[In the following excerpt, Loughrey discusses the classical European origins of the pastoral form and surveys its embodiment in works by writers of the English Renaissance.]

Pastoral is a contested term which modern critics have applied to an almost bewildering variety of works. In earlier critical discourse, however, it had a fairly limited and stable sense, describing literature which portrayed, often in an idealised manner, ‘the life of shepherds, or of the country’.¹ The genre originated with the Greek poet Theocritus (c. 316-260 bc), who entertained the sophisticated Alexandrian court of Ptolemy with a series of vignettes depicting the countryside and peasantry of his native Sicily. His Idylls are not entirely typical of the later tradition, since they contain considerable elements of realism and sometimes dwell on the harsher aspects of the lives led by an entire rural community, consisting not just of shepherds, but of farmers, serfs, goatherds, fishermen, neatherds and housewives. Nevertheless, Theocritus's successors found in the Idylls almost all the motifs which later crystallised into the conventions of formal pastoral: herdsmen find leisure to indulge in impromptu song contests or debates; extravagantly praise the beauty of their coy mistresses, or the charms of country life; recount tales derived from classical mythology or regional folklore; and bewail the death or absence of lovers. In many cases, Theocritus provided a model for the form as well as the content of subsequent pastoral verse. Idyll I, for example, in which Thyrsis sings of the death of Daphnis, employs all the machinery of pastoral elegy (invocation to the muse, expression of grief, inquiry into the causes of death, pathetic fallacy, description of the bier and procession, lament, concluding note of consolation) which Milton made use of in ‘Lycidas’ and an anonymous eighteenth-century critic parodied in ‘Recipe for a Pastoral Elegy’.

Vergil based his earliest known works, the Eclogues, on Theocritus's Idylls. He introduced, however, a number of innovations which decisively influenced almost all later writers of pastoral. In particular, he transferred his herdsmen from Sicily to Arcadia, the now traditional home of the shepherd of literary convention. Arcadia, as Bruno Snell has convincingly argued, represented for Vergil not a humdrum province of Greece, but a poetic landscape whose woods and mountains were haunted by the Olympian Immortals. It was an imaginary topography where ‘the currents of myth and empirical reality flow one into another’, and gods mingled freely with men. The shepherd inhabitants of this world were similarly etherealised. Despite the topical and political themes introduced into the Eclogues, Vergil's herdsmen are consistently portrayed as refined, serious-minded individuals, ruled by tender passions which they express through poetry. It comes as no surprise when Vergil, in Eclogue X, inserts his own friend, the contemporary poet Gallus, into this setting, for shepherd and artist have become virtually indistinguishable. From Vergil onwards, pastoral poetry has been pre-occupied with such tensions between reality and the world of the imagination, so that the form is often peculiarly self-conscious of its own aesthetic nature, and concerned far more with exploring the meaning of its conventions than in depicting any actual countryside.

The involvement of pastoral with classical mythology helped forge its association with the myth of the Golden Age, an elegiac lament for a lost age of innocence which shares many of the characteristics of the Christian idea of Eden. It was conceived of as a time at the dawn of history when Saturn and Astraea, the virgin goddess of Justice, ruled in the Garden of the Hesperides, and mankind lived unalienated from either its environment or itself. The season was perpetual spring, which rendered clothing superfluous, and allowed a fecund nature to provide sustenance without toil. Unhindered by the divisive influence of ambition, greed, aggression, or jealousy, men and women lived together in a fellowship based on leisure and love. The most familiar rendering of this myth is contained in Ovid's Metamorphoses, translated by Arthur Golding in 1567:

Then sprang up first the golden age, which of its selfe
          maintainde,
The truth and right of every thing unforst and
          unconstrainde.
There was no feare of punishment, there was no
          threatning lawe
In brazen tables nayled up, to keepe the folke in awe.
There was no man would crouch or creepe to Judge
          with cap in hand,
They lived safe without a Judge in every Realme and
          lande.
The loftie Pynetree was not hewen from mountaines
          where it stood,
In seeking straunge and forren landes to rove upon the
          flood.
Men knew none other countries yet, than were
          themselves did keepe:
There was no towne enclosed yet, with walles and
          ditches deepe.
No horne nor trumpet was in use, no sword nor
          helmet worne.
The worlde was suche, that souldiers helpe might
          easly be forborne.
The fertile earth as yet was free, untoucht of spade or
          plough,
And yet it yeelded of its selfe of every things inough.
And men themselves contented well with plaine and
          simple foode,
That on earth by natures gift without their travell
          stoode,
Did live by Raspis, heppes and hawes, by cornelles,
          plummes and cherries,
By sloes and apples, nuttes and peares, and lothsome
          bramble berries,
And by the acornes dropt on ground from Joves brode
          tree in fielde.
The Springtime lasted all the yeare, and Zephyr with
          his milde
And gentle blast did cherish things that grew of owne
          accorde.
The ground untilde, all kinde of fruits did plenteously
          avorde.
No mucke nor tillage was bestowde on leane and
          barren land,
To make the corne of better head and ranker for too
          stand.
Then streames ran milke, then streames ran wine, and
          yellow honny flowde
From ech greene tree whereon the rayes of firie
          Phebus glowde.(2)

As the keeping of flocks was deemed to be the original employment of mankind, the life-styles of the denizens of the Golden Age and the shepherds of Arcadia were increasingly equated. This in part encouraged poets to develop the escapist elements of the genre, and indulge in nostalgic dreams of a past happier time. But the myth could also function as a social critique, for, as Harry Levin explains, it can only be defined by the negative formula ‘not like now’. Thus many pastoral satires made use of the trope to attack corruptions of State (courtiers are hireling shepherds) or Church (pastors neglect their flocks). Vergil's Eclogue IV stood the myth on its head and celebrated the birth of a child who was to restore the Golden Age in the near future. Its Messianic message, one consistently interpreted as a prophecy of the birth of Christ, is in W. H. Auden's terms Utopian rather than Arcadian, a vision of the future where the ‘contradictions of the present … have at last been resolved’.

Horace's Epode II is the fountainhead of the third strand of classical pastoral, the great myth of rural retirement:

Happy the man, who far from town's affairs,
The life of old-world mortals shares;
With his own oxen tills his forebears' fields,
Nor thinks of usury and its yields.
No soldier he, by the fierce bugle called,
Nor sailor, at each storm appalled;
He shuns the forum, and the haughty gate
Of nobles stronger than the State.
His business is round poplars tall to twine
The ripe young layers of the vine;
Or in some quiet valley to survey
His lowing heifers as they stray.
Now with his knife the worthless shoots he lops,
Grafting instead for richer crops;
Draws the new honey, in pure jars to keep,
Or shears the timid staggering sheep.
When Autumn, with his mellow fruitage gay,
Doth o'er the fields his head display,
What joy it is the grafted pears to try,
And grapes which with sea-purple vie;
Fit gift, Priapus, choosing for thy hand,
Or Silvan, thine, guard of his land!
What joy, beneath some holm-oak old and grey
Or on thick turf, one's limbs to lay;
While streams past toppling banks roll down their
          flood,
And the birds croon in every wood,
And fountains murmur with their gushing streams
Sounds that shall sooth to sleep and dreams.
Then when the thunderous winter comes again,
Rainstorms and snowdrifts in its train,
This side and that a many hounds he'll set.(3)

The numerous imitations of this piece, such as Katherine Philips's ‘A Country-Life’, generally ignore Horace's craftily ironic postscript:

Alfius the usurer, when thus he swore
Farmer to be for ever more,
At the mid-month his last transaction ending,
By next new moon is keen for lending.

Alfius the moneylender is a week-end cottager who will soon return to the city despite the charms of the countryside. T. G. Rosenmeyer has objected that the Horatian praise of country life has more in common with Georgic, didactic literature on the subject of husbandry, than pastoral. But while it is true that in many cases the shepherd of literary convention does not feature at all in such works, the two traditions are so closely allied that they frequently impinge on one another, for the emotional basis of each is recognisably similar—‘God made the country, and man made the town’.⁴

Few pastorals were written during the Middle Ages, but the form survived in such peripheral genres as Pastourelle and vernacular Bergerie. The revival of classical scholarship in the Renaissance, however, led to a renewal of interest in the mode, and many of the greatest poets of the period experimented with Latin eclogues. Probably the most influential were a set by Mantuan (1448-1516), which directly inspired the first clumsy attempt at formal pastoral in English, Alexander Barclay's five Eclogues (c. 1515-21).

The first English work to rival the achievement of the Continental pastoralists was Edmund Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender (1579). Spenser modelled his XII eclogues, one for each month of the year, on the bucolics of Theocritus, Vergil and Mantuan, but attempted to naturalise the form by incorporating within the poem considerable elements of a native realism derived from Chaucer. The extraordinary contemporary popularity of The Shepheardes Calender, stemming both from its dazzling technical virtuosity and allegoric subtlety, helped create a vogue for pastoral: it is therefore perhaps ironic that A. C. Hamilton should find its overall argument to be ‘the rejection of the pastoral life for the truly dedicated life in the world’. The eclogues of Spenser's prolific followers—Drayton, Browne, Wither and Phineas Fletcher—developed in their own distinctive ways the methods of The Shepheardes Calender. But pastoral soon lost its almost exclusive association with the eclogue form, and during the period 1579-1680 came to exercise a pervasive influence, which a short survey such as this can do no more than hint at, over the entire literature and culture of Renaissance England.

Most epics of the period, for example, are studded with pastoral landscapes. Sometimes these take the form of the locus amoenus, a set-piece description of an ideal landscape which serves as the backdrop to the development of the plot's romantic interest, but which may, as in the case of Acrasia's Bower of Bliss in Book II of Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1596), represent a sensual snare tempting the unwary knight from the path of virtue. On other occasions shepherds are introduced to complicate the value structure of the poem, providing a subversive alternative to the predominant martial and heroic ethos: Calidore's ‘truancy’ among the herdsmen of Book VI of The Faerie Queene, for example, not only allows him to woo fair Pastorella but finally enriches his understanding of the true nature of Courtesy. The popular prose romances of the period, derived from the example of Longus's Daphnis and Chloe (c. 350 bc) and Sannazaro's Arcadia (1502), also blended the heroic with the bucolic. Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia (1590), for example, intersperses pastoral lyrics within an intricate plot of courtly love and adventure which requires its major protagonists to spend much of their time disguised as shepherds.

Pastoral songs and lyrics not only existed as components of larger works but were popular in their own right. The most famous example, Marlowe's ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’, was originally published in an anthology of exclusively pastoral verse, England's Helicon (1600). Its exploitation of the dissonance between the world of natural simplicity evoked and the artful presentation of the poem itself is characteristic of the genre.

Come live with mee, and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Vallies, groves, hills and fieldes,
Woods, or steepie mountaine yeeldes.
And wee will sit upon the Rocks,
Seeing the Sheepheards feede theyr flocks,
By shallow Rivers, to whose falls,
Melodious byrds sing Madrigalls.
And I will make thee beds of Roses,
And a thousand fragrant poesies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle,
Imbroydred all with leaves of Mirtle.
A gown made of the finest wooll,
Which from our pretty Lambes we pull,
Fayre lined slippers for the cold:
With buckles of the purest gold.
A belt of straw, and Ivie buds,
With Corall clasps and Amber studs,
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with mee, and be my love.
The Sheepheards Swaines shall daunce and sing,
For thy delight each May-morning,
If these delights thy minde may move;
Then live with mee, and be my love.

The speaker may claim to be a simple swain, but his rhetoric marks him off as a displaced courtier, singing not of cakes and ale but coral clasps and amber studs amidst an environment which promises birds that sing complicated part songs and a workforce only too pleased to put on rustic entertainments for the tourists.

The elements of wish-fulfilment are even more clearly apparent in the numerous libertine seduction poems which celebrate the promiscuous sexual mores of the Golden Age:

Then unconfined each did Tipple
Wine from the Bunch, Milk from the Nipple.(5)

The doctrine that Man was most innocent when pursuing untrammelled instinctual gratification did not, however, go unchallenged. Milton's Adam and Eve may appear to condone it, since before the Fall the act of love is both totally satisfying and, because divinely ordained, completely innocent. But the happy couple live in a state of married chastity, and Milton is at pains to contrast their lawful pleasures with ‘the bought smile / Of harlots, loveless, joyless, unendeared, / Casual fruition’. It is unusual to find such explicit sexuality in the garden literature of the period, which normally celebrated the joys of contemplative retirement. Marvell's ‘The Garden’ is more typical of this strand of pastoral, with its stress on otium and the recuperative powers of nature: ecstasy is attained not through sexual indulgence but through a withdrawal from the world of the senses towards a hortus conclusus of repose:

Mean while the Mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness:
…
Annihilating all that's made
To a green Thought in a green Shade.

It is equally possible, of course, to view the cultivated garden as a symbol of Man's perversion of an unspoilt Nature. It is entirely typical of Marvell's complex pastoral vision that he explored this central ambiguity. His ‘Mower’ poems wittily contrive to subvert the traditional pastoral harmony between Man and his environment, and demonstrate the ease with which pastoral conventions could become the vehicle for metaphysical speculation.

The country house poems of the period appear to have a more direct relationship with the realities of the English countryside. Ben Jonson's ‘To Penshurst’, for example, describes the landed estate where Sidney wrote his Arcadia, and celebrates its hierarchical yet harmonious social organisation in which farmers and aristocrats meet on terms of an easy familiarity bred of mutual respect and dependency. The Marxist critic Raymond Williams however, demolishes this aristocratic myth by demonstrating the brutally exploitative economic infra-structure which supported such great houses. In his view, the pastoral themes and images in ‘To Penshurst’ serve to mystify and thus legitimise the true relationship between the landowning classes and their agricultural workers. Similarly, James Turner is concerned to relate the ideology of ‘A Country-Life’ to the circumstances of its author: ‘Katherine Philips's life was the diametric opposite of what she purports to celebrate. The meaning of “A Country-Life” cannot be adequately grasped without relating it to this matrix of contradiction and suppression.’

The problematic relationship between the reality of life in the countryside and the pastoral myth of rural existence is part of Shakespeare's concern in As You Like It (1599). The Duke may find life in the forest of Arden ‘more sweet / Than that of painted pomp’, but Touchstone is there to remind us that it is a good deal more comfortable in Court, and the aristocrats do not hesitate to return there when given the opportunity. In The Winter's Tale (c. 1610) the pastoral life does seem to offer a genuine alternative to that of a court dominated by jealousy and tyranny, but the distinction is by no means clear cut. Perdita is nurtured by the shepherds of Bohemia, but she is in fact a lost princess and her native virtue is genetically determined. Few such complexities trouble John Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess (1608) which introduced the pastoral tragi-comic mode to the English stage. Fletcher derived the mixed generic form largely from the seminal examples of Tasso's Aminta (1573) and Guarini's Il Pastor Fido (c. 1580) which had developed the inherent dramatic potential of the dialogue format of most eclogues. The play was a failure in the popular theatre, but was successfully revived at court in 1632. Pastoral themes also infiltrated the semi-dramatic court genre of the masque. Both Milton's Comus (1634) and Ben Jonson's The Golden Age Restored (1616) for example, consciously blend classical and native pastoral imagery. This form of entertainment, however, ended with the Civil War and was not revived after the Restoration.

Even though its heyday was over, pastoral verse remained a popular medium in the early part of the eighteenth century. Pope made his dazzlingly precocious poetic début with a set of Pastorals (1704) modelled with neo-classical propriety on Vergil. Ambrose Philips, on the other hand, attempted to inject into his Pastorals (1708) details of life in the contemporary English countryside. His talents were unfortunately limited, so that Pope and his fellow Scriblerians had little difficulty in ridiculing the result. The happiest outcome of the ensuing literary war, which Hoyt Trowbridge traces in some detail, is Gay's The Shepherd's Week (1714). It is the earliest and probably the best mock-pastoral, which parodies Philips's style by selectively presenting the grosser aspect of rustic life, yet describes country scenes with a vivacity that many have enjoyed for its own sake.

During the course of the century formal pastoral increasingly came to be regarded as a sentimental masquerade, remote from the affairs of everyday. The trivialisation of its images is best symbolised by the inanities of Marie Antoinette's mock dairy farm, le Petit Trianon. Anti-pastoral developed as a response to this state of affairs. George Crabbe, for example, indignantly contrasted empty pastoral rhetoric with the drudgery of actual rural labour in The Village (1783):

I grant indeed that fields and flocks have charms
For him that grazes or for him that farms
But when amid such pleasing scenes I trace
The poor laborious natives of the place
And see the mid-day sun with fervid ray,
On their bare heads and dewy temples play;
While some, with feebler heads and fainter hearts,
Deplore their fortune, yet sustain their parts -
Then shall I dare these real ills to hide
In tinsel trappings of poetic pride?

[I, 39-49]

The increasing dominance of the mode of realism meant that serious poetic efforts were directed towards the nature poetry which romantic sensibility found so convivial. Wordsworth termed ‘Michael’ (1800) a ‘Pastoral’ but as Michael Squires notes, the union of realism and sublimity it achieves is incompatible with formal pastoral. With Wordsworth the shepherd of literary convention leaves the stage, returning only for occasional appearances in works such as Arnold's Thyrsis (1866).

Although formal pastoral poetry had its origins in classical times, pastoral critical theory did not. Renaissance scholars were disturbed to find that, despite the fact that the genre came into being two generations after his death, Aristotle had not classified the characteristics of pastoral! The earliest serious theoretical discussions, Vida's Ars Poetica (1527) and Sebillet's Art Poétique Françoys (1548), received no contemporary translation and so fall outside the scope of this volume.⁶ Their concerns were reflected, however, in the first extensive consideration of pastoral in English, E. K.'s dedicatory Epistle to Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender (1579). E. K. (probably Edward Kirke) praises Spenser both for dignifying the language, and for giving his eclogues a native hue. He picks out, for example, Spenser's deliberate archaisms, claiming ‘such old and obsolete wordes’ fittest for the ‘rusticall rudeness of shepheardes’, and thus enunciates the principle of generic decorum which was to dominate many later treatises. His other chief concern is with explicating the allegory of the poem, which he believed unfolded ‘great matter of argument covertly’.

Sir Philip Sidney's An Apologie for Poetrie (c. 1583) defended imaginative literature from the attacks of the Puritans. His discussion of pastoral is brief, for he believed in a hierarchy of literary genres, with epic and tragedy occupying the most exalted positions, and pastoral the humblest. Its value is primarily didactic, teaching both the ‘miserie of people under hard Lords or ravening Souldiours’, and also ‘what blessedness is derived to them that lye lowest from the goodnesse of them that sit highest’. As Laurence Lerner notes, the potentially radical implications of the first lesson are immediately vitiated by the socially conservative message of the second.⁷ George Puttenham's brief discussion of pastoral in his Arte of English Poesie (1589) is almost exclusively devoted to the question of its origins. His contention that, although sheep-keeping may have been one of the earliest employments of mankind, pastoral poetry was the product of a later urban culture, is almost universally accepted by modern scholars.

John Fletcher's ‘Preface’ to his Faithful Shepherdess (c. 1609) is a skirmish in the critical war surrounding Guarini's Il Pastor Fido (c. 1580). Jason Denores had criticised the latter in his Discorso (1587) and thus provoked a lively dispute concerning the legitimacy of such hybrid genres as pastoral tragi-comedy. Ben Jonson also felt constrained to defend his Sad Shepherd (c. 1636) from charges of generic mongrelism, and in his ‘Prologue’ to the play makes a sensible plea for critical flexibility.

Michael Drayton's compact ‘To the Reader of his Pastorals’ (1619) generally eschews critical squabbles. Drayton leaves such disputes to ‘Scaliger and the Nation of Learned Censors’, preferring instead to dwell on the well established analogies between Biblical and pastoral themes: ‘In the Angels song to Shepheards at our Saviours Nativitie Pastorall Poesie seems consecrated.’ He shares with E. K. a concern for decorum and an admiration for Spenser, but displays an empirical bias which leads him to prefer Theocritus's Idylls, on account of their realistic detail, to Vergil's Eclogues. Thomas Hobbes's ‘Answer to the Preface before Gondibert’ (1650) is even more frankly empirical, viewing pastoral simply as representation of the countryside. It was the last major critical statement concerning pastoral made before discussion became dominated by the influence of René Rapin (1621-86) and Bernard le Bouvier de Fontenelle (1657-1757).

Notes

1. OED: Pastoral, a. and sb. I, 3.

2. Ovid, The Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding (1567): I, 102-31; in W. H. D. Rouse (ed.), Shakespeare's Ovid (London, 1961), p. 23.

3. Horace, Epode II trans. J. Marshall (Everyman edition, London, 1911), pp. 113-14.

4. William Cowper, The Task.

5. Richard Lovelace, ‘Love Made in the First Age’.

6. For details of these and other early theorists, see J. E. Congleton, Theories of Pastoral Poetry in England, 1684-1798 (Gainesville, Fl., 1952).

7. L. D. Lerner, The Uses of Nostalgia (London, 1972), p. 118.