[In the following excerpt from an essay first published in 1972, Lerner argues that the pastoral, as a representation of the provincial mediated by courtly writers seeking relief from the problems of a sophisticated society, is poetry of illusion and thus of wish-fulfillment.]

Every culture has one or more centres of social, artistic and moral standards, a place where the educated people live, where the King's English, or its equivalent, is spoken, where the theatres perform and the political decisions are taken. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries this centre was the court; by the nineteenth it was the city; in modern America it is becoming the university. Most literature is written from and for this centre; but there are always corners of society, rural or provincial pockets, lower social levels, with their own less articulate, less sophisticated traditions, sometimes imprinted by old-fashioned court mores, sometimes seeming to live an older, more unchanging life of their own. It used to be true that the literature of the centre was written, that of the corners oral, but literacy and radio have changed that.

To describe this contrast, we can speak of court, or metropolitan or (more generally) centric literature, and set it against unsophisticated, rural, popular or (more generally) provincial literature. To this can be added another contrast, concerning the way in which a poem sees the world it describes. It may present that world as it is, through the eyes of a familiar and an expert, subjecting it to none of the distracting expectations of the outsider. This I will call the direct vision. Or it may deliberately see its world as answering to the illusions or discontents of an outsider, as a projection rather than as the object of the matter-of-fact gaze of the inmate; this I will call the mediated vision. Now, by using these two pair of contrasts, we arrive at a fourfold scheme of classification.

The first class—centric and direct—will contain most of the great literature of Europe, which has naturally emerged from, and deals with, the court or the city. Tragedy belongs here (Hamlet's Denmark and Thésée's Athens are part of Renaissance court culture, wherever they are ostensibly situated), and so do most novels. It would be odd if this were not the area in which greatness harboured.

In the second class—provincial-direct—we must put the ballads, which emerge from, and belong to, regional pockets of our culture: the narrative poems of Wordsworth, proudly proclaiming their setting in humble and rustic life; the regional novel; dialect poetry.

The third class—centric-mediated—can take two forms, positive and negative. If positive, then the view of court or city is mediated by longing and respect; it is seen from far as the desirable top where, if we are lucky, there may be room. The archetype of such writing is the Dick Whittington story. If it is negative, we get pastoral satire: denunciation of court by contrasting it with Arcadian simplicity.

Finally, there is provincial-mediated, which is pastoral. This too can be positive or negative. If the poet's need is to escape from the sophisticated corruption of court life into the freshness, simplicity and honesty of an unspoiled countryside, the result is pastoral properly speaking. If, however, he looks at the country, not through the eyes of his wishes, but through those of fear or dislike, if he believes in courtly grace and subtlety and is simply pausing to laugh at rustic boors, we can call the result anti-pastoral.

What would a poem be like which did not strive towards the matter-of-fact gaze of the expert, but deliberately saw nature in terms of an outsider's expectations?—which brought to the countryside emotions and expectations which were not rejected, but which determined the way the poem was written? Would it not be like this?—

O sweet woods, the delight of solitariness!
O how much I do like your solitariness!
Here nor treason is hid, veiled in innocence,
Nor envy's snaky eye finds any harbour here,
Nor flatterer's venomous insinuations,
Nor cunning humourist's puddled opinions,
Nor courteous ruins of proferred usury,
Nor time prattled away, cradle of ignorance,
Nor causeless duty, nor cumber of arrogance,
Nor trifling title of vanity dazzleth us,
Nor golden manacles stand for a paradise.
Here wrong's name is unheard, slander a monster is.
Keep they spright from abuse; here no abuse doth
          haunt:
What man grafts in a tree dissimulation?

[Sidney, song from Arcadia (1598)]

No poem could have a simpler structure than this. It is a plain insistent assertion that the country is free from certain evils. This negative point is the only one it makes. Almost every detail mentioned is a detail, not about the country, but about the court—it is a poem about what the country is not like. This gives it a curious kind of strength, a kind that is incompatible with subtlety: a growing passion of indignation and need mounts in its cumulative rhetoric, and its very formality adds to its power, in a way that is only possible in Elizabethan poetry, when men sometimes (especially for emotions like hate and indignation) seem to have thought, and felt, in rhetorical patterns.

Sidney shows us the poetic mechanism we are looking for so clearly that his poem consists entirely of an announcement of what kind of poem he is writing. Let us turn to someone who has the same point to make, but spent rather longer in the woods:

Now my co-mates, and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we but the penalty of Adam,
The season's difference, as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter's wind,
Which when it bites, and blows upon my body
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile, and say
This is no flattery: these are counsellors
That feelingly persuade me what I am:
Sweet are the uses of adversity
Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head:
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
I would not change it.

[As You Like It (1599), II i 1-18]

Nothing in this passage is an attempt to see the countryside as it is. One point runs through it all, that the country is not the court. The contrast with ‘painted pomp’, with ‘flattery’, with ‘public haunt’, determines everything. Real toads are not venomous, and carry no jewels, but to the exiled Duke this does not matter, for the toads of Arden are not real.

The next example is also highly conventional: but it is non-dramatic, and of greater verbal complexity than the Duke's lines. It is by the most sophisticated and, probably, the most pastoral of seventeenth-century poets:

Ametas and Thestylis Making Hay-ropes
A. Thinkst thou this love can stand,
                    Whilst thou still dost say me nay?
                    Love unpaid does soon disband:
                    Love binds love as hay binds hay.
Th. Thinkst thou that this rope would twine
                    If we both should turn one way?
                    Where both parties so combine,
                    Neither love will twist nor hay.
A. Thus you vain excuses find,
                    Which yourselve and us delay:
                    And love ties a woman's mind
                    Looser than with ropes of hay.
Th. What you cannot constant hope
                    Must be taken as you say.
A. Then let's both lay by our rope,
                    And go kiss within the hay.

[Marvell (c. 1650)]¹

Marvell is a poet of paradox: not flagrantly, like Donne and Crashaw, but delicately and deeply. The deepest paradox in this poem is both hidden and obvious: it is the contrast between its rustic image and its verbal sophistication. The poem depends utterly on the figure of the hay-ropes, as if the two lovers had no other way of expressing themselves: their dialectic consists in modifying the analogies that can be drawn from this one vehicle. Yet it is not as if they think in images: for the comparison is regularly deployed as a formal simile, and at least in a technical sense the thought exists independently of it. It is a poem in which we can see the rhetorical art, and admire the poet's skill.

Yet as long as we admire the skill, the lovers stay apart: the better they express their feelings, the less they love. This is the paradox, too, of Marvell's ‘The Definition of Love’, that perfection and fulfilment are incompatible:

My love is of a birth as rare
As 'tis for object strange and high;
It was begotten of Despair
Upon Impossibility.

The perfect love, that poem says, does not exist: ‘Ametas and Thestylis’ moves in exactly the opposite direction. Here is a perfect image for love, it says; look how much can be expressed through it. But its lovers, rejecting despair and impossibility, must reject the attempt to express their love. They must lay aside the rope and go kiss within the hay. The poem is over, and the rest is silence.

The sophistication of this poem completely prevents us from seeing haymaking as it really is, and country life is shamelessly subordinated to the poet's wish to turn a polished analogy. And then, in the end, the poem gaily rejects everything it has done. The country folk, showing more good sense than the poem, are going to stop talking about love, and get on with it.

The Renaissance poets were, of course, well aware that their version of the countryside was an illusion. To show this, we can turn to the first and most famous of all, Jacopo Sannazaro, whose Arcadia, published in 1502, began a vast literary fashion. In the Epilogue to this work, Sannazaro defends himself for writing pastoral. Addressing his pipe (‘sampogna’), he says: ‘Do not mind if someone, accustomed perhaps to more exquisite sounds, rebukes your baseness or considers you rude’; nor (the opposite criticism) if they say that you have not followed the laws of shepherds properly, and ‘that it is not fitting for anyone to pass further than what belongs to him’ (‘passar più avanti, che a lui si appartiene’): which seems to refer both to social and stylistic climbing. To this latter criticism Sannazaro replies that he has been the first in this age to

awaken the sleeping woods, and teach shepherds to sing the songs they had forgotten. All the more since he who made you out of these reeds came to Arcadia not as a rustic shepherd but as a most cultured youth, although unknown and a pilgrim of love.

Pastoral poetry, in other words, is the work of courtiers: for that reason, it would be inappropriate to censure it for baseness (it isn't really) or for presumption (why shouldn't he ‘passare più avanti’, considering who he really is?). Sannazaro is having his oatcake and eating it. Not surprising, then, that when Selvaggio meets Montano (Prosa Secunda) and asks him to sing, he addresses him ‘con voce assai umana’. This ‘humanist voice’ (a modern translation renders it ‘in a most courteous phrase’) is no doubt a deliberate slip of the tongue, a quiet reminder of how educated these shepherds naturally are.

There is a formal device that corresponds to the fact that the version of the countryside is mediated. The song which Montano sings in reply to Selvaggio's request tells how he found Uranio stretched out sleeping, and woke him, and they then discussed whether to sing. In Prosa Terzia, the shepherds go to the feast of Pales, and as they enter the holy temple they see various scenes painted on the gate—nymphs, Apollo guarding Admetus's cattle, Endymion, and so on. When we hear the priest's prayer in the temple, we realise that we are in the same world as these mythological paintings: he prays not to see Diana bathing, or the vengeful nymphs.

What we have in these two examples is the obliqueness of presentation so common in pastoral. The shepherd poet sings only after announcing he is going to sing, or discussing what, or taking part in a contest. Rural or mythological scenes are not described direct, but paintings of them are described. The method is old, and goes back to Virgil, to Theocritus even; and some scholars tell us that it has its origin in the actual shepherd contests of rural Sicily. Whether that is true or not, its place in Renaissance pastoral is surely the opposite—not as a sign of realism, but as a sign of sophistication, a way of removing us from the immediacy of real rustics in real fields.

PASTORAL AND ANTI-PASTORAL: ‘AS YOU LIKE IT’

Of course, the same work may hover between positive and negative—as for instance As You Like It does. The Duke, we have seen, is a poet of simple pastoral enthusiasm; but the play as a whole sets pastoral and anti-pastoral constantly against each other, and does not encourage us to form a clear preference.

They are set against each other most directly in III ii: the conversation between Corin and Touchstone on the shepherd's life. Each speaks unequivocally for one of the attitudes: courtly trickery against the good sense of Arden, or courtly polish against the slow-witted rustic chewing his straw. It is an old argument, going back at least to the twentieth idyll of Theocritus, in which Eunica despises the neatherd for his coarse smell, and he tells himself indignantly about the neatherds who have been loved by goddesses. Who wins that argument? And who wins this one?

Touch. Hast any philosophy in thee, shepherd?

Corin. No more, but that I know the more one sickens, the worse at ease he is; and that he that wants money, means and contentment is without three good friends. That the property of rain is to wet, and fire to burn. That a good pasture makes fat sheep; and that a great cause of the night is lack of the sun. That he that hath learned no wit by nature, nor art, may complain of good breeding, or comes of a very dull kindred.

Touch. Such a one is a natural philosopher.

[III ii 21 ff.]

It is quite wrong to play this scene (as I have seen it done) with a sly Corin winking at the audience, and smiling to see whether Touchstone will take him seriously. If Touchstone believes in courtly wit, as he clearly does, then Corin must be allowed to believe in rustic sense, and not turn into a secondary Touchstone. It is easy to say what each stands for; but it is not so easy to say who has the better of it.

A natural philosopher has no need of artificialities or rhetoric, for he goes directly to what is really important; a ‘natural’ who philosophises will produce nothing but empty platitudes like these. Touchstone is consciously punning, but which meaning of ‘natural’ more truly describes Corin? ‘The property of rain is to wet’, he says—just like the Bachelierus of Molière, who has been taught in medical school the reason why opium makes us sleep:

                    A quoi respondeo
                    Quia est in eo
                    Virtus dormitiva,
                    Cuius est natura
                    Sensus assoupire.
Chorus: Bene, bene, bene respondere
…

[Le Malade Imaginaire, 3me Intermède]

Isn't Corin, too, offering a tautology as if it were a substantive point? That's what rain is. Or is he? Shakespeare is at his most elusive here. These are the things that a countryman needs to know—not how to kiss hands, but how to look after his sheep, who have to be protected from the elements. In a world of servants, coaches and umbrellas, rain doesn't wet any more.

Of course, it would be wrong for either of them to win clearly in the third act. The balance must continue to the end: a balance between the play's official self and its undercurrents—for, of course, it is officially pastoral, and on the deepest level, I believe, it stays so. Act I is certainly pastoral in its preference. The court is corrupt, as Le Beau admits with a sad gesture towards a happiness that he can locate only by saying it is not to be found here:

…                                                                                 Sir, fare you well
Hereinafter in a better world than this,
I shall desire more love and knowledge of you.

[I ii 272-5]

We have already been told where this better world is. In (surely) one of the most haunting sentences in English—given, with an irony the play can easily handle, to Charles the thug—we have been told of the Duke's banishment:

They say he is already in the Forest of Arden, and a many merry men with him; and there they live like the old Robin Hood of England: they say many young gentlemen flock to him every day, and fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden world.

[I ii 108 ff.]

England and France are casually mixed up because we are in neither England nor France: this Arden is out of space and time. C. S. Lewis has described very well where it is, in his defence of Spenser's shepherds:

Some readers cannot enjoy the shepherds because they know (or say they know) that real country people are not more happy or more virtuous than anyone else; but it would be tedious to explain to them the many causes (reasons too) that have led humanity to symbolise by rural scenes and occupations a region in the mind which does exist and which should be visited often.²

Arden is the world that Le Beau was longing for (though he, alas, never gets there). The visitors to Arden sing its praises in much the same terms as the Duke's simple solemn eulogy:

Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude.
…

[II vii 175-8]

What little action there is mostly confirms this idyllic view. Orlando ‘thought that all things had been savage here’, but he finds only hospitality and friendship. Above all, Arden is the place of happy lovers: there they find what they could not find at court—leaving, if necessary, their wickedness behind them. To dress Corin up as Hymen is an ingenious way of relating the happy love-stories to the pastoral element—though at a price, since it destroys the atmosphere of mystery, even magic, that seems to be growing at the end.

All this, then, makes As You Like It a pure pastoral … but: inevitably, there are buts. First, the action. However much the Duke may like Arden, the moment he is offered his kingdom back he forgets the sermons in stones and takes it. He was speaking as exiled dukes no doubt should in Arden; but he did not actually mean it.

As we look carefully at them, all the pastoral points grow slightly dubious. Orlando finds kindness in the forest, but at the hands of courtiers, not countrymen. The lovers marry, but then they leave Arden: it is the place for love but not for marriage. And, most important of all, there are Touchstone and Jaques.

The task of these two choric characters is to comment and to mock: to remind us of what the others forgot. Touchstone, as we have already seen, is explicitly anti-pastoral, mocking the Arcadian life as he mocks romantic love—and often both at once:

… I remember when I was in love I broke my sword upon a stone, and bid him take that for coming a-night to Jane Smile, and I remember the kissing of her batlet, and the cow's dugs that her pretty chopped hands had milked; …

[II iv 42 ff.]

Jaques is a more complicated character, and his relation to the pastoral theme is less obvious. He mocks at romantic love more churlishly than Touchstone (‘Rosalind is your love's name?’: we can hear the sneer); at poetry (‘call you 'em stanzas?’); and at the pastoral life:

If it do come to pass
That any man turn ass,
Leaving his wealth and ease
A stubborn will to please,
…

[II v 47-50]

He is anti-pastoral from the moment he appears—indeed, before he appears, for the corollary of telling the Duke that he usurps more than his brother (Jaques's first, reported opinion) is that there should not be any people in Arden—or, at any rate, no courtiers. Jacques welcomes Touchstone into the forest along with that un-Arcadian property, a watch; he thinks marriage should obey the proper rules and not be carried out under a bush, like a beggar. In this his morality is centric; and, most interesting of all, he refuses to go along with the others at the end of the play.

Most interesting: for what he is refusing is to go back to court yet this does not make him a pastoral character. He is not staying in Arden either, not even for the rest of the dance. During the brief time remaining to the play, he would rather stay at the abandoned cave, a forest without pastoralists. After that, he will go where he really belongs: to a monastery or hermitage. There his sneers can be sublimated into contemptus mundi; in Arden they are merely kill-joy. Pastoral and monasticism are both retreats from the world, but quite different from each other. A monastery is an act of pure withdrawal, and because of this it can be accepted by the community it withdraws from. Retreat is a human need, and the occasional or partial retreats everyone needs are symbolised and reinforced by the existence of groups who have retreated totally. The countryside, however, is accepted by the court, not psychologically, but economically: it represents, not withdrawal, but simply farming. The pastoral poet is therefore exploiting his medium as the hermit is not, turning country life, which is community life, into an occasion for withdrawal from the community. Out of this exploitation can come a fruitful artistic tension, but this tension will be destroyed by anyone who has no interest whatever in the medium, only in withdrawal. That is why Jaques never felt at home in Arden. Touchstone disliked it because it was not the court. Jaques discovers only at the end that his true vocation is that of an old religious man.

Touchstone and Jaques were added by Shakespeare to Lodge's story.³ This makes it obvious that he has changed his source by complicating the simple pastoralism into something more ambivalent, where the choruses undermine the official message. It is not surprising that a few other changes mock the pastoral world, or stand tiptoe on the edge of mockery. Thus Shakespeare removed the violence. Lodge's wrestler kills the franklin's sons and is killed by Rosader; Charles breaks their ribs (‘that there is little hope of life in them’), and when he is thrown by Orlando, Le Beau reports, ‘He cannot speak, my lord’ (the line usually gets a laugh), and Charles is then carried out. No actual deaths, but very nearly. Lodge's usurper is killed in battle; but Shakespeare's, though he raises an army, turns out at the last minute to be harmless:

…
And to the skirts of this wild wood he came;
Where meeting with an old religious man,
After some question with him, was converted
Both from his enterprise and from the world,
His crown bequeathing to his banished brother
And all their lands restored to them again
That were with him exiled. This to be true
I do engage my life.

[V iv 164-71]

He needs to engage it, the whole story is so gloriously improbable. The outcome reeks gaily of fairy-tale. Having removed the battle, Shakespeare makes fun of what he has done, as if all you have to do, to get rid of the violence, is to wave a happy ending at your story.

The one touch of violence that remains is the wounding of Orlando, which is brought right on stage in the form of the bloody napkin—at sight of which Rosalind forgets her shepherd's role and almost puts an end to the game she has been playing. This is Shakespeare's comment on the tone of his play. ‘Look’, he has already said, ‘no blood.’ Now he says, ‘See what blood would do to my pastoral; it would spoil everything’.

Notes

1. Marvell's ‘Ametas and Thestylis Making Hay-ropes’ was published in Poems (1681), but written c. 1650.

2. C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (London, 1936), ch. 7.

3. Thomas Lodge, Rosalynde (1590) is the source of As You Like It.