IN 1632, Edward Blount completed an act of literary exhumation. Prefacing his edition of six plays by the Elizabethan author John Lyly, Blount claimed he had ‘dig’d up the Graue of a Rare and Excellent Poet’, only to discover a forgotten aspect of literary—and social—history: ‘All our Ladies were then his Schollers; And that Beautie in Court, which could not Parley Euphueisme, was as litle regarded; as shee which now there, speakes not French.’2 The term ‘euphuism’ is derived from the eponymous hero of Lyly’s two prose fictions, Euphues. The anatomy of wyt (1578) and Euphues and his England (1580), and is commonly used to describe Lyly’s distinctive prose style. However, as Blount suggests, mastering euphuism is a skill which can extend beyond reading alone. Successful imitation is the equivalent of learning another language, and one which gains readers entrance into an elite. It is not as easy as Blount makes it sound. In Peter Hausted’s Latin university play, Senile Odium (The Hatred of an Old Man), published in 1633, Euphues turns up as a faded celebrity, reduced to a spot of private tutoring. His pupil Gorgonius is laboriously trying to improve his seduction techniques by imitating Lyly’s writing. But whenever he embarks on supposedly euphuistic sentences he forgets his words and gets interrupted by scornful rivals. After two attempts to deliver the line, ‘O most verdantly vigorous of virgins’, he gives up in disgust.3
Thankfully, euphuism is far more fluid and dynamic than Gorgonius’s painful attempts at rote learning suggest. Rather, it is an evolving mode, which develops in the course of Lyly’s own work and in the work of his imitators in order to accommodate the changing agendas of those speaking and writing it, and the genres in which it is placed. While it originates in recognizable linguistic markers, the concepts behind Lyly’s style become embodied in dramatic and thematic representation. To the inventor of the term (not Lyly), the idea of defining euphuism in academic terms would have been laughable. Fourteen years after the publication of Lyly’s first book, his one-time friend and fellow author Gabriel Harvey inveighed against his enemy, the pamphleteer Thomas Nashe, with heavy irony: ‘What hee is improued since, excepting his good olde Flores Poetarum, and Tarletons surmounting Rhetorique, with a little Euphuisme, and Greenesse inough, which were all prettily stale, before he put hand to penne.’4 In other words, Nashe’s writing is deeply derivative, a patchwork of popular styles which he has tried to inject with the passé literary trends ‘euphuism’ and ‘Greeneness’, the latter term referring to Lyly’s successor, Robert Greene.
Harvey then refers to the exploitation, and recognition, of a phenomenon rather than to a clearly defined set of rhetorical techniques. As both Blount’s court ladies and Hausted’s Gorgonius realize, euphuism is a language of opportunism, a guide to how to get on in society. It also requires a calculating discrimination; the most successful euphuists are those who use Lyly’s style to ratify their own convictions. Euphuism is primarily a form of intellectual dressing up, and the metaphorical link between clothing and writing resonates throughout his work. One of the courtiers in Lyly’s play Sapho and Phao (1584) tells his friend to ‘turne your library to a wardrope’, and the advice might be applied as much to Lyly’s readers and imitators as to his personae.5 As Blount and Hausted suggest, euphuism is a collective mode, which develops beyond the control of its inventor and gives rise to endless imitation. Euphuism is about infinite expansion; a single thought can breed analogies, anecdotes, intellectual choices, and printed pages. It is thus ideally suited to the rapidly developing print culture of the late sixteenth century, as the multitude of texts claiming kinship with Euphues testify. Lyly’s style effectively provided the environment in which printed prose fiction was established in the 1580s; euphuism was a new way of dressing up language and writing for fun.
Harvey’s sneering comment on Nashe was meant to be devastating, but as so often in early modern literature, the last laugh was on Harvey. His criticism reveals the internecine relationships between writers and styles in this period. According to Harvey, Lyly himself had opportunistically deprived his then friend of the fame that should have been his. In publishing the Anatomy he had taken credit for the invention of a prose style for which he, Harvey, was partly responsible: ‘young Euphues hatched the egges, that his elder freendes laide’.6 Lyly had rushed his work into print (gaining instant fame), leaving the unrecognized Harvey clucking discontentedly. While Harvey rarely missed a chance of literary self-aggrandizement, he also unwittingly became one of Lyly’s most enduring publicists, his insult enshrining ‘euphuism’ in the popular imagination. His harrumphing suggests quite how widespread and active the practice of what Harvey calls ‘euphuing’ was before Lyly’s work appeared and how impossible it is to trace a single source for it. Lyly’s writing has been linked to Cicero, Isocrates, Gorgias, and Guevara among many others, and it can be co-opted to represent different sides in literary debates. Many writers wrote elaborately patterned prose; what Lyly did was effectively to trademark it with some characteristic variations of his own.
Perhaps it is most helpful to view the development of euphuism in the emergent context of printed prose fiction. George Pettie’s A Petite Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure (1576) was a bestselling collection of short stories supposedly celebrating marriage, but usually detailing its awful consequences. Pettie’s prose is peppered with long alliterative speeches, balanced clauses, and rhetorical questions. One example sums up both his manner and matter: ‘But see the frailty of our felicity, marke the misery which mortall men are subiect to. A man would have thought this married couple in love so loyall, in estate so high, in all thinges so happy, had bene placed in perpetuity of prosperity. But alas what estate hath fortune ever made so invincible, which vice can not vanquish?’7
Equally important is the tone of Pettie’s work, which ranges from the apocalyptic to bantering insinuations to women readers. George Gascoigne’s ‘A Discourse of the Adventures passed by Master F. J.’ (1573; revised 1575) is a similarly knowing pseudo-autobiographical tale of a young man, F. J., and his affair with a married woman, which Gascoigne hints is a roman à clef. The plot also recalls the tale of Troy, in particular Criseyde’s desertion of Troilus. Gascoigne’s prose style is unlike that of Pettie or Lyly. The complexity of his work lies primarily in the interlacing of different kinds of writing and literary puzzles apparently designed to enmesh the reader. By his own account, his book earned Gascoigne instant notoriety, and at least one version was censored.
Though Gascoigne’s literary celebrity was probably partially self-created, his text undoubtedly changed the Elizabethan literary scene. Lyly, grandson of the celebrated schoolmaster and grammarian William Lily, had graduated from Oxford and failed to gain an academic appointment. His intention appears to have been to imitate Gascoigne, but with caution, to write a more seemingly moral but eye-catching fiction which would cause a stir in influential circles and gain a place in the establishment for its author. Accordingly, in Lyly’s first book, Euphues. The anatomy of wyt, the complexity of Gascoigne’s riddling is matched by the intricacies of Lyly’s flashy prose style and by his ambitious claims in the dedicatory epistle to act as a surgeon dissecting ‘wit’. Gascoigne’s hero, F. J., is paralleled by Lyly’s protagonist Euphues, often identified with Lyly himself. But Euphues also came with a known literary pedigree, featuring as a witty and potentially learned persona in Roger Ascham’s educational treatise The Schoolmaster (1570). One of the first points to take account of, then, is the multiplicity of connotations which Euphues has, as both text and protagonist. ‘Wit’ itself is a concept even more fluid than euphuism and as central to its definition. The junk shop of mental images which can be found in the human brain lies behind the extraordinary frame of reference of Lyly’s personae.8
The multiplicity of interpretation suggested by the title of Lyly’s work is equally characteristic of his style. The search for a definitive list of what euphuism is is as misleading as the search for its ultimate origins.9 Its most characteristic components can, however, be identified by their now less familiar rhetorical names. In brief, Lyly’s prose relies heavily on isocolon (clauses of similar syllabic length), parison (clauses with a similar structure), and paramoion (similar sounding words, including figures such as alliteration and assonance). Underlying most of Lyly’s comparisons are the concepts of repetition with variance, parallelism, and antithesis, with particular emphasis on the difference between appearance and reality. Many of these structures are contained in monologues in which Lyly’s personae debate emotions, ideas, or the merits of different courses of action, often in rhetorical questions.
So for example, when Euphues is considering ‘whether beautie or witte moue men most to loue’, he reflects:
How franticke are those louers which are carried away with the gaye glistering of the fine face? the beautie whereof is parched with the Sommers blase, & chipped with the winters blast, which is of so short continuance that it fadeth before one perceiue it florishe, of so small profit that it poysoneth those that possesse it, of so little value with the wyse, that they accompt it a delicate bayte with a deadly hooke, a sweete Panther with a deuouring paunch, a sower poison in a siluer potte.10
While heavily indebted to Pettie’s techniques, Lyly weaves a far more elaborate thread of ideas together. His prose typically shows life as a process of continual change. Here alliterative descriptions of physical perfection mirror each other (‘gaye glistering’, ‘fine face’), and are progressively denuded, first by nature (‘parched with the sommers blase, & chipped with the winters blast), and then by a series of clauses stressing transience (‘of so short continuance … of so small profit … of so little value’). Beauty turns out to be ‘a delicate bayte’ and ‘a sweete Panther’, which both conceal danger, and finally ‘a sower poison in a siluer potte’. Lyly inverts the word order so that the third comparison gives the dangerous element (‘a sower poison’) before its attractive container; it is as if readers have just drunk deeply from a silver flagon and realized their mistake too late.
The unexpected appearance of the sweet panther in an otherwise quotidian range of images calls attention to another of Lyly’s most characteristic effects. His prose is oriented around the discovery of apparent correspondences and relationships between the human, natural, and classical worlds. Underpinning the dilemmas of his personae is a bizarre collection of analogies and anecdotes. His protagonists support their arguments with references to familiar gods and stories from classical literature, often from the tale of Troy, but also by alluding to a menagerie of extraordinary creatures and their habits, some of which may be found in the pages of writers such as Pliny, author of a famous Latin encyclopaedia of natural history, and others which Lyly appears to have invented. Thus, when Euphues’s friend Philautus discovers that Euphues has betrayed him, he exclaims:
Couldest thou not remember Philautus that Greece is neuer without some wily Vlisses, neuer void of some Synon, neuer to seeke of some deceitfull shifter? Why then did his pretended curtesie bewitch thee with such credulytie? Shall my good will bee the cause of his ill wil? bicause I was content to be his friende, thought he mee meete to be made his foole? I see now that as the fish Scolopidus in the floud Araris at the waxinge of the Moone is as white as the driuen snow, and at the wayning as blacke as the burnt coale, so Euphues, which at the first encreasing of our familyaritie, was very zealous, is nowe at the last cast become most faythlesse.11
The cast of classical mythology join animals, vegetables, and minerals to form a busy subculture, often undergoing processes of transformation, sometimes revealing their true natures, but often masking them. The story thus takes place on multiple levels, as the tale of Troy is re-enacted in the midst of extreme nature. Euphues is both a shifty Ulysses and a distinctly odd fish.
Lyly’s style, so often about deceptive appearances, is intimately and logically tied into his plot. Like Gascoigne, Lyly wrote about betrayal. Euphues deceives his friend Philautus by falling in love with his fiancée Lucilla and starting a secret, but unconsummated, affair with her. She in turn betrays Euphues by discarding him for another lover, Curio. Alliterative words, in particular, gain momentum. There is repeated discussion of trial, trust, and truth, while the concepts of fraud, flattery, friendship, fancy, and fickleness are increasingly interlaced. The book is also deeply contradictory. Lyly’s use of parallelism might suggest that he is keen to celebrate balance and harmony and to support his points with academic analogies. Reading one half of a Lylian sentence raises expectations of an antithetical second half; in Philautus’s fulmination, ‘curtesie’ is answered by ‘credulytie’, ‘friende’ by ‘foole’. The narrative is peppered with arcane examples and seems designed to generate footnotes. But rather than grounding his text in helpful exemples, Lyly’s citations allow readers to become engulfed in his own endless creativity. The relevance of the fish Scolopidus’s habits to Philautus’s situation is left up to readers. As Blount noted, imitating euphuism is like learning another language, but it is also one which readers have to create and evaluate for themselves. Lyly offers his readers entry into a faux elite, his prose a pseudo-academic tissue of images designed to give a veneer of learning, but in fact delivering a very alternative education. Moreover, as readers discover, the natural phenomena to which Lyly refers frequently exhibit contradictory behaviour on different pages, according to the agendas of the personae deploying them. Behind the apparent order, Lyly’s natural and rhetorical world runs riot.
The problems of arguing logically from such premises are swiftly exposed in the opening pages of the Anatomy. Euphues is a gifted young Athenian who falls into bad company and is subsequently rebuked for wasting his talents by an old man tellingly named Eubulus, or ‘good counsel’. Their argument goes to the heart of the text. Eubulus warns Euphues of the corruption with which he is liable to be tainted and the importance of nurture: ‘the tender youth of a childe is lyke the temperinge of newe waxe apte to receiue anye forme … as therefore the yron beeinge hotte receyueth any forme with the stroake of the Hammer, and keepeth it beeinge colde for euer, so the tender witte of a childe if with diligence it bee instructed in youth, wyll with industrye vse those qualities in hys age’. Euphues rudely responds with his own set of examples in support of acting according to nature: ‘Doe you not knowe … That the stone Abeston being once made hotte will neuer be made colde’. It all depends which examples you pick and how you use them, or as Euphues puts it, ‘it is ye disposition of the thought yt altereth ye nature of ye thing’.12 Multiple instances throughout the text confirm Euphues’s point of view; examples are cited to prove one point, then recycled to prove the opposite a few pages later. Eubulus’s mention of wax is a case in point. While for Eubulus it provided an image of mutability, Lucilla later uses it as proof of genetic inheritance and therefore, stability. Unwittingly echoing Euphues’s own thoughts on the power of nature, she observes that, ‘as the softe waxe receiueth what soeuer print be in the seale, and sheweth no other impression, so the tender babe being sealed with his fathers giftes representeth his Image most lyuely’.13 Lyly was always self-conscious about his own praxis and some of his most potent images invoke the idea of printing impressions and their relative permanence.
The only way to operate effectively in Lyly’s universe is to choose examples to your own advantage. Now the parallelism underlying euphuism operates beyond the merely linguistic sphere. Euphues finds a friend in Philautus, who he assumes will be ‘at all times an other I, in all places ye expresse Image of mine owne person’. Euphues wants to find a parallel, to make himself and Philautus into a walking euphuistic comparison; plot and grammar merge. Euphues confirms his delusions of grandeur when he places himself in a self-selected great tradition of faithful friends: ‘Damon to his Pythias … Titus to his Gysippus … was neuer found more faithfull then Euphues will be to his Philautus’.14 The ability to write oneself credibly into a developing literary heritage is an important element of euphuism; Euphues never recognizes the gap between the example and its re-enactment.
The problems come when Lyly’s hero encounters a better euphuist than himself. When Euphues meets Philautus’s fiancée Lucilla in Naples he is instantly smitten and begins flirting with her. And in what for Lyly’s successors would become one of the defining characteristics of euphuism, both lovers separately and secretly reflect on their new found attraction to each other in parallel monologues. Now Euphues runs into trouble. While analysing his own situation, he remarks that: ‘To true it is that as the Sea Crabbe swimmeth always against the streame, so wit always striueth agaynst wisedome.’ A few lines later, this image is gobbled up in an inexorable food chain: ‘The filthy Sow when she is sicke, eateth the Sea Crabbe and is immediately recured.’ Euphues, however, is less lucky than the filthy sow: ‘And can men by no hearb, by no art, by no way procure a remedye for the impatient disease of loue?’ Unable to find helpful examples in the natural world, Euphues turns to distorting classical mythology to justify himself: ‘Did not Paris though he were a welcome guest to Menelaus serue his hoste a slippery prancke? If Philautus had loued Lucilla, he woulde neuer haue suffered Euphues to haue seene hir.’15
Lucilla meanwhile, like the filthy sow, is an avid consumer and eagerly embraces her status as a negative example. When she retires to her room to consider the ethics of jettisoning Philautus in favour of Euphues, she initially weighs the merits of her lovers in a frequently imitated euphuistic construction: ‘I but Euphues hath greater perfection. I but Philautus hath deeper affection.’ She soon begins to refine the concept of value in both the natural and the lapidary sphere: ‘For as the Bee that gathereth Honny out of the Weede, when she espyeth the faire flower flyeth to the sweetest … So I although I loued Philautus for his good properties, yet seing Euphues to excell him, I ought by Nature to like him better … Is not the Dyamonde of more valewe then the Rubie, bicause he is of more vertue?’16 Throughout his fiction, Lyly uses the example of the bee as an image of creation. Lucilla co-opts it, again echoing Euphues’s earlier arguments in favour of the omnipotence of nature. Her assessment of the relative merits of different jewels is equally telling. Lucilla’s sound commercial sense in choosing the most valuable lover reflects Lyly’s own enterprise in publishing a love story; both ensure that their ventures are profitable.
What is the point of euphuism? The twisted logic Euphues and Lucilla use suggests that the mode is a parody of the abundance of exemplary principles expressed in contemporary conduct books.17 Any argument can be used on any side of the question. Lyly’s unlikely natural phenomena provide no insight into human behaviour. The eccentricities of his language create a screen behind which Lyly can hide his love story; speech takes the place of sex. Parallel monologues in which personae appear to reveal their inward thoughts only point up the distance between them. It is impossible to know what examples the other person has chosen to manipulate. And while Lyly, as narrator, throws in a few moralistic asides, he also goes out of his way to stress his own inability to read his protagonists, often providing readers with a range of alternatives. In the second edition of the text he comments ironically on Euphues’s and Philautus’s friendship: ‘Either Euphues and Philautus stoode in neede of frindshippe, or were ordained to be friendes: vpon so short warning, to make so soone a conclusion might seeme in mine opinion if it continued myraculous, if shaken off, ridiculous.’18 Euphuism overwhelms readers with choices—of analogies, examples, and motivations.
The Anatomy is less a display of surgical excision than an ongoing process of redescription, with some of the techniques used being apparently designed to mislead. After his betrayal by Lucilla, Euphues turns into an embittered author of tracts and letters, including a misogynistic ‘cooling card’ addressed to young men in love. Euphues uses the rhetorical figure paradiastole, in this case the redescription of virtue as vice, to dissuade men from believing in female goodness, ‘If she be chaste then is she coy, … if a graue Matrone, who can woe hir?’19 Euphuism presents a universe in which natural phenomena and ethical values are equally vulnerable to incessant metamorphosis. Change is the only viable principle, in both prose and plot. It is thus appropriate that Lucilla, the better euphuist, successfully changes lovers in the course of the text and emerges from the plot with Curio and her father’s inheritance, although Lyly later invents a horrible death for her. In the second edition of the text, Lyly stresses that this mutability is also embodied in Euphues himself. He adds an early passage in which Euphues boasts of his Ulyssean flexibility, ‘if I be in Crete, I can lye, if in Greece I can shift, if in Italy I can court it’.20
Lyly’s text thus appears deliberately wayward—a story about swapping sexual partners couched in an absurdist language system devoid of ethics.21 Yet, the book contains more than fiction. The moralistic tracts with which the book ends are not merely the ravings of Euphues’s embittered mind, although there is little sign of his reformation. While they are largely derivative, his letters and miniature essays contain ideas on education which would have been acceptable to Roger Ascham.22 Euphuism allowed Lyly to reclothe them for a general readership and to suggest a connection, albeit questionable, between Euphues’s experience of love and his acquisition of wisdom. The delight in language celebrated by euphuism could be shaped into didactic statements as well as into a love story. The corpus which ends the Anatomy turns Lyly’s hero into a more improving author; euphuistic fiction becomes the precursor to euphuistic teaching.
But the reading public proved unwilling to be taught. Lyly’s transformation of Euphues from lover into priggish moralist was unappreciated by his readers, despite the immediate popularity of his text and style. Lyly duly relaunched his hero into the world of entertaining, but improving, love stories. Euphues and his England is a nicely calculated exercise in reader response, equipped with a separate preface for Lyly’s previously unacknowledged women readers. Gone are the tracts; moralistic statements are ‘sowed … like Strawberies’ in a recreational and reformist text.23 Euphues the moralist and Philautus the would-be lover sail to England, where Philautus eventually chooses an appropriate wife from the English court. The style is broadly similar to that used in the Anatomy, though less crammed with comparisons. Drawing on contemporary courtesy books, Lyly presents euphuism as the language of court ladies virtuously discussing questions of love—the image Blount later highlighted. He even inserts a parody of his own earlier text; in one episode Philautus visits Psellus the magician in search of a love potion. After citing many euphuistic examples of the magical properties of the natural world, Psellus readily admits that they are all useless.
Yet Lyly’s meditation on the ideas underlying euphuism reaches beyond self-parody. He had packed his first book with petits récits involving weird nature and classical gods. In this book the repetition and multiplicity which lie at the heart of euphuism become the main story—or rather stories. Euphues and his England is an anthology in which the protagonists and tales often seem to collapse into each other. Posing as parent and painter in the dedicatory epistle, Lyly meditates on the difference between the Euphues of his first and second books. The idea is continued into the first pages of text, a tissue of interweaving narratives of similarly named young men who lead prodigal lives with various outcomes. Euphuism, itself based on repetition and varying, became for Lyly a way of writing a sequel, of creating a text and protagonist which were both the same and different. Lyly’s contribution to the book is only part of the story. Euphues, he claims, has only been drawn to the waist. Readers are left to imagine the rest of the ‘body’ of text and of Euphues; the essentially unfinished and regenerative quality of euphuism is written into the newly reconstituted hero.
Lyly had one very specific reader in mind. His ploy to get noticed had worked. By 1580, he had found a patron in the Earl of Oxford, to whom Euphues and his England is dedicated. But Lyly was aiming still higher. Accordingly, the text ends with a tract called ‘Euphues Glasse for Europe’ in which Euphues praises England, apparently as a prelude to praising its monarch. Yet the Queen had sought to restrict the dissemination of her image; now, paradoxically, the job of the artist was to provide an acceptable mode of non-representation.24 Lyly’s chosen avoidance strategy relies on a further refinement of euphuism, this time the weaving of a skein of anecdotes about ancient art into his plot. Lyly had apologized to his readers for an unfinished Euphues in the prefatory material; by the end of the book he had collected a community of ancient artists refusing to finish their portraits of authority figures or goddesses. Thus, he recounts how the painter Zeuxis only represented Venus’s back. Euphues himself finally breaks off from praise as if overwhelmed by emotion (enacting the rhetorical figure of aposiopesis) and cunningly avoiding describing Elizabeth. Lyly had begun by asking his readers to help him fill in the gaps in his text for seemingly aesthetic reasons. By the end of the book, the euphuistic analogy had become a political strategy.
This is the last we hear of Euphues from Lyly, although he enjoyed a lively afterlife in the titles of his imitators. But it was only the start of the story of ancient art. By 1583 Lyly had received a commission to write for boy players at the Blackfriars and went on to write eight plays, seven of which are in prose. His first drama, Campaspe (1584), marked the expansion of the politicized euphuism which Lyly had begun to explore in Euphues and his England. Emerging from the anecdotes which had confined him in the latter book, Apelles takes centre stage, and like Euphues, is an artist obliged to negotiate with unpredictable authority figures. The play features Alexander’s supposed love for his captured slave Campaspe and his renunciation of her to his court painter Apelles, who is also in love with her. As ever, Lyly’s art is paradoxical, with separate prologues addressed to the court and the Blackfriars stressing the transitory and insubstantial nature of the entertainment. Within the opening speech of the play, however, historical reality intervenes—or at least a version of it. Campaspe is set during Alexander’s siege of Thebes, when, according to the courtier Clitus, ‘Thebes is rased, the people not racked, towers throwne down, bodies not thrust aside, a conquest without conflict, and a cruell warre in a milde peace.’25 As Lyly’s audience was likely to have known, the exact opposite was true. Alexander sacked the city and sold the survivors as slaves. Now euphuism becomes the vehicle for pointing up these disjunctions to the audience. The insertion of ‘not’ into the clauses disrupts the balance normally contrived in a euphuistic sentence and draws attention to the logical impossibility of war contained in peace.
If euphuism developed through the juxtaposition of odd concepts, in this play the ideas invoked become significantly more alarming. Alexander, Clitus reassures the captive Campaspe, ‘drinketh not bloud, but thirsteth after honor’—instantly conjuring up an image of a bloodthirsty tyrant. Alexander’s own attempts to present himself as a merciful ruler are equally hard to credit. His peacetime programme relies on contradiction: ‘that whilest armes cease, artes may flourish, and ioyning letters with launces, we endeuor to be as good Philosophers as soldiers’.26 Having just announced that the arts can only thrive in peacetime, Alexander reveals that he has no intention of giving up weapons. Instead, his alliterative clauses suggest an uncomfortable reading group in which soldiers’ books are stuck on spears.
There are fewer of Lyly’s odd beasts in Campaspe, but plenty of disturbing composites. Language in this play is dissected far more thoroughly than in the Anatomy. The contrasts set up are not always between opposites, but between apparently related words. When the courtier Parmenio informs Campaspe’s fellow captive Timoclea that Alexander is ‘the conquerour’ she questions his terminology:
Par. |
Madame, you neede not doubt, it is Alexander, that is the conquerour. |
Timo. |
Alex. hath ouercome, not conquered. |
Par. |
To bring al vnder his subiection is to conquer. |
Timo. |
He cannot subdue that wich is diuine. |
Par. |
Thebes was not. |
Timo. |
Vertue is.27 |
‘Conquering’ is whittled down to ‘overcoming’, then to ‘subjecting’ and ‘subduing’. But all verbs fail in the face of Timoclea’s assertion of an indissoluble core of virtue. Campaspe meanwhile is always attempting to define the balanced way things should be and coins aphoristic euphuisms which reflect on Alexander’s lack of decorum: ‘In kinges there can be no loue, but to Queenes: for as neere must they meete in maiestie, as they doe in affection.’28
The ultimate contrast in the play is between what can and cannot be controlled. Love and virtue remain impossible to subdue, so Alexander gives up his claim to Campaspe. Yet, he seems to regard his desire for her as an exercise in power, rather than emotion, as Lyly shows by his assignment of euphuistic speeches. Look, for example, at his dialogue with his confidant Hephestion, which contains what is effectively Lyly’s calling card, a long euphuistic set piece on the dangers of love. The speech showcases many of Lyly’s most typical locutions, interlacing Campaspe’s charms with their possibly deleterious effect on the martial Alexander: ‘Wil you handle the spindle with Hercules, when you should shake the speare with Achilles?’ … ‘I, but she is comly in al parts of the body: yea but she may be crooked in some part of the mind.’29 However, the speaker is not Alexander, but Hephestion, who seems far better at articulating what a lover should say than his master. Euphuism gives him an acceptable language of love which, as Blount’s court ladies later discovered, could be usefully reworked on appropriate occasions.
To analyse such a speech inevitably draws attention to the difference between page and stage, to imagine how boy players would choose to make Alexander’s awkwardly threatening euphuisms contrast with Hephestion’s slick speech-writing. Lyly himself was always keenly aware of his unspoken contract with both actors and audience. His prologues and epilogues constantly stress his dependence on applause—and willing book buyers. Euphuism had to be translated into theatre, the parallelism of his anecdotes into plot and subplot.30 Monologues are exchanged for dialogues, often a run of echoing one-liners. The characteristic balance of a Lylian sentence is frequently varied by a tripartite construction. Thus, Caelia in Midas (1590) observes that ‘if loue, golde, or authoritie might haue inchaunted me, Mydas had obteyned by loue, golde and authoritie’.31 Characters parallel each other both within the plot and in their own speeches to each other; Gallathea (c. 1585), for example, features two young women, both disguised as boys, who echo and vary the words each other uses.
Lyly’s prose books allowed him to set up a teasing rapport with his readers by apparently giving them access to a world of arcane knowledge. His plays similarly encourage a comic sense of exclusivity. In Campaspe Lyly had given flesh to the ancient stories of Alexander and Apelles; in his next play, Sapho and Phao, he tells his audience the truth about love, or rather, the figure of Venus repeatedly invoked in the Euphues books. The ferryman Phao, like Euphues and Apelles, has to learn to negotiate his way round a capricious authority figure, in this case Venus, as well as dealing with Sapho the love poet. Venus favours him by making him beautiful, but he still has to try and make money, a contradiction summed up in the relationship between his name and his fortune:
Sapho. |
What faire boy is that? |
Trachinus. |
Phao, the Ferrie man of Syracusa. |
Phao. |
I neuer saw one more braue: be al Ladies of such maiestie? |
Criticus. |
No, this is she that al wonder at and worship. |
Sapho. |
I haue seldome seene a sweeter face. Be all Ferrie men of that fairenesse? |
Trachinus. |
No Madame, this is he that Venus determined among men to make the fairest.32 |
Phao is a fair ferryman, who earns his living by taking fares, his attributes accumulating in a dialogue in which the speakers mirror each other’s syntax.
The euphuism of Lyly’s plays is a distinctly aural pleasure and allows for some of his most exuberant puns. Look, for example, at the moment when Sapho asks Phao what will cure lovesickness: ‘Phao. Yew Madame. Sapho. Mee? Phao. No Madame, yewe of the tree.’33 Though Lyly’s reliance on obscure natural properties gradually decreased, his mockery of elite worlds of language grew more pointed. Both Gallathea and Endimion (1588) feature pages attempting to ingratiate themselves with ludicrous and fraudulent masters, whom they try to impress by reciting Latin tags and meaningless alchemical terms respectively. Lyly is always conscious of the need for careful linguistic negotiation with unpredictable superiors. As one servant in Midas comments, ‘if you call a dog a dog, you are vndone’.34
Euphuism is always a language of extremes, and of different kinds violently yoked together. In the theatre, this is most strikingly represented by the theatrical transformations Lyly imposes on his characters. Two women in Lyly’s plays are turned into talking trees. Euphuism is about change. Resistance to change, especially the changes brought on by love, can seriously alter your state. Yet, those who are too eager for change do not escape either. Most poignantly ridiculous is the case of Haebe in Gallathea, due to be sacrificed to a monster who has requested the most beautiful maiden. In what appears to be her final speech, she creatively adapts the standard euphuistic love complaint in a flurry of alliteration: ‘Shall it onely be lawfull amongst vs in the prime of youth, and pride of beautie, to destroy both youth and beautie: and what was honoured in fruites and flowres as a vertue, to violate in a virgine as a vice? But, alas! destenie alloweth no dispute; die Haebe, Haebe die!’35 But she doesn’t die because she is not beautiful enough. Euphuism is always about superlatives, the fairest and the foulest. Mediocrity is never exemplary.
To modern readers, such as they are, euphuism may seem like a perverse byway in the history of English literature. Yet, it is hard to overestimate the impact which Lyly’s books made on imaginative writing. During the 1580s Euphues the persona became a stalwart of subtitles and paratexts, even when he was of no relevance to the narrative. What is always important about the imitation of Lyly’s work is not its accuracy (there are plenty of bad euphuists), but conscious alignment with the cult Lyly had started—Harvey’s definition of euphuism. Imitative fiction began as early as 1580, with the publication of Austen Saker’s Narbonus. But it was not until 1583 that any author effectively replied to the challenges set up by Lyly. Newly graduated from Cambridge, Robert Greene appeared in print with Mamillia: A Mirrour or looking-glasse for the Ladies of Englande, which apparently sought to reverse the misogynistic norms of Lyly’s first prose book. Lyly wrote about two men who loved one unworthy woman; Greene’s story concerns two chaste young women, Mamillia and Publia, who fall victim to the faithless Pharicles.
Greene never mentions Lyly’s name. But the shadow of his fiction falls across not just the author, but his personae in the book’s many monologues. Euphuism, understood as a distinctly bookish mode, underlies the relationship of Mamillia and Pharicles. They meet when Mamillia is reading (the Anatomy perhaps) and establish each other’s credentials as competent euphuists by discussing the properties of ‘the hearb Sisimbrium’. However, euphuistic patterns become more complex when they are used to forecast the likelihood of a suitor’s fidelity. Mamillia enjoins herself to ‘Choose by the eare, and not by the eye. Pharicles is fayre, so was Paris, and yet fickle.’36 Pharicles embodies the deceptive beauty common to so many euphuistic comparisons. Lying behind the correspondence of ‘Pharicles’ and ‘fayre’ lies that of ‘Pharicles’ and ‘Paris’. But though she reads her suitor accurately, Mamillia decides to love him (chastely) anyway.
Mamillia is imbued with a sense of inevitability as much as knowingness. An understanding of euphuism may help to read a situation, but may equally simply provide ballast to existing predilections—which always lead to love. Greene used euphuism as a template for moralistic love stories, with easily identifiable patterns for his readers to recognize. His monologues are accordingly more layered, with sets of similar and usually alliterative clauses piled upon each other. Publia reflects that there is ‘no fruit so fine, but the caterpillar wil consume it: no adamant so hard, but wil yield to the file: no metal so strong, but wil bend at the stamp: no maid so free, but loue will bring her to bondage & thraldom’.37 Greene’s repetition of clauses has a cumulative effect; by the end of the speech Publia (like Mamillia) has convinced herself that love is the only option.
Greene spent his career vigorously exploiting Lyly’s influence. Parallel pairs of lovers’ monologues and emblematic transformations crowd his many fictions even as he, like Lyly, increasingly dropped the habits of odd flora and fauna. By the late 1580s he was busily distancing himself from his predecessor, even though he remained heavily reliant on his tactics. Menaphon (1589) includes a parodic recognition scene in which an estranged husband and wife establish their identities by swapping euphuisms. But it would be dangerous to regard Greene’s work as evidence of Lyly’s unpopularity. In 1589 Greene was able to rely on his readers’ familiarity with Lyly’s style. Even in the 1630s, when Blount felt Lyly’s plays needed to be collected and publicized, Peter Hausted could still make comedy out of Euphues for an academic audience. We may be most familiar with pejorative comments on euphuism, such as Sir Philip Sidney’s fury in A Defence of Poetry (c. 1579) at ‘all stories of beasts, fowls and fishes’.38 But the amount of space Harvey in 1590 still devoted to ranting about the ‘fly-blowne Euphuisme’ which had disfigured English literature and made ‘no Art, but Euphuistes’ suggests quite how thoroughly Lyly’s work had permeated literary consciousness.39
Euphuism provided a shared cultural reference point, which operated on multiple levels according to context. And if the mode was sometimes ridiculed, it was also recognized. Often used as a shorthand for court life, euphuism was further refined as the preserve of courtly villains and seducers, the stylistic equivalent of mustachio twirling. Look for example at the seduction techniques of Prince Edward in Greene’s play Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c. 1592) and Arsadachus in Thomas Lodge’s prose fiction A Margarite of America (1596). The many linguistic experiments of Shakespeare’s Iago include echoes of euphuism. Predicting Othello’s transformations, he observes: ‘The food that to him now is as luscious as locusts shall be to him shortly as acerb as coloquintida.’40 As Vladimir Nabokov’s equally florid narrator noted in Lolita (1955), ‘You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.’41
Lyly’s texts continued, if sporadically, to be reprinted and retitled, while linguistic parallelism can be traced in authors as diverse as Samuel Johnson and Jane Austen.42 Lyly’s own image remained equally liable to reinterpretation, as Blount’s association of euphuism with the French language was more influential than he could have predicted. Lyly’s work was aligned with foreign and decadent literature, from which a manly English prose must be reclaimed.43 It was not until the nineteenth century that euphuism began to be fully debated and reinvented as a forerunner of Victorian aesthetic principles.44 Walter Pater’s nostalgic (and vague) evocation of euphuism in Marius the Epicurean (1885) turned it into a blueprint for a new age of style. But it proved to be too good for this world, as Flavian the euphuist poet succumbs to the plague.
A less ethereal euphuist is provided by Sir Walter Scott in the form of the dandified knight Sir Piercie Shafton in The Monastery (1820). Shafton’s credentials as a euphuist are questionable, and his definition of the mode finely circular: ‘that eloquence which no other eloquence is sufficient to praise, that art which, when we call it by its own name of Euphuism, we bestow on it its richest panegyric’.45 The character was not liked by Scott’s readers and, like Euphues, lived on thanks to derogatory references by other writers. Yet Scott’s denouement provides a revealing reading of Lyly’s first work. The fraudulent Shafton is unmasked as the upstart son of a tailor—the reason behind his delight in fine clothing. For Shafton, library and wardrobe are intimately connected. His literary and sartorial disguises also have a positive result inasmuch as he finds love with a miller’s daughter. Opportunistic euphuism then wins out again over two hundred years after its first appearance in print. Perhaps we need to start thinking of Lyly as less a flash in the pan and more as part of the furniture.
Barish, Jonas. ‘The Prose Style of John Lyly’, English Literary History, 23 (1986): 14–35.
Henderson, Judith Rice. ‘Euphues and his Erasmus’, English Literary Renaissance, 12 (1982): 135–61.
Hunter, G. K. John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962).
Kesson, Andrew. John Lyly and Early Modern Authorship (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).
Lyly, John. The Complete Works of John Lyly, ed. R. Warwick Bond, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902).
Maslen, R. W. Elizabethan Fictions: Espionage, Counter-Espionage, and the Duplicity of Fiction in Early Elizabethan Prose Narratives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
Pincombe, Michael. The Plays of John Lyly: Eros and Eliza (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996).
Schurink, Fred. ‘The Intimacy of Manuscript and the Pleasure Of Print: Literary Culture from The Schoolmaster to Euphues’, in Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485–1603 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 671–86.
Scragg, Leah. ‘ “Any shape one would conceive”: From a Prose Style to Lyly’s Plays for the First Blackfriars Theatre’, in Janet Clare and Roy Eriksen, eds., Contexts of Renaissance Comedy (Oslo: Novus, 1984), 61–76.
——— ‘John Lyly and the Politics of Language’, Essays in Criticism, 55.1 (2005): 17–38.
——— ‘Speaking Pictures: Style and Spectacle in Lylian Comedy’, English Studies, 86.4 (2005): 298–311.
Stephanson, Raymond. ‘John Lyly’s Prose Fiction: Irony, Humor and Anti-Humanism’, English Literary Renaissance, 11 (1981): 3–21.