SOURCE: Alpers, Paul. “Pastoral Speakers.” In What Is Pastoral?, pp. 185-222. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Alpers identifies Shakespearean characters who, like Melibee and Colin Clout in Spenser's Faerie Queene, assume the role of the traditional literary shepherd to assert pastoral virtues and values. Alpers describes the following characters as “representative shepherds”: Costard in Love's Labour's Lost, Corin in As You Like It, the grave-digger in Hamlet, and Florizel, Perdita, Autolycus, and Polixenes in Act IV of The Winter's Tale.]

I

The Virgilian figure of the representative shepherd is inherently capable of fresh interpretation and application. Its possibilities provide one way of accounting for both the importance and the variety of pastoral poetry in the sixteenth century. Even when conventional pastoral genres seem to lose their vitality (roughly, around the turn of the seventeenth century) pastoral retains its capacity for fresh realization and for extending its range. The effect of Shakespearean pastoral—historically in England and “typologically” in our account—was to unsettle and diversify the Virgilian formula, “The poet represents (himself as) a shepherd or shepherds.” When pastoral values and usages are located in a variety of figures and are no longer closely identified with the literary shepherd—and this, in effect, is the shift from Spenser to Shakespeare—the poet need not represent himself as a shepherd in order to sustain the pastoral mode. The characteristic figure then becomes what we will call a pastoral speaker. A pastoral speaker is one whose mode of utterance and strength relative to the world derive from the literary shepherd, but who is not represented as a herdsman or similar humble figure. In the same way, Shakespearean drama produces what we will call shepherd-equivalents—socially humble figures who may not be identified with the country and its occupations, but whose function and presence are like those of the herdsmen of traditional pastoral.

The emergence of the pastoral speaker from representative shepherds is played out in the pastoral episode (cantos 9 and 10) of Book 6 of The Faerie Queene. Sir Calidore, pursuing the Blatant Beast of slander, comes upon a world of shepherds, falls in love with the fairest shepherdess, and as a sort of reward or confirmation of his decision to cast his lot with them, happens upon Mount Acidale, said to be Venus's earthly retreat, where he sees the Graces dancing to the music of a shepherd. In the context of The Faerie Queene, the leading question about this long episode has been the hero's so-called truancy: whether or not he is to be blamed for choosing a pastoral life and forsaking the quest imposed upon him. However, coming to the cantos as we do, what is most notable is that each is centered on the figure of a representative shepherd. In canto 9, the old shepherd Melibee speaks for the values of the “lowly, quiet life” of shepherds which Calidore desires to share; in canto 10, the shepherd who pipes to the Graces and then instructs Calidore about them is Colin Clout, a figure of the poet himself.

Melibee and Colin Clout play out the two versions of pastoral, agrestis and silvestris, in Virgil's first Eclogue. Melibee inhabits and speaks for the ordinary life of the fields, which are repeatedly identified as his local (9.4,14,20); Colin Clout is placed in a mythical landscape, a wooded hill inhabited by the deities of love, that is explicitly off bounds to “wylde beastes” and “the ruder clowne” (10.7). Melibee speaks with the forthrightness, the cultivated simplicity that we have seen as the hallmark of one kind of literary shepherd. Colin Clout not only makes the woods resound with his beloved (10.10), but his music has the power to prompt her appearance (whether as apparition or real presence) and that of the local nymphs and the Graces themselves. Most important, the confrontation of these figures with a hero from the court world brings out the pastoral character of their modes of representation. When Calidore sees the Graces dancing and steps forward, resolved to know what they are, the vision disappears, leaving only the shepherd, who “for fell despight of that displeasure” (10.18) breaks his bagpipe. This might seem to “break off the pastoral song,” but it is in fact its occasion and beginning. However bitterly Colin Clout reacts to Calidore's interruption of the vision, the Knight of Courtesy's expression of regret prompts the shepherd not to “learne these woods, to wayle my woe,” as would an isolated lover, but to explain to this new shepherd (for so he takes Calidore to be) the nature of what he has just seen. The ensuing speech is as long as the poet's own representation of the vision; in recapitulating myths and motifs and expanding the moral explication initiated by the poet, it is clearly meant to be a substitute for it. As the two shepherds come together, Colin Clout turns from piping to speech, and we are given a definitive instance of the way pastoral utterance can be thought to restore the loss that occasioned it. In the final stanzas of Colin's speech, the fervent listing of the beloved's moral attributes seems to restore her to his presence—what else can be suggested by “She made me often pipe and now to pipe apace”?—and in the concluding address to Gloriana, the voice of the poet merges with that of his persona in the plea to “pardon thy shepheard” for exalting a “poore handmayd” (10.27-28).

The encounter with Melibee also concerns the motives and scope of pastoral utterance. After supper in the old shepherd's cottage, Sir Calidore thanks his host and self-consciously initiates a pastoral discourse:

And drawing thence his speach another way,
Gan highly to commend the happie life,
Which Shepheards lead, without debate or bitter strife.
How much (sayd he) more happie is the state,
In which ye father here doe dwell at ease,
Leading a life so free and fortunate,
From all the tempests of these worldly seas,
Which tosse the rest in daungerous disease;
Where warres, and wreckes, and wicked enmitie
Doe them afflict, which no man can appease,
That certes I your happinesse enuie,
And wish my lot were plast in such felicitie.

(9.18-19, my emphasis)

Calidore, like many modern readers, takes the point of the pastoral life to be escape from worldliness and its discontents. His speech encapsulates these motives in the key word, “happie,” which, as the courtier may well know, has plenty of pastoral authority. Both its meanings are registered in this speech. Like Virgil's Meliboeus, Calidore calls the shepherd he addresses “fortunate,” while “felicity” looks to its root, felix, the word which initiates Virgil's praise of country life in a famous passage in the Georgics (2.490ff.). “Happy” is the epithet Shakespeare's Amiens bestows on the Duke in his pastoral guise. But Melibee denies both the suggestion of unalloyed pleasure and the implication (explicitly reproved in their next exchange) that it depends on luck:

Surely my sonne (then answer'd he againe)
If happie, then it is in this intent,
That hauing small, yet doe I not complaine
Of want, ne wish for more it to augment,
But doe my self, with that I haue, content.

(9.20)

Pastoral contentment may sometimes be due to innocence, but for Melibee it is a knowing virtue. He speaks with more self-awareness and nuance than other moralizing old shepherds, because he corrects his younger antagonist by revising his implied account of desire and choice. His speech ends with the story of the false choice he himself made “when pride of youth forth pricked my desire” and, disdaining “shepheards base attire” he sought his fortune at court (9.24). Dismayed by the “vainnesse” and “idle hopes” he found there,

After I had ten yeares my selfe excluded
From natiue home, and spent my youth in vaine,
I gan my follies to my selfe to plaine,
And this sweet peace, whose lacke did then appeare.

(9.25)

The last line exactly replicates Calidore's ostensible motive for praising Melibee's life, and shows the connection between the knight and the shepherd. At the same time, Calidore's eager desire is checked by the double force of Melibee's verb “plaine” (i.e. complain): because, with “follies” as its object, it first registers self-reproach, it expresses a just appreciation, not mere regretful longing, for its second object, the “sweet peace” of his “natiue home.” The final words of this stanza and of the whole speech speak of desire not only chastened by but transformed into moral choice:

Tho [then] backe returning to my sheepe againe,
I from thenceforth haue learn'd to loue more deare
This lowly quiet life, which I inherite here.

(9.25)

Melibee's espousal of contentment is neither austerely stoical nor hard-bitten and defiant, in the manner of Mantuan's shepherds. On the contrary, his speech has a rather idyllic character—which is what prompts his critical antagonists to speak of his “laziness,” his “dream world,” and the “soft pastoralism” of the canto.¹ Remarks like these replicate Calidore's misunderstanding, for the idyllic touches in Melibee's speech are grounded in chosen tasks and satisfactions. He defines pastoral content by topoi of golden age poems—the land's self-sufficiency and freedom from foreign trade—but scales them down to a life of conscious simplicity:

So taught of nature, which doth litle need
Of forreine helpes to lifes due nourishment:
The fields my food, my flocke my rayment bred;
No better doe I weare, no better doe I feed.

(9.20)

His statement that “all the night in siluer sleepe I spend” is not advanced as a leading claim (though it is a familiar point in poems praising the country), but appears on the heels, as if the result and reward, of his criticism of ambition and his consequent confidence in “my minds vnmoued quiet” (9.22). Melibee's pastoral rhetoric similarly modifies another golden age topos, the spontaneous growth of crops:

They that haue much, feare much to loose thereby,
And store of cares doth follow riches store.
The little that I haue, growes dayly more
Without my care, but onely to attend it.

(9.21)

Until the final half-line, this distinction between worldly care and pastoral carelessness, may seem conventionally innocent. But the last phrase denies the absolute meaning of “without my care” and thus revises our sense of what is at issue in pastoral security (se-curus = without care). The suggestion of freedom is maintained, but scaled down to the claim that one is without care if one knows what truly to care about—in this case the flocks mentioned in the next lines or the rural tasks detailed two stanzas later.

As if recapitulating the way pastoral was historically inscribed within the heroic, the romance context brings Melibee and Colin Clout face to face with a courtier who is responsive to their discourses. Their encounters therefore make unusually clear what is involved in the representative status of the literary shepherd. Melibee represents a way of life that Calidore values and desires; he can even be said to represent the knight himself, in that his rejection of the court and return to the country offer a challenging version of the choice Calidore claims to want to make. Colin Clout has a similar relation to the knight, in that his life is devoted to celebrating a “countrey lasse” (10.25) who seems a “miracle of heauenly hew,” as Pastorella did when Calidore first saw her “enuiron'd with a girland, goodly graced, / Of louely lasses” and piping shepherds (9.8). Moreover, the vision of the Graces is first mentioned by way of explaining why Calidore would be justified in remaining in the country (10.4), and the effect of Colin Clout's “discourses,” as of Melibee's, is that the knight “wisht, that with that shepheard he mote dwelling share” (10.30). Both Melibee and Colin Clout hold out, to the hero and implicitly to the reader, alternatives of attitude and role.

But how, in fact, can the courtier-hero take these alternatives seriously? It is one thing for the poet to present considerations for and against renouncing the “shadowes vaine / Of courtly fauour” and seeking “the happy peace” and “perfect pleasures” which one finds “amongst poore hyndes, in hils, in woods, in dales” (10.1-4). It is another to translate the awareness of pastoral values into the choice of a life so completely defined by a single place and a single round of activities as Melibee's and Colin Clout's. Pastoral envisages this possibility, and many fine poems—from “His golden locks time hath to silver turned” to Upon Appleton House—examine and praise it. But the value of pastoral is not confined to such situations. Rather, it is equally represented by the Shakespearean pattern, in which time spent in a pastoral locale restores courtiers to their homes and to themselves. Since the country is not Calidore's “native home,” the question is what in his case can be the equivalent of Melibee's choice.

Spenser's handling of the episode shows his awareness of the problem. Calidore reacts to Melibee's praise of the shepherds' life with what the poet calls “double rauishment” (9.26): he is enraptured with the speech itself and with the country maiden with whom he has fallen in love. These pastoral erotics underlie the sentimental vehemence of his response. After a stanza in which he tries to “insinuate his harts desire” by aping his host's praises of the country,² he says:

That euen I which daily doe behold
The glorie of the great, mongst whom I won,
And now haue prou'd, what happinesse ye hold
In this small plot of your dominion,
Now loath great Lordship and ambition.

(9.28)

The insistence still on “happinesse,” the grand word “dominion” (which represents “small plot” precisely as a form of “Lordship”), and the use of “loath” to express moral recognition show that the knight has not yet taken in what he has heard. The very structure of the sentence, a sustained period quite unusual in The Faerie Queene, suggests that he has still not adopted the style he professes to admire. What Melibee reproves, however, is not this rhetoric itself, but the wish it prompts:

And wish the heauens so much had graced mee,
As graunt me liue in like condition;
Or that my fortunes might transposed bee
From pitch of higher place, vnto this low degree.

(9.28)

Melibee replies that it is vain to accuse the heavens of “fortunes fault” and says: “fittest is, that all contented rest / With that they hold: each hath his fortune in his brest” (9.29). This is a pastoral moral, but so generalized as to be detached from particularities of place or social role. Melibee then goes on to state a moral—“It is the mynd, that maketh good or ill” (9.30)—that is certainly not confined to pastoral. But its corrective point is what enables Calidore to find a mode adequate to his situation:

Since then in each mans self (said Calidore)
It is, to fashion his owne lyfes estate,
Giue leaue awhyle, good father, in this shore
To rest my barcke, which hath bene beaten late
With stormes of fortune and tempestuous fate,
In seas of troubles and of toylesome paine,
That whether quite from them for to retrate
I shall resolue, or backe to turne againe,
I may here with your selfe some small repose obtaine.

(9.31)

In Melibee's speech, the truth that each man fashions his life takes the form of apothegms, a rhetorical form conventional with the old shepherds of pastoral and expressive of the notion that all humans have the same simple needs. Calidore's courtly metaphor (and his deployment of it in what would have been called an “allegory”) might thus seem once more to miss the point. In fact it shows, unlike his previous mimicry and literalism, that he now understands Melibee's pastoral moral—that knowledge of self is inseparable from knowing and accepting one's circumstances. The image of the ship in the port suggests genuine rest, but does not deny that the courtier spends his life on the high seas. Its justness is confirmed by the moral poise of the final lines. As he suspends the choice he knows he will have to make, the knight's understanding takes the form of the “small repose” of this stanza itself. Calidore here has achieved his own version of pastoral. Like the poets of “The Garden” and “L'Allegro,” he does not represent himself as a shepherd, but the mode in which he speaks has been determined by the literary shepherd(s) whom he has encountered.

Calidore eventually does become a shepherd. When the erotics that underlie his rhetoric take the form of wooing, Pastorella will have nothing to do with his knightly manner. In a passage that repeats the pattern of having his courtliness corrected, he learns to accommodate himself to what Melibee calls “our rudenesse” (9.33) and dons “shepheards weed” (9.36) in order to be with his beloved. This leads to a stanza (9.37) in which we see him guarding and folding Pastorella's sheep and humbling himself to learn to milk (“loue so much could”), but after this it is difficult to keep his pastoral guise in view or mind. Though nominally a shepherd, he is repeatedly referred to as “the knight,” for it is his behavior in that role that concerns the poet—e.g., “Thus did the gentle knight himselfe abeare / Amongst that rusticke rout in all his deeds” (9.45). Hence his most memorable appearance as a shepherd is not in the putative reality of the story, but in a simile that represents his accommodation to Pastorella:

Which Calidore perceiuing, thought it best
To chaunge the manner of his loftie looke;
And doffing his bright armes, himselfe addrest
In shepheards weed, and in his hand he tooke,
In stead of steelehead speare, a shepheards hooke,
That who had seene him then, would haue bethought
On Phrygian Paris by Plexippus brooke,
When he the loue of fayre Oenone sought,
What time the golden apple was vnto him brought.

(9.36)

We are made to imagine Paris in a state of innocence, merely loving his fair shepherdess, even though the stanza closes by reminding us of the fierce war that will result from his forsaking her. These fatal intimations, which might be thought to disrupt the idyll, are balanced by fixing the moment just before Paris's choice and by the golden apple itself, with its physical appeal and its evocation of a glamorous scene that is not unlike what we will see on Mount Acidale—the appearance of three goddesses to a shepherd in love.³ As in Calidore's speech about the “small repose” he may obtain in the shepherds' world, the effect here is to suspend events and issues that will take the protagonist into the world of heroic action. The simile thus creates for the reader a pastoral encounter of his own. We have to recognize both the appeal of idyllic simplicities and the dilemmas that attend the courtly figure in pastoral guise. This is genuinely pastoral writing, but it is discontinuous with the narration that is unfolding in this canto.⁴ Unlike the world of Lodge's Rosalynde, where Paris and many of his mythological brothers and sisters are very much at home,⁵ neither the world of Melibee nor of Colin Clout can accommodate the Phrygian shepherd. He can only appear to us in a simile, one part of the poet's rather piecemeal representation of his hero in these cantos. But the stanza is one of the great moments in the episode. Brief though it is, it shows that the resources of pastoral representation and the claims of representativeness are not confined to the shepherds of the eclogue tradition.

Finally, this episode reveals not only the nature and resources of pastoral representation, but a limitation of some of its forms. One of the striking things about Calidore's sojourn among the shepherds is that none of them, besides Melibee, utters a word. Their speech (though not very much of it) is reported indirectly; we are told of their pipings and carolings; we are shown Coridon, Calidore's rival in love, bringing Pastorella gifts and biting his lip for jealousy; but Melibee is the only shepherd whose speech is directly quoted.⁶ The canto as a whole thus brings out the fact that Melibee represents a way of life in the specific sense that he can speak for it. The presence of the knight and the context of heroic romance make explicit what in eclogues is assumed but unstated: that what makes a shepherd representative is his ability to represent. To put the matter most pointedly, the shepherd Melibee is able to be a pastoral figure because he has been at court. This detail in the story comes from its source in Gerusalemme Liberata (7.12-13), but it is impossible to ignore its connection with Melibee's powers and privilege of speech. The poem itself is clear about this connection, insofar as it concerns pastoral thematics and poetics. Melibee's having crossed the boundary within which he now dwells makes him conscious of it and the choice it represents. He is even a figure of the poet, in that his ability to represent himself (which is necessarily to represent himself as a shepherd) enables him to represent the lives of shepherds. He thus suggests that pastoral is essentially a mode of courtly and humanist self-representation.

One need not view this with indignation: it is no secret that pastoral is of the country, but by and for the city. But its insufficiencies become clear in Spenser's treatment of Coridon. Unlike his confrontation with Melibee and his learning to woo Pastorella, Calidore's dealings with Coridon do not count as a pastoral encounter, because they do not make him imagine himself as a shepherd and hence reconsider what he is and what he values. On the contrary, in this context Spenser praises his hero as if he had arrived fresh from court and had never put on shepherd's weeds:

Thus did the gentle knight himselfe abeare
Amongst that rusticke rout in all his deeds.
.....For courtesie amongst the rudest breeds
Good will and fauour.

(9.45)

In his own person, the Knight of Courtesy can only condescend to the rustic. He pats Coridon on the head for his country gifts to Pastorella (9.40)—gifts which can have real charm and erotic expressiveness when represented by the passionate shepherds of eclogue and lyric—and commends his prowess in wrestling when he has in fact just humiliated him (9.43-44). When we go on to canto 10, we find that the poet's own treatment of the rustic is worse than the knight's condescension. After staging a scene in which Calidore rescues Pastorella from a tiger, while Coridon runs away in fear, the narrator says:

From that day forth she gan him [Calidore] to affect,
And daily more her fauour to augment;
But Coridon for cowherdize reiect,
Fit to keepe sheepe, vnfit for loues content.

(10.37)

These lines reject not only cowardice but the herdsman's condition punningly linked to it. The last line in effect renounces pastoral, whose claim on us is precisely the acknowledgment that our condition in love, as in other fundamental human situations, can be represented by keepers of sheep. Coridon fails to be a pastoral figure (and Spenserian pastoral fails the rustic), because the courtly poet is unable or unwilling to represent him in the full sense: in depicting him, he does not speak in his stead or on his behalf. Hence Coridon cannot be imagined to speak for himself and therefore cannot be met in a pastoral encounter.

II

Not surprisingly, it is in the drama that rustic figures speak for themselves in ways that extend the repertory of the representative shepherd and enlarge the possibilities of pastoral. Shakespeare's interest in representative rustics is made evident early in his career, in the first scene of Love's Labor's Lost. After the King and his fellows reaffirm their vows to study for three years and make their court “a little academe,” Berowne, already restive under the disavowal of love, asks whether they shall have no “quick recreation.” The King replies that Don Armado, the fanciful, rhetoric-mongering Spaniard, will serve “for my minstrelsy,” and Longaville concludes:

Costard the swain and he shall be our sport;
And so to study three years is but short.

(1.1.179-80)

This sounds as if country entertainment will be as neatly separated and contained as the eclogues which the natives of Sidney's Arcadia stage for King Basileus in his rural retreat. At this very moment entertainment arrives, but not in the anticipated form. Costard is brought in by Dull, the constable:

CONSTABLE.
Which is the Duke's own person?
BEROWNE.
This, fellow. What wouldst?
CONSTABLE.
I myself reprehend his own person, for I am his Grace's farborough [petty constable]; but I would see his own person in flesh and blood.

(1.1.181-85)

Any malapropism suggests the capacity of language to go haywire, and a malapropism on “represent” calls attention (in modern lingo) to the arbitrariness of signs and hence the inherent capacity of words to be substituted for one another. But the potentially dizzying effect is balanced here by the obviousness of the meaning: “reprehend” not only can be mistaken for but can adequately represent “represent.” By transforming our own verbal consciousness into simplicity of apprehension and the release of laughter, the rustic's malapropism becomes a piece of pastoral representation.

The pastoralism of this moment initiates a more far-reaching pastoral encounter in the scene. Costard has been “taken with a wench,” thus violating an edict that represents, in the ordinary world of constables and actionable offenses, the King's high-minded vow to avoid all commerce with women. The letter from Don Armado, which Dull bears to the King and which makes known Costard's offense, puts on display the substitutability of words to which Dull's malapropism called attention. The scene then concludes with a pastoral encounter on this theme:

KING.
Did you hear the proclamation?
COSTARD.
I do confess much of the hearing it, but little of the marking of it.
KING.
It was proclaim'd a year's imprisonment to be taken with a wench.
COSTARD.
I was taken with none, sir, I was taken with a damsel.
KING.
Well, it was proclaim'd damsel.
COSTARD.
This was no damsel neither, sir, she was a virgin.
KING.
It is so varied too, for it was proclaim'd virgin.
COSTARD.
If it were, I deny her virginity; I was taken with a maid.
KING.
This maid will not serve your turn, sir.
COSTARD.
This maid will serve my turn, sir.

(1.1.284-99)

This joke has some of the decisiveness of farce, but it translates physical need into verbal force, and its mode is pastoral. Not only does “Costard the swain” represent what he himself ruefully calls “the simplicity of man to hearken after the flesh” (217); he takes on this role by speaking up for, i.e., representing himself to the King. Whether his devastating reply is naive or consciously witty—and it is pastoral precisely in that one cannot tell—its effect, true to the word of his rustic companion, is to “reprehend the Duke's own person.” The swain's behavior and self-representation enact both the literal meaning and the pun in “reprehend”: by representing human needs and nature, he criticizes the King's outlawing of love. In hearkening after the flesh—a locution set off against much talk of hearing verbal displays—Costard has already enacted the protest Berowne couches in sophistry: “Com' on then, I will swear to study so, To know the thing I am forbid to know” (1.1.59-60).

In terms of literary genealogy Costard is not a pastoral figure like Spenser's Melibee, who derives from the moralizing old shepherds of Renaissance eclogues. Costard comes from the world of festive comedy, and as a literary type is a clown or fool (the two other epithets, besides “swain,” used of him in the play). Empson might argue, as he certainly suggests, that all these figures in Shakespeare are “versions of pastoral.” Leo Salingar's description of Shakespeare's fools could similarly have had Empson in mind: “They may be simpletons or jesters, or a mixture of both, so that it becomes difficult to distinguish their unconscious humour from their wry wit; but in general, they stand for instinctive human nature as contrasted with culture, for the naïve man or the physical man as against the man of sentiment.”⁷ But in Costard, Shakespeare assimilates the clown to a pastoral context—an aristocratic retreat to the country to pursue a life of contemplation—and a pastoral problematic, the transformation of erotic energies into play and utterance. In this context, it might appear that Costard's pastoral representativeness is subject to the same limiting observation we made about Spenser's Melibee—that the pastoral figure is ultimately a piece of courtly self-representation. But the conditions of drama, and particularly the drama of the Shakespearean theater, give the country figures a certain independence. Melibee speaks Calidore's language, for there is no other in The Faerie Queene. Costard speaks his own language, which turns out, at times, to have a representative authority of its own.

One sometimes feels that Costard's verbal bumbling and naive attitudes are simply stock representations of the comic rustic. To the extent that this is true, he is speaking the courtier's language, in the sense that his verbal powers are limited to the way courtly writing (as in the Miso, Mopsa, and Dametas of Sidney's Arcadia) mocks country folk. The difficulty of saying when this is true of Costard and when not is a sign of the limitations of Love's Labor's Lost. But As You Like It makes clear what is already at work in the earlier play. The difference between the figure of Corin and his prototype in Rosalynde shows how Shakespeare, as many critics have recognized, strikes a new note in pastoral writing. Lodge's Alinda and Rosalynde first see the old shepherd Corydon in his “pleasant eclogue” with Montanus, just as Celia and Rosalind first see Corin discussing Silvius's love with him. When the eclogue is finished, Alinda steps forward, identifies herself as “a distressed Gentlewoman” wandering in the forest, and requests “some place of rest”:

… May you appoint us anie place of quiet harbour, (be it never so meane) I shall be thankfull to you, contented in my selfe, and gratefull to whosoever shall bee mine hoste.

Coridon hearing the Gentlewoman speak so courteously returned her mildly and reverentlie this aunswere:

Fair Mistres, we returne you as heartie a welcome, as you gave us a courteous salute.⁸

This little exchange perfectly exemplifies what Empson calls “the essential trick of the old pastoral, which was felt to imply a beautiful relation between rich and poor” (SVP, 11). Here the “trick” takes the form of Alinda making her request in exactly the terms that are to be attributed to the shepherd: quiet harbor, acceptance of meanness, thankfulness, content. Hence there cannot fail to be a perfect harmony between courtier and rustic. The conventionality, in all senses, of the passage makes one appreciate the way Spenser tests the courtier's representation of pastoral ideals, the way he uses the shepherd to hold the courtier to his terms. On the other hand, Lodge's far simpler version of the encounter is not without its charms. Here is the end of the speech in which Corydon represents “the shepherd's life”:

Envie stirres not us, wee covet not to climbe, our desires mount not above our degrees, nor our thoughts above our fortunes. Care cannot harbour in our cottages, nor doo our homely couches know broken slumbers: as we exceede not in diet, so we have inough to satisfie; and Mistres I have so much Latin, Satis est quod sufficit.

(189)

This is a quite entrancing bit of self-reflexiveness. Corydon's motto reiterates “we have enough to satisfy” and thus enacts its own sufficiency: “the Latin I have tells me I need no more.” The shepherd is thus saved from the pretentiousness of Holofernes the schoolmaster, who misquotes this apothegm in Love's Labor's Lost (5.1.1). But in addition, the gesture acknowledges the self-reflexiveness of this pastoral—the fact that the shepherd represents the gentleman's values because he speaks the gentleman's tongue. The writer's pleasure in the piece of wit is also a willingness to stand by this motto, and he thus makes good the ritual diffidence of his prefatory address “to the Gentlemen Readers”:

Gentlemen, look not here to find anie sprigs of Pallas bay tree, nor to heare the humour of any amorous Lawreate, nor the pleasing veine of anie eloquent Orator: Nolo altum sapere, they be matters above my capacitie.

(159)

Shakespeare's characters do not take for granted “the beautiful relation between rich and poor,” and therefore, as Judy Z. Kronenfeld points out in an excellent article,⁹ Shakespeare's pastoralism does not presume upon it. Far from presenting herself as having already made pastoral virtues of her necessities, the exhausted Celia urges her companions to ask Corin “if he for gold will give us any food” (2.4.65). It is in such terms that Rosalind makes their request:

I prithee, shepherd, if that love or gold
Can in this desert place buy entertainment,
Bring us where we may rest ourselves and feed.
Here's a young maid with travel much oppressed,
And faints for succor.

(2.4.71-75)

If Melibee refused Calidore's gold, it would certainly be possible for the figure addressed here to reject the idea of payment for the help he gives. Instead, economic necessities are brought to the fore:

                                                                                                    Fair sir, I pity her
And wish, for her sake more than for mine own,
My fortunes were more able to relieve her;
But I am shepherd to another man,
And do not shear the fleeces that I graze.
My master is of churlish disposition,
And little reaks to find the way to heaven
By doing deeds of hospitality.
Besides, his cote, his flocks, and bounds of feed
Are now on sale, and at our sheep-cote now
By reason of his absence there is nothing
That you will feed on; but what is, come see,
And in my voice most welcome shall you be.(10)

(2.4.75-87)

One's first thought is that this speech undermines pastoral values. It first suggests that charity and succor are dependent on one's means and then that the citizen of Arden who has the means is charitable neither to his servants nor to strangers. But as a number of critics have observed and as Kronenfeld says most precisely, “Shakespeare first defines the situation as unconventional, then finds within it the conventional virtues, thus revitalizing the idea of pastoral charity.”¹¹

The question is how Shakespeare manages to restore pastoral values here; or rather, how he manages to do it without falling back on the fact (as much a trick of the old pastoral as any) that “good owners” come along just when their money and decency are needed. The answer is in Corin's rhetoric and presence, which are very much those—or better, Shakespearean developments of those—of other representative shepherds. The astringent precision of “And do not shear the fleeces that I graze” is pastoral not only because it states the simple fact, as Empson puts it (SVP, 11) in “learned and fashionable language.” Though more self-conscious than apothegms (mainly because it doubles the literal and metonymic use of “fleeces”) it is in touch with their mode. Furthermore, the way in which it represents the shepherd's economic status itself expresses pastoral values, for the meanings and associations of “graze” (feeding, protective supervision, ease of pasture) suggest that not being able to shear the fleeces of one's flock is to have a natural sequence blocked and even a natural right denied. The assertion of pastoral values is direct and explicit in the portrait of the “churlish” master, and it enacts, both in this epithet and its criticism, the traditional pastoral paradox that the humble person reproves his social superior by representing the virtues he should exemplify. Finally, the speech ends with a remarkable pastoral gesture. “In my voice most welcome shall you be” says in Corin's dignified plain style what the younger Shakespeare conveyed by rustic malapropism. For it is tantamount to saying “I myself reprehend my master's own person”: that is, I give the welcome in his stead (represent him) and implicitly rebuke him for being unwilling to give it himself. Moreover, the line is a self-fulfilling moment: coming at the end of Corin's speech, it does not project its welcome into the future but enacts it on the spot. The somewhat odd locution, “in my voice,” draws attention to the self-reflexiveness, and it completes the revitalization of pastoral values by representing human solicitude as responsive speech.¹²

Indeed, so clear is the pastoralism of Corin's speech that one may well ask what was the point of the realistic “swerve” with which he began. For it cannot be claimed that Corin makes us cognizant of a permanent element in the world he represents. In the speech most often quoted as an example of his homespun dignity, he says:

Sir, I am a true laborer: I earn that I eat, get that I wear, owe no man hate, envy no man's happiness, glad of other men's good, content with my harm, and the greatest of my pride is to see my ewes graze and my lambs suck.

(3.2.73-77)

The first phrases may indicate the status of a hired hand, but the speech as a whole suggests the independent proprietor—especially the final detail, which is reminiscent of the way Spenser's Melibee and Lodge's Corydon speak of their flocks as their only care. (What is critically searching in this line is that what makes “pride” pastoral—its conversion into pure satisfaction—is its representation in terms of maternal feeding.)¹³ One understands why commentators with politics more radical than Kronenfeld's feel irritated at the way the play lapses into conventional pastoralism. Without endorsing the dismissiveness of some of these critics,¹⁴ we can take the questions they raise seriously and ask what purpose is served by Corin's moment of social realism. Is the speech any more than an on-the-spot display by Shakespeare that, as always, he is too smart to be taken in by a convention? After all, the very title of this play can call to mind the opportunism or cynicism of its leading wits, Touchstone and Jaques.

The questions the speech raises about pastoral values and relationships serve to ground them in situations and relationships more dramatic than in earlier pastorals, including pastoral dramas. Instead of the pretty speechifying of Lodge's Alinda, we have Rosalind asking for help in circumstances of distress. Even if Rosalind's courtesy to Corin suggests a conventional sense of noblesse oblige, Corin's reply reveals that gentle values depend on the individual gentleperson. But beyond the relation between the characters, Corin's words about his master introduce a broader idea—that the kind of thing we have seen happening at court can happen anywhere, even in Arden. Arden may prove to be the “better world” in which the courtier LeBeau, bidding farewell to Orlando, imagines he would “desire more love and knowledge” of the disgraced man whom he cannot befriend (1.2.285). It may even prove to be the golden world of carelessness imagined by the wrestler Charles. But if so, it is because it allows room for decency as knowing as LeBeau's. There is no presumption of any virtue inherent in the place (commentators have often noted the absence of magic in these woods), just as Corin's speech makes it clear that there are no virtues inherent in the social ranks that, ideally, express them. The economic and social realism specific to Corin's speech is simply one manifestation of the broader and more conservative human realism of the play.

But if this is so, if virtues are not inherent in locale, then there is no reason why so-called pastoral values should be represented by shepherds. This is precisely what is conveyed by the scene preceding the courtiers' entrance into Arden and their encounter with Corin. When Orlando returns home from the wrestling match, he is met by the old family servant Adam, who warns him that his brother intends to kill him; when Orlando says he will take his chances at home, rather than beg or rob, Adam offers him his life's savings,

Which I did store to be my foster-nurse,
When service should in my old limbs lie lame,
And unregarded age in corners thrown.
Take that, and He that doth the ravens feed,
Yea, providently caters for the sparrow,
Be comfort to my age!

(2.3.40-45)

The pathos that makes these lines celebrated is mitigated by the play. Adam is spared the fate of being “unregarded”—not by acts of providence or the magic that does duty for them on the stage, but because his generosity insures an answering care and generosity in his young master. Similarly, when Orlando, seeking food for Adam, breaks violently in upon the Duke and his men, his act of desperate loyalty is met with civil generosity. If the play makes us feel that such responsiveness and solicitude are not conventional in the invidious sense, it is because we are persuaded that either of these episodes could have developed differently. A young master like the Bertram of All's Well (not to mention the Oliver of this play) might have accepted Adam's gold in a different spirit, Jaques would have dealt differently, as he is at pains to show, with the desperate Orlando. If the virtues and values are pastoral, it is because of the characters (in all senses) of the individuals who espouse and exemplify them. When Adam offers his gold and his service, Orlando exclaims:

O good old man, how well in thee appears
The constant service of the antique world,
When service sweat for duty, not for meed!

(2.3.56-58)

These words present Adam as, in Kronenfeld's phrase, “a model of pastoral virtue.”¹⁵ Precisely because they call to mind pastoral ideas, they detach Adam and the virtues he represents from pastoral representation in the narrow, literal sense. By dividing the figure of the virtuous old shepherd between Corin and Adam, Shakespeare reveals the possibility of “shepherd-equivalents”—humble figures who are not shepherds but who have their literary characteristics and representative presence.

The equivalence between Adam and Corin may seem so conscious, even programmatic (making a deliberate point about conventional pastoral) as to be of merely local interest in As You Like It. But Shakespeare's dramaturgy can produce shepherd-equivalents in unexpected contexts. The grave-digger in Hamlet is simply a “clown,” as the stage direction calls him, when he expounds the law and quizzes his fellow at the beginning of the scene. But he becomes a pastoral figure in the presence of courtiers. When Hamlet and Horatio enter, they find him singing in the grave and tossing skulls about him as he does his job. The hero's presence makes us aware of the pastoral value of his earlier “clownish” speeches. His talk about Adam as the first gentleman is simple not only in its manner but in its secure knowledge of what we must all come to. The self-reflexiveness of his clinching point, that Adam “bore arms” because he was a digger, reveals the confidence in his own representativeness, already suggested when he says, “There is no ancient gentlemen but gard'ners, ditchers, and grave-makers; they hold up Adam's profession” (5.1.29-30). This claim anticipates all the elements of Hamlet's meditations as he watches him—on the jawbone of Cain, the social inversions of death and their suggestion of “fine revolution,” and the lawyer's attempt to contract out of death—and it also reveals the hero's painful, performative self-consciousness.

When Hamlet finally addresses him, the grave-digger is as good as his word: “Whose grave's this, sirrah?” “Mine, sir” (5.1.119). He, if no other man, could be associated with the birds and the low-roofed tortoises who reveal, to the pastoralizing speaker of Upon Appleton House, the folly of man who, “superfluously spread / Demands more room alive than dead” (st. 3). (Marvell's poem can be regarded as a reprise of this scene, Theocritus to its Homer. The narrator coolly encompasses both the prince whose “imagination trace[s] the noble dust of Alexander” [5.1.202-3] and the grave-digger, whose riddle to his companion, to which he himself is the answer, is “What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?” [5.1.41-2]) There is no sentimentality here, perhaps not even any pathos in the ordinary sense. The grave-digger's sense of the whole tragedy comes down to clownish tautologies:

HAMLET.
How came he mad?
GRAVE-DIGGER.
Very strangely, they say.
HAMLET.
How strangely?
GRAVE-DIGGER.
Faith, e'en with losing his wits.
HAMLET.
Upon what ground?
GRAVE-DIGGER.
Why, here in Denmark.

(5.1.156-61)

Tired jests, we have heard them before, but the grave-digger knows the grounds on which he stands. His pragmatic answers to Hamlet's morbid question about ground—“How long will a man lie i'th'earth ere he rot?”—take on their full human value in the subsequent exchange about Yorick's skull. Hamlet's improvisation on it shows, in parvo, the intellectual and existential range of the first modern hero. It has all his performative energy, charm, and finesse, and at the same time reveals his mordant wit, his revulsion at the flesh, his self-disgust and despair. For the grave-digger, exclaiming “A pestilence on him for a mad rogue!” Yorick is the same fellow, “alive as dead.” Unlike the melancholy prince, he is at home with death.

III

The final Shakespearean transformation of the representative shepherd occurs in Act 4 of The Winter's Tale. It is no secret that the pastoralism of this act turns the tragic beginnings of the play to its comic end. But when we look for the figures we expect to find, the representative shepherds of eclogues and of pastoral drama and romance, they seem to be reduced and marginal. Hence Greg's astonishing statement that “the shepherd scenes of [the] play … owe nothing of their treatment to pastoral tradition, nothing to convention, nothing to aught save life as it mirrored itself in the magic glass of the poet's imagination.”¹⁶ Critics tend to poach these scenes for what can be absorbed into accounts of the whole play: the exchange on art and nature; the Old Shepherd's statement, “thou met'st with things dying, I with things new-born” (3.3.113-14); and Perdita's phrase, “great creating Nature” (4.4.88), which is assumed to state the quintessence of pastoral. The motivic and symbolic weight of these moments is consonant with the solemnities of the rest of the play, but is often felt to be at odds with the conditions of their utterance. The Arden editor wants to cut the Old Shepherd's statement down to size, as a piece of rustic wit, and critics regularly find it awkward that Polixenes, who is up to no good, takes the “right” side in the debate about art and nature. Autolycus presents similar difficulties—is he a life-enhancing figure or a corrupt scoundrel?—and even Perdita goes in and out of focus as we try to understand the relation between her innocence and her authority. All these figures count as pastoral speakers. Their variety—less obvious, because less programmatic, than in As You Like It—has obscured what they have in common. Those who are not inhabitants of the countryside are court figures who represent themselves as country folk, and the sheep-shearing festival convenes them all.

The most obvious courtly pastoralist is Florizel, who when we meet him has already undergone the change of guise that Spenser's Calidore learns to accept for the sake of love. The test of his “swain's wearing” (4.9) is the character of his speech:

                                                                                                    Apprehend
Nothing but jollity. The gods themselves
(Humbling their deities to love) have taken
The shapes of beasts upon them. Jupiter
Became a bull and bellow'd; the green Neptune
A ram and bleated; and the fire-rob'd god,
Golden Apollo, a poor humble swain,
As I seem now. Their transformations
Were never for a piece of beauty rarer,
Nor in a way so chaste, since my desires
Run not before mine honor, nor my lusts
Burn hotter than my faith.

(4.4.24-35)

In other contexts, like the tapestries of Spenser's House of Busyrane, Ovidian transformations involve humiliation, the god within laid low by his need. Florizel's is a pastoral transformation. His initial locution—“The gods themselves … have taken / The shapes of beasts upon them”—conveys the swain's humility, for it represents what one suffers as a willing choice. The loving prince seems as good as his word, which is to say as good as his costume. But the purity of avowal here—the “way so chaste” Florizel claims for himself—involves an additional element of pastoral costuming, the festivity which has Perdita “most goddess-like prank'd up” (10) and which allows the lover to say, “Apprehend nothing but jollity.” Because of the occasion, there is an element of sheer play in the young prince's self-representation, and he therefore, like other pastoral lovers but without their frustration, can distill his desire into lovely utterance. Indeed the playwright himself can be said, like his young hero, to be playing with pastoral in this long scene.¹⁷ Not in the sense (which it is a main purpose of this book to discourage) that something must be done to pastoral to make it interesting, but in the strong and specific sense that he brings out the possibilities in pastoral of playing and of making a play.

After the anguish of Leontes' Sicily, where fantasies of bestial sex and the wearing of horns poison the imagination, this speech has the liberating effect promised by its opening line. If “Leontes' state of mind is a parody of the imagination of lover and poet,” as Northrop Frye says,¹⁸ Florizel gives new and saving qualities to the lover's avowals. He provides an alternative to the courtly habit of hyperbole that is implicated in the tragedy of the first three acts. We first see it in the convoluted courtesies of the opening scene, then in the playful extravagancies (e.g. “Your queen and I are devils,” 1.2.82) that help fire Leontes' imagination, and finally in the state of desperation that embraces Paulina's indignation and Antigonus's willingness to stake his wife's and daughters' virtue on Hermione's (2.1.133-57). Florizel's pastoralism acts as a protection against courtly hyperbole. The delicate absurdities of Jupiter's bellowing and Neptune's bleating treat erotic utterance with affectionate irony and thus register a saving difference from the courtly representation of innocence, which sex invades like a catastrophe: “We were as twinn'd lambs that did frisk i' th' sun, / And bleat the one at th' other” (1.2.67-68). The speech guarantees the claims implicit in its central lines:

                                                            the fire-rob'd god,
Golden Apollo, a poor humble swain,
As I seem now.

“The fire-robed god,” his epithet suggestive of erotic urgency, is renamed first as the god of poetry and then as the pastoral speaker who is his equal in love and who wields, as these very lines suggest, equivalent powers of rhetorical transformation. Well may Florizel assure Perdita that youthful lovers can escape the rages of their fathers.

Yet one may wonder whether Florizel's purity of avowal is not subject to all the limitations of fragile innocence usually attributed to pastoral. Is this young sir, breathing forth his chaste desires, any more than the male equivalent of those floral virgins Perdita imagines dying “ere they can behold / Bright Phoebus in his strength” (4.4.123-24)? Is this the son whose erotic insistence (“Or I'll be thine, my fair, / Or not my father's,” 4.4.42-43) can redeem the devastation wrought by the adult male imagination? Why do this speech and this scene not seem to us, in the context of this play, as the madness of Ophelia—Perdita's predecessor in bestowing flowers on her elders—seems to Laertes: “Thought and afflictions, passion, hell itself / She turns to favor and to prettiness” (Hamlet, 4.5.188-89)?

The answer lies in the way Shakespeare makes pastoral usages answerable to a dramatic situation and dramatic relations productive of pastoral values. Though his source, Robert Greene's Pandosto, provided scenes in the country, it was Shakespeare who made these scenes a pastoral occasion. He developed the sheep-shearing festival from a single sentence in Pandosto¹⁹ and did more than make it a site of convening—though that motif is itself made prominent by scenes which show Polixenes and Camillo setting off for the country (4.2) and then Autolycus and the Clown (Perdita's “brother”) heading for the festival (4.3). By turning Greene's country episodes into a single gathering, Shakespeare brings together what Greene keeps separate—ordinary country life and the prince's pastoral wooing—and to them adds the disguised Polixenes and Camillo, whose analogues in Pandosto do not cross the border that separates court and country. These changes are both pastoral—in that the festive convening makes all the characters “shepherds,” rural celebrants, for the nonce—and dramatic, in that the various elements of the situation are brought into contact (and therefore potential conflict) with each other.

The full dramatic potential, as one might expect of a pastoral, is suspended. True conflict does not occur until Polixenes throws off his disguise; the fact that he thus breaks off a mock marriage—which, like those of Rosalynde and As You Like It, seems as good as the real thing—makes it explicit that this is a disruption of pastoral.²⁰ At the same time, the festive pastoral is, from its opening lines, deeply attentive to dramatic realities:

These your unusual weeds to each part of you
Does give a life; no shepherdess, but Flora
Peering in April's front.

(4.4.1-3)

This is a double pastoral: the princess who is represented as a shepherdess (knowingly within the play, though not by herself) is here recostumed as a rural goddess. At the same time, these lines are made dramatic by the way the circumstances of their utterance engage their most striking detail. “Peering in April's front” is usually taken to mean “peeping out in early April.” This takes the subject to be flowers, not their goddess,²¹ but Florizel's loving praise and Perdita's presence make it impossible not to think of the goddess herself. Imagining Flora “in person” brings out the personification in “April's front” (i.e. brow or face, a much more likely meaning, in any case, than “first days”).²² These personifications make the phrase mean either “Flora looking out through or appearing in the face of April” or “Flora looking in(to) April's face.” In a direct authorial description of the costumed Perdita, the first reading might come into play, but the words are spoken by her lover, who is presumably looking at her as he speaks and she at him. Though not literally “proud-pied,” like the April of Sonnet 98,²³ both his youth and the spirit of the occasion allow us to imagine him as the month who “dressed in all his trim / Hath put a spirit of youth in everything.” When Perdita replies to his playful aggrandizing, she draws out the motif implicit in the lovers' mutual gaze:

                                        But that our feasts
In every mess have folly, and the feeders
Digest 't with a custom, I should blush
To see you so attir'd—swoon, I think
To show myself a glass.

(4.4.10-14)²⁴

To look at him is both to see someone disconcertingly different and at the same time to see herself reflected (as, indeed, the flower-prince Florizel can be thought to reflect Flora).

The pastoral development of lovers' mutual reflection is immensely liberating for the play. For the tragedy that seems to have befallen Sicily is generated by a powerful misconstruction of erotic mirroring. Leontes imagines Hermione and Polixenes “paddling palms and pinching fingers” and then “making practic'd smiles / As in a looking-glass” (1.2.115-17). As this fantasy leads him to the verge of distraction, he turns for relief to Mamillius and initiates a more painful and grotesque fantasy of mirroring. “Art thou my boy?” he asks his son. He tries out on himself the cuckold's familiar torment, and resists (but in fact reinstates) it by gazing on the boy's face and seeing himself there. “What? hast smutch'd thy nose? / They say it is a copy out of mine” (1.2.121-22) Whether the lad's nose is running or dirty, Leontes' thought leads to a contorted play on “neat,” with its double sense of “cleanly” and of cattle, horned beasts. This prompts a metaphorical statement of the first question: “How now, you wanton calf, / Art thou my calf?” “Yes, if you will, my lord,” comes the reply, and indeed he will:

Thou want'st a rough pash and the shoots that I have,
To be full like me; yet they say we are
Almost as like as eggs.

(1.2.128-30)

These lines, in which Leontes simply equates his adult sexuality with wearing the cuckold's horns, begin the speech which will explode in the distracted soliloquy, “Affection, thy intention stabs the center!” The lines that bring him to that point are an insistent claiming that Mamillius is his likeness. We see here the habit of desperate asseveration that both reflects and helps create Sicily's frame of mind:

                    Women say so [that we are like as eggs]
That will say anything. But were they false
As o'er-dy'd blacks, as wind, as waters, false
As dice are to be wish'd by one that fixes
No bourn 'twixt his and mine, yet were it true
To say this boy were like me.

(I.ii.130-35)

Leontes imagines the dicer in terms that cannot help but bring Polixenes to his mind, but they also bring out, for us, the terrible burden he imposes on his son by not recognizing a “bourn 'twixt his and mine.” It is this psychological imposition, Leontes' use of Mamillius as a narcissistic reflector,²⁵ that makes credible the strong suggestion, in the romance plot, that he kills him.

Leontes' self-mirroring gradually extends to the whole world around him, until the only retreat from his diseased mind—the only place “Sicily” the country can be different from “Sicily” the monarch—is the prison, that other locale of doomed enclosure, to which the women of the play withdraw or are confined. The pastoralism of Bohemia frees the play and, eventually, Sicily from these segregations and self-enclosures. Dramatized in Florizel's and Perdita's wooing, pastoral masking makes erotic mirroring at once delighted and self-conscious. The underlying notion might be put as follows: “If I, dressed up for festivity and loving, am not myself, then you in whom I see myself, are also not myself.” Perdita's imagined swooning at her own image is itself differentially reflected, a dozen lines later, when Florizel's phrase—“Golden Apollo, a poor humble swain, / As I seem now”—raises the question of how he mirrors the god.

Perdita registers the sense of others' otherness when she speaks of the disparity in rank between herself and her prince: “To me the difference forges dread” (4.4.17). Her fear derives from differences seen dramatically—that is, as fixed and ineluctable, leading to conflict and consequences. But so long as Polixenes remains in pastoral guise, dread is suspended and difference emerges in the checks and balances of the dialogue—always dramatically plausible, but conceived in and sustaining a pastoral mode. Many of the speeches are set pieces, manifestly related to what we might find in eclogues. When the Old Shepherd enters on the festival scene with his rustic companions, he speaks, like many of his literary ancestors, as laudator temporis acti. (His first appearance, in 3.3, was in a familiar role in eclogues and romances—the herdsman searching for his lost sheep.) He reproaches Perdita for shirking her duties as a hostess by portraying the behavior of his “old wife” on such days. This is a pastoral register different from the play of Florizel and Perdita, but related to it by innocent utterance and the motifs of festivity and country bearing. It has a similar effect in and on the play. The old man's wholehearted insistence that his virgin daughter “quench [her] blushes” (4.4.67) and put herself forth to entertain her guests has the effect of undoing the confusions of insistent entertainment and sexual boldness with which Leontes' tragedy began. The Old Shepherd's speech is immediately followed by the most famous set piece in the play, the exchange on art and nature between Perdita and Polixenes. In the pleasure given by its rivaling responsiveness, it is related to exchanges in eclogues, and it is the dramatic device of the festival, to which all come in the character of shepherds, that enables it to occur. Polixenes' speech gives critics pause because it seems out of character: there is a disparity between his defense of mingling base and gentle and his actual purpose in coming to the countryside. But it is precisely that he is out of character here. The liberating quality of the feast, suspending for a while the dramatic realities that will reassert themselves, allows him to speak as if he belonged to Perdita's world and to register his differences in the role of sympathetic elder.

The benign registration of differences between genders and generations sustains a major development in the play. In a brief but important essay, C. L. Barber drew attention to the centrality of what seems to be Leontes' homosexual attraction to Polixenes. He points to the “twinn'd lambs” speech, of course, but also to the way Leontes' paranoid jealousy conforms to the Freudian account and to “the remarkable insistence on identification of the two kings with their sons.”²⁶ He then makes the following structural argument about the whole play:

The primary motive that must be transformed before Hermione can be recovered in The Winter's Tale, as the father-daughter motive is transformed in Pericles, is the affection of Leontes for Polixenes, whatever name one gives it. The resolution becomes possible because the affection is consummated, as it could not otherwise be, through Perdita and Florizel.

I think our analysis enables us to state more clearly what Barber somewhat elides here. He draws attention, in the opening acts, to a homoerotic hall of mirrors: Leontes sees himself in Polixenes, and the power of this bond is manifested by the way the two monarchs mirror each other in seeing themselves in their sons. For the children to fulfill the fathers' love for each other, one son must be killed off and a daughter substituted for him. The pastoral scene turns this stern necessity into a far stronger version of “favor and prettiness” than could be represented by Ophelia and the Oedipal drama that claims her as victim. Nor is the movement from homoerotic bonds to heterosexual love in itself uncommon in Shakespearean comedy.²⁷ What is distinctive in The Winter's Tale is that the children's love frees both them and their elders, who return at the end of the play not simply as authority figures but as lovers. This realignment of eros requires that the fathers as well as the children take part in the pastoral transformations of Act 4. We may feel that Polixenes's behavior after unmasking deprives him of any personal right, so to speak, to the cultivated dignity of his speech on art and nature. But his masking has caught him up in the play's work of freeing erotic devotion; his words to Perdita, as pastoral raisonneur, can therefore serve as a motto for the great final scene, in which he is one of the wondering observers as Hermione's statue takes flesh.

The ancillary characters of Bohemia extend the way pastoral disguising plays out erotic and social differentiation. After the “eclogue” which begins the feasting—with Perdita's flower speech, the last set piece, as its apogee—the celebration gives way to “a dance of Shepherds and Shepherdesses.” This introduces a scene of rural merriment, at the heart of which is Autolycus, selling his knacks and singing his ballads. The question for critics—and for those staging the play as well—is whether this adds anything of importance to what Derek Traversi calls the “rarified idealism” of the verse pastoral that has preceded. Traversi is typical in his uneasiness about Autolycus: he likes the “note of wayward humanity” and the “direct evocation of the flesh” but he does not want to attribute too much importance, in the central conceptions of the play, to the rogue's “vivacious spontaneity.”²⁸ This interpretive uncertainty comes, in the first instance, from failing to see Autolycus's connection with other aspects of the play's pastoralism. He is one more Shakespearean variation on the literary shepherd: a fugitive from the court who has attired himself in country garb, he achieves his ends by means of entrancing songs. The scene over which he presides makes its pastoral conception evident when it concludes with a dance of “three carters, three shepherds, three neatherds, [and] three swineherds,” who are costumed as satyrs. One expects to find herdsmen and satyrs in pastoral drama and romance, and there is no pointed disparity with Autolycus, as there is between Silvius and Touchstone in As You Like It. For the satyr dance, turning sexual energy into musical pleasure, stages the significance of Autolycus's ballads, which occasion innocent bawdry and which themselves are sold as love-gifts.

The importance of Autolycus's pleasures becomes apparent when Polixenes decides to make his move. He asks Florizel why he purchased no love-gifts from the pedlar:

                                                                                How now, fair shepherd?
Your heart is full of something that does take
Your mind from feasting. Sooth, when I was young,
And handed love as you do, I was wont
To load my she with knacks.

(4.4.345-49)

These lines beautifully illustrate the doubleness of pastoral masking. Polixenes challenged Perdita in this same tone of elderly solicitude, which we can take as honest (to use one of the play's key words) insofar as the speaker accepts his country guise. An old shepherd speaking these lines would suggest a tolerant awareness of the folly he once played out himself: this is the tone Corin takes, in the first words Rosalind hears in the Forest of Arden, as he counsels the enamored Silvius (2.4.22ff.). But Polixenes, preparing to throw off his disguise, is “angling” here, in the manner of his brother-king (1.2.180). His dramatic purpose gives a disparaging inflection to “handed” and “load my she with knacks”: it brings into the countryside a whiff of Leontes' physical loathing (“paddling palms and pinching fingers”) and contemptuous locutions (“My wife's a hobby-horse, deserves a name / As rank as any flax-wench” 1.2.275-76). Florizel replies that his gifts are those of the heart, and he shows what he means by redeeming his beloved's hand:

                                                  I take thy hand, this hand,
As soft as dove's down and as white as it,
Or Ethiopian's tooth, or the fann'd snow that's bolted
By th' northern blasts twice o'er.

(4.4.362-65)

Polixenes professes to admire this protestation, but his admiration is compromised by an undertone of mockery (“How prettily th' young swain seems to wash / The hand was fair before!”). We must be able to resist such mockery ourselves, if these extravagant speeches are to redeem the hyperboles of love that Leontes corrupted and that underlie the wonders of the statue scene.

Our admiration of Florizel can be more wholehearted, it can admit wonder, because of the comic erotics of the preceding scene. There Autolycus and his companions play out the words with which the Old Shepherd's servant announces his arrival:

He hath songs for man or woman, of all sizes; no milliner can so fit his customers with gloves. He has the prettiest love-songs for maids, so without bawdry, which is strange; with such delicate burthens of dildos and fadings, “jump her and thump her.”

(4.4.191-95)

Here, as in the rest of the scene, gloves and ballads are interchangeable love-gifts, each felt to express the lover's desires and to pay suitable tribute to the mistress's powers. Florizel's verbal decking of his beloved's hand does not feel excessively rarefied, because it is seen to be of a piece with these more common exchanges. It is Polixenes's spirit, not his son's, that will scorn such commerce and the erotic extravagance it too expresses. The young lover deifying the mistress he has “most goddess-like prank'd up” is reinscribed in the balladeer who is said to “sing over” ribbons, smocks, and cuffs “as they were gods and goddesses” (207-8). When Autolycus enters singing “Lawn as white as driven snow” he is as good as his herald's word. Even the innocent obscenity of “dildos” is not left as a mere joke against the rustics, as Polixenes might view it. The malapropism, taking the name of the phallus as a ballad refrain, is one more instance of pastoral transformation—a “delicate burthen” indeed.

To redeem the play from Leontes, Sicily, the world of the fathers, there was needed—so the dramaturgy of Act 4 argues—both the innocent extravagance of the princely lover and a figure who has a more ironic and earthbound sense not only of human desires but of poetizing as a form of pleasure, self-expression, and advantage-seeking. This diversifying of pastoral roles engages a promise of innocence first stated in Act 1, as the Sicilian tragedy unfolds. When Hermione and Polixenes, having seen his exchange with Mamillius, ask Leontes what troubles him, he dismisses their concern by saying he was carried away by seeing himself in “the lines of my boy's face” (1.2.153-54). What he sees there—himself as a boy “unbreech'd,” with his “dagger muzzled”—shows how he reads his own sexual disturbance into Mamillius. As if to turn everyone's attention, including his own, from these suggestions, he asks: “Are you so fond of your young prince as we /Do seem to be of ours?” Polixenes replies:

                                                                                                    If at home, sir,
He's all my exercise, my mirth, my matter;
Now my sworn friend, and then mine enemy;
My parasite, my soldier, statesman, all.
He makes a July's day short as December,
And with his varying childness cures in me
Thoughts that would thick my blood.

(1.2.165-71)

This representation of innocence is as important to the play as the more frequently cited lines about the boyhood of the two kings. Both terms in the phrase “varying childness” bring out the difference from Polixenes's earlier portrayal of “twinn'd lambs,” who “bleat the one at th' other” as if absolutely identical. Here innocence is not only seen in human form but is manifested by the human capacity to play a variety of roles.

It is precisely this power of our nature that Leontes corrupts the moment Polixenes and Hermione leave:

                                                                                                                        Gone already!
Inch-thick, knee-deep, o'er head and ears a fork'd one!
Go play, boy, play. Thy mother plays, and I
Play too, but so disgrac'd a part, whose issue
Will hiss me to my grave: contempt and clamor
Will be my knell. Go play, boy, play.

(I.ii.185-90)

What first strikes us, of course, is the ugly twist Leontes gives to the innocent word. But this moment initiates a more fearsome corruption of playing. Leontes' paranoid fantasy—imagining himself onstage in his own part, the object of all eyes—is augmented by an additional need to play out the parts of those who betray and mock him. It is this that provides the finishing touch, the sting at the end, of the scene of loathing with which his speech continues:

                                                                                                    There have been
(Or I am much deceived) cuckolds ere now,
And many a man there is (even at this present,
Now, while I speak this) holds his wife by th' arm,
That little thinks she has been sluic'd in 's absence,
And his pond fish'd by his next neighbor—by
Sir Smile, his neighbor.

(1.2.190-96)

Leontes' capacity to take on all the parts in his drama appears in his vehement imaginings of the love-play of Hermione and Polixenes—a vein he regularly draws on, as if playing Iago to his own Othello. Nowhere is this playing of parts more evident than in his carryings on after he invades the scene in the nursery (2.1), where Mamillius, in his “varying childness,” is about to tell his winter's tale. As he pulls the boy from his mother, she asks, “What is this? Sport?” and soon sees the games her husband plays:

                                                                                                    You, my lords,
Look on her, mark her well; be but about
To say she is a goodly lady, and
The justice of your hearts will thereto add
'Tis pity she's not honest—honorable.
Praise her but for this her without-door form
(Which on my faith deserves high speech) and straight
The shrug, the hum or ha (these petty brands
That calumny doth use. …)

(II.i.64-72)

The solipsism of Leontes' Sicily is evident. Everywhere he turns he sees his suspicions confirmed—in Camillo's dismay (cf. 1.2.384-87), in Polixenes' flight, and in Mamillius's pining away. But bound up with self-mirroring and its misinterpretations is the active self-projection by which the monarch populates his realm with fantasy figures of his own enactment.

Perhaps it is this ludic twist that enables The Winter's Tale to be a tragicomedy. In any case, one of the most important functions of the pastoralism of Act 4 is to redeem the capacity to play—to restore “varying childness” to the world, under the aspect of festivity. Autolycus's centrality is clear here. Not only does he diversify, in respect to Florizel, the role of pastoral singer, he is himself a notorious player of parts. This is the way he represents himself to the Clown as he pretends, as if in parody of Leontes, to be his own victim:

I know this man well [says Autolycus]; he hath been since an ape-bearer, then a process-server, a bailiff, then he compass'd a motion of the Prodigal Son, and married a tinker's wife within a mile where my land and living lies; and, having flown over many knavish professions, he settled only in rogue. Some call him Autolycus.

(4.3.94-100)

The rogue's role-playing is assimilated to pastoral in the sheep-shearing scene. Of all Autolycus's songs, the one that most achieves his ends is neither “Lawn as white as driven snow” nor “Will you buy any tape,” both of which hawk his wares, nor one of the fantastical ballads he summarizes, which themselves parody the tragic events in Sicily (4.4.262-81). Rather it is the trio ballad, in which he joins the country folk, of “Two maids wooing a man.” He has scarcely begun his pitch to sell this song, when Mopsa and Dorcas inform him they have known it a month since and invite him to join them in singing it. “I can bear my part,” says Autolycus; “you must know 'tis my occupation” (4.4.295-96). It is this song which entrances the Clown: “He would not stir his pettitoes [Autolycus tells us later] till he had both tune and words, which so drew the rest of the herd to me that all their other senses stuck in ears” (4.4.606-9). It is this moment that makes Northrop Frye speak of Autolycus as “a kind of rascally Orpheus”²⁹—with perfect truth to pastoral tradition, since it recalls the beginning of Virgil's eighth Eclogue, when the herds leave off grazing, in wonder at the songs of two shepherds. Shakespeare seems to have remembered this passage (whether or not through intermediaries) when Camillo praises Perdita: “I should leaving grazing, were I of your flock, / And only live by gazing” (4.4.109-10). The fullness of pastoral conception here perhaps justifies a fussy correction of Frye's remark: it is the Clown, the rustic, whose singing of this song has such Orphic effect, while Autolycus, the original singer, goes about picking pockets.

In Perdita's flower speech, pastoral playing lies at the heart of pastoral speaking. Perdita is a pastoral speaker here, because in her dramatic character she takes on the function of the literary shepherd. In a double act of convening, she welcomes her lover and her companions by imaginatively gathering the flowers of springtime:

                                                                                Now, my fair'st friend,
I would I had some flow'rs o' th' spring that might
Become your time of day—and yours, and yours,
That wear upon your virgin branches yet
Your maidenheads growing. O Proserpina,
For the flow'rs now, that, frighted, thou let'st fall
From Dis's wagon!

(4.4.112-18)

The invocation of Proserpina brings out the conventional function of pastoral song—to bring the singer and her fellows together in the face of separation or loss. But if the speech has the underpinnings of pastoral elegy, it does not have the tone: Perdita does not feel Proserpina's fate as a loss to herself, nor does she, like the ordinary literary shepherd, feel in a diminished situation. On the contrary, her poetizing, like her character, seems to restore the maiden-goddess and the season that is associated with her. Hence the grandeur critics attribute to her innocence in this speech. She is “more truly representative of the age of innocence than Milton's Eve.” “Like Hermione's, unlike Autolycus's, [hers] is an achieved innocence.”³⁰ She is said to be like “great creating Nature” herself: “She so excels nature—or, at least, nature's norm—that her imagination can dispense with the objects [i.e. the flowers] themselves.”³¹ If the pastoral singer's invoking of an absent companion or predecessor has the effect of convening him, Perdita has been so successful that some critics mistakenly think that this scene takes place in springtime.³²

Nevertheless, however understandable the critics' rhetoric and however much this speech thematizes natural recovery and the finding of that which is lost, Perdita cannot bring about the resolution which depends on that recovery. It is of the essence of the play's mode that no single character has that power—even Leontes, to Sicily's great good fortune, does not have the tragic hero's strength relative to his world—and Perdita most assuredly does not. She can lay claim to being Flora in this scene, but not Astraea.³³ But the playing that enables her to “be” Flora explains both the character of her innocence in this speech and the compatibility of its power with its pastoralism. The speech begins in play—Perdita's merry rebuke of Camillo's extravagant praise (quoted above)—and it leads to the self-conscious avowal, “Methinks I play as I have seen them do / In Whitsun pastorals.” However we imagine her accompanying gestures or behavior, variable role-playing is implicit in the rhetoric of her catalogue of flowers. We can see this most readily by comparing Ovid's account of Perdita's prototype:

Haud procul Hennaeis lacus est a moenibus altae,
nomine Pergus, aquae: non illo plura Caystros
carmina cycnorum labentibus audit in undis.
silva coronat aquas cingens latus omne suisque
frondibus ut velo Phoebeos submovet ictus,
frigora dant rami, Tyrios humus umida flores:
perpetuum ver est. quo dum Proserpina luco
ludit et aut violas aut candida lilia carpit,
dumque puellari studio calathosque sinumque
inplet et aequales certat superare legendo,
paene simul visa est dilectaque raptaque Diti:
usque adeo est properatus amor. dea territa maesto
et matrem et comites, sed matrem saepius, ore
clamat, et ut summa vestem laniarat ab ora,
collecti flores tunicis cecidere remissis,
tantaque simplicitas puerilibus adfuit annis,
haec quoque virgineum movit iactura dolorem.

(5.385-401)

Not far from Henna's walls there is a deep pool of water, Pergus by name. Not Caÿster on its gliding waters hears more songs of swans than does this pool. A wood crowns the heights around its waters on every side, and with its foliage as with an awning keeps off Phoebus's rays. The branches afford a pleasing coolness, and the well-watered ground bears bright-coloured flowers. There spring is everlasting. Within this grove Proserpina was playing, and gathering violets or white lilies. And while with girlish eagerness she was filling her basket and her bosom, and striving to surpass her mates in gathering, almost in one act did Pluto see and love and carry her away: so precipitate was his love. The terrified girl called plaintively on her mother and her companions, but more often upon her mother. And since she had torn her garment at its upper edge, the flowers which she had gathered fell out of her loosened tunic; and such was the innocence of her girlish years, the loss of her flowers even at such a time aroused new grief.³⁴

I quote the whole passage to bring out the many thematic connections—playing itself, protection from Phoebus's strength, the profusion of flowers and some specific flowers (lilies and violets), the motif of spring outlasting its time. Moreover, Ovid's passage, though not a pastoral, is conscious of song at its beginning—where it enhances and identifies the special character of this spot—and of its distortion in the virgin's cries of distress at the end. But what is particularly revealing for us is the way Ovid characterizes Proserpina: his whole emphasis is on her simplicitas.³⁵ This passage, like the entire narration, sharply differentiates innocence and experience, children and parents. Innocence has its pathos, but it is seen from the outside and as itself a simple thing. The experience of pathos belongs to Ceres, who has moments of rage that come close to those of the rapist Dis. The cooler complexity of the poet's supervising intelligence, registered here by usque adeo est properatus amor (396), is matched in the story by Jove, who takes on the poet's tone when Ceres tells him of their daughter's fate:

                                                            commune est pignus onusque
nata mihi tecum, sed si modo nomina rebus
addere vera placet, non hoc iniuria factum,
verum amor est.

(5.523-26)

She is, indeed, our daughter, yours and mine, our common pledge and care. But if only we are willing to give right names to things, this is no harm that has been done, but only love.

Ovid tells the story of Proserpina as it would be seen by Polixenes. What is astonishing about Perdita, as critics in various ways have tried to say, is her knowingness in innocence. In the flower speech, this characteristic—which elsewhere manifests itself in frank playfulness—appears in a fluent assumption of identities and roles. What shall we say is the character of the speaker who evokes “daffodils, / That come before the swallow dares, and take / The winds of March with beauty” (4.4.118-20)? Does the idea of coming before the swallow dares reveal the maiden's fearfulness? Or does the virgin feel an identity with the spring flower, the daffodil, and its imputed boldness? This would be consistent with her imagined gathering of the flowers her frightened prototype let fall—the frankness of the country maid coming in to surpass the goddess in virginal presence. The range of her identifications is extended in the next detail, which evokes the erotic appeal of the flower's bold fragility and puts the speaker, momentarily, in the role of the forceful lover. “Take,” which here means “charm” or “seize the affections” (OED), retains a suggestion of vehemence; the word is not a pun, but it has a range that could include everything in Ovid's one-line narration of the rape of Proserpina. Paene simul visa est dilectaque raptaque Diti is the way a self-conscious poet rolls up items into a single moment; Perdita's “take” is pastoral in its simplicity, its resistance to being discomposed. At the same time, one would not say of this speaker, tantaque simplicitas puerilibus adfuit annis. Rather her speech displays “the pastoral process of putting the complex into the simple,” and it here depends on a flexibility of identification that sublimates, makes grand and exquisite, the power of “varying childness”—a phrase, we recall, used of the very Florizel who now stands before us in his youth.

There is a similar effect in

                                                                                pale primroses,
That die unmarried, ere they can behold
Bright Phoebus in his strength (a malady
Most incident to maids).

(4.4.122-25)

Traversi, an ideologue of maturity, says, “The beauty of these lines is devoid of strength, even clings pathetically to its own lack of vigor.”³⁶ This is the accent of Polixenes. But how can we dispute the assumption that the maiden speaker is identical with the maidens represented? She surely feels some sense of identification with them—not only because of her virginity, but because she herself justly fears she may die unmarried. Her locution for sexual experience recalls, by its similar structure, the social fears she expressed earlier: “Or how / Should I, in these my borrowed flaunts, behold / The sternness of his [Polixenes's] presence?” (4.4.22-24) Nevertheless, the suggestions of maidenly pathos do not determine Perdita's character as speaker here. For one thing, she could not speak as she does without some implicit experience, denied to the primroses, of “bright Phoebus in his strength.” That her grasp of the virgins' situation goes beyond the simplicitas belonging to girlish years is confirmed by the element of wit in her final phrase. The Arden editor explains that the reference is to chlorosis, “the green sickness,” and refers us to Herrick's “How Primroses came green,” which records the legend that virgins, “troubled with Green-sicknesses,” were transformed into the flower which retains their hue. There is no doubt about the actuality of chlorosis, but neither grammar nor rhetoric allows us to refer “a malady most incident to maids” to the adjective “pale.” It can only refer to the preceding line and a half, which concerns the condition of being unmarried. Perdita wittily distances herself from maidenhood and suggests that to live beyond it—as she very much wants to—is a condition of health. (This suggestion is also consistent with the seasonal doubling—recuperating the values of spring for life in the summer, when the sun is in his strength.) Moreover, the phrase, rightly understood, borders on tautology: being unmarried is, of course, “most incident to maids,” for it defines them. The virgin speaker thus absorbs her desires and self-awareness into a phrase that, on the one hand, looks like a piece of comic primness, and on the other like its sophisticated partner, Marvellian wit.

One final consideration shows how this speech turns the workings of ordinary pastoral to the uses of drama. For whom do we imagine Perdita to be “singing” here? She speaks to her companions and her shepherd-lover, as she would in an eclogue. But when we ask in whose stead or on whose behalf she speaks, we are aware of another figure than those present. When she calls on Proserpina to bring the flowers of spring, Perdita—conscious of presenting “flow'rs of middle summer” to “men of middle age” (4.4.106-8)—intuits the role of the maiden's mother, the absent Ceres. Perdita thus speaks not only for herself but for Hermione, and it is in this way—deeply consistent with the pastoralism of both situation and character—that her presence in this scene, as many critics have felt, adumbrates the play's resolution. The final flowers of her catalogue, “bold oxlips” and “the crown imperial,” and the wonder of her presence, which has Florizel saying “all your acts are queens” (4.4.146) and Camillo calling her “the queen of curds and cream” (161), prepare us to be believers of the greater wonder when her royal mother comes to life and is told that “our Perdita is found.”

The main figures in Shakespeare's Bohemia are all conceived in terms provided by traditional pastoral. Florizel, Perdita, Autolycus, and Polixenes map out the possible ways in which court personages assume pastoral guise, and each speaks importantly in the character of a shepherd. But in their range and presence they quite dwarf the “real” shepherds who are their hosts, those whom one would expect—thinking of works like Sannazaro's Arcadia, Il Pastor Fido, Diana, and Rosalynde—to populate and determine the character of the pastoral world. We can locate the diminishment of the representative shepherd by the way The Winter's Tale deals with pastoral encounters. Immediately after Polixenes storms off, uttering his dire threats, Perdita says:

                                                            Even here undone!
I was not much afeard; for once or twice
I was about to speak, and tell him plainly
The self-same sun that shines upon his court
Hides not his visage from our cottage, but
Looks on alike.

(4.4.441-46)

The plain talk she imagines here is precisely what courtly interlocutors have heard from Spenser's Melibee and Shakespeare's Corin. Why does this pastoral encounter not occur face-to-face? Surely because the dramatic tensions are too strong for pastoral exchange. Perdita, in fact, did stand up to Polixenes in the art-nature “debate,” but the conditions there are explicitly those of eclogue, where the courtier accepts his role as shepherd. Shakespeare's dramaturgy, in other words, is conscious of the fact which Spenser's could not fully acknowledge—that the shepherd encountered by the sophisticated speaker is really a self-representation. Hence the pastoral encounters of The Winter's Tale occur between like characters, or, to put it another way, pastoral encounters are seen to be versions of pastoral exchange.

The dramaturgy of Act 4 is thus expressive and cognizant of the limitations of pastoral. Nevertheless, the power of the act as a whole is not in spite of but due to its commitment to pastoral usages. The possibility of exchange—which is to say, the possibility of action and utterance that establish connections between separate persons, the recognition of likeness in apparent difference (Perdita's imagined rebuke to Polixenes), the possibility represented by the grafting Polixenes defends when it is understood in the spirit of Perdita (i.e. when we understand the art-nature dialogue as responsive song, not debate)—these pastoral usages and thematics are the means by which the play transforms the disasters with which it began. Moreover, the fact that the tragic beginnings are identified with the court of Sicily means that the play as a whole engages the way in which pastoral figures are self-representations: we come to see the courtly pastoralists of Act 4, in themselves and in their relations, as alternatives to the courtiers of Acts 1-3. The pastoralism of Act 4 thus recovers the uses of pastoral encounter; but the encounter takes place not so much between the characters as within the mind of the audience.³⁷ This is clearest in the episodes between Autolycus and the rustics, the last of which, concluding Act 4, parodies pastoral encounters, as Autolycus acts the role of the courtier to intimidate the Old Shepherd and his son. Our interest in these episodes is expressed less by what is going on between the characters on stage than by what goes on between us and the scenes as comic and pastoral wholes. What is crucial is that we not view any of the figures, either the rustics or Autolycus, in the spirit of Polixenes. It is because we feel the generosity and freedom Autolycus brings into the play—in the liberating sexual playfulness of his first song (“When daffodils begin to peer”) and then in the scene about love gifts—that we feel the alternatives, eventually to be realized in Hermione and the repentant Leontes, to Polixenes' disparaging of erotic devotion. We thus feel a pastoral alternative for ourselves, but it is no longer represented by a putatively real shepherd like Spenser's Melibee.

Notes

1. “Laziness”: Harry Berger, Jr., “A Secret Discipline: The Faerie Queene, Book VI,” in Form and Convention in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser, ed. William Nelson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 61; reprinted in Berger's Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 233. “Dream world”: Humphrey Tonkin, Spenser's Courteous Pastoral (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 292. “Soft pastoralism”: Isabel G. MacCaffrey, Spenser's Allegory: The Anatomy of Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 364. In her discussion of Melibee (365-70), MacCaffrey rightly resists the implications of this phrase, but the result is that she has difficulty making his moral authority consistent with the nature of his life.

2. 9.27. Calidore's first words are a Meliboean pastiche. His opening phrase, “this worlds gay showes,” is picked up from Melibee (9.22), while key words in the next two lines, “vaine” and “lowlinesse,” echo the alexandrines of the last two stanzas of Melibee's speech (9.24, 25).

3. The convention, in Elizabethan poems and pageants, of presenting the golden apple to the Queen may even be thought to give a benign cast to its introduction here, where Paris is compared to a knight of Gloriana. Examples of this device in Tudor court entertainments are cited in R. Mark Benbow's introduction to his edition of Peele's Araygnement of Paris, in The Life and Works of George Peele (New Haven: Yale University Press), vol. 3 (The Dramatic Works of George Peele, 1970), 20.

4. For fuller discussion of this point and of what this episode implies for The Faerie Queene, see Paul Alpers, “Spenser's Late Pastorals,” ELH 56 (1989): 797-817.

5. For example, when Rosalynd and Aliena first come to Arden, they come upon Montanus and Coridon singing “a pleasant eglog” in the following setting:

   The ground where they sat was diapred with Floras riches, as if she ment to wrap Tellus in the glorie of her vestments: round about in the forme of an Amphitheater were most curiouslie planted Pine trees, interseamed with Limons and Citrons, which with the thicknesse of their boughes so shadowed the place, that Phoebus could not prie into the secret of that Arbour; so united were the tops with so thicke a closure, that Venus might there in her jollitie have dallied unseene with her deerest paramour. Fast by (to make the place more gorgeous), was there a Fount so Christalline and cleere, that it seemed Diana with her Driades and Hemadriades had that spring, as the secret of all their bathings.

   Thomas Lodge, Rosalynde (1590), in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, vol. 2 (1963), 183. The amorous shepherd Paris is a point of reference throughout Rosalynde (cf. 206, 247, 248, 252, 253).

6. Coridon finally speaks in 11.30-32. But this is after the brigands have wiped out the shepherds' world. It is as if this devastation gives him a voice: what he recounts is the brigands' slaughter of the shepherds, including Melibee and, he thinks, Pastorella.

7. Leo Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 16.

8. In Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961-75), 2: 187-88. Subsequent references will be parenthetical in the text.

9. Judy Z. Kronenfeld, “Social Rank and the Pastoral Ideals of As You Like It,” Shakespeare Quarterly 29 (1978): 333-48.

10. The only detail Shakespeare adds is the master's churlish disposition, for Lodge's shepherd also serves a “landlord” who means to sell his farm and flock. But this information appears after Alinda has declared her intention “to buy some farme, and a flocke of sheepe, and so become a shepheardesse, meaning to live low, and content me with a countrey life” (188).

11. Kronenfeld, “Social Rank,” 344.

12. All editors gloss “voice” as “vote,” following Dr. Johnson's explanation: “As far as I have voice or vote, as far as I have power to bid you welcome.” But surely “vote” is not a possible meaning here. Rather we should look to two extended meanings of “voice” (7c, 10c), under which OED gives only quotations from Shakespeare. None of these examples is difficult to understand, but they apparently strike a lexicographer as unusual. What they have in common is the literal idea of “voice,” speaking up for something. E.g. Measure for Measure 1.2.179-81: “Acquaint her with the danger of my state; / Implore her, in my voice, that she make friends / To the strict deputy.” Also Merry Wives 1.4.156; Cymbeline 3.5.115. In two examples, the phrase “father's voice” is used for parental authority over a daughter's marriage (MSND 1.1.54, All's Well, 2.3.54). Corin's “in my voice” includes both ideas contained in these other examples—social authority and speaking on behalf of someone or for some purpose. Johnson's gloss indicates both these ideas, but they are not usefully codified in the gloss “voice = vote.”

13. Touchstone immediately seizes this point and rags the old shepherd for getting his living by “the copulation of cattle” and betraying “a she-lamb of a twelve-month to a crookèd-pated old cuckoldly ram.” The clown's coarseness here irritates some critics and certainly seems “anti-pastoral,” but in fact his responsive wit restores to this topos the male presence it has with Spenser's Melibee:

    The little that I haue, growes dayly more
    Without my care, but onely to attend it;
    My lambes doe euery yeare increase their score,
    And my flockes father daily doth amend it.

    (6.9.21)

    It is hardly “realism” to say this: Lodge's Corydon knows as much when, saying that shepherds only experience “meane misfortunes, as the losse of a few sheepe” he says, “The next yeare may mend al with a fresh increase” (188-89). Touchstone simply steps in and performs his version of this knowledge. To the extent that Shakespeare makes pastoral new by dramatizing its situations, attitudes, conventions, and characters, its truths and values will emerge dramatically—here, mainly by sharpening the characterization of responsive speakers. To adapt the cryptic remark of Holofernes the schoolmaster, the pastoral allusion holds in the exchange (LLL 4.2.45).

14. E.g. John Barrell and John Bull, eds., The Penguin Book of English Pastoral Verse (London: Allen Lane, 1974), 108.

15. Kronenfeld, 339.

16. Walter W. Greg, Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama (London: A. H. Bullen, 1906), 411.

17. I owe this suggestion to Janet Adelman, who made many helpful comments about this chapter.

18. “Recognition in The Winter's Tale,” in Fables of Identity (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1963), 115.

19. In the Arden Edition of The Winter's Tale, ed. J. H. P. Pafford (London: Methuen, 1963), 204.

20. Cf. Florizel's words to Perdita at 4.4.49-51, which directly associate pastoral feasting with effective mock-marriage: “Lift up your countenance, as it were the day / Of celebration of that nuptial, which / We two have sworn shall come.”

21. Hence the note in Frank Kermode, ed., The Winter's Tale (New York: New American Library, 1963): “i.e. Flora in April, when the flowers peep out rather than boldly appear.” The gloss quoted above is the Riverside Shakespeare's.

22. Cf. OED: “front” in the meaning required by Riverside and Kermode is largely a military term, which is wholly inappropriate, nor does “front of an object” (e.g. table or building) really do here. Other Shakespearean uses of “front” support “front = brow or face” (Ham 3.4.56, Lear 2.2.108, A&C 1.1.6, Mac 4.3.232, 5.9.13), though the one valid counterexample in OED is Shakespearean: “As Philomel in summer's front doth sing” (Sonnet 102).

23. It is probable, however, that he is quite dressed up for a swain. At the end of scene 4, he exchanges his garb with Autolycus, who is then able to pass himself off, admittedly to the rustics, as a courtier.

24. Like J. H. P. Pafford, the Arden editor, and Stephen Orgel, in his forthcoming edition in the Oxford Shakespeare series, I accept Theobald's emendation “swoon” for the Folio reading “sworn,” which Riverside adopts.

25. The phrase is that of Peter Erickson, “Patriarchal Structures in The Winter's Tale,” PMLA 97 (1982): 821.

26. “‘Thou that Beget'st Him That Did Thee Beget’: Transformation in Pericles and The Winter's Tale,” Shakespeare Survey 22 (1969): 59-67. In revised form, this essay has been incorporated into C. L. Barber and Richard P. Wheeler, The Whole Journey: Shakespeare's Power of Development (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986). Both the phrase just quoted and the next quotation are on p. 330.

    In using Barber for the purposes of practical criticism, I do not mean to prefer his interpretation to the more deeply elaborated psychoanalytic accounts of Murray Schwartz, “Leontes' Jealousy in The Winter's Tale,” American Imago 30 (1973): 250-73, and “The Winter's Tale: Loss and Transformation,” American Imago 32 (1975): 145-99, and of Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers (New York: Routledge, 1992), 220-38. Perhaps this is the place to say that my thinking about issues of identity and difference in Shakespeare owes much to the work of Stanley Cavell, though my account of The Winter's Tale is along quite different lines from his, in Disowning Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 193-221.

27. Cf. Janet Adelman, “Male Bonding in Shakespeare's Comedies,” in Shakespeare's Rough Magic: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber, ed. Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 73-103.

28. Shakespeare: The Last Phase, 155, 138.

29. Fables of Identity, 117.

30. S. L. Bethel and A. D. Nuttall, as quoted by Michael Taylor, “Innocence in The Winter's Tale,” Shakespeare Studies 15 (1982): 236.

31. Rosalie L. Colie, Shakespeare's Living Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 278.

32. E.g. F. C. Tinkler, “The Winter's Tale,” Scrutiny 5 (1936-37): 358. Students who use the Riverside Shakespeare are told that the Bohemian scenes “celebrate … the awakening of spring” (p. 1565), but are not informed that sheep-shearing takes place in late June or that 4.4.79-81 indicates that the feast in this play is later (see Arden note at 4.3.37).

33. She has a clear relation to the Flora of Peele's The Arraignment of Paris.

34. Text and translation (slightly modified) from Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. Frank Justus Miller, 3d ed. (rev. G. P. Goold), 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library).

35. This emphasis recurs in the brief scene of her eating the pomegranate in the underworld, cultis dum simplex errat in hortis (5.535).

36. Traversi, 149.

37. One way Shakespeare achieves this effect is by juxtaposing scenes: Antigonus's soliloquy, recounting his vision of the sorrowing Hermione, and his exit pursued by a bear are followed by the appearance of the Old Shepherd and his son (3.3); the scene in which Polixenes and Camillo set off for the country (4.2) is followed by the entrance of Autolycus and his encounter with the Clown (4.3).

Frequently Cited Works

References to the following will be made parenthetically in the text.

William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions paperback, 1960) (Cited in text as SVP)

Andrew Marvell, The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972)

John Milton, Poems, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (London: Longmans, 1968)

The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974)

Edmund Spenser, Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912)

Theocritus, ed. A. S. F. Gow, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952)

Theocritus, Idylls, trans. R. C. Trevelyan (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925)

Virgil, Eclogues, Latin text and translation from Paul Alpers, The Singer of the Eclogues (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979)