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.[[371]]
The benefit, according to Gosson, which poetry should produce is that of good moral example. Moral doctrine, he believes accessible in the churches, and against the poets he urges that the evil social environment of the theatre offsets the benefit to be derived even from good plays. What profits the moral lesson of such a play if after witnessing the performance a man walk away with a woman whose acquaintance he has just made in the theatre.[[372]] He may drink wine, he may play cards, he may even enter a brothel.
In his Defence of Poetry (1579), Lodge retreats to the caverns of the middle ages to equip himself with arms. Under the influence of Campano, who died in 1477, he advances allegory as the explanation which makes the apparently light and trifling poets moral teachers of the utmost seriousness. Addressing Gosson he exclaims:
Did you never reade that under the persons of beastes many abuses were dissiphered? Have you not reason to waye that whatsoever ether Virgil did write of his gnatt or Ovid of his fley was all covertly to declare abuse?... You remember not that under the person of Aeneas in Virgil the practice of a dilligent captaine is described; you know not that the creation is signified in the Image of Prometheus; the fall of pryde in the person of Narcissus.[[373]]
And he quotes Lactantius as comparing poetry with the Scriptures. If either are taken literally, they will seem false. We should judge by the poet's hidden meaning.[[374]] The purpose of the poets, to Lodge, was "In the way of pleasure to draw men to wisdome." When he defends comedy, Lodge drifts away from allegory. Terence and Plautus he praises for furnishing examples of virtue and vice upon the boards, thus to amend the manners of his auditors. He believed that poetry did amend manners, and correct abuses--if properly used. But he is very quick to admit the very abuses which Gosson attacked.
I abhore those poets that savor of ribaldry: I will admit the expullcion of such enormities, poetry is dispraised not for the folly that is in it, but for the abuse whiche manye ill Wryters couller by it.[[375]] I must confess with Aristotle that men are greatly delighted with imitation, and that it were good to bring those things on stage that were altogether tending to vertue; all this I admit and hartely wysh, but you say unlesse the thinge be taken away the vice will continue. Nay I say if the style were changed the practise would profit.[[376]]
Thus he defends poetry bcause it teaches morality by example and by allegory.
With that higher intelligence and learning which have already been contrasted with the unthinking acceptance of his times[[377]] Sir Philip Sidney wrote his Apologie for Poetrie. 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,[[378]] in no way invalidates his claim to distinction. The purpose of poetry is to Sidney, in the first place, to teach and delight,[[379]] "that fayning notable images of vertues, vices, or what els, with that delightfull teaching which must be the right describing note to know a poet by."[[380]] 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. Sidney says that the poets "imitate both to delight and teach, and delight to move men to take the goodnes in hande ... and teach, to make them know that goodnes whereunto they are mooved."[[381]] It is incredible that he did not know this terminology as rhetoric. Poetry, he believes, fails if it does not persuade its reader to abandon evil and adopt good.
And that mooving is of a higher degree than teaching, it may by this appeare, that it is well nigh the cause of teaching. For who will be taught, if he bee not mooved with desire to be taught? and what so much good doth that teaching bring forth (I speak still of morall doctrine) as that it mooveth one to do that which it dooth teach?[[382]]