The Queer Shakespeare: John Lyly

Not Just the Tudors

History Hit

History

4.8 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 3 May 2021

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

John Lyly's name may not be so familiar. He was a playwright and poet writing at the same time as Shakespeare and, in his day, was more famous than the Bard himself. Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to Dr Andy Kesson about Lyly's radical and, frankly, queer works: his plays in which Queen Elizabeth was compared - at court! - to the lesbian poet Sappho, and in which the marriage of two girls dressed as boys is approved by Venus, goddess of love. Why has Lyly been forgotten? And why might he just be the alternative Shakespeare for our times?

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0:00.0	Now we all know about William Shakespeare, but there was another writer at the time who
0:06.2	was even more famous than the Bard.
0:09.0	John Lilly.
0:13.9	His works were radical, and frankly he was even more keen than Shakespeare, on gender-bending
0:19.0	characters and unconventional love affairs.
0:22.7	You ladies may see that Venus can make constancy, fickleness, courage, cowardice, modesty,
0:30.9	lightness, working things impossible in your sex and tempering hardest hearts like softest
0:38.1	wool.
0:39.1	No, you ladies, you to love ladies, which lurketh under your eyelids whilst you sleep and
0:47.3	playeth with your heartstrings while you wake.
0:53.7	On this edition, not just the tutors, I'm joined by Dr Andy Kesson.
0:58.4	To find out more about John Lilly, why he's disappeared into obscurity, whether he might
1:03.2	just be the forgotten Shakespeare for our times.
1:11.9	Andy is a reader in English literature at the University of Rohampton, who has a terrifyingly
1:16.8	long list of research publications to his name, all to boot, entertainingly and brilliantly
1:21.6	well written.
1:22.8	He has also done a couple of major funded public-facing projects in the last few years.
1:28.4	One of them was before Shakespeare, which looked at why and how commercial playhouses came
1:33.6	to be built in London during the reign of Elizabeth I.
1:36.8	The one he's working on now is called Box Office Bears, which is a fabulous title, and
1:41.0	it's a new research project on animal baiting in early modern England.
1:45.2	You can find out more about both of these at beforeshakespeare.com.
	...

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