The Plays of John Lyly

Abstract

David Bergeron: it is no longer considered fashionable or just to dismiss Lyly on the grounds that his delicate, graceful, and often carefully-crafted plays are flimsy and insubstantial.Oxford's 1967 reprinting of R.W. Bond's The Complete Works of John Lyly (originally published in three volumes in 1902), and Anne B. Lancashire's 1969 edition of Gallathea and Midas for the Regents Renaissance Drama Series (to which Daniel nowhere refers) are further signs of a lively academic interest in this too-often underrated dramatist.Nonetheless, Lyly's plays remain largely the preserve of specialists; to others Lyly is little more than the man who bestowed the dubious gift of euphuism on the world.It is the educated general reader's neglect and misconstruction of Lyly as a playwright that Carter A. Daniel's new edition of Lyly's plays is primarily designed to rectify.More specifically, Daniel's purpose, as explained in his bibliographical notes (25), is "to make Lyly's plays conveniently available to the modern reader without any more scholarly encumbrances than are necessary."Although "is it not intended to provide variant textual readings or complete variorum commentaries or to break any new bibliographic ground," Daniel has in fact "completely reedited" these plays "from microfilm copies of the printed quartos of the 1580s and 1590s and the collected Sixe Court Comedies of 1632," so his edition is of interest to the specialist in Lyly as well as to the more general reader to whom the introduction, the afterwords to the plays, and the endnotes are directed.On the whole, Daniel achieves his stated purpose quite well: Lyly's plays are now made generally accessible by virtue of Daniel's being a modern-spelling edition and of its being in one attractively-printed, eminendy-readable volume (the first one -volume edition of the plays since Edward Blount's in 1632, in fact).The level of language and the tone in Daniel's own prose are well-suited to the goal of making Lyly attractive and meaningful to the modem non-specialist reader: his writing is relaxed, informal, and, on occasion, colloquial.Only a strict purist would respond with outrage to his rendering natura naturans as "Nature doing its thing" (362, note 25 to Campaspe).Still, three features in the overall presentation of the volume impede its ease of use by, for example, undergraduate students: first, the lines are not numbered, so one is virtually forced to refer to individual passages by page number rather than by the conventional act, scene, and line numbers, and, of course, finding a passage alluded to by a critic but not quoted by him is made more difficult; second, the act and scene numbers are not indicated at the top of the page, so locating a passage takes longer than it should; and third, the notes, though fairly numerous, are not generally lengthy, and should have been presented as footnotes rather than as endnotes.

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