What child is there, that coming to a play, and seeing Thebes written
in great letters upon an old door, doth believe that it is Thebes? If
then a man can arrive, at that child's age, to know that the poet's
persons and doings are but pictures what should be, and not stories
what have been, they will never give the lie to things not
affirmatively, but allegorically and figuratively, written. And
therefore as in history, looking for truth, they go away full fraught
with falsehood: so in poesy, looking for fiction, they shall use the
narration but as an imaginative groundplot of a profitable invention.
But hereto is replied that the poets give names to men they write of,
which argueth a conceit of an actual truth, and so, not being true,
proves a falsehood. And doth the lawyer lie, then, when under the names
of John a stile and John a noakes, he puts his case? But that is easily
answered. Their naming of men is but to make their picture the more
lively, and not to build any history: painting men, they cannot leave
men nameless. We see we cannot play at chess, but that we must give
names to our chessmen; and yet methinks he were a very partial champion
of truth that would say we lied for giving a piece of wood the reverend
title of a bishop.
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