LYLY, John

(c. 1554-1606)

John Lyly authored prose narratives, plays for the private Elizabethan stage, and religious tracts. Born in Canterbury, Lyly attended King's School, Canter­bury, before matriculating at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1569. He received his bachelor of arts in 1573 and his master of arts in 1575. He briefly pursued an academic career before turning to work under the patronage of Edward de Vere, earl of Oxford, for whom he served as secretary after 1580. Later, Lyly sat on four Parliaments, as the member for Hinden in 1589, for Aylesbury in 1593, for Appleby in 1597, and for Aylesbury in 1601.

Lyly is best known for two of his prose narratives, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Euphues and His England (1580), which served as stylistic models for English prose in the early 1580s. Both use carefully structured sen­tences that rely heavily upon rhetorical figures such as antithesis, epigram, al­literation, and rhetorical questions. This style became very fashionable during the 1580s and was ridiculed afterwards, especially in the 1590s, but the contin­ued popularity of Lyly's work is reflected by their publication history, since The Anatomy of Wit was reprinted nineteen times from 1578 to 1638, and Euphues and His England was published fourteen times from 1580 to 1609. Lyly also wrote his plays for the Boys' Companies of the Blackfriars Theater beginning in 1583; these include Campaspe, Sappho and Phao, Galatea, Endymion, Midas, Love's Metamorphosis, Mother Bombie, and The Woman in the Moon. Readers of religious controversies see Lyly's authorship in controversial tracts; Gabriel Harvey* attributed Pap with a Hatchet, one of the responses to Martin Marpre-late, to Lyly; and other anti-Martinist tracts have been credited to Lyly, Thomas Nashe,* or a team of the two.

Bibliography

M. Pincombe, The Plays ofJohn Lyly: Eros and Eliza, 1996.

Karen Nelson