CRITICISM

Alpers, Paul. “Pastoral and the Domain of Lyric in Spenser's Shepheardes Calender.” Representations 12 (Autumn 1985): 83-100.

Discusses the influence of Spenser's Shepheardes Calender on English poetry, arguing that in composing the first set of English pastorals in the European tradition Spenser helped himself—and English poetry in general—to overcome the difficulties of writing lyric verse.

Bernard, John D. “Spenserian Pastoral and the Amoretti.” ELH 47, No. 3 (Autumn 1980): 419-32.

Argues that the pastoral is a major factor that shapes Edmund Spenser's conception of his subject in the love poems of the Amoretti.

Blanchard, J. Marc. “The Tree and the Garden: Pastoral Poetics and Milton's Rhetoric of Desire.” Modern Language Notes 91, No. 6 (1976): 1540-68.

Examines “Comus” and Paradise Lost in the context of the pastoral and the masque, and seeks to understand the relationship of mimesis, or literary imitation, to language and desire.

Buxton, John. “Michael Drayton.” In A Tradition of Poetry. London: Macmillan, 1967.

Examination of Drayton's work, emphasizing his interest in pastoral themes.

Cheney, Patrick. “Career Rivalry and the Writing of Counter-Nationhood: Ovid, Spenser, and Philomela in Marlowe's ‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.’” ELH 65, No. 3 (1998): 523-55.

Claims that Marlowe's famous pastoral poem is as an amatory lyric in the style of the Greek poet Ovid.

Cooper, Helen. Pastoral: Mediaeval into Renaissance. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977, 257 p.

Discussion of medieval pastoral literature and its influence on Renaissance pastoralism.

Cory, Herbert E. “The Golden Age of the Spenserian Pastoral.” PMLA 25 (1910): 241-67.

Survey of the pastoralists who followed Spenser, including Greene, Drayton, Browne, and Fletcher.

Cullen, P. Spenser. Marvell and Renaissance Pastoral. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970, 212 p.

Discusses the flexibility and variety of the pastoral form by comparing the works of Spenser and Marvell.

Empson, William. Some Versions of Pastoral. London: Chatto and Windus, 1935, 298 p.

Landmark study that tries to show the ways in which the pastoral process and its resulting social ideas have been used in English literature. Includes chapters on Shakespeare, Marvell, and Milton.

Friedman, Donald M. Marvell's Pastoral Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970, 300 p.

Comprehsive study of Marvell's wide-ranging use of pastoral themes in his poetry.

Greenlaw, E. “Shakespeare's Pastorals.” Studies in Philology XIII (1916): 122-54.

Detailed analysis of Shakespeare's pastoral plays in the context of the genre of pastoral romance.

Greg, Walter W. Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama. London: A. H. Bullen, 1906, 464 p.

Important early study that focuses on the pastoral drama in Elizabethan literature; includes discussions of dozens of plays and offers chapters devoted to the principal dramatists of the form.

Grundy, Joan. The Spenserian Poets: A Study in Elizabethan and Jacobean Poetry. London: Edward Arnold, 1969, 224 p.

Argues that pastoral poets Drayton, Browne, and Wither were conservative and backward-looking.

Haber, Judith. Pastoral and the Poetics of Self-Contradiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 218 p.

Study that seeks to account for the persistence of the “antipastoral” in pastoral poetry.

Hanford, J. H. “The Pastoral Elegy and Milton's Lycidas.” PMLA 25 (1910): 403-07.

Explores the relationship of Greek elegy to Milton's poem.

Jones, Ann Rosalind and Peter Stallybrass. “The Politics of Astrophel and Stella,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 24 (Winter 1984): 53-68.

Suggests that the poems in Sidney's Astrophel and Stella function as a complex displacement of the ideological pressures of the court.

Kermode, Frank. “Introduction.” In The Tempest (Arden Edition). London: Arden, 1958.

Analysis of the tension between nature and art in Shakespeare's play.

Kronenfeld, Judy Z. “Social Rank and the Pastoral Ideals in As You Like It.” Shakespeare Quarterly 29, No. 3 (Summer 1978): 333-48.

Argues that in As You Like ItShakespeare calls into question the pastoral idealizations of the relationship between the high and the low, or the Christian and the courtly.

Levin, Harry. The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969, 231 p.

Detailed examination of the idea of the Golden Age as manifested in literary and artistic works of the Renaissance.

Mallette, Richard. Spenser, Milton and the Renaissance Pastoral. East Brunswick, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1981, 224 p.

Notes the correspondences between Spenser and Milton and examines how both poets employed pastoral conventions in unique ways to understand, promote, and evaluate the enterprise of poetry.

Marinelli, Peter V. Pastoral. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1971, 90 p.

Explores the nature of the pastoral from its beginnings to the twentieth century, concentrating on Renaissance pastoralists.

Orgel, S. K. “Sidney's Experiment in Pastoral: The Lady of May.” In Essential Articles for the Study of Sir Philip Sidney, pp. 61-71. Hamden: Archon Books, 1986.

Argues that Sidney's mixed-mode court masque about the contemplative life, The Lady of May, provides us with a “brief and excellent example of the way his mind worked.”

Patrides, A. ed. Milton's “Lycidas”: The Tradition and the Poem. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983, 270 p.

Collection of the major critical writings on Milton's pastoral poem.

Poggioli, Renato. The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Bucolic Ideal. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975, 340 p.

Reconstruction and reinterpretion of the bucolic ideal as presented in idyllic literature from the early Renaissance to the twentieth century, emphasizing the pyschology of the genre.

Sambrook, James. English Pastoral Poetry. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983, 160 p.

Short, descriptive history of general tendencies and individual achievements in English nondramatic pastoral poetry from the sixteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Schenk, Celeste Marguerite. Mourning and Panegyric: The Poetics of Pastoral Ceremony. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988, 228 p.

Offers a poetics of pastoral ceremony, beginning with classical elegies and ending with Romantic and modern ceremonial lyrics.

Schwenger, Peter. “Herrick's Fairy State.” ELH 46, No. 1 (Spring 1979): 335-55.

Examine's Herrick's bucolic fairy poems “Oberon's Feast” and “Oberon's Palace” as a single unit.

Stillman, Robert E. “The Politics of Sidney's Pastoral: Mystification and Mythology in the Old Arcadia.” ELH 52, No. 2 (Winter 1985): 795-814.

Analyzes the Old Arcadia as myth, arguing that this makes it possible to understand the “double sense” of the text—its remoteness from the historical world and its desire to make contact with it.