Criticism

Renaissance literary criticism in England began in 1580, when Philip Sidney sat down during an idle summer at Wilton House to write The Defence of Poesy. Probably. Maybe it began five years previously, when George Gascoigne had some notes on versification included at the end of his Posies. Or perhaps it started earlier still, when Richard Willes included some theses on the art of poetry in his collection of pattern-poems. What about before that? After all, Willes went to school at Winchester, and it seems his interests were encouraged there – from what we can tell, at least, his headmaster, Christopher Johnson, instructed the boys to debate set questions about poetry and its effects. But Willes wrote in Latin, rather than English, so maybe he doesn’t count. What does it matter if Spenser read him and liked him?

Maybe Renaissance literary criticism was actually invented in 1815, when Joseph Haslewood printed the final volume of Ancient Critical Essays. Haslewood was developing the work of some eighteenth-century scholars, including Samuel Johnson and Joseph Warton, who had toyed with the idea of writing the history of English criticism. He was, however, the first editor to print a selection of Renaissance treatises on poetry – from Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesy (1589) to Daniel’s Defence of Ryme (1603) – alongside one another, as well as the earliest to categorise them, according to their common characteristics, as ‘critical essays’. In doing so, he created a canon of Renaissance texts which have been debated, compared, and anthologised as a group ever since, and which still tend to be dubbed works of ‘Renaissance literary criticism’.

Peter Paul Rubens. The Four Philosophers. 1611-12. Pitti Palace, Florence.

Despite the terms we now use to refer to their works, it was unusual for writers in sixteenth-century England to identify themselves as ‘critics’, and rarer still for them to tell their readers that they wrote ‘criticism’. The word ‘critic’ originates in Greek, in the verb krinein (to judge), and derives from the adjective kritikos (discerning, critical), which could be used as a substantive (that is, as a noun) to refer to a grammarian. Yet it appears that, as the term passed via the classical languages into popular use, it became primarily a term of ridicule, reserved for use against censorious pedants, rather than a title bestowed upon expert readers of literature. Thus, in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (1598), the term mingles connotations of cynicism and severity, when Biron chides himself for having been ‘[a] critic, nay, a night-watch constable, | A domineering pedant’ (III.i.171–2).

John Florio goes further, figuring critics as sea-beasts, who come across as being all the more out of place for managing to eke out their living on land. For this early modern man of letters, critics are ‘Pirates in [a] paper sea’, ‘sea-dogs, or lande-Critikes, monsters of men’ ([a5]v). In a similar vein, Thomas Nashe compared overzealous fault-finders to curs, but he would also add part of another animal to the chimera – his ‘critical Zenos’ (E4v) are also ‘mice-eyed decipherers and calculaters uppon characters’ (K2r).

Notwithstanding the genuine threat that writers like Nashe faced from slanderers and censors, a significant reason why ‘critic’ served so readily as a term of abuse was doubtless to do with class. Elizabethan men, on the whole, reserved their esteem for rhetoricians who devised arguments in public debates. The ‘mice-eyed’ critic (who, as I have mentioned, was associated with the grammarian) cut a decidedly less macho figure. In the Renaissance, the study of grammar involved close reading, as well as the correction and comparison of works of poetry, and thus encompassed a far broader set of activities than our modern understanding might lead us to expect. Nevertheless, grammar’s reputation in the ancient world as a lesser activity, or as mere training, cast long shadows. The Roman theorist, Quintilian, helpfully illustrates the classical attitudes that filtered into Renaissance culture. For despite all his admiration for the attentive criticism of the grammarian, Quintilian is keen to emphasise his own superior status as a rhetor, or rhetoric teacher. The relative social standing of practitioners in these two closely-related disciplines is made abundantly clear.

N. de Larmessin, after T. de Bry. Julius Caesar Scaliger. 1682. Line Engraving. Wellcome Library, London. Licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0).

There is, however, another side to the story. Prior to its emergence in the vernacular as a term of abuse, criticism had experienced a more serious revival among Latin humanists, particularly in France, as part of the discipline of poetics. In Book V of his Poetices libri septem (1561), the Italian émigré and polymath Julius Caesar Scaliger compared passages from Homer and Virgil alongside one another, with the aim of determining the relative merits of each. ‘Criticus’, to use the Latin title given by Scaliger to Book V, was made up of judgement (iudicio) and imitation (imitatio), and it was the final activity for would-be poets to perform before writing their own verse. In other words, Scaliger intended criticism to be the tool they would use to determine the best authors, and, having done so, to decide which of them to imitate. In the programme outlined over the course of his Poetices libri, criticism was to become an indispensable part of the poet’s work.

It was also, for Scaliger, to be rather wide ranging. Revision of one’s own writing, he thought, should be called criticism, since it requires the author to reconsider it as though it had been written by somebody else. And so, in Scaliger’s wake, other writers saw a role for friends and conversation. Pierre de Ronsard, for example, suggests that aspiring poets should make serious conversation with others about their work an integral part of their craft. Ideas of this kind fed directly into the works of authors like Willes and Sidney long before the words ‘critic’ and ‘criticism’ began being used widely in English. They stand in stark contrast to the devious activities captured in the caricatures presented by Florio and Nashe at the end of the century.

If they were able to read Latin, and especially if they were familiar with Scaliger, then sixteenth-century English writers must have been aware that they were participating in activities that could be identified as criticism – even if, as appears to have been the case, they were hesitant to appropriate the term for use in the vernacular, and preferred, instead, to subsume their critical work under more general notions of artistry or craftsmanship. Elizabethan England was a bilingual culture that was open to European ideas, and writers who broached complex questions in English frequently thought them through in Latin, and with reference Latin sources and terminology. Critici, or critics, were part of English literary culture decades before they were part of its vernacular language. Thus, if we can look beyond its apparent anachronism, and its underlying connotations of nineteenth-century gentlemanly ‘taste’, we might just discern that Haslewood’s decision to describe the works of Sidney, Puttenham, and others as ‘critical essays’ may not have been so wide of the mark after all.

Fraser McIlwraith is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at UCL.

Selected Bibliography.

Florio, John. A Worlde of Wordes, or, Most copious, and exact dictionarie in Italian and English (London, 1598).

Haslewood, Joseph (ed.), Ancient Critical Essays upon English Poets and Poësy (London, 1811-1815), 2 vols.

Nashe, Thomas. Lenten Stuffe (London, 1599).

Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria (The Orator’s Education), ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, 2001).

Ronsard, Pierre du. L’art poetique (Cambridge, 1930).

Scaliger, Julius Caesar. Poetices libri septem (Lyons [Geneva], 1561).

Shakespeare, William. Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. G. R. Hibbard (Oxford, 2008).

Will[e]s, Richard. De Re Poetica [1573], ed. and trans. A[lastair] D. S. Fowler (Oxford, 1958).

26 March 2021.