From Foul Sheets to Legitimate Model

YW ^rIHEN Philip Sidney praises dramatic poetry as an art of imitation, he speaks of it as representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth whose dual purpose is teach and delight.1 Sidney is not unique, of course, in extolling poetic representation, figures, and counterfeits as didactic devices. He is speaking from within a tradition of texts by Aristotle, Horace, and Scaliger. Nor is Sidney's Apology for Poetry the sole treatise in Renaissance England to ponder the significance of counterfeiting as a poetic norm and model teaching method. The pens of a group of polemical writers-John Northbrook, Stephen Gosson, and a myriad of other polemicists and preachers-spilled much ink in evaluating what and how counterfeiting teaches. Yet the intent of these essayists was not, like Sidney's, to link representation the highest end of the mistress knowledge ... in the knowledge of man's self, in the ethnic and politic consideration, with the end of well doing and not of well knowing only.2 Rather, Northbrook, Gosson, and their seventeenth-century counterpart William Prynne, who defined themselves as critics of the theater, recognized the end of dramatic counterfeiting to be the imitation of noysome lust, the visitation of stews and the solicitation of dolls common rather than the knowing and well doing of mistress knowledge. These critics of the theater do not debate Sidney's claim that dramatic poetry is an art of imitation, that its counterfeiting teaches the spectator how to know and perform things. The persuasiveness of such teaching is the source of their antitheatrical fear and their critique of dramatic counterfeiting. In admitting that plays teach even the art of counterfeit that so motivates drama, John Northbrook worries about the dangerous and infectious consequences of such instruction: If you will learne howe to bee false and deceyve your husbands, or husbands their wyves, howe to beguyle, howe to betraye, to flatter, lye, sweare, to disobey and rebell against princes ... shall not you learne, then, at such interludes how to practice them?3 So potent is the theatrical infection described by Northbrook that it cannot be attributed to any one aspect of dramatic spectacle and life

Art · History · Irish and British Studies · Philosophy · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

• The Script in the Marketplace

  Joseph Loewenstein•Representations•1985

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