Characters and characterization in John Lyly’s Endymion: The Man in the Moone

Abstract

This paper studies the characters and the methods of characterization John Lyly uses in his euphuistic court play Endymion: The Man in the Moon (1591). The characters gather mythological, allegorical, and historical significance and are arranged in a hierarchy from the moon down to earth. The techniques the writer uses include the traditional methods of characterization through speech and action. And since the events in the play do not reach the level of a plot in the Aristotelian definition, which prevailed in the Renaissance, the writer underplays the method of character depiction through action. He, however,gives a lot of attention to portraying the characters through their utterance. This results from the fact that the characters spend most of the time talking about their attitudes, their relationships, and the few events that take place in the play. Lyly also uses the less traditional method of juxtaposition and social positioning. Juxtaposition is generated from the binary nature of Endymion and the crowd of antithetical pairs of characters that populate the drama. The social positioning method of character portrayal places the characters in a stratified social, allegorical, and mythical structure from which they gather various collective attributes by belonging to the given layers in the formatted structure. The article means to shed light on Lyly's dramaturgy by studying these means of character depiction.