Lyly, John, 1554?-1606 -- Criticism and interpretation
SAPHO. Then will I love yewe the better, and indeed I think it
should make me sleepe too, therefore all other simples set
aside, I will simply use onely yewe.
PHAO. Doe Madame: for I think nothing in the world so good as
yewe[116].
[116] _Sapho and Phao_, Act III. Sc. IV. 60-85.
Altogether there is a great increase in general vitality in this play.
Lyly draws nearer to the conception of ideal comedy. "Our interest," he
tells us in his Prologue, "was at this time to move inward delight not
outward lightnesse, and to breede (if it might be) soft smiling, not
loud laughing"; and to this end he tends to minimize the purely farcical
element. The pages are still present, but they are balanced by a group
of Sapho's maids-in-waiting who discuss the subject of love upon the
stage with great frankness and charm. Mileta, the leader of this chorus,
is, we may suspect, a portrait drawn from life; she is certainly much
more convincing than the somewhat shadowy Campaspe. The figures in
Lyly's studio are limited in number--Camilla, Lucilla, Campaspe, Mileta,
all come from the same mould: in Pandion we may discover Euphues under a
new name, and the surly Vulcan is only another edition of the "crabbed
Diogenes." And yet each of these types becomes more life-like as he
proceeds, and if the puppets that he left to his successors were not yet
human, they had learnt to walk the stage without that angularity of
movement and jerkiness of speech which betray the machine.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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