CRITICAL CONTEXTS FOR RENAISSANCE READERS: THE POETIC THEORY AND PRACTICE OF SIR KENELME DIGBY AND SIR HENRY WOTTON

The writings of Sir Kenelme Digby and Sir Henry Wotton provide a basis for modern readers of Renaissance poetry to understand assumptions which underlie literary theory of the period. The audience to which the best Renaissance poets addressed themselves was a limited one whose members shared cultural values inherent in the literature itself. These values are not intrinsic to a modern world view and present-day readers have not always identified the unstated principles governing composition and analysis of Renaissance literature.;An examination of twentieth-century criticism identifies the vast diversity of current attitudes toward author, work, and a theoretical reader. By comparison, Renaissance critical theory is remarkably consistent. Among important materials that describe the underlying premises of Renaissance thought is Digby's manuscript on poetry, published here for the first time. Its focus on the psychology of readers informs modern critical premises and makes accessible, to those who wish it, an enlightening perspective on Renaissance aesthetics.;Digby and Wotton were prominent intellectuals whose opinions were sought by their contemporaries and whose influence among their peers was substantial. They were not known as poets but as critics in a time when the role of reader and commentator was evolving from a scholastic to a social mode. Their poems and essays illustrate distinctions between creativity and response as well as the underlying aesthetic premises of their better-known contemporaries.