Note 26 — SHAKESPEARE—A THEORY

It must have circulated privately some years before 1595, for Sir John Harington in his English version (1591) of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, calls Sidney “our English Petrarke,” and refers to his Apologie for Poetry (along with the Arte of English Poesie, 1589, dedicated to Lord Burleigh) as handling sundry poetical questions “right learnedly.” I may add that the motto to Sidney’s Apologie—odi profanum vulgus et arceo—touches the motto to Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis; that King Lear touches the Arcadia; and generally that a complete enumeration of the apparent contacts between Sidney and Shakespeare would probably fill many pages. [Some have even ventured to doubt whether the poetry which goes in the name of Sidney, who died at Zutphen in 1586, was really written by Sidney at all. Ed.