43 “A MEDICINE OF CHERIES”: THE LANGUAGE OF PROFIT IN SIDNEY’S Defence of Poesie BERTA CANO ECHEVARRÍA Mª EUGENIA PEROJO ARRONTE University of Valladolid The rise of Puritan ideas in the second half of the sixteenth century gave way to a number of attacks against poetry apparently based on moral grounds. One of the most famous examples in Gosson’s “The School of Abuse”, which was dedicated to Philip Sidney. Some time later Sidney wrote his Defense of Poesie, which has been understood since as a reply to Gosson’s arguments against poetry. Apart from the moral debate, we can read in Gosson’s work an indirect attack against idleness, a mark of identity of the aristocracy. To countervail this idea Sidney uses a language tinged with a vocabulary that makes of poetry a Puritan value based on the ideas of profit, usefulness and action. Both Sidney and Gosson hide behind a moral screen to enter a debate that deals with the social conflict between the aristocracy and the rising middle class that was taking place at the moment. Philip Sidney designs his Defence of Poesie almost like a military campaign. Following the established stages of oratory, he develops a strategy where the tactics consist in blocking all the fronts and filling the possible gaps to avoid any weak points from where to be attacked. The fact that Sidney develops arguments based on different, sometimes contradictory, justifications has given way to di- vergent interpretations as to whether Sidney’s Defence is ascribable to traditional neoplatonist ideas, or to more advanced views about the relation of fiction to reality (Levao 1979: 230). Similarly, it is uncertain whether Sidney aligns himself with the more moralistic positions, or this is just a screen to defend the right to seek pleasure and enjoyment from literature. “Which is Sidney’s real position?” we can ask ourselves; and a possible answer to this question is “All and none at the same time”. As a matter of fact, in the introductory paragraph of the Defence, after recounting in a comical-ironical tone how Esquire Pugliano had spoken to persuade his audience that horses and horsemen were the most noble creatures and subjects in a State, Sidney concludes that he learnt a lesson from this speech “that selflove is better than any guilding, to make that seem gorgious wherin our selves be