Meaning & Analysis
It is traditionally accepted that painters, travelers, and poets are allowed to exaggerate, invent, or distort the truth in their work or stories.
Insights
Creative License
The proverb figuratively recognizes the special license given to artists, poets, and travelers to depart from literal truth in pursuit of artistic effect, storytelling, or imaginative impact.
Value of Imagination
It underscores the cultural role of imaginative fiction—suggesting that embellishment, invention, or even outright fabrication can serve higher purposes, such as entertainment, insight, or inspiration.
Social Satire
The saying also functions satirically, poking fun at the tendency of poets and travelers (and by extension, anyone who spins tales) to embellish or deceive, thereby blurring the line between creativity and dishonesty.
Historical Privilege of Storytellers
From antiquity through the early modern period, storytellers—whether poets, painters, or explorers—were granted a social exemption from strict factual accuracy, their 'lies' valued as part of their creative or instructive power.
Authority and Suspicion
While 'lying by authority' legitimizes fiction for artistic or rhetorical effect, it also signals cultural ambivalence about truth and deception, hinting at skepticism toward the veracity of both artists and travelers.
Shakespearean Resonance
Shakespeare and his contemporaries frequently played on the duality of poets as both truth-tellers and fabulists, using the theme to explore deeper questions about reality, representation, and human nature.
Parallel Proverbs and Expanding Scope
Many languages and cultures express similar ideas (e.g., 'Old men and far travelers may lie by authority'), indicating a widespread understanding that certain professions operate with different standards of truthfulness.
Rhetorical Devices
Enumeration
The listing of 'painters,' 'travelers,' and 'poets' creates a rhetorical grouping that broadens the scope and humorously highlights their shared license.
Irony
The proverb uses irony to draw attention to the contradiction between the general expectation of truth and the special exemption granted to artists and storytellers.
Alliteration
The repetition of the 'p' sound in 'painters' and 'poets' adds a memorable, musical quality to the proverb, aiding recall and oral transmission.
Transcription
Quotations
To lye belongeth vnto Astrologers, or stargasers, and to Poets.
According to that old verse . . Astronomers, Painters, and Poets may lye by authoritie.
Poets and trauellours may lie by authority.
Besides, we Poets lie by good authoritie.
Whence it is said, that Travellers, Poets and Lyers, are three words all of one signification.
(Poets and painters).
Travellers and Poets may lie by authority.
Poets and Painters by authoritie As wel as Travellers we say may lie.
Painters, Poets, and Travellers, a lye becomes them.
(may have).
(may lie by authority).
(Poets, and Painters).
Shakespeare Citations
Art not a poet? —Yes. —Then thou liest.
Cross References
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.