whether in quips and airs and graces, or in loftier style, unless he
himself frequented their society. Marlowe did not frequent the best
society; HE was no courtier, but there is the high courtly style in
the speeches of the great and noble in Edward II. Courtiers and
kings never did speak in this manner, any more than they spoke in
blank verse. The style is a poetical convention, while the quips and
conceits, the airs and graces, ran riot through the literature of the
age of Lyly and his Euphues and his comedies, the age of the Arcadia.

A cheap and probable source of Will's courtliness is to be found in
the courtly comedies of John Lyly, five of which were separately
printed between 1584 and 1592. Lyly's "real significance is that he
was the first to bring together on the English stage the elements of
high comedy, thereby preparing the way for Shakespeare's Much Ado
about Nothing and As You Like It" (and Love's Labour's Lost, one may
add). "Whoever knows his Shakespeare and his Lyly well can hardly
miss the many evidences that Shakespeare had read Lyly's plays almost
as closely as Lyly had read Pliny's Natural History. . . . One could
hardly imagine Love's Labour's Lost as existent in the period from
1590 to 1600, had not Lyly's work just preceded it." {120a}

"It is to Lyly's plays," writes Dr. Landmann, "that Shakespeare owes
so much in the liveliness of his dialogues, in smartness of
expression, and especially in that predilection for witticisms,
quibbles, and playing upon words which he shows in his comedies as
well as in his tragedies." There follows a dissertation on the
affected styles of Guevara and Gongora, of the Pleiade in France, and
generally of the artificial manner in Europe, till in England we
reach Lyly, "in whose comedies," says Dr. Furness, "I think we should
look for motives which appeared later in Shakespeare." {121a}