As in Lyly's Galatea, the eroticism in Campaspe builds through oblique language that enables lovers to ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant,’ as Emily Dickinson writes. Apelles and Campaspe fall in love almost instantly, and yet they ‘dazzle gradually’, spending their scenes with a paintbrush and canvas lodged firmly between them, not to mention all the words that fill the gaps that remain. What is Lyly showing us about the nature of erotic experience (Apelles's and Campaspe's in particular) on a divided stage such as this? To begin, he dramatises what we already know: that erotic experience comprises much more than just physical contact. Lyly confirms this by scrutinising the roles that instruments – easel and canvas, pigments and words – play in Apelles's and Campaspe's erotic relation. While anything that stands between two lovers may be an obstacle to the fulfilment of their erotic desire, it may also prove an instrument of desire. An object placed between two bodies in some kind of dynamic relation invariably increases the friction between them. It creates drag – it obstructs – but it also generates heat, a potential source of erotic pleasure. As Lyly demonstrates, such friction is felt within imaginative, linguistic and conceptual realms, not just in the physical world. A goodly portion of the play consists of Apelles and Campaspe employing artistic and linguistic media that both bring them into relation and keep them apart. The portrait of Campaspe that Apelles paints is more than the sign of their erotic relationship – it is its medium. That which stands between them provides the means by which they love one another, by which they reorder their own world and the world outside them, imbuing both with the creativity, richness and nuance that characterise Lyly's own art no less than Apelles’s.

The opening scene between Apelles and Campaspe occurs in and around the painter's workshop, a setting that visually binds their dialogue together with the act of artistic creation.2 It is perhaps this backdrop that prompts the lovers to recognise each other's creative capacities almost instantly. As early as their first exchange, Apelles and Campaspe acknowledge their individual artistic talents and ambitions, but perhaps more importantly, their first few lines together establish the artful medium that will distinguish all of their dialogues.