Lodovico Castelvetro, an Influential Italian critic, teacher, and theorist excommunicated by the Inquisition and living in exile in Vienna, translates and writes an illuminating, scholarly commentary on Aristotle's Poetics called La poetica di Aristotele vulgarizzata ("Aristotle's Poetics Popularized").

Published in 1570, La poetica, though often erroneous in transmitting Aristotle's ideas, punctures the hoary Platonic concept that poets are possessed by divinely inspired madness and that only a cultural elite can enjoy art, asserting that this is a myth perpetuated by the ignorant masses and by poets themselves.

Castelvetro disagrees with Horace's notion of the didactic and pleasurable function of art, defended poetry as a means of pleasure alone.

In emphasizing realism in drama, Castelvetro clarifies the distinction between rhetoric and poetry, and defends the dramatic unities of time, place, and action.