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Unit 5: The Renaissance-University Wits and Contribution of Shakespeare to This Age

evidence. Indeed, individual scholars have repeatedly resorted to Peele in their attempts to grapple Notes
with Elizabethan plays of uncertain authorship. Plays that have been assigned to (or blamed on)
Peele include Locrine, The Troublesome Reign of King John, and Parts 1 and 2 of Shakespeare’s
Henry VI trilogy, in addition to Titus Andronicus. Edward III was attributed to Peele by Tucker
Brooke in 1908. While the attribution of the entire play to Peele is no longer accepted, Sir Brian
Vickers demonstrated using metrical and other analysis that Peele wrote the first act and the first
two scenes in Act II of Titus Andronicus, with Shakespeare responsible for the rest.

5.6 John Lyly
John Lyly was an English writer, best known for his books Euphues, The Anatomy of Wit and
Euphues and His England. Lyly’s linguistic style, originating in his first books, is known as
Euphuism.
In 1632 Blount published Six Court Comedies, the first printed collection of Lyly’s plays. They
appear in the text in the following order; the parenthetical date indicates the year they appeared
separately in quarto form:
Endymion (1591)
Campaspe (1584)
Sapho and Phao (1584)
Gallathea (1592)
Midas (1592)
Mother Bombie (1594).
Lyly’s other plays include Love’s Metamorphosis (though printed in 1601, possibly Lyly’s earliest
play — the surviving version is likely a revision of the original), and The Woman in the Moon,
first printed in 1597. Of these, all but the last are in prose.

Notes 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. His importance as
a dramatist has been very differently estimated. Lyly’s dialogue is still a long way removed from
the dialogue of Shakespeare. But at the same time it is a great advance in rapidity and resource
upon anything which had gone before it; it represents an important step in English dramatic art.
His nimbleness, and the wit which struggles with his pedantry, found their full development in
the dialogue of Twelfth Night and Much Ado about Nothing, just as “Marlowe’s mighty line” led
up to and was eclipsed by the majesty and music of Shakespearean passion.
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. As a matter of fact his reputation
and popularity as a playwright were considerable. Harvey dreaded lest Lyly should make a play
upon their quarrel; Francis 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.
Lyly must also be considered and remembered as a primary influence on the plays of William
Shakespeare, and in particular the romantic comedies. Love’s Metamorphosis is a large influence
on Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Gallathea is a major source for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In 2007,
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