[In this excerpt, Chaudhuri suggests that Barclay's Eclogues represent significant pastoral works before Spenser's because of their emphasis on the hardship of a shepherd's life.]

BARCLAY'S ECLOGUES: SATIRE AND THE SUFFERING RUSTIC

Roughly between 1500 and 1513,¹ Alexander Barclay wrote five Eclogues which must be accounted the most important English ones before Spenser's. They are the reverse of Arcadian. Rather, they emphasize the poverty and hardship of the shepherd's life, and are full of satirical and didactic passages. In fact, the first three eclogues are based upon De curialium miseriis, a prose satire of court life by Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II. The two other pieces are modelled on Mantuan V and VI.

The Argument to ‘Eclogue I’ describes the old shepherd Cornix's poverty in spite of a life of toil. The eclogue itself opens with an account of the shepherds' miseries after a storm. Here Barclay borrows from Mantuan III to commence on a note of suffering and questioning that Aeneas Silvius does not provide:

If God (as men say) doth heauen and earth sustayne,
Then why doth not he regarde our dayly payne?(2)

As a rule, however, the anger and resentment seek a different object. Cornix has already noted the contrast between their state and that of the rich. At first his speech echoes Mantuan; but Barclay introduces more and more touches of his own, building up to a completely original climax:

They do nought els but reuell, slepe and drinke,
But on his foldes the poore shepheard muste thinke.
They rest, we labour, they gayly decked be
While we go ragged in nede and pouertie
.....But what bringeth them to this prosperitie,
Strength, courage, frendes, crafte and audacitie.

(ll. 343-6, 351-2)

There are many such passages in Barclay, mostly original to the poet. In ‘Eclogue IV’, the poor shepherd Minalcas complains:

Pouertie to me should be no discomforte
If other shepheardes were all of the same sorte.
But Codrus I clawe oft where it doth not itche,
To see ten beggers and halfe a dosen riche …(3)

In ‘Eclogue V’ the protest and satire reach a climax:

In lust, in pleasour, and good in aboundaunce
Passe they their liues, we haue not suffisaunce.

(ll. 143-4)

As in the source-poem, Mantuan VI, the town-country debate is turned into a more basic contrast between rich and poor—and further, between duty and pleasure, moral sense and irresponsibility. Barclay adapts his original towards this end. The interlocutors in Mantuan VI, Fulica and Cornix, had differed in nothing except their views on town and country. But Barclay reallocates their speeches up to line 236 so that Amintas becomes a vain upstart, flaunting his smattering of city ways, while Faustus is the traditional, dour, moralizing shepherd.

Barclay introduces much new matter on the shepherd's toil and poverty. The following six lines from ‘Eclogue IV’ expand as many words in Mantuan:

Bye strawe and litter, and hay for winter colde,
Oft grease the scabbes aswell of yonge as olde.
For dreade of thieues oft watche vp all the night,
Beside this labour with all his minde and might,
For his poore housholde for to prouide vitayle,
If by aduenture his wooll or lambes fayle.

(ll. 173-8)

The idyllic world of classical pastoral is far away. This is shown in ‘Eclogue II’ by an interesting reference to Virgil III. 70 (again this is Barclay's own addition to Aeneas Silvius):

Thy princes apples be swete and orient,
Suche as Minalcas vnto Amintas sent,
In sauour of whom thou onely haste delite,
But if thou shouldst dye no morsell shalt thou bite.

(ll. 879-80, 883-4)

Virgil's shepherd-world (though that was not all Arcadia) becomes a remote Never Never Land associated with the city and the court!

Along with this goes much satire. Of course, Barclay's sources are basically satirical, but he adds to the plenty. ‘Eclogue II’ contains a long piece of satire against women (ll. 399ff.), and another on eating and drinking at court (ll. 538ff.). The latter sticks to Aeneas Silvius, but the former far exceeds the original. The account of cheating traders in ’Eclogue V’. 686ff. is largely Barclay's own invention. In the same poem (ll. 803-30) he inserts a passage from Mantuan (II. 67-78) on the abuse of the Sabbath in the country. But he prefaces this with an original passage (ll. 779-802) on similar irreverence among city-dwellers. He cannot let the criticism of rural life stand by itself.

In a word, Barclay's Eclogues mark an extreme development of the ‘suffering shepherd’ vein. They show a pronounced satirical and moral bent, vivid accounts of a shepherd's hardships, and a keen awareness of injustice and exploitation, the contrast between rich and poor. We may relate this to Barclay's concern with the concept of the three estates, as pointed out by Ruth Mohl.⁴

All this strongly suggests an independent influence in addition to Mantuanesque pastoral. The obvious model would be Piers Plowman, commonly thought to be the first English satire.⁵ It circulated widely in manuscript in the Renaissance,⁶ ran into four printed editions in mid-century, and was mentioned by many authors.⁷

Even more influential, perhaps, was an extensive body of ‘Plowman literature’, inspired by the more satirical and demotic aspects of Langland's work. Pierce the Ploughman's Crede was twice printed in addition to manuscript copies. The Plowman's Tale was ascribed to Chaucer, included in his manuscripts, and (from 1542) printed in his works. The Praier and Complaynte of the Ploweman vnto Christe was printed in 1531 and 1532 and—crowning proof of popularity—included from 1610 in Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Yet another tract was printed c.1550 and reprinted some forty years later during the Martin Marprelate controversy.⁸

In his primary identity, Piers was the figure of the common man, and frequently of the oppressed peasant. As is well known, ‘Piers Plowman’ was a code-name in a letter written by John Ball during the Peasants' Revolt. Langland's own work provides a strong basis for such use,⁹ and later Plowman-literature is dominated by protest and criticism. The Plowman's Tale makes a sustained attack upon the wealth and power of the clergy. In Pierce the Ploughman's Crede, the humble ploughman knows the Creed while friars sunk in sloth and luxury do not. The Praier and Complaynte of the Ploweman is most vehement of all:

For the pore man mote gone to hys laboure in colde & in hete, in wete & drye, & spende his flesch & hys bloude in the rych mennes workes apon gods grounde to fynde the rych man in ese, & in lykynge, & in good fare of mete & of drinke & of clothinge. Here ys a gret ȝifte of the pore man. For he ȝeueth his own body. But what ȝeueth the rych man hym aȝeynwarde? Sertes febele mete, & febele drinke, & feble clothinge.¹⁰

The opposition of clergy and laity has become a simple contrast of rich and poor, proud and meek.

Even in a work of humanist affinities like the early Tudor play of Gentleness and Nobility, the ploughman tells the knight and the merchant that private possession stems from tyranny and extortion (ll. 608-16).¹¹ The sober political tract Pyers Plowmans Exhortation, vnto … Parlyamenthouse (c.1550) exposes contrasts of wealth and poverty, ending with a stern warning of ‘the plage and vengeaunce of Good, ready to be powred doune uppon the whole realme, for this cruell oppression of the pore’ (sig. b4^r). Earlier, at a more popular level, God Spede the Plough had listed the ploughman's burden of taxes and other exactions.

This is precisely the complaint made in the Wakefield Second Shepherds' Play:

we ar so hamyd,
ffor-taxed and ramyd,
We ar mayde hand tamyd,
          with thyse gentlery men.(12)

The hard labour of the Wakefield shepherds is very like the ploughman's, as described in God Spede the Plough and the Crede. In the Wakefield First Shepherds' Play too, the First Shepherd's reflections on earthly transience soon focus upon his own poverty and loss. The Second Shepherd complains how the townsmen exploit them:

If he hask me oght ❙ that he wold to his pay,
ffull dere bese it boght ❙ if I say nay;

(ll. 73-4)

Shepherd and ploughman become kindred figures in this demotic literature, part of a whole gallery of rustic types. Langland himself associates ‘Plowmen and pastours and pouere commune laborers, ❙ Souteres and shepherdes’ (Passus X. 466-7). In John Ball's ‘Piers Plowman’ letter, Ball himself is ‘Iohan schep’ (shepherd),¹³ perhaps because he is a priest. Skelton's Colin Clout, a spokesman for the common rustic, bears a name that may already have been applied to shepherds.¹⁴ In the Catholic Banckett of Iohan the Reve (BL MS Harley 207), the members of the proletarian symposium are exactly (and perhaps consciously) the same as in the lines quoted from Langland: ‘peirs ploughman, Laurens laborer. Thomlyn Tailyer. And hobb of the hill. with other’ (fo. 1^r). Hob is a shepherd, the best read among the rustics, and to him falls the honour of the conclusive defence of the doctrine of transubstantiation. In I playne Piers … the Ploughman preaches his subversive message to all fellow-labourers, including ‘hoggeherdes sheperhedes and all youre sorte dyspysed’.¹⁵

From the other direction, in Mantuan VI, God in his curse upon the younger sons of Eve equates the shepherd with all poor labourers in both town and country:

vester erit stimulus, vester ligo, pastina vestra;
vester erit vomer, iuga vestra, agrestia vestra omnia; …
.....sed tamen ex vobis quosdam donabimus urbe
qui sint fartores, lanii, lixae artocopique
et genus hoc alii soliti sordescere …

(ll. 95-101)

[Yours shall be the goad, yours the mattock, yours the dibbles; yours the ploughshare, yours the yokes, yours all things rustic … Some of you, however, we shall give to the city. They shall be poulterers, butchers, sutlers, bakers, and the tribe of all others accustomed to demean themselves with work …]

The old Kalender of Shepardes has some lines to the ploughman beginning ‘Peers go thou to plowe.’¹⁶ In line with such precedents, Barclay in his fourth eclogue equates shepherd and ploughman as similar rustic types:

What should a Ploughman go farther than his plough,
What should a shepherde in wisedome wade so farre …

(ll. 792-3)

And again, in ‘Eclogue V’:

It were a maruell if Cornix matter tolde
To laude of shepheardes, or plowmen to vpholde …

(ll. 399-400)

These brief touches underscore my earlier point about the ‘suffering shepherd’: he is not a distinct type or symbol, but a figure of the rustic poor generally. His higher symbolic functions are forgotten. In Barclay's Eclogues, this is particularly in evidence owing to conflation with the ‘Piers Plowman’ tradition.

Plowman-literature preserves one function of the pastoral metaphor: the ecclesiastical. The clergy are habitually presented as neglectful hireling shepherds or wolves in sheep's clothing.

Lorde of all schepherdes blessed mote thou be. For thou louedest more the scheep then her wole. For thou fedest thy sheep both in body & in soule. [But the prelates] distroyen thy schepe, … that for drede they ben disparpled a brode in mownteynes, & there the wilde beestes of the felde distroyeth hem, & deuoureth hem for defaute of a good schepherde.¹⁷

For all its forensic detail, this is a single-noted metaphor, an overworked pastoral image rather than genuine pastoralism. Moral approbation, philosophic appeal, such suggestive detail as there might be—all these have passed to the ploughman-figure. Moreover, the ploughman is basically ‘real’, an actual rustic; the shepherd is a metaphoric or allegorical one, with the ploughman and his fellows as his ‘sheep’.

Such division is unfortunate; but union, as we have earlier seen, is nearly impossible. The literal and metaphorical shepherds come to clash. In Barclay I. 485, Christ is ‘the shephearde of Nazareth’; in Aeneas Silvius's non-pastoral context, he had been merely ‘Salvator noster Iesu’ [Jesus our saviour].¹⁸ Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury, becomes ‘the riche shepheard which woned in Mortlake’ (‘Eclogue I’. 499). But this is spoken by an actual shepherd who would be one of the shepherd-priest's ‘flock’. Morton visits Coridon's family cottage as ‘the patron of thinges pastorall’ (‘Eclogue I’. 511), an aristocrat or overlord rather than a true herdsman. With Alcock, Bishop of Ely, Barclay can avoid this metaphoric maze by exploiting a common pun on Alcock's name: ‘He all was a cocke, he wakened vs from slepe’ (‘Eclogue I’. 521). But incongruously, the cock is also ‘a father of thinges pastorall’ (l. 531); and in ‘Eclogue III’. 470-1 Barclay sadly mixes the two metaphors: ‘the gentle Cocke whiche sange so mirily, ❙ He and his flocke were like an vnion’. Exactly the same clash between ruler-shepherd and commoner-shepherd occurs in ‘Eclogue IV’ in a secular context. In the city,

The riche and sturdie doth threaten and manace
The poore and simple and suche as came but late
.....And suche be assigned sometime the flocke to kepe
Which scant haue so muche of reason as the shepe,
And euery shepheard a other hath enuy,
Scant be a couple which loueth perfitely …

(ll. 124-5, 129-32)

In fact, in line 131, ‘euery shepheard’ seems to be neither ruler nor subject but mankind generally. The significance of sheep and shepherd differs from line to line. One sees the need to define the pastoral mode clearly once again.

When Spenser set about doing so in The Shepheardes Calender, he would have found in Barclay—and in Plowman literature generally—a model for his moral, didactic, and satiric vein.¹⁹ But this is a subsidiary element in Spenser's design. In a general way, he emphatically moves away from Barclay's model.

J. R. Schultz failed to find any correspondence, beyond the most accidental, between Barclay's Eclogues and The Shepheardes Calender.²⁰ Yet, as Mustard, Schultz, and White have all noted,²¹ it is unlikely that Spenser would not have known of Barclay's work—which was not only appended to John Cawood's edition of The Ship of Fools in 1570 but published separately several times before.²² The probability is increased by the fact that, as Mustard points out, E. K.'s Epistle to Harvey clearly echoes Barclay's ‘Prologe’.

In any case, there is one fundamental matter in which Spenser draws upon the poetic tradition of which Barclay's Eclogues form a part. This consists in an important element of the language of the Calender, E. K.'s ‘rusticall rudenesse of shepheards, eyther for that theyr rough sounde would make his rymes more ragged and rustical, or els because such olde and obsolete wordes are most vsed of country folke’.²³ Philologists, most notably B. R. McElderry,²⁴ have tried to minimize the importance of this element. Others have tried to show that the archaic and dialectal diction is most pronounced in the moral and satiric eclogues, where satiric roughness merges with that demanded by ‘pastoral decorum’.²⁵ But the other eclogues make the same demand, and it seems idle to deny that the language has an archaic and dialectal element all through.²⁶ Alexander Lyle admits (p. 164) that ‘Januarye’ has the same substantial presence of archaic and rustic words as ‘Februarie’, though with a very different effect. I shall cite two other local instances, both at the openings of poems and thus conditioning our response to what follows. The first eighteen lines of ‘March’ yield alegge, sicker, thilke, studde, bragly, vpryst. ‘Aprill’ begins

Tell me good Hobbinoll, what garres thee greete?
What? hath some Wolfe thy tender Lambes ytorne?(27)

The words italicized (by me) were all archaic at that date, on the testimony of the OED.²⁸ The stress-based rhythm that Lyle and Ingham consider characteristic of the moral eclogues, as of earlier rustic and satiric literature, is found equally in the framework of ‘August’—a fact they do not recognize.

I shall make no attempt at a philological or metrical study of the Calender. I have cited sample passages only to confirm the presence of this element in Spenser's language all through the work. He is re-creating with his own resources an equivalent for the diction, idiom, and register of utterance that he and his age found in Chaucer and late Middle English literature, especially Plowman literature—whose affinities with Barclay's Eclogues I have tried to show. Spenser's debt to Chaucer is well authenticated. He has also been shown to echo The Plowman's Tale in ‘Maye’.²⁹ In his concluding verses to the Calender, ‘the Pilgrim that the Ploughman playde a whyle’ may refer to the Tale or to Piers Plowman. In either case, Spenser is professing formal allegiance to a conservative poetic ideal to which Barclay's Eclogues form an adjunct—with the vital difference that Spenser applies the mode to subject-matter that Barclay and the Plowman-poets know nothing of: love, poetry, simple sport, and the appreciation of nature.

These themes are in line with continental art-pastoral; but the distinctive, purportedly rustic element in Spenser's language invests them with a special simplicity and spontaneity, checks their sophistication with a constant hint at rustic directness and sincerity. This leads us beyond the Calender to the considerable body of pastoral lyrics written after it and, I shall argue, in line with it. Such lyrics (epitomized by the collection in England's Helicon) have practically nothing in common with Barclay's Eclogues; but from Barclay, via Spenser, they preserve a special strain of the ‘honest shepherd’ in their treatment of idealized pastoral life.

Notes

1. As estimated by Beatrice White in her edn. of the Eclogues (EETS os 175; Oxford, 1928).

2. Eclogue I. 213-14; all refs. to White's edn. (cit. n. 8).

3. Eclogue IV. 97-100. Cf. Eclogue II. 789ff. (based on Aeneas Silvius); Eclogue IV. 305ff. (4 ll. in Mantuan expanded to 30); Eclogue V. 663-4 (original to Barclay).

4. [Mohl, Ruth,] The Three Estates in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (New York, 1933), 143-9.

5. See Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (Gregory Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays, ii. 62. l. 25, p. 64, l. 34-p. 65, l. 6); Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (ibid. ii. 320, l. 19); Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman, ch. 10 (J. E. Spingarn (ed.), Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1908), i. 132-3); Milton, Apology for Smectymnuus (Milton's Works, Columbia edn., iii/1 (New York, 1931), 329, ll. 9-10).

6. At least 5 new MSS were made: Bodl. MS Digby 145 (see A-Text, ed. G. Kane (London, 1960), 9-10); BL Royal Lib. MS 18 B. xvii (see C-Text, ed. W. W. Skeat (EETS os 54, 1873), p. xlviii); Caius College, Cambridge MS 201, made from the printed 1561 text (see B-Text, ed. W. W. Skeat (EETS os 38; 1869), p. xxx); Cambridge Univ. Lib. MS Gg. 4. 31 (see B-Text, ed. G. Kane and E. T. Donaldson (London, 1975), 8); Sion Coll. MS Arc. L. 40. 2/E(S) (ibid. 15).

7. For a list see W. W. Skeat (ed.), Piers Plowman, iv/2 (EETS os 81, 1885), 863-70. However, many of Skeat's instances actually concern the ‘Plowman literature’ I shall describe in the next few pages.

8. STC 19903a, 19903a.5. The 1550 title-page reads ‘I playne Piers which can not flatter …’.

9. See e.g. B-Text Passus X. 67-8, Passus XIV. 174-8. (All refs. to the B-Text, ed. Kane and Donaldson.)

10. 1531 edn., sig. e5^v.

11. Refs. to the Malone Society repr., 1950.

12. ll. 15-18; refs. to The Towneley Plays, ed. G. England (EETS es 71, Oxford, 1897; repr. 1952).

13. R. H. Robbins (ed.), Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (New York, 1959), 55.

14. See Cooper, [Helen,] Pastoral, [: Medieval into Renaissance. Ipswich: Brewer, 1977,] p. 153.

15. 1550 edn., sig. a8^r.

16. The Kalender of Shepardes, printed by Thomas Este for John Wally (1570?), sig. a5^r.

17. The Praier and Complaynte of the Ploweman vnto Christe (n.p., 1531?), sig. e8^r-v.

18. De curialium miseriis, ed. W. P. Mustard (Baltimore, 1928), 26.

19. The matter has been treated, and through exclusive attention over-emphasized, in Alexander Lyle, ‘The Shepheardes Calender and Its English Antecedents’ (B.Litt. Oxford, 1969). See also the brief account in David R. Shore, Spenser and the Poetics of Pastoral (Kingston, Ont., 1985), 29-30.

20. ‘Alexander Barclay and the Later Eclogue Writers’, Modern Language Notes 35 (1920), 52-4.

21. W. P. Mustard, ‘Notes on the Eclogues of Alexander Barclay’, MLN 24 (1909), 10; Schultz, MLN 35; White (ed.), Barclay's Eclogues, p. lxi.

22. Eclogues I-III (c.1530, c.1548, c.1560), IV (c.1521), V (c.1518): dates as in STC.

23. Epistle to Gabriel Harvey preceding The Shepheardes Calender.

24. ‘Archaism and Innovation in Spenser's Poetic Diction’, PMLA 47 (1932), 144-70.

25. See Lyle (cit. n. 26), ch. vi; P. Ingham, ‘Spenser's Use of Dialect’, ELN 8 (1971), 166-7.

26. It seems both futile and unnecessary to attempt to separate the archaic from the strictly dialectal, as both are being used to give the language a simultaneously primitive and rustic flavour. Because of the belief in the ‘purity’ of early Chaucerian English, archaisms would in any case be placed in the same register as unsophisticated and dialectal forms.

27. All Spenser refs. to [Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Seliincourt (Oxford, 1912, repr. 1970)]. …

28. For ytorne see McElderry, [Bruce Robert. Spenser's Poetic Diction, State University od Iowa, 1925,] pp. 156-7. My sample suggests that McElderry is grossly over-cautious in estimating the number of archaisms in the Calender. Except for alegge, he does not note any of the words listed above.

29. See Variorum notes on ll. 1-8, 39: The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. E. Greenlaw et al. (Baltimore, 1932-57), Minor Poems, i. 297-8.