An Apology For Poetry (1595)

The Comedic Sublime: A Distinctly Dutch Baroque in the Work of Frans Hals

“…Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden. 25 Art is able to produce worlds, then, that extend beyond the given world, and artists have their own zodiac apart from the celestial one. Read through the lens of this quote, Hals can be a good example of this, in his own Dutch and worldly way.…”

Looking at Van Dyck's Scipio in its Contexts

“…Plays about Roman history would aim for a certain solemnity, but there was also 41 77 and the bold freedom of tone in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra finesses it. Philip Sidney, who wanted English drama to be generically pure, had complained of its`mingling kings and clowns'; 78 but the history play was to flourish for this very reason, developing a double structure which counterpointed the narrative of high politics and warfare with a comic subplot which was`base, common and popular'. 79 In Henry IV and Henry V (still popular in the Jacobean theatre) Shakespeare developed this method of composition into a means of historical analysis, and gave it enduring cultural prestige.…”

The Virtues of Animals in Seventeenth-Century Thought

“…[End Page 482] Such a shift had been forshadowed as early as the end of the sixteenth century, when Sir Philip Sidney inquired "whether the feigned image of Poesy or the regular instruction of Philosophy hath more force in teaching?" 84 Increasingly, as the seventeenth century progressed, the question was resolved in favor of Poesy. 85 While naturalists like John Johnston had attributed love, fidelity, chastity, and courage to horses, these equine virtues were transferred, for example, in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, to the fictional "houyhnhnms" a race of rational horses.…”