This euphuistic style helps to support the view that Campaspe was Lyly's first venture at writing for the stage.
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Both Gosson and Lyly adopted the Euphuistic style and were saturated in Italian reading through John Florio's lessons. It is possible that another Euphuist, George Pettie, was the "I.P." who signed the Italian verses that prefaced the First Fruits.
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Aristotle and Plato share a conversation, and other philosophers appear as well. The play also features the witty pages that are a hallmark of Lyly's drama. The play's prose style is heavily "euphuistic," sharing significant commonalities with Lyly's famous novel Euphues (1578). Notably, Apelles is a crucial figure in both works.
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88 The little we have of Watson's prose is highly euphuistic. He was a friend of John Lyly at Oxford, and both continued their literary connection in London under the patronage of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, himself an Oxford alumnus.John Dover Wilson, John Lyly, Macmillan and Bowes, Cambridge, 1905.
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I. M. has not been identified. T. G. has been identified as Thomas Groos. The bulk of the volume consists of A Paraphrase upon the Third of the Canticles of Theocritus, in both verse and prose. The author's style in the preface is highly affected and euphuistic, but the Theocritean paraphrase reads pleasantly.
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The euphuistic sentence followed principles of balance and antithesis to their extremes, purposely using the latter regardless of sense. John Lyly set up three basic structural principles: #phrases of equal length that appear in succession; #the balance of key verbal elements in successive sentences; #the correspondence of sounds and syllables, especially between words that are already balanced against each other.
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Burns also notes that Averell's prose is Euphuistic and draws on classical knowledge, despite there being no record of his having graduated from Oxford or Cambridge. On 2 November 1578 he married Gyllian Averell, née Goodale (1556–1596), the daughter of a baker, Robert Goodale and his wife, Ann. Their first child, Annes, was born three months after the wedding. Burns points out the irony of Averell conceiving a child before marriage given the moralism of some of his pamphlets.
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But two publications were useful to him for particular aspects of the novel. For sixteenth-century monastic life he was indebted to British Monachism; or, Manners and Customs of the Monks and Nuns of England by Thomas Dudley Fosbrooke, of which he owned an enlarged edition published in 1817. Shafton's euphuistic speech owes something to Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Euphues and his England (1580) by John Lyly, though affected speeches in the plays of Jonson and Shakespeare were more consistently mined.Ibid., 436–39.
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An anti-theatrical writer, Gosson by his own confession wrote plays, for he speaks of Catiline's Conspiracies as a "Pig of mine own Sowe." Because of their moral standpoint, he excludes such plays as these from the general condemnation of stage plays in his Schoole of Abuse, containing a pleasant invective against Poets, Pipers, Plaiers, Jesters and such like Caterpillars of the Commonwealth (1579). The euphuistic style of this pamphlet and its ostentatious display of learning were in the taste of the time, and do not necessarily imply insincerity. Gosson justified his attack on the grounds of the disorder which the love of melodrama and of vulgar comedy was introducing into the social life of London.
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The boys were generally in the range of 8–12 years old (prepubescent boys are chosen as choirboys precisely because their voices have not yet "broken" with puberty). They were musically talented, strictly disciplined, educated in the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric), and sometimes fluent in Latin. The boys amounted to formidable competition for the companies of adult actors in Elizabethan England. Between 1558 and 1576 (the year James Burbage built The Theatre in London and the age of popular Elizabethan drama began), companies of boy actors performed 46 times at Court, versus only 32 times for companies of adult actors in the same period. The playwright John Lyly earned fame when his "Euphuistic" plays were acted at Court by the Children of Paul's in the 1260.
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