Apologizing for Pleasure in Sidney's Apology for Poetry : The Nurse of Abuse Meets the Tudor Grammar School

Abstract

As one of its major strategies for defending poetry, Sidney's Apol ogy describes poetry's capacity simultaneously to teach and to delight, to instruct effectively by appealing to pleasure.1 According to the Apology, it is pleasure which creates poetry as superior to history and philosophy, for poetry's ability to delight moves readers to virtue, rather than subjecting them to tedious discussions or ambiguous ex amples. Even in the initial stages of civilization, it was the sweet delights (98) of poetry which prepared early peoples to exercise their minds for the reception of knowledge. But on the other side of the Apology's claim that poetry's delight enlivens its lies the in ference that the experience of delight must be justified by instruction. This inference becomes explicit in the Apology's limitation of its de fense to a definition of poetry as feigning notable images of virtues, vices, or what else, with . . . delightful teaching (103). When sepa rated from its moral function, poetry's pleasure renders it a nurse of abuse, dangerously capable of eliciting the wrong sort of pleasure to infect its readers with pestilent desires (123). By exploring the nurse of abuse image, together with other highly gendered figures, this essay advances the following argument: to the explicit charges against which Sidney's Apology defends poetry—that it lies, it pro motes immorality, it was banished from Plato's ideal republic, and that it serves no useful purpose—can be added an implicit charge, that the pleasures offered by poetry rendered it dangerously effemin izing. A reading of Sidney's Apology as defending poetry against charges of effeminacy was perhaps first performed in a passing comment by Walter Ong, who suggested that the anxiety, common among Renais sance humanists, that literature, and poetry in particular, was ac tually soft or effeminate motivated Sidney's claim that the Amadis de Gaule moved men to courage.2 More recently, M. J. Doherty's gen dered reading of the Apology has also linked Sidney's poet and femi ninity. Interpreting the Apology's Lady Poesy in terms of the ancient

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