Plotting early modernity

The relative scarcity of literary critici sm in sixteenth- and earlyseventeenth-centurEy ngland is liable to seem surprising when compared to the many Continental writings of the same period devoted to an analysis of the poetic arts. Before the publication of John Dryden's Of Dramatiek Poesie: An Essay in 1668, the English criticaI landscapeh ad been fragmented, occasional, and defensive: one thinks of the attempts by Edmund Spenser, Gabriel Harvey, and ot hers to establish the importance of vernacular English as a poetic language; of the rejoinders betweenT homasC ampi on and SamuelD aniel over the value of rhyme; or ofthe strident antitheatrical polemic of Northbrooke, Philip Stubbes, Stephen Gosson, and William Prynne, among others. Discussion of dramatic poesy, in particular, had suffered from the Puritan attacks on the public stage, s ucht hat the developmenot of a systematicc ritical discourse on the drama was hindered by the need to justify the very existence of public theaters and players in the first place. Both Sir Philip Sidney's and Thomas Heywood's famous essays are, of course, apo logies or defenseso f poesy, a nd as such both primarily addresst he ethieal statuso of poetics, as indeed do many of their contemporaries.'..