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Lyly's Euphues suffers from overwrought conceits and forced antitheses, but it influenced writers to pay more attention to the manner in which thought was expressed. The flowery prose of Sidney's Arcadia presents a pastoral world of romance. His Apologie for Poetrie is a meritorious piece of early criticism.
Though the work was taken up idly as a summer's pastime, it became immensely popular and was imitated by a hundred poets. The Apologie for Poetrie , generally called the Defense of Poesie, appeared in answer to a pamphlet by Stephen Gosson called The School of Abuse , in which the poetry of the age and its unbridled pleasure were denounced with Puritan thoroughness and conviction.
While in the meantime two Armies fly in, represented with four swords and bucklers, and then what hard heart will not receive it for a pitched field!"* *An Apologie for Poetrie, published 1595. If the actors of the Elizabethan time had no scenery they made up for the lack of it by splendid and gorgeous dressing. But it was the dressing of the day.
A Discourse of English Poetrie by the laborious but uninspired tutor, William Webbe, is not a defense; but interspersed among his remarks advocating the reformed versifying, and his arid catalog of poets, ancient and modern, is a good deal about the moral purpose and value of poetry.
It was during the ten years preceding the publication of Webbe's Discourse that this controversy seems to have been hottest. From the first, perhaps, it bulked more largely with the critics than with the poets themselves. Gosson's School of Abuse, 1579. Webbe's Discourse of English Poetrie, 1586. Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie, 1589. Harington's Apologie of Poetrie, 1591.
This tale must at one time or other giue vp the ghost, and as good now as stay longer, I would gladly rid my hands of it cleanly if I could tell how, for what with talking of coblers, & tinkers, & roapemakers, and botchers, and durt-daubers, the marke is cleane gone out of my muses mouth, and I am as it were more than dunsified twixt divinitie and poetrie.
Whereby moste plainly maie be comprehended, with how moche felicitie he did describe his conceiptes, and how moche for Poetrie he should have ben estemed, if the same for the ende therof, had of him ben exercised.
"Fraunces Petrark, the laureat poete," is to him one "whose rethorique sweete enlumyned al Itail of poetrie." The "Troilus" which he produced about 1382 is an enlarged English version of Boccaccio's "Filostrato"; the Knight's Tale, whose first draft is of the same period, bears slight traces of his Teseide.
A dainty bit in Sidney's "Apologie for Poetrie" seems to me aptly to characterize our author's prose: "The uttering sweetly and properly the conceits of the minde, which is the end of speech."
Gosson writes: The right use of auncient poetrie was to have the notable exploytes of worthy captaines, the holesome councels of good fathers and vertuous lives of predecessors set down in numbers, and sung to the instrument at solemne feastes, that the sound of the one might draw the hearers from kissing the cup too often, and the sense of the other put them in minde of things past, and chaulke out the way to do the like.
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