The Confusions of Gallathea: John Lyly as Popular Dramatist

1 COMPAEATIVE i ama Volume 32Summer 1998Number 2 The Confusions of Gallathea: John LyIy as Popular Dramatist Kent Cartwright We have learned to think of John LyIy as the archetype of the failed "humanist as courtier."' In that melancholy conception, the humanist endeavors to put his high ideals and intellectual skills to work for the court, only to discover that it values him solely as an entertainer. We can consider LyIy, however, from another, less familiar angle, that of the humanist as "popular playwright," a perspective that reveals him as adding to the emotional power of public theater. To do so calls into question a prevailing paradigm of sixteenth-century drama: that humanist plays differ from popular ones in that the former are intellectual, arid, and aristocratic while the latter are visceral, imaginatively arousing, and plebeian, and that consequently playwrights such as LyIy failed with the public because they wrote a static "drama of ideas." The paradigm constructs a hierarchical popular/elite binary, insisting —counterintuitively, I think—on two separate traditions, with the popular preferred.2 Even where critics find the traditions merging, they view the lively popular stage as accepting from the humanist line only its sense of thematics and coherence. Reappraisal of the reigning paradigm of Tudor drama might begin with recognizing 207 208Comparative Drama a virtue in humanist plays exactly where they presumably fall short of popular ones, in the aspect of theatricality. Toward that end, I offer two arguments about LyIy's drama, and therein I use the "court comedy" Gallathea (c.1584) as my leading example.3 First, although Lyly's plays have been treated by modern critics as static and intellectual dramas of ideas, GaIlathea generates emotional and visceral delight from not exactly ideas, but a pleasurable "confusion" that displays theatrical values one expects from popular plays. Here LyIy demonstrates a contribution to public theater from humanist drama: a juxtaposition of didacticism with life's uncertainties, a tension between intellect and emotion that is auditorially engaging. Second, Gallathea shares conventions, strategies, and goals with popular drama. Its structure, mythological machinery, and language recall while pushing beyond the stage romances, m particular, of the previous decade. These two aspects converge, in that Gallathea's kinesthetic and emotional confusions work to fashion the kind of desire for theater helpful in attracting repeat spectators to the permanent playhouses. LyIy is associated with Elizabethan court drama of the 1580s.4 Plays at court occurred in celebration of the Christmas season and thus as part of the ritualism of court life. After approval by the master of revels, works were produced with elaborate scenery and costumes and were staged in one of the great halls, with the queen seated in prominence opposite the stage. Early in Elizabeth's reign, humanist court drama was exemplified by such plays as Sackville and Norton's Gorboduc (1562) and Richard Edwards's Damon and Pithias (1564) with their onedimensional figures and didactic messages. By the 1580s two types of drama came to prevail: humanist classical stories, often enacted by school-boy companies, emphasizing courtly themes of love, chastity, friendship, valor, and magnanimity; and chivalric romances, typically performed by professional men's companies, showcasing adventure, love, enchantment, intrigue, exotic characters , and spectacle. These qualities might overlap, as in The Rare Triumphs ofLove and Fortune (1582), a romance performed by Derby's Men and before the court, in which classical gods oversee a story of love and exoticism among mortals. By the 1580s, then, the repertoire of the popular stage had come to make up an element of court drama; LyIy is credited with further merging classical and popular playmaking.5 G. K. Hunter praises LyIy in terms of his "complex and sophisticated plays," "genuine literary contribution," and "dainty artifice,"6 literary and intellectual Kent Cartwright209 qualities that LyIy contributes to popular drama from his humanist training. Instead of emphasizing the theatrical appeal of LyIy's plays—that is, Hunter suggests that popular drama acquired some humanist sophistication—he links public and elite drama by allowing the former to assume "literary" values, while leaving a kind of basic visceral appeal still the exclusive property of the amphitheater. Thus, paradoxically, modern criticism brings the popular and...