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ound 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}
The Baconians who think that a poet could not derive from books and court plays his knowledge of fashions far more prevalent in literature than at Court, decide that the poet of Love's Labour's Lost was not Will, but the courtly "concealed poet." No doubt Baconians may argue with Mr. R. M. Theobald {121b} that "Bacon wrote Marlowe," and, by parity of reasoning many urge, though Mr. Theobald does not, that Bacon wrote Lyly, pouring into Lyly's comedies the grace and wit, the quips and conceits of his own courtly youth. "What for no?" The hypothesis is as good as the other hypotheses, "Bacon wrote Marlowe," "Bacon wrote Shakespeare."
The less impulsive Baconians and the Anti-Willians appear to ignore the well-known affected novels which were open to al