Studies in Philology

Sir Philip Sidney has exemplified the meager access English readers are thought to have had to Aristotle’s Poetics in the sixteenth century. This article shows, on the contrary, that a passage of his Defence of Poesie was directly translated from the Poetics. Philological analysis across extant translations and contemporary polyglot dictionaries demonstrates, moreover, that Sidney’s source was the Greek itself, and suggests a revised model for English encounters with this crucial text in the Renaissance.

[A] thing well said will be wit in all Languages; and though it may lose something in the Translation, yet, to him who reads it in the Original, ’tis still the same.