SOURCE: "Sidney's Feigned Apology," in Renaissance Minds and Their Fictions: Cusanus, Sidney, Shakespeare, University of California Press, 1985, pp. 134-56.

In the following excerpt, Levao examines some of the difficulties and paradoxes in Sidney's An Apology for Poetry.

Any attempt to discuss Sidney's theory of poetic fictions proves to be something of a paradox, since An Apology for Poetry opens with a warning not to take theories too seriously. There Sidney compares himself to his master in horsemanship, John Pietro Pugliano, who, not content to teach his young students the practical side of his profession, "sought to enrich [their] minds with the contemplations therein." So mighty does his art appear, thanks to the light of self-love, that "if I had not been a piece of a logician before I came to him, I think he would have persuaded me to have wished myself a horse" (p. 95).¹ Following his master...