John Lyly's name may not be so familiar. He was a playwright and poet writing at the same time as Shakespeare and, in his day, was more famous than the Bard himself. Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to Dr Andy Kesson about Lyly's radical and, frankly, queer works: his plays in which Queen Elizabeth was compared - at court! - to the lesbian poet Sappho, and in which the marriage of two girls dressed as boys is approved by Venus, goddess of love. Why has Lyly been forgotten? And why might he just be the alternative Shakespeare for our times?
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