’ which flourished for a while gave way to a series of
romances inaugurated by the ‘Arcadia’ of Sir Philip Sidney. Sidney’s brilliant position for a few
years as the noblest representative of chivalrous ideals in the intriguing Court of Elizabeth is a
matter of common fame, as is his death in 1586 at the age of thirty-two during the siege of Zutphen
in Holland. He wrote ‘Arcadia’ for the amusement of his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, during
a period of enforced retirement beginning in 1580, but the book was not published until ten years
later. It is a pastoral romance, in the general style of Italian and Spanish romances of the earlier
part of the century. The pastoral is the most artificial literary form in modern fiction. It may be said
to have begun in the third century B. C. with the perfectly sincere poems of the Greek Theocritus,
who gives genuine expression to the life of actual Sicilian shepherds. But with successive Latin,
Medieval, and Renaissance writers in verse and prose the country characters and setting had
become mere disguises, sometimes allegorical, for the expression of the very far from simple
sentiments of the upper classes, and sometimes for their partly genuine longing, the outgrowth of
sophisticated weariness and ennui, for rural naturalness. Sidney’s very complicated tale of
adventures in love and war, much longer than any of its successors, is by no means free from
artificiality, but it finely mirrors his own knightly spirit and remains a permanent English classic.
Among his followers were some of the better hack-writers of the time, who were also among the
minor dramatists and poets, especially Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge. Lodge’s ‘Rosalynde,’
also much influenced by Lyly, is in itself a pretty story and is noteworthy as the original of
Shakespeare’s ‘As You like It’.
Lastly, in the concluding decade of the sixteenth century, came a series of realistic stories depicting
chiefly, in more or less farcical spirit, the life of the poorer classes. They belonged mostly to that class
of realistic fiction which is called picaresque, from the Spanish word ‘picaro,’ a rogue, because it
began in Spain with the ‘Lazarillo de Tormes’ of Diego de Mendoza, in 1553, and because its heroes
are knavish serving-boys or similar characters whose unprincipled tricks and exploits formed the
substance of the stories. In Elizabethan England it produced nothing of individual note.
28 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY