Paper 5 Prose Notes

Euphues - Date and Author

John Lyly - 1578

Euphues - Context

Based in partial satire of Commonplace Books - books of stock phrases/adages used in arguments around important topics

Started a whole style - Euphuism - popular in 1580s

Very popular amongst elite, but mocked by Philip Sidney and Gabriel Harvey

Eventually fell out of fashion by later 1580s

Euphues - Preface

‘It is therefore, me thinketh, a greater show of a pregnant wit than perfect wisdom in a thing of sufficient excellency to use superfluous elegance’

Euphuism demonstrates more wit than wisdom, which Lyly wants

‘a fashion is but a day’s wearing, and a book but an hour’s reading’ - admitting ephemerality of book and style; also accepting flaws due to temporary nature

Euphues - Defence of Euphuism

‘But so many men, so many minds; that may seem in your eye odious which in another’s eye may be gracious.’ - Different strokes…; Euphues defending himself by not defending euphuism at all, more just calling out accuser

Both Euphues and the Naples man use commonplace idioms:

Neapolitan = ‘the tender youth of a child is like the tempering of a new wax’

Euphues = ‘the sun doth harden the dirt and melt the wax’; ‘the similitude you rehearse of the wax argueth your waxing and melting brain’ - mocking him for commonplaces and wax-mogging him in metaphors

Euphues - Joking with Reader

‘I appeal to your judgement, gentlemen, not that I think any of you of the like disposition able to decide the question but […] are more fit to debate the quarrel’ - Joking that the elite readership don’t find answers, just debate things

Euphues - Outcome

Lucilla’s father dies from ‘seeing his daughter to have neither regard of her own honour nor his request’ - dies due to fickleness [euphistic]

Lucilla ends up with Curio - man who does not say anything in the text - certainly a satirical point

Pandosto - Author and Date

Robert Greene - 1588

Pandosto - Context

Emerging out of chivalric romance genre - arguably influenced by The Clerk’s Tale

Went on to inspire Shakespeare - Winter’s Tale

Pandosto - Class Lament

‘Alas Bellaria, how infortunate art thou because fortunate! Better hadst thou been born a beggar than a prince’ - Bellaria realises the power of her position has led to her being over scrutinised

‘One mole staineth a whole face, and what is once spotted with infamy can hardly be worn out with time’ - Bellaria reckoning with rumour and gossip in relation to her class position

Pandosto - Conflict of Love and Class Disparity

‘Ah Dorastus, wilt thou so forget thyself as to suffer affection to suppress wisdom, and love to violate thine honour’ / ‘As thus he was pained, so poor Fawnia was diversely perplexed. For the next morning, getting up very early, she went to her sheep’ — Internal issue of love and fate are contrasted with actual issues of doing actual work, foregrounding economic tensions later

Pandosto - Class Misunderstandings [lifestyle]

‘either your want is great, or a shepherd’s life is very sweet, that your delight is in such country labours’ - Dorastus cannot understand why Fawnia would prefer to be a shepherdess than other things

‘Sir, what richer state than content, or what sweeter life than quiet? […] Instead of courtly ditties we spend the days with country songs. Our amorous conceits are homely thoughts’ - Fawnia asserting the value of a simple life of labour, both lives are equally virtuous and one is not innately better than another

Pandosto - Class Misunderstandings pt. 2 [appearance]

‘If thou marvel, Fawnia, at my strange attire [it] disgraceth my outward shape’ - Dorastus wearing shepherd’s clothes to try and impress Fawnia, despite admitting it is beneath him

‘Painted eagles are pictures, not eagles […] Shepherds are not called shepherds because they wear hooks and bags but that they are born poor and live to keep sheep. So this attire hath not made Dorastus a shepherd. but to seem like a shepherd’ - Appearance vs. reality, Fawnia shatters classist idea of becoming a socio-economic status

Pandosto - Ending

Pandosto has ‘betrayed his friend Egistus’, ‘his jealousy was the cause of Bellaria’s death’, ‘lusted after his own daughter’ - so ‘he slew himself’ - tragic end to comic romance, assuring moral balance and punishments

‘Dorastus, taking leave of his father, went with his wife and the dead corpse into Bohemia where, after they were sumptuously entombed, Dorastus ended his days in contented quiet’ - Strange ending tonally, discomfort despite ostensible happiness, perspective shift mirrors line of succession

SECONDARY - Euphues - Biographical Context

Paul Salzman [intro] - ‘When Lyly wrote Euphues he was trying to achieve some recognition at Elizabeth’s court, having cut a figure at university as a fashionable young man’

SECONDARY - Euphues - Euphuistic style

Paul Salzman [intro] - ‘while Lyly is often interested only in rhetorical display, he does also use his style to explore the situation that Euphues, Philautus, and Lucilla find themselves in’

SECONDARY - Pandosto - Relation to Shakespeare

Paul Salzman [intro] - ‘Pandosto is, in some ways, a more unusual romance than The Winter’s Tale, for Shakespeare’s major change was the creation of a “happy ending”’

SECONDARY - Pandosto - Pastoralism

Paul Salzman [intro] - ‘The central pastoral section, Fawnia’s upbringing among the shepherds and her wooing by Dorastus, is hedged about by a much more threatening world’

SECONDARY - Pandosto - Ending

Paul Salzman [intro] - ‘Greene may be implying the death of Fawnia, as well as Pandosto and Bellaria. I do not believe that Greene intended the romance to end on quite so dark a note, but it is not unfitting in view of the general tenor of Pandosto’

SECONDARY - General - Social divides

Lori Humphrey Newcomb - ‘fiction consumption was increasingly linked to social differentiation’ - arguable?

SECONDARY - General - Commodity

Lori Humphrey Newcomb - ‘Although early modern London was not a fully developed capitalist society, its printed books were undeniably commodities on a notably free market’

SECONDARY - General - Factors of Modernity

Daniel Vitkus - lists a non-exhaustive 15 total traits [selected some here…]

• New modes of production in the agrarian economy

• Transition from a manuscript-based literacy to a combined manuscript-print culture

• The Reformation

• The beginnings of a modern nation-state with a centralised bureaucracy

• Descartes, the cogito

SECONDARY - General - Politeness

Keith Thomas - ‘The apotheosis of politeness was elegant conversation’

SECONDARY - General - Women

Lori Humphrey Newcomb - ‘Women’s reading for leisure was castigated in terms that drew on the humanist tradition of warnings against female literacy’

Jane Anger - her Protection for Women - Date and Context

1589

Responding to ‘Boke his Surfeit in Love’

Key Points from Jane Anger

Men are lecherous

Men are ungrateful

Men are exhausting

Anger - Lechery

‘If we wil not suffer them to smell on our smockes, they will snatch at our peticotes’ - Men will turn sexual denial into sexual aggression and violence

‘they will straight make matter of nothing, blazing abroad that they have surfeited with love’ - Purpose of sex is not for pleasure, rather to gain points with other men

Anger - Ungratefulness

‘Without our care, they lie in their beds as dogs in litter & goe like lowsie mackarell swimming in the heat of sommer’ - Gross animal figurations to show filth and laziness of male sex

Anger - Exhaustion

‘our good towards them is the destruction of ourselves’

‘we being wel formed, are by them fouly deformed’

‘Wee are contrary to men because they are contrarie to that which is good’

Using parallelisms and antitheses to mirror sexual differences