[In the following excerpt, Sambrook surveys the eclogues of courtly writers such as Michael Drayton, Richard Barnfield, George Wither, and William Browne, who took Edmund Spenser as their model, and contends that the work of these later poets lacks the symbolic richness and formal complexity of that of their master.]

Allegory became a less potent lure as Elizabethan and Jacobean poets moved further away from Italian models. A late Jacobean critic, Michael Drayton, in the address to the reader of his Pastorals (1619), admits allegory as a possibility rather than a necessity: “the most High, and most Noble Matters of the World may bee shaddowed in them, and for certaine sometimes are.” However, Drayton agrees with his predecessors that among English pastoral poets Spenser stands first: “Master Edmund Spenser had done enough for the immortality of his Name, had he only given us his Shepheards Kalender, a Master-piece if any.”¹

The Shepheardes Calender became the principal model for Elizabethan and Jacobean pastoral eclogue, although English translations from both Theocritus and Virgil appeared in the decade following its publication. Sixe Idillia, that is, six small, or petty, poems, or aeglogues, printed at Oxford in 1588 contained translations by an anonymous hand of idylls 8, 11, 16, 18, 20, and 31 attributed to Theocritus. The first four of these were discussed in chapter 1. Idyll 20, wrongly numbered 21 in the 1588 volume, is a pseudo-Theocritean piece in which an oxherd complains about Eunica, a girl in the town, who has rejected his love; he calls his fellow herdsmen to witness that he is handsome and accomplished, and regrets that Eunica is apparently unaware that even godddesses have loved country lads. Idyll 31 is a whimsical fable, according to which Aphrodite summons the boar which killed her beloved Adonis, and the creature explains that he had intended only to kiss the youth's naked thigh and had gored him by mistake. On this, Aphrodite forgives the boar and makes it one of her followers. The “Argument” prefixed by the translator in the 1588 edition displays that common Elizabethan tendency to impose allegorical interpretations upon classical myth, for it concludes “The Poet's drift is to shew the power of Love, not only in men, but also in brute beasts: although in the last two verses, by the burning of the Boar's amorous teeth, he intimateth that extravagant and unorderly passions are to be restrained by reason.”²

In 1591 appeared The Shepherds Starre, a much amplified “paraphrase upon the third of the Canticles of Theocritus, Dialogue wise” by Thomas Bradshaw; and in 1647 and 1651 translations by Thomas Stanley of idylls 20 and 31, and pieces by Bion and Moschus were published. Clearly, early translators went to the lightest and “prettiest” parts of Theocritus. The publication of a full translation had to wait until Thomas Creech's Idylliums (1684).

In the case of Virgil, William Webbe Englished the first and second eclogues in his Discourse on English Poetry (1596), and A. F. (possibly Abraham Fraunce) published in 1589 his translation of The Bucoliks of P. Virgilius Maro … with his Georgiks. Typical of his age, A. F. stressed the allegorical character of Virgil's eclogues: in the dedication he went so far as to claim that the “principall occasion of writing these Pastoralls was the majestie of Julius Caesar and Augustus his sonne.”

All types of formal elogue represented in The Shepheardes Calender are found in the work of Spenser's Elizabethan and Jacobean successors, but love-complaint is the commonest. Virgil's pederastic second eclogue provided a model for the two opening poems of Richard Barnfield's The Affectionate Shepherd (1594): “The Tears of an Affectionate Shepheard sicke for Love or The Complaint of Daphnis for the Love of Ganimede,” and “The Second Dayes Lamentation of The Affectionate Shepheard.” Daphnis's invitation to love is accompanied by an offer of gifts, which include “Straw-berries or Bil-berries … Bath'd in a melting Sugar-Candie streame,” “A golden Racket, and a Tennis-Ball,” “a green Hat and a Feather,” a lamb, a goat, a nightingale, green-cheese, nutmeg, ginger, and much else besides. All this goes back, through Virgil, to the less extravagantly miscellaneous catalog of gifts in the eleventh idyll of Theocritus. Theocritus's Polyphemus describes Galatea as “Whiter to look upon than curds, more delicate than a lamb, / Than a young calf more skittish, plumper than ripening grape,” (20-21), and leaves it at that; Virgil does not elaborate on the beauty of Alexis which is simply announced in the first word of the eclogue, “formosum”; but Barnfield's Daphnis offers elaborate and luscious descriptions of the beautiful, unloving Ganimede:

                                                                                a sweet-fac'd Boy,
(Whose amber locks trust up in golden tramels
Dangle adowne his lovely cheekes with joy,
When pearle and flowers his faire haire enamels). …
His Ivory-white and Alabaster skin
Is stained throughout with rare Vermillion red,
Whose twinckling starrie lights do never blin
To shine on lovely Venus (Beauties
bed:)
          But as the Lillie and the blushing Rose,
          So white and red on him in order growes.(3)

(7-10, 13-18)

Barnfield's enameled and sugary elaboration of the catalog of gifts, and, more particularly, of the beauties of the reluctant boy clearly show the influence of recent erotic Ovidian mythological narrative poems by Lodge, Marlowe, and Shakespeare.

The third poem in Barnfield's volume, “The Shepherds Content, or The happines of a harmless life,” conventionally compares the shepherd's life with the monarch's, courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, merchant's, and husbandman's. Though Barnfield's conception of the shepherd's life is Arcadian, he introduces frolics and well-known songs and dances of the English shepherd who,

when Night comes drawes homeward to his Coate,
Singing a Jigge or merry Roundelay;
(For who sings commonly so merry a Noate,
As he that cannot chop or change a groate)
          And in the winter Nights (his chiefe desire)
          He turns a Crabbe or Cracknell in the fire.
He leads his Wench a Country Horn-pipe Round,
About a May-pole on a Holy-day;
Kissing his lovely Lasse (with Garlands Crownd)
With whopping heigh-ho singing Care away.

(188-97)

Typical of Barnfield's eclecticism, this poem finds room for a love lament, an elegy on Sidney, and compliments to Spenser, Drayton, and Watson (or his translator Fraunce), under their pastoral names of Colin, Rowland, and Amintas.

Elizabethan pastoral of courtly compliment readily took up the Spenser-Sidney image of Elizabeth as queen of shepherds and lady of May. A funeral eclogue on Walsingham, Meliboeus (1590), translated by Thomas Watson from his own Latin, is by no means the only poem in which she is “Diana matchlesse Queene of Arcadie.” In George Peele's thoroughly Spenserian An Eglogue Gratulatorie (1589), to “the right honourable and renowned Shepherd of Albions Arcadia,” Robert earl of Essex, she is the employer of two swains, Sidney and Essex, who “served, and watch'd, and waited late, / To keep the grim wolf from Eliza's gate.” Here the overtones of religious pastoral can be heard, for the grim wolf is not merely Spain but also Roman Catholicism, which threatens the innocent and peaceable flock of a queen who is supreme head of a national church. In 1603 Henry Chettle used eclogues and prose passages after the fashion of Sannazaro to weave a capacious Englandes Mourning Garment: “Worne here by plaine Shepheardes; in memorie of their sacred Mistresses, Elizabeth, Queen of Vertue while shee lived, and Theame of Sorrow, being dead. To which is added the true manner of her Emperiall Funerall. After which followeth the Shepheards Spring-Song, for entertainment of King James our most potent Soveraigne. Dedicated to all that loved the deceased Queene, and honor the living King.” Some interest attaches to Chettle's mention of contemporary poets under pastoral names, including Shakespeare as Melicert. Also indebted to both Sannazaro and Spenser are the Piscatorie Eclogs appended to Phineas Fletcher's The Purple Island (1633).

There is bucolic masquerade too in The Shepheards Hunting (1615) by the wordy and contentious George Wither (1588-1667). This set of five long eclogues reprints two that had appeared in the previous year as an appendix to William Browne of Tavistock's collection The Shepheards Pipe: Browne appears as Willy, and Wither himself as Roget; the principal subject of their discourse is Wither's imprisonment in the Marshalsea, and the “shepherd's hunting” of the title is Wither's career as a satirist which had landed him in prison. Wither's Fair Virtue (1622) is a shapeless medley of pastoral description and song which extends to nearly five thousand lines. Wither, like Barnfield, is best in short pieces, such as that delightful evocation of the undergraduate's salad days, “I loved a lass a fair one,” with its idyllic glimpses of the Oxford countryside.

The greatest pastoralist among Spenser's disciples is Michael Drayton (1563-1631). His pastoral name “Rowland of the Rock” was often linked to Colin Clout's in contemporary complimentary verse, and his first pastorals, a set of nine “eglogs” entitled Idea, the Shepheards Garland (1593), betray clearly, in structure, subject, language, and meter, the influence of The Shepheardes Calender. Thus the first and last eclogues are love laments by Rowland himself, the seventh is a debate between youth and age, and the third is a panegyric upon Elizabeth, here called “Beta” to complement Spenser's praise of Elisa. The fourth in some ways complements Spenser's Astrophel, since its central passage is a lament for a dead shepherd who repreents Sidney. The only tune in Spenser's poem that finds no echo in Drayton's is the religious and political satire. Drayton ignores allegories of shepherd as Christian pastor in order to concentrate upon the equation between shepherd and poet. His subject is not man's whole life, of which the twelve months of The Shepheardes Calender are emblematic, but the poet's craft, as he indicates in his subtitle, “Rowland's Sacrifice to the nine Muses.”

The freshest of the eclogues is the eighth, in which the burlesque tone of a mock-romance reminiscent of Chaucer's “Sir Thopas” is offset by affectionate regionalism; for the setting is Drayton's beloved Warwickshire, and the delicious beauty of Dowsabell, heroine of the tale, is defined by reference to good things of the Midland countryside, such as Leominster wool, the grass that grows beside the Derbyshire Dove, and the swan that swims in the Trent (lines 147-52). Dowsabell loves and is loved by a jolly shepherd, and their happy little wooing dialogue acts as a corrective to Rowland's love complaints in other eclogues. The mood and technique of this poem are close to the pastoral ballads found in contemporary broadsides and miscellanies. While in no sense “realistic,” it draws some of its vitality from the wooing games of real country people.

English country games crop up unexpectedly in Drayton's Endimion and Phoebe: Ideas Latmus (1595) when satyrs on Mount Latmus play barley-break. This poem is one of those Ovidian mythological narratives so fashionable in the 1590s, of which Marlowe's Hero and Leander (written 1590) and Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis (1593) are best known; but though Drayton borrows from Marlowe and Shakespeare, his treatment of love, in accordance with the myth he has chosen, is Platonic and almost entirely without their eroticism. Endimion is, of course, a shepherd, and his home upon the slopes of Mount Latmus has all the features of the Arcadia described by Sannazaro. Endimion and Phoebe was considerably cut and extensively revised when it appeared in Drayton's collected Poems (1606) under the title of “The Man in the Moone.” Here the myth becomes a tale told by old Rowland at a shepherds' feast in honor of Pan, and is linked to this framework by a satirical passage about misdeeds of shepherds as observed by the man in the moon. The satire, the framework, and the identity of the tale-teller all serve to make the poem something of an oversized eclogue, and to link it with Drayton's Eglogs which it immediately follows in the 1606 collection.

These Eglogs are a complete rewriting and rearrangement of The Shepheards Garland with the substitution of a new ninth eclogue. Drayton's revisions introduce a new note of satirical bitterness. For instance, in the sixth eclogue, a rehandling of the fourth in The Shepheards Garland, the deaths of Sidney and Queen Elizabeth (and the accession of the “Northerne” monarch, James I) are made to signify the death of an old order of virtue, poetry, and patronage:

The Groves, the Mountaynes, and the pleasant Heath,
That wonted were with Roundelayes to ring,
Are blasted now with the cold Northerne breath,
That not a Shepheard takes delight to sing.(4)

(85-88)

Despite such occasional asperity, the dominant mood of this series, as of the earlier series of eclogues, is delight in the poet's art and in the English landscape. The setting of the ninth eclogue is just such a sheep-shearing feast in the Cotswold Hills as the one described in Drayton's Poly-Olbion, song 14, and depicted on the map for that song. The songs in the ninth eclogue are marked by such refined and formalized hyperbole as that⁵ which represents Sylvia, the moorland maiden, staying the course of nature and defying mutability:

Motto. Why doth the Sunne
against his kind,
          Stay his bright Chariot in the Skies?
Perkin. He pawseth, almost strooken
blind,
          With gazing on her heavenly Eyes …
Motto. How come those Flowres to
flourish still,
          Not withering with sharpe Winters breath?
Perkin. Shee hath rob'd Nature
of her skill,
          And comforts all things with her breath.
Motto. Why slide these Brookes so
slow away,
          As swift as the wild Roe that were?
Perkin. O, muse not Shepheard, that
they stay,
          When they her Heavenly voice doe heare.

(149-52, 157-64)

Thus Perkin expresses the timeless quality of his love as well as the excellence of his mistress. The exquisite formality of this song satisfyingly balances the vivid and sympathetic rustic observation in the setting.

Balance is lost in The Shepheards Sirena published with The Battaile of Agincourt in 1627, but probably written about thirteen years earlier. The lyric, “Neare to the Silver Trent, Sirena dwelleth,” is one of the finest of its age; the “framework” has shepherds and shepherdesses who sing roundelays and dance “trenchmore,” but they also fight to prevent swineherds invading the sheep walks with their hogs and rooting up the pastures. There is an allegory here, which Drayton leaves obscure (and deliberately so if the “Angry Olcon” who encourages these swineherds is James I, as most commentators believe),⁶ but the asperity of this passage is out of key with the rest of the eclogue. This same 1627 volume contains Drayton's exercise in the fashionable minor Jacobean-Caroline genre of fairy poetry: Nimphidia, a happy piece of mock-heroic whimsy. Its fairies owe most to art, but something to a still living rustic superstition too:

These make our Girles their sluttery rue,
By pinching them both blacke and blew,
And put a penny in their shue,
          The house for cleanely sweeping.

(65-68)

Fairy lore and rustic custom find their way together into Drayton's last pastoral The Muses Elizium (1630), the eighth “Nimphall” of which is a prothalamion celebrating the wedding of a nymph and a fay. In several nimphalls Elizium is contrasted with the ironically named Felicia, a once paradisal and now wretched region which represents the real world, or specifically England;⁷ and in the tenth nimphall Drayton introduces himself, in the character of an aged satyr, fleeing from plague-stricken Felicia and coming to Elizium, that “Paradise on earth,” without tempest or winter, where delights never fade, where brooks are decked with lilies, and trees always laden with ripe fruit, where sit “Apolloes prophets,” and before them sing the Muses and dance the Graces:

Decay nor Age there nothing knowes,
There is continuall Youth,
As Time on plant or creatures growes,
So still their strength renewth.
The Poets Paradise this is,
To which but few can come;
The Muses only bower of blisse
Their Deare Elizium.

(97-104)

This Paradise is the world of literary art itself, and The Muses Elizium as a whole represents Drayton's furthest development in pastoral toward pure aesthetic patterning and the creation of pleasing forms that are freed from any reference to objective reality.

An alternative development of pastoral toward idyllic loco-descriptive poetry may be observed in extenso in Drayton's Poly-Olbion (part 1, 1612; part 2, 1622), a thirty-thousand-line-long poetical guide book to the rivers, mountains, forests, antiquities, legend, customs, natural resources, and occupations of all the counties of England and Wales. Drayton's address “to the Generall Reader” promises him a journey through “delicate embrodered Meadowes, often veined with gentle gliding Brooks; in which thou maist fully view the dainty Nymphes in their simple naked bewties, bathing them in Crystalline streames; which shall lead thee, to most pleasant Downes, where harmlesse Shepheards are, some exercising their pipes, some singing roundelaies, to their gazing flocks”; and the maps that preface each of the thirty songs show a nymph in every stream and a shepherd on every hill. In order to dramatize his catalog of the varied beauties of the English countryside he uses the machinery of classical pastoral, the local deities; thus the nymph of the Irwell boasts of that river's beauty and incidentally paints a familiar picture of the well-being and gaiety of English country folk:

Yee lustie Lasses then, in Lancashire that dwell,
For Beautie that are sayd to beare away the Bell,
Your countries Horn-pipe, ye so minsingly that tread,
As ye the Eg-pye love, and Apple Cherry-red;
In all your mirthfull Songs, and merry meetings tell,
That Erwell every way doth Ribble farre excell.

(65-70)

Allegorical satire in The Shepheards Sirena directed against those unidentified bad poets who defile beautiful and sacred old sheep-walks reappears in Drayton's commendatory verses “to his friend the Author” which preface Britannia's Pastorals, Book I by William Browne (1690-45?). Drayton welcomes this young pastor to the company of true shepherds who continue the Spenserian tradition; but Browne, like Drayton, diverges further from Spenser the more he writes. Britannia's Pastorals (book 1, 1613; book 2, 1616; and a fragment of book 3 written in the 1620s) is a discursive narrative poem founded upon hints from Ovid, Sannazaro, Tasso, Sidney, The Faerie Queene, and John Fletcher's pastoral play The Faithful Shepherdess. Browne's romantic action finds a place for a varied cast of shepherds and shepherdesses, Olympian Gods, lustful satyrs, Grecian local deities, Devonshire fairies and personifications of Truth, Time, and Riot. Though it is the longest narrative pastoral poem in the language it is technically a series of eclogues because it consists of a succession of songs which are sung by a shepherd to an audience of fellow shepherds. At the end of each song the narrative is broken off, as night falls, or as rain begins, or as a sheep caught in a brake requires the singer's attention. Browne follows the Elizabethan poets' fashion of localizing classical myth, and transporting a whole system of pagan deities, nymphs, and satyrs to the England of their own day: indeed, his true subject is the English countryside and its people. He asks at the opening of book 1, song 1:

What need I tune the Swaines of Thessaly?
Or, bootlesses, adde to them of Arcadie? …
My Muse for lofty pitches shall not
rome
And homely pipen of her native home

(9-10, 13-14)⁸

and the complicated romantic action is often relieved by glimpses of the people of Browne's native home, Devonshire, at work in the fields or at play at a May game or rustic wedding. A characteristic passage is the following from book 2, song 1:

Long on the shore distrest Marina
lay:
For he that ope's the pleasant sweets of May,
Beyond the Noonstead so farre drove
his teame,
That harvest folkes, with curds and clouted creame,
With cheese and butter, cakes, and oates ynow,
That are the Yeomans, from the yoke
or Cowe,
On sheaves of corne were at their noonshuns close,
Whilst by them merrily the Bagpipe
goes:
Ere from her hand she lifted up her head,
Where all the Graces then inhabited.
When casting round her over-drowned eyes,
(So have I seen a Gemme of mickle price
Roll in a Scallop-shell with water fild)
She, on a marble rocke at hand behild,
In Characters deepe cut with Iron stroke,
A Shepheards moane, which, read by her, thus spoke:
          Glide soft, ye silver Floods,
                    And every Spring:
          Within the shady Woods
                    Let no Bird sing!
Nor from the Grove a Turtle-Dove
Be seene to couple with her love:
But silence on each Dale and Mountaine dwell,
Whilst Willy bids his friend and
joy Farewell.

(225-48)

Heroic action is suspended for a moment as Browne gives the time of day with a reference to harvesters, before he continues, by way of the pearl conceit, to the higher style of his stately lyric. These Devonshire vignettes, or idylls (if we retain the meaning of eidullion, “a little picture”), often appear in the form of extended similes, such as the angler and the squirrel-hunt in book 1, song 5. Such characteristic thumbnail sketches as “A Little Lad set on a banke to shale / The ripened Nuts” (book 2, song 4) have an immediacy and clarity that contrast strikingly with the overall narrative.

The local patriotism that underlies the whole work is proudly declared in book 2, song 3: “Haile, thou my native soile! thou blessed plot / Whose equal all the world affordeth not!” (602-3). Such patriotism is given a specifically pastoral character in book 2, song 4, where an aged shepherd is drawn from his story of Pan and Syrinx into a digression that is unusually distant even for Browne:

And now, ye Brittish Swains (Whose harmlesse sheepe
Then all the worlds beside I joy to keepe,
Which spread on every Plaine and hilly Wold
Fleeces no lesse esteem'd then that of gold,
For whose exchange one Indy Iems
of price,
The other gives you of her choicest spice.

(933-38)

Britain's exports of wool and woollen goods were to become a well-loved and well-worn theme for the patriotic poets of the following century, but those poets would regard with less equanimity than Browne the foreign luxuries for which wool was exchanged. An anticipation of another favorite eighteenth-century theme occurs when, in book 2, song 3, Browne assures his readers that golden-age shepherds are blessed with natural reason:

          O happy men! you ever did possesse
No wisedome but was mixt with simplenesse;
So wanting malice and from folly free,
Since reason went with your simplicite.

(426-29)

Drayton, Wither, and Browne presented themselves as a group—using pastoral often to celebrate the friendships of poets. In their work there was a tendency to “naturalize” the pastoral to the English scene; they viewed Elizabethan England retrospectively as a golden age. As late as the 1620s, in an age when poetic fashions inclined either toward “strong lines” or Horatian urbanity, they took Spenser as their model. However, it is the more relaxed, even homely, elements in Spenser that they inherited; the symbolism of The Shepheardes Calender was beyond them. Thus beside their master they appear comparatively unserious.

Notes

1. The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. W. Hebel, 5 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961), 2:517-18.

2. Some Longer Elizabethan Poems, intro. A. H. Bullen, in An English Garner (1903; reprint ed., New York: Cooper Square, 1964), p. 145.

3. Quotations from Barnfield are taken from Some Longer Elizabethan Poems, intro. Bullen.

4. Quotations from Drayton are taken from The Works, ed. Hebel.

5. This song had been published, with slight variations, in England's Helicon (1600).

6. See The Works, ed. Hebel, 5:206-9, and authorities cited there. Hebel links Drayton's poem with Browne's The Shepheards Pipe (1614), Wither's The Shepheard's Hunting, and those satires which earned Wither royal displeasure and landed him in prison.

7. The identification of Felicia with England is argued in R. F. Hardin, Michael Drayton and the passing of Elizabethan England (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1973), pp. 127-31. Hardin treats Drayton as essentially a poet of nostalgic patriotism.

8. Quotations from Browne are taken from The Works, ed. G. Goodwin, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1894).