-to mention the three greatest delineators of women in our
language. They are the Undines in the story of our literature, beautiful
and seductive, complete in everything but soul!

While realising that woman should be the real protagonist in comedy,
Lyly also appreciated the fact that skilful dialogue and brilliant
repartee are only less important, and that for this purpose prose was
more suitable than verse. Gascoigne's _Supposes_ was his model in both
these innovations, and yet he would undoubtedly have adopted them of his
own accord without any outside suggestion. And since _The Supposes_ was
a translation, _Campaspe_ deserves the title of the first purely English
comedy in prose. The _Euphues_ had given him a reputation for sprightly
and witty dialogue, he himself was possibly known at Court as a
brilliant conversationalist, and therefore when he came to write plays
he would naturally do all in his power to maintain and to improve his
fame in this respect. With his acute sense of form he would recognise
how clumsy had been the efforts of previous dramatists, and he knew also
how impossible it would be, in verse form, to write witty dialogue, up
to date in the subjects it handled. He therefore determined to use
prose, and, though he manipulates it somewhat awkwardly in his earlier
plays while still under the influence of the euphuistic fashion, he
steadily improves, as he gains experience of the function and needs of
dialogue, until at length he succeeds in creating a thoroughly
serviceable dramatic instrument. This departure was a great event in
English literature. Shakespeare was too much of a poet ever to dispense
altogether with verse, but he appreciated the virtue of prose as a
vehicle of comic dialogue, and he uses it occasionally even in his
earliest comedy, _Love's Labour's Lost_. Ben Jonson on the other
hand--perhaps more than any other Lyly's spiritual heir--wrote nearly
all his comedies in prose. And it is not fanciful I think to see in
Lyly's pointed dialogue, tinged with euphuism, the forerunner of
Congreve's sparkling conversation and of the epigrammatic writing of our
modern English playwrights.

Such are the main characteristics of Lyly's dramatic genius. To attempt
to trace his influence upon later writers would be to write a history of
the Elizabethan stage. In the foregoing remarks I have continually
indicated Shakespeare's debt to him in matters of detail. _The Midsummer
Night's Dream_ is from be