SOURCE: "Lyly," in The Elizabethan Prodigals, University of California Press, 1976, pp. 58-78.

In 1595, seventeen years after Euphues established his reputation, a decade after Elizabeth advised him to "aim all his courses at the Revels," John Lyly acknowledged defeat. "If your sacred Majesty think me unworthy," he wrote the Queen, "and that, after ten years tempest, [I] must at the Court suffer shipwreck of my times, my hopes, and my wits, vouchsafe in your never erring judgment some plank or rafter to waft me into a country, where, in my sad and settled devotion, I may in every corner of a thatched cottage write prayers instead of plays—prayers for your long and prosperous life—and a repentance that I have played the fool so long and yet live." Lyly's "if suggests that he had yet to reach the dead end of despair. It was, however, not far off. Two years later, in a petition to the Queen's principal secretary, Sir Robert Cecil, Lyly renewed his plea for relief, though now with no sense that the disappointment of his courtly ambition might be avoided. "I hope I shall not be used worse than an old horse who after service done hath his shoes pulled off and turned to grass, not suffered to starve in the stable. I will cast my wits in a new mold … for I find it folly that one foot being in the grave, I should have the other on the stage." But, plank or pasturage, relief was denied. "Thirteen years your Highness's servant," he wrote the next year, "but yet nothing."¹ And nothing it remained until his death in 1606, three years after Elizabeth's.

Lyly's repentance, unlike Gascoigne's, does not even pretend to derive from a fear that his work may have misled his audience. Poetry failed him in a more tangible way. Since leaving the university, he had entertained the Court and depended on it for preferment, but his hopes were left unfulfilled. He learned that to expend wit in the making of stories and plays was wasteful folly; it procured nothing. Here then is the pattern of prodigality reduced to its bare economic essentials.

But that pattern had figured significantly in Lyly's career long before neglect moved him to despair. In Euphues he created the most imitated avatar of prod igality to appear in sixteenth-century England. What, it is often asked, made this book so extraordinarily popular? Style is the usual answer, the wittily patterned artifice of Lyly's prose. And the usual answer is right, at least in part. But there was more to the appeal of Euphues than style. Strange as it may now seem, Lyly's contemporaries were as much taken by the plot, the protagonist, and the moral attitude of Euphues as by its Euphuism. Not until Harvey's attack in 1593 did "Euphues" begin to assume its modern connotation as a byword for Lyly's rhetorical manner as distinct from the experience and moral stance of his protagonist²—and by 1593 the Euphuistic fashion had largely passed. The six fictions, written prior to that date, which refer explicitly to Euphues, testify to a very different interest.³ Only one speaks at any length of Euphues' style, and then to reject it as "sauced with a little suspicion of flattery."⁴ And only three imitate it. But all six identify Euphues as an antiromantic moralist, "constant in reprehending vanities in love,"⁵ and most remember that he came to sagacity by way of error and repentance. The vain futility of courtly delights, as Lodge recalls in Euphues' Shadow, "made Euphues repent the prime of his youth misspent in folly and virtuously end the winter of his age in Silixsedra."⁶ The image of the former prodigal sententiously edifying the youth of England from his melancholy cell on Silixsedra seems to have particularly struck these writers, for they come back to it again and again. Not all agree with Euphues' opinions—Greene in Menaphon: Camillo's Alarm to Slumbering Euphues and John Dickenson in the later Arisbas: Euphues Amidst his Slumbers (1594) both defend love against Euphues' attacks—but they do all recognize those opinions as characteristic of Lyly's hero. Furthermore, imitation—imitation of the Euphuistic experience as well as the Euphuistic morality—was at least as common a response as disagreement, and often the imitation was quite open. Rich, for example, says of his Don Simonides that "under these clouds of feigned histories … you may find the anatomy of wanton youth, seasoned with over-late repentance,"⁷ a clear allusion to The Anatomy of Wit; and Lodge, still more openly, declares that in his Euphues ' Shadow he "limn[ed] out under the figure of Philamis the fortunes of Euphues, wherein you shall see that young men's first wits are like April dews which breed more unwholesome weeds than profitable flowers."⁸ When we regret, as modern critics often do, Euphues' "deficiency of characterization and action," we miss what its first readers found most evident.⁹ As a character, Euphues stirred their imaginations as forcefully as any character in modern fiction has stirred ours. Euphues' clever way with words was, of course, one expression of his character and did some of the stirring; the mistake of modern criticism has been to give it credit for doing all.

A sixteenth-century clergyman's remark on the biblical prodigal might be applied to the way some early readers took Euphues. "Each several man," he writes, "should be another's looking-glass, but this man is a spectacle in the theater of this world for all men to look upon…. We are prone to pattern this prodigal person in his preposterous and perverse affections and we lively bear his image…. This poetical fiction fitteth us."¹⁰ I would suggest that the young, humanistically educated men of courtly and literary pretension who came to London in the late 1570's found this looking-glass best set out in Lyly's version of the story of prodigality. Numerous imitations by men like Gosson, Saker, Melbancke, Rich, Lodge, and Greene, many of which claim to shadow their author's own experience, seem to support this suggestion. Lyly's was evidently the poetical fiction that most nearly fit them. And the image was no less applicable for being, as Lyly confessed in Euphues and his England, itself a portrait of its author.¹¹ Defining and dramatizing the self was Lyly's intent. In giving a fictional design to his own life, he apparently seized on much of what seemed most worth emphasizing in theirs, whether they measured that worth in terms of accuracy and sincerity or in terms of self-promotional effect. Nor was the appeal of the image lessened by what today seems most obvious: Euphues' unpleasantness. We find it hard to believe that anyone could ever have admitted, much less cultivated, a likeness to him. That Lyly and his contemporaries failed to notice the unsympathetic side of their chosen model is one of the best clues to the dilemma of their generation.

What is the nature of the Euphuistic identity that these young men were so prone to follow? We notice first that it bears clearly the mark of its lineage—its descent from mid-century humanism. Like The Schoolmaster or The Glass of Government, the first part of Euphues anatomizes wit; like Gascoigne's, Lyly's hero is an overly bright prodigal. Euphues' name and attributes come from Ascham and the names of Eubulus and Philautus from the education drama, which also furnished Lyly his plot with its opening rejection of good advice and its conclusion in repentance.¹² Even Lyly's style has a respectable, schoolmasterly source, the Oxford lectures of William Rainolds, and, through Rainolds, Cicero.¹³ Moreover, the book is sprinkled with Ciceronian sentences and bulked out with translations (though unacknowledged) from Ovid and Plutarch. Lyly could hardly have used what he had been taught more systematically. Yet, despite its seeming eagerness to reassert the content of the humanist curriculum and to reemploy the humanist didactic method, The Anatomy of Wit covertly and perhaps unconsciously undermines both.

All the most remarkable changes Lyly made in the fiction of the prodigal son testify to his disruptive interest in those courtly manners and Italianate customs that Ascham had disdained. Euphues is set not in an inn of questionable repute but in an elegant salon; its leading lady is not a common trull but the well-bred daughter of "one of the chief governors of the city"; the entertainment is not gambling but the fashionable Italian dubii d'amore. More significant still, Lyly al ters the definition of wit. For Gascoigne, Ascham, and the earlier pedagogical writers, a quick wit meant a quick memory, the most useful intellectual quality in an educational system that put such emphasis on getting one's lessons by heart. For Lyly, wit resides rather in the tongue than in the memory. Wit is the skill at repartee required for success in the sophisticated, courtly conversazione: readiness, eloquence, and aptness of response. Euphues, we are told, "gave himself almost to nothing but practising of those things commonly which are incident to these sharp wits—fine phrases, smooth quipping, merry taunting, using jesting without mean, and abusing mirth without measure" (10).

Of itself this proves no irrevocable truancy. Italianate manners and courtly wit are, after all, the stated objects of Lyly's satire. Even if we detect an excessive delight in his portrayal of that which he pretends to correct, it hardly distinguishes him from the schoolmaster dramatists who were titillated by the wantonness they condemned. The satirists of the 1590's recognized this common human paradox when they made envy the chief motive force of their malcontent personae. In Euphues, however, the contradiction between the acknowledged and the unacknowledged intent comes closer to the surface. In the opening paragraph Lyly makes the startling admission that not only is the finest wit likely to be the most wicked but that this very imperfection is the secret of its attraction.

As therefore the sweetest rose hath his prickle, the finest velvet his brack, the fairest flour his bran, so the sharpest wit hath his wanton will and the holiest head his wicked way. And true it is that some men write, and most men believe, that in all perfect shapes a blemish bringeth rather a liking every way to the eyes than a loathing any way to the mind. Venus had her mole in her cheek which made her more amiable; Helen her scar on her chin which Paris called cos amoris, the whetstone of love; Aristippus his wart, Lycurgus his wen. (10)

When an author begins by admitting that, though his anatomy uncover vicious imperfections, they may be regarded as a cos amoris, his satire is disarmed and his doubleness of intent made too apparent to be ignored. Moreover, in this case, the witty rhetorical patterns on which the author's own claim to the attention of his audience so largely depends derive from the discovery (and on occasion from the manufacture) of imperfection. For Lyly's style to use them, the sweetest rose must have his prickle, the finest velvet his brack. Whatever he may claim to the contrary, Lyly necessarily delights in the world's imperfection. Without it there would be no antithesis, and without antithesis there would be no Euphuism.¹⁴

We can perhaps best appreciate Lyly's ambivalence by looking at a particular problem. Take, for example, the question of experience. The humanist position, championed early in the century by Lyly's grandfather, was, as Erasmus so flatly put it, that "experience is the common schoolhouse of fools and ill men."¹⁵ Colet and William Lily began St. Paul's School, and Erasmus and Lily wrote its first textbook with the idea that their age could be reformed by learning and imitating the example of antiquity. A faith in the moral effect of exempla was the trait most characteristic of the movement they represent. What happens to that faith in Euphues? It is subject to such questioning that The Anatomy of Wit has been described as "a book celebrating experience."¹⁶ The first words of Euphues' pedagogical treatise, "Euphues and his Ephebus," do sound like a direct answer to Erasmus. "It is commonly said, yet I do think it a common lie, that experience is the mistress of fools; for in my opinion they be most fools that want it" (111). But, seen from another point of view, Euphues' position appears no different from that of Gnomaticus who in The Glass of Government had suggested that the prodigals might, as a last resort, be left to experience the world without the mediation of precept and example. Euphues asserts only that one may learn, as he did, from experience. His treatise, however, shows that by starting early enough (with Walter Shandy he suggests beginning at the moment of procreation) a youth may be prevented from having to rely on the painful lessons of experience. He writes, not in praise of experience, but "to the intent … that all young gentlemen might shun my former looseness" (113).

But the ambivalence continues as Lyly's didactic pretensions are undone by his artistic success in the creation of character. Euphues and Lucilla make nonsense of talk about nurture. Both discover that the exemplary patterns of behavior culled from antiquity are amoral in their effect. Those patterns are mirrors in which we see ourselves with unequaled clarity. But though they advance us in self-knowledge, they do nothing to increase our moral self-control. However Euphues and Lucilla got to be what they are, it is clear that nothing, certainly no packaged wisdom, has the strength to divert them from their fated course. In describing their consistency we do not need to invoke the strange formulations of Renaissance psychology, the irrationalities of humor adjust or the absolute disjunction of ethos and pathos. Euphues and Lucilla appear as coherent to us now as they must have to their original audience.

Though Lucilla is transformed by passion, there has been ample warning that she felt uncomfortable in the role of fiancée to the tiresomely respectable Philautus. Her uncivil reception of Euphues, introduced as Philautus's friend, marks a preliminary rebellion against the conventions of that role. Euphues does not miss the meaning of her action; her disdain provokes and excites him. In the first interview they have alone, she shows herself the equal of Cressida at stirring the sexual appetite of her victim. Like Shakespeare's heroine, she instinctively knows the art of holding off. She plays tauntingly with temptation, making sexual innuendoes more overt than anything the stiffly prudish Euphues would have dared. Her effect on him is much that which Cressida has on Troilus. "Euphues was brought into a great quandary and as it were a cold shivering to hear this new kind of kindness, such sweet meat, such sour sauce, such fair words, such faint promises, such hot love, such cold desire, such certain hope, such sudden change" (65). Lucilla clearly finds her true self in this role which she plays so brilliantly. Her succeeding development, her lust for Curio and her tragic end, is more briefly sketched but follows naturally from what we already know of her.

In the character of Euphues, Lyly created one of the most consistently unsympathetic figures in English literature. Whether as prodigal or as precisian, complacent self-satisfaction is the constant base of his character. The example of the schoolmaster dramatists and the classical moralists may have dictated the choice of self-love as the prodigal's motivating flaw, but Lyly had too firm a conception of the character of Euphues to suppose that his moral reformation would change more than the local expression of his enduring philautia. Egotism, not the passion of youth, led to his rejection of Eubulus' advice. He stood "in his own light," deeming "no penny good silver but his own" (25). Likewise, he chose his friend out of self-love. "By so much the more I make myself sure to have Philautus, by how much the more I view in him the lively image of Euphues" (29). Not even his love was motivated by the charms of his beloved. He was initially provoked by Lucilla's failure to notice him and was led on by her reversal to flattering attention. The spur to his reformation was a sudden shock to his self-esteem, the discovery that he too might be jilted, and for the unprepossessing Curio at that. He begins at once on the course that will complete his alienation from our esteem by self-righteously lecturing Lucilla on inconstancy, a failing of which he was so recently guilty. Remorse and self-incrimination play a small part in the solitary lament which follows. He refuses to see his own treachery imaged in Lucilla's. "I had thought that women had been as we men, that is, true, faithful, zealous, constant; but I perceive they be rather woe unto men by their falsehood, jealousy, inconstancy" (84). His "Cooling Card for Philautus and All Fond Lovers" is no more fatuously inappropriate than the blindly condescending "Certain Letters" which he writes. He reproves Philautus, whose greatest transgression is having let himself be betrayed by Euphues; corrects Alcius, a young prodigal; and impudently chides Botonio and Eubulus, the one for regretting his exile, the other for lamenting the death of his daughter. This last impresses particularly as insensitive nonsense, as does his letter to Philautus on the death of Lucilla. Philautus's sorrow is far more attractive than Euphues' prudish disdain. He neglects to remember that Lucilla was the woman for whom he betrayed the friend he now so self-righteously corrects. Euphues knows nothing of positive goodness; his virtue is wholly negative. To his friend Livia he writes that "to reprove sin is the sign of true honor, to renounce it the part of honesty … for they say to abstain from pleasure is the chiefest piety; and I think in court to refrain from vice is no little virtue" (180). The fact that the "they" in question is Cicero does little to make this sentiment more attractive, though it may have masked its want of charity from a classicist.¹⁷ Far from renewing the humanist tradition through his borrowing from it, Lyly reveals the poverty to which it had been reduced. Reproving and renouncing, abstaining and refraining are all that Euphues' sources can show him in the way of virtue.

Out of the most narrowly repressive principles of mid-century humanism, Lyly has created a strikingly consistent character, a monstrous prig. If his creation has not received all the praise it deserves, it is perhaps because readers suspect Lyly of not knowing what he was doing. They are probably right. Without a trace of irony he offers the reformed Euphues for our admiration and emulation. The narrator, who in the early pages never tired of undercutting the pretensions of Euphues, seems by the end of the book to have merged with him, leaving us uncomfortably opposed to both with only the sanction of our own subjective feelings, feelings that were apparently not shared by Lyly's first readers. There was, of course, to be a reaction, as titles like Camilla's Alarm to Slumbering Euphues (1589) or Euphues Amidst His Slumbers (1594) indicate, and Lyly himself was to get the reaction started with his sequel to The Anatomy of Wit. But in the years immediately following the publication of the first Euphues, the priggishness seems to have gone unnoticed. And here is the real mystery. Why was such an unattractive character so attractive to the younger Elizabethans? If we can answer that, we will have gone a long way toward understanding them.

First we should admit that it was not Euphues' self-conceit that they most eagerly imitated, but something of it almost inevitably crept in. We find, for example, Austen Saker's Narbonus complacently warning his former companions of the dangers of the court that he has so recently left, or Stephen Gosson's Phialo superciliously lecturing a friend on how to lecture a friend.'¹⁸ Self-conceit was difficult to avoid because their books were advertisements for themselves. "Employ me," they say, "I am properly disillusioned. Dangerous youth is safely behind me, and here are its fruits, repentence and virtuous admonition." This quality of self-advertisement makes irrelevent a complaint like Sidney's about the style of Euphues. Of course its strings of similes are unpersuasive. Such criticism mistakes the rhetorical objective. The Euphuists were trying less to sell ideas (their ideas were, after all, commonplaces usually chosen to reflect the prejudices of their audience) than to sell themselves. They displayed wit and, at the same time, showed by the plot of their story a critical awareness of the danger of wit. They thus made a simultaneous claim to wit and wisdom. But, in doing so, they could hardly avoid that mixture of petulant insolence and learned pride which Smollett two centuries later defined as priggishness.¹⁹…

Euphues mirrors the division in Lyly's audience. Like the prodigal generation, the book is torn by opposite and irreconcilable tendencies. It maintains the content and didactic method of mid-century humanism. It takes over the story of the prodigal son and repeats the expected themes, the warning against women, against love, against travel, and so on. It incorporates a translation of one of the primary sources of humanistic pedagogy, Plutarch's treatise on the education of children, which includes mention of the ideal union of wit and wisdom, nurture and nature, the active and the contemplative lives. But, like the freshest colors that soonest fade, this world, as Lyly develops it, engenders its own opposite. Analytic wit allows no synthesizing wisdom. Fully created nature defies nurture. And the contempt of the world implicit in the prodigal son plays expands to destroy the active life. Euphues, Phialo, Narbonus, Don Simonides, and Philotimus remain, if not specifically contemplatives, lonely and disillusioned outsiders. I suspect their creators left them that way because they were unable to imagine their own place in society. On whose terms were they to enter? Their own or their fathers'? Caught between dependence and independence, they found themselves shut off from the active life, however much they may have wished to embrace it.

Like the usual prodigal son story, the history of the prodigal generation falls into three phases: admonition, rebellion, and repentance. The first centers on The Anatomy of Wit. In it the various glasses of government, rocks of regard, schools of abuse, and labyrinths of liberty find their point of convergence. No single book so definitively expresses the next phase, the period of rebellion. Four works do, however, stand out: Lyly's Euphues and his England, Greene's Pandosto, Lodge's Rosalind, and Sidney's New Arcadia. Greene, Lodge, and Sidney will preoccupy us in the next several chapters. In the remaining pages of this one, I would like to suggest what Lyly did to Euphues.

The critics who have discussed Lyly in greatest detail disagree about the relation of The Anatomy of Wit to its sequel. On the one hand, Albert Feuillerat and Walter Davis have thought the works very different indeed, Davis claiming that the second "is in many ways a complete departure" from the first, and Feuillerat identifying that departure with a transfer of Lyly's primary allegiance from the Protestant humanists to the Italianate courtiers, from Burghley to Oxford.²⁵ G. K. Hunter, on the other hand, has disputed this biographical explanation and denied that there is enough of a difference between the two parts of Euphues to need explaining. The Anatomy of Wit, Hunter points out, was not dedicated to Burghley, but to Sir William West, Lord Delaware. Of Delaware not enough is known to speculate about the nature of his influence. Nor is it clear that the viciousness of Oxford's life led him as a patron to prefer licentious writing. As Hunter remarks, Oxford "'commanded' his 'loving friend' Thomas Bedingfield to translate Cardan's Comfort into English (1573) and this argues seriousness of mind and sobriety of taste."²⁶ This successfully weakens Feuillerat's biographical reasoning. It does not of course prove the two works alike, nor does Hunter pretend it should. He argues rather that there can be no significant opposition between The Anatomy of Wit and Euphues and his England because neither has any definable coherence. Each is a "gallimaufry," a collection of topoi, of popular themes, of attitudes adopted one minute to be dropped the next. To prove the two works alike one need only demonstrate, as Hunter does, that they discuss similar subjects in a similar style, using a similar fiction, that of the prodigal son. Looking any closer at the way these subjects or that fiction is handled smacks for Hunter of anachronistic, novel-conditioned criticism.

Hunter's view accounts more adequately than either Feuillerat's or Davis's could for the commonplace and courtesy book quality of both parts of Euphues, yet, in my opinion, it is considerably overstated. Though Hunter claims that "we must derive our interpretation from the whole drift of the book," his argument denies that Euphues has any such thing. "Drift" implies direction; Hunter allows only a swirling movement in place. Yet despite the admittedly frequent eddies and countercurrents, most readers do recognize that each version has its own drift and that the drift of Euphues and his England opposes that of its predecessor. One is addressed to gentlemen scholars, the other to ladies and gentlewomen; one claims to be a moral treatise, the other a plaything; one satirizes women and love, the other praises both. As Lyly wrote in the Epistle Dedicatory to Euphues and his England, "Had I not named Euphues, few would have thought it had been Euphues" (194). And not only is the second Euphues unlike the first; it is unlike any prodigal son story we have before encountered. It grants the prodigal at least a partial victory, demonstrating to even his Eubulean counsellor that conventional wisdom must be modified, not merely endorsed, by experience.

In Euphues and his England, Philautus plays the prodigal and Euphues takes the role unhappiness won him of moral instructor. His lesson, which occupies the first of the book's three parts, does move, as Hunter says, "somewhat jerkily" from topic to topic, as Lyly exhausts first one and then another page of his commonplace book; but plot governs the underlying drift, for Euphues' lesson takes the form of a narrative, a prodigal son story, or rather two prodigal son stories in one, and both reveal a new skepticism about humanistic morality. Euphues begins with the story of Callimachus, whose father, "the lewd usurer" Cassander, dies, leaving his son only a legacy of good advice. Callimachus naturally rebels and sets out to see the world. On his way he meets a hermit living in an ascetic paradise where cat and mouse play at peace together. Unknown to Callimachus, the hermit is his uncle, the twin brother of his father, in whose keeping his fortune has secretly been left. The hermit tries to dissuade him from travel by telling the second prodigal son story, his own. He and his brother, twins of opposite nature though of identical nurture, each inherited a share of their father's wealth. He wasted his part in travel and riotous living, while his brother prudently stayed at home and got richer and richer. The hermit draws the obvious moral, "Then, my good Callimachus, record with thyself the inconveniences that come by travelling" (219). Callimachus rejects his advice, arguing much as Euphues did in The Anatomy of Wit that because experience has brought suffering to some it need not do so to him. But of course it does. After much travel he returns to the hermit's cell to confess, "I find too late, yet at length, that in age there is a certain foresight which youth cannot search, and a kind of experience into which unripened years cannot come; so that I must of necessity confess that youth never reineth well but when age holdeth the bridle" (224-225). Euphues concludes by turning from parable to precept. "Be not lavish of thy tongue," he warns Philautus. "Everyone that shaketh thee by the hand is not joined to thee in heart…. Be not quarrelous for every light occasion…. Beware thou fall not into the snares of love" (226)—the same advice item for item that Eubulus gave him, that the usurous father gave Callimachus, and that any Elizabethan schoolboy was likely to have encountered in Isocrates' Ad Demonicum, if he had not already heard it from his father.

This episode remains firmly attached to the humanistic ethos. Both Euphues' tale of Callimachus and the hermit's tale of himself end with the usual overthrow of prodigality, but in both there is an uncharacteristic reluctance to believe that admonition can have any effect. The father does not trust Callimachus with his inheritance despite the counsel he has given him, and the uncle admits, "But why go I about to dissuade thee from that which I myself followed, or to persuade thee to that which thou thyself fliest? My gray hairs are like unto a white frost, thy red blood not unlike a hot fire; so that it cannot be that either thou shouldst follow my counsel or I allow thy conditions" (221). Euphues, speaking to Philautus, echoes him, "I well believe thou rememberest nothing that may do thee good nor forgettest anything which can do thee harm" (229). Furthermore, the hermit's story demonstrates with almost scientific rigor that nature resists nurture. "We were nursed both with one teat," he says of himself and his twin, "where my brother sucked a desire of thrift, and I of theft…. So one womb nourished contrary wits and one milk divers manners; which argueth something in nature, I know not what, to be marvellous, I dare not say monstrous" (215-216). Marvelous or monstrous, it is something that would hardly please a humanist.

That humanist would have been no better pleased by the opposition, in both stories, of avarice and prodigality—a paradigm more suggestive of Horace, Terence, or their Italian imitators than of the schoolmaster dramatists.²⁷ Instead of the usual dialectic of virtue and vice, Euphues' exempla present opposed extremes, with the inevitable suggestion that virtue is to be found not with one or the other, but somewhere in between. The avaricious father is as little to be imitated as his prodigal son. And his precepts so resemble those of Euphues and the hermit that we necessarily brand the morality that all three represent as a miserly tradition.

Wisdom is great wealth. Sparing is good getting…. Put no more clothes on thy back than will expel cold, neither any more meat in thy belly than may quench hunger…. Enter not into bands, no, not for thy best friends; he that payeth another man's debt seeketh his own decay…. Be not hasty to marry. It is better to have one plough going than two cradles; and more profit to have a barn filled than a bed…. Be not too lavish in giving alms…. And he that cannot follow good counsel never can get commodity. (209-210)

The strict rational prudence of Isocrates and his humanist imitators is shown to verge on uncharitable money grasping. Virtue resides as little with it as with prodigality, and prodigality has at least the advantage of leading to repentance, while avarice leads only to a mean old age and a sordid death.

Euphues has unconsciously posed a dilemma. The next episode, still another prodigal son story, begins to find a way out of it. Again Lyly raids his commonplace book—in this section Hunter notices topics ranging from "the mystery of kingship" to "wine—pro and contra"—but again plot, however jerky its progress, does define a recognizable drift. The story of Fidus, the retired courtier turned beekeeper whom Euphues and Philautus meet on the road to London, opens as usual with a scene of advice given and rejected. The young Fidus, newly arrived at court, is admonished by a grave friend who perceives in him, just as Eubulus, Euphues, and the hermit perceived in the young men they advised, a good wit but a wanton will. And if this friend's allowance of riding, running at the tilt, and reveling seem to owe more to the Italian Book of the Courtier than to humanistic pedagogical treatises, the warning against love and women with which he concludes is just what we have come to expect. Fidus's reception of this misogynist counsel also runs true to course. "I gave him great thanks—and glad I was we were parted. For his putting love into my mind was like the throwing of bugloss into wine: which increaseth in him that drinketh it a desire of lust" (250). Unlike Euphues, who in his examples moved rapidly from the disobedient departure to the penitent return, only mentioning the years of prodigality, Fidus lingers nostalgically over each detail of the progress of his love, repeating conversations, questioni d'amore, and melancholy soliloquies. Though his love proves ultimately unhappy, leading him, like Euphues and the prodigal hermit, to retire from the world, his beloved is not unfaithful. Iffida is, in fact, the first honest woman we have met. Nor does Fidus tell his tale as a warning to Philautus. Theirs is not the usual relationship of gray-beard moralist to young scapegrace. The old lover rather reminisces for the benefit of a young initiate. "Well, God grant Philautus better success than I had" (273). Many of the fictions of the first phase of Elizabethan prodigality, including its centerpiece, The Anatomy of Wit, instruct the reader in the mysteries of polite courtship—and that instruction contributed mightily to their success—but this is the first to admit it.

The tales of the hermit, of Callimachus, and of Fidus constitute the opening movement of Euphues and his England. The first two set avarice against prodigality; the third explores the bittersweet of prodigal love. The story to which they are prologue takes away the bitter and leaves only the sweet. It thus breaks the confines of humanistic admonition, confines which, with some stretching, could still have accommodated the unrepentant, but unhappy Fidus. If he did not draw the usual moral from his story, Euphues easily could and, once he and Philautus were on the road again, did. Philautus's experience, however, disproves the usual warnings, confirming our impression of significant drift.

Philautus begins by imitating his prodigal predecessors. He rejects traditional wisdom and gives himself up to love. Like Fidus's Iffida, his Camilla is a model of faithful virtue; and, like Iffida, she is faithful to someone else. He tries to win her by magic and by the magic of rhetoric, and, when all fails, he decides to sicken and die. He regrets having estranged Euphues and recalls his advice. "Now, now, Euphues, I see what it is to want a friend, and what it is to lose one; thy words are come to pass, which once I thought thou spakest in sport, now I find them as a prophecy" (362). Normally this would be the prelude to Philautus's retirement from the world. But here the story takes a new and more obliging direction. To replace his rose, Philautus is offered a violet, Mistress Francis. "Be merry, gentleman; at this time of the year a violet is better than a rose" (383). Philautus debates the necessity of lasting faith even to a hopeless love, prevaricates, and ends by marrying his English violet. Here then prodigality is not punished, but rewarded, if not with what it at first desired, at least with something almost as good. Philautus has been allowed to stray rather far from the narrow path of virtue, particularly in his Italianate recourse to necromantic intrigue, without undue suffering. This is no longer the dangerous world where any false step was irretrievable. The women in England are virtuous, the men loyal. Even the Italian magician turns out to be a benign philosopher. The palpable evil of The Glass of Government and The Anatomy of Wit has been dispelled. In England one can muddle through with impunity.

These further adventures of Euphues and Philautus test humanistic precept against the reality of contemporary England. The Anatomy of Wit had been set in a semiallegorical Naples which stood at once for the Italy against which Ascham had railed and the Italianate English metropolis. Until the mention of Elizabeth in the final pages, its time had been no more definite. It began like an old tale. "There dwelt in Athens a young gentleman of great patrimony and of so comely a personage" (10). Euphues and his England insists on its own actuality. It begins, "Euphues, having gotten all things necessary for his voyage into England, accompanied only with Philautus, took shipping the first of December, 1579, by our English computation" (205). It seems at moments almost to have been written as it was being lived. "To make short, the winds were so favorable, the mariners so skilful, the way so short, that I fear me they will land before I can describe the manner how—and therefore suppose them now in Dover town" (231). In this contemporary setting even Euphues discovers that his teaching must be modified. He recants his "Cooling Card" and advises Philautus to marry. The irrelevance of his preconceived morality is mirrored in the inadequacy of his geography, based as it is on the same kind of classical sources. On the boat he concludes his moral lesson by edifying his traveling companions with a description of England, but his humanistic Baedeker, Caesar's Gallic Wars, is as preposterously out of date as his misogynism. He gets the orientation of the island wrong and informs his listeners that the "coin they use is either brass or else iron rings," and that "all the Britains do dye themselves with woad, which setteth a bluish color upon them" (227-228). Experience teaches him that De Bello Gallico works no better as a travel guide than Ovid's Remedia Amoris did as an introduction to love. In a letter sent to Livia from his cell on Mount Silixsedra, he corrects his misconceptions about the geography and manners of Britain, basing his revised report on the very recent Description of England (1577) by William Harrison. Philautus's experiences in England bring his misogynism up to date.

Euphues is forced to change his ideas as no other Eubulean sage ever was. He does not, however, change enough. He remains an alien figure in England. He is respected; his company is sought; his advice requested; but he is, nevertheless, an outsider. At the dinner party at Lady Flavia's all the guests are paired, Surius with Camilla, Philautus with Mistress Francis, even the aging hostess with the supernumerary Martius. Only Euphues, who is chosen to judge their debate on love, remains unmated. And he concludes against them all. "Great hold there hath been who should prove his love best, when in my opinion there is none good" (405). His judgment is not so much wrong as irrelevant. He would ground love wholly upon "time, reason, favor, and virtue," ignoring the irrational passion which is an inevitable ingredient of love, even for the most virtous of English women, Camilla. Again in his debate with Philautus, Euphues fails to strike the right note, the note that might make him part of that harmonious English chorus he so much admires. He praises love, renouncing his former satire, but it is the wrong kind, chaste spiritual love, not the love that realizes itself in a fruitful marriage. The narrator, for once unequivocally on the side of Philautus, agrees in defending this typically English resolution of the conflict of passion and reason. "I must needs conclude with Philautus, though I should cavil with Euphues, that the end of love is the full fruition of the party beloved" (382).

Like Jacques, another reformed prodigal turned moralist, Euphues has no place in the comic world of love and marriage. He blesses the newlyweds and gives them a little more good advice culled from the Conjugal Precepts of Plutarch. Then, just as Jacques quit the regenerated world of As You Like It to join the convertite Duke Frederick, Euphues withdraws to his cell on Mount Silixsedra, its "seat of flint" figuring the hardness of his doctrine. He and his humanistic morality are for other than the dancing measures of England in 1580.

What accounts for the extraordinary change in Lyly's fiction? The dedication of Euphues and his England to the Earl of Oxford provides, as Feuillerat realized, an important clue. If the particular tastes of Oxford and his circle did not shape the second Euphues to quite the extent that Feuillerat thought, Lyly's association with Oxford did at least decide the orientation of his career, and his book reflects that orientation. Like The Anatomy of Wit, Euphues and his England reaches out for preferment. But where Lyly before thought preferment could be had only by repenting passion and the literature that expresses it, he now allows passion, and thus by extension allows literature. Ambition's aim was still the court, but by the time he wrote Euphues and his England, Lyly saw a possibility of realizing ambition as a writer. Prodigal son stories of the stricter sort generally advertise themselves as the unique product of youthful folly. The author, they claim, will now turn to graver subjects. And that is, in fact, what Gascoigne, Whetstone, Rich, and Gosson did, while Saker and Melbancke stopped writing altogether.²⁸ Lyly, with the help of Oxford, took another road. Within a few years we find him producing comedies for the court under Oxford's patronage, and for almost a decade he was the most popular court dramatist. But this hopeful development did not have a happy ending. By the early 1590's, he had lost his audience, and in 1595 came the first of the pleading epistles to Elizabeth and Cecil, admitting failure and announcing literary repentance.

In those letters we hear once again the voice of Euphues, witty though repentant. It was a role that Lyly never wholly abandoned. He claimed it not only in the Epistle Dedicatory to Euphues and his England, but also in the letter he prefixed to Thomas Watson's Hekatompathia (1582). "The repeating of love," he wrote, "wrought in me a remembrance of liking, but searching the very veins of my heart, I could find nothing but a broad scar where I left a deep wound…. Whereby I noted that young swans are gray and the old white, young trees tender and the old tough, young men amorous and growing in years either wiser or warier."²⁹ Despite his portrayal of Philautus's success, Lyly continued to wear the mask of disillusionment. Like Euphues, he was the old swan, the old tree, the old man wiser and warier, kept by experience from joining the celebration that he heralded. Brought up under the Old Law, he could not accept grace.

Notes

¹The Complete Works of John Lyly, ed. R. Warwick Bond, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1902), I, 65-71.

²Pierces Supererogation in The Works of Gabriel Harvey, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 3 vols. (London, 1884-1885), II, 128.

³ Anthony Munday, Zelauto … Given … to Euphues (1580), Barnabe Rich, The Second Tome of the Travailes and Adventures of Don Simonides (1584), Greene, Euphues his Censure to Philautus (1587) and Menaphon Camillas Alarum to Slumbering Euphues (1589), and Lodge, Rosalynde. Euphues Golden Legacie (1590) and Euphues Shadow (1592).

⁴ Rich, The Second Tome, sig. I iv. (UMEES, Reel 393.)

⁵Ibid., sig. I iii.

⁶ Gosse's Lodge, II, 8.

⁷Second Tome, sig. A iv.

⁸ Gosse, II, 8.

⁹ Wallace A. Bacon in his introduction to William Warner's Syrinx (1950; rpt. New York, 1970), p. xlviii.

¹⁰ Samuel Gardiner, Portraiture of the Prodigal Sonne (1599), sig. A4^v-A5. (UMEES, Reel 243.)

¹¹Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit and his England, ed. Morris W. Croll and Harry demons (1916; rpt. New York, 1964), p. 191. References in the text to Euphues will be to this edition.

¹² John Dover Wilson, "Euphues and the Prodigal Son," The Library, 10 (1909), 337-361.

¹³ William Ringler, "The Immediate Source of Euphuism," PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association of America], 53 (1938), 678-686.

¹⁴ For a suggestive analysis of Lyly's antithetical style, see Jonas Barish, "The Prose Style of John Lyly," ELH [English Literary History], 23 (1956), 14-35.

¹⁵Experientia stultorium magistra. The free translation is Ascham's (Schoolmaster, ed. Ryan, p. 51).

¹⁶ Walter R. Davis, Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction (Princeton, 1969), p. 119. Cf. G. K. Hunter who argues that the letters with which Euphues concludes show "experience as the true teacher of a ready wit" (John Lyly, pp. 52-53).

¹⁷In [voluptate] spernenda et repudianda virtus vel maxime cernitur (De legibus, I, 52).

¹⁸ Saker, Narbonus. The Laberynth of Libertie (1580) and Gosson, The Ephemerides of Phialo (1579). Other books referred to in the next several paragraphs are Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse (1579), Barnabe Rich, The Straunge and Wonderfull Adventures of Don Simonides (1581) and The Second Tome of the Travailes and Adventures of Don Simonides (1584), and Brian Melbancke, Philotimus. The Warre betwixt Nature and Fortune (1583).

¹⁹ OED, "prig." The quotation from Count Fathom (1784) fits Euphues rather well: "The templar is, generally speaking, a prig; so is the abbé: both are distinguished by an air of petulance and self-conceit, which holds a middle rank betwixt the insolence of a first-rate buck, and the learned pride of a supercilious pedant."…

²⁵ Davis, p. 131; Feuillerat, John Lyly, pp. 83-84.

²⁶ Hunter, Lyly, p. 70.

²⁷ See, for example, Horace's Satire II, iii, Terence's Adelphi, or Giovammaria Cecchi's Figliuol Prodigo. Another analogue to Lyly's opposition of avarice and prodigality is Ravisius Textor's De Filio Prodigo (Dialogi, 1530). Textor identifies the source of the first part of his dialogue, the satire on avarice, as Horace's Epistle I, v. "The second part," he writes, "is drawn from the well known story of the prodigal child." (Secundum tractum est ex historia notissima de puero prodigo.).

²⁸ There was some backsliding on Rich's part, but he tried to cover it up. On the title page of his Brusanus (1592), he claimed that it was written "seven or eight years sithence," which would have put it back with the second tome of Don Simonides (1584). For evidence that he was lying and that the book was written shortly before it was published, see my "Lyly, Greene, Sidney, and Barnaby Rich's Brusanus, " HLQ [Huntington Library Quarterly], 36 (1972/73), 105-118.

²⁹Works, ed. Bond, I. 26. Something of the same vestigal humanistic restraint can be seen in Lyly's comedies where the central characters—Alexander, Sappho, Cynthia, or Sophronia—end by refusing love.