Chapter 7 - John Lyly and Shakespeare’s Early Career

Summary

When he wrote Gallathea, Lyly combined certain elements which might be said to be at the heart of Shakespearean comedy: cross-dressed lovers, woods as spaces for personal discovery, supernatural imps with power over human interaction, a narrative moving towards marriage against seemingly irreconcilable odds. Though Shakespeare’s earlier plays, such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Love’s Labour’s Lost, are most often described as Lylian, every one of his comedies engages with some combination of these elements, and towards the end of his career, in the second scene of The Tempest Shakespeare can be seen rewriting the first scene of Gallathea. This chapter will give this side of Shakespeare’s authorship a new emphasis by juxtaposing it with different elements of Lyly’s influence over his early career, charting the use of Lyly’s prose fiction in Two Gentlemen of Verona and his play The Woman in the Moon in Titus Andronicus. By looking at various kinds of influence – generic, structural, performative, tonal – this chapter will present a new understanding of Shakespeare’s early use of Lyly’s work.