Thus by the end of the sixteenth century, the Italian critics had formulated a logical and self-consistent theory of the purpose of poetry. Inheritors of the allegorical theory of the middle ages, which they in part discarded, and discoverers of classical rhetoric which they carried over bodily into their theories of poetry, they passed on to France, Germany, and England their rhetorical theories. The purpose of poetry, as well as of rhetoric, was to them persuasion--to teach, to please, to move. The instrument of poetry was the rhetorical example.
English Renaissance Ideas of the Purpose of Poetry
In England the Italian interpretations of the literary criticism of Greece and Rome made slow headway against the established traditions of the middle ages. In particular the vogue of allegory did not yield to the idea of the moral example transferred from rhetoric to poetic.
When Thomas Wilson published the first edition of his _Arte of Rhetorique_ in 1553, the corpus of Greek criticism in the Aldine _Rhetores Graeci_ had been in print forty-five years, and the commentaries of Dolce, Daniello, Robortelli, and Maggi were available. But Wilson wrote a very good rhetoric with no books before him but Quintilian, Cicero and the rhetoric _Ad Herennium_, which he thought to be Cicero's, Erasmus, Plutarch _De audiendis poetis_, and St. Basil. His treatment of poetry is quite naturally, then, that of a rhetorician who had been reared in the mediaeval tradition of allegory.
Allegory in the sense of Quintilian as a trope, an extended metaphor, Wilson mentions only once. His instance will bear quotation:
It is evil putting strong Wine into weake vesselles, that is to say, it is evil trusting some women with weightie matters. The English Proverbes gathered by John Heywood, helpe well in this behalfe, the which commonly are nothing els but Allegories, and darke devised sentences.[360]
Allegory in its more general mediaeval sense of the kernel of moral truth within the brilliant husk of the poet's fables he discusses at greater length elsewhere with full exemplification.
For by them we may talke at large and win men by persuasion, if we declare beforehand that these tales were not fained of such wisemen without cause.