SOURCE: Introduction to English Pastoral Poetry: From the Beginnings to Marvell, edited by Frank Kermode, George Harrap and Company, 1952, pp. 11-44.

[In the following excerpt, Kermode looks at the scope of the pastoral form, especially as it was used by English Renaissance poets; outlines its history and its critical and philosophical background; and discusses the general theory of Imitation as it relates to the pastoral.]

Jove, Jove! this shepherd's passion
Is much upon my fashion.

As You Like It, II, iv, 56-57.

Hast any philosophy in thee, shepherd?

Ibid., III, i, 21.

Pastoral is one of the ‘kinds’ of poetry, like Epic, Tragedy, and Satire. We still know what these ‘kinds’ are, though we probably attach less importance to them than earlier readers did. To an Elizabethan critic they were natural; men had discovered, not devised, them. A poet who wrote in some novel form not recognized as a ‘kind’ was liable to be called to account, and accused of a breach of decorum, which is an offence against nature. Pastoral, though it ranked below some of the other ‘kinds’ of poetry, had, during the period which most concerns us, this official protection, and the Elizabethan schoolboy learned its laws as part of his rhetorical training. Yet to Dr Johnson it was a form “easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting”—he was writing about Lycidas—and to us it probably suggests the word ‘artificial’ rather than the word ‘natural.’

We can perhaps learn something from the use of the word ‘artificial’ in this connexion. For us it suggests mannerism, triviality, lack of seriousness, possibly even the ersatz. But for the Elizabethan it was usually high praise. “Our vulgar Poesie,” says Puttenham, a good critic,

cannot shew it selfe either gallant or gorgious, if any lymme be left naked and bare and not clad in his kindly¹ clothes and coulours,² such as may convey them somewhat out of sight, that is from the common course of ordinary speach and capacitie of the vulgar iudgement, and yet being artificially handled must need yeld it much more bewtie and commendation.

And Puttenham is speaking, not merely of Pastoral, but of all poetry. He is recommending the poet to be as ‘un-natural’ as possible, though he would not have used that word. He meant that to do the work of Art the poet must be artificial; and the work of Art was no less than the improvement or development of Nature. There are great difficulties in this word ‘Nature,’ as the Elizabethans themselves realized. They would argue, for example, that Art itself is an instrument of Nature. But the chief meaning, as it concerns us here at the moment, may best be expressed as ‘the antithesis of Art,’ the wild or savage as opposed to the cultivated, the material upon which Art works. And this opposition is nowhere so evident and acute as in Pastoral, for in this ‘kind’ the cultivated, in their artificial way, reflect upon and describe, for their own ends, the natural life. For reasons we shall have to consider, this natural life was normally associated with shepherds.

At first sight it must seem odd that so considerable a proportion of European literature should concern itself with rustics, and even odder that it should concentrate on a small class of rustics. It will probably be easier to understand if we devote a little time to the history of the kind, and its critical justification. It must not be forgotten that when a new kind is founded its literary momentum may carry it far beyond the particular situation from which it took its origin; that is to say, the literary tradition is carried on by one writer imitating another despite the fact that the world of the second is different from that of the first. He is asking his readers to judge him by a purely literary criterion, and his mind is working in accordance with one of the laws of literary history which lays it down that to imitate a classic writer is the same as imitating Nature. Nature and Homer, so Pope tells us, are the same. The theory of Imitation has for good or ill a great deal to do with pastoral poetry, and it needs to be expounded in connexion with our present purposes. It seems, therefore, that this approach to the Pastoral of the English Renaissance involves three main considerations, which are in fact closely related to each other: we must look at the history of the kind, at its critical and philosophical background, and at the general theory of Imitation as it affects Pastoral. But first, we must try to understand its scope and fertility.

THE NATURE OF PASTORAL POETRY

Some modern writers use the term ‘Pastoral’ to describe any work which concerns itself with the contrast between simple and complicated ways of living; its method is to exalt the naturalness and virtue of the simple man at the expense of the complicated one, whether the former be a shepherd, or a child, or a working-man. This is perfectly justifiable, although the title given to the kind emphasizes that the natural man is conventionally a shepherd. There were reasons for this, but when the old feeling about shepherds, about which I shall be speaking shortly, faded, the preoccupation of the Pastoral with them tended to increase its ‘artificiality.’ [A necessary result of this is that there is much pastoral poetry which must be sympathetically read with reference to the convention in which it is written; otherwise it will certainly seem a barren or frigidly ornamental literary exercise, as Lycidas did to Johnson. Milton could not impress him by claiming that he and King “drove a field” and ‘battened their flocks with the fresh dews of night’; “we know,” says Johnson, “that they never drove a field, and that they had no flocks to batten.”³ And to Johnson it seemed that Pastoral was useful only to give young poets something to cut their teeth on. “It seems natural for a young poet to initiate himself by Pastorals, which, not professing to imitate real life, require no experience …”⁴ If we are to avoid Johnson's mistake we must be aware of what the poets who wrote artificially about shepherds were trying to do; clearly they had in mind a great deal of earlier pastoral writing which had established the conventions within which they worked, and assumed in their readers a knowledge of the history of the kind. That is why our historical inquiry must be directed, not only upon the general situation which produces significant contrasts between the natural and the cultivated, but upon the tradition of literary Pastoral which is carried on by one poet's imitating another. But first, the more general topic of the scope of Pastoral.

The first condition of pastoral poetry is that there should be a sharp difference between two ways of life, the rustic and the urban. The city is an artificial product, and the pastoral poet invariably lives in it, or is the product of its schools and universities. Considerable animosity may exist between the townsman and the countryman. Thus the ‘primitive’ may be sceptical about the justice of a state of affairs which makes him live under rude conditions while the town-poet lives in polite society. On the other hand, the town- or court-poet has a certain contempt for the peasant (sometimes very strong); and both primitive and court-poet write verse which reflects these attitudes. Occasionally there is a certain similarity of subject. Townsman and rustic alike may consider the idea that at a remote period in history nature gave forth her fruits without the aid of man's labour and worship. Perhaps, somewhere, she still does so. This idea that the world has been a better place and that men have degenerated is remarkably widespread, and a regular feature of pastoral poetry. We have abused Nature, by breaking its laws or falling into sin, and we are therefore steadily deteriorating so that our only hope is for a fresh start, after some kind of redemption. The restoration of the Golden Age is a theme of Virgilian Pastoral, and was naturally taken over in the Pastoral of the Christian era. All such ideas are more ancient than the pastoral convention, but they naturally became attached to it in the course of time. They occur in primitive poetry as well as in the poetry of the cultivated, but this should not deceive us into thinking that there can be primitive Pastoral. The first condition of Pastoral is that it is an urban product.

Nevertheless, it is as closely connected with earlier poetry as the Epic is with the lays of the ‘heroic age.’ For example, although the literary tradition of the Golden Age is securely rooted in Virgil, Ovid, Seneca, Juvenal, and Boëthius, we may be sure that the primary impulse, human resentment at the conditions and struggles of life, vitalizes the myth in its literary form and establishes its kinship with similar primitive myths which occur in almost every recorded culture from Mycenæan to American Negro. Something better must have existed, and for some folly or sin we can easily recognize in ourselves we have been turned out of the garden and can only hope to return.

Satire, also an urban ‘kind,’ assumes that in its own milieu, the metropolis, it discovers the extremest forms of degenéracy, which it exposes by contrasting it with some better way of life—that is, some earlier way of life; the farther back you go the better. One would expect Satire to get better and better, as the conditions grow more odiously stimulating; and in Rome this happened, for from being a comparatively good-humoured affair it took over various rights from other forms, including that of direct and vigorous attack on the vices of society and individuals, and culminated in the fierce and gloomy Juvenal, who is the genuine prototype of European Satire, though the last of the considerable Roman practitioners. In the heyday of English Pastoral the satirist, with Juvenal never far from his thoughts, is always at hand, flogging away with his scourge of untrimmed decasyllables; sometimes, by a pardonable etymological confusion, imagining himself a satyr, but never to be reconciled to the loss of virtue always entailed in wresting a metropolis out of the gentler countryside. Pietas, gravitas, virtus—these are qualities which wither in acquisitive communities; leisure increases, and with it the arts and the vices. By contrast the rural nation of a few generations back appears as free of vice as it is of culture in the narrow sense of a refined minority pursuit. Society outside the town walls is still comparatively simple, and still natural—especially in properly pastoral areas, where the country has to be rich and fresh—whereas the town has viciously supplied imagined wants in nature with the art of brick and stone. Obviously there is common ground between Pastoral and Satire; but Pastoral—here I limit the meaning of the word to literature which deals with rural life, and exclude other ‘versions’ of Pastoral—Pastoral flourishes at a particular moment in the urban development, the phase in which the relationship of metropolis and country is still evident, and there are no children (as there are now) who have never seen a cow.

Heroic poetry celebrates the achievements of an age of heroes in the verse of sophisticated poets like Homer. “The result,” writes Professor G. Thomson,⁵ “was a dynamic tension between them [the poets] and their material, and so deeply had they absorbed their material that this tension appears as something internal in the heroes of the story.” He then quotes a speech of Sarpedon's which certainly justifies the comment that it is “not the voice of a robber chief.”⁶ The heroic poet, believing in his right, and that of his patrons, to the heroic life, and yet experiencing a complex response to the recounting of that life which the heroes themselves could not have imagined, is under extraordinary pressure. The position of the pastoral poet is even less simple than that of the heroic poet; although his rustics are in a way contemptible in their simplicity and coarseness, they have a way of life which is admirable because it is natural, and are, in fact, a local and contemporary version of Golden Age humanity, without the intrigues of the Court and the money-grubbing of the city. The shepherd in particular leads a deliciously idle life and whiles away the time playing a pipe. He became the type of the natural life, uncomplicated, contemplative, and in sympathy with Nature as the townsman could never be. He is the measure of the cultivated man's unnaturalness: he has plenty of time for thought; when he weeps the Nature with which he lives in such sympathy weeps also. Unlike the townsman, he does not meddle with Nature. (Of course, one believes this only in a certain frame of mind, or when striking a certain attitude, like that adopted by Marvell in The Mower against Gardens, or by the seventeenth-century French poet Theophile when he said:

La nature est inimitable
Et dans sa beauté véritable
Elle éclate si vivement
Que l'art gaste tous ses ouvrages,
Et luy fait plustost mille outrages
Qu'il ne luy donne un ornement.(7)

Unlike the townsman, he lives a contemplative and not an active life. This, as everybody knew from the story of Cincinnatus, and as Cicero had said of Scipio Africanus, was the best preparation for virtue. God preferred Abel before Cain, the contemplative life of the shepherd before the active life of the farmer. In Hesiod as well as in the Gospels a divine nativity is announced to shepherds. Their craft endows them with a kind of purity, almost a kind of holiness.

The simplest kind of pastoral poetry assumes that the quiet wildness of the country is better than the cultivated and complex life of the hurrying city and court. These places are unfortunate islands of luxury in a green sea of simplicity; Nature's handmaid, Art, has driven Nature out, and at best the city is a garden, tortured by artist-gardeners who

                                         … the cherry vex
To procreate without a sex;

while, in the fields beyond,

Every mower's wholesome heat
Smells like an Alexander's sweat.

It does not concern itself with the subtleties which Polixenes offers to the reluctant Perdita. Living in his city garden with its sophisticated philosophies, its exotic plants, its cultivated music, the poet contemplates the life he has rejected, the life of the healthy countryside, with its simple manners, natural flowers, and rude pipings. The die is cast; in the great no man's land of the fields even the grasshoppers will mock him—as Marvell said in his lines on Nun Appleton House. There is no going back; the Golden Age is a moving fiction, the vendange and the hock-cart are charming and interesting, and upon them one may construct the amusements of a polite society; but the gentleman is now committed to another way of life. And always at the back of this literary attitude to Nature is the shadow of its opposite; the knowledge that Nature is rough, and the natural life in fact rather an animal affair; by long cultivation men have improved the natural breed, and the difference between the cultivated and the natural is the difference between a Ferdinand and a Caliban.⁸ It is surely inevitable that in such a situation the poet should allow his complexities to colour his talk of the rustic subject, as the Epic poet projected his intellectual tensions on to the hero. Sarpedon appeared as a man of extraordinary sensibility; the shepherd appears as philosopher and poet.

Provided, then, that one does not allow the hard view of Nature as crude and rough to overset the dreamier view of its as uncorrupt,⁹ one may well find that the rustic, and in particular the shepherd, has fascinating possibilities for the cultivated poet. A natural piper and singer, he is easily made to stand for the poet. It may be that the cultivated poet at a very early date learned his themes from the rustic primitive. In Ancient Greece and in the Europe of the Middle Ages the women at the corn-mills sang their cantilenœ molares, songs which told of a former Age of Gold, under the reign of a peaceful king whose sudden death brought it to an end; they dreamed of rest as a hungry man does of food. Another theme of the peasant singer was the encounter of rustic and courtier, in which the rustic triumphed. This was a kind of song which certainly had its origin in sheep-country, as modern French scholars have shown. Both of these themes, sophisticated and given a new orientation, belong to the stock of the pastoral poet. He will also observe that the figures of the shepherd and the shepherd-king have accumulated through the ages new and deeper meanings; if the pastoral poet is late enough in time he will never be unconscious of the persistent pastoral imagery of Christ,¹⁰ in sermon and parable, or of the manner in which the Church has adapted that imagery. (The connexion between this imagery and that of the formal Pastoral was made explicit by Petrarch.) The Christian Pastoralist will also remember that the Song of Solomon, with all its unfathomable significance to the allegorical divine, is an epithalamium cast in the form of a dream-Pastoral. The poet's language is therefore capable of venturing close to, and across, that vague frontier which in the great periods of poetry separates secular and religious imagery.

These are merely a few random hints as to the complexity of Pastoral, treated abstractly. In the England of 1600, which produced most of the poetry in this collection, the relationship between the poet and his theme was governed in these and in many other ways, and affected by more specific religious, political, and economic tensions. Evidently it cannot be properly understood in isolation from the ‘kind’ within whose conventions it is written.

These general remarks might be summed up as follows. Pastoral depends upon an opposition between the simple, or natural, and the cultivated. Although this opposition can be complex, the bulk of pastoral poetry treats it quite simply, and assumes that natural men are purer and less vicious than cultivated men, and that there exists between them and Nature a special sympathy. The natural man is also wise and gifted in a different way from the cultivated man. By reason of his simplicity he is a useful subject for cultivated study, since his emotions and virtues are not complicated by deterioration and artificiality. The themes of the cultivated poet may be connected with those of the primitive poet, much as the garden is related to the open countryside, but the cultivated poet sophisticates them and endows them with learned allusions. Thus the Pastoral can become a vehicle for poetic speculation on religious mysteries, on the hierarchy of the Church, and also on poetry itself.

ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE ‘KIND’

There are extant very old songs concerning shepherds, which may be connected with pastoral poetry. One dates from the early (i.e., Sumerian) civilization of Mesopotamia; in it a girl prefers a farmer (socially superior because economically more highly organized) to a shepherd:

Never shall the shepherd marry me;
Never shall he drape me in his tufted cloth;
Never shall his finest wool touch me.
Me, the maiden, shall the farmer,
And he only, take in marriage—
The farmer who can grow beans,
The farmer who can grow grain.(11)

The shepherd spurned here is quite like the rejected swain in the Twentieth Idyll of Theocritus. The simplicity which accompanies the poverty of the shepherd is celebrated in many pre-Pastoral myths; in particular, there is the myth of the royal child (to the Christian, the type of Christ), cast away or exiled in infancy, who “receives the ministrations of shepherds, and is reared by a foster-father of humble birth”;¹² a myth later treated in pastoral poetry by many poets, and especially by Spenser and Shakespeare.

The connexion between myth of this kind and the beginnings of Pastoral is obscure. Little is known about the sources of Theocritus, the first pastoral poet, who was born in Syracuse about 310 B.C., and lived in Alexandria under the patronage of Ptolemy Philadelphus. These sources may have had local characteristics which Theocritus generalized when he established the form. It is impossible to guess what these might have been. It may, however, be supposed that some pastoral themes, like those of gift-bringing and song-contest, originated in the sheep-pastures of Sicily. It is known that Theocritus, in those Idylls which deal with country life, made a fairly thorough attempt to write in rustic language, ‘placing’ his rustics socially by using the Doric dialect, and allowing their hexameters to be occasionally the vehicles of coarse or bawdy expressions. Theocritus found that the country folk were interesting in themselves, and worth recording in these relaxed hexameters. He did not himself do much by way of refining the poetic-philosophic potentialities of the Pastoral, but simply offered a courtly version, presumably substantially accurate, of certain rustic activities as he had observed them in Sicily and on the island of Cos. This in itself was an achievement related to, and in a sense bred out of, the needs of his time. “Theocritus,” says Professor Jackson Knight, “brought the country itself out from the mere relief of the choric ode, and normal, active love out from the background of a story, on to the central stage, where highly complex urban communities needed it most.”¹³

We find in Theocritus the court-poet, dependant of tyrants, habitué of the advanced literary communities of Alexandria, many signs of the typical pastoral attitude. In his First Idyll he celebrates the death of the shepherd-hero Daphnis, which in folklore had represented the annual death of Nature itself. Thus the “pathetic fallacy,” as Ruskin called the convention by which Nature is made to share human sorrow, enters the pastoral tradition at the very beginning. From this Idyll developed the whole elaborate convention of the Pastoral Elegy, which perhaps reached its climax in Milton's Lycidas and in his Epitaphium Damonis. Yet Daphnis could have meant little to Theocritus except in the vicarious way in which the townsman enjoys the serious rites of the countryside. The pastoral flute was an instrument not of utility but of nostalgia, the nostalgia of a sophisticated poet for an art which was not yet a matter for hair-splitting and casuistry. And although Theocritus was more content than any pastoral poet up to the time of the Elizabethans to give his readers a straightforward account of the simple completeness of bucolic culture, and let them draw from it the conclusions to which he himself had come, he did not always avoid that projection of his own values and interests on his characters which we have noted as being characteristic of Pastoral. In the Seventh Idyll, for instance, the emphasis in the description of the harvest festival in Cos is on the fact that the city poets are playing at shepherds in this rich and authentic autumn setting. Actual poets are discussed under fancy names.

So ‘shepherd’ can on occasion mean ‘poet’; to sing or play in shepherd fashion is to write or publish poetry. … The first step had been taken towards the days when, if anyone was called a shepherd in poetry, it would have been a startling discovery to find that he really was a country fellow who got his living by looking after actual sheep and had never published or tried to publish anything in his life.¹⁴

Kinds of poetry are not unchangeable entities, though the Renaissance found that easy to believe. Theocritus is obviously a pastoral poet, and in some ways the most accomplished of all who explore the form; but conditions which later became inseparable from the kind are only sketched and hinted at in its earliest exponent.¹⁵ The work of developing these hints fell to a line of comparatively undistinguished poets who were writing between the time of Theocritus and the time of Virgil. For these poets Theocritus was the model, and from him they derived authority for the manner of their writing, giving him the status of a classic. Their themes, their metre (the hexameter), and their dialect (the Doric) they derived from him.

The position of Theocritus thus resembles in some respects that of Homer. He is the acknowledged classic of pastoral poetry, though his influence upon the tradition is less direct and in the long run less formative than that of Virgil. But he quickly became a true classic, the subject of imitation by later poets working in the same line.

Imitation is one of the fundamental laws of literary history, for it arises whenever a poet contemplates poetry. It is the function which gives literary history a meaning in terms of itself, and provides the channels of literary tradition. It is a wide concept, covering many related aspects of literary activity, and when used dogmatically it has often had very damaging and confusing consequences. But when that is said it must still be remembered that Imitation, in so far as it implies the need for an awareness of the best that has been thought and said, and the best ways of thinking and saying it, an awareness of what a classic is and how it should modify later work, is a doctrine of prime import for the study of literature, and particularly of modern literature; for it was during the Renaissance that the characteristic modern attitude to the ancients (the classics) was adopted and defined.

The critics of the Renaissance sometimes named the poet's chief requirements as being Art, Imitation, and Exercise; these requirements relate to the knowledge, study, and practice of the best models and methods of their medium. Another requirement, that of native genius, is also mentioned; unfortunately, not all practitioners of poetry have this, and the result was a good deal of poetry which depended upon critical laws and the pedantic imitation of detail. The consequence is a degree of tedium which has tended to bring the whole doctrine into disrepute as a dreary rhetorical substitute for poetry. This bad kind of Imitation is not confined to poetry; two great, but very different, humanists, Politian and Erasmus, were driven to complain of the absurdities into which those neo-Latinists fell who insisted upon the closest imitation of Cicero's style down to the last esse videatur. If we consider the degree to which Imitation penetrated the educational systems of the Renaissance and shaped the minds of all its writers we shall not be surprised that it occasionally had such dull and mechanical consequences. But not with the true scholar and poet who had laboured to understand it in ancient criticism and ancient literature—who understood that, although the letter may kill, the spirit will always give life, and that the doctrine was, among other things, a rational interpretation of the true relationship between the ancient and the modern world. Not, in fact, with Jonson, whose many and close imitations of Horace, Juvenal, and other poets require far more explanation than that they happened to have said already whatever it was he proposed to say. They were his guides, he said, not his commanders. Like Pope and Milton, he distinguished between the essence and the accident in his model; like Pope, he inhabited the critical and moral environment of the classic civilization without forfeiting citizenship of his own. He understood Imitation, and I have sometimes felt that it is through Jonson that we, in a rather different world, might hope best to understand it, and to understand how it can be held responsible on the one hand for mountains of dullness and on the other for Volpone and Lycidas. To conclude this digression, it may be said that a measure of the importance of the doctrine historically is the possibility of maintaining that the great seventeenth-century war of Ancients and Moderns was really fought on divergent interpretations of Imitation, in the widest sense of the term.

But Imitation, even in its narrowest rhetorical sense, is not a modern doctrine; it was current in the schools of Alexandria and Rome. The imitators of Theocritus did not, so far as is known, explore, using him as a guide; they reproduced. The best-known Greek pastoral poem outside Theocritus is the elegy written for Bion, a second-century Alexandrian poet, which was formerly, but it seems incorrectly, attributed to Moschus, under whose name it still goes. This poem is the next link in the chain connecting the First Idyll of Theocritus with Milton.¹⁶ It is written in literary Doric, with many allusions to Theocritus. Its connexion with rustic life is purely formal. Bion is a shepherd-poet who had gladdened Pan with his pipe and his songs; pastoral details are given allegorical significances by now very obscure. These details, however, themselves descended from Theocritus, who was already an edited classic, and perhaps the subject of commentary not merely philological but of the laboured and far-fetched sort that Virgil was later to receive. In Moschus there are in full measure those artifices of allegory and myth and language which, when they are separate from the genuine emotional and intellectual interests of Pastoral, give the kind its reputation as a matter of frigid ornament. His Lament is, in fact, the kind of poem Johnson thought Lycidas was.

There is no need, for our purposes, to say any more of post-Theocritean Greek pastoral poetry, or, indeed, of the dependent Latin tradition. “It would seem,” says H. J. Rose, “that by the time of Nero one of the stock rhetorical exercises, a thing of which every passman was supposed to be capable, was to describe a country feast or praise the life of the countryman.”¹⁷ But meantime Virgil had intervened to change the merely rhetorical tradition.

Virgil seems to have gone straight to Theocritus for the model of his Imitation. He used him as a guide, not as a commander, and the result is poetry which it would be impossible to study as merely part of a rhetorical tradition. It is pastoral poetry which, for the first time, complicates the simple town-country contrast with serious reflections upon that contrast; which cultivates simplicity in decorated language; and which uses the country scene and rustic episode for allegorical purposes.

Robert Graves speaks of “the Virgilian pseudo-shepherd,”¹⁸ and there would be no objection to the phrase if its tone were not slightly disparaging. The pastoral figures of the youthful Virgil are as sophisticated as his later Trojan emigrants. He places them in a remote paradise which he calls Arcadia, though in fact Arcadia was and is a rugged and unparadisial place; he could not use Sicily, as Theocritus had done, because it was over-familiar, though his Muses are the Pastoral Muses of Theocritus—Sicelides Musæ. Some of his most exquisite passages refer, as Mr Graves suggests, to vulgar and unpoetic contemporaries; he discusses contemporary agrarian questions; he flatters powerful men; he celebrates in exalted language homosexual love (though it should be remembered that this passion was not at the time regarded as peculiarly vicious). In fact, Virgil develops the hints of Theocritus in a very thorough way; he is derivative, and often translates (sometimes, it has been argued, even mistranslates) his master. Indeed, there seems to be a case for dismissing Virgil as a particularly ‘artificial’ writer of Pastoral, who simply “used the pastoral situation as a convenient rostrum for moral philosophy”¹⁹ and for other even less reputable purposes. If the charge is fair it is a poor look-out for the remainder of the European bucolic corpus, in which Virgil is by far the most potent influence; one of the eclogues, the fourth, has perhaps the best claim of all pagan poetry to be considered, with respect to the whole culture of Christian Europe, seminal. Clearly this account of Virgil is incomplete.

Daphnis, the figure whom Virgil borrowed from Theocritus to do duty for Gallus, a friend lamenting his desertion by professional mistress, had a place in the Sicilian mythology that corresponds to that of various more familiar figures like Thomas the Rhymer, who took fairy brides under odd and stringent conditions. The similarity between the Greek Daphnis and the sensitive but worldly Gallus is of course somewhat remote, and Virgil does not force it, preferring to convey it by delicate allusion to the Theocritean character. But it is surely wrong to suggest that he was indifferent to the ultimate propriety of the analogy. A soldier-poet distressed by the defection of “an actress in low comedy who has left him to go off with a soldier”²⁰ may very well be celebrated in these terms, as the scheming monopolists of Elizabeth's court were glorified in great poetry as knights of chivalry. There is a basic similarity in the situation of Gallus and Daphnis. Again, the lament for the dead Daphnis in Eclogue V may be about Julius Cæsar; both were gods, and both were shepherds—Cæsar of his people. To adherents of Octavian Cæsar was also a saviour. The Pastoral is a leveller—it has to assume that “you can say everything about complex people by a complete consideration of simple people.”²¹ But in order to do so you must project polite complexities on the rude pastoral situation. When the peasant is nothing but a courtier in disguise, when the sillabubs are, as it were, pasteurized, there is nothing left but an emptily artificial Trianon masquerade. Despite Virgil's polite projections and his well-groomed hinds, he has not done this; he has left the situation intact, and the characteristically urban plight of Gallus, as well as the political murder of Julius Cæsar, yield a fuller significance when they are appraised in terms of a world schematically simple and sensitive to magic and poetry.

Virgil's is the supreme achievement of classical Pastoral; the virtues of his English rivals derive from a revaluation of the relationship between the actual town-country situation and the poetic tradition. He is perhaps as far removed from the facts of rural society as it is safe to go; his imitators support this suggestion by adopting a sterile pose even farther removed Virgil's influence is therefore not without its dangers; it is easier to reproduce the letter than the spirit. The best of later pastoral poetry arduously achieved the Virgilian feat of rediscovering the true impulse of the classical form.

The most influential of Virgil's eclogues is the fourth. This poem, with its hundred problems for the scholar, has a hundred virtues for the poet. It conquers new and legitimate territory for the Pastoral, and gives licence for a new and more authoritative tone—paulo maiora canamus. Above all, it suggests to other poets an unsuspected complexity in the ‘pseudo-shepherd’ and his associated imagery, a suggestion partly responsible for the profundity characteristic of so many later poems. The view of this eclogue generally held during the formative period of modern Pastoral was that, by employing the dicta of the Cumæan sibyl, Virgil had been enabled to prophesy the birth of Christ a few decades later, and some modern scholars have found traces of evidence that he was in fact indebted to the sibylline remains. But that does not matter. The enormous influence of Virgil in the Renaissance derives in some degree from his strange medieval reputation as a mage and pre-Christian prophet, and this reputation is undoubtedly dependent to some extent on the acceptance of the ‘Messianic’ Eclogue as a pagan prophecy of Christ—an acceptance made with the authority of St Augustine. In the official hierarchy of kinds Pastoral was always classed as one of the lower manifestations of poetry on account of the ostensible meanness of its milieu and characters; the Fourth Eclogue authorized an occasional ‘unkindly’ majesty of diction, of which later poets were to take advantage. The influence of this poem extends far beyond the pastoral kind, but within that kind it is often at work when there is no explicit reference to Virgil. It is the point at which the Golden Age of Saturn, the return of which the poet foresees, mingles with the Christian vision of man in paradisial state before Adam's sin, and after redemption is complete.

Virgil may therefore be regarded as a liberator of the Pastoral. The immensity of his achievement did nevertheless induce in his imitators a servility which, if unaccompanied by a proper sense of the fullness of that achievement and an awareness of what each poet needs to do again for himself, gave rise to the bad kind of imitation, which imitated the letter and not the spirit. This was not Virgil's fault. He did for Theocritus what he was to do for Homer; he established the classical poem and suggested many of its recognized variant forms. These remarks, which must conclude the scanty appraisal of the Eclogues which is all we have space for here, really say no more than that Pastoral would have been another, and a lesser, thing had Virgil never applied himself to the exploration of its problems and possibilities. …

RENAISSANCE THEORIES OF PASTORAL

A reasonable idea of the normal Renaissance definition of Pastoral may be derived from Puttenham's remarks on the Eclogue in his Arte of English Poesie:²²

the Poet devised the Eglogue … not of purpose to counterfait or represent the rusticall manner of loves and communication: but under the vaile of homely persons, and in rude speeches to insinuate and glaunce at greater matters, and such as perchance had not bene safe to have disclosed in any other sort, which may be perceived by the Eglogues of Virgill, in which are treated by figure matters of greater importance then the loves of Titirus and Corydon. These Eglogues came after to containe and enforme morall discipline, for the amendment of mans behaviour, as be those of Mantuan²³ and other modern poets.

Puttenham, as usual, displays considerable common sense. He avoids the doctrine that the Pastoral is the oldest of genres because of its association with primitive rustic communities, and confines himself to a description of what it was really like in the hands of authors like Mantuan, who imitated Virgil and included topical references and ecclesiastical allegories. He insists on the paradox inherent in the kind; though rudely written, it deals with great matters. Decorum insists that the proper style for Pastoral is low, or rude, though there is precedent (invoked by Spenser and Milton) for higher flights. Sidney, who in his own Arcadia wrote a heroic Pastoral, a blend of two kinds, pretends in his Apologie for Poetrie that Pastoral is a possible weak point in the defences of poetry, where its opponents may choose to assault it, “for perchance where the hedge is lowest they will soonest leap over.” Webbe says that, despite its lowness, the Pastoral can offer much profitable delight, and in this he includes both flattery and inveighing against abuses. Although poets preferred to use a decorative licence, decorum nevertheless insisted that Pastoral, like Satire, belonged to the base style, “to be holden within their tether by a low, myld and simple maner of utterance, creeping rather then clyming, & marching rather then mounting upwardes.” This tenet explains in a general way the provincialisms and archaisms conscientiously used by Spenser in his Eclogues. Although they descend ultimately from the Doric of Theocritus, it is not even certain that Spenser knew the Greek poet at first hand; he is showing his familiarity with the laws of poetry and the practice of the best modern French poets.

The most thorough examination of the status of the kind was that undertaken by the Italian dramatist Guarini, his supporters, and his opponents, in a long controversy about Guarini's pastoral drama, Il Pastor Fido, towards the end of the sixteenth century. Guarini had been challenged by a certain Jasone de Nores, who held that pastoral drama was socially and morally useless, and also that it contravened the ancient laws of poetry. Pastoral, said de Nores, was not only useless to town-dwellers, but might even do harm by inducing them to live in the country; if the pastoral life was unfavourably treated, then harm was done to the rustics as well. He thought shepherds particularly poor subjects for drama, since they were lazy and lacking elaborate manners and customs. The Ancients avoided these difficulties; for one thing, their pastoral poems were all short eclogues which did not infringe the laws of probability, or make shepherds talk like princes or philosophers. Guarini's reply is interesting because he was forced to make explicit the rationale of Pastoral. He relies upon the historical argument that the pastoral society is the earliest of all, and that when every one was a shepherd there must have been shepherd kings, shepherd poets, shepherd warriors, and so on, so that in writing about shepherds one can write freely about the concerns of the modern world. They are all reflected in a very simple form in the hypothetical pastoral community. He is at some pains to explain that love, a special concern of Renaissance Pastoral, can be easily and pleasantly studied in this context.²⁴

Such arguments are of little interest save in that they show a certain concern about the historical justification of this apparently somewhat arbitrary form. Although Guarini shows some independence of the strict classicist interpretation of the kind, he is a poet of the second or third rank, and shows no real understanding of the true philosophic importance of the kind, or of the peculiar contribution which his age was able to make to it. His countryman Tasso, in his Aminta, is much closer to such an understanding, and in France the kind was patiently and successfully investigated; but it is not until we consider English Pastoral that we can recognize an appreciation, almost intuitive and certainly remarkably complete, of pastoral poetry as it was shaped by the pressure of the age's thought and sensibility. For this understanding we look not to critics, but to poets. …

NATURE IN THE RENAISSANCE PASTORAL

When Marvell, at the end of our period, wrote about a mower's hatred of gardens, he was representing the world of Nature, the uncultivated, the pure, by the untamed, uncorrupted fields; and the world of Art, the civilized, the cultivated, the sphere in which men had meddled with Nature, by the garden. He was, of course, simplifying for his own purposes a difficult philosophical opposition between Art and Nature, but he is none the less putting, with considerable subtlety, a point of view which was frequently expressed in the Renaissance, and which recurs with some persistence in the history of our literature. Probably the contrast between town and country—the social aspect of the great Art-Nature antithesis which is philosophically the basis of pastoral literature—was more poignant at that time than it has been since. London was becoming a modern metropolis, with a distinctively metropolitan ethos, before the eyes of its citizens, who were by tradition and even by upbringing much more rural than any town-dweller can now be. The plays of Jonson, and some of Shakespeare's too, contain many references to the new morality, the new men, the new social standing of the commercial classes, the growth of wealth not based upon the soil; and the death of an old order which hated usury and did not imagine that cakes and ale were hostile to virtue. The great Astrophel himself, like many other courtiers, was deeply in debt, and consciously living the life of a dead and lamented epoch—a kind of golden age of chivalry—in the age which saw the inauguration of modern capitalist finance. Puritanism, at its best a way of life and worship worthy of fine minds, was legitimately associated, by Jonson and others, with a tendency to hypocritical self-aggrandizement and to a mean interference with the traditional pleasures and customs of others. Essentially an urban growth, it was suspicious of country matters, and its hatred for the maypole and its associated sports, which Puritans rightly conjectured to be descended from pagan religious rites, was logical in a religious attitude which also condemned the drama. The satirist looked about him in a town which was turning into a metropolis, and observed that its citizen body was stratifying into new classes, actively discontented with the old dispensation, and living under a municipal authority predominantly Puritan. The court was held to be corrupt and affected; the increase in luxury and artificiality visible in the lives of courtier and burgher alike deeply troubled Jonson, who found that the language was imitating “the public riot.” When Jonson turned from Satire to Pastoral, at the end of his career, he lamented the death of an order as old, he thought, as the countryside; a way of life in which generosity, in the fullest sense of that word, accompanied a purity of life and pleasure which the Juvenalian town had exchanged for disease, obscurantism, affectation, and bigotry.²⁵ The moving passage from his Sad Shepherd … is one of the themes which occur frequently in Elizabethan Pastoral.

The contrast between town and country is frequently expressed in the literature of the period. There was a tendency to laugh at country folk, and this was a traditional activity; but there was also a tendency to idealize them. Overbury writes of a milkmaid:

The golden ears of corn fall and kiss her feet when she reaps them, as if they wished to be bound and led prisoners by the same hand that felled them. Her breath is her own, which scents all the year long of June, like a new made haycock. She makes her hands hard with labour, and her heart soft with pity: and when winter evenings fall early (sitting at her merry wheel) she sings a defiance to the giddy wheel of fortune. … The garden and bee-hive are all her physic and chirurgery, and she lives the longer for it. … Thus lives she, and all her care is she may die in the spring-time, to have store of flowers stuck upon her winding-sheet.²⁶

Something of the Elizabethan sense of the urgent beauty of the country life emerges in Nicholas Breton's dialogue, “The Courtier and the Countryman.” The Countryman speaks:

Now for the delight of our eyes, we have the May—painting of the earth, with flowers of dainty colours, and delicate sweets: we have the berries, the cherries, the peas and the beans, the plums and the codlings, in the month of June: in July the pears and the apples, the wheat, the rye, the barley and the oats, the beauty of the wide fields, and the labours with delight and mirth, and merry cheer at the coming home of the harvest cart. We have, again, in our woods the birds singing: in the pastures the cow lowing, the ewe bleating, the foal neighing, which profit and pleasure makes us better music than an idle note and a worse ditty, though I highly do commend music, when it is in the right key. Again, we have young rabbits that in a sunny morning sit washing their faces, while as I have heard there are certain old conies that in their beds sit painting of their faces. …

To all this, the worsted Courtier replies, “I can the better bear with your humour because it is more natural than artificial, yet could I wish you would not so clownify your wit, as to bury your understanding under a clod of earth.” Which earns him the reproof, “Now for your Nature and Art, I think better of a natural Art than an artifical Nature”; for this is a pastoral countryman, who understands the terms of the town. We might note what he has to say about love, the passion which occupies so much space in Elizabethan pastoral poetry:

And for love, if it be in the world, I think it is in the country, for where envy, pride, and malice and jealousy makes buzzes in men's brains, what love can be in their hearts, howsoever it slip from their tongues? No, no, our turtles ever fly together, our swans ever swim together, and our loves live and die together. Now if such love be among you, it is worthy to be made much of, but if you like today and loathe tomorrow, if all your love be to laugh and lie down, or to hope of gain or reward, that is none of our love. …

Here is the Golden Age envisaged in the countryside, all the more poignantly because the countryside is still very near one's own doorstep. This tension between town and country seems to be productive of the special kind of literature we call Pastoral. Poets were interested in the contrast between the wild and the cultivated. But their interest was not dependent entirely upon social changes and the discovery of ancient Pastoral; the interest of Renaissance poets in Nature was stimulated by the discovery of countries in which men were living in a state of nature, unaffected by Art, and outside the scope of Grace. Anyone who turns to Montaigne's essay Of Cannibals may read an account of one sensitive and subtle reaction to the news from the New World. The travellers came back with their accounts of the natives, or even brought the savages back with them—Montaigne conversed with some. But, because there were two opinions about natural men, one holding that they were virtuous because unspoilt, and the other that they were vicious because they belonged to what the theologians called the state of nature as opposed to the state of grace, the travellers emphasized the evidence which suited the theory they favoured; some reported the New World savages to live in perfect concord and happiness (as Montaigne says they did), but others found them treacherous and devil-worshipping. Both these views fell in neatly with preconceptions already held and already expressed in literature and philosophy. On the one hand there is the classic expression of Golden Age happiness in the much-imitated chorus of Tasso's Aminta; this could easily be extended to the ‘naturalist’ libertine poetry of Donne and Carew and Randolph, which Marvell subtly countered in his poetry. On the other hand there is the deeper examination of Nature and its true relationship to Art and Grace which Spenser in The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare in his last comedies, and Milton in Comus undertook. Each of these poets sometimes presents Nature for what it is—that state from which men, by nurture and grace, have been led away. The generous ‘salvage man’ in Spenser is so by reason of the cultivated stock from which he sprang; his nature is improved by the action of grace. The King's sons in Cymbeline cannot suppress their nobility, and Caliban is natural and vile in contrast with Miranda, who has the virtues of nobility; nobile, it was believed, was a contraction of non vile. Comus rules over the realm of Nature, and attempts to deprave the lady, who is clad in the magical armour of nobility and chastity, by using the very arguments of the ‘naturalist.’

This is only a very hurried glimpse of the serious philosophic element which penetrates the English Pastoral of the Renaissance. In the longer poems, and in the plays, it is rarely far from the surface—as, for example, in Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess. It mingles with serious attempts to reproduce the ancient tradition in the modern Eclogue by inventing a native Doric and adapting the equipment of the Sicilian shepherd to his English equivalent; with studious adaptations and translations of modern authors like Mantuan, Sannazaro, Marot, Ronsard, Montemayor, Tasso, and Guarini. Every device of literary Pastoral is found in some form or other in the poetry of this period; every use to which the kind can be put is exploited, from the ecclesiastical allegory which Googe derived from Mantuan to the elegies which Bryskett and Milton derived from Moschus. All the moral and scientific interests of the time found expression in the form, and the age's passion for allegory found the Pastoral a particularly congenial form of expression. In Spenser alone one may study almost every aspect of Renaissance Pastoral.²⁷ It is generally acknowledged that the publication of The Shepheardes Calender, in 1579, was one of the most important events in the history of English poetry, and not only in the history of Pastoral. In this work Spenser, while not ignoring the charms of the English pastoral scene, which often gave the work of his contemporaries a fresh, unstudied charm, brought into the tradition of English poetry the influence of every great pastoral poet of the past, from Theocritus to the modern French poets. As E. K. says, after a roll-call of the bucolic poets of the past, Spenser follows their “footing” everywhere, “yet so as few, but they be wel sented, can trace him out.” Spenser's imagination worked freely within the classical tradition, which he explored in depth, but he was also capable of sustained efforts in heroic Pastoral of a sort not contemplated by the ancient poets. In the Sixth Book of the Faerie Queene, which is the Legend of Courtesy, we have the richest and most impressive example of a distinctively English development of the pastoral tradition, which was later imitated by Shakespeare and Milton.

But it is not only the great who engage us. Hundreds of poets wrote Pastoral in one form or another, and the general level of achievement was almost incredibly high; never had Pastoral seemed a more natural mode of song. And when its summer had passed, and poets had for a while contented themselves with re-examining the formal Eclogue, there came Herrick, who seemed to look back on all the richness of the Elizabethan Pastoral and distil from it a nostalgic essence, and Marvell, whose handful of poems seem to sum up the whole story of the English Pastoral, inexhaustibly rich in their solemn undertones.

With Marvell the story really ends, for the later Pastoral lived in a quite different atmosphere, and in a quite different relationship to its readers. Marvell's lyrics, whenever they were written, were not published until the tradition in which they existed was already being forgotten. Dryden's translations of Theocritus are pert, as Theocritus never was; the true impulse of rustic Pastoral petered out; it was something the Giant Race had understood. The Pastorals of Pope show how much and how little the new poetry could do in this kind; in Pope there is a union, impossible a century earlier, between the practice and the academic theory of Pastoral. The eighteenth century excelled in the mock-Pastoral, which is a kind of pantomime following the great play. The Augustans were often conscious of their defects, and Pope understood the significance of his addiction to mock-Epic; the Dunciad, he said, was a kind of satyr-play appended to the great trilogy of Homer, Virgil, and Milton. It is not too difficult to see an analogy with mock-Pastoral. Human needs had, perhaps, not changed; but certain things of importance had reduced the relevance of the old Pastoral. London had lost the country; its maypole, as Pope observed, had been taken down. The literary and philosophical preoccupations of the Renaissance poets had largely given way to a new, or newly expressed, set of problems. The old poetry, and everything that gave it its peculiar richness, had been largely forgotten by the time Johnson expressed his rational objections to Lycidas.

CONCLUSION

To some extent, the conditions under which the pastoral poetry of the English Renaissance was written were similar to those which give rise to the first pastoral poetry in Theocritus; but many other factors worked upon it to make it different, though of the same ‘kind.’ For one thing, the Renaissance poets were aware of their great ancient progenitors, as Virgil had been aware of Theocritus. Not only was Imitation a part of their accepted rhetorical and educational system; it was also a leading principle in their poetic, it controlled their attitude to their Art. The best poets would imitate the spirit which gave life, and adapt the work of their masters to a new world. This new world was not unconscious of the ages of poetry which filled the time between Theocritus and itself; during that time there had been other kinds of poetry relevant to the pastoral kind, and the language of shepherds had been applied variously to greater concerns, notably to the government of the Church, and the worship of God and the Blessed Virgin. Pastoral poetry concerns itself with the relationship between Nature and Art, and Renaissance views of Nature had been enlarged by new knowledge. The object of the pastoral poet's contemplation was no longer merely the happy peasant or shepherd, but the true natural man of the New World. Old modes of thinking about Nature and Art did, however, survive, and led a lively existence in the thought of the Renaissance. Montaigne's reaction to the accounts he had heard of the New World and its inhabitants were conditioned by all he knew of the old pastoral myths of the Golden Age. A ‘naturalist’ philosophy induced poets to portray that age as hedonistic and sinless, though wanton; in reply, the more moral poets asserted supernatural values, and described Nature as corrupted by the sin of Adam. Furthermore, even more keenly than Theocritus, perhaps, the English poets of the Renaissance found a pure though nostalgic pleasure in contemplating the life of the countryside. This is, in essence, the same delight that all ages know, and which is so keenly expressed in Chaucer. Country sports and country loves were interesting for their own sake, as well as being a kind of comment on the sophistication of the city. Flowers were valued not only as decorations for the laureate hearse of a dead shepherd-poet, but for their own beauty. Although, in thoughtful mood, the poet might think of Nature as God's Book of the Creatures, the more usual reaction of the Elizabethan poet is one of spontaneous pleasure. This pleasure, and the nostalgia of which I have spoken, combine with the critical and philosophical elements in the pastoral tradition to produce the rich profundity of English pastoral poetry.

Notes

1. I.e., Appropriate to its kind, or genre.

2. I.e., Figures of rhetoric.

3. Lives of the Poets: “Life of Milton” (World's Classics edition, I, 116; Oxford University Press, 1906).

4. Lives of the Poets: “Life of Pope” (ibid., II, 324). The tradition that poets profitably commence their careers with Pastoral developed from Virgil's Eclogues.

5. Æschylus and Athens (Lawrence and Wishart, 1941), p. 66.

6. Iliad, XII, 310-328.

7. “Nature is inimitable; and in her real beauty she bursts forth with such vigour that Art can merely spoil all her works, committing upon her a thousand outrages for every ornament it manages to bestow.” This is the opinion that is orthodoxly confuted by Polixenes in The Winter's Tale.

8. This is a topic of endless discussion. The reader might consult Castiglione, The Courtier, for a characteristic debate upon it. Shakespeare's Tempest treats the theme allusively but very fully.

9. This hard view is as old as the soft one; both are pre-Christian, though Christian views on Nature tend to prefer the hard view, when by Nature is meant that which Adam's fall corrupted, and which is opposed to Grace. But this is a complicated subject.

10. See, for example, John X, 11-16.

11. Frankfort, Frankfort, Wilson, and Jacobsen, Before Philosophy (Penguin, 1949), p. 180.

12. See A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History, abridged D. C. Somervell (Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 219 ff.

13. Roman Vergil (Faber and Faber, 1944), p. 31.

14. H. J. Rose, The Eclogues of Vergil (Cambridge University Press, 1942), p. 11.

15. Some scholars believe that Theocritus found in Cos a school of pastoral poets, whom he imitated; but none of these poets has survived.

16. It is not included here, for lack of a suitable English translation.

17. The Eclogues of Vergil (Cambridge University Press, 1942), p. 16.

18. The Common Asphodel (Hamish Hamilton, 1949), p. 253.

19. Graves, op. cit., p. 252.

20. Graves, op. cit., 253.

21. W. Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (Chatto and Windus, 1935), p. 137.

22. Edited by G. D. Willcock and A. Walker (Cambridge University Press, 1936), pp. 38-39.

23. The Eclogues of Baptista Spagnuoli, known as Mantuanus, were published in 1498, and won him a great reputation as a Latin poet. His bucolics were standard in the Renaissance; when Holofernes misquotes him in Love's Labour's Lost, IV, ii, 95-96, the implication is that Holofernes is a dunce. Mantuan was one of Spenser's many models in The Shepheardes Calender, and hundreds of other eclogues are indebted to him. He is one of the authorities for the attack on unworthy pastors in Lycidas. The earliest English writers to be affected by him were Barclay and Googe. He is represented in this book by one of his Eclogues in the translation of Turberville.

24. Pastoral drama as such has been excluded from this collection; it is too bulky to be properly represented. But it is none the less an important Renaissance development of Pastoral. When an extract from it seems to make an important point about Pastoral I have not hesitated to use it.

    The other great formal development of Renaissance Pastoral was the prose or verse-and-prose romance. The chief writers in this kind were Sannazaro (1456-1530), in Italian; Montemayor (1520-61), in Spanish; and Sidney in English. Their starting-point was the Hellenistic romance, and generally speaking they are more concerned with narrative values than with specifically pastoral values. They have their place in the history of the novel, and in the history of Epic, as Sidney's comments in the Apologie suggest. Sannazaro, with his polished melancholy and his insistence on the “pathetic fallacy” whereby he makes the whole of Nature lament with the unhappy lover, was enormously fashionable, and Sidney even borrowed his title, Arcadia. He was probably very well known in England. So was Montemayor, who provided Shakespeare with at least one, and probably two, plot-ideas. Sidney was likewise used, but was equally thought of as a pastoral poet, and his death stimulated a large number of pastoral elegies in the tradition of Theocritus, Moschus, and Virgil.

25. Characteristically, Jonson chose the Robin Hood legend as the theme of his Sad Shepherd. This hero of the dead golden world of England echoes throughout Elizabethan Pastoral.

26. This Character, with others of the same kind, may be found in J. Dover Wilson's Life in Shakespeare's England (Cambridge University Press, 1925; Penguin, 1949).

27. See the very valuable appendices in Volume I of the Minor Poems in the Variorum Spenser (ed. Greenlaw and others) (Oxford University Press, 1933-47).