- All's Well That Ends Well
- Antony and Cleopatra
- As You Like It
- The Comedy of Errors
- Coriolanus
- Cymbeline
- Hamlet
- Henry IV, Part 1
- Henry IV, Part 2
- Henry V
- Henry VI, Part 1
- Henry VI, Part 2
- Henry VI, Part 3
- Henry VIII
- Julius Caesar
- King John
- King Lear
- Love's Labor's Lost
- A Lover's Complaint
- Macbeth
- Measure for Measure
- The Merchant of Venice
- The Merry Wives of Windsor
- A Midsummer Night's Dream
- Much Ado About Nothing
- Othello
- Pericles
- The Rape of Lucrece
- Richard II
- Richard III
- Romeo and Juliet
- Shakespeare's Sonnets
- The Taming of the Shrew
- The Tempest
- Timon of Athens
- Titus Andronicus
- Troilus and Cressida
- Twelfth Night
- The Two Gentlemen of Verona
- Venus and Adonis
- The Winter's Tale
One of the criticisms Sidney rebuts in the refutation section of the Apology is the claim that poetry is the “mother of lies” and the poet is essentially dishonest. This passage forms the key counterargument Sidney makes against this criticism. The essence of Sidney’s rebuttal is that the poet cannot lie because he or she makes no claim to tell the truth. A lie, Sidney suggests, is the willful misrepresentation of reality: a person claims that something in the case even when he or she knows it not to be so. The poet, however, never “affirmeth”—unlike the historian, or the…