The Paradox of Mimesis in Sidney's Defence of Poesie and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus

The article explores the paradoxical tensions underlying the concept of artistic mimesis and verisimilitude in the English Renaissance by submitting to close analysis, side by side, the rhetorical positions of Sidney's Defence of Poesie and the dramatic spectacle of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. Sidney's Defence, with its contradictory ethical oscillations, reveals the many irreconcilable pressures that the Aristotelian idea of mimesis had to contend with in the early modern period. Marlowe's tragic farce, on the other hand, goes beyond theory and fully exploits these pressures for their most absurd and literally spectacular dramatic possibilities.