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In this dignified and vigorous pamphlet, written about 1583, and published in 1595, Sidney presents the best and most consistent argument for the moral purpose of poetry that appeared in England. That the main line of his argument and his best material is drawn from Minturno and Scaliger, as Spingarn has demonstrated, in no way invalidates his claim to distinction.
And as Aristotle had affirmed in his Rhetoric that the character of the speaker was one of the three essential elements in persuasion, Minturno is constrained to make the moral character of the poet an indispensable quality of his poetry. Like Minturno, Scaliger insisted that poetry must teach, move, and delight. It is thus the result in action which Minturno and Scaliger emphasize.
As Spingarn points out, Ben Jonson was first led to classicism in poetical theory by the example of Sidney. But during the intervening years the scholars of Holland had supplanted those of Italy; and whereas Sidney derived his Aristotelianism from Scaliger and Minturno, Jonson derived his even more from Pontanus, Heinsius, and Lipsius and from the Latin rhetoricians, Cicero and Quintilian.
It was edited again by Maggi in 1550, by Vettori in 1560, by Castelvetro in 1570, and by Piccolomini in 1575. It had inspired the De Poeta of Minturno and the Poetics of Scaliger. But with all the changes which were worked in the literary criticism of the renaissance by the recovery of Aristotle's Poetics, renaissance theories of poetry were nevertheless tinged with rhetoric.
He must move his readers to share the emotions of his characters, to shun vice, and embrace virtue. This extreme rhetorical parallel was further insisted on by Minturno , who defined the duty of a poet as so to speak in verse as to teach, to delight, and to move.
Sir John Harington who published his Brief Apologie of Poetrie in 1591, four years before the publication of Sidney's Apologie, based much of his treatise on Sidney. Unfortunately, he did not digest fully the arguments of the manuscript in his hand, and instead of a first-hand knowledge of Minturno and Scaliger had only the commonplaces of Plutarch.
To Budé all history was a moral example and Puttenham's inclusion of didactic fiction is in line with much renaissance thought, which regarded the two as almost interchangeable. Puttenham, like Webbe, was more in accord with Horace in admitting both the pleasant and profitable effects of poetry than he was with Minturno, Scaliger, and Sidney.
But as the end of all earthly learning is virtuous action, in Sidney's mind, he agrees with Minturno and Scaliger in borrowing from rhetoric Cicero's three-fold aim of the orator: to teach, to delight, to move.
In this respect, as has been shown, they were carrying on the traditions of the middle ages. The opposing view derived ultimately from the classical rhetorics, and entered England through the criticism of the Italian scholars particularly Minturno and Scaliger.
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