To
attempt to estimate Lyly's position as a novelist and as a prose writer
is to chase the will-o'-the-wisp of theory over the morass of
uncertainty; the task of investigating his comedies is altogether
simpler and more straightforward. After groping our way through the
undergrowth of minor literature, we come out upon the great highway of
Elizabethan art--the drama. Let us first see how Lyly himself came to
tread this same pathway.

There is a difference of opinion between Mr Bond and Mr Baker, our chief
authorities, as to the order in which Lyly wrote his plays[97]. But
though Mr Baker claims priority for _Endymion_, and Mr Bond for
_Campaspe_, both are convinced that our author was already in 1580
beginning to look to the stage as a larger arena for his artistic genius
than the novel. And from what I have said of his life at Oxford and his
connexion with de Vere, we need not be surprised that this was so. It
would be well however at this juncture to recapitulate, and in part to
expand those remarks, in order to show more clearly how Lyly's dramatic
bent was formed. Seats of learning, as we shall see presently, had long
before the days of Lyly favoured the comic muse, and Oxford was no
exception to this rule. Anthony a Wood tells us how Richard Edwardes in
1566 produced at that University his play _Palamon and Arcite_, and how
her Majesty "laughed heartily thereat and gave the author great thanks
for his pains"; a scene which would still be fresh in men's minds five
years after, when Lyly entered Magdalen College. But it is scarcely
necessary to stretch a point here since we know from the _Anatomy of
Wit_ that Lyly was a student of Edwardes' comedies[98]. Again, William
Gager, Pettie's "dear friend" and Lyly's fellow-student, was a
dramatist, while Gosson himself tells us of comedies which he had
written before 1577.

[97] Baker, p. lxxxviii, places _Endymion_ as early as Sept. 1579.
Bond, vol. III. p. 10, attempts to disprove Baker's contention, and in
vol. II. p. 309, he maintains chiefly on grounds of style that
_Campaspe_ was the earliest of Lyly's plays, being produced at the
Christmas of 1580.

[98] Bond, II. p. 238.

Probably however it was not until he had left Oxford for London that
Lyly conceived the idea of writing comedy, for we must attribute its
original suggestion to his friend and employer the Earl of Oxford.
Edward de Vere, Burleigh's son-in-law, had visited Italy, and affected
the