Beginning with Goodwill in the Works of Sir Philip Sidney

As Sir Philip Sidney points out in the Defense of Poesie, literature is supposed to delight and instruct. At the same time, though, Sidney also implies that every piece of literature is inherently flawed, because human writers cannot create text without errors, and human readers cannot process that text without erring in their own right. To confront this problem, Sidney invokes the concept of goodwill, asking his readers to judge textual mistakes with kindness, mercy, and indulgence, as far as they can. This attitude of goodwill, grounded in both a philosophical and a theological tradition, ultimately depends on the relationship between the author and the reader—which, optimally, is affectionate enough to encourage the downplaying of mistakes and the emphasizing of virtue-driven instruction. While this goodwill-infused method of textual judgment can backfire, causing readers to downplay or gloss over serious errors, Sidney’s Defense of Poesie and Old Arcadia both imply that relationally dependent goodwill is the strongest possible methodology for maximizing textual didacticism, because it compensates as much as possible for the inherent flaws of a piece of writing.