SOURCE: “The Elizabethan Pastoral,” “The Pastoral Drama,” and “The Seventeenth-Century Pastoral,” in The Penguin Book of English Pastoral Verse, introduced and edited by John Barrell and John Bull, Penguin Books, 1974, pp. 13-20; 107-11; 141-48.

[In the following excerpts, Barrell and Bull trace the development of English pastoral poetry and its relation to the changing social conditions of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. The critics examine the relations between the conventions of the pastoral mode and the actuality of rural life as well as the evolving historical reality of gentlemen-poets' connection with the land.]

THE ELIZABETHAN PASTORAL

During the Dark and Early Middle ages, the Pastoral all but disappeared in Europe. It did find some form of expression in the troubadour pastourelles in France, poems which reflect the transition from a popular ballad tradition to a sophisticated court culture—and thus have as their dominant theme the conflict between the two worlds in the attempted seduction of a peasant girl by a courtly knight. But feudal society was too stratified, too static, to allow a proper consideration of pastoral matters. Interest in the Pastoral revives in the Renaissance when the feudal idea of community is first seriously threatened. But the Pastoral offered more than a nostalgic myth. It is the Eclogues of Virgil that are taken as a model, with the possibilities that they afforded for a greater sophistication, for didacticism, and even for religious satire; an apparently humble cloak for dangerous thought. As the Bible became available in the sixteenth century in the vernacular, so the links between the Pastoral and Christ the shepherdking were strengthened, with an emphasis on the nativity and its associations with the pastoral theme of regeneration and the coming of the new Golden Age. These strands were most highly developed in Italy—particularly by Petrarch and by Mantuan, to whom Spenser's The Shepheardes Calendar acknowledges a debt—and it is by way of Italy that the mainstream of the Pastoral reaches England.

Apart from a few translations, and the ‘eglogs’ of Barnabe Googe, the first important attempt to write an English Pastoral is The Shepheardes Calendar (1579), a poem in which the conventions established by a number of pastoral poets—Theocritus, Virgil, Sannazaro, Mantuan, Marot—are assimilated and ‘English'd’ with remarkable success. Spenser's shepherds—Colin Clout, Hobbinol, Cuddie and the rest—have almost all been identified with members of Spenser's circle and correspondence—Colin is Spenser himself—and most of them reveal a sophistication, a delicacy, and a learning which a number of critics have thought so uncharacteristic of shepherds as almost to break in on the ‘kind’, to be not at all the proper language of the genre. But these shepherds, at least as courtly as their European predecessors, are equally capable of the bucolic roughness we find in Theocritus, and Spenser's problem in this poem, and his success, was a matter of finding a form in which the sophisticated and the bucolic could coexist. The essence of this sort of Pastoral, as William Empson has put it, is the belief that ‘you can say everything about complex people by a complete consideration of simple people’; but, however you disguise the fact, this is bound to involve making shepherds more complex than shepherds are expected to be; so that we can suspend our disbelief only in proportion as we can be made to feel that these are credible shepherds talking.

Unlike Italy and France, England had still to develop a secure and protected literary language when Spenser began writing, and even the poets most determinedly devoted to a separation of genres, of ‘kinds’, by language as well as by subject-matter, were liable to find their poems being invaded by words obviously inappropriate to the type of poem they were writing. A properly written eclogue requires an infusion of dialect—Theocritus' peasants had spoken in Doric, and Spenser half-invented an archaic provincial dialect to put in the mouths of his shepherds, too. In Italy and France, where the theory of kinds was well established, the use of dialect was understood easily for what it was—the conventional attribute of shepherds and of the kind appropriate to them. It was not the best language, but the proper language of the kind, so that the ‘low’ words didn't so much point to the low things they described, as make a general point about the humble status of Pastoral. In England we find Spenser trying to make the same point, with the help of cumbersome glosses, but in The Shepheardes Calendar, and in the Pastorals of many of his successors, this language has a quite different effect from the one officially intended. The dialect-words or the low-life words used by Spenser, or by Drayton for example, are by no means as unusual as they ought to seem, because they are parts of a language quite proper in other types of English writing. They will not let us see them as literary curios, or simply as signs of the kind being used—they point firmly to the things they denote. When Spenser refers to a ‘galage’, or when Drayton mentions ‘start-ups’, we recognize that this is a possible version of English Doric, but we visualize also with disarming clarity the rude action of the rustic pulling on his boots. The artificial roughness so carefully cultivated by the pastoral poet gives way for a moment to a genuine roughness which the Pastoral had previously no less carefully excluded; and as the language points to an image of a contemporary and a recognizable reality, it suggests the possibility that the Pastoral might be used to describe rural life not only in Arcadia, but in the England of 1580.

It can hardly be said that Colin, Cuddie and the rest are made to be particularly knowledgeable about sheep—they know rather more than a well-read townsman of the twentieth century might be expected to know, but not a great deal more; it doesn't seem, either, that their credibility is much to do with the archaisms that Spenser finds for them to speak. But apart from Colin himself, Spenser's shepherds are capable of speaking with a cheerfully colloquial tone, and a robustness of expression, which represent a far more serious attempt to find an English Doric than do the intrusive and well-researched words from provincial and Middle English. This tone is not the invariable one of Hobbinol and the others—it disappears and reappears during the course of each eclogue, and alternates with a far more courtly tone; so that an eclogue will often be introduced by some talk about sheep and some raillery between the participants in the dialogue, which gives way to a lyrical complaint, or to a more sententious passage written partly in a ‘higher’ language, in turn succeeded by a particularly broad piece of shepherd's talk. This causes some strange disjunctions of level: the roughness of the shepherds' language invites us to believe in them as real shepherds; but when we do, it is their politeness we are asked to admire, so that we cannot help noticing that these are not shepherd-poets, but sometimes shepherds and sometimes poets; that when they make their complaints, they have to employ a different language from that of their usual banter.

In this way the poem obliges us to recognize a variety of social possibilities and identities: we have to distinguish between a set of low-life characters speaking a fairly plausible version of colloquial, rural English; the friends of Spenser masquerading as these shepherds; Colin himself, masquerading as a more conventional shepherd-poet, who because he is unhappy in love has the excuse never to descend from the polite language into the language of his friends; and those friends again, disguising themselves for a second time, this time as more conventional Arcadian shepherds on Colin's level, whenever they have something of real importance to say. The disjunctions, the different levels, the artifices by which Spenser should be able to lead us away from any contemporary reality, instead keep leading us back to it, and invite us to ask what sort of natural simplicity, what sort of Arcadia, could be the product of so much necessary confusion and artifice.

The idea that the Pastoral is masquerade, that the ‘shepherd's weeds’ are not the natural attributes of the poet, but are perhaps too self-consciously assumed by him, was much exploited by Shakespeare and by other writers who sometimes chose to be satirical at the Pastoral's expense, but it is never far away from Spenser either. It becomes explicit in the passage from the sixth book of The Faerie Queene, included in this anthology. Sir Calidore, staying among the shepherds of Arcadia and finding fair Pastorella unimpressed by his ‘courteous guize’, assumes the dress of a shepherd and then easily wins her love. But in becoming a shepherd he does not cease to be a chivalrous knight; and when Pastorella finds that she does finally prefer Sir Calidore to the shepherd Corydon, it is because his knightly qualities, so unusual and so becoming in a ‘shepherd’, strike an answering chord in her heart. For she too, although she does not know it, is not really of shepherd-stock, but of altogether higher degree. Sir Calidore has traditionally been identified with Sir Philip Sidney, and whether or not this was Spenser's intention, the figure of the knight dressed as a shepherd is very close to the hardly less fictitious character attributed to Sir Philip by many Elizabethan writers and nostalgic Jacobeans. The mythological Sir Philip embodied all the values of one kind of pastoral vision: he was the most learned and the most chivalrous courtier, at once the most brilliant individual and the most faceless, the most anonymously perfect knight. He was also the shepherd-poet Astrophel, and author of the Arcadia, a model Pastoral in prose and verse; and while in the title of Spenser's ‘Astrophel’, a pastoral elegy on his death, Sidney is described as ‘the most noble and valorous knight’, in the poem itself he is ‘a gentle shepherd borne in Arcady’; that is to say, a shepherd, but an exceptionally well-born one.

The court is of course conventionally opposed in Pastoral to the country, but in the figures of Sir Calidore and Sir Philip courtier and shepherd coexist so harmoniously that it becomes hard to distinguish between them, and in this version of Pastoral both combine in their distrust of the court. We can see fairly clearly here the Golden Age being relocated in the myth of a recent feudal past: the courtier or poet represents himself as estranged from the hurly-burly of the Renaissance court, the world of individualism, the struggles for preferment, so that he becomes an old-fashioned courtly poet, or valorous knight, in a court that has left him behind. This first act of masquerade is followed by a second, as the courtier disguises himself next as a shepherd. The world thus created—in The Faerie Queene, and in the poems from the Arcadia—has far more to do with the dream of an old social order than with that of a pre-historic Golden Age. It is a world in which a ‘natural’ chivalry and a ‘natural’ simplicity replace the artful and the politic, and in which such classes of people as the poem admits can meet in an apparently natural social order, accepted by everyone; so that knights can become shepherds, and knights again, just because there is no question of these transformations reflecting any actual social mobility. The shepherds in Spenser's later Pastoral, and in the Arcadia, are far more courtly than were those in the more homely passages of The Shepheardes Calendar; one could never imagine Sir Philip as Cuddie, complaining that his shoe was stuck to his foot by the cold.

The prevailing tone of this higher kind of Pastoral is nostalgic, and although nostalgia is a permanent conventional feature of earlier Pastoral, it reappears in Sidney's poems particularly as the malaise of the Renaissance, ‘wanhope’ or ‘accidie’. In Sidney's ‘Disprayse of a Courtly life’, a courtier presents himself as having been, formerly, a shepherd, who tended his sheep with the other shepherds ‘lovingly like friends’; but now he lives in the ‘servile Court’, where pride and intrigue make him long for the artlessness of the country; he prays that Pan might restore him to his former state; and the poem ends with the moral that ‘the meane estate is best’. But this version of pastoral-courtly ‘accidie’ is more complex than at first appears, for Sidney's nostalgia is implicitly recognized by him as being for an ideal literary world, and not for any real or possible alternative way of life. As such it carries with it the assurance that no return is possible, that there is nothing to return to.

The nostalgia of Sidney becomes still more problematic when we find it expressed by those already inhabiting his Arcadia. A very large number of the poems from the Arcadia itself are laments, some to do with disappointments in love but all expressing a generalized despair which sees no chance of a return or a release. The process by which this final refinement of pastoral nostalgia has been reached is complicated enough: the poet, who first imagines himself as a poet or courtier from an earlier time, then imagines himself as a shepherd in a classical Arcadia; but his nostalgia is not removed by these two movements back in time—it stays with him, so that he finds himself still looking back to the Golden Age he apparently already inhabits, or to a Golden Age before the Golden Age. The hopelessness, the impossibility of Arcadia becomes clearer with each fresh artifice and masquerade—the poets of the generation after Sidney look back to the arguably less artificial Shepheardes Calendar to discover how the Pastoral might still be written.

Apart from the dramatists, the most remarkable poet of this next generation is Michael Drayton, who in The Shepheardes Garland (1593) is clearly impatient with masquerades and searches for Arcadia. There is in Drayton's Pastoral no simple or formal nostalgia for the Golden Age—his shepherds are old, their time has past, they live on to mock the pastoral pretensions of those around them. The few youthful shepherds in these eclogues are quickly relieved of their lyricism and their hopes by their much-lived elders. The Shepheardes Garland is centred on the ageing Rowland (presumably the poet) who looks back to a time when life was better, a time before urbanization and the first processes of the manufacturing industries, before the trees were ripped up to reveal the mineral earth beneath them. There is no suggestion of a recoverable pastoral age, for ‘the golden age is gone’ and ‘wishes may not revoke that which is past’. The tone is one of almost unrelieved pessimism. In the final eclogue, Rowland, after half a night lamenting the hopelessness of his past aspirations, retires to bed, ‘never a man alive so hard bested’. The future has nothing to offer, and the contemplation of the past brings only despair.

Drayton never really fitted into the court circle to which he looked so unsuccessfully for patronage. In the fourth eclogue, Wynkin bemoans the loss of Sir Philip Sidney, in the shape of Elphin, ‘the God of Poesie’, and we see not only the pessimistic awareness of the growth of a new kind of urban, not courtly, culture, but an acute sense of the significance for poetry of this change. Drayton's Pastoral, for all its freshness and its brilliance of detail, is a self-conscious turning-back not to some imaginary idealized Arcadia but to a time immediately before he was writing, the great period of Spenser and Sidney; the world those poets had turned away from has become an Arcadia for Drayton. And his despair is the stronger precisely because he can no longer locate the Golden Age in a mythical and a feudal past. In the first eclogue, Rowland, surrounded by all the traditional emblems of a pastoral Spring, remains as an aged shepherd outside the tradition that has produced him, a creature of Winter:

The heavens with their glorious starry frame,
Preparde to crowne the sable-vayled night:
When Rowland from this time-consumed
stock,
With stone-colde hart now stalketh towards his flock.

The final line—and especially that sudden change of tense—removes Rowland's despair from the well-rehearsed lines of conventional complaint, and introduces a personal tone that is predominant throughout the rest of the eclogues.

In the eighth eclogue we have the deliberate archaism of Motto's ‘worthy rhyme’ of Dowsabell, which seems to exist only to indicate its irrelevance in a changed society. The story, with its heavy echoes of Chaucer—and so with the suggestion of an earlier literary ‘pastoral’ age when it was possible for the poet to prosper—delights the reader with its simple expression of reciprocated love, only to return him inevitably to the sad and unfulfilled reality of the present; just as elsewhere, the love poetry of the young Rowland can be recalled, but only ironically. There was no possibility of a resurrection of an Elphin, for the Elizabethan Golden Age (that of Betta in the third eclogue) had ended. The courtly shepherd with his elaborate series of masks has been replaced in Drayton by the figure of the poet no longer able to rely on court patronage. For the first time in the development of the English Pastoral the poet finds himself quite shut out of his courtly Arcadia. The sense of despair is even stronger in the revised version of the eclogues, produced after the accession of James I, when ‘malice denies mee entrance with my sheepe’. In the revised ninth eclogue (which becomes the tenth in the second version) in an image which recalls the end of the original first eclogue, brings Rowland no longer to a restless sleep, but to death; as one who ‘as a stone, alreadie seemed dead’.

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THE PASTORAL DRAMA

The reaction against the aristocratic Arcadia of Spenser and Sidney was led by the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, and in particular by Shakespeare. Sidney and Spenser were eloquent adherents to a European tradition which saw poetry in terms of different ‘kinds’ with different subjects appropriate to them; so that kings, lords, military leaders could properly appear only in the Heroic kind, or the Tragic, while Pastoral was concerned with a polite version of low life as it was lived by shepherds. But when Pastoral began to be written in England, there was already a native tradition directly inimical to such a hierarchical idea of literature. Other poets, in other countries of Europe, had achieved in the Pastoral kind a fairly unproblematic synthesis of elements in their native literatures, whether peasant songs or pastoral ballads, with the conventions they had inherited from the ancients; but only in England had a popular drama developed, during the Middle Ages, in which it was not at all unusual for members of the highest and the lowest ranks of society to be represented together on the stage. An example of an English comedy in which courtly and low-life characters are brought together in a version of Pastoral [is] Sir Clyomon and Clamydes …, and the culmination of the tradition can be seen, of course, in Shakespeare, and perhaps particularly in the relationship between Prince Hal and the riff-raff of the Boar's Head. It is not that social distinctions are done away with in this English tradition; they preoccupy Shakespeare considerably, and their importance is continually reaffirmed by him; but in English drama, and to an extent in the Elizabethan novel, these distinctions can be explored by figures from the nobility and from low-life together. This tradition had begun with the medieval Christian drama, in which differences of rank had receded into unimportance before the long perspectives of purgatory and damnation; and it was well equipped to deal with the social confusions of England in the second half of Elizabeth's reign in a way which the pure Pastoral—with its commitment to deal only with low-life characters, or with courtiers masquerading as shepherds—was not.

In Shakespeare's As You Like It, the pretensions of the Pastoral to provide a possible alternative to the struggles of the courtly life are deflated, at the same time as we are still invited to enjoy those pretensions for what they are worth. Shakespeare's technique in this play is to bring together two sorts of shepherd from two literary traditions: Corin and Audrey belong to a native English tradition, the impossibly earthy rustics who had been made fun of in Sir Clyomon and Clamydes; Silvius and Phebe are a refined and delicate shepherd and shepherdess from the pages of the Arcadia. When the courtly characters Rosalind, Celia and Touchstone first arrive in the forest of Arden, they seem to expect from Corin something of the welcome that Sir Calidore found among the shepherds of The Faerie Queene; Corin replies that he wishes he could be of more help, but he is ‘shepherd to another man’, who is not given to deeds of hospitality. This intrusion of economic realities into the English Arcadia invites us to expect that Shakespeare will go out of his way to point the contrast between Corin and the anachronistic lovers Silvius and Phebe; but in fact almost all the weight of Shakespeare's satire is brought to bear against the genuinely low-life shepherds. For Touchstone, in his conversations with Corin and with Audrey, keeps insisting, and reasonably enough, that if theirs is the pastoral life it is really not more attractive than life at court; the simplicity of the one hardly compensates for the loss of comfort in leaving the other. And this insistence, that there is a pastoral life which is both real and difficult, creates the context in which we can evaluate the pastoral tradition inhabited by Silvius and Phebe, and indeed the pastoral elements in the play as a whole. We are invited to enjoy this courtly Pastoral, but for what it obviously is—a masquerade, a game for the amusement of bored courtiers and not a conceivable alternative to the uncongenial and disorderly reality of life in Elizabeth's court.

In contrast, The Winter's Tale, which dates from late in Shakespeare's career, does seem to offer the pastoral life as a serious alternative to that of the court. The play divides naturally into three sections: the court where jealousy and tyranny prevail; the countryside of Bohemia which displays all the virtues of the simple rural life in a naturalistic setting; and finally the court again, improved and softened by its contact with the country. Shakespeare has altered his main source (Greene's Pandosto, 1592) in ways which emphasize the positive qualities of the pastoral alternative. The old Shepherd who finds the abandoned Perdita thinks naturally of caring for the child before he discovers the treasure left with her, whereas in Greene the baby and the wealth are discovered simultaneously and covetousness is the prime instigation of the action of the shepherd and his wife. Furthermore, Shakespeare's presentation of the lives of the shepherds is much more vivid (as is evident from the extract in this anthology), and the detailed celebration of the natural life has no counterpart either in Greene or in the forest in As You Like It. The sheep-shearing feast-scene was frequently played as a separate piece throughout the late eighteenth century, and the removal of this scene from its courtly setting is a fair indication of the nature of its appeal.

However, in spite of the presentation of a court life ameliorated by that of the country, it is evident that the strength of The Winter's Tale is essentially that of myth. The court may be infused with the virtues of the country, but there is never a formal fusion. The possibility of an actual, as opposed to a mythic, social mobility, is mocked when (V, 2) the old Shepherd and the Clown are rewarded for their fostering of the King's daughter by being made Gentlemen, and yet still continue to act the role of naïve and gullible rustics. The two finest ornaments of the rural scene are (of course) disguised aristocrats; Perdita is always seen to be as different from her fellow shepherds as was Pastorella in The Faerie Queene; and the Prince Florizel has no difficulty in recognizing her aristocratic qualities through her ‘unusual weeds’. Indeed her part as Queen of the Feast is a recognition of her implied majesty. Perdita gives to Camillo and the disguised Polixenes flowers worthy of their age, hybrid carnations and gillyflowers, ‘which some call Natures bastards’, thus affording Polixenes opportunity to discourse on the benefits of a cross-breeding of the ‘baser kind’ and the ‘nobler race’, precisely that process which, as it appears, will occur if he consents to the marriage of his son Florizel to the base Perdita. Ironically, it is Perdita who argues against the marriage of the high and the low, court and country. The world of The Winter's Tale is ultimately that of the ‘Whitsun Pastorals’, where, for a short while, the illusion of social mobility can appear, but where in the end the old harmony and the old order will prevail. Shakespeare's court audience always knows that the beautiful and virtuous shepherdess is Perdita, the heir to the throne of Sicily. The Winter's Tale may preach on the surface a gospel of cross-breeding, but the final effect is a celebration not of the rural life but, albeit often ambiguously, of that of the court; thus the play both proclaims and precludes the alternative.

Shakespeare's success in the dramatic Pastoral had much to do with his willingness to bring together the conventions of the ‘right Pastoral’ and those of English low-life comedy; in As You Like It he was concerned to distinguish between these two traditions, in The Winter's Tale to join them together in a fiction of the pastoral life at once delightful and credible. Ben Jonson, in his play The Sad Shepherd (c. 1612), appears to be trying to write as conventional and proper a Pastoral as he can, but one dealing with English and not Arcadian shepherds; the result is a sort of epitaph on the first phase of conventional English Pastoral. Like Corin in As You Like It, the shepherds in Jonson's play are quite conscious of the economic realities which have stopped Sherwood Forest from being an English Arcadia. The exchange of speeches on pages 133-5 is an eloquent account of the appearance in Sherwood of a new sort of sheep-farmer, more acquisitive than the old, and puritanical in attitude to the traditional feasts and sports of English shepherds. This theme, or a version of it, will be heard again from time to time throughout the history of the Pastoral in England; and yet it comes more strangely from the mouths of Jonson's shepherds than it had from Shakespeare's Corin. The language Jonson invents for the shepherds in his play has a delightful simplicity which nevertheless belongs quite clearly to the formal, the courtly Pastoral, far more than to the English comic tradition. They complain of their fate in a homelier version of the same sophisticated Arcadian despair we saw in Sidney; and, like Sidney's shepherds, their tone reveals a quite fatalistic acceptance of their obsolescence. And in this way the sense of an old style of shepherd unequipped to deal with the demands of a changing style of agriculture is matched precisely by our sense of the inadequacy of the old pastoral conventions to deal with this sort of intrusion of reality. These shepherds are automata, wound up years ago but still stumbling around the changed landscape; they are trapped by an anachronistic tradition, by the fact that Jonson is not prepared to admit any very thorough mixture of kinds; so that the shepherds can never become genuinely comic in a way that might re-animate them, and make us feel their disappearance is less than inevitable.

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THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PASTORAL

‘The Golden-Age was when the world was yong’ for Fulke Greville and his fellow ‘Spenserians’, but for most poets after about 1610 the pastoral age had not only receded but had disappeared from view. Writers of Pastoral in the years between the accession of James I and the outbreak of the Civil War—where they are to be found—concur in Drayton's location of the Golden Age within the historical development of the English Pastoral. The second book of William Browne's Britannia's Pastorals opens with a nostalgic eulogy of Spenser, and the sense of an era having past is prevalent. The dominant model for such writers is the later Spenser, of The Faerie Queene. It has been argued that in Browne we have the first evidence of an actual observed English landscape—a move, that is, away from the classical towards the romantic—but, as in works like Phineas Fletcher's The Purple Island, it is the formal rehearsal of past artificiality that is most striking. The Golden Age has passed, and as the life of the Court becomes increasingly subjected to external political pressures the possibility of a celebration of a courtly idealism is ever more problematic.

The metaphysical poets were rarely interested in a pastoral tradition—Donne's ‘The Baite’ is little more than an exercise-piece, one in a long and ever more tedious series of replies to Marlowe's long-dead ‘Passionate Sheepheard’. The imagery of the metaphysicals, where it is not concerned with personal salvation, is insistently contemporary, full of references to a new mercantile age, to commerce, exploration, political struggle and conquest. The poetry is critical of the values of such an age undoubtedly, but the poets no longer see a viable alternative in a world of pastoral innocence. In place of a vision of a simple, harmonized society, the metaphysicals looked for a resolution of contemporary problems in terms of the individual, be it in the area of the religious or the secular. A pastoral tradition which had arisen in reaction to an awakening of an individualist philosophy in the Renaissance had little to offer a writer intent on exploring the new world of scientific rationalism. The poetry of the metaphysical period is largely that of an urban culture which no longer feels sufficient connection with a rural alternative, an alternative which had anyway become ever more an artifice and a way of avoiding the contemporary and the threatening. The poet's problems were to be faced either in their urban context or by a turning inwards; a school of poetry which could call into question the whole manner of discussing human relationships taken over from Petrarch and an Italian tradition would clearly have little use for that other foreign importation, the Pastoral.

Where there is any expression of the pastoral vision it is either from poets looking back (those who looked through Drayton to Spenser) to an aristocratic culture that had all but passed, or … as an implicit assumption in urban and court satire. At the same time, however, the seventeenth century sees the emergence of a different kind of pastoral voice, one that expresses no longer a merely idealized view of the countryside surrounding the town which housed the poet, and one which makes for the first time hesitant moves in the direction of ‘realism’. The two sonnets of Drummond (another ‘Spenserian’) that we have included are very similar in theme, both praising an actual retreat from an urban world of politics and commerce. It is a theme that derives chiefly-from Horace—Pope's ‘Ode to Solitude’ is included as a later example of juvenile borrowing from the Horatian—but its origins may also be sought in a non-pastoral area, the essay-form as developed by Montaigne. This turning away from the ‘real’ world of affairs is very much like the ‘turning inwards’ of the metaphysicals, and in a writer such as Cowley the two become merged. The country is seen as a place where the individual is free to find himself. What is different about this rural alternative is that it purports to have a specific geographical location—that is, the poet is not wandering around a classical landscape, but is supposedly living in the country with a roof over his head and a plot of land to work for his food. The seventeenth century produced many ‘imitations’ of Horace's ‘Epode, In Praise of a Country Life’, and, although space will not permit examples, the opening of that of Jonson will make the point:

Happie is he, that from all Businese cleere,
          As the old race of Mankind were,
With his owne Oxen tills his Sires left lands,
          And is not in the Usurers bands:
Nor Souldier-like started with rough alarmes,
          Nor dreads the Seas inraged harmes:
But flees the Barre and Courts, with the proud bords,
          And waiting Chambers of great Lords.

The group ritual of the older pastoral is replaced by an emphasis on the individual's relationship to his own land—the possession of ‘paternal acres’ is all-important. The poet never imagines himself living below his own social level, as a shepherd or traditional pastoral figure, so that the fantasy of country property—and fantasy it is, for Jonson like most celebrators of such a retreat possessed not a single field to till—does at least have a solid connection with the poet's life.

What is being celebrated here is more than an imaginative escape from the pressures of urban life; it is also the possibility of economic freedom for the writer. The fantasy is an adaptation of the situation of the pastoral poet to that of his patron, the landowner. What these poems represent is a ‘bourgeois’ version of the myth, with the poet, no longer cast as shepherd or clown, in the role of gentry-farmer supporting himself single-handedly—or probably with the aid of a buxom country wife—in such a way as to leave ample time for the main business of philosophical reflection. The patronage of the manor house is replaced by the freedom of the self-sufficient small farm.

But if the manor house had meant restriction, it had also meant security. As a microcosm of the larger society it symbolized both power and patronage, and stood in a relationship of mutual dependence with the rural community around it. The values of this world are invoked by Jonson in ‘To Penshurst’, when however this harmonious relationship is not the rule but the exception. The poet eats, as do the ‘farmer and the clowne’, the same food as the ‘lord and lady’, and he is happy to celebrate their munificence. The house which had given birth to the Pastoral—Sidney had lived there—still remains as a final embodiment of the pastoral myth of aristocratic organization; farmers and classical gods walk the same fields. As in Carew's ‘To Saxham’, the fish, flesh and fowl of the estate queue happily for their turn to be eaten; the humour is deliberate and indicates the ultimate impossibility of the vision. Jonson may express a nostalgia for what Penshurst represents but he is too much the realist not to realize that it is something that has passed.

Herrick's ‘The Hock-Cart’ is an attempt, from a Cavalier perspective, to deal honestly with the nature of the bond between the landowner and his workers. The union of the two groups is achieved in the ritual of the harvest-feast - a recurrent theme in the Pastoral—when the workers put down their tools to celebrate their master in feast and song. But the relationship is harsher than that; the harvest-feast slurs over the reality. The following morning will see the old order of ruler and ruled re-established, and the brief equality of the feast will cease. Like the oxen that pull their ploughs, the workers will resume their toil;

And, you must know, your Lords word's true,
Feed him ye must, whose food fils you.
And that this pleasure is like raine,
Not sent ye for to drowne your paine,
But for to make it spring againe.

This strain, which becomes ever more evident throughout the century, makes it increasingly difficult for the serious perpetuation of this kind of pastoral celebration. Civil strife and the growth of a new landowning class would complete the process. When Pope refers to a vision of a restored ‘manor house’ community a century later, his appeal is one of political nostalgia. The account of rural organization had always been a mythical one, and the nearer it approaches to ‘realism’ the more its bones are revealed to all.

This sense of the passing of an age finds its greatest expression in Milton's ‘Lycidas’ (1637). The poem is a revitalization of an old form—the pastoral elegy—and also, in effect, an elegy for the Pastoral. The poet mourns the death of the young shepherd, Lycidas—Edward King, a young Cambridge scholar—and argues that with his death, the possibility of the traditional Pastoral has ended. Milton had already, in ‘L'Allegro’ (c. 1631), drawn heavily on the earlier Pastoral. Milton's shepherds are unable to play a pastoral role; the sheep are untended and hungry; the shearers have lost their skills; and the poet disturbs nature in his sorrow, preventing the coming of Spring and a new pastoral cycle. But ‘Lycidas’ is not just the culmination of the ‘idealized’ tradition. The world of the traditional Pastoral is opposed by that of the Christian myth, and the poem concludes with a resolution of the two in the resurrection of Lycidas into a heavenly paradise—not the now impossible earthly one—leaving the poet with renewed hope, to wander in ‘fresh woods, and pastures new’. Although the poem is full of echoes of the past—the inclusion of anti-clerical satire, for instance, is sanctioned by Spenser's ‘Fifth Eclogue’—the tone is not finally one of impossible nostalgia. The world of Lycidas has passed, and the poet, having assimilated the past, must find his own way in the new world. The conclusion is optimistic and indicative of an emergent Protestant consciousness on Milton's part, with the emphasis falling on the individual's break with the tradition.

There is a considerable amount of reference to the world of conventional Pastoral in Paradise Lost as well. In Book IX the reader's pastoral expectations are played upon for dramatic effect with the presentation of Satan ‘as one who long in populous City pent’; but it is in Book IV that we find a full fusion of the classical and the christian Pastoral. No account of the Garden of Eden could conceivably ignore the pastoral tradition, and it is not too surprising to find ‘Universal Pan’ walking the same groves as Adam and Eve. In Book IV, Milton leaves the grand epic style for a quieter, pastoral voice. His Paradise is very like Blake's state of ‘Innocence’ in which the beasts of the earth pose no threat to man, and God's creatures live the ‘happiest life (of) simplicitie and spotless innocence’. But Milton does not see Paradise as a pre-Rousseauite home for ‘natural-man’. He is concerned to present the Garden as a planted Garden, a creation of the universal architect, and in opposition to the chaos that is the world of Satan and unbridled passion. The pastoral represented an ordered nature for man before the Fall, an environment which offered no threat.

The opposition of created Garden and unspoilt Nature is obviously central to the Pastoral, but it is an opposition that may take many forms. Untamed Nature may be a place of repose from the vexations of the town, or a threat to man in organized society; the Garden may appear as a recognition of the essential harmony of the natural order, or a denial of it. The poet who is most concerned with the ambiguities of this opposition in the seventeenth century is Andrew Marvell. In his ‘mower’ poems, the cultivated Garden is not an indication—as it is in Milton—of an ordered Universe, but is an urban phenomenon, the product of ‘Luxurious Man’ after the Fall. It is only in the exotic ‘Bermudas’ that Marvell's puritan emigrés can find an unaltered paradise, far from the possibility of urban ‘knowledge’. ‘The Mower against Gardens’ suggests the impossibility of harmony between man and his environment, and thus offers a serious threat to the entire pastoral tradition. But there is no simple praise of the natural life, for wild Nature is always threatening. The figure of the innocent but ineffective Shepherd is rejected in favour of the Mower with his destructive relationship to the land, ‘depopulating all the ground’. The mower does not respond to the natural, as does the shepherd, but struggles against it, reducing it to order. So that although he is hostile towards the artificiality of cultivation, it is his job precisely to tame Nature, to tailor it more neatly for urban man. This ambiguity of attitude becomes even more complicated when we realize that there is no straightforward identification by Marvell with the mower. In ‘Ametas and Thestylis making Hay-Ropes’—a poem whose apparent simplicity is deceptive—the world of urban metaphysical wit is thrown over for the natural rural activity of weaving, in imagery which combines the idea of work, dancing and copulation. Again the sterility of the city is opposed by the natural activities of the country, but activities which have a sense of pattern, of order.

The problems raised by Marvell's poetry are many and complex, and it is in ‘The Garden’ that he comes nearest to resolving them. The poem contrasts the efforts of ambitious urban man who labours incessantly to win the ‘Palm … Oke, or Bayes’, with a vision of a natural paradise in which the individual, free from society, has the whole of Nature dancing attendance:

What wond'rous Life in this I lead!
Ripe Apples drop about my head;
The Luscious Clusters of the Vine
Upon my Mouth do crush their Wine.

But—although Marvell clearly conjures with imagery of a sensual Garden of Eden, the poem does not adopt a nostalgic Golden Age tone; nor is Marvell acceding wholly to the Horatian tradition of ‘retreat’. He regards the original Eden as an idealized pastoral condition before the demands of human relationships enforced a separation of needs and desires, and considers how to achieve this paradise once more. Thus the Garden is both a place of natural retreat, where the trees ‘weave the Garlands of repose’ allowing the poet to think in serenity; and a created retreat, giving evidence of the hand of a gardener. The Garden is a paradise of the imagination, to be found by a turning inwards:

Mean while the Mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness:
The Mind, that Ocean where each kind
Does streight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other Worlds, and other Seas;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green Thought in a green Shade.

The Garden is a world within the world and not a separation from it; it is a state of individual harmony that has no geographical placement, and is not to be achieved by the labour of men as conventionally understood. The traditional oppositions of the Pastoral are reconciled in Marvell's ‘happy Garden-state’, and the Golden Age is relocated in the world of puritan individualism.