Selected Prose and Dramatic Work

Lyly John

John Lyly (1554?-1606) has come to seem an incidental player in a literary scene dominated by Shakespeare. But as the sixteenth century drew to a close, the relative status of the two writers was less defined.

Lyly was the principal court dramatist of the 1580s and author of the period's best-selling prose work, the wonderfully elaborated Euphues. A lack of modern editions means that his work has been neglected even by scholars. This edition draws the unique nature of his achievement to the attention of a wider audience and fills out our sense of a period to which his work was pivotal.

Three texts are included: a substantial extract from Euphues: the Anatomy of Wit, and the plays Campaspe (the first significant comedy of the English Renaissance) and Gallathea (his supreme achievement, it exercised a considerable influence on Shakespeare). Readers can at last engage in extenso Lyly's highly original style and mode of thought. The texts are newly edited from first editions; the extract from Euphues is the first modern spelling edition of the 1578 text.

With an introduction, and annotated for the non-specialist, this edition contributes to the revaluation of a key figure in English Renaissance literature.

About the Author

John Lyly was born in 1554. After studying at Magdalen College, Oxford and also at Cambridge, he was appointed to a position in the household of Lord Burghley. He leaped to literary prominence with the best-selling prose works of the Elizabethan period, "Eupues: The Anatomy of Wit" (1578) and "Euphues and His England" (1580). The Earl of Oxford installed him as the resident playwright at the Blackfriars theatre, where he went on to produce a series of highly wrought comedies for performance at court. These exerted an important influence on Shakespeare. In the later 1580s the closure of the company for which he wrote brought his career to a premature halt, and he died in poverty in 1606.

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