John Lyly's Sappho and Phao: From Light/Dark Imagery to Shadows of a Likeness

John Lyly's Sappho and Phao: From Light/Dark Imagery to Shadows of a Likeness

This article examines John Lyly's second court comedy, Sappho and Phao (1584) in light of its appropriation of the interplay between brightness and darkness. While chiaroscuro may be an anachronistic descriptor, the term points at significant similarities. This artistic technique was still new to English painters before the late 1590s. It derives from Greco-Roman approaches to light/dark contrasts and black-white juxtapositions. The Italian artist Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo introduced this skill in his Trattato dell'Arte (1584), which was first rendered into English by Richard Haydocke in 1598. Haydocke, however, did not use the term chiaroscuro directly, but interpreted it as the interplay between light and shadow. In response to Haydocke's translation, Nicholas Hilliard's Arte of Limning (1600) also elaborated on the extent to which a painter must capture the substance with the effect of shadow, especially when the sitter for a likeness is Queen Elizabeth I. Although these references could not have appeared on Lyly's reading list when he was composing the play, Sappho and Phao presents a cycle of pictorial episodes limned through the euphuistic effect of light/dark imagery, a dramatic device derived in part from Lyly's classical training and also exemplifying Lyly's euphuism (a subtle style of antithesis and balance).