Sapho and Phao

The evidence, taken as a whole, may indicate that both plays, Campaspe and Sapho and Phao, were acted by a combination of personnel from three troupes of boy actors—those of Paul's and the Chapel and the young company that the Earl of Oxford maintained in the 1580s.

Venus, on her way to Syracuse to humble the pride of Queen Sapho, endows a young ferryman named Phao with great beauty.

She has her husband Vulcan (his forge is under Mount Etna) mould new arrows to break love spells; she turns for help to her son Cupid, who in Lyly's hands foreshadows the later Puck in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Variety and comic relief are provided by the talk of Sapho's ladies in waiting, by the "Sybilla" whom Phao consults for advice and guidance, and of course by the witty pages who recur so regularly in Lyly's dramas.

Lyly shaped his version of the Sapho and Phao story to form an allegory of contemporaneous events and circumstances at the English royal court; the Prologues published with the 1584 quarto refer to this "necessity of the history."

The Duke courted Elizabeth up to 1582, but finally gave up the effort and left England romantically disappointed, as Phao leaves Sicily.