No doubt, the moral aspect of comedy is here marked with what must be
called immoderate stress. Here, too, as when he deals with the kindred
side of tragedy, Sidney demands that the poet shall, in his villains,
"show you nothing that is not to be shunned"; in other words, that,
so far as it paints evil, comedy shall take the form of satire.

But, even with this restriction, it must be allowed that Sidney takes
a wider view than might appear at a hasty reading; wider, it is
probable, than was at all common among the men of his generation. No
Shakespeare had yet arisen to touch the baser qualities of men with
a gleam of heroism or to humanize the most stoical endurance with a
strain of weakness. And even Shakespeare, in turning from the practice
to the theory of his art, could find no words very different from those
of Sidney. To him, as to Sidney, the aim of the drama is "to show
virtue her own image and scorn her own feature"; though by a saving
clause, which Sidney perhaps would hardly have accepted, it is further
defined as being to show "the very age and body of the time his form
and pressure". Yet it must be remembered that Sidney is loud in praise
of so unflinching a portraiture of life, base and noble, as Chaucer's
_Troilus and Cressida_. And on the whole it remains true that the
limitations of Sidney are the limitations of his age, while his
generosity is his own.

The remainder of the _Apologie_ is necessarily of slighter texture.
Apart from the examination of Plato's banishment of the poets--a theme
on which Harington also discourses, though with less weight than
Sidney--it is concerned mainly with two subjects: an assertion that
each form of poetry has its peculiar moral import, and a lament over
the decay into which English poetry had fallen in the sixteenth century.