Blackwell Reference Online

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John Lyly (1554–1606) was an Elizabethan author whose prose writings enjoyed incredible popularity, and whose plays have been seen as paving the way for the comedies of William Shakespeare. Lyly was perhaps born in Rochester, Kent, where his father worked in 1550, or in Canterbury, also in Kent, where a younger brother was born in 1562. He was the eldest of eight children born to Peter Lyly and Jane Burgh. His paternal grandfather was William Lily, the humanist contemporary of Thomas More and John Colet, who was high master of St Paul's School from 1509 to 1522/23, and author of a ubiquitous grammar textbook. An uncle, George Lily, was secretary to Reginald Pole, and a canon of Canterbury Cathedral under Mary; his father served under archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker as a registrar or notary ( Hunter 2004 ). Although the relevant records are missing, Lyly was probably a pupil, like his brothers, at Canterbury's King's School (which Christopher Marlowe would later attend). He matriculated at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1569, and graduated BA in 1573 and MA in 1575, although attempts to secure a fellowship at Magdalen were unsuccessful. At some point in the late 1570s, he moved to London and lived in the Savoy, where the former King's School teacher William Absolom was master. It was ‘in the Sauoy’, Gabriel Harvey recalled in Pierces supererogation (1593), that ‘young Euphues ... log in or subscribe to read full text