The Plays
[In the following excerpt, Hunter investigates the "debate-theme" of Midas, Endimion, and Gallathea.]
Midas
The basic plot of Midas is taken from Lyly's favourite classical authority, Ovid, who tells two stories of Midas: first, how he desired the gift of the golden touch, how he came to repent it and was absolved; and, second, how Midas was fitted with asses ears for preferring the music of Pan to that of Apollo. Lyly … places this story inside a debate structure. He shows that Midas' judgment that gold is the best of gifts results from a dispute between War (Martius), Wealth (Mellacrites) and Love (Eristus), here presented as the counsellors of their monarch. These three appear throughout the play as the modes of temptation to which a sovereign is most subject, and serve to give a philosophic and even political tinge to activities which, in Ovid, are merely part of the arbitrary and inexplicable relationship of gods and men. In each case the end proposed to Midas is improper: war is desired to give Midas power over neighbouring states; love is to be pursued for the end of 'such a tender wantonness that nothing is thought of but love, a passion proceeding of beastly lust, and coloured with a courtly name of love' (II.i.61-3); gold is sought because it can buy love, monarchy and even justice:
Justice herself that sitteth wimpled about the eyes doth it not because she will take no gold, but that she would not be seen blushing when she takes it; the balance she holdeth are not to weigh the right of the cause but the weight of the bribe. She will put up her naked sword if thou offer her a golden scabbard.
(I. i. 90-94)
The story of Midas' golden gift shows how gold leads to sterility. The ills attendant on the other advices are also illustrated in the course of the play, though less fully and less coherently. A point of view opposite to that of the three counsellors is also indicated, by the person of the king's daughter, Sophronia (her name is meant to be indicative of her wisdom); it is she who speaks the clearest denunciation of the different advices and their effects on Midas:
The love he hath followed—I fear unnatural—the
riches he hath got—I know unmeasurable—the
wars he hath levied—I doubt unlawful—hath
drawn his body with grey hairs to the grave's
mouth, and his mind with eating cares to desperate
determinations … Let Phrygia be an example of
chastity, not lust; liberality, not covetousness;
valour, not tyranny. I wish not your bodies
banished, but your minds, that my father and your
king may be our honour and the world's wonder.
(II. i. 88-107)
At the end of the play when Midas comes to self-knowledge, having learned humility and discretion as a result of his double misfortune (and this final episode is, of course, added to Ovid) it is in precisely these terms that his palinode is expressed:
I will therefore yield myself to Bacchus and acknowledge my wish to be vanity; to Apollo and confess my judgment to be foolish; to Mars and say my wars are unjust; to Diana and tell my affection hath been unnatural.
(V. iii. 58-61)
This framework of moral debate enables the play to make topical reference of a fairly obvious kind without disrupting the structure of the entertainment; where there is already a moral pattern worked into the play, the localization of some of the terms does not require much re-adjustment of focus. The assimilation of Midas to Philip II of Spain occurs in one of the spaces left open by the framework of debate—the temptation to war, for which Ovid supplies no material. The use of a contemporary reference at this point may sharpen our apprehension of ambition and ill-judgment, but the place of these qualities in the general scheme would still be clear to a reader who had not made the equation between the moral and the political aspects.
In fact, there is nothing to make the equation even plausible till we get to Act III. There, in the long complaint by Midas, which fills the greater part of scene i, we hear, among other confessions:
Have not I made the sea to groan under the number of my ships; and have they not perished that there was not two left to make a number? … Have not I enticed the subjects of my neighbour princes to destroy their natural kings? … A bridge of gold did I mean to make in that island where all my navy could not make a breach. Those islands did I long to touch, that I might turn them to gold, and myself to glory. But unhappy Midas … being now become a shame to the world, a scorn to that petty prince and to thyself a consumption. A petty prince, Midas? no, a prince protected by the gods, by nature, by his own virtue and his subjects' obedience. Have not all treasons been discovered by miracle, not counsel? that do the gods challenge. Is not the country walled with huge waves? that doth nature claim. Is he not through the whole world a wonder for wisdom and temperance? that is his own strength. Do not all his subjects (like bees) swarm to preserve the king of bees? that their loyalty maintaineth.
(III. i. 31-60)
In the period of the Armada it would be hard to hear of a great fleet miraculously frustrated 'that there was not two to make a number' without thinking of Philip II, and there is nothing in the context to contradict the thought. Again, the unqualified praise of a monarch in Elizabethan court entertainment always requires us to glance towards Elizabeth, and when we hear of Midas' enemy as a paragon, whom he seeks to destroy by plots, by invasion and by lavish expenditure, it is natural to extend the meaning to cover the general opposition between Spain and England. Further, Lyly had already identified Elizabeth with Sapho, and Sapho appears in Ovid as the Queen of Lesbos. Here the ruler of Lesbos is Midas' enemy. Identification cannot be resisted when all the evidence points one way.
But the identification of Midas with Philip of Spain does not take us very far into the play or require us to interpret every scene allegorically. It does not affect the sub-plot; the scene of Sophronia and her ladies-in-waiting, engaged in a choice between story-telling, song and dancing obviously parodies the original choice between Wealth, War and Love, but it does not follow it down into its political implications. Its point would seem to be made if we accept it as a vignette of courtly grace, otherwise absent from the play.
Halpin and Bond [in Oberon's Vision and the Complete Works, of Lyly, respectively] wish to extend the allegory to figures other than Midas. They would see Martius, for example, as a pseudonym for the Duke of Alva; the argument against this is simply that it seems an unnecessary restriction of the range of reference that the name and the attitude implies; but I would not deny that the persons of Alva could have occurred to Elizabethans as well as moderns as a local representative of the ambitious bloodthirstiness which Martius represents in general.
The golden gift has an obvious and utilized congruity with the treasure which Spain extracted from the Indies—'the utmost parts of the West, where all the guts of the earth are gold' (II. i. 101)—but we need not seek for political meaning in the fact that this is the gift of Bacchus nor in the bathing in Pactolus which removes the curse. These belong to the source, and it is sufficient for court allegory if the play at some points makes clear the relevance of the modern parallel.
The second story which Ovid tells about Midas starts from his false judgment in the case of Apollo v. Pan, and proceeds through his sentence to wear asses ears to the final episode of the blabbing reeds—the means by which the world learns about his deformity. Lyly presents all these without notable alteration, and adds a final scene in which Midas repents of his misjudgment (and of his inordinate ambitions) and is restored to human shape. The addition of this second story does not, however, add anything to the dramatic impact of the play; can it have been intended to add to the allegorical import? Halpin wished to identify the contest between the gods with the Reformation and supposed that Midas' mistaken preference for the music of Pan stood for Philip's adherence to the Roman Catholic church. This is attractive on a priori grounds, since pan (=all) and catholic are cognate terms. But no one at all sensitive to literary atmosphere could read the scene of the contest and suppose that it was intended allegorically; there is nothing in the scene which is not perfectly explicable in terms of the literal meaning. Moreover Pan appears too often in Elizabethan pastoral allegory to represent approved English figures to make the identification at all provable. Pan is here, as there, the representative of rustic poetry, and the qualities ascribed to him bear only a converse relation to those ascribed in this period to Roman Catholicism: subtlety, treachery, pride, empty ostentation (Spenser's Archimago, Duessa and Orgoglio).
Indeed the figure and song of Pan (as we have it) may seem to readers less asinine than Midas to be as good (in its own way) as that of Apollo, though lacking the music we cannot be confident—and we cannot even be sure that the songs we possess mirror Lyly's intention. The 'low' rustic style has its own charm here in the vein of
When the merry bells ring round,
And the jocund rebecks sound
To many a youth and many a maid
Dancing in the chequer'd shade.
It is certainly not true that 'Pan [hath showed] himself a rude satyr, neither keeping measure nor time' in lines like
Cross-gartered swains and dairy-girls
With faces smug and round as pearls
When Pan's shrill pipe begins to play
With dancing wear out night and day.
It would be a curious malformation of intention if Lyly's supposed satire on the Roman Catholic church ended by appearing admirable for the very qualities that Protestants thought of as their own peculiars—homely honesty and downrightness. It seems wisest to drop the whole idea of allegorical intention in this episode and view the musical contest as just another example of Midas' instability of judgment, put in to give added weight to his repentance, and providing the audience with an opportunity to call Philip of Spain an ass.
I have discussed the temptation to wealth, where Ovid supplied the material, and that to war, where contemporary history seems to be the primary source; what of the third temptation, that of Eristus or Love? Sophronia says that Midas' love is 'unnatural' (II. i. 88) and Midas repeats the word in his palinode. On the other hand, the only love mentioned in the play is that of Midas for Celia, whose conquest is anticipated in Act I ('Celia, chaste Celia shall yield'), but who remains chaste in Act II, her words being as follows:
if gold could have allured mine eyes, thou knowest Midas that commandeth all things to be gold had conquered; if threats might have feared my heart, Midas, being a king, might have commanded my affections; if love, gold or authority might have enchanted me, Midas had obtained by love, gold and authority.
(II. i. 20-25)
The rebuttal of the three temptations of gold, love and force by Celia (the name is no doubt intended to be significant) aligns her clearly with Sophronia as representing the virtue in the play, but does not in the least explain Midas' unnatural love. Bond says that Celia is the daughter of Mellacrites—on the evidence I suppose of I. ii. 1 f., where Licio says to Petulus: 'Thou servest Mellacrites, and I his daughter'; but there is nothing to suggest that the daughter is Celia. What is clear is that she is also beloved of Eristus, 'whose eyes are stitched on Celia's face, and thoughts gyved to her beauty' (II. i. 60 f.); it is also clear that she does not return any of this love, since she says of herself, 'I am free from love, and unfortunate to be beloved'. There is no evidence in the play of a mode of relationship which would make Midas' love 'unnatural', and I suspect that the pursuit of the question along these lines is misguided anyway. Eristus is nothing but the type of the lover and so Celia, I suspect, is only the object of love in general, a heaven of beauty that it is 'unnatural' to attempt by earthly love:
Celia hath sealed her face in my heart, which I am no more ashamed to confess than thou that Mars hath made a scar in thy face, Martius.
(II. ii. 81-3)
There is a case here for regarding the difficulty as likely to have arisen from too precise a conceptual framework and too slight a dramatic interest.
This play is also remarkable (and the unusualness may be related to the difficulties I have just discussed) for the lack of interest in courtly love. All Lyly's plays, except this one, turn on the emotion of love, seen as the main motive for human activities. Love shows court life at its most intense, and moves gods or sovereigns to descend into human life and reveal their powers in a context of human passion. The absence of this favourite theme in Midas is all the more remarkable in that the framework of debate allows for it so clearly. Martius and Mellacrites have their attitudes exposed at length, but Eristus is confined to a few undeveloped statements. Bond's suggestion that the 'unnatural' love of Midas is meant to be filled out by knowledge of contemporary scandal is completely unconvincing. It might be supposed that the topical allusions to Philip of Spain took up so much space (Midas is the second longest of Lyly's plays) that there was no room left for a developed image of love, natural or unnatural. On the other hand, however, one must note that the subject on which the play is centred could never have been intended for a purpose other than that of exposing foolish monarchy. Lyly's other plays of courtly intrigue centre on a divinely good monarch, but here this Alexander-Sapho-Cynthia figure has to be deduced from her opposite, Midas.
Endimion
No one could accuse Endimion, Lyly's other play supposedly devoted to court allegory, of lacking the dimension of love; for this is the element in which the whole play moves. The use of the legend of Endimion, about the hopeless love adventures of a shepherd and the moon, is a fairly obvious case of adapting the feelings of love to shadow forth the complex of fear, ambition, admiration that real courtiers felt about their real sovereign; for there can be little doubt that the Cynthia of the play is the Cynthia of Ralegh and Ben Jonson—Queen Elizabeth herself. The play uses a strain of high-flown adoration towards Cynthia, which seems to be unnaturally intense if Cynthia is only the moon. Take the oracle that Eumenides sees in the magic well:
When she whose figure of all is the perfectest, and never to be measured—always one, yet never the same—still inconstant, yet never wavering—shall come and kiss Endimion in his sleep, he shall then rise; else never.
(III. iv. 155-58)
This mood of abject admiration falls on every character when Cynthia is mentioned. Lyly nowhere gives evidence of attachment of this kind to ideal concepts, whether of Love or Truth or Heavenly Beauty or what-you-will; but this is precisely the attitude to Elizabeth that Sapho and Phao and Midas have prepared us for.
The outline of the plot certainly renders an image which Elizabeth could take as a graceful compliment to her virtue and attractiveness, and which it is hard not to see as a general image of court life … [In] Sapho and Phao … Sapho the queen is left constantly but hopelessly loved by the hero, who is in his turn constantly but hopelessly pursued by another lady with a strong claim on the affections. Lyly uses the same formula here, but makes it more integral to the plot. A noble gentleman hopelessly adoring, from the distance of humility, a goddess-queen who reigns over a 'court' of ladies, is betrayed by his very faithfulness and high-minded constancy to the forces of ingratitude, treachery and envy which lurk unseen around the throne. Evil spells cast him into a perpetual sleep; only the faithfulness of a friend breaks the dark night of disfavour, and reveals to Cynthia the true natures of the faithful and the unfaithful. Cynthia, ever gracious though ever distant, is willing to end the spell by her redeeming kiss. Virtue is rewarded by royal condescension and the corrupters and deceivers are known for what they are. The story reads, as I say, like a generalized transcript of court intrigue, written from the point of view of one who has an axe to grind about unfair disgrace and a hope of reaching favour again by means of judicious flattery.
Moreover, the details of the particular vision that Endimion relates when he is recovered from his sleep are strongly reminiscent of the dream of Sapho which we have already considered as possible allegory, and would seem to derive (as does the other) from an image of court-intrigue and corruption obscuring the true merit of the speaker, and carrying aloft the opportunists and the time-servers:
There, portrayed to life, with a cold quaking in every joint I beheld many wolves barking at thee, Cynthia, who having ground their teeth to bite, did with striving bleed themselves to death. There might I see ingratitude with an hundred eyes, gazing for benefits, and with a thousand teeth gnawing on the bowels wherein she was bred. Treachery stood all clothed in white, with a smiling countenance, but both her hands bathed in blood. Envy, with a pale and meagre face (whose body was so lean that one might tell all her bones, and whose garment was so tottered that it was easy to number every thread) stood shooting at stars, whose darts fell down again on her own face. There might I behold drones or beetles I know not how to term them, creeping under the wings of a princely eagle, who, being carried into her nest, sought there to suck that vein that would have killed the Eagle. I mused that things so base should attempt a fact so barbarous or durst imagine a thing so bloody.
(V. i. 119-34)
The 'drones and beetles' here, which suck the life-blood of the Eagle, closely correspond to the 'ants … and caterpillers' which suck away the life of the royal cedar in Sapho. What is lacking here is a figure equivalent to that of the loyal stockdove, whose guilelessness destroyed his hope of favour; but this is supplied by the whole history of Endimion, and more particularly by the passage immediately preceding, where he refuses 'counsels and policies' when they are offered to him and has to content himself in consequence with 'pictures'. I take this to mean that Endimion could have given Cynthia political advice or counsel which would have protected her; but he refrained out of humility and now has to content himself with a knowledge (? and literary portrait) of the falsehood at court.
Perhaps we should connect with these passages part of the Epilogue to Endimion, spoken at court presumably by one of the actors:
Dread Sovereign, the malicious that seek to overthrow us with threats do but stiffen our thoughts and make them sturdier in storms; but if your Highness vouch-safe with your favourable beams to glance upon us, we shall not only stoop but with all humility lay both our hands and hearts at your Majesty's feet.
The use of 'we' here suggests that the aggrieved party can be represented by the Pauls' boys. If this is the same grievance as is represented in the play itself (and why should we multiply grievances without necessity?) then the relationship with Cynthia expressed in the vision must refer to Lyly and his theatrical enterprise. This would be a rather unexciting truth, and would require us to dismiss the charge that 'the malicious' 'would have killed the Eagle' as rhetorical exaggeration. Certainly, for whatever reason, the notion has found no favour with commentators, who have preferred, now for over a hundred years, to brave illogicality in the pursuit of more romantic truths.
The first in this field was the Rev. N. J. Halpin, who published in 1843 a treatise called Oberon's Vision; in this (among other implausibilities) he identified Endimion with Leicester and suggested that the sleep in the play figured the disgrace which followed the discovery of his (third) marriage in 1579. This view, with minor modifications, has been accepted by G. P. Baker, in his edition of the play (1894), by Bond in the Complete Works, by Schelling in his Elizabethan Drama and most recently by F. S, Boas in his Queen Elizabeth in Drama (1950).
But powerfully backed though the case for Leicester may have been, it does not seem to have had much except human credulity to support it. There is no evidence that plays were ever performed before Elizabeth to support Leicester or any other faction in the court. Even if such plays existed, it seems highly improbable that Lyly should write one in support of Leicester. He was never a member of Leicester's faction; he was the servant of the Earl of Oxford, who belonged to the opposite party. Again, it is clear that Halpin was ignorant of dates, and that Bond (and Feuillerat for the sake of his own theory [in his John Lyly]) distort the external evidence. The title-page tells us that the play was performed at Candlemas before Elizabeth when she was at Greenwich; there is only one Candlemas in our period which the records say was spent at Greenwich—2nd February 1588—and we must give this as the date of the play. This is too late, however, to give any relation to Leicester's disgrace, or to the affairs of James VI that Feuillerat thinks relevant [Albert Feuillerat, John Lyly, 1910].
If we must find, in the plot of Endimion, any reference to the court affairs of the time, it seems better to retire altogether from the state affairs and to look at the more private intrigues of the court. From this point of view the theory of Professor Josephine Waters Bennett has much to recommend it ["Oxford and Endimion," PMLA LVII, 1942]. Mrs Bennett accepts the 1588 dating and remains inside the framework of Lyly's known allegiance to Oxford. … Oxford quarrelled in 1580 with associates whom he accused of secret Papism. As a result he was entered into temporary custody and disfavour. In the following year he was accused of adultery with Anne Vavasour, one of the Queen's ladies, and this time the disfavour was more lasting. It was not until 1583 that the Queen consented to receive him again. Anne Vavasour had also been imprisoned, and in the Tower she may have been in the custody of Sir Henry Lee, who had apartments there. Certainly she later became Lee's mistress. In the Wood-stock or Ditchley Entertainment in 1592 Lee refers to a long sleep with which the Fairy Queen had punished him for not guarding the pictures left in his care, pictures first seen at the Woodstock Entertainment of 1575. Lee failed in his duty, because
lo, unhappy I was overtaken,
By fortune forced, a stranger lady's thrall,
Whom when I saw, all former care forsaken,
To find her out I lost myself and all,
Through which neglect of duty 'gan my fall.
The 'stranger lady' would seem to be Anne Vavasour, and Mrs Bennett supposes that the sleep refers to a disgrace which she conjectures to have been suffered by Lee after the seduction of his fair captive. If Endimion is taken to refer to this affair, viewing it from the side of Oxford, then Tellus who casts Endimion into an enchanted sleep must be Anne Vavasour, who accused Oxford of being the father of her child and so cast him into the dark night of royal disfavour; and Corsites the 'captain' who guards Tellus in her imprisonment must be Sir Henry Lee. Mrs Bennett supposes that the 'kiss' which restores Endimion is the pension of one thousand pounds per annum which the Queen granted to Oxford in 1586.
As I have stated, Mrs Bennett's interpretation of the play has many advantages; but it also contains some improbabilities. If the play was performed in 1588, the matters it refers to were finished and done with. Mrs Bennett thinks that it commemorates the granting of the pension, and gives Oxford's side of the earlier difficulties. On the face of it this seems unlikely. We do not know that the pension and the disgrace were in any way connected, and it would seem impolitic to rake up the disgrace in order to commemorate the pension. But even if we were to grant the possibility of such a play, we should still have to prove that the play as we have it lives up to the intention, and this is not clear at all points. Oxford's apologia would, presumably, move along the following lines: Oxford was innocent of the accusations that Anne Vava-sour levelled against him; she on the other hand was not innocent, witness her seduction by Sir Henry Lee. If this was Lyly's brief, the play mismanages it grossly. Mrs Bennett supposes the 'picture of Endimion' which Tellus weaves in her imprisonment, and which she is allowed to keep at the end of the play (V. iii. 251-5) is the child born to Anne Vavasour. But Oxford denied paternity, and it would have been indiscreet of Lyly to suggest that the child was his. Again, the play makes nothing of Anne Vavasour's promiscuity; Tellus loves only Endimion; she answers Corsites' love with deceit, and accepts him at the end only because Cynthia commands it. The play does not, in fact, come anywhere near a competent defence of Oxford, and this must make us doubtful that the play was ever intended for this purpose.
But quite apart from the plausibility or implausibility of these different identifications, is there not an assumption shared by them all which runs counter to the nature of courtly art as we have described it? The argument that it is so has been put persuasively by J. A. Bryant Jnr. in a paper read before the Southeastern States Renaissance Conference in 1956 ["The Nature of the Allegory in Lyly's Endimion," Renaissance Papers 1956]. Professor Bryant starts from the point of Lyly's alteration in the classical myth. The myth told of the moon's love for a shepherd; Lyly alters this to one more flattering to the English Cynthia—the moon herself must be loved but cannot be treated as the victim of love. But the alteration involves Lyly in difficulties: in order to show the virtue of the goddess he has to depict an alternative love (to play the Venus to her Sapho, so to speak) and this produces the central design of Endimion between the moon and the earth, Cynthia and Tellus, his higher and lower destinies. Further, if he is to show Tellus as worthy of love, though unequal to Cynthia, he has to counter Endimion's rejection by another man's zealous pursuit, and this introduces Corsites. The whole play can be built up in this way as a functional development of a desire to flatter the Queen. Given Lyly's taste for symmetry and fondness for the conventions of courtly love (the conventions of his art) nothing else need be imported to explain the general structure of the play, with its final pairing-off of couples—Corsites and Tellus, Geron and Dipsas, Sir Tophas and Bagoa.
The perception that Lyly's play grows naturally out of the conjunction of the myth and the desire to flatter Elizabeth does not, of course, explain away any of the particular elaborations, which appear most obviously in the vision of Endimion, twice presented, and which strongly suggest particular reference to a contemporary situation, which may (as we have seen above) be Lyly's own situation. But does remove the necessity to suppose that Lyly began with a contemporary event, and then set about dramatizing it, finding equivalents in myth and story which would clothe his meanings. I have argued already that the search for point-by-point correspondences in courtly allegory is a vain one and I rejoice to find Mr Bryant writing in a similar vein: 'such academic attempts at explanation usually proceed upon the assumption that the subject at hand is a dead fact, to be dissected, described, tabulated and provided with an index … But… the assumption is wrong'. This objection applies to those who have supposed Endimion to clothe a philosophic scheme, no less than to those who have seen it as a description of history. In either case the form of the play, as we have it, is judged incompetent and unsuccessful, except as a means—and even as a means it is rather inefficient (Bond has to suppose that Lyly did not know enough to get his facts right)—a means to convey a hidden truth, which will then pay back some of its own coherence and importance to the action that Bond and others suppose to be (in itself) 'incoherent and purposeless'.
Yet Endimion has often been reprinted, and students are invited to read it on what are, I suppose, literary grounds; moreover the play has been performed on the modern stage with some degree of success. This would seem to argue that Lyly gave his play some measure of literary coherence, and that the 'meaning' that emerges need be no more than an audience can deduce from any myth-like or archetypal situation. The historical critics seem to begin with the perfectly legitimate observation that this situation is like court life, and that Cynthia must reflect Queen Elizabeth. Their next assumption is, however, that the coherence of the play must then be pursued at the historical not at the literary level. Halpin and Bond ask, 'if Cynthia is the Queen, who is Endimion her suitor?' and come to the conclusion, very proper in its terms, that Leicester is the obvious suitor. Feuillerat and Bond ask, 'if Cynthia is the Queen, who is Tellus her rival?' and reach the conclusion, very proper in its terms, that Mary, Queen of Scots is the obvious rival. None of these critics has asked, 'is the relationship between Cynthia, Endimion and Tellus one that has any dramatic or artistic justification?' Concentration on this question would at least avoid methods of argument such as are provided (inter alia) by Bond's mode of identifying Eumenides with Sir Philip Sidney:
There is one name that rises instinctively to the lips when acts that are lovely and noble and of good report are mentioned—one that still falls upon the ear like refreshing music in this hard heart-wearying age of brass, even as its bearer softens and shames with his mild lustre the coarser fames and gaudier heroics of that iron time—the name of that pensive Hesper light O'er Chivalry's departed sun,
Sir Philip Sidney. Can the relations of Eumenides in the play be made to square with him?
(III. 95)
The method being used here is one which relies on stiffening the play with romantic responses to history and so by-passing the appeal of the play as a play. If Eumenides fulfils the role of a friend, we look for an historical 'friend' to make the play more real to us instead of looking for an artistic pattern that justifies the role.
If we look in the play for artistic pattern we find quite enough to stimulate discussion and response: we can find in it the major elements which appear everywhere in Lyly's plays—debate, mythology, romantic love, symmetrical arrangement—but ordered in a new and individual sequence. The play certainly contains a debate-theme—the old favourite of love versus friendship—which is announced unequivocally. Eumenides the faithful friend and lover is entitled to any one wish he may ask for; he is then faced with the problem of having to prefer either friendship or love:
Why do I trifle the time in words? The least minute being spent in the getting of Semele is more worth than the whole world: therefore let me ask … What now, Eumenides? Whither art thou drawn? Hast thou forgotten both friendship and duty? Care of Endimion and the commandment of Cynthia? Shall he die in a leaden sleep because thou sleepest in a golden dream? Ay, let him sleep ever, so I slumber but one minute with Semele. Love knoweth neither friendship nor kindred.
Shall I not hazard the loss of a friend for the obtaining of her for whom I would often lose myself? Fond Eumenides, shall the enticing beauty of a most disdainful lady be of more force than the rare fidelity of a tried friend? The love of men to women is a thing common and of course; the friendship of man to man infinite and immortal. Tush! Semele doth possess my love. Ay, but Endimion hath deserved it. I will help Endimion. I found Endimion unspotted in his truth. Ay, but I shall find Semele constant in her love. I will have Semele. What shall I do?
(III. iv. 103-19)
We can see the relevance of this conflict to that between the higher love that Endimion feels for Cynthia and the lower love he is offered by Tellus, but there is no explicit conflict in Endimion's situation, and the debate frames the action much less than it does in Campaspe or Sapho and Phao. In both these plays the different emotional states of the central characters are arranged in a static pattern which allows them to be debated; Alexander debates magnanimity against love, and the play contrasts magnanimity in Alexander against love in Apelles; so Sapho debates love against chastity, and the play contrasts chastity in Sapho against love in Venus. But Cynthia is semper eadem, and the play studiously refuses to debate the issue between her and Tellus. The contrasted emotional states in this play are treated as developing out of one another in a narrative sequence, rather than as existing in a static design.
It follows that as the debate is less important so the narrative is more elaborate. Of all Lyly's plays, Endimion is the one which is nearest to medieval romance. The succumbing of the hero to an enchanted sleep, specially devised for him by a malignant witch, and the adventures of his friend while pursuing a remedy, the encounter with the lover-hermit Geron, the enchanted fountain, only useful to the pure in heart—all this reads like a survey of romance motifs.
Given the story, it is not surprising that Endimion is the longest of Lyly's plays, and that in which the symmetries of treatment are most developed towards the Shakespearian mode of parallel human instances—it is also the play which seems to have influenced Shakespeare most directly. The adoration of Cynthia by Endimion is paralleled by the courtship of Semele by Eumenides, by Corsites' pursuit of Tellus, and (in the sub-plot) by Sir Tophas' pursuit of Dipsas. The cruelty of Tellus to Endimion is paralleled by the cruelty of Dipsas to Geron; the sublime chastity of Cynthia is parodied by the merely coquettish chastity of Semele. The denouement, in consequence, works out a broad survey of reconciliations:
Well, Endimion, … thou hast my favour, Tellus her friend, Eumenides in paradise with his Semele, Geron contented with Dipsas.
(V. iii 271-3)
The function of this denouement is no doubt the same as that of Sapho and Phao—to highlight the wisdom and sympathy of the Queen—but the effect is very different. In Sapho the focus is on the mind of the Queen; Phao is a poor shadow. In Endimion the hopeless love of the hero has its own vein of madly poetic appeal:
Tell me, Eumenides, what is he that having a mistress of ripe years, and infinite virtues, great honours and unspeakable beauty, but would wish that she might grow tender again? getting youth by years and never-decaying beauty by time; whose fair face neither the summer's blaze can scorch nor winter's blast chap, nor the numb'ring of years breed altering of colours. Such is my sweet Cynthia whom time cannot touch because she is divine nor will offend because she is delicate. O Cynthia, if thou shouldest always continue at thy fulness, both gods and men would conspire to ravish thee. But thou to abate the pride of our affections dost detract from thy perfections, thinking it sufficient if once in a month we enjoy a glimpse of thy majesty, and then, to increase our griefs, thou dost decrease thy gleams, coming out of thy royal robes wherewith thou dazzlest our eyes down into thy swath clouts beguiling our eyes.
(I. i. 50-65)
As the love of the subject has come into focus, so the mind of the sovereign has retreated to an altitude out of descriptive range. Cynthia is different in kind from the other characters in the play, and though the action takes place under her benign influence she is not part of it. The contrasts made by the different modes of love reconciled at the end of the play do not affect our conception of Cynthia, even by a process of contrast, for she cannot be conceived to have been tempted to any of these attitudes. In Endimion, in fact, we can see the goddess-sovereign figure, who has dominated Lyly's drama up to this point, retreating into a state of aloofness where she ceases to have much effect on the conduct of the play.
Harmonious Variety
We have seen the debate-theme 'What is true royalty?' controlling the form of Campaspe and Sapho and Phao, and we have seen the same formal method applied in a more negative way in Midas: 'What interests ought a true monarch to avoid?' We have also seen Endimion developing the world of Sapho and Phao in a rather different direction. The desire to compliment the Queen does not here involve a contrast of her royalty with other emotional states, but rather requires a demonstration of her influence on the world of courtiers beneath her. As a result, most of Endimion is concerned with the inter-locking intrigues of a spectrum of characters, all held together in a single situation.
In this respect Endimion reaches out to the mode of play construction we are to discuss in this section, where the interest is no longer centred on a single royal figure, Alexander-Sapho-Cynthia-Midas, but is diffused among many parallel instances, these being so organized that they complete a recognizable range of cases. Take away Cynthia, or replace her by a force about which the play has no particular feeling, and the construction of Endimion begins to resemble very clearly that which Lyly had first essayed in Gallathea.
Gallathea
The only approach to pastoral we have met so far in Lyly's plays is the rather thin wash of rusticity to be found in Sapho and Phao, serving there to start off the praise of courtliness when such a one as Sapho is queen; to this we may add the isolated scene of the shepherds in Midas (Act IV, scene ii) in which we meet 'we poor commons (who tasting war, are made to relish nothing but taxes)'; but this is proletarian rather than truly pastoral in function. It is clear enough, however, from the opening words of Gallathea that this is to be a deliberate exercise in the pastoral mode:
The sun doth beat upon the plain fields; wherefore let us sit down, Gallathea, under this fair oak, by whose broad leaves being defended from the warm beams we may enjoy the fresh air which softly breathes from Humber floods.
It might be objected that the desire to escape from the warm sun into the shade is not one that characteristically affects the shepherds or other swains on the banks of Humber. As Warton pointed out, 'complaints of immoderate heat, and wishes to be conveyed to a cooling cavern, when uttered by the inhabitants of Greece have a propriety which they totally lose in the character of a British shepherd'. But the objection is irrelevant to the banks of Lyly's Humber. The lines translate and are, I presume, meant to recall words that have universally been allowed to stand for the pastoral world in general—
Tityre tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi
—the opening line of Virgil's eclogues. And as Virgil is recalled in the opening lines of the play, so the title itself and the main motif of the plot is probably intended to recall the other prime pastoral authority, Theocritus, whose sixth idyll tells of the unwelcome attentions that the nymph Galatea has to endure from the monster Polyphemus, and whose eleventh idyll gives the song with which the monster wooed the shrinking nymph. The monster that is due to prey upon Lyly's Gallathea is not a cyclops, however; for, like Hesione and Andromeda and Ariosto's Angelica she is likely to form the virgin-tribute paid to a sea-monster. The name of this monster—the Agar—Lyly seems to have taken from the eagre or tidal-wave of the Humber estuary, but for the attendant circumstances he seems to have gone back to the story of Neptune and Hesione, derived it would seem through Natalis Comes, the famous Renaissance mythographer.
The pastoral setting, which the opening of the play establishes, is one that is preserved throughout. No courtiers or royal persons appear. The gain in homogeneousness (as against Sapho and Phao) is very great. And the appearance and intervention of the gods does not really affect this. For the pastoral world here presented is one where man and nature interact continuously. The gods act like the forces of nature pressing on man: Cupid pressing him into love, Diana into chastity, Neptune into fear and obedience. And this is indeed what the play is about—the interrelation of gods and men, obedience and deceit. The motto of the play might be taken from what Gallathea says to her father in the first scene: 'Destiny may be deferred, not prevented' which finds a more particular application to the facts of the play in Tyterus' 'dissemble you may with men, deceive the gods you cannot', and this Neptune in his turn takes up and repeats, as if summarizing his whole intention in the play—which is to pay out those who seek to circumvent the destiny he imposes: 'their slights may blear men, deceive me they cannot'. The narrative with which the play opens mirrors in little this theme which pervades the action:
In times past, where thou seest a heap of small pebble, stood a stately temple of white marble, which was dedicated to the god of the sea—and in right, being so near the sea; hither came all such as either ventured by long travel to see countries, or by great traffic to use merchandise, offering sacrifice by fire to get safety by water; yielding thanks for perils past and making prayers for good success to come. But Fortune, constant in nothing but inconstancy, did change her copy, as the people their custom; for the land being oppressed by Danes, who instead of sacrifice, committed sacrilege, instead of religion, rebellion; and made a prey of that in which they should have made their prayers, tearing down the temple even with the earth, being almost equal with the skies; enraged so the god who binds the winds in the hollows of the earth that he caused the seas to break their bounds, sith men had broke their vows, and to swell as far above their reach as men had swerved beyond their reason. Then might you see ships sail where sheep fed, anchors cast where ploughs go, fishermen throw their nets where husbandmen sow their corn, and fishes throw their scales where fowls do breed their quills. Then might you gather froth where now is dew, rotten weeds for sweet roses, and take view of monstrous mermaids instead of passing fair maids.
(I. i. 13-34)
This story might serve as a natural introduction to a play in which men once again seek to evade the wrath of the gods, though this time there is no element of terror involved.
It will be seen even from the little that has been said so far that the unity and construction of Gallathea is very different from that of the plays which have been discussed. A greater homogeneousness is achieved by removing direct reference to the world of courtly manners, but is achieved only at the cost of losing direct comment on formulated ideals of living. To illustrate this point we may compare the debate structure here with that in Sapho and Phao: both plays deal with the conflict between Venus and Diana or Love and Chastity. When we compare them in this way it is immediately apparent that the debate matters much less in Gallathea than in Sapho and Phao. The pressure on the earlier play was to convey the nature of the excellence which cancels any natural opposition between love and chastity, by taking the best things out of both positions
[so] that your Dian
Was both herself and Love.
In the earlier play the opposition between the two sides in the debate had to be sharpened in order that the nature of this excellence should emerge, showing Sapho to possess both the humanity to feel love and the magnanimity to conquer it. In Gallathea no one is really shown to suffer by the opposition between Cupid and Diana. It is true that the Nymphs of Diana, wounded by Cupid, utter plaints of love not unlike those we have met in the earlier plays:
Can Cupid's brands quench Vesta's flames, and his feeble shafts headed with feathers pierce deeper than Diana's arrows headed with steel? Break thy bow, Telusa, that seekest to break thy vow and let those hands that aimed to hit the wild hart scratch out those eyes that have wounded thy tame heart. O vain and only naked name of chastity, that is made eternal and perisheth by time, holy and is infected by fancy, divine and is made mortal by folly!
(III. i. 10-17)
But the focus of the play does not rest on the pathos of such a plaint. Sapho's sufferings in love have a central interest, for Sapho (like Alexander) is the obvious centre of the plot; and the whole force of its intellectual discriminations press down on her situation. In so far as the plot has weight, the weight lies here. But in Gallathea the love-plaints of the various nymphs are so laid together that we do not rest our interest on any single one of them. The tension between the mortals who hope to deceive both men and gods, and the gods who are lurking in the very same woods, determined not to be out-done in deception—this tension is conveyed by means of a whole series of interrelated episodes which illustrate and make general their points by their very variousness and not by their capacity to be brought to bear on a single situation. We have said that Campaspe and Sapho and Phao ask and seek to answer in their various ways the question, 'Where lies true royalty?' But no question of this kind will serve to focus the meaning of Gallathea. Instead, a whole series of cross-intrigues is used to present a vision of pretensions and limitations, self-will and destiny which is reminiscent of both Greek Romance and Shakespeare's last comedies.
In handling this new technique in Gallathea, Lyly produces one of the most beautifully articulated plays in the period. Almost all the plot material is made out of one motif—the attempt to deceive destiny by means of disguise. From this starting-point one can see the play being built up by methods almost exactly analogous to those of fugue in music. The first statement of the subject shows Tyterus disguising Gallathea in order to deceive Neptune. The second entry shows Cupid disguising himself to deceive Diana. In the third entry Melebeus disguises Phillida, again in order to deceive Neptune. Finally, in a fourth entry Neptune declares that he will disguise himself as a shepherd, to deceive all the other deceivers. The exposition, mathematically exact, is complete. Next, the play moves on to development of this material; by a dramatic equivalent to the contrapuntal texture of a fugue we sound together the themes of Phillida's disguise and Gallathea's disguise, and so arrive at the developing love-plot of these two nymphs, each knowing herself to be a woman and hoping that the other is a man. Add to this the voices of the second entry and one finds the nymphs of Diana, also inflamed, some for Gallathea and some for Phillida—again supposing that they are as male in fact as they are in attire. The re-entry of the fourth voice is delayed to its most dramatic moment. Neptune reiterates the 'subject' in a thunderous bass:
And do men begin to be equal with gods, seeking by craft to overreach them that by power oversee them? Do they dote so much on their daughters that they stick not to dally with our deities? Well shall the inhabitants see that destiny cannot be prevented by craft nor my anger be appeased by submission. I will make havoc of Diana's nymphs, my temples shall be dyed with maidens' blood, and there shall be nothing more vile than to be a virgin. To be young and fair shall be accounted shame and punishment, in so much as it shall be thought as dishonourable to be honest as fortunate to be deformed.
(V. iii. 10-19)
By now, however, the tangle of mistaken loves, of nymphs in love with one another, and of supernatural powers promoting one side or another, is sufficiently complex to take the bite out of Neptune's threat. Diana and Venus enter in what in music would be called 'close imitation' after him. In a stretto of all the gods on the stage at one time, the discordant self-deceptions that have resulted from the attempt to deceive others are resolved into concord.
It is tempting to carry the fugai analogies to the structure of Gallathea still further, and talk of entries inverted or cancrizans (as when the gods invert the human point of view) but probably to take them further would be to reduce their usefulness, which is, of course, only that of analogy. But the analogy is worth using, if only to counteract complaints like that of Feuillerat, 'Gallathea, de toutes les productions lyliennes … c'est … une de celles dont la composition est le plus hétérogène' and to show that the 'lack of development' is not due to lack of formal control. By using a critical vocabulary which does not import assumptions that the end of drama is to develop characters, organize intrigue and show personality at work, we take ourselves a little nearer the true excellencies of Lyly's plays.
For the 'dispersed' interest of Gallathea does not, for the sympathetic reader, lower the dramatic temperature or cause his attention to wander before the next appearance of these same characters. Where all the characters are arranged to imitate one another, and where the focus of interest is on the repetition and modification and re-arrangement of a basic pattern of persons, we do not ask how the persons will develop individually, but how the situation can be further manipulated. Having seen Tyterus disguise Gallathea and hide her in the woods, then Melebeus disguise Phillida and dispose of her in the same way, we are then anxious to hear the two disguises chiming together. Having heard that, we then wonder how the pursuit of the other nymphs by Cupid will affect the first situation; for his threat to 'use some tyranny in these woods' and 'confound their loves in their own sex' is expressed in terms that bring Gallathea and Phillida within its compass. The process is one of agglomeration, by which similar experiences are continually being added together to produce new and piquant situations. As the wheel turns and the same episode comes round again, it is never quite the same, for new confusions and accompaniments are always being added or taken away.
This formal unity is not, however, so oppressive that no space is left for that delicate observation of manners and witty evocation of refined attitudes that gives Lyly's comedy its characteristic charm. The comedy of errors between the two nymphs is handled without ever invoking the slapstick of Plautus or Shakespeare—people punished or abused for things they never did—but produces instead the 'soft smiling, not loud laughing' over human capacity for self-deception. Each maiden retreats into herself in order to imitate the signs of maleness she finds in the other:
Gallathea. … But whist! here cometh a lad; I will learn of him how to behave myself.
Enter Phillida in man's attire.
Phil. I neither like my gait nor my garments; the one untoward, the other unfit, both unseemly. O Phillida! But yonder stayeth one, and therefore say nothing. But O Phillida!
Galla. I perceive that boys are in as great disliking of themselves as maids; therefore though I wear the apparel, I am glad I am not the person.
Phil. It is a pretty boy and a fair; he might well have been a woman; but because he is not I am glad I am, for now under the colour of my coat I shall decipher the follies of their kind.
Galla. I would salute him, but I fear I should make a curtsey instead of a leg.
Phil. If I durst trust my face as well as I do my habit, I would spend some time to make pastime; for say what they will of a man's wit, it is no second thing to be a woman.
Galla. All the blood in my body would be in my face if he should ask me (as the question among men is common), 'are you a maid?'
(II. i. 10-30)
It is characteristic of Lyly to organize a situation where we in the audience can watch his characters failing to understand one another. We alone are given the total understanding that is required. Lyly offers us the pleasure of a smiling superiority to and enjoyment of the accidents and misunderstandings that affect others in their lives and (more especially) loves. He repeats the method a little later in the same play. We watch the plaints of love following one another in a regular order, and then witness what follows when each nymph attempts to disguise her feelings from the others
Eurota. … why blushest thou, Telusa?
Tel. To hear thee in reckoning my pains to recite thine own. I saw, Eurota, how amorously you glanced your eye on the fair boy in the white coat, and how cunningly (now that you would have some talk of love) you hit me in the teeth with love.
Eur. I confess that I am in love, and yet swear that I know not what it is. I feel my thoughts unknit, mine eyes unstayed, my heart I know not how affected or infected, my sleeps broken and full of dreams, my wakeness sad and full of sighs, myself in all things unlike myself. If this be love, I would it had never been devised.
Tel. Thou hast told what I am in uttering what thy self is. These are my passions, Eurota, my unbridled passions, my intolerable passions, which I were as good acknowledge and crave counsel as to deny and endure peril.
But soft, here cometh Ramia; but let her not hear
us talk.
We will withdraw ourselves and hear her talk.
Enter Ramia.
Ramia. I am sent to seek others, that have lost
myself.Eur.… Ah, would I were no woman!Ramia. Would Tyterus were no boy!Tel. Would Telusa were nobody!
(III. i. 39-111)
The play is, of course, basically a play about love, and of the three gods who appear on the stage (I take Venus to be a mere extension of Cupid) only Cupid seems willing to do more than preserve the status quo. He is the only agent of change, for love is the only emotion in the play which involves the interaction of people and allows their natures to move forward. This remains true even though love here is only the courtly and witty game which is all that Lyly ever touches on, and probably all that his instruments were capable of expressing. I have spoken of the play as lacking direct reference to the court; this is true, in that it is totally unconcerned with magnanimity or honour, but in another sense the play is courtly enough, the loves of the nymphs reflecting the love ideals of refined ladies—ideals which can be indulged here with complete impunity, since there are no male suitors with-in sight. Here is the supreme example in Lyly of the delicate precision of his style, used to discover in witcombat the delicacy of virginal sensations about love.
Philadelphia. It is a pity that Nature framed you not a woman, having a face so fair, so lovely a countenance, so modest a behaviour.
Gallathea. There is a tree in Tylos whose nuts have shells like fire, and being cracked, the kernel is but water.
Phil. What a toy is it to tell me of that tree, being nothing to the purpose. I say it is pity you are not a woman.
Galla. I would not wish to be a woman unless it were because thou art a man.
Phil. Nay, do not wish to be a woman, for then I should not love thee, for I have sworn never to love a woman.
Galla. A strange humour in so pretty a youth, and according to mine, for myself will never love a woman.
Phil. It were a shame if a maiden should be a suitor (a thing hated in that sex) that thou shouldest deny to be her servant.
Galla. If it be a shame in me, it can be no commendation in you, for yourself is of that mind.
Phil. Suppose I were a virgin (I blush in supposing myself one) and that under the habit of a boy were the person of a maid; if I should utter my affection with sighs, manifest my sweet love by my salt tears, and prove my loyalty unspotted, and my griefs intol-erable, would not then that fair face pity this true heart?
Galla. Admit that I were as you would have me suppose that you are, and that I should with entreaties, prayers, oaths, bribes and whatever can be invented in love desire your favour, would you not yield?
Phil. Tush, you come in with 'admit'.
Galla. And you with 'suppose'.
Phil. What doubtful speeches be these? I fear me he is as I am, a maiden.
Galla. What dread riseth in my mind! I fear the boy to be as I am, a maiden.
Phil. Tush, it cannot be, his voice shows the contrary.
Galla. Yet I do not think it, for he would then have blushed.
Phil. Have you ever a sister?
Galla. If I had but one, my brother must needs have two; but I pray have you ever a one?
Phil. My father had but one daughter, and therefore I could have no sister.
Galla. Ay me, he is as I am, for his speeches be as mine are.
Phil. What shall I do? Either he is subtle or my sex simple.
Phil. Come let us into the grove, and make much one of another, that cannot tell what to think one of another.
(III. ii. 1-59)
In the discovery of this vein of delicate innuendo, Lyly does more than anticipate Shakespeare; he advances his own art. It is well worth pausing to notice the skill with which he orchestrates (so to speak) the advance and retreat of the two maidens, the desire to speak out and the fear of being understood. The passage is made up entirely of repetitions, but the formality does not in the least impede the movement round a circuit of maidenly daring; so that we end the scene knowing better what sensitivity and delicacy are like. Small wonder that Shakespeare should have remembered the scene, and tried to transplant its easy control of verbal ballet, advance and retreat, into his own richer idiom.
The play thus uses the somewhat savage story of Neptune's anger, and the annual sacrifice of virgins exacted to appease him, to frame a world of exquisite refinement in the emotions. The evocation of the tenderness of virginal feelings acts as a foil to the dangerous and bitter state of virginity most feelingly evoked in Hebe's speech of farewell when she is due to be devoured by the Agar:
Farewell the sweet delights of life and welcome now the bitter pangs of death. Farewell you chaste virgins, whose thoughts are divine, whose faces fair, whose fortunes are agreeable to your affections, enjoy and long enjoy the pleasure of your curled locks, the amiableness of your wished looks, the sweetness of your tuned voices, the content of your inward thoughts, the pomp of your outward shows; only Haebe biddeth farewell to all the joys that she conceived and you hope for, that she possessed and you shall; farewell the pomp of princes' courts, whose roofs are embossed with gold and whose pavements are decked with fair ladies, where the days are spent in sweet delights, the nights in pleasant dreams, where chastity honoureth affections and commandeth, yieldeth to desire and conquereth.
Come, Agar, thou unsatiable monster of maiden's blood and devourer of beauty's bowels, glut thyself till thou surfeit and let my life end thine. Tear these tender joints with thy greedy jaws, these yellow locks with thy black feet, this fair face with thy foul teeth. Why abatest thou thy wonted swiftness? I am fair, I am a virgin, I am ready. Come Agar, thou horrible monster, and farewell world thou viler monster.
(V. ii. 25-55)
What would have been rather cloying without the spice of danger, what would have been rather heartless without these hints of flowery tenderness, becomes by the combination of the two a more affecting and effective image.
The loves of the all-female cast are brought to a happy conclusion in the only way possible—by sex-change or metamorphosis. It is often supposed, with Dr Johnson, that 'a new metamorphosis is a ready and puerile expedient' ; and the onset of this trick for ending the play may be seen as marking a decline in Lyly's dramatic art. Actually, Lyly's adoption of this mode of denouement coincides with his adoption of the whole mode of play construction which I have called 'harmonious variety', and can be seen as an integral part of its method. The plays I have dealt with as debates showed a controlling royal figure, who could end the play by rejecting the errors and re-establishing the right. But in Gallathea and the other plays of my second group the cast is not controlled from the centre in this way; the cast is grouped in such a way that there is a state of permanent unbalance, keeping the action in movement; balance can be restored at the end only by some fiat from outside. It may be that this is a poor thing beside a logical development based on character, but the latter is not possible within the terms of Lyly's art; the interest is focussed on the groups, and the individuals inside the groups are arranged to complement one another, not to establish separate individualities.
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