Lyly, John | Samuel Lee Wolff (essay date 1923)
Samuel Lee Wolff (essay date 1923)
SOURCE: "The Humanist as Man of Letters: John Lyly," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. 31, No. 1, 1923, 8-35.
[In the following excerpt, Wolff considers the various influences on Euphues, including Puritanism. The critic downplays Lyly's importance as an influence on later writers, but praises his comedies.]
We all remember Lyly very much as Mr. Brooke remembered human perfectibility or Adam Smith. We "went in for that at one time", and from some college Survey of English Literature we have preserved a dim reminiscence of the Euphuist and the dramatist—the writer of an impossible style soon displaced in vogue by that other impossible style of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, and the writer of plays soon eclipsed by the plays of Shakespeare. But we are not permitted to remain in this peaceful vagueness of mind. From time to time our ears are assailed by wars and the rumors of wars. We hear that Lyly...
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