[In the following excerpt, Montrose offers an historical prologue to reading the Elizabethan pastoral, and claims that the pastoral embodies the contradictory values of Elizabethan social life.]

I SHEPHERDS AND CRITICS

Modern theories of pastoral have a way of turning into theories of literature. Perhaps the most influential of such theories have been those of William Empson and Renato Poggioli. The former isolates the pastoral “process” in verbal strategies for “putting the complex into the simple”; the latter analyzes the pastoral “impulse” as a projective mechanism for the sublimation of civilization's discontents.¹ Such generous definitions have encouraged a transformation of virtually every kind of literary text into yet another version of pastoral. Indeed, the rage for pastoral and pastoralization evident in Anglo-American literary studies during the past quarter century seems in itself to constitute a symptomatic pastoral impulse, an exemplary pastoral process: to write about pastoral may be a way of displacing and simplifying the discontents of the latter-day humanist in an increasingly technocratic academy and society; the study of pastoral may have become a metapastoral version of pastoral. The version of pastoral I shall propose here is predicated upon a recognition of the historical and social specificity of literary forms and formal categories—and, indeed, of the very concept of “literature”—an acknowledgment that criticism is a cultural practice that ineluctably constructs the meanings it purports to transcribe. I have not written a comprehensive survey of Elizabethan pastoral literature; on the contrary, I have been highly selective in the use of examples, aiming at suggestive hypotheses rather than exhaustive descriptions.² The present essay is intended as a prolegomenon and a provocation to the rereading of Elizabethan pastoral texts.

The historical study of Elizabethan pastoralism cannot confine its inquiry to matters of literary taxonomy and thematics, to what pastorals “are” or what they “mean”; it must also ask what pastorals do, and by what operations they perform their cultural work. Such an inquiry may necessitate a transformation of the theoretical assumptions—explicit or implied—upon which much modern criticism of Elizabethan literature has been founded. For example, consider the theoretical assumptions of Laurence Lerner's recent study, The Uses of Nostalgia, a book on pastoral that is indebted to the ideas of Empson and Poggioli.³ With ironic condescension, Lerner writes that “the sixteenth century found no difficulty in knowing what pastoral was: it was a poem about shepherds.” Lerner's project is “to set what pastoral really is against what it was supposed to be,” even if this requires him “to tamper with history” (39). His book “does not discuss any poems simply because their characters are dressed up as shepherds and shepherdesses” (34); “courtier and shepherd,” after all, “are just trappings” (39). There is, we are told, “a good deal of the pastoral impulse in literature that is not pastoral in form—just as there were pastorals in the sixteenth century that observed no more than the mechanics of the tradition” (39). In response, we might ask how a tradition can be separated from its “mechanics,” and what a pastoral “impulse” that is not embodied in pastoral form might be. What is here objectified as “theme” is itself the critic's own rewriting of the intrinsically formal constituents of a text. Merely to pose the question of “what pastoral really is” is to situate oneself within an idealist aesthetics that represses the historical and material determinations in any written discourse, including the critic's own. “What pastoral really is” can only be addressed in terms of what it was, and is, “thought to be.” Lerner's work exemplifies a curiously widespread indifference to the possibility that pastoral's merely conventional, formal, or mechanical elements may themselves require (and reward) interpretation. We might do well to reverse Lerner's perspective, to consider pastoral as the manifestation of an impulse to dress up characters as shepherds and shepherdesses. Such a shift might help us to “reproblematize” the significance of pastoral's dominant modal form—“a poem about shepherds”—and to clarify the mode's historical vicissitudes.⁴ As far as Elizabethan writers were concerned, pastorals were indeed poems about shepherds, if only figuratively so; for them, it was precisely the shepherdly trappings that made pastorals pastoral.⁵ And it is the culture-specific significance of such conventions upon which any historicist criticism must insist.⁶

One of the strengths of Empson's own perspective was its suggestion that pastoral forms may not only embody individual psychological accomodations to the social order (as Poggioli suggests) but may also mediate class differences and ideological contradictions, so as to make a particular version of “the social order” possible:

The essential trick of the old pastoral, which was felt to imply a beautiful relation between rich and poor, was to make simple people express strong feelings (felt as the most universal subject, something fundamentally true about everybody) in learned and fashionable language (so that you wrote about the best subject in the best way). From seeing the two sorts of people combined like this you thought the better of both; the best parts of both were used. The effect was in some degree to combine in the reader or author the merits of the two sorts; he was made to mirror in himself more completely the effective elements of the society he lived in.

(Some Versions of Pastoral, 11-12)

Kenneth Burke, an early advocate of Empson's book, sharpened its implications for an ideological analysis by observing that pastoral deals with “class consciousness” not by emphasizing conflict but by aiming at “a stylistic transcending of conflict” in symbols of communion, thereby contributing “to the ‘mystifications’ of class.”⁷ The representative strengths of aristocratic and peasant values and styles are combined—but only for the benefit of the peasant's betters, Empson's “reader” and “author.” When, in 1594, a rural laborer in Essex asked rhetorically, “What can rich men do against poor men if poor men rise and hold together?” he was, in effect, demystifying “the beautiful relation between rich and poor” that Empson poses as the pastoral trick.⁸

The element of ideological criticism in the work of Empson and Burke has given sinews to the modern study of pastoral. But the conception of a rigid dichotomy of economic class—the rich and the poor—misrepresents the multiple and overlapping status hierarchies of Elizabethan society, and the connotations of a pastoral “trick” are too crudely conspiratorial to describe the complex mediations through which cultural forms and social relations are reciprocally shaped.⁹ Nevertheless, despite its oversimplifications and anachronisms, Empson's perspective does point us toward a more precise characterization of the interplay between Elizabethan pastorals and Elizabethan society. This may be specified as a dialectic between Elizabethan pastoral forms and Elizabethan social categories. Elizabethan pastoral forms may have worked to mediate differential relationships of power, prestige, and wealth in a variety of social situations, and to have variously marked and obfuscated the hierarchical distinctions—the symbolic boundaries—upon which the Elizabethan social order was predicated. I shall develop this proposition in the succeeding sections of the present essay. Before doing so, however, I should like to consider further the materialist critique of pastoral mystification adumbrated in the writings of Burke.

In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams has attacked “the ordinary modern meaning of pastoral” that has been institutionalized by academic criticism.¹⁰ He points out that such an approach is confined to the superstructural elements of texts and traditions, that it fails to confront the social embeddedness of literary discourse. Working from within a countertradition of agrarian radicalism, Williams excavates the complex mediations by which English literature grows from the soil of English society—how poems and novels embody changing modes of production and property relations, the shifting dialectic between rural and urban forms of social life. Williams' study challenges the ideological assumptions of that “English pastoral tradition” which has been shaped by Anglo-American literary criticism. The Country and the City is important for the study of Elizabethan works conventionally called “pastoral” even though—in part, perhaps, because—Williams refuses to consider them. He writes that “Virgil, like Hesiod, could raise the most serious questions of life and its purposes in the direct world in which the working year and the pastoral song are still there in their own right” (21). And it is an imitation of this “direct world,” an accurate reflection of the material conditions of an agrarian society, that is the focus of Williams' analyses and the touchstone for his judgments:

The achievement, if it can be called that, of the Renaissance adaption of just these classical modes [i.e., Virgil's eclogues and georgics] is that, step by step, these living tensions are excised, until there is nothing countervailing, and selected images stand as themselves: not in a living but in an enamelled world. … What happened in the aristocratic transformation was the reduction of these primary activities to forms, whether the “vaile” of allegory or the fancy dress of court games.

(18, 21)

Here Williams uses “form” as a pejorative term. Yet Virgil, by the very act of writing, also necessarily “reduced” the “primary activities” of herding and planting to “forms”—namely, the eclogue and the georgic. And, in a more fundamental sense, these “primary activities” themselves embody and reproduce culture-specific forms of practical knowledge appropriate to pastoral and agrarian modes of production. When Williams writes of the world of “the working year and the pastoral song” as a direct world, his nostalgic vision is tempered by his political commitment.

The Country and the City is a work of powerful and eloquent moral indignation; one that effectively and honestly demonstrates that the politics of literature are inseparable from the politics of criticism. However, in his brief and categorical dismissal of “the Renaissance adaption” of pastoral, Williams uncharacteristically oversimplifies the ideological complexity of a large and heterogeneous corpus of cultural texts. A vulgarization of Williams' perspective on Renaissance pastoral introduces a recent anthology of English pastoral verse: “The pastoral vision is, at base, a false vision, positing a simplistic, unhistorical relationship between the ruling, landowning class—the poet's patrons and often the poet himself—and the workers on the land; as such its function is to mystify and to obscure the harshness of actual social and economic organization.”¹¹ Although I am in sympathy with the thrust of this argument, I find its own formulation to be simplistic and unhistorical. In his more recent work, Williams has explicitly repudiated an outmoded Marxian aesthetic in which culture is represented as a superstructural reflection of an economic base. This model, which to some degree continues to inform Williams' critical practice in The Country and the City, has been succeeded by one in which culture is represented as at once more autonomous in its processes and more material in its means and relations of production.¹² If we construe “culture as the signifying system through which necessarily (though among other means) a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced and explored” (Culture, 13), then the making of Renaissance pastoral “forms” may now appear to be not merely a process of “reduction” or simply a “false vision,” but rather a “primary activity” in its own right: “forms and conventions in art and literature [are] inalienable elements of a social material process” (Marxism and Literature, 133). Thus the transformation of agrarian activity into pastoral form can be construed as an instance of a totalizing cognitive process by which Elizabethan experience was structured, represented, and reproduced. Williams, following Antonio Gramsci, postulates such a “hegemonic” process:

Hegemony is … not only the articulate upper level of “ideology,” nor are its forms of control only those ordinarily seen as “manipulation” or “indoctrination.” It is a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living. … It is a lived system of meanings and values—constitutive and constituting—which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming.

(Marxism and Literature, 110)

Elizabethan pastoral discourse is indeed “ideological” (in Williams' narrowed conception of that term) but is not reducible to a particular ideology—which is what Williams seems to imply in The Country and the City. My subject is that “aristocratic transformation” of pastoral which Williams has repudiated as the “reduction” of “living tensions” to “an enamelled world.” I am not concerned to apologize for this version of pastoral but rather to understand some of the reasons for its cultural vitality and to locate its place within the “lived system” of Elizabethan “meanings and values.”

The eclogue was the pastoral genre inherited and imitated by Renaissance poets. But Elizabethan pastoral is characterized by a proliferation into other genres of what Alastair Fowler calls “conscious model innovations” (“The Life and Death of Literary Forms,” 214): not only are there eclogues and interpolated pastoral episodes within larger narrative and dramatic forms, but also lyrics, romances, satires, comedies and tragicomedies, erotic Ovidian narratives, pageants and masques, all of which may be wholly or partially pastoral. It is this explosion of pastoral possibilities that makes the last decades of the sixteenth century and the first decades of the seventeenth century the golden age of English pastoral literature. Pastoral pervades the forms and performances of Elizabethan culture. It is ubiquitous not only in established literary and pictorial genres but also in religious, political, and didactic texts and in the figurative discourse of letters, speeches, and recorded conversation. What all of these texts have in common is not a genre, theme, or impulse but rather a nexus of conventional persons, places, animals, objects, activities, and relations. These conventions combine into a symbolic formation which has been selected and abstracted from a whole way of life that is materially pastoral, a world in which animal husbandry is a primary means of production. Thus, the properties of Elizabethan pastoral are formal properties, formal properties rooted not only in a literary tradition but also in those conditions of Elizabethan social and economic life to which that tradition continues to be meaningful. Therefore, the logical place to begin studying the social matrix of Elizabethan pastoral form should be in the pastures themselves, where we can observe the material conditions and relations of an agrarian society. But if we are to follow the direction of the pastoral process, we shall find that we must very soon shift our ground from the country to the court. Such is the trajectory of this essay: part two explores the inhibition of relations between agrarian life and pastoral form in terms of an Elizabethan preoccupation with the discriminations of social status. …

II COMMONS AND GENTLES

Nine out of ten people in Elizabethan England were rural dwellers, and sheep outnumbered people, perhaps by as many as three to one. This was a society dependent upon unreliable sources of agrarian production for its physical survival, and dependent upon sheep for food and fertilizer as well as for wool, the raw material of England's basic industry.¹³ Foreign visitors were repeatedly struck by the abundantly pastoral quality of the English landscape, its inhabitation by “countless numbers of sheep.” Such travelers' accounts corroborate the opinion of a native: in his Description of England, William Harrison maintains that

Our sheep are very excellent, sith for sweetness of flesh they pass all other. And … our wools [are] to be preferred before those of … other places.

Certes this kind of cattle is more cherished in England than standeth well with the commodity of the commons or prosperity of divers towns, whereof some are wholly converted to their feeding; yet such a profitable sweetness is found in their fleece, such necessity in their flesh, and so great a benefit in the manuring of barren soil with their dung and piss that their superfluous numbers are the better borne withal.¹⁴

For Harrison, the enclosing and engrossing attendant upon large scale sheepfarming were necessary evils, so vital was pastoralism to the Elizabethan way of life. The nation's pastoral life was in fact symbolically enshrined within the Parliament itself: a French ambassador described in his journal the central placement there of “four great mattresses, full of wool and covered in red … these are very high and well stuffed; they say that it signified the prosperity of England which comes from wool.”¹⁵

The pervasive importance of agriculture and animal husbandry in Elizabethan society might lead one to expect an open interplay between the features of Elizabethan rural life and those of Elizabethan pastoral form. Yet such an interplay is, in most cases, curiously difficult to locate and describe: it is, at best, tenuous or fragmentary, sublimated or displaced. Most criticism of Elizabethan pastoral literature seems untouched by the issues Raymond Williams has raised; it is content to take the “enamelled world” of pastoral idealization on its own terms. Pastoral literature is usually studied in the context of literary history or thematics, that is, within an apparently autonomous system of literary discourse that has been largely constructed by the criticism that studies it. But if there appear to be no connections between the material and textual domains of Elizabethan life, it is because they have been ruptured or occluded. If Elizabethan rural life seems irrelevant to Elizabethan pastoral literature, that irrelevance is nevertheless conspicuous. Indeed, the suppression or marginalization of material pastoralism constitutes an essential feature of Elizabethan literary pastoralism—a feature that demands interpretation.

In the stratified agrarian society of Elizabethan England, the pastoral metaphors of Scripture might emphasize the common creaturely bonds of humankind: lords and commons alike were sheep in Christ's flock. But they could also sanction religious and secular hierarchies: prelates and princes were Christ's vicegerents, shepherds of the human flock. The wide if very uneven distribution of livestock ownership further complicated this pattern of pastoral relations. The dichotomy of “rich and poor” that Empson shares with the laborer from Elizabethan Essex must be specified as a conflicting relationship to real property, the traditional source of wealth, power, and prestige. The pastoral “trick” may have had some point in the Elizabethan countryside because some commoners did in fact own sheep. Substantial yeomen, who were often freeholders, sometimes had great flocks. But poor husbandmen who were copyholders, landless agrarian laborers, and youthful servants in husbandry often kept a few sheep for domestic uses. The shepherds themselves, who were usually contracted laborers with specialized skills, were sometimes paid in livestock allowed to graze on their employers' pastures.¹⁶ Thus landed gentlemen and landless laborers, metaphorical shepherds and literal shepherds, could identify with each other because they shared a benevolent lordship over domesticated creatures that gave bountifully of themselves to the human community.

Such a “beautiful relationship between rich and poor” is operative in the conceit of the lordly shepherd, which occurs in a pastoral poem by the aptly named Richard Barnfield:

Like a great King he rules a little land,
Still making Statues, and ordayning Lawes;
Which if they breake, he beates them with his Wand:
He doth defend them from the greedy Jawes
Of ravening Woolves, and Lyons bloudy Pawes.
          His Field, his Realme, his Subjects are his Sheepe,
          Which he doth still in due obedience keepe.(17)

Because Empson's analyses tend to be confined to forms of writing within the domain of literature, it may be useful to complement Barnfield's poem by considering an Elizabethan pastoral text that was actually produced within a pastoral environment. Sir Horatio Palavicino signed letters from his Cambridgeshire estate, “being amongst my shepperds clippinge my shepe.”¹⁸ Palavicino does not address the shepherds themselves; he self-consciously evokes them in a rhetorical strategy aimed at his correspondent. The epistolary transaction frames and delimits Palavicino's pastoral world and his own place within it. Palavicino was a political agent and a creditor of Queen Elizabeth, an alien who had acquired his English property and become an English gentleman by means of the wealth he had accumulated from his moneylending and commercial ventures. His idyllic gesture suppresses his bitter and protracted dispute with one of his shepherds, as well as his legal battle with his tenants over grazing rights; however, it does hint at his aggressive acquisition of pasturage in order to capitalize on the demand for wool. In Palavicino's valediction, the relationship between master and men is translated into pastoral fraternity. But the evocation of communion and community is contradicted by Palavicino's conspicuous reiteration of the first-person possessive pronoun. The otiose country gentleman is also the calculating businessman whose gold and silver is ewes and rams. In Palavicino's letter, as in Barnfield's poem, the sheep becomes a hierarchy-transcending incarnation of property, a subject of human exploitation uniting or identifying the interests of groups that had profoundly differing proprietary relations to the land itself, to their own labor, and to each other.

It is difficult to imagine Palavicino or any other Elizabethan gentleman signing his letters, “being amongst my ploughmen, tilling my fields.” The georgic figure of the ploughman or husbandman is banished from the vast majority of Elizabethan pastoral texts. Barnfield, however, does invoke such agrarian laborers in “The Shepherds Content”:

The painfull Plough-swaine, and the Husband-man
Rise up each morning by the breake of day,
Taking what toyle and drudging paines they can,
And all is for to get a little stay;
And yet they cannot put their care away:
          When night is come, their cares begin afresh,
          Thinking upon the Morrowes busines.

(st. 15)

Although these absent presences are invoked to demonstrate that “Shepherd's life is best,” the anomalous stanza generates precisely those “living tensions” (as Williams calls them) that the poem has ostensibly expunged from its “world.” By the eighteenth century, poets like Stephen Duck and George Crabbe would turn Barnfield's exclusionary procedure inside out, making such agricultural laborers the victimized heroes of an explicitly antipastoral rural poetry.¹⁹ But in the culture of the literate Elizabethan classes, the omnipresent realities of rural life enter formal discourse almost exclusively in pastoral terms. Agriculture and sheepraising were sometimes competing for the same land resources, as the enclosure controversy reminds us. But they were equally likely to exist together in a symbiotic relationship: “in all areas of mixed farming, the folding of sheep on the arable was a pillar of the farming system”; “in all save the strictly wood-pasture districts, the sheepfold was … the mainstay of husbandry. … The whole farm was laid out and run to suit the sheep, but only on the strict understanding that they devoted themselves to fertilizing the land for corn and grain.”²⁰ Elizabethan pastoral literature betrays almost no trace of this positive relationship that sheepherding often bore to other agrarian activities. The imaginative ecology of pastoral literature tends to suppress the intimate connection—whether hostile or beneficent—between herding and farming that was in fact typical of the Elizabethan countryside.

The note of ambivalence in William Harrison's already quoted account of Elizabethan sheepfarming registers the fact that pastoralism was the focus of a moral, economic, and ecological controversy that had provoked pamphlets and petitions, riots and rebellions, throughout the sixteenth century; it would remain controversial throughout the following century. In order to capitalize on an expanding market for wool (and also for mutton) Tudor land-owners enclosed common fields and engrossed small, scattered holdings. These and other measures taken to “rationalize” pastoral farming often resulted in the abrogation or erosion of traditional tenant rights and in the disruption or even the destruction of village life in some rural areas.²¹ The controversy about this agrarian transformation became acute during the tumultuous spiritual, political, social, and economic upheavals of the mid-sixteenth century. During this period, reform-minded polemicists attacked the causes as well as the consequences of agrarian unrest in a mode of satire and complaint that found its roots in The Vision of Piers Plowman. In this literature, the fundamentally opposed interests of Commons and Gentles were metaphorized in the opposition of Ploughman and Shepherd; that is, in terms of the single issue that repeatedly catalyzed agrarian discontent throughout the century.²²

What is probably the best known expression of the antipastoral attitude in Tudor England actually comes from the pre-Reformation period, from the pen of Thomas More. In part 1 of Utopia, Morus makes an impassioned attack on incipient agrarian capitalism:

Your sheep … that used to be so meek and eat so little … are becoming so greedy and wild that they devour men themselves, as I hear. They devastate and pillage fields, houses, and towns. For in whatever parts of the land that sheep yield the softest and most expensive wool, there the nobility and gentry, yes, and even some abbots though otherwise holy men, are not content with the old rents which the land yielded to their predecessors. Living in idleness and luxury, without doing any good to society, no longer satisfies them; they have to do positive evil. For they leave no land free for the plow; they enclose every acre for pasture. … As if enough of your land were not already wasted on woods and game-preserves, these worthy men turn all human habitations and cultivated fields back to wilderness.²³

Here pastoralism exemplifies the rapaciousness of spiritual and temporal lords, whose whole way of life is inimical to the true practice of Christianity. More's observation of agrarian relations in Tudor society conditions his invention of those in Utopian society. The most remarkable feature of the latter is that “agriculture is the one occupation at which everyone works, men and women alike, with no exceptions” (40). If Utopia is a true commonwealth, while European society is merely “a conspiracy of the rich” (89), it is because More's fiction radically alters the relations of production as well as the relations of distribution. Within the moral ecology of More's Humanism, the regression to wilderness produced by sheepfarming manifests the spiritual regression of England's lordly shepherds. Therefore, idleness—an aristocratic prerogative in Renaissance Europe—must be rigorously excluded from the lives of all Utopians. Labor, both manual and intellectual, is at once an acknowledgment of the defective human condition and the means of its repair. The program articulated in More's fiction is to reclaim the wilderness by the joint labors of cultivation and education.²⁴

The Christianized georgic mode of More's Erasmian Humanism finds a striking new embodiment a century and a half after Utopia in the Puritan Humanism of Paradise Lost—not in punitive post-lapsarian labor but in the unalienated labor of Edenic cultivation. In Milton's unorthodox treatment of the unfallen human condition, Adam and Eve “labor still to dress” a luxuriant garden that is “tending to wild” (PL 9.205, 212).²⁵ The Christian revolutionary in Milton shared with the social revolutionaries of the mid-seventeenth century a belief in the original dignity of labor.²⁶ In the texts of More and Milton, the validation of agricultural labor goes hand in hand with a radical critique of aristocratic values and styles—a critique that is, of course, not proletarian in character but rather religious, intellectual, and bourgeois. The pastoral flowering of late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England, on the other hand, is dominantly aristocratic in values and style—even though the majority of its poets were of relatively humble origins and means. Renaissance pastoral takes the court as its cynosure. Although many of these works direct criticism or hostility against courtly decadence or the inequities of courtly reward, such anti-courtliness tends to measure either the court's distance from its own high ideals or the courtier's distance from the satisfaction of his ambitions. In other words, the element of anticourtliness in Elizabethan pastoral literature is quite unlike the anticourtliness of Utopia or Paradise Lost in that it is itself an aspect of courtly or aristocratic culture. Indeed, it is one of that culture's characteristic forms—an authorized mode of discontent—rather than a critique made in terms of a consciously articulated oppositional culture.

English literary pastoralism began to flourish in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, in the latter half of Elizabeth's reign—that is, only after the diminution of the bitterly controversial agrarian literature whose subject was precisely those material practices and relations that provided a social matrix for Elizabethan pastoral conventions. If cultural expropriation followed upon economic expropriation, a period of decontamination was nevertheless necessary before such pastoral forms were fit to embody the changing concerns of writers, patrons, and audiences.²⁷ In the troubled countryside of earlier Tudor writings, gentlemen abuse their tenants; in the idyllic countryside of Elizabethan pastorals, gentlemen may escape temporarily from the troubles of the court. The readers and writers of Elizabethan pastorals have little discernible interest in defending traditional peasant rights or in acknowledging those agrarian activities that exemplify baseness. On the contrary, Elizabethan poets who oppose pastoral goodness to courtly vice create shepherds who exemplify the ideals of gentility. Such a poetry is not concerned to embrace the lot of Elizabethan husbandmen or to advance egalitarian ideas but to recreate an elite community in pastoral form. In such pastorals, ambitious Elizabethan gentlemen who may be alienated or excluded from the courtly society that nevertheless continues to define their existence can create an imaginative space within which virtue and privilege coincide.

Although farming was a poetic subject sanctioned by Virgil's Georgics, the Elizabethans banished it to manuals on husbandry. If the georgic mode was fundamentally uncongenial to Elizabethan poets, one reason may have been that the culture of the Elizabethan elite stigmatized the varied tasks of manual labor. Literary celebrations of pastoral otium conventionalize the relative ease of the shepherd's labors. Compared to other agrarian tasks, sheep-farming requires very little investment of human resources.²⁸ The fictional time-space of counteless eclogues and other Elizabethan pastorals is structured by the diurnal rhythm of shepherding: driving the flock out to pasture at daybreak and driving them back to fold at dusk. Within this frame, the literary shepherd's day is typically occupied by singing, piping, wooing, and the other quaint indulgences of the pastoral life.

The characteristic condition of such a life was well described by Richard Mulcaster as “great leisure to use liberty where the meaner sort must labor.” Mulcaster, however, was writing about the benefits of gentility: “Those things gentlemen have, and are much bound to God for them, which may make them prove excellent if they use them well: great ability to go through withal where the poorer sort must give over, ere he come to the end; great leisure to use liberty where the meaner sort must labor; all opportunities at will where the common is restrained.”²⁹ Peter Laslett elaborates upon the material basis for the distinction between gentles and commons:

The term gentleman marked the exact point at which the traditional social system divided up the population into two extremely unequal sections. About a twenty-fifth, at most a twentieth, of all the people alive in the England of the Tudors and the Stuarts … belonged to the gentry and to those above them in the social hierarchy. This tiny minority owned most of the wealth, wielded the power and made all the decisions, political, economic and social for the national whole. …

Here was a society which has no devices for the saving of labour. … The simplest operation in everyday life needed effort. … The working of the land, the labour in the craftsman's shop, were infinitely taxing. … Yet the primary characteristic of the gentleman was that he never worked with his hands on necessary, as opposed to leisurely, activities.

The simple fact of leisure dividing off this little society of the privileged—it had to be little at a time when the general resources were so small—is the first step in comprehending the attitude of our forefathers to rank and status.

(The World We Have Lost, 27, 29, 30)

Laslett's description implies that the distinction between gentility and baseness was a social marker that became physically inscribed upon the body itself. The conventions of pastoral romance transpose this marker into those refinements of carriage and complexion that manifest the natural superiority of rusticated aristocrats to the coarse and sunburned rustics among whom they sojourn. The amorous and aesthetic pursuits of literary shepherds were cultural luxuries available only to a tiny minority in the society of early modern England—luxuries of the kind prized and enjoyed by Renaissance gentlemen and, in particular, by Renaissance courtiers.

The opposition of gentility and baseness was, then, the most fundamental of Elizabethan social discriminations. Mulcaster put the matter patly: “All the people which be in our country be either gentlemen or of the commonality” (Positions, 162). Elizabethan commentators recognized several gradations within this dichotomy, and there existed other status and interest groups that were either misunderstood or thought unworthy of mention. But this social boundary was universally acknowledged, even when its exact placement was in dispute. The Elizabethan preoccupation with marks of status and with the nature of gentility were themselves symptoms of unprecedented social mobility.³⁰ As David Cressy has pointed out, Elizabethan commentators had to struggle with social facts that did not fit their received social theories: “Their major difficulty … lay in trying to describe a society whose legal system and status system were based on possession of land at a time when non-landed skills, wealth and power were increasingly significant” (“Describing the Social Order of Elizabethan and Stuart England,” 29). Sir Thomas Smith wrote that “we in England divide our men commonly into foure sortes, gentlemen, citizens, yeoman artificers, and laborers.”³¹ The first group encompassed the entire social elite, from the monarch and peers down to simple gentlemen—not only country gentry but wealthy bourgeois social climbers who invested in land, and university educated professionals, clergy, and scholars. Smith concluded—with some contempt—that

gentlemen … be made good cheape in England. For whosoever studieth the lawes of the realme, who studieth in the universities, who professeth liberal sciences, and to be shorte, who can live idly and without manuall labour, and will beare the port, charge and countenaunce of a gentleman, he shall be called master … and shall be taken for a gentleman.

(De Republica Anglorum, 40; italics mine)

Some Elizabethan pastorals explicitly set forth discriminations between gentility and commonality; others function to manifest the gentility—or deny the commonality—of their authors and their audiences. And many more, when put into the context of their production and reception, reveal an implicit or oblique engagement with problems of status. This affinity of pastoral forms for the symbolic mediation of social categories depends primarily upon pastoral conventions of leisure and labor, conventions in which a rich and heterogeneous Renaissance cultural tradition deriving from both biblical and classical sources interacts with the material features of Elizabethan ecology, economy, and society.

In effect, the distinction between gentility and baseness depended upon a differential subjection to the penalty of fallen Adam, a selective dispensation from the original injunction that “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, til thou returne to the earth: for out of it wast thou taken” (Genesis 3: 19; Geneva Bible, 1560 ed.). In Chaucer's time, the Peasants' Revolt epitomized and challenged this social differentiation in a powerfully interrogative proverb: “When Adam dalf and Eve span, / Who was thanne a gentil man?”³² To the arrivistes of the Tudor aristocracy, that question must have been particularly irksome. Not surprisingly, allusions to the proverb declined markedly during the sixteenth century. But some gentlemen remained willing to acknowledge it, if only in order to repudiate it. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Edmund Dudley maintained that it was the sin of “Arrogancy” that taught the commons that

ye be made of the same metell and mold that the gentiles be made of. Whie then should thei sport and play and you labor and till? He will tell you also that at your birthes and at your deethes your riches be indifferent. Whie should thei have so motche of the prosperite and treasure of this world and ye so lytle? Besydes that, he will tell you that ye be the childeren and righte enheritors to Adam aswell as thei. … He will shew also how that christ bought you as derely as the nobles with one maner of price, which was his preciouse Bloude. Whie then should ye be of so poore estate and thei of highe degre? … And percase he will enforme you how … god creatyd in you one maner of noblenes without any diversitie, and that your soules be as precious to god as theires.³³

Early in the following century, James Cleland opened a treatise on nobility by invoking the proverb, then answering it with equivocations:

To satisfie then the common objection of the vulgar, who disapprove al inequalitie, in demanding

When Adam delv'd, and Eva span,
Who was then a Noble man?
…

I grant that not only in respect of our beginning, but of our ending too, we are all equals without difference or superioritie of degrees, all tending alike to the same earth from whence we sprong. … King and subject, noble and ignoble, rich and poore, al are borne and die a like: but in the middle course, betweene our birth and burial, wee are over-runne by our betters, and of necessitite must needs confesse that some excell & are more noble than others.³⁴

For Cleland, nobility is not “subject to the mutabilitie of Fortune” but “is permanent in the minde” (4). However, he hastens to add that he does not mean by this “that everie one who lives vertuouslie, and can daunt his affections, is foorthwith a Noble or a Gentleman, but hee onlie whose Vertue is profitable to the King and Countrie; whom his Majestie esteemes worthie to beare a coate of armes, & to enjoie diverse priveledges for services done to him & His kingdome” (5-6). There is a telling contrast between the emphases of Dudley and Cleland, which measures the success of the Henrician and Elizabethan regimes in establishing the royal court as the source of identity and honor, power and reward.³⁵ By the beginning of the Stuart dynasty, the focus of the argument has changed from the agrarian relationship between lords and laborers to the courtly relationship between the king and the privileged society of royal dependents who serve him. As I have already suggested, pastoral discourse follows a similar direction during the sixteenth century. Literary pastoralization involves not only a process by which agrarian social relations are inscribed within an ideology of the country but also a process by which that initial inscription is itself appropriated, transformed, and reinscribed within an ideology of the court.

The production of Elizabethan pastoral discourse is characterized by ideological processes of displacement, sublimation, and repression. The aristocratic and courtly culture of the Renaissance cleanses the taint of agrarian labor from pastoral imagery, thus making possible a metaphorical identification between otiose shepherds and leisured gentlemen. Such a process is observable in “The Shepheards Content.” Here Barnfield shows how Empson's literary swain actually combines the best parts of the best people:

He is a Courtier, for he courts his Love:
He is a Scholler, for he sings sweet Ditties:
He is a Souldier, for he wounds [i.e., of love] doth
                    prove;
…
          He is a Gentleman, because his nature
          Is kinde and affable to everie Creature.

(st. 41)

When Bacon notes that Cain and Abel figure the Ploughman and the Pastoralist, his purpose is to emphasize a distinction that is at once social and spiritual: “We see again the favour and election of God went to the shepherd, and not to the tiller of the ground.” The relative moral valuations borne by the Ploughman and the Shepherd in an earlier and more critical Tudor literary tradition have been reversed. For Bacon, the Shepherd is an image of the contemplative life, “by reason of his leisure, rest in a place, and living in the view of heaven.”³⁶ Sixteenth-century writers customarily located the initial distinction between nobility and baseness—the origins of inequality—in the moral distinction between Adam's heirs, the superiority of Seth over Cain, and in the postdiluvian world, in the moral distinction between Noah's heirs, the superiority of Shem and Japhet over Cham. Having claimed so much in his Blazon of Gentrie (1586), Johne Ferne goes on to assert that “from S[h]em did pursue by the flesh, our Saviour and King Jesus Christ: a Gentleman of bloud, according to his humanitie, Emperour of heaven and earth, according to his deitie, even as his holy Herealds, (the Evangelistes) have out of their infallible recordes testified.”³⁷ Ferne feels it necessary to prove even the Good Shepherd's pedigree to be socially acceptable.

In a celebrated formulation, Lévi-Strauss specifies the social function of mythic narratives as the provision of “a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction (an impossible achievement if, as it happens, the contradiction is real).”³⁸ I propose that pastoral form may encode such a function in Renaissance culture—a culture in which a theory of social fixity was contradicted by the evidence of social flux, in which the putative coincidence of virtue, honor, and gentility with lineage, status, and wealth was continually placed in question. The primarily courtly pastoral of the Renaissance puts into play a symbolic strategy, which, by reconstituting the leisured gentleman as the gentle shepherd, obfuscates a fundamental contradiction in the cultural logic: a contradiction between the secular claims of aristocratic prerogative and the religious claims of common origins, shared fallenness, and spiritual equality among men, gentle and base alike. When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then a gentleman? Elizabethan pastoral participates in the ideological process of providing evasive answers to such pointed questions about personal, familial, and collective origins. I am not proposing a monocausal explanation for the ubiquity of pastoral forms in Elizabethan culture; nor am I implying that the mediation of social boundaries was necessarily a conscious motive in the writing of Elizabethan pastorals. The social ambiguities and contradictions to which I have pointed could be encoded in cultural forms and practices other than pastorals. And the range of pastoral significations is not reducible to a single ideological operation. I have sought to draw attention to what seems to me a vital though largely unremarked conjunction of form and function, and to suggest why the fit between them was so good. A social matrix for Elizabethan pastoral forms and practices may be located in the interstices between the categories of baseness and gentility, on that ambiguous social boundary that pastorals symbolically mark and transgress. In Elizabethan culture, the metaphor of the gentle shepherd could enact a variety of strategies in behalf of gentlemen—or would-be gentlemen—who were lineal descendants of Adam and Eve.

Notes

1. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (1936; rpt. New York: New Directions, 1968), 23, Renato Poggioli, The Oaten Flute (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975), 1.

2. For comprehensive historical surveys of English Renaissance pastoralism, see Walter W. Greg, Pastoral Drama and Pastoral Poetry (1906; rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1959); Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Poetry (1952; rpt. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1968), 1-63; Simone Dorangeon, L'Églogue Anglaise de Spenser à Milton (Paris: Didier, 1974); Helen Cooper, Pastoral: Medieval into Renaissance (Ipswich: D. S. Brewer, 1977), 144-213.

3. Laurence Lerner, The Uses of Nostalgia (New York: Schocken, 1972), 39.

4. For the notion of reproblematization, I am indebted to Fredric R. Jameson, “The Symbolic Inference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis,” Critical Inquiry 4 (1978), 507-23. Jameson suggests that to invoke “ideology” and the ideological is “to reproblematize the entire artistic discourse or formal analysis thereby so designated. The term ‘ideology’ stands as the sign for a problem yet to be solved, a mental operation which remains to be executed. … [I]t is an imperative to re-invent a relationship between the linguistic or aesthetic or conceptual fact in question and its social ground” (510). The present essay is intended as a contribution to the reinvention of a relationship between Elizabethan pastoral and its social ground.

   In a recent essay that draws upon the work of William Empson and Kenneth Burke, Paul Alpers writes that “a definition of pastoral must first give a coherent account of its various features—formal, expressive, and thematic—and second, provide for historical continuity or change within the form.” He finds the basis of such a definition in the Burkean concept of a “representative anecdote,” “a brief and compendious rendering of a certain situation or type of life.” For Alpers—as, I believe, for Renaissance poets and critics—“the representative anecdote of pastoral is the lives of shepherds.” This means “that pastoral works are representations of shepherds, who are felt to be representative of some other or of all other men. But since all the terms in this definition are subject to modification or re-interpretation, pastoral is historically diversified and transformed.” See Alpers, “What Is Pastoral?,” Critical Inquiry 8 (1982), 437-60; quotations from 441, 448, 449, 456, respectively. The present essay might be thought of as a culture-specific ideological analysis of pastoral's representative anecdote.

   Because terminological ambiguity besets so much discussion of pastoral, it may be useful at the outset to note Alastair Fowler's formal distinction between genre and mode: “By genre I mean a better defined and more external type than mode. Genres each have their own formal structures, whereas modes depend less explicitly on stance, motif, or occasional touches of rhetorical texturing.” See Alastair Fowler, “The Life and Death of Literary Forms,” New Literary History 2 (1971), 199-216; quotation from 202. Thus, “pastoral” as a noun is a modal form, while “pastoral” as an adjective (as, for example, pastoral eclogue, elegy, or romance) is genre-specific.

5. For example: Sidney defends the pastoral, which, “sometimes, under the pretty tales of wolves and sheep, can include the whole considerations of wrong-doing and patience” (A Defence of Poetry, in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten [Oxford: Clarendon, 1973], 95). William Webbe writes that “Eglogues … bee commonly Dialogues or speeches framed or supposed betweene Sheepeheardes, Neteheardes, Goteheardes, or such like simple men. … Although the matter they take in hand seemeth commonlie in appearaunce rude and homely, as the usuall talke of simple clownes, yet doo they indeede utter in the same much pleasaunt and profitable delight. For under these personnes, as it were in a cloake of simplicitie, they would eyther sette foorth the prayses of theyr freendes … or enveigh against abuses” (A Discourse of English Poetrie [1586], in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Gregory Smith, [Oxford: Clarendon, 1904], 1: 262). In a preface to the 1619 edition of his pastoral poetry, Michael Drayton writes that “pastorals, as they are a Species of Poesie, signifie fained Dialogues, or other speeches in Verse, fathered upon Heardsmen … who are ordinarie persons in this kind of Poeme. … The subject of Pastorals, as the language of it ought to be poor, silly, & of the coursest Woofe in appearance. … Nevertheless, the most High, and most Noble Matters of the World may be shaddowed in them, and for certaine sometimes are” (“To the Reader of His Pastorals,” in The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. William Hebel, et al. [Oxford: Shakespeare Head, 1961], 2: 517). The opinions quoted here are representative of Tudor and Jacobean discussions of pastoral; these are surveyed in J. E. Congleton, Theories of Pastoral Poetry in England 1684-1798 (Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press, 1952), 37-51. Puttenham's discussion of pastoral is analyzed in detail in part three of the present essay.

6. In his Introduction to a recent collection of studies of “The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms in the Renaissance,” Stephen Greenblatt writes that “Renaissance literary works are no longer regarded either as a fixed set of texts that are set apart from all other forms of expression and that contain their own determinate meanings or as a stable set of reflections of historical facts that lie beyond them.” Distinctions “between artistic production and other kinds of social production … do in fact exist, but they are not intrinsic to the texts; rather they are made up and constantly redrawn by artists, audiences, and readers. These collective social constructions on the one hand define the range of aesthetic possibilities within a given representational mode and, on the other, link that mode to the complex network of institutions, practices, and beliefs that constitute the culture as a whole” (Introduction, Genre 15.1-2 [1982], 4). My only qualification of this admirable formulation is that not only “the range of aesthetic possibilities” but also the very category of the aesthetic is socially constructed.

7. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (1950; rpt. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969), 123-24. Also see his early reviews of Empson's book, rpt. in The Philosophy of Literary Form, 3rd ed., rev. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973), 422-26. For a recent appreciation of Empson's work, see Paul Alpers, “Empson on Pastoral,” New Literary History 10 (1978), 101-23.

8. Quoted in Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution, rev. ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 119.

9. On Elizabethan social structure, see Lawrence Stone, “Social Mobility in England, 1500-1700,” Past & Present, no. 33 (April 1966), 16-55; Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost, 2nd ed. (New York: Scribner's, 1971), 23-54; David Cressy, “Describing the Social Order of Elizabethan and Stuart England,” Literature and History, no. 3 (March 1976), 29-44.

10. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973).

11. The editors' Introduction, in A Book of English Pastoral Verse, ed. John Barrell and John Bull (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), 4.

12. See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977); “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” in Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: NLB, 1980), 31-49; Culture (London: Fontana, 1981); “Marxism, Structuralism and Literary Analysis,” New Left Review, no. 129 (Sept.-Oct. 1981), 51-66.

13. See Peter J. Bowden, The Wool Trade in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Macmillan, 1962), xv: “Wool was, without question, the most important raw material in the English economic system. … Every class in the community, whether landlord, farmer, merchant, industrial capitalist or artisan, had an interest in wool, and it was the subject of endless economic controversy.” Material on every aspect of Elizabethan sheepraising and agriculture is to be found in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Volume IV, 1500-1700, ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967). Future pages references to the Agrarian History of England and Wales will be to volume four.

14. William Harrison, The Description of England (1577, 1587), ed. Georges Edelen (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1968), 308, 310. For the impressions of visitors that England was a land of “countless numbers of sheep,” see England as seen by Foreign Visitors in the Days of Elizabeth and James the First, ed. William Brenchley Rye (1865; rpt. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967), 30, 31, 57, 70, 109. On the sheep population of Elizabethan England, see Bowden, The Wool Trade in Tudor and Stuart England, 37-38.

15. André Hurault, Sieur de Maisse, Journal (1597), trans. and ed. G. B. Harrison and R. A. Jones (Bloomsbury: Nonesuch, 1931), 30.

16. See Alan Everitt, “Farm Labourers,” in Agrarian History of England and Wales, 414; K. J. Allison, “Flock Management in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 11 (1958), 98-112; Mildred Campbell, The English Yeoman Under Elizabeth and the Early Stuarts (1942; rpt. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1960), 197-205; Ann Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), 25, 39.

17. “The Shepherds Content” (1594), st. 22, in Richard Barnfield, Poems, 1594-1598, ed. Edward Arber (1882; rpt. New York: AMS, 1967). I have silently modified obsolete typographical conventions in quotations from this and other editions of Elizabethan texts.

18. Quoted in Lawrence Stone, An Elizabethan: Sir Horatio Palavicino (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956), 283. On Palavicino as a rapacious sheepfarmer, see especially 275-76.

19. See, for example, the selections anthologized in A Book of English Pastoral Verse, ed. Barrell and Bull, 385-424.

20. Joan Thirsk, “Farming Techniques,” in Agrarian History of England and Wales, 188; Eric Kerridge, The Farmers of Old England (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1973), 20.

21. For balanced discussion of this still controversial subject, see Joan Thirsk, “Enclosing and Engrossing,” in Agrarian History of England and Wales, 200-55; M. W. Beresford, The Lost Villages of England (1954; rpt. London: Lutterworth, 1965); J. A. Yelling, Common Field and Enclosure in England, 1450-1850 (London: Macmillan, 1977).

22. On the Piers Plowman tradition in Tudor satire, see Helen C. White, Social Criticism in Popular Religious Literature of the Sixteenth Century (1944; rpt. New York: Octagon Books, 1965), 1-40; Smith, Elizabethan Poetry, 194-216. Whitney R. D. Jones, The Mid-Tudor Crisis (London: Macmillan, 1973), provides a good introduction to the issues of the period.

23. Sir Thomas More, Utopia (1516), trans. and ed. Robert M. Adams (New York: Norton, 1975), 14. Further quotations will be from this edition.

24. On the importance of cultivation and education in Utopia, see Wayne A. Rebhorn, “Thomas More's Enclosed Garden: Utopia and Renaissance Humanism,” English Literary Renaissance 6 (1976), 140-55. Two brilliant and complementary studies of Utopian society in the context of More's life and times are J. H. Hexter, The Vision of Politics on the Eve of the Reformation (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 19-149; and Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), 11-73.

25. Paradise Lost is quoted from John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey, 1957). On Milton's unorthodox presentation of Eden, see J. M. Evans, Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968); and Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, “Innocence and Experience in Milton's Eden,” in New Essays on Paradise Lost, ed. Thomas Kranidas (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969), 86-117.

26. “Man hath his daily work of body or mind / Appointed, which declares his Dignity” (PL 4.618-19). Regarding seventeenth-century ideas about wage labor, see Christopher Hill, Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1974), 219-38; and, for Milton's connections with the radicals, see Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (1977; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), esp. 93-116, 395-96. (It should be noted that Hill tends to overstate his case.)

27. I offer this hypothesis tentatively, and only as a partial explanation of the “cultural lag” between the longstanding importance of sheepfarming in the English economy and the later Elizabethan emergence of pastoral as an important literary mode. In The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981), Fredric Jameson suggests that “the strategic value of generic concepts for Marxism clearly lies in the mediatory function of the notion of a genre, which allows the coordination of immanent formal analysis of the individual text with the twin diachronic perspectives of the history of forms and the evolution of social life” (105). To seek for direct correlations between socioeconomic and literary change would be to fall into the reductionism of reflection-theory. Any study of the problematic relationship between pastoral farming and pastoral writing must acknowledge the limited autonomy of each and the mediated nature of their relationship.

28. Thomas More recognized this as a cause of underemployment and vagrancy: “One herdsman or shepherd can look after a flock of beasts large enough to stock an area that would require many hands if it were plowed and reaped” (Utopia, 15).

29. Richard Mulcaster, Positions (1581), ed. Richard L. DeMolen (New York: Teachers College Press, 1971), 157.

30. As Lawrence Stone puts it, in The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), the dominant ideology and the particular policies that were “designed to freeze the social structure and emphasize the cleavages between one class and another were introduced or reinforced at a time when in fact families were moving up and down in the social and economic scale at a faster rate than at any time before the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed it was just this mobility which stimulated such intensive propaganda efforts” (36). On the Elizabethan preoccupation with the origins and nature of gentility, see Ruth Kelso, The Doctrine of the English Gentleman in the Sixteenth Century (1929; rpt. Gloucester, Ma.: Peter Smith, 1964).

31. Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum (1583), ed. L. Alston (1906; rpt. Shannon: Irish Univ. Press, 1972), 31.

32. See Albert B. Friedman, “‘When Adam Delved …’: Contexts of an Historic Proverb,” in The Learned and the Lewd: Studies in Chaucer and Medieval Literature, ed. Larry D. Benson (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1974), 213-30. Friedman notes that allusions to the proverb begin to decline in the early sixteenth century.

33. Edmund Dudley, The Tree of Commonwealth (1509/10), ed. D. M. Brodie (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1948), 88-89.

34. James Cleland, The Instruction of a young Noble-man (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1612), 2-3.

35. See Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy; and Mervyn James, English Politics and the Concept of Honour 1485-1642 (London: Past & Present Society, 1978).

36. Of the Advancement of Learning, book 1, in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, et al. (Boston: Taggard & Thompson, 1860-64), 6: 138.

37. John Ferne, The Blazon of Gentrie (1586), facsimile ed. (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1973), 2-3.

38. “The Structural Study of Myth,” in Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. C. Jacobson and B. G. Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 1:229. Fredric Jameson reformulates Lévi-Strauss' structuralist theory in the terms of an explicitly Marxist discourse. For Lévi-Strauss' operative narrative unit, the mythologeme, Jameson substitutes the concept of the ideologeme, “the smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic collective discourses of social classes” (The Political Unconscious, 76). The ideologeme should be grasped, “not as a mere reflex or reduplication of its situational context, but as the imaginary resolution of the objective contradictions to which it thus constitutes an active response” (118).