3.3. Poetics in the Tudor age
3.3.1. English Humanism around 1500
3.3.2. Elyot, Wilson, Ascham
3.3.3. Early Defences of Poetry
3.3.4. Prosody and Theory
3.3.5. Elizabethan Dramatic Criticism
3.3.1. English Humanism around 1500
As we have seen, there is not much literary theory in England during the Middle Ages. And there is no explicit literary theory written in English until the influence of the Italian humanists in the sixteenth century. But there is an implicit poetics along the lines of Medieval didacticism in such poems as Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale, where the narrator tells the pilgrims to pay attention to his poem so that they may separate its teaching from the allegorical machinery:
(9)
But ye that holden this tale a folye,
As of a fox, or a cok and hen,
Taketh the moralitie, goode men.
For seint Paul seith that al that writen is,
To oure doctrine it is ywrite, ywis;
Taketh the fruyt, and lat the chaf be stylle.
And The Owl and the Nightingale (13th century), a debate poem which opposes didactic to lyric poetry, might be considered to be the "earliest literary criticism in English."
The first approach to criticism of individual works written in English can be found in the introductions to late medieval works written by William Caxton (1422?-91), the first printer and editor in England (f. i. prefaces to the Aeneid and to Morte d'Arthur ).
English literary criticism proper, written in English and concerned with English literature, is born during the Renaissance. It follows the models of European humanism, but these ideas are already adapted to English reality, or rather to the spirit of English nationalism. We have already noted the national drive in Renaissance criticism. Even though it cannot be said to be fundamentally different, in aims and methods, from continental criticism, "English criticism, both in its nature and its course, was determined, broadly speaking, by immediate national needs and problems." This is because, like the rest of Renaissance criticism, English criticism does not follow models or authorities in a blind way. Instead, it follows the one great Renaissance principle: trying to examine problems under the light of reason. "So that, despite constant recourse to ancient teaching, the fundamental principle which governed English criticism at this stage was not, as is sometimes assumed, that of 'following the ancients', but rather of accepting Nature or reason as the ultimate guide in theory and practice alike." Renaissance rationalism is not opposed to religious belief: rather, the humanists assume that reason leads man to recognize the inherent order in nature which is an expression of the divine will.
In Italy the medieval tradition had not completely relegated rhetoric. Humanism developed the rhetorical side of the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) until it came to include a solid classical education, guided by a strong assumption that Eloquence and Wisdom are indivisible. But in England no such tradition existed. Logic was there the dominant discipline at the beginning of the sixteeenth century, and the classical tradition had to be imported from continental Europe. Therefore, it is natural that the first generation of English humanism is represented by two foreigners: Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536) and the Spaniard Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540), who both taught at English universities and contributed to a new impetus given to learning and to a critical outlook on medieval institutions and intellectual practices. Their work is a continuation of that of the Italian humanists of the fifteenth century, but is only occasionally related to literature, consisting of treatises on education, works on rhetoric and editions and commentaries of religious works. Indeed, the work Erasmus is often inimical to literature and poetry, which is despised as nonserious and often ridiculous. The ideal of an educated man in this first generation of English humanists is still the medieval "orator", while "In the generation that was to follow, the 'courtier' was to supersede the 'orator' as the educational ideal; and poetry was then to be more seriously studied as well as more widely cultivated." Rhetoric is for Vives what it had been for the classics, "the most powerful of the arts" since it develops what is most powerful in man, the power of the word. Vives associates eloquence with learning and knowledge, and opposes the medieval conception of rhetoric as a technique of ornamentation or of elegant expression. A concern for style should not come before the concern with the subject matter --that is, inventio, grounded on a broad culture, is more important than elocutio. Style should not be cultivated for its own sake: instead, it comes naturally as the expression of the speaker's personality. This does not mean that the concept of decorum is rejected: on the contrary, it is emphasized that style must not become an end in itself, but adapt itself to the expression of the subject matter. Vives recognizes that
(10) prose too has its rhythms, though they are not fixed by definite and constant law as in poetry."
The aim throughout is the effective use of language through an unobtrusive use of devices, not a proliferation of rhetorical ornaments for their own sake. Vives lays importance on the study of the classical models, but he suggests that the aim of this study is
(11) [rather] to form a critical judgment of the writings of the great authors than merely to acquiesce in their authority and to receive everything on trust.
The aim is not merely to revive the classics, but to surpass them. "Both Erasmus and Vives recognize that literary appreciation is not a matter of mere rules" and both call to the personal response to literature. Erasmus recommends as a method to literary appreciation:
(12) When anything has delighted you, ask the reason why. You will find that it is due to some device or subtlety or harmony of expresson, to some ingenuous use of proverb, fable, simile or the like."
However, Vives was more sympathetic than Erasmus to poetry. Erasmus sees poetry in the way of medieval rhetoricians, as an allegorical discourse ornamented with all the resources of rhetoric. Vives's conception gives a place to inspiration described in Platonic terms:
(13) The poet is a man who possesses great passion, . . . which raises him above the usual and ordinary state of his nature, and who in this elation conceives lofty, almost heavenly, inspirations. Then the sharpness of his mind contemplates and concentrates itself on great ideas; it also arranges them and thus causes within his body a harmony derived from the exaltation of the mind.
The poet's enthusiasm is contagious, and his audience is driven to the same state of excitement, and the mind is strengthened and refreshed by poetry; not least by the harmony of the verse itself, which is a reflection of the harmony of the human soul. Still, we can see that this theory is pre-Aristotelian. The early humanists also perpetuated the medieval obsessive moral concerns with liteature: Vives warns against dangerous reading, such as romances of war and love, like Amadis and Celestina. They are especially dangerous, it seems, for women readers. As for the morally offensive passages in the classics, Vives recommends expurgation of or else their allegorical interpretation.
At the same time new ideas were being developed in the field of religious interpretation. We saw that the later Middle Ages sought to limit allegorical readings of sacred writings, limiting them throught the use of the literal sense. Now the humanist John Colet (1466-1519) wrote some Lectures on St. Paul's Epistles and a commentary on the first chapter of Genesis which are significant for their concern with history. He studies the works in their historical setting, studying, for instance, the historical conditions of the audience of St. Paul and also the personality of the writer and his rhetorical art. With respect to Genesis, he argues that Moses writes "after the manner of a popular poet" adapting his meaning through a fable in order to convey his message. Meanwhile, Erasmus undertakes a historical study of the Gospels and calls for Christians to read the Bible instead of works on theology. The spirit of the Reformation is already in the air.
3.3.2. Elyot, Wilson, Ascham
The development of criticism during the mid sixteenth century is slow, above all compared to the situation in Italy and France. Humanist work in Latin goes on in works by Gabriel Harvey (1545-1630) like Rhetor and Ciceronianus (both 1577). But there are a few significant works in the vernacular by Sir Thomas Elyot (c. 1490-1546), Thomas Wilson (c. 1525-81) and Roger Ascham (1515-68).
Sir Thomas Elyot's Boke of the Governour (1531), written in the wake of Castiglione and Macchiavelli, expounds a utilitarian theory of poetry. Poetry was fashionable in England during the sixteenth century. It was one of the many activities a perfect courtier had to excel in: according to Castiglione,
(14) One of the courtier's most necessary gifts is that of writing both in rime and prose, especially in this our vulgar tongue.
But theory did not seem to be up to the situation in the beginning. Elyot treats poetry with a Platonic severity, praising Homer and Virgil because they teach moral lessons, arms, politics and even horse-breeding. We see that the standard according to which poetry is judged is still an ethical one. Aristotle's more elaborate defense is as yet ignored by English critics, not only by Elyot but also by Wilson and Ascham. Elyot stresses the need to select those autors who are morally profitable, but is tolerant with superficial immoralities and thinks that each reader should make his choice for himself:
(15) Wherefore since good and wise matter may be picked out of these poets, it were no reason for some light matter that is in their verses to abandon therefore all their works, no more than it were to forbear or prohibit a man to come into a fair garden lest the redolent savours of sweet herbs and flowers shall move him to wanton courage, or lest in gathering good and wholesome herbs he may happen to be stung by a nettle.
In matters of style, Elyot also demands a natural expression: he condemns an over-ornamented style. Eloquence is not a matter of ornamentation, but of effectiveness.
A more energetic reaction against rhetoric is found in John Jewel's (1522-71) Oratio contra rhetoricam (c. 1548). Rhetoric is condemned as a perversion of language and thought, and an absurd art which seeks to elaborate language, which should remain a natural and spontaneous gift. It is for Jewel an art of fraud.
It is not until the middle of the sixteenth century that we find something like a "school" of criticism in Cambridge, represented by Thomas Wilson, Sir John Cheke and Roger Ascham. Their main concern is with style: a defense of the vernacular English, while they oppose the over-elaboration of style; they reject "inkhorn" terms and the "aureate" diction of much of fifteenth-century poetry; they want English to be written "pure."
Thomas Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique (1560) is the English culmination of a reaction against medieval rhetoric. It is the most important in a series of works which lay a certain emphasis on the vernacular and try to revive ancient teaching. Wilson is more interested in giving reasonable advice on how to adapt style to different circumstances and uses than in fixing rules:
(16) The wise man will not be bound by any precise rules, . . . but such only as by reason he shall think best to use, being master over art, rather than art should be master over him.
For Wilson eloquence is a matter of thoughts before it is a matter of words: clear thought, adequate invention should be the ground style. It is no more than the sound but general advice of writers on rhetoric from Plato on. Clearness of expression is emphasized throughout; the orator must use words which are understood by all. Latin and Greek words must have been approved by custom before their use in English is advisable. Clauses must be short, and the discourse must follow a coherent development. Wilson follows the traditional doctrine of the three styles, high, middle, and low. Use of figures and tropes is free in the high style, but must be avoided in the low one.
More interesting is his treatment of humour and wit. Humour is usually caused by folly or by some deformity, physical or moral, though great vices or painful situations are not a fit subject for humour. This is the classical Aristotelian doctrine. "Wit, he explains, is occasioned by various devices; by ambiguous speech, by things said contrary to expectations, by puns and play upon words, by understatement and overstatement, or again by irony, as when a merry saying conceals a serious thought."
His ideas on description of character are also classical rather than medieval. Instead of the stereotyped catalogues of medieval rhetoric, Wilson suggests that we should draw a personality by using some detail which is vivid and significant --a description should be energetic. Nevertheless, Wilson upholds the theory of character-types (national, of age, of sex...).
His conception of poetry is also late medieval rather than Renaissance, as a kind of esoteric and allegorical oration. Wilson's work was to the taste of his age: it was cultured, readable and insisted on good sense and courtliness, and accordingly it went through many editions.
Roger Ascham's Scholemaster (1570) is a book on education, but it also deals with method in writing English prose. Although he does not write a systematic treatise, the spirit of Ascham's advice on rhetoric is close to Wilson's. Clear ideas, something definite to say, common words and brevity are a doctrine common to both. Ascham says that careful revision of verse consists mainly of reducing and compressing:
(17) Twenty to one offend more in writing too much than too little.
Ascham insists on the need to follow the model of the classics, especially Cicero and Virgil, not in each detail, but with an aim at adapting their methods, in search of a polished expression. Ascham criticises those who want to rely on Nature alone, and disdain the help of Art, and also those who think that imitating the ancients is copying their works instead of following their example rationally.
As in earlier humanists, we find in Ascham a primitive concept of poetry, in spite of some new conceptions derived from classical doctrine (e.g. in the definitions of tragedy and comedy). Ascham though that poetry was not too serious an activity. He associated it with foreign and corrupting fashions, or else with the barbaric past of the Middle Ages: Malory's Morte Arthur is "open manslaughter and bold bawdry." Chaucer is called "the English Homer" but is valued mostly for his moral teaching, although his skill in character-drawing, showing "the inward disposition of the mind" of each figure, is praised.
The decision Elyot, Wilson and Ascham took to write in English is an important and deliberate step in the defense of English as a vehicle of learning, since many humanists believed that no serious science or literature could be written in English. But in 1520, the dramatist John Rastell already praised the development English language and its use in literature, and was confident that important works written in English would come in time.
3.3.3. Early Defences of Poetry
In the last quarter of the sixteenth century the Puritans begin their attacks on art in general and on the theatre in particular, which they consider immoral. The best known of these is Stephen Gosson, who dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney his School of Abuse (1579). Sidney was a protestant all right, but not nearly as intolerant as Gosson; the Apology for Poetry is considered by some to be a retort to this uncalled-for dedication. It is the best treatise on poetics of the Elizabethan age, and will be studied separately.
The Apology for Poetry is not the first writing of its kind in England: it had been preceded by earlier "Defences" (apart from the works of Elyot and Luis Vives) like Richard Willis's De re poetica disputatio (1573) and John Rainolds's Oratio in laudem artis poeticae and Both are similar to the Apology, drawing on the same traditions. But they are written in Latin. Only Sidney's Apology is widely remembered today. Thomas Lodge, one of the "University wits," wrote a reply to The School of Abuse, the Defence of Poetry (1579). He adopts as his line of defence the medieval idea of allegory which is the most common view during the English Renaissance well into the seventeenth century. In poetry,
(18) under the shadow of birds, beasts and trees the follies of the world were deciphered.
From this point of view, poetry is secret philosophy, moral or natural, transmitted under a veil of fiction. As to the corrupting power of poetry, Lodge will have none of it --it is there only for those who want to be corrupted:
(19) Those of judgment can from the same flower suck honey with the bees, from whence the spiders take their poison.
Poetry may have a moralizing value for Lodge, and more than that, he sees it as a civilizing force. But all these ideas are part of the conventional defense.
We have seen that a concern with language and simplicity of style is common to Elyot, Wilson and Ascham. For a different view we must turn to a gloss on Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar published by one E. K. (1579). E. K. feels obliged to defend Spenser's "Gothic" and his use of a complex and archaic vocabulary, on the grounds that a strange diction is more dignified, allows more aesthetic effects, and that dissonance is also necessary in music.
Another defence of post-classical exuberance is found in Sir John Harington's Apology for poetry prefixed to his translation of Orlando furioso (1591). This is an epic which does not follow a unity of action, and is therefore unlike the Greek and Latin models; it has many protagonists and the narrator picks up one thread of the story leaving another hanging in the air. Harington defends this technique, which, he says, produces a pleasant suspense and compels the reader to go on to see the end of the work. He defends a liberty of treatment in epic poetry, arguing the laws laid by the Greeks are not necessarily binding on modern writers. Harington follows Tasso's ambiguous line of defence against Minturno: that Ariosto's poem is of an independent and legitimate kind, while trying to reconcile it to classical requirements.
3.3.4. Prosody and Theory
During the late Middle Ages there were three main tendencies in English prosody, which we can see exemplified in the works of Langland, Gower, and Chaucer.
· The alliterative tradition of Old English had a late flourishing in the fourteenth century, producing works such as Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Its main characteristics are alliteration, an absence of rhyme (although rhyme is sometimes used in combination with alliteration), an accentual rhythm and syllabic irregularity.
· The influence of French prosody, clearly felt in the works of Gower, manifests itself in the syllabic regularity of the lines and rhyme.
· Chaucer helped shape normal English prosody, giving his authority to the successful mixture of the two tendencies which had been effected in some popular poems. This mixed solution uses rhyme, and its pattern is accentual, though it preserves metrical regularity whenever adequate (that is, weak syllables do not count). Chaucer used with great success the decasyllabic line and the rhyme royal stanza (ababbcc; for instance in Troilus and Criseyde ), as well as the heroic couplet (Canterbury Tales).
This success had a short life, because the changes in language effected in the fifteenth century brought along an insecurity in prosody which was long to disappear. The imitators of Chaucer use chaotic rhythms and measures, and, what is more, these changes prevented later writers from appreciating the success of Chaucer's versification: as late a writer as Dryden still believes that Chaucer writes without metrical regularity, merely because he did not know the pronunciation of Middle English.
This situation lasts until the examples of Wyatt, Surrey and Spenser in the sixteenth century. The first metrical treatise after the Middle Ages is George's Gascoigne's Certayne Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse or Ryme in English (1575). Gascoigne (1542-77) condemns the carelessness of poets and warns against "ryme without reason," that is, against letting the formal patterns of poetry distort the sense. The basis of any poem must be something worth saying, not a series of ornamental expressions; words will follow naturally. Gascoigne does not reject poetical licence, conventional linguistic liberties allowed in poems, but he insists on clarity of style and brevity.
He classifies the main stanza-forms used in English: the rhyme royal, a seven-line decasyllabic stanza (ababbcc) is fit for "grave discourses"; the ballad, with six octosyllabic or hexasyllabic lines (ababcc) is used with "light matters," and other forms. He also rebukes the misuse of the term "sonnet," which was at the time being applied to any short poem. Gascoigne offers instead the Elizabethan version of the sonnet (as used by Spenser, Shakespeare...):
(20) the first twelve lines do rhyme in staves [i.e. stanzas] of four lines by cross metre, and the last two rhyming do conclude the whole.
But he does not mention blank verse or the heroic couplet. The tendency of English poets to write purely iambic verse is criticised, and variations with more complex feet (dactylic ´ - - , anapaestic - - ´) are recommended. He discountenances run-on lines and notes each stanza should enclose a unit of sense.
The most exhaustive and systematic of the Elizabethan treatises on poetry was the Art of English Poesie (1589), attributed to George Puttenham. The approach is rhetorical, with lists of figures and examples of their use in English poets, although Puttenham invents his own names and his own classification of figures, discarding the traditional ones. His general idea is that poetic language must be different from ordinary language, that it is more graceful due to the alterations in the form, the sound and the sense of words and sentences, additions and omissions, re-arrangements and disorder, amplifications and abrigments, which affect the ear of the receiver, his mind, or both. Puttenham likes formal patterns, and comments exhausively on them: he calls attention, for instance, to figure-poems, emblems, anagrams, "or again, the fantastic poem of the 9th-century monk, Hucbald, dedicated to Carolus Calvus in praise of bald heads, a veritable tour de force in which every word began with the letter 'c'." Puttenham is sympathetic to such Oulipian exercises avant la lettre, and observes that they suit poets at court because of the "high conceits and curious imaginations" they reveal. He defends the use of rhyme and syllabic prosody in English, and is also interesting by the emphasis he lays on the pleasures and emotion of poetry, rather than on the didactic aspect so commonly discussed at the time. Puttenham disregards the moral-allegorical defence, and notes instead the homoeopathic-cathartic value of the elegy. Indeed, he distinguishes between the public genres, comedy, tragedy, epic and satire, which are public in nature and have a moral and political aim, from minor genres like odes, epigrams, elegies, sonnets and ballads, which are private in nature and originate in the need of expressing individual emotions. On the whole Puttenham concentrates on minor genres, ignoring the Italian theorists who at this time followed Aristotle and developed theories privileging major genres like the epic and tragedy.
Puttenham shows a nationalistic ambition in affirming
(21) that there may be an Art of our English Poesie, as well as there is of the Latine and Greeke.
an art which is founded on "the law of Nature or reason." The trouble with Puttenham's claims, as with similar ones by Sidney, is that there was not so much great English poetry written so far to justify them. He "is apparently the first to recognize the existence of a standard dialect as the literary language, which had evolved from the several dialects of medieval times."
It is not surprising that many theorists, facing the chaotic situation in the theory of English prosody, tried to apply the well-established classical models to it. Important poets like Sidney and Spenser, and the scholar Gabriel Harvey, were in favour of this idea. Wilson and Ascham ridiculed rhyming verse. William Webbe published in 1586 a Discourse of English Poetrie, far inferior to Sidney's Apology, both in learning and in sympathy with the poetic spirit. He is also an advocate of classical prosody, and tries to rewrite some lines of Spenser with disastrous results. Richard Stanyhurst (1547-1618), went so far as to invent a new spelling to accomodate the English language to the classical measures in his translation from the Aeneid (1582). This classicist enterprise will have its devotees now and then during the next 250 years. It is also the subject of the last strictly Elizabethan discussion on literature, a debate between the poets Thomas Campion and Samuel Daniel on the question of rhyme. Both poets used rhyme, but Campion (Observations on the Art of English Poesie , 1602) despises it and endeavours to construct a rhymeless prosody, partly classical, but respecting the peculiarities of English; his treatise calls attention to the most interesting prosodical development of the English Renaissance, blank verse. Blank verse (introduced in Surrey's translation of the Aeneid, 1557) was to become the favourite meter of Shakespeare and Milton. Most theorists disregard it; it is not mentioned by Gascoigne or Puttenham. Ascham sees it as a compromise: he complained that it did not follow classical quantity, but the absence of rhyme had a classical precedent.
Daniel (A Defence of Rhyme, 1603) argues that it is senseless to despise rhyme just because it is not used in classical poetry, and holds that each language and each literature is entitled to its own ways and its own fashions
(22) Me thinkes we should not so soone yeeld our consents captiue to the authoritie of Antiquitie, vnlesse we saw more reason: all our vnderstandings are not to be built by the square of Greece and Italie. We are the children of nature as well as they. . .
This is a nationalistic defence of modernity and of native poetics which looks back to Harington and forward to Dryden. Common consensus and national tradition are to be the guidance, and not classical practice, though Daniel's position is moderate througthout.
Moreover, Daniel argues, rhyme gives more delight to the reader and far from being a hindrance to writing, it may help inspiration:
(23) In an eminent spirit whome Nature hath fitted for that mysterie, Ryme is no impediment to his conceit, but rather giues him wings to mount and carries him, not out of his course, but as it were beyond his power to a farre happier flight.
Limitation of form generally has merits which are appreciated by Daniel; this is the secret of the tight structure of the sonnets. Moreover, Daniel does not reject blank verse; he thinks it is especially fit for tragedies. The practice of poets was to decide in favour of Daniel's more flexible position. Even the poet-critics who advocate a prosodic reform, such as Campion or Sidney, do not practise in their poems what they preach in their treatises. The defenders of the classics recognize in the end that verse-forms in english poems must ultimately conform, not with alien rules, but with the characteristics of the English language.
Daniel's version of Renaissance optimism is also to be seen in his poem Musophilus (1599). "The main theme of Musophilus is that literature is primarily a means by which men may extend their own spiritual lives into the past and the future." Daniel's hope for the future is not only individual, as "he conjures up, as in a prophetic vision, the glory that awaits the progress of English verse and the future greatness of English literature" and its civilizing effects both in England and America.
3.3.5. Elizabethan Dramatic Criticism
The importance of drama as a literary genre in the Elizabethan age is evident. It developed, as it did in Spain, in an independent way, guided by the taste of a popular audience rather than by artistic tradition. Nevertheless, dramatic criticism is comparatively undeveloped during the sixteenth century. Elizabethan drama was not the work of refined courtiers and humanists, and was often disregarded as a lower form of poetry. The lack of a medieval tradition and the late introduction of Aristotelian criticism may also be accountable.
In the main, there are condemnations of dramatic practice, on formal or on moral grounds --of the mixture of tragedy and comedy, of wild and shapeless stories, of coarseness and immorality on stage, or of drama generally. The Puritans rejected drama as a whole; many humanists, like the University Wits (Thomas Nashe, Robert Greene, George Peele), derided native forms of comedy as coarse and of Marlovian tragedy (Tamburlaine, 1587) as bombastic and melodramatic.
There are also defences, like a prologue by Nicholas Grimald to his Christus Redivivus (1540), the now lost Play of Plays (1581) and Thomas Heywood's Apology for Actors (1612). Nicholas Udall, in the prologue to Ralph Roister Doister (1553) defends a more serious type of comedy as a respectable and moralizing form of writing. In the prologues to his works, John Lyly will emphasize imagination, the use of a witty and pleasing language and a plot which escapes from the classification into comedy or tragedy; the play must produce delight, "soft smiling, not loud laughing." Generally speaking, as the century draws towards its end, there is an increasing tendency to justify and improve native forms of comedy, instead of just disparaging them or suggesting Classical models, as the Humanists did. Criticism becomes then more concrete and independent, as well as more aware of the peculiarities of English literature.
There are attempts at defining and defending the new genres. Thomas Nashe commends history plays, a native development, because they promote virtue and patriotism-- an appreciation which is moral and political, rather than aesthetic. John Fletcher defines tragicomedy, which
(24) is not so called in respect of mirth and killings, but in respect it wanteth deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy.
This definition answers back the charge that tragicomedy breaks the tragic and comic feelings by mixing them; but still those plays exist (Shakespeare) and are not yet justified otherwise than through their popularity. The appeal to common taste to justify the new genres becomes more frequent; some still hold that drama has a didactic aim, while others say that the "new art" is one of mere amusement (f. i. Shakespeare's or Dekker's plays).
Shakespeare is of course the most important dramatist of the age, and is recognised as such by the chroniclers. But his own pronouncements on drama are ambiguous, since they are always spoken by some character in his plays. However, some statements seem to convey his own views, for instance when he makes Hamlet define the function of drama:
(25) to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.
The notion of drama as a mirror of life comes from Cicero, and is a Renaissance commonplace. However, it underlines the fact that Shakespeare wants to be above all mimetic, realistic, rather than directly moralizing; accordingly, in this scene Hamlet advises actors to use a way of declamation and gestures which are not exaggerated and suit the meaning of the words.
Shakespeare also reacted against strict adherence to the rules of time and space in drama, arguing that dramatic illusion is grounded not so much on the actual verisimilitude of staging as on the imaginative cooperation on the part of the audience: it is a convention which enables certain kinds of plays, such as history plays, to be possible at all.