Renaissance
LENT TERM 2025
Tuesday February 4th, 5.15pm Dr Eve Houghton (St John's College, Cambridge)
Speaking Personally: John Lyly’s Euphues and Free Indirect Style
Critics have often associated free indirect style with the novel since the nineteenth century and with the voice of an impersonal narrator. But the history of free indirect style is not synonymous with the history of the novel; in sixteenth-century fiction, impersonal narration emerges from a rhetorical culture that grounds the authority of sentences precisely in their lack of an enunciator. This paper addresses the famously allusive style of John Lyly’s Euphues (1578), with its constant appeal to the authority of a shared consensus. Euphuism is not merely a practice of quotation; it is a practice of imitation, mimicry, and assimilation, analogous to free indirect style, in which the voice of authority is incorporated into a character’s own discourse. What looks like personal expression in Euphues thus often seems more like a vehicle for communal, shared beliefs: each voice is curiously indistinguishable from other voices. While later readers tended to see this as an aesthetic inadequacy—a testament to Euphues’s failure to convincingly differentiate the voices of its characters—early modern readers treated the wide diffusion of common wisdom in the text as a guarantor of its truth and aptness. This paper argues that the impersonality of free indirect style has its roots in the commonplace book, the intellectual culture that shaped the first English fiction writers. Narrative authority in Euphues emanates from a voice whose origin is uncertain but whose truth is universally acknowledged. There will be extended drinks, and possibly even some snacks, following the seminar (rather than a dinner), so please plan to stay longer than usual! Team RGS (Raphael Lyne, Hester Lees-Jeffries, Jenny Richards, David Hillman)
