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We have looked at LyIy's Euphues and his plays as literary experiences worthy of comment in their own right. They may be seen, however, from another angle-as part of a tide of fashion which swept them up, sustained them for a moment, and then, as relentlessly, swept them away.1
FROM R. Warwick Bond's monumental edition of Lyly's work, published at the start of the twentieth century,2 to G. K. Hunter's critical biography, quoted above, that has shaped understanding of the Lylian canon from the 1960s to the present day, the career of the most influential prose writer of the Elizabethan period, and foremost dramatist of the 1580s, has been constructed in terms of a rapid ascent and decline linked to changes in literary taste. The derision to which euphuism was subject in the closing decade of the sixteenth century, the apparent failure of The Woman in the Moon following the closure of Paul's boys, the lack of further new material that can be firmly attributed to Lyly in the fifteen-year period prior to his death in 1606, and his fruitless petitions to the queen pleading his poverty and past service have all led to his construction as "the victim of fashion,"3 too wedded to a particular dramatic mode to compete in a rapidly changing theatrical milieu, and unable to come to terms with a "shift of temper, which was to make [him] obsolete and isolated" before the completion of his "natural term."4
The case for Lyly's abrupt marginalization in a world of rapidly changing tastes is not as firmly proven, however, as the general conviction in its favor might appear to suggest. Central to the argument is the assumption that The Woman in the Moon, generally regarded as the last of Lyly's plays, postdates the closure of Paul's boys (circa 1590), and constitutes an unsuccessful attempt by the dramatist to transfer his talents to the public stage. A number of factors have combined to support this proposition. Unlike the rest of the Lylian corpus, but like much of the material produced for the Theatre or the Rose, the play is written in blank verse rather than euphuistic prose and is announced by Lyly himself as a new venture. The prologue pointedly defines it in terms...