ABSTRACT
Prose has always been later to reach perfection than poetry because poetic language is always the first to undergo the discipline of literary treatment. The age of Elizabeth is no exception. Some decent literary prose appeared under Henry VIII, though most of it was cumbersome and long-winded; under the influence of their Greek and Latin studies, Cheke and Ascham wrote a clear if rather pedestrian style; but when the literary men really got hold of prose they did terrible things to it. Dissatisfied with the plainness of daily speech and the artlessness of his predecessors, John Lyly, in his two romances Euphues (1579) and Euphues his England (1580), developed a style of his own which, by the name of Euphuism, became the model and bane of English writing. Its
essence lay in a laborious display of rhetorical devices; Lyly was particularly fond of pointless but well-balanced antitheses, frequent alliteration, a prodigality of similes arranged in wearisome strings, and rhetorical questions. Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia (c. 1580) suffers from much the same faults, though they are less glaring; oddly enough-in view of the large number of versified romaJlces that ought to have been in prose-the episodic and often exalted Arcadia ,vould be better all in rhyme than in a mixture of both. Unlike Lyly, Sidney (who after all was a minor genius) could turn out good prose within the limits of his convention, but too often he was guilty of conceits like the following description of a piece of sewing:
This stuff was popular for a time, but that it palled is evident both from the way in which Shakespeare later parodied it and from the career of Robert Greene (IS60?-92), perhaps the first professional journalist, who always wrote in the fashion. Thus he produced a lesser Euphues, pastoral romances in the manner of Sidney, andwhen realism grew in vogue-the splendid pamphlets, mostly of low life, on which his fame rests: Notable Discovery of Cozenage, A Quaint Dispute between Velvet-Breeches and Cloth-Breeches, and others (1590-2). Here the style has become racy, straightforward, and English. The main achievement of this greater freshness was Thomas Nash's The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), a picaresque novel full of humour and incident. Nevertheless, even at its best Elizabethan literary prose makes hard going and proves how much less universal prose is than verse.
