SOURCE: "Lyly's Quarreling Lovers," in The Love-Game Comedy, Columbia University Press, 1946, pp. 148-73.

In the following excerpt, Stevenson examines Lyly's comedies in relation to the "sixteenth-century rebellion of common sense against the attenuated sentiments of romantic tradition. "

Romance had been rejected by [Michael] Drayton and [John] Marston; it had been idealized beyond contamination from real life by Spenser and Cardinal Bembo; it had been described by John Donne as the spiritual half of love, which in normal experience exists on both spiritual and physical levels. John Lyly was the first Elizabethan writer to perceive that the opposed attitudes in this quarrel over romance could be used for another purpose. They could be embodied in a series of characters whose conflicts could be used as the basis of a sustained narrative and at the same time illustrate one of the significant problems of the day. Lyly explores the possibilities...