John Lyly | Page 5

versatility of our author, but not one of them can be described as lucrative. Nor can his publications have brought him much profit; for, though both Euphues and its sequel passed through ten editions before his death, an author in those days received very little of the proceeds of his work. Moreover the publication of his plays is rather an indication of financial distress than a sign of prosperity. The two dramas already mentioned were printed before Lyly's connexion with the Choir School; and, when in 1585 he became "vice-master of Poules and Foolmaster of the Theater," he would be careful to keep his plays out of the publisher's hands, in order to preserve the acting monopoly. It is probable that the tenure of this Actor-manager-schoolmastership marks the height of Lyly's prosperity, and the inhibition of the boys' acting rights in 1591 must have meant a severe financial loss to him. Thus it is only after this date that he is forced to make what he can by the publication of his other plays. The fear of poverty was the more urgent, because he had a wife and family on his hands. And though Mr Bond believes that he found an occupation after 1591 in writing royal entertainments, and though the inhibition on the choristers' acting was removed as early as 1599, yet the last years of Lyly's life were probably full of disappointment. This indeed is confirmed by the bitter tone of his letter to Elizabeth in 1598 in reference to the mastership of the Revels' Office, which he had at last despaired of. The letter in question is sad reading. Beginning with a euphuism and ending in a jest, it tells of a man who still retains, despite all adversity, a courtly mask and a merry tongue, but beneath this brave surface there is visible a despair--almost amounting to anguish--which the forced merriment only renders more pitiable. And the gloom which surrounded his last years was not only due to the distress of poverty. Before his death in 1606 he had seen his novel eclipsed by the new Arcadian fashion, and had watched the rise of a host of rival dramatists, thrusting him aside while they took advantage of his methods. Greatest of them all, as he must have realised, was Shakespeare, the sun of our drama before whom the silver light of his little moon, which had first illumined our darkness, waned and faded away and was to be for centuries forgotten.
CHAPTER I.
EUPHUISM.
It was as a novelist that Lyly first came before the world of English letters. In 1578 he published a volume, bearing the inscription, Euphues: the anatomy of wyt, to which was subjoined the attractive advertisement, very pleasant for all gentlemen to reade, and most necessary to remember. This book, which was to work a revolution in our literature, was completed in 1580 by a sequel, entitled Euphues and his England. Euphues, to combine the two parts under one name, the fruit of Lyly's nonage, seems to have determined the form of his reputation for the Elizabethans; and even to-day it attracts more attention than any other of his works. This probably implies a false estimate of Lyly's comparative merits as a novelist and as a dramatist. But it is not surprising that critics, living in the century of the novel, and with their eyes towards the country pre-eminent in its production, should think and write of Lyly chiefly as the first of English novelists. The bias of the age is as natural and as dangerous an element in criticism as the bias of the individual. But it is not with the modern appraisement of Euphues that we are here concerned. Nor need we proceed immediately to a consideration of its position in the history of the English novel. We have first to deal with its Elizabethan reputation. Had Euphues been a still-born child of Lyly's genius, had it produced no effect upon the literature of the age, it would possess nothing but a purely archaeological interest for us to-day. It would still be the first of English novels: but this claim would lose half its significance, did it not carry with it the implication that the book was also the origin of English novel writing. The importance, therefore, of Euphues is not so much that it was primary, as that it was primordial; and, to be such, it must have laid its spell in some way or other upon succeeding writers. Our first task is therefore to enquire what this spell was, and to discover whether the attraction of Euphues must be ascribed to Lyly's own invention or to artifices which he borrows from others.
While, as I have said, Lyly's name is associated with the novel by most modern critics, it has earned a