Midas (Lyly play)

Midas is an Elizabethan era stage play, a comedy written by John Lyly. It is arguably the most overtly and extensively allegorical of Lyly's allegorical plays.

Midas was entered into the Stationers' Register on 4 October 1591; it was first published in 1592 in a quarto printed by Thomas Scarlet for Joan Broome. She was the widow of William Broome, the bookseller who issued reprints of Lyly's Campaspe and Sapho and Phao in 1591; the widow Broome herself published the first editions of Lyly's Endymion (1591) and Gallathea (1592).

Midas was probably acted by the Children of Paul's, Lyly's regular company through most of his playwriting career. The title page of the first edition states that the play was performed at Court on Twelfth Night, probably on 6 January 1590.John Dover Wilson proposed that Lyly himself may have played the role of Midas; but this is a speculation unsupported by evidence.

"Obviously" the play was written after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. The play also features an allusion to the English Armada of 1589; the authorship of Midas must date from the 1588–89 period.

The student theatre ensemble of Stuart Hall School, located in Staunton, Virginia, staged a production of Midas in 2010 [1] directed by Theatre Programme Director, Brett Sullivan Santry. The performers, who ranged in age from eleven to seventeen, rehearsed and performed under the tenets of Original staging practices from the Elizabethan period. Given the play’s extremely limited modern production history, the probability exists that the Stuart Hall production marked the first time the play was staged in North America.

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