ABSTRACT

The distinction between nature and art was a classical and medieval commonplace as well as a Renaissance and post-Renaissance one. Edward William Tayler calls the pairing "indispensable to the thinkers of the Renaissance" and adds that "the use of one term seems automatically to suggest the other, as if the absence of one of the words must betray the fact that the subject has been examined incompletely". Nature, then, appears in Renaissance writing and in the classical texts upon which that writing drew as both the principle of perfection and the principle of imperfection-and so does art, in a contrary or complementary relationship. The stability and mutual exclusiveness of the opposition between nature and art seems to be a necessary foundation for George Puttenham's enterprise, which is the composition of a manual setting out in detail what can be said about English poetry as an art of language.