John Lyly and early modern authorship

Andy Kesson

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781784993696
• eBook ISBN: 9781526101853
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

During Shakespeare's lifetime, John Lyly was repeatedly described as the central figure in contemporary English literature. This book takes that claim seriously, asking how and why Lyly was considered the most important writer of his time.

PART I

Lyly and prose fiction

CHAPTER 1

Buy the book: imaginative stories in the book market (1566–78)

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Lyly’s first work was called Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, and G. K. Hunter has proposed the central word of the title as ‘a clear indication of his method of work’ in all of Lyly’s writing:

His aim is to ‘anatomise’ or open up an area of life by exploring its divergent inter-related elements [. . .]. What is interesting here is the extent to which anatomy has led to circularity [. . .]. This use of plot to defeat the progressivist assumptions of plot seems even stranger in drama than in a proto-novel of the type of Euphues.¹

Hunter’s Lyly is a storyteller with little interest in stories, a man with no sense ‘of cause and effect’: ‘Everywhere in Lyly emotions are brought to our attention as matters to be discussed rather than acted upon.’ Peter Saccio, one of Lyly’s greatest critics, similarly draws on this idea when he states that ‘one will not find any kind of plot at all in Campaspe’.² Lyly himself likes to claim that the stories in his work are meaningless: the prologue to Endymion warns that the play is ‘superfluous for the matter’, and forbids the audience ‘to dispute of’ the story ‘because it was a fiction’ (78), and he assumes a personal voice at the end of Euphues and His England to tell his female readers that ‘I, gentlewomen, am indifferent’ (354). Though this word means something like ‘neutral’ or ‘impartial’ rather than ‘uninterested’, this indifference seems an unexpected stance from a writer who has just produced two stories about Euphues, and Lyly’s request in Endymion that ‘none will apply pastimes’ (78) underlines the fact that the play’s story has diverse significations.

Anatomies and storytelling

There is much to recommend Hunter’s emphasis on the word anatomy. Lyly introduces himself in the Anatomy of Wit as ‘a fool [that] hath intruded himself to discourse of wit’ (29). If the last word of this phrase is an obvious reference to the book’s title, the representation of his authorship as a form of discursive intrusion continues the image of his work as an anatomisation. In the same epistle the author describes himself as ‘The surgeon that maketh the anatomy’ and ‘the butcher [who] cut[s] the anatomy of a man’ (28). These references to the writer and his writing as something penetrative and intrusive confirm Hunter’s claim that anatomy is an important term with which to understand Lylian authorship, and Lyly was the first writer to use the term in a literary sense during what Devon Hodges calls a ‘culture of dissection’ when, ‘with violent determination’, as Jonathan Sawday puts it, ‘writers of anatomies used their pens as scalpels to cut through appearances and reveal the mute truth of objects’.³ Lyly’s discursive intrusion, his role as anatomist, therefore serves as an image of his disinterested or distant relationship to his material. It also suggests the examination of a static body rather than the linear detailing of a moving narrative, and indeed scholars have suggested that Lyly’s writings, and especially his plays, have a peculiarly static energy.⁴

There may be other ways to think about Lyly’s discursive intrusion into Tudor storytelling culture, however, and to move beyond this emphasis on static dialogue. Evidence in his plays and prose fiction suggests a greater engagement with plot and its emotive possibilities than Hunter suggests. In three of his first four plays, Lyly staged a tableau in which one character tells a story to another, pausing the present tense of the drama in order to describe the history of the fictive world. In each case, Lyly provides a listener who is moved by and invested in the story. In his second play, Sapho and Phao, the boy Phao tells the prophetess Sibylla that he ‘cannot love’, and she tells him a biographical story in the ‘hope [it] shall be as a straight thread to lead you out of those crooked conceits and place you in the plain path of love’ (II.i.36, 39–41). Despite the clear intentions of the storyteller, her listener undergoes a range of emotions and arrives at the opposite conclusion to that which she intends. Phao is captivated (‘I pray, tell on’), inquisitive (‘Was not the god angry to see you unkind?’) and is ‘driven by your counsel into divers conceits’, but ultimately refuses the speaker’s intentions: ‘but to yield to love is the only thing I hate’ (II.i.64, 59, 130–2). Here Sibylla’s story seems to fail in its purpose, but nonetheless excites an emotional response from a listener who does indeed almost immediately fall in love. In his next two plays, Gallathea and Endymion, Lyly once again showed his audiences characters moved and excited by a story. In Gallathea, Tityrus explains to his daughter the history of her home and the danger she is in, causing her to experience ‘terror’ and ‘horror’ (I.i.55–7). In Endymion, Eumenides’ curiosity to hear the old man Geron’s life story ‘hath so melted my mind that I wish to hang at your mouth’s end’, and he begins and ends the scene by asking Geron to explain who he is (III.iv.2).

In all three cases, stories are not circular. Eumenides is excited in advance by the prospect of a story; Gallathea reacts to a story as it is told; Phao responds to the story at its conclusion. All three gain knowledge and suffer emotionally through the process of storytelling. These scenes demonstrate a writer who is very much invested in storytelling. They also suggest a dramatist skilful in staging the storytelling moment, for Lyly uses these stories to colour and clarify the world of the play: in other words, stories are not only part of the fictional world but help to establish and define it. Thus Geron promises an explanation as he and Eumenides leave the stage together, so that Lyly uses a character’s backstory to construct the offstage fictional world of Endymion: ‘That shall be as we walk, and I doubt not but the strangeness of my tale will take away the tediousness of our journey’ (III.iv.204–6). In Sapho and Phao, Sibylla prepares the audience for the ideological implications of the love interest of the main plot by describing her failed relationship with a god. As she discovers, the effect of stories upon a listener can confound the storyteller’s intention.

Perhaps the most radical use of storytelling is at the start of Gallathea. As Leah Scragg has shown, father and daughter seek refuge under a tree, but the father’s story transforms the tree from a place of safety to the site of sacrifice. Scragg shows that ‘the story the speaker unfolds involves a series of transmutations’, a characteristic of Lyly’s writing Scragg has done much to emphasise: this demonstrates the vital place of story at the heart of Lyly’s writing style.⁵ Narrative doesn’t just move in itself, it transforms the meaning of the narrator, the listener and their world, and in so doing it radically alters the audience’s access to the stage fiction. As these three examples show, Lyly was perfectly capable of appreciating – and manipulating – the emotive and unexpected effects of storytelling.

Lyly’s prose fiction also attests to the author’s imaginative investment in his stories, not least because Lyly’s paratextual comments on his work show us the ways he expected and then rejected future narrative developments.⁶ The Anatomy closes with a promise of a ‘second part’, a sequel. In the first edition of the book (December 1578) Lyly explained that ‘I left [Euphues] ready to cross the seas to England’ (150). Within months of the first edition, Lyly was projecting the storyline of his forthcoming sequel in a new letter to ‘THE GENTLEMEN SCHOLARS OF OXFORD’ that was appended to reprints of the first work from 1579 onwards: ‘Euphues at his arrival (I am assured) will view Oxford’ (151). But when the sequel, Euphues and His England, appeared in 1580, it recorded no such visit. Over two years, Lyly had imagined, sketched out and then rejected at least one narrative scenario for Euphues. There seem to be two possibilities here: either these changes represent Lyly’s own investment in and uncertainty over his story or they demonstrate his desire and ability to tantalise readers with false promises and possible outcomes. Such problems over narrative choice show Lyly engaging with stories and storytelling, commenting on the process of representation in a manner comparable to some of the more self-conscious choruses of Shakespeare and Peele. The chorus to Henry V asks the audience to ‘excuse’ the ‘due course of things, / Which cannot in their huge and proper life / Be here presented’. Peele’s chorus to David and Bersabe reflects, towards the end of the play, on how ‘this storie lends us other store’: that is, the source material offers the theatre company further narrative options.⁷ Lyly is equally open in sharing with his readers the narrative choices he makes, though, unlike Shakespeare or Peele, his ‘storie’ or ‘huge and proper life’ appears to be self-generated rather than based on historical or Biblical sources.

Moreover, in the narrative Lyly eventually did create, his characters are regularly placed in the position of auditors to other peoples’ stories. Philautus’s excited and self-interested response to Fidus’s biographical story is a key example of Lyly’s representation of the effect of storytelling upon a listener: ‘But he, so eager of an end, as one leaping over a stile before he come to it, desired few parentheses, or digressions, or glosses, but the text, where he himself was coting in the margent’ (199).

Breaking into Fidus’s story, the narrator sets out Philautus’s impatience with what he views as digressions from the main ‘text’; but he also makes clear that Philautus himself is creating digressions of his own. This passage makes demands on the imaginative powers of the reader, since the word ‘he’ in the narrative is left unglossed, and a reader is forced to deduce whether it refers to the storyteller, to Fidus or to either of his male listeners, Euphues or Philautus. A footnote in Scragg’s edition gives the only sensible interpretation, explaining that ‘he’ refers to Philautus (199, n.7), but the important point is that Lyly’s text requires readers to make this deduction for themselves: to gloss the text. This is then a passage describing a listener impatient of marginal glosses, but who is himself ‘coting in the margent’; it is a passage which places its readers or listeners in the margins themselves, forcing a readerly gloss of an unattached and initially ambiguous pronoun.

This complex image of storytelling represents an engaged and active listener anxious to edit what he hears of other people in order to apply it to himself. Lyly’s readers may well have used his work in the same way. Despite his reputation for circular, unemotional or distanced storytelling, Lyly developed narratives that excite and terrify his characters, defy authorial expectations and trouble those of their readers. As an imaginative author revising the Euphues and His England narrative, Lyly showed himself to be as engaged in the problems of linear story composition as any of his characters. There are, then, ‘cause and effect’ and emotional progression in Lyly’s stories. Contrary to Hunter, Lyly’s role as anatomist did not preclude an interest in the emotive and fictive effects of narration.

The storytelling market

This chapter assesses Lyly’s discursive intrusion from another perspective: the emerging market for print narrative into which Lyly’s Anatomy literally intruded. Lyly’s role within this storytelling market was so incisive that it produced a series of imitations that reimagined his work, style and character and thereby transformed the ways in which stories could be told in books. A series of storytelling models were available to Lyly, in the form of William Painter’s multivolume Palace of Pleasure (1566–67), Geoffrey Fenton’s Certaine Tragicall Discourses (1567), William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat (written in the early 1550s but published in 1570), George Gascoigne’s ‘Adventures of Master F.J.’ (included in A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, 1573) and George Pettie’s Petite Palace of Pettie his Pleasure (1576). All these works offered an emergent and ongoing narrative tradition which Lyly both continued and changed. They provided models for Lyly’s later innovations, in their titles, styles, narrators, characters and in the way they engaged with an emerging but more established literary model in the book market, the poetry miscellany.

The importance of Lyly’s innovation will become clear in Chapter 2, which discusses the unprecedented effect of Lyly’s work on his contemporaries. Numerous critics have observed Lyly’s immediate impact on the print market, but few have considered why and how his work made such an impact. Even the best recent work on the prose fiction market relies upon the old assumption that Lyly’s success can be explained in relation to the character Euphues. Thus Steve Mentz observes that ‘The widespread use of the name Euphues in the titles of later books represents...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• General editors’ preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: our Lyly?
• Part I: Lyly and prose fiction
• Part II: Lyly, performance and print
• Part III: Euphuism and reception
• Conclusion: Go dare
• Bibliography
• Index