It has never wholly recovered from
the euphuism--to use the word in its widest sense--of the late sixteenth
century. The influence of John Lyly and his tribe is still traceable,
despite a hundred metamorphoses, in some of the plays of to-day and in
many of the plays of yesterday. From the very beginnings of English
comedy, it was accepted as almost self-evident that "wit"--a factitious,
supererogatory sparkle--was indispensable to all dialogue of a
non-tragic order. Language was a newly discovered and irresistibly
fascinating playground for the fancy. Conversation must be thick-strewn
with verbal quibbles, similes, figures, and flourishes of every
description, else it was unworthy to be spoken on the stage. We all know
how freely Shakespeare yielded to this convention, and so helped to
establish it. Sometimes, not always, his genius enabled him to render it
delightful; but in most of the Elizabethans--though it be heresy to say
so--it is an extremely tedious mannerism. After the Restoration, when
modern light talk came into being in the coffee-houses, the fashion of
the day, no doubt, favoured a straining after wit; so that the
playwrights were in some measure following nature--that very small
corner of nature which they called "the town"--in accepting and making a
law of the Elizabethan convention.
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