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4 Elizabethan Playwrights and Poets

The Elizabethan era is often regarded as a golden age for English culture, language, and literature. Though William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Edmund Spenser are amongst the best remembered writers of this era, many other poets, playwrights, and dramatists helped to forge this literary golden age. This article examines four lesser-known Elizabethan playwrights and poets.

John Lyly

Amongst the first of the great Elizabethan dramatists was John Lyly (c. 1553/54-1606), whose popularity reached its peak in the days before Shakespeare and Marlowe. Born in Kent, England, in either 1553 or 1554, he graduated from both Oxford and Cambridge, earning him a place amongst the group of well-educated late 16th-century English poets referred to by literary scholars as the 'University Wits'. Lyly was not a particularly gifted student – indeed, the antiquarian Anthony Wood notes that his genius was "naturally bent to the pleasant paths of poetry" rather than those of academics. Shortly after leaving Oxford, Lyly finished his first work, a prose romance entitled Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578). It was an instant bestseller, undergoing four editions within its first year, and was quickly followed by a second part, Euphues and His England (1580).

These works were, according to scholar Stanley Wells, "short on narrative, but rich in dialogue, argument, and debate" and had a "colossal, if brief, impact on the development of English prose" (63). Here, Wells refers to the prose style with which Lyly writes, called 'euphuism', which involves an "unremitting use of alliteration, antitheses, puns, carefully balanced clauses, similes derived from natural history, and many other rhetorical figures of speech" (Wells, 64). This kind of writing was lighter and more elegant than Elizabethan audiences were used to reading and quickly became fashionable, later influencing the works of Robert Greene and Shakespeare.

After his almost overnight success, Lyly turned to writing comedies. With the patronage of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford – a poem-loving aristocrat sometimes thought to be the true author behind Shakespeare's works – Lyly leased the first Blackfriars Playhouse in 1583. His first two plays, Campaspe and Sapho and Phao, were performed here the following year by the Children of Paul's, a troupe of boy actors favored by Elizabeth I of England. Throughout the 1580s and '90s, Lyly would continue to write plays – the most significant of these is his 1588 comedy Endymion, which was written in his trademark euphuistic style and contains multiple references to ancient myths and traditional English folklore. Indeed, all of Lyly's plays are characterized by mythological references as well as light and witty dialogue, leading him to be considered the first of the Elizabethan playwrights to write in "plain English". His style influenced the next batch of playwrights who would quickly eclipse him in fame; by the late 1580s, writers like Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd had taken Lyly's place in Elizabethan theatre. As his influence faded, Lyly focused less on playwrighting and more on his political career. Having sporadically sat in Parliament since 1580, he now coveted the position of Master of the Revels, an office that was continually denied to him. Frustrated, he wrote the queen a despairing letter in 1593, begging her to remember his years of service:

Thirteen years your Highness' servant, and yet nothing; twenty friends that though they say will be sure, I find them sure to be slow; a thousand hopes, but all nothing; a hundred promises, but yet nothing. Thus casting up the inventory of my friends, hopes, promises, and time the summa totalis amounteth in all to just nothing.

(Wells, 66)

Lyly died in 1606, never having achieved his dream of becoming Master of the Revels. Like many of his contemporaries, his memory rests within Shakespeare's long shadow, although his influence looms large in the Bard of Avon's work; indeed, Shakespeare's plays Twelfth Night and Much Ado About Nothing are stylistically similar to Lyly's work, a fact that would have been recognized and appreciated by Elizabethan audiences. One example of Lyly's poetry is Oh, For a Bowl of Fat Canary:

Oh, for a bowl of fat Canary,

Rich Palermo, sparkling Sherry,

Some nectar else, from Juno's dairy;

Oh, these draughts would make us merry!

Oh, for a wench (I deal in faces,

And in other daintier things);

Tickled am I with her embraces,

Fine dancing in such fairy rings.

Oh, for a plump fat leg of mutton,

Veal, lamb, capon, pig, and coney;

None is happy but a glutton,

None an ass but who wants money.