Lyly himself quoted liberally from North's translation. North took advantage of the enormous popularity of the first Euphues novel — Euphues: the Anatomy of Wit — in 1578, to publish a second edition of his Diall, c.1580. Shakespeare (and many other authors) also took advantage. The result was two of his early plays, written or substantially revised in the late 1570s and early 1580s. We know these plays as The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Love's Labour's Lost.
Lyly was a “secretary” of Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. In 1583, Vere purchased the contested lease of the Blackfriars monastery, confiscated by Henry VIII. Deeply in debt, Vere transferred the lease to Lyly1 and the two took over the property including the theater.2 In 1576, this became “the court” theater, under Richard Farrant, Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal, in order to relieve Queen Elizabeth of the ever louder complaints of the puritan faction against plays being performed in the royal chapels.
John Lyly was a cousin of William Cecil, the Baron Burghley, and put up by him at the Savoy Hotel, in 1575, across from Cecil House on the Strand, where Edward de Vere occupied the old Master's chambers.3 It is after this fashion that he became Vere's “secretary”.
Burghley was not the only member of the Burghley-Vere family to put up associates at the Savoy. In 1573, Edward was in arrears for £10: 11: 8 in rent in lieu of two “tenements” he had sublet.4 He was in the habit, until the crown took possession of his lands, around 1590, of providing rooms for his generally impoverished literary intimates. During Vere's residence, it was the resort of many of the literary men of London — some of whom would write Euphuistic works in the decade following Lyly's novel.
Vere split his time between the royal court, generally resident at White Hall or Windsor castle, and his rooms at the Savoy. In the latter, the literati of London gathered. In each, he consulted with the political and literary groups against the Leicester faction — the group around Leicester's nephew and literary lieutenant, Philip Sidney, had the Wilton House as its headquarters, the Edward de Vere group those Masters rooms at the Savoy. Neither was above pillaging the works of the other.
The connection between the works of Lyly and those of Shakespeare almost certainly began before Lyly's first Euphues novel. They were already cross-pollinating. Vere was already celebrated as the best poet among his peers, something of a towering figure in that regard — was already writing interludes / plays at least as early as 1576. Court plays were generally much shorter, at that point, than the public plays of the Elizabethan theater.5 The first two acts of TGoV by themselves would not be considered unusually short for a complete interlude.
Unfortunately, the Revels Accounts covering the period Blackfriars flourished — 1583-1584 — are incomplete. The totality of the evidence makes clear that most — if not all — of the plays were performed by the Children of the Royal Chapel together with the Boys of St. Paul's cathedral. We learn, largely from other sources, that both Lyly and Vere had their own plays performed there, as well as other plays widely recognized to constitute the first great efflorescence of the Elizabethan theater.
Amongst all of this (and much more) we have the two aforementioned Shakespeare plays written or revised showing abundant stylistic signs associated with the theater of the 1570s and 1580s. Those same plays, as we have them, show clear signs of being considerably revised, at some point, in order to satisfy the more mature styles of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan theater.
Among the earlier-style we find scattered fourteener and Poulter's measure lines characteristic of the 1570s and passages that at times appear to be those same fourteener and Poulter measures transformed into prose. We find lines long known to be close adaptations from Lyly's Euphues: the Anatomy of Wit.
In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, we find the text overwhelmed with instances of the type of wordplay the Greeks called plokē:
Valentine. ’Tis true; for you are over boots in love,
And yet you never swum the Hellespont.
Proteus. Over the boots? nay, give me not the boots.
Val. No, I will not, for it boots thee not.
Here the word played upon is “boots”. It is repeated each time with a different meaning. This is plokē and it is characteristic of Euphues: the Anatomy of Wit. In the TGoV, it is everywhere that the scene involved is light in tone.
Around 1580 this style of banter could be heard everywhere in the royal court.
Valentine. Are all these things perceived in me?
Speed. They are all perceived without ye.
Val. Without me? they cannot.
Speed. Without you? nay, that ’s certain, for, without
you were so simple, none else would: but you
are so without these follies, that these follies are
within you,
And Shakespeare seems to be included — at least in his plays. To the extent even that TgoV might be considered over-the-top for the excess of it.
Elsewhere we find many instances of chiasmus. Even occasionally anaphora converted into prose:
Pantino. Tut, man, I mean thou’lt lose the flood, and,
in losing the flood, lose thy voyage, and, in
losing thy voyage, lose thy master, and, in
losing thy master, lose thy service, and, in
losing thy service,—Why dost thou stop my
mouth?
Or it would be a proper example of poetic trope anaphora if it were broken up, in this instance, into the original trimeter lines.
And, in losing the flood, lose thy voyage,
And, in losing thy voyage, lose thy master,
And, in losing thy master, lose thy service,6
But then in Lyly the frequent anaphora is always couched in prose.
This is not the only change that suggests — together with the remnant fourteeners and Poulter's measure — that the first version of the play may have preceded The Anatomy of Wit — that it may have been a much shorter interlude that included the first two acts — perhaps even without the euphuisms — and a much shorter ending along the lines of the final act of Twelfth Night.
We might excuse him for the fact that a playwright writes for his audience, not for himself. But he has made his play turn dark as it goes on. In the second half, the style is almost entirely that of his middle period. Not only is it largely in blank verse but there are no Euphistic tropes. Far more, the Amicita Perfecta, so much the theme of the time, that the beginning of the play promises, is shattered in the harshest way. One friend has repeatedly betrayed the other. Reality has reared its ugly head.
Everywhere The Anatomy and the first two acts of this play overflow with such word play. It would not take long for Shakespeare reject it as affectation, however, as he has in the second half of TGoV. He would continue to use these tools but much more sparingly. By Henry IV, Part 1, he would be mocking Euphuism.
The Blackfriars theater was forced to close, in late 1584, by an unrelated court judgment that voided Edward de Vere's lease. John Lyly remained in charge of the Boys of St. Paul's — as Vice-Master — the bulk of his duties being to rehearse them for new plays presented in “the singing room, behind the Convocation House at St. Paul's”.7 Edward de Vere appears also to have been unofficially involved as evidenced by Shakespeare's hand being detected in Peele's The Troublesome Raigne of Iohn, King of England, likely first played there. The involvement is limited, suggesting he was filling the role of editor rather than co-author. How long the arrangement lasted would appear not to be known.
The Stratfordian consensus on the plays heavily influenced by Euphuism tends to be that Shakespeare went retro to have a Euphuistic phase ten years after the trend had ended and the style gone entirely out of fashion. Otherwise, the Stratford man would have had to write the early plays when he was 14 years old and had never been outside of the vicinity of Stratford.
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1This may have been his means of paying Lyly for his various services, including co-management of the Blackfriars itself, or a means of avoiding actions against the property to recover outstanding debts. Probably both.
2The property consisted of the theater and a number of high-end apartments.
3 Green, Nina. Transcription of a letter from the Chaplains of the Savoy to William Cecil, 12 August 1573. Lansdowne 20/30, ff. 75-6. http://www.oxford-shakespeare.com/BritishLibrary/BL_Lansdowne_20-30_ff_75-6.pdf
4 Loftie, William John. Memorials of the Savoy (1878). 129.
5 Plays at the universities and Gray's Inn were generally much longer even at this early point.
6It is wise to remember that the play was not published until the First Folio of 1623. We do not know for sure that someone from among the many hands through which the text passed didn't recast the lines in prose rather than Shakespeare. The general pattern of the rewrite, however, strongly suggests that Shakespeare made this and the many other changes.
7Bond, R. Warwick. The Complete Works of John Lyly (1901). I.34.
Also at Virtual Grub Street:
- On the Possibility that Edward de Vere and Shakspere of Straford Shared a Beer in Southwark. February 9, 2026. "The Earl of Oxford would have taken this route in 1575, as would Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne,"
- Du Bartas – Dinosaurs = Shakespeare's Gaunt Speech in Richard the Second. November 30, 2025. "After quite some time it was discovered that one John Eliot's French lesson book Ortho-epia Gallica included..."
- Sonnet 130: Shakespeare's Reply to a 1580 Poem by Thomas Watson. September 7, 2024. “Interesting to see our Derek Hunter debating with Dennis McCarthy, at the North group,...”.
- Rocco Bonetti's Blackfriars Fencing School and Lord Hunsdon's Water Pipe. August 12, 2023. “... the tenement late in the tenure of John Lyllie gentleman & nowe in the tenure of the said Rocho Bonetti...”
Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
- Check out the V.G.S. Oxfordian Shakespeare Poetry Page for many poems by Shakespeare together with historical context.
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