This chapter explores how the concept of sympathy is explored and interrogated in three Elizabethan prose texts: John Lyly’s Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578); Sidney’s The Old Arcadia (c. 1580); and Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde (1590). Lyly’s Euphues represents an important transitional moment in the history of the concept, as it employs both the earlier Latin form sympathia and the newer English word sympathy to describe the ‘sympathy of manners’ between two male friends: Euphues and Philautus. It is argued that the pair share each other’s emotions because of a common set of circumstances, rather than sympathetic magic or humanist models of friendship. The chapter reads these three prose fictions in the context of other works that reproduce or complicate the notion of a ‘sympathy of affections’ between friends or lovers. Within this discourse we can see the term sympathy increasingly used to describe a correspondence of woe, or what the narrator of Anthony Munday’s translation of Palmerin (1588), in a suggestive modification of the trope, refers to as a ‘sympathy of afflictions’.

Court talk is not the style that early modern courtiers use to speak to one another. It is an ersatz substitute for that style, an outsider’s fantasy about insider talk. Taken from conduct manuals, prose romances, poems, and plays, court talk is an overdone approximation of how courtiers are imagined to speak. Tracking the efflorescence of this style, this chapter turns to the still-neglected plays of John Lyly, which sell to their audiences the fantasy that their highly decorated style was the argot of the Elizabethan court. It is a fantasy that prompts aspirants from the period to weave Lyly’s style into their own conversations, even though it is only an exaggerated version, an erudite caricature, of the way Elizabethan barons and lords actually spoke. The failure of court talk to approximate courtliness is exactly what makes it into a synecdoche for a burgeoning social imaginary that I call the courtly public sphere. Through its relentless isocola, court talk expresses what Lauren Berlant might call the “cruel optimism” of this social imaginary: the emptiness of its promise of belonging, and the impossibility of ever letting that promise go.

Chapter Five explores the early modern phenomenon of girls “putting on” the minds of others. It argues that, when they engaged in these acts of cognitive play, girls were able to try on alternative perspectives and experiences — not necessarily male ones, but those that belonged to sexually active females: the lover, the harlot, the pregnant woman. It focuses on the girls from John Lyly’s Gallathea, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure, all of whom costume their bodies and put on the minds of sexually experienced females. Their performances allow them to project themselves into these roles without actually becoming “women” in a heteronormative sense that would require their bodies to transform through penetrative intercourse, pregnancy, or birth. The girls who dress up in these plays do so under different levels of duress, but they all share an ability to use their brainwork to manipulate the Protestant girl-to-woman script they were expected to follow — to resist, revise and, in some cases, reject it.

When he wrote Gallathea, Lyly combined certain elements which might be said to be at the heart of Shakespearean comedy: cross-dressed lovers, woods as spaces for personal discovery, supernatural imps with power over human interaction, a narrative moving towards marriage against seemingly irreconcilable odds. Though Shakespeare’s earlier plays, such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Love’s Labour’s Lost, are most often described as Lylian, every one of his comedies engages with some combination of these elements, and towards the end of his career, in the second scene of The Tempest Shakespeare can be seen rewriting the first scene of Gallathea. This chapter will give this side of Shakespeare’s authorship a new emphasis by juxtaposing it with different elements of Lyly’s influence over his early career, charting the use of Lyly’s prose fiction in Two Gentlemen of Verona and his play The Woman in the Moon in Titus Andronicus. By looking at various kinds of influence – generic, structural, performative, tonal – this chapter will present a new understanding of Shakespeare’s early use of Lyly’s work.