3.4.1. Life, Work and Sources
Sidney was the son of an illustrious family. He received a solid education, based on the medieval trivium (Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic), and the classical languages and literature. He travelled widely through Europe, and met in person many of the leading humanists of all countries. Early in his life he developed Protestant sympathies, and he was active in the politics of his country, aiming at establishing an international Protestant league against Spain. He died in the Netherlands, in a skirmish with Spanish forces while on mission for the Queen.
Sidney is remembered for his sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella and for his pastoral novel interspersed with poetry, Arcadia. He did not write for publication; the Defence was probably written in the early 1580s, and it circulated in manuscript copies before it was published posthumously in 1595 in two separate editions under two different titles: An Apology for Poetry and The Defence of Poesy.
Sidney's aim in writing the Apology was to justify that a sensible and comprehensive control over human affairs can be learnt from poetry. Poetry is not a contemplative but a practical activity: it is designed to teach. Sidney links the Reformation with the advancement of learning, and this with poetry. Poetry, then, has a direct usefulness to the building of the nation; writing good poetry is a patriotic enterprise.
Three traditions of critical thought mingle in Sidney:
· The Horatian-Aristotelian combination current in Italian poetics. Aristotle is seen as a support to Horace, but on the whole he is not a major influence on his own yet. The first English version of Horace's Art was published in 1567; later, Ben Jonson was to make his well-known verse rendering. Horace reaches Sidney directly; we do not know whether it is the same with Aristotle. He certainly knew some of his Italian commentators.
· The classical rhetorical tradition, whose main figure is Cicero. This tradition had lived on during the Middle Ages in the trivium. Following a medieval tradition and encouraged by Cicero, the Humanists subsume poetry under rhetoric. Poetry is seen by many as a variant of ornamented prose. In England, Ascham and Wilson present this account. Sidney opposes it: he sees rhetoric as merely a "serving science," an instrument of other disciplines. Poetry is more than rhetoric: it is a special kind of knowledge and creation for Sidney, even though he is careful to make poetry the vehicle of morality and religion.
· The Platonic, or rather the neo-Platonic tradition as transmitted by Boethius and Ficinus. These neo-Platonists admit that the beauty of objects is a way of ascending towards the divine beauty.
We may recognize in Sidney a Horatian background reinforced by Aristotelian and Ciceronian technicalities as well as by the Platonic Ideal. The plan of the Apology is as follows: first an encomium of poetry in humanist terms, underlining the authority of the ancients. There follows a comparison between poetry and other disciplines of knowledge, with a refutation of the current objections against poetry, a discussion of poetic forms, and lastly, an examination of the state of English poetry.
3.4.2. Poetry: Its nature and aims
Sidney's Apology follows a line of Humanist vindication of poetry which is already old by the time he writes (though not so much in England). Dante and Petrarch had rejected the low estimate of poetry current during the Middle Ages, and Boccaccio had identified poetry with high-toned, serious-minded and learned poetry. Some chapters of the Genealogy of the Gentile Gods set the tone for the numerous essays written for the next three centuries demanding a prominent place of poetry among the other disciplines of learning. Still, we see that in Sidney's time poetry was condemned by some Puritans; philosophical attacks against poetry (Cornelius Agrippa, De vanitate et incertitudine scientiarum, 1527) were not lacking either. It is obvious that the defense of poetry was the critical task proper of the age.
To Sidney, a man with an acute political and religious sense, the highest sciences are those which teach virtuous action in the political or the ethical sphere. These are history and moral philosophy. Theology he refuses to consider alongside human learning; it has for him a sphere of its own outside which it cannot stand comparison. His comparison of poetry with history and with philosophy is based on Scholastic psychology, which distinguishes three main faculties in the human mind: imagination, reason, and memory. The different kinds of learning are directed to one or another of these faculties:
(26) enriching of memory (i.e. history), enabling (or strengthening) of judgment (i.e. philosophy), and enlarging of conceit (i.e. poetry).
Enlarging of conceit: that is, expanding the human mind and improving ideas. In order to present this concept in a lively way, Sidney depicts character-sketches of the historian and the philosopher which are close to caricatures.
During the Renaissance there was not much theorising on metaphysics, but there was an acute interest in applied philosophy. "Much of Renaissance achievement lay in diffusing over all human activities the intense, highly specialised acquisitions of philosophy in medieval times" (Shepherd 31). Sidney presents a typical Renaissance attitude in seeing the man of letters as the model for learning, and not the abstract philosopher, who is caricatured as a mixture of Scholastic pedant and minor Greek philosopher. Practical, useful and effective knowledge, leading to action, is valued more highly than abstract theory.
The Humanists tend to establish comparisons between history and poetry. We saw that Castelvetro defined poetry as an imitation of history; Lorenzo Valla sees in history the source of both poetry and philosophy. Sometimes these opinions are reversed, but all the disciplines are seen as closely related. History is valued for its rhetorical power, apart from its factualness. It is seen as a school of examples and morals. And of course there is an increasing political, nationalistic interest in the writing of history.
Sidney distrusts too high a rating of the moral and educative value of history. He stresses that it deals with particulars, and not universals, an opinion already advanced by Aristotle. History is not then guided by a rational principle, but by mere facts which may contradict what is morally desirable. Poetry, on the other hand, supplies that rational organization and so it is a reliable moral guide; its examples are more ideal than those of history because they are not tied to fact and can be modelled on pure moral intention.
One main argument for Sidney's defense of poetry is that all sciences depend on nature, but that poetry is a higher activity than science. All sciences are dependent on nature, but poetry builds a nature of its own:
(27) Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect into another nature, in making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in Nature, as the heroes, demigods, cyclops, chimeras, furies, and such like; so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts but freely ranging within the zodiac of his own wit. Nature never set forth the earth in so rich a tapestry as divers poets have done, neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely. Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden.
We see that poetry presents a "golden world", that is, an ideal world which brings out the potentialities of the real one. According to this conception, poetry gives examples, but not merely in the way of allegory, veiled theology or moral philosophy. "To Sidney . . . poetry was an exercise of the free creative faculty, in which the poet transcended the limitations of actual life, yet succeeded by means of his fictions in giving a delightful and inspiring revelation of ideal and universal truth." It is, fundamentally, a neo-Platonic position. Sidney does not see that this idea is contrary to Plato's views. At first sight, the theory is not too far from Aristotle's, though it seems to lean more to the side of idealization --Aristotle also accepts realistic poetry. Sidney quotes Aristotle to support his idea that poetry works with universal concepts, and not with particulars, that it aims at universal value. But while Aristotle's universals are generally cognitive, Sidney's universals are moral. Sidney's theory of poetry as the production of another nature derives from Scaliger, but Sidney adds religious and transcendental overtones coming from neo-Platonism theories of the ideal world.
Many of the scholastic accounts of poetry gave it a humble place among the sciences, and often equated fiction with lies. For instance, Conrad of Hirsau praises Virgil in the following terms:
(28) There has never been a [greater] author in terms of style and metre, and no one, when he ought to have told the truth, nevertheless lied in a more polished and civil fashion.
One of Sidney's main arguments in defense of poetry is his riposte to the accusation that poetry is a kind of lie:
(29) The poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth. For, as I take it, to lie is to affirm that to be true which is false . . . . But the poet (as I said before) never affirmeth. The poet never maketh any circles about your imagination, to conjure you to believe for true what he writes . . . . And therefore, though he recount things not true, yet because he telleth them not for true, he lieth not. (124)
Sidney's argument, based on the difference in intention, might derive from Augustine's definition of lying. At first sight, this may sound like a good riposte. It is indeed a primary and essential justification of fiction against the obtuse accusation that it does not present us with factual truth, a justification that apparently has to be repeated at regular intervals. But taken as a whole it is a highly problematical assertion, and it does not solve the problem of the relationship between fiction and truth. The poet does affirm after all, because there is a logical relationship between fiction and reality. Otherwise, he could not teach, and Sidney assumes that he can. Saying that poetry does not affirm may be problematic if taken literally -it might imply that poetry need not have any relationship of congruence with the rest of reality: it would be a theory of art for art's sake. Some of the assertions in the Apology take a dangerous approach to that view. Poetry would be not an interpretation of reality, but an alternative, improved reality. There is a risk of contradiction with Sidney's main aim in writing the treatise: to show that this congruence exists, and that poetry is a mode of knowledge which provides us with a better understanding of the real world.
In fact, according to the main argument of Sidney's theory, the discovery of inherent reason within nature produces an imitation which betters nature, but the notion of creation ex nihilo is absent. The poet's activity is not seen as one of creation; it is rather a discovery or recognition of a pattern which was already there in an imperfect way. It is arguable, though, that Sidney does not develop a fully consistent view of the relation between poetry and reality. And of course poetry may be badly used, and not help us in discovering the truth: it may deal with phantastiké, with unworthy objects, instead of guiding us along the patterns of God's creation. As any instrument, poetry is dependent on the moral nature of he who uses it.
Sidney condemns aestheticism as something which jumps out of the natural order of things. Things must be content with their place, and subservient to the whole of God's scheme: even a purse, beautifully embroidered though it may be, must answer to its original function, keeping money inside (Arcadia ). Everything in nature is directed to an end, and nothing is an end in itself. Art must therefore be used to hide art, and shoew that both poetry and nature are subject to decorum. Sidney believes that poetry can provide a grasp of the design governing the whole.
Sixteenth-century interpretations of Aristotle and Horace lean towards didacticism; it is always Horace's third possible aim for poetry (to please and teach) which is quoted, repeated and emphasized (although there are some exceptions to this view, like Castelvetro).
Sidney defends usefulness in poetry. Delight is instrumental to the main purpose, but it is a good in itself as well. This assertion of pleasure is also a typical phenomenon of the Renaissance: we may think of Lorenzo Valla's De voluptate (1440), a vindication of pleasure and of active life which goes against all the medieval ideals. Delight is good for Sidney, because it derives from the recognition of harmony, perfection or goodness. It appeals then not merely to the senses, but to the understanding as well. Poetry can catch some of the delight of the senses by means of the words, which substitute sense experience. It also provides, of course, an intellectual delight.
But the main characteristic of poetry is its power to move. Moving has two senses: stirring the emotions of the reader and inducing him to action. To move does not mean to perturbate the hearer in any way, but rather to persuade him to do something. Sidney would agree with Puttenham's claim that
(30) poets from the beginning were the best persuaders and their eloquence the first rhetoric in the world.
Moving is a higher aim than teaching, because its effects are seen in actual action. We may think here of this threefold aim of poetry (teach, delight and move) similar those set by Cicero to the accomplished orator. The Christian reformulation of this doctrine by St. Augustine had set as the sole aim of the discipline to move men to holiness. Renaissance theory of literature still shows a strong rhetorical influence in seeing moving and conviction as the main end of poetry. Since poetry is more moving than both philosophy and history, poetry for Sidney "in the most excellent work is the most excellent workman." The idea that poetic style is more affective and moving, that it is more fit to lead the emotions of people who cannot reach the abstractions of philosophy, is a commonplace of medieval scholasticism. According to Henry of Ghent,
(31) in the speculative sciences, where the main aim is the illumination of the intellect, one must proceed by way of proof and in a subtle manner, but in moral matters, where the goal is an upright will and that we should become good, one must proceed by persuasion and use of figures.
Sidney has probably inherited this conception. It originates in the Ethics of Aristotle, and it is consonant with Sidney's conception of poetry as an instrument of ethics. However, Sidney's views on poetry should be distinguished from Aristotle's, since they are much more heavily rhetorical. Aristotle "never suggests that poetry is an effective way of communicating a kind of knowledge that could also be communicated (but less effectively) by other kinds of discourse." At the basis of this conception is the idea that poetic techniques are only a means of presentation, a "form" which is added to a pre-established "content." Renaissance theory does not conceive of poetry as a means of discovery, and divorces form from content.
3.4.3. The Poet
Sidney dismisses (as Scaliger before him) Plato's condemnation of the poets in the Republic, and commends instead what he believes to be the praise bestowed on the poet in Ion, even though he points out that the claim of divine inspiration is excessive. It is characteristic of Renaissance theorists that they tend to present Plato as a defender of poetic inspiration; for them, Plato condemned only the abuse of poetry. Sidney does not favour much any theory of inspiration. The Roman name given to the poets, vates or prophets, he adduces as a proof of reverence bestowed on them, but acknowledges that in itself it is superstitious.
There is a tendency in neo-Platonism to draw a parallel between human and divine creation: "What God creates in the world by His thought man conceives in himself by intellectual act and expresses it in language, puts it into his books and makes a copy of it using earthly materials" (Shepherd 62). How is this to be effected? Ronsard, Tasso, Puttenham, Chapman, and many other poets and critics in the Renaissance advocate the old inspirationalist theory in Ion, which at the time is taken to be an exaltation of poetry, and speak of the "divine fury" of the poet. "Possessed by this fury, a poet's spirit was thought to rise to a direct awareness of the divine harmony and acquire a supernatural wisdom." Willis notes that poetic fury is not to be understood as pathological madness, but rather as a state of exaltation induced by intense concentration. Others speak of direct divine inspiration. For Spenser, poetry was
(32) no art, but a divine gift and heavenly instinct, not to be gotten by labour and learning, but adorned with both, and poured into the wit by a certain enthousiasmos and celestial inspiration.
Giordano Bruno wrote in England and dedicated to Sidney his work De gli Eroici Furori (1585). But the dedication, though not as unwelcome as Stephen Gosson's, was equally misapplied, because Sidney himself did not adhere to these doctrines of inspiration and had satirized them in Astrophil and Stella:
- (33)
- I never drank of Aganippe well,
- Nor ever did in shade of Tempe sit;
- And muses scorn with vulgar brains to dwell;
- Poor layman I, for sacred rites unfit
- Some do I hear of poet's fury tell,
- But (God wot) wot not what they mean by it. . . .
- (from Sonnet 74)
Sidney believes that the poet has an insight into the proper nature of things, but this insight comes from right reason, not from any kind of fury or madness. It is a controllable force. Sidney's doctrine may have some neo-Platonic traits, but it is a very reasonable brand of neo-Platonism, similar to that applied to painting by the Italian painter and theorist Zuccaro. The ideas in human mind are all right the images of the divine ideas, but they have a low origin: they are derived from sense, and they are not "substantial", like the divine ones, but "accidental."
Poetry, then, is a vocation, a rational activity, not a divine gift in any other sense than the reason common to men is divine. But "orator fit, poeta nascitur": poetry must lead, and not be led. It is an "unelected vocation," and one which ought to be a demanding one, Sidney implies as he exhorts his fellow-poets to more self-discipline. More work and less heroic fury: this is Sidney's classicist advice.
But there are more romantic elements than this in Sidney's theory of poetry than this counsel would warrant. Towards the end of the Apology, Sidney complains that in the lyrical poets of his time Sidney finds a general lack of energy which betrays a lack of passion:
(34) many of such writings as come under the banner of unresistible love, if I were a mistress, would never persuade me they were in love. (175)
Persuasion may be the end of love lyrics, but to persuade one must move, and one does not move by mere imitation and study, without energy. Persuasion is therefore linked to expression and to a renewal of the rhetorical tradition. Sidney opposes using conventional rhetorical ornaments becayse they work against the main aim of poetry: worn-out resources are no longer convincing. The poet must find a new and more vivid expression, something which only the poet's personal experience and subjective enthusiasm can provide. This conception is not much stressed in the Apology, but it is a suggestive theme in Astrophil and Stella (SEE PHOTOCOPIES):
This poem is written at the start of a tradition which favours original invention over imitation of previous authors, a tradition which will not come to the foreground of literary theory until the Romantic age. It is significant that we find this statement in a poem, and not in Sidney's purposed theoretical formulation of his poetic principles; sometimes a writer's theory and his practice are not completely coordinated. In the Apology the classical tradition is given a much more prominent role. And it is only feeling that Sidney is favouring; of imagination he is more distrustul, because he links it to pestilent desires.
In the Apology, the poet is dealt with only as an embodiment of his art. Sidney does not pay much attention to the personality of the poet, and is not much concerned with his mental states. The poet has the dignity of his craftÊhis ideal must be one of great seriousness. He has the public role of a teacher, which he is to perform in the activities of his life as a courtier, after the ideal formulated by Castiglione and Elyot. Being a courtier is not a restricted ideal at that time: the ideal courtier is a man of learning, a man of fashion, good manners and witty conversation, a lover, a politician and a warrior.
The poet is not committed to publication. The aristocrat Sidney favours the kind of restricted and privileged audience he enjoyed during his lifetime; the Apology itself was designed for restricted circulation in courtly circles. At the end of the treatise, Sidney indulges in a half-serious, half-playful call to the reader, asking him to become a defender of poetry, too:
(35) Thus doing, your name shall flourish in the printer's shops; thus doing, you shall be of kin to many a poetical preface; thus doing, you shall be most fair, most rich, most wise, most all, you shall dwell upon superlatives. (142)
3.4.4. The Poem: Genres
Sidney stresses the importance of decorum: the differences between the poetic genres must be preserved. This difference in form is linked to a difference in end: each kind of poetry and each genre follows different aims and is designed to please a different kind of public. There are three main kinds of poetry: religious, philosophical, and imaginative poetry. This last kind is the most properly poetic one, and the one Sidney is most concerned with. It is subdivided into several genres. Sidney's list of genres is typical of the Renaissance, partly based on metre and partly on subject matter. It follows an order of preeminence, and includes Heroic Poetry, Lyric Poetry, Tragic Poetry, Comic Poetry, Satiric Poetry, Iambic Poetry, Elegiac Poetry, Pastoral Poetry.
Each genre has its own end and its own merit: pastoral, for instance, is interpreted by Sidney as an essentially allegorical genre which sings of virtue and politics under cover of talesÊthis is certainly the case in Spenser's Colin Clout and in Sidney's Arcadia. Elegy sings the evils of the world, iambic poetry (the epigram) decries villainy, and satire makes us reflect on our own folly.
Comedy imitates the common errors of life. Through it we get an experience of vice and learn the effects which are to be expected from it. It shows evil characters and doings, but that does not mean that it teaches evil; Sidney compares it to a mirror which must show truth: this means that it is a realistic genre, instead of an idealized one like tragedy and epic.
Tragedy is interpreted by Sidney in the standard fashion of his age: it shows the uncertainty of human fortune, and gives advice to kings and tyrants. To this medieval idea, he adds the Aristotelian idea that the function of tragedy is to cause pity and fear, or, as he puts it, "admiration and conmiseration." But the emphasis is on moral teaching rather than on emotional catharsis, and so the theory not quite Aristotelian. Sidney expounds the doctrine of the unities of space and time, which had been developed in the continent by Robortello, Scaliger, and Castelvetro; but he presents these rules as sensible recommendations rather than as inviolable precepts.
Lyric is rated in the Apology rather more highly than in other Renaissance treatises, maybe because Sidney himself was an outstanding practitioner of the genre. Anyway, there is a general move in the Renaissance to recognize the seriousness of lyric poetry. The aim of lyric is for Sidney to praise virtue, give moral precepts and sing the praise of God; it teaches honourable enterprises and is the enemy of idleness. It is striking that most of Sidney's lyrical production (and most of what we consider lyric poetry) falls outside this definition. As we can see, Sidney is so eager to demonstrate the didactic purpose of all genres that he distorts actual practice. But in Sidney's own poetry we can find the traditional objectives of instruction and delight combined with a more urgent affective goal, which touches the poet himself. The close link between lyric and subjective feeling is clearer in Sidney's poems than in his treatise, althought here he insists on the need for sincerity and he condemns the tendency to rhetorical and insincere forms. He calls for a less elaborated, more direct lyrical style.
Like most Renaissance theorists, Sidney places epic poetry foremost in his list of genres. The model to follow is the Aeneid. Heroic poetry moves men with example and makes virtue triumph. It is the most idealized of all the genres, and therefore the closest to the essence of poetry within Sidney's conception. It was surely his early death what prevented Sidney from attempting the writing of a protestant epic, a work which would have fulfilled all the ideals of poetic relevance and high seriousness that the neo-Classical theory ideally demands from literature.
3.4.5. The Poem: Prosody and Diction
It results from Sidney's definition of poetry that verse form is ancillary, not essential to poetry, as Minturno had held against Scaliger. Verse is the most adequate form for poetry, since it is more harmonious and dignified, but
(36) It is not rhyming and versing that maketh a poet, no more than a long gown maketh an advocate.
Imaginative writings in prose can also be called poetry. Metre is appropriate because it reflects the harmony of the Universe. It is also a good mnemonic resource and helps poetry in teaching; besides, it favours the alliance of poetry with "divine music." But in the last analysis it is only an ornament, not a necessity. It is "feigning" together with teaching that makes a poet, and not verse. A shortcoming of this way of putting it is that verse seems something which is added to a pre-existing meaning, instead of helping to constitute that meaning.
The rhythm of modern verse, he says, is based on "number, with some regard of the accent," and on rhyme. Sidney was one of several poets who tried to adapt the Classical measures to English. One reason is that he was aware of the danger that the mechanical necessity of rhyme may distort the coherence of the poem. Like Gascoigne, Sidney argues that rhyme must be founded on reason. In submitting sound to sense, a writer declares the rationality of poetry.
In spite of his defense of classical poetry, Sidney's views are not extreme. He accepts and uses rhyme, and he believes that the English language is fit for both types of versification, the classical and the modern one, because of the free position of the accent in its vocabulary (as compared to French, for instance). He seems to think that classical verse can be adapted to English substituting accent for quantity. Other attempts at using classical prosody in English were a failure, because the English ear perceives accentual and even syllabic rhythm as more significant than any metrical pattern resting on an alterance of long and short vowels.
There were two general attitudes to style current in Sidney's time:
· That good style consists in an elaborate, difficult and ornamented language, different from the simplicity of everyday speech.
· That the best style is simple and direct, that ornaments only serves to hinder the clarity of truth.
In rhetoric as well as in poetry, Sidney leans moderately to the second position. He opposes the extremely ornamental diction of Euphuism, even though he advocates a polished aesthetic use of language. Words, he thinks, should remain transparent and be comprehensible to the hearer. The ideal is (as in similar proposals in Italy, France, or Spain) that of the conversational speech of courtiers, in which art is used to hide art, instead of showing it, and the result is both simple and polished. The rhetorical tradition of Cicero and Demosthenes, Sidney believes, will no longer carry out the aim of poetry, which is to persuade, because its resources are now evident: there is a surfeit of rhetoric. Conviction will only come through sincerity, and this cannot exist together with rhetoric. However, Sidney himself did not always write according to the principles he preached. His novel Arcadia (1580), inspired in Sannazaro and Montemayor, is written in a florid style which often out-Lylies Lyly.
3.4.6. English Poetry
In the Apology we find one of the earliest surveys of English literature. Apart from the usual complaints that poetry has fallen from an earlier state of preeminence and that contemporary poets are cold and rhetorical, Sidney presents us with the "great tradition" of English poetry up to his time: among medieval poets he values Chaucer (though he mentions Troilus and Criseyde rather than The Canterbury Tales), and he shows an appreciation for medieval romances and ballads uncommon in a Humanist. Among his contemporaries he praises the Earl of Surrey, and Spenser, though he does not approve of the archaic diction of the latter.
As concerns drama, he complains that English tragedies and comedies, even the great Gorboduc , are faulty as to the classical rules of space and time: the English stage is fond of dramatising many episodes which should instead be narrated in a messenger speech, or suppressed altogether by plunging in medias res. He calls for a strict verisimilitude of the action represented on the stage, and for less reliance on the fancy of the spectator. Besides, he says, Englishmen are too fond of farce, and spoil their tragedies by turning them into tragicomedies. The aim of the stage (even in the case of comedy) for Sidney is to produce delight, rather than laughter:
(37) delight we scarcely do but in things that have a conveniency to ourselves or to the general nature; laughter almost ever cometh of things most disproportioned to ourselves and nature. (136).
Comedy is more polished and intellectual than farce. It makes us laugh by exposing human foibles, not through mere clowning; laughter should come from its satiric aspect. As to tragicomedy, it is not rejected outright; only the sudden breaches of tone which spoil the tragic effect. The test is the emotional effect, the quality of the dramatic illusion produced, not a blind submission to the rules.
Sidney concludes with a profession of faith in the future of English language, and analysing its advantages (mixed vocabulary, simple grammar, sweet sound) which will make it capable of producing great literature in the future. The Apology itself, because of its intrinsic merits and its historical significance, lives up to this expectation. One of its merits is to have made literary criticism readable and entertaining for the English audience of the Renaissance; many of its ideas were influential on writers like Shakespeare and Ben Jonson.