Formal and elaborate prose style which had a vogue in the 1580s in drama, prose fiction, and probably also in the conversation of English court circles.
It takes its name from the moralistic prose romance Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, which John Lyly wrote in 1578. In the dialogues of this work and of Euphues and His England (1580), as well as in his stage comedies,
Lyly exaggerated and used persistently a stylized prose which other writers had developed earlier.
The style is sententious (that is, full of
moral maxims), relies persistently on syntactical balance and antithesis, rein-
forces the structural parallels by heavy and elaborate patterns of alliteration
and assonance, exploits the rhetorical question, with long similes.
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