Some Dialogues of Love in Lyly's Comedies

Abstract

Unless we speak loosely, we cannot say that English comedies dramatized love before Lyly began writing plays. His experiments with dialogue, guided by his sense of the limitations of language, put on stage probably for the first time conversations not about love but conversations that dramatize love. Generally speaking, when in earlier comedies lovers confront one another, they meet briefly at the outset to state their feelings and again at the conclusion to suggest a happy future, but throughout the play they remain separated. There are historical reasons for this separation, but the reason which interests me is theoretical and arises from the very nature of love and from the potentialities of drama. To put the matter roughly, love is intimately internal, whereas drama must present man's external behavior. If they ignore allegory in articulating their love stories as dramas, playwrights are faced with the problem of devising behavior to suggest the presence of sentiments, a problem not peculiar to drama, for in the middle ages the code of courtly love achieved this effect, crystallizing into outward gestures what is felt deeply within. But as D. L. Stevenson has shown, these gestures were no longer effective for dramatists of late sixteenth century England.' The playwright may solve this problem by ignoring gesture and using direct statement. The hero simply says to the heroine, I love you. The Shoemakers' Holiday (1599), a comedy written much later than Lyly's plays, illustrates the difficulties of this solution. When Rose and Lacy meet on stage, they elaborate the fact of their love by several metaphors but are at a loss to say more; Dekker interrupts their rapidly thinning conversa-