JOHN LYLY was born in 1554. After studying at Magdalen College, Oxford and also at Cambridge, he was appointed to a position in the household of Lord Burghley. He leaped to literary prominence with the best-selling prose works of the Elizabethan period, Eupues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Euphues and His England (1580). The Earl of Oxford installed him as the resident playwright at the Blackfriars theatre, where he went on to produce a series of highly wrought comedies for performance at court. These exerted an important influence on Shakespeare. In the later 1580s the closure of the company for which he wrote brought his career to a premature halt, and he died in poverty in 1606.