SOURCE: Bevington, David. “Introduction to Sappho and Phao.” In John Lyly: Campaspe and Sappho and Phao, edited by G. K. Hunter and David Bevington, pp. 141-96. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991.

In the following excerpt, Bevington explores Elizabethan dramatist John Lyly's version of the Sappho myth—derived from Ovid—in his 1584 play Sappho and Phao.

[John Lyly, in his drama Sappho and Phao,] seems unaware of, or uninterested in, much of the historical information that we possess today about Sappho. The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature and the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythography¹ report that she was born at Mitylene, or perhaps Eressos, on the island of Lesbos in the eastern Aegean, probably in the seventh century b.c. She was of good parentage, and was a contemporary of the poet Alcaeus. Forced to leave Lesbos, perhaps because of political difficulties, she may have gone to...