Paper #1 Topic: How the prose style of John Lyly -- what came to be called euphuism -- helps convey theme (themes, ideas, meanings) and character (aspects of character; characterization) in the first six paragraphs of Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, as excerpted in NAEL. (Number paragraphs and sentences, as directed for the assignment on the English prose of Sir Thomas More in More's History of Richard III. Relegate references to and documentation of particular sentences and paragraphs to parenthetical documentation. Example, using Sir Thomas More: More uses antithesis and chiasmus in "xxxxxxxxxxx" (par. 5, sent. 3) to suggest xxxxxxxxx by xxxxxxxxx [the last "xxxxx" would be an explanation of how the antithesis and chiasmus help suggest some idea or aspect of personality or character].)

        Whether the novelist (or author of the long work of prose fiction) be one of the Renaissance, seventeenth-century, or eighteenth-century pioneers, or the nineteenth-century or twentieth-century masters, all the large elements--plot, characterization, setting, point of view, theme-- are compounded out of the particular author's prose style. Everything is made out of the words and sentences. (A good brief survey of long prose fiction in all national literatures, from ancient Greece to the present, may be found in the entry on "novel" in the Encyclopedia Britannica.)

        Lyly is famous for Euphuism, which first influenced writers of his time and then became a satiric target (as, for example, in Shakespeare's Love's Labor's Lost). Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), all 139 pages or 173 pages of it (in the authoritative editions by R.W. Bond [Cambridge UP, 1902] or Morris Croll [1916; rpt. Russell & Russell, 1964] , respectively), was such a bestseller and so popular that it evoked a sequel by Lyly, Euphues and His England (1580), which  ran double the length of the original, though both books are padded by moralizing epistles that are closer to essays or sermons than essential ingredients of the works.  The existence of a sequel is one reason the full title of either narrative needs to be cited. (Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, abridged of the questionable epistles, is available to the modern reader in three fine paperback anthologies of English Renaissance prose fiction:  Elizabethan Prose Fiction, eds. Robert Ashley and Edwin Moseley [Rinehart Editions - Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1953, with many reprintings]; Elizabethan Prose Fiction, ed. Merritt Lawlis [Odyssey Press - Bobbs-Merrill, 1967, with many reprintings]; and An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction, ed. Paul Salzman [Oxford World's Classics - Oxford UP, 1987, with many reprintings].) Other English authors at the time used the name Euphues on their title pages, attempting to glean some of this popularity for their own books.  The main literary question must be how Lyly's famous prose style helped him accomplish his tasks as a fiction writer (if not novelist). That is, how do the features of Lyly's prose style as exemplified in the first six paragraphs of Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit  (printed in NAEL, a modernized text based on the authoritative edition of R.W. Bond's complete works) help in these paragraphs to describe or define aspects of the characters, describe or define the world in which they operate, and by extension suggest what Lyly's views are of human nature (through his characterization) as well as the world and society (through the portrait of the setting)?

        Besides the stylistic elements mentioned  in the NAEL introduction to Lyly and in the article on euphuism in Holman's and Harmon's Handbook to Literature or Cuddon's and Preston's Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (the NAEL introduction and HTL or PDTL should be studied), Lyly's style also includes isocolon or parison (phrases or clauses of equal length, either in words, or syllables, or both), rhyme, assonance, sentence fragments, long sentences, short sentences, periodic sentences, loose sentences, parallelism (between sentences and paragraphs, as well as within paragraphs), clausal or phrasal repetitions like anaphora or epistrophe, anadiplosis, chiasmus or antimetabole, homeoteleuton, allusion, pun, metaphor -- and other stylistic components to be found in Prinsky's Checklist of Prose Style, included later in these Notes and Questions. (All these terms should be looked up in PDLT or HTL or a collegiate dictionary.)

        The use of paragraphs or paragraphing, an aspect of modern prose style, cannot be reliably judged in most Renaissance prose -- and even in prose up through the early eighteenth century (an exception may occur here and there, such as the essays of Addison and Steele).  Authors of what is now referred to as "the early modern period" (= English Renaissance) often did not bother much not only about spelling or punctuation (oh for those golden days!) but also paragraphing -- such matters were left in the hands (literally) of the printers (what today we would call the typesetters or compositors) . Thus, the Essays of Francis Bacon are variously paragraphed in modern editions, and class lecture has already covered the conundrum of the treatise of Sir Philip Sidney -- Defense of Poesy or Apologie for Poetrie -- that is one solid paragraph as originally published, and reflected in the first early authoritative edition by Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge UP, 1907; 1926), and subsequently paragraphed with extreme variety in modern editions of the work.  Likewise, Lyly's Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit is variously paragraphed in modern editions. For example, the passage printed as the first six paragraphs  in NAEL, reflecting the paragraphing of the edition of R.W. Bond, is paragraphed differently in the edition by Morris Croll (six paragraphs, but divided differently: "There dwelt in Athens," "The freshest colours soonest fade," "When parents have more care," "But it hath been an old said saw," "Here he wanted no companions," "An old gentelman in Naples"), Merritt Lawlis (seven paragraphs: "There dwelt," "As therefore the sweetest rose," "The freshest colors soonest fade," "When parents have," "But it hath been an old-said saw," "Here he wanted no companions," "An old gentleman in Naples"), and Paul Salzman (eight paragraphs: "There dwelt," "As therefore the sweetest rose," "Alexander valiant," "When parents have," "It happened this  young imp," "Here my youth," "There frequented to his loding," "An old gentleman in Naples").

1. (a) How do elements of Lyly's prose style, in specific instances, as well as generally, help describe, define, or portray aspects or traits of Euphues' personality? Of youth's personality, generally? (b) Of his parents' temperament? Of parents in comparison or contrast to youth? (c) Of characters Euphues meets in these paragraphs? Of foreigners? Of foreigners in comparison or contrast to the "Athenians" (Lyly's thinly- veiled allegory for the English)? (d) Of the old man? Of old age, maturity, wisdom? Of old age, maturity, wisdom, in comparison to the youthful Euphues?

2. What ideas does Lyly seem to be suggesting about human personality or nature generally, through specific instances and at large, through item 1, preceding? How might the concepts of opposites (or oppositions), Golden Mean, or balance apply and be suggested through any aspects of Lyly's prose style?

3. (a) How do various aspects of Lyly's style help describe, define, or portray various settings in the first six paragraphs? What do they help suggest about various societies, or society in general? (b) How might the concepts of opposites (or oppositions), Golden Mean, or balance apply and be suggested through any aspects of Lyly's prose style?

4. (a) What do these aspects of Lyly's style, through item 3 above, help suggest about the world and about society, beyond the novel as well as in it? (b) How might the concepts of opposites (or oppositions), Golden Mean, or balance apply and be suggested through any aspects of Lyly's prose style? (c) What implications about symmetry, order, balance, opposites, or oppositions in Nature or the cosmos might Lyly's prose style convey?

5. (a) Study "Prinsky's Checklist for Prose Style" for an analytical breakdown of components to look for. (b) Before writing, read Chapter 5 in "Prinsky's English 102 Pamphlet" for information on analyzing and writing about literary works. (c) Don't overlook interconnections of a theme or stylistic element in two or more paragraphs (or parts of any literary work). (d) Cite and analyze lots of specifics, documenting (preferably in parentheses) all by sentence and paragraph (for convenience, use S and P, plus arabic numeral for parenthetical documentation; e.g., S2P3 would mean a reference to the second sentence of the third paragraph of the passage). (e) Don't overlook the study questions (and, I hope, your notes from class lecture) on the excerpt from More's History of Richard III.

(see prose, prose rhythm, and style in Cuddon's and Preston's Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Theory [PDLT] or Holman's and Harmon's Handbook to Literature [HTL]; most items below can be found in PDLT or HTL or a collegiate dictionary)

1. What kinds of words (diction)?

    a. Long (polysyllabic) or short
    b. Abstract (general) or concrete (specific)
    c. Level of usage (formal, standard, informal or colloquial, vulgate (substandard, nonstandard, slang)
    d. Etymology or language from which words derived: e.g., Latinate, Germanic, Anglo-Saxon (cf. George Orwell's essay
       "Politics and the English Language"); or dialect: e.g., use of Hispanic or Gallic words
    e. Connotative or denotative; use of connotation, denotation
    f. Imagery; repetition; redundant; tone
    g. Figures of speech, rhetoric, or grammar: allusion, ambiguity, amphibology, antiphrasis, antistrophe, antonomasia,
        apostrophe, double entendre, euphemism, homeoteleuton, hyperbole, irony, litotes, meiosis, metaphor, metonymy, mixed
        figures, oxymoron, paradox, periphrasis, personification, polyptoton, pun, simile, symbol, synecdoche, tenor/vehicle,
        trope, understatement, zeugma; also, aphorism, maxim, proverb, sententia
    h. Figures of sound: alliteration, assonance, consonance, onomatopoeia, meter, rhyme, prose rhythm

2. What kinds of sentences?

    a. Long or short
    b. Usual or unusual (inverted) word order; anastrophe, hypallage, hyperbaton
    c. Simple, compound, complex, compound-complex; kinds or prevalence of phrases (e.g., infinitive, prepositional,
        participial, absolute, gerund ); kinds or prevalence ofclauses (e.g., noun clauses, relative clauses, adjective or adverb
        clauses, subordinate clauses, mainclauses); frequent or usual placement of types of phrases or clauses
    d. Loose / cumulative, or periodic; balanced, antithetical
    e. Declarative, interrogative, imperative, exclamatory
    f. Grammatically simple or involved (with parentheses, sentence interrupters,appositives); typical sentence openers (e.g.,
        And, Therefore, When)
    g. No, few, or many sentence fragments; kinds of these; apparent communicative function
    h. Figures of grammar: anacoluthon, anadiplosis, anaphora (epanaphora), anastrophe, antithesis, asyndeton (polysyndeton), chiasmus,
        enallage, epanalepsis, epistrophe, hyperbaton, hysteron proteron, parallelism, repetition, rhetorical question, zeugma
    i. Hypotaxis; parataxis; kinds of connectives (mainly conjunctions within and between sentences)

Never lose sight of what style is for: the expression or communication of meaning. The goal is not mere cataloging of terms, but rather analysis of how meanings flow from or inhere in the stylistic components or devices, especially as used by a particular author in a particular literary work.
 
 

 EUPHUES: THE ANATOMY OF WIT

Type of work: Novel
Author: John Lyly (c. 1554-1606)
Type of plot: Didactic romance
Time of plot: Sixteenth century
Locale: Naples and Athens
First published,: 1579

Principal characters:

Euphues, a young gentleman of Athens
Philautus, a nobleman of Naples, his friend
Don Ferardo, a governor of Naples
Lucilla. his daughter, engaged to Philautus
Livia, her friend
Eubulus, an old gentleman of Naples

Critique:

        Unquestionably the greatest contribution of Lyly's romance to the development of the English novel was the style of the writing. Although the "euphuistic" style, characterized by numerous similes, the use of countless examples taken from nature and mythology, frequent rhetorical questions, balanced sentence construction, and alliteration, had appeared earlier in English prose, no one before Lyly had used it so skillfully or with such persistence. As always, Lyly's intention was to refine the manners of an era that realized its need for delicacy and sophistication. There is, in addition, a strong strain of moralistic didacticism in Euphues, which was also written to oppose Italian influences in the court of Queen Elizabeth. Athens is generally accepted to have been, in Lyly's mind, a symbol of Oxford University; and he addressed a brief epilogue to the "Gentlemen Scholars of Oxford." What little plot there is in Euphues is probably based on some of Lyly's own experiences during his college days, but the story is less important for its own sake than as a vehicle for ornately written digressions, so that its essential purpose, the development of a graceful and ornate prose style, is undeniably well achieved. That the Elizabethan age welcomed such a development is shown by the fact that the extreme popularity of Euphues gave the name that still clings to the kind of writing which Lyly perfected.

        A large part of the end of Euphues abandons narrative in favor of disquisitions disguised as philosophical letters, plus a more or less hypothetical dialogue with an atheist. All this material is related to the emphatic didactic function of the work.

The Story:

        Euphues, a young gentleman of Athens, was graced by nature with great personal beauty and by fortune with a large patrimony, but he used his brilliant wit to enjoy the pleasures of wickedness rather than the honors of virtue. In his search for new experiences the young man went to Naples, a city famed for loose living. There he found many eager to encourage a waste of time and talent, but he was ever cautious, trusting no one and taking none for a friend. Thus he escaped real harm from the company of idle youths with whom he associated.

        An elderly gentleman of Naples, Eubulus, one day approached Euphues and admonished the young man for his easy ways, warning him of the evil results that were sure to follow and urging him to be merry with modesty and reserve, In a witty reply Euphues rebuffed the old man's counsel and told him that his pious urgings only resulted from his withered old age. So in spite of the sage warning, Euphues remained in Naples, and after two months there he met a pleasing young man named Philautus, whom he determined to make his only and eternal friend. Philautus, impressed by the charm of Euphues, readily agreed to be his firm friend forever. Their friendship grew, and the two young men soon became inseparable.

        Philautus had long before earned the affection and trust of Don Ferardo, a prominent official of Naples, and had fallen in love with his beautiful daughter Lucilla. While Don Ferardo was on a trip to Naples, Philautus took his friend with him to visit Lucilla and a group of her friends. After dinner Euphues was given the task of entertaining the company with an extemporaneous discourse on love. He declared that one should love another for his mind, not for his appearance. When the conversation turned to a discussion of constancy, Lucilla asserted that her sex was wholly fickle. Euphues began to dispute her, but, suddenly struck by Lucilla's beauty and confused by his feelings, he broke off his speech and quickly left.

        Lucilla discovered that she was attracted to the young Athenian. After weighing the respective claims of Euphues and Philautus on her affections, she convinced herself that it would not be wrong to abandon Philautus for Euphues; however, she decided to pretend to each that he was her only love. Euphues, meanwhile, had persuaded himself that Lucilla must be his in spite of Philautus: friendship must give way before love. In order to deceive his friend, Euphues pretended to be in love with Livia, Lucilla's friend. Philautus was overjoyed and promised to help him win Livia.

        The two young men went immediately to the house of Don Ferardo. While Philautus was attending the governor, who had finally completed arrangements for his daughter's marriage to the young man, Euphues and Lucilla engaged in a subtle debate about love and finally declared their passion for each other. When Don Ferardo told his daughter of his plans for her marriage to Philautus, she told him of her love for Euphues.

        Philautus, betrayed at once by both his friend and his beloved, blamed now one and now the other. He wrote a scathing letter to Euphues, saying that they were friends no longer and that he hoped Euphues would soon be in his own unhappy situation, for Lucilla, having proved untrue, might be faithless again. Euphues replied in a taunting letter that deception in love is natural. He expressed confidence that Lucilla would be faithful to him forever.

        After what had happened, however, it was impossible for Euphues to visit Lucilla while her father was at home. During her lover's absence she fell in love again, this time with Curio, a gentleman who possessed neither wealth nor wit. When Euphues at last went to apologize for being away so long, Lucilla replied curtly that she had hoped his absence would be longer. Admitting that her new lover was inferior to both Philautus and Euphues, she supposed God was punishing her for her fickleness. Although she realized that her life was likely to be unhappy, a fate she had earned, she did not hesitate to scorn Euphues. Don Ferardo argued that it was her filial duty to give up the worthless Curio. When she refused, her father died of grief not long after.

        Having renewed his friendship with Philautus before departing from Naples, Euphues left with his friend a written discourse against the folly of love. Saying that love, although it started with pleasure, ended in destruction and grief, he urged his friend to forget passion and to turn his attention toward more serious pursuits.

        After returning to Athens, where he engaged in long hours of study, Euphues wrote a treatise on the proper way to rear a child. With the weakness of his own upbringing in mind, since it had not steered him away from the shoals of sloth and wickedness, he urged that a young man should be legitimately born and should be brought up under the influence of three major forces: nature, reason, and use. In this manner the young man would be educated in the ways of virtue as well as in the customs of use.

        Euphues wrote many other letters and treatises: in one he urged the gentlemen scholars of Athens to study with the laws of God in mind; in another he debated with an atheist and converted him to godliness; a letter to Philautus encouraged him to abandon his dissolute life in Naples; in a letter to Eubulus, Euphues thanked the old man for his good advice and told him of his return to righteousness; another letter to Philautus expressed regret at the death of Lucilla and at the irreligious character of her life; two letters to a pair of young men told them to accept their destiny and to live virtuously; in response to a letter in which Livia told of her intention to be virtuous, Euphues praised her and told her of Philautus' possible visit to Athens.