The Art of Elizabethan Prose: When English Learned to Show Off
Before the novel, before the newspaper, before the modern essay — there was a queen, a printing press, and a group of writers who decided that English was worth taking seriously.
There is a moment in every language’s life when it stops being merely useful and starts being beautiful. For English, that moment arrived somewhere in the second half of the sixteenth century, during the reign of Elizabeth I. It arrived not in poetry — Shakespeare and Spenser were doing extraordinary things with verse, and we know that story well — but in prose. In the sentence. In the paragraph. In the deliberate, self-conscious art of writing non-fiction, romance, argument, and reportage in plain, flowing, unrhymed English.
This is the story of that moment.
England, 1558: A Language Looking for Itself
When Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558, English prose had a problem. Latin was still the language of serious intellectual life — theology, philosophy, science, diplomacy. Greek was the language of classical wisdom. English, by comparison, felt rough. Undeveloped. Undignified. Scholars wrote serious things in Latin. English was for ballads and business records.
But England in 1558 was also a nation in the middle of something extraordinary. The printing press — set up by William Caxton in 1476 — had been running for eighty years, and a reading public had grown up around it. Explorers like Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh were returning from the edges of the known world with stories that readers desperately wanted to hear. Humanism — the recovery of classical learning, the celebration of human reason — was the intellectual fashion of the day. And at the centre of all of it sat a queen who was herself a brilliant scholar, who spoke six languages, and who made intellectual distinction fashionable at court.
What happened, over the next forty-five years, was a kind of national literary project. Elizabethan writers — some aristocrats, some middle-class strivers, some court insiders, some pamphlet-writing outsiders — collectively decided to show what English could do. The results were astonishing in their variety: ornate and flowery in one writer’s hands, plain and aphoristic in another’s, romantic and pastoral in a third’s. But all of it was animated by the same fundamental ambition: to make English prose worthy of serious attention.
John Lyly and the Art of the Elaborate Sentence
The writer who most spectacularly threw down the gauntlet was John Lyly, and he did it in 1578 with a prose romance called Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit.
Lyly’s novel — if we can call it that — follows a young Athenian gentleman named Euphues (the name comes from the Greek for “well-gifted”) through a series of moral adventures involving friendship, love, and betrayal. The plot is serviceable. But nobody was reading Lyly for the plot. They were reading him for the sentences.
Lyly invented — or at least perfected — a style that came to be known as Euphuism. The recipe goes roughly like this: take a sentence and split it in two, perfectly balanced halves. Load it with alliteration. Add a simile drawn from the natural world — the behaviour of animals, the properties of stones, the habits of plants. Then repeat, and repeat, and repeat. The effect is musical, hypnotic, and slightly dizzying.
Here is the flavour of it: “As the bee that gathereth honey out of every flower keepeth that which is sweet and refuseth that which is sour, so the young man that taketh counsel of all men pondereth that which is profitable and rejecteth that which is unprofitable.”
Notice the two-part balance. Notice the alliteration. Notice the nature simile. That is Euphuism in miniature.
For a brief, brilliant moment, Euphuism was wildly fashionable. The court loved it. Imitators proliferated. And then, inevitably, the parody arrived. Shakespeare put Euphuistic speeches into the mouth of Falstaff in Henry IV Part 1 — not to celebrate the style, but to mock it. When Shakespeare is making fun of your prose, you know it has peaked.
But the mockery shouldn’t make us dismiss Lyly. He was the first English prose writer to treat the sentence as something that could be crafted — shaped, balanced, polished like a jewel. That idea — prose as art — is his lasting contribution.
Philip Sidney and the World as It Should Be
Where Lyly’s prose is ornamental and self-regarding, Philip Sidney’s is romantic and idealistic. Sidney — courtier, soldier, diplomat, poet — wrote his enormous prose romance The Arcadia around 1580, originally as a private gift for his sister Mary Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke. He never intended to publish it. But after his death at the Battle of Zutphen in 1586, it was published and became one of the most widely read works of the age.
The Arcadia is a long, elaborate fiction set in an idealised pastoral kingdom. Two princes, disguised as a shepherd and an Amazon warrior, fall in love with the daughters of a king. There are adventures, trials, disguises, near-executions, and eventually resolution. But what makes the work remarkable is not its story — it is its world. Arcadia is England made perfect: beautiful landscape, high-minded characters, love as a noble aspiration rather than a grubby reality.
Arcadianism as a literary mode is, essentially, the art of making the world better than it is. It is not naïve — Sidney’s characters suffer genuinely — but it is aesthetically elevated. Things are more beautiful, more honourable, more significant in Arcadia than they are in actual Elizabethan England.
Why does this matter? Because the Arcadia is one of the earliest long prose fictions in the English language. It is not a novel — the novel, as we understand it, won’t really arrive for another century — but it is a direct ancestor of the novel. It showed that English prose could sustain a long, complex, emotionally engaging narrative. That was not a small thing.
Francis Bacon and the Power of Saying Less
And then there is Francis Bacon, who looked at all this elaborate, ornate, decorated prose and said, essentially: enough.
Bacon published his first collection of Essays in 1597 — the same decade that Lyly and Sidney had been dazzling readers with their elaborate sentences. His essays are short, spare, and aphoristic. They read like a man who has thought very hard about something and is only telling you what matters.
The topics are remarkable in their range and modernity: Of Truth, Of Friendship, Of Studies, Of Death, Of Marriage and Single Life. And the style is the antithesis of Euphuism. Where Lyly builds sentences out, Bacon compresses them down. Where Lyly adds similes from nature, Bacon strips every unnecessary word away. The result reads like wisdom rather than performance.
Consider his most famous line, from Of Studies: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”
Three categories, three verbs, one sentence. There is no wasted syllable here. And yet the idea is rich, memorable, and has been quoted for four hundred years. That is the plain style at its finest.
Bacon adapted the essay form from the French writer Montaigne, but where Montaigne’s essays are personal and wandering — full of digression and self-examination — Bacon’s are impersonal and authoritative. He is not interested in sharing his feelings. He is interested in saying something true about the world in the fewest possible words.
The lineage from Bacon is long and direct. Jonathan Swift. Samuel Johnson. George Orwell. The best non-fiction writing of today. All of it owes something to Bacon’s discovery that English prose could be powerful precisely through restraint.
The Others: A World of Prose
Lyly, Sidney, and Bacon are the dominant voices, but Elizabethan prose is richer than just those three.
Richard Hakluyt was a geographer and clergyman who spent his life collecting explorers’ accounts of the wider world. His Principal Navigations (1589) is essentially a great anthology of travel writing — sailors’ logs, merchants’ diaries, and adventurers’ narratives assembled into something that reads like the world opening up. Hakluyt almost single-handedly invented travel writing as a literary genre in English.
Thomas Nashe was the rebel of the group — a pamphleteer and satirist whose prose romance The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) is sometimes called the first English novel. Nashe’s style is fast, colloquial, and funny. Where Sidney elevates, Nashe descends — gleefully, brilliantly, into the low-life world of rogues and mercenaries. Reading Nashe feels strangely modern.
Richard Hooker sits at the opposite end of the temperamental spectrum. His Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is serious philosophical theology, written in long, carefully constructed sentences modelled on Latin. Hooker showed that English could carry the weight of the most demanding intellectual argument.
Together, these writers — and the many others working in pamphlets, sermons, translations, and letters across the period — produced an enormous range of prose. They covered everything from spiritual philosophy to pirate adventures. They wrote for courts and for bookstalls. They argued, they imagined, they described, they persuaded.
What They Left Behind
The Elizabethan prose writers left three things that we are still living inside.
The first is the novel. Sidney’s Arcadia and Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller are early, imperfect steps toward what will become, in the 18th century, one of the dominant art forms of Western culture. Prose fiction learns to walk in the Elizabethan period.
The second is the essay. Bacon’s short, compressed, argumentative pieces created a form that is now fundamental to intellectual life — to journalism, to academia, to opinion writing, to the blog post you are reading right now.
The third is the English language itself. The Elizabethans coined new words, built new sentence structures, pushed English into registers and subjects it had never occupied before. They proved, definitively, that English was a language worthy of serious literary ambition. Every writer in English since then has been working in the space they opened up.
There is a temptation to think of literary history as the story of poetry and novels — of Shakespeare’s plays and Dickens’s characters and Woolf’s sentences. But before any of that was possible, there had to be a group of writers who decided that prose — the plain, flowing, argumentative, storytelling sentence — was worth taking seriously.
That group was Elizabethan. And the argument they started has never really ended.
This post is part of a series on the History of English Prose, covering the Elizabethan Age to the Modern Period. Written for students of English Honours, Semester II.
