A Study On The Weakening Of Male Images In John Lyly's Endymion

Endymion is an innovative comedy written by British playwright John Lyly.He was directly inspired by the Greek mythology romance—"Endymion and the Moon"and got the main theme of Endymion on the basis of the Greek myth;as a playwright of Elizabeth I,he altered and adapted the old tale in order to please his sovereign.Lyly made a great change on shaping male figures and redesigning storyline.In this way,John Lyly created a brand new story that contains some representative social consciousness and typical features of Elizabethan era.Up to now,there has been much discussions centered on the Elizabethan drama in academic research.However,because John Lyly was not the most typical figure of English Renaissance,his plays were barely discussed deeply and widely.For Endymion,some scholars have come up with the idea of "court allegory" as a possible guess to explore the connotation implied by it;the result from their studies illustrates that the script might be a reflection of Queen Elizabeth's court.Relying on this conclusion,other scholars have put forward another point of view: this script reflects,to some extent,the relationship between courtier John Lyly and his sovereign Queen Elizabeth since Lyly served as her dramatist.Based on previous research,this paper proposes a new argument: John Lyly weakened almost all the male characters of Endymion in order to highlight females,especially the heroine Cynthia,in the play.Lily brings out Cynthia's noble status and her strong ability through contrast between male image and female image,so that he finally reached the purpose to eulogize Queen Elizabeth I euphemistically.This paper is supposed to achieve a goal,which is to further demonstrate that Endymion was a play John Lyly wrote for Elizabeth I with the purpose of flattering and eulogizing the queen;meanwhile,in order to show this purpose more obviously,John Lyly weakened part of the male characters when he was shaping those figures.The significance of this paper is to reveal that budding feminism in the English Renaissance and the social influence of Elizabeth I had brought strong impact on shaping male characters in English literature at that time.Meanwhile,this paper provides a reference to study the representations of feminism in literary works under male's perspective.