Pastoral
Encyclopedia
The adjective pastoral refers to the lifestyle of pastoralists, such as shepherds herd
ing livestock around open areas of land
according to season
s and the changing availability of water and pasturage. It also refers to a genre
in literature, art or music that depicts such shepherd life in an idealized manner, for urban audiences
. As a noun, a pastoral refers to a single work of such art, poetry, music or drama.
An alternative word for pastoral as a genre, both in adjectival and noun form, is bucolic, from the Greek βουκóλος, meaning a cowherd.
of literature in which the author employs various techniques to place the complex life into a simple one. Paul Alpers distinguishes pastoral as a mode rather than a genre, and he bases this distinction on the recurring attitude of power; that is to say that pastoral literature holds a humble perspective toward nature. Thus, pastoral as a mode occurs in many types of literature (poetry, drama, etc.) as well as genres (most notably the pastoral elegy).
Terry Gifford defines pastoral in three ways. The first way emphasizes the historical literary perspective of the pastoral in which authors recognize and discuss life in the country and in particular the life of a shepherd. This is summed up by Leo Marx
with the phrase "No shepherd, no pastoral". The second type of the pastoral is literature that "describes the country with an implicit or explicit contrast to the urban". The third type of pastoral depicts the country life with derogative classifications.
In Hesiod
's Works and Days
we see the concept of a golden race of men in which human beings lived together with nature in harmony. This Golden Age
shows that even before Alexandria
, ancient Greeks had sentiments of an ideal pastoral life being something that is lost to them. This is the first example of literature that has pastoral sentiments and may have began the pastoral tradition. Ovid's Metamorphoses is much like Hesiod's "Works and Days" with the description of ages (golden, silver, brazen, iron and human) but with more ages to discuss and less emphasis on the gods and their punishing. Here nature acts as the main punisher. Another example of the mention of this perfect relationship between man and nature is Theocritus
' poem Idylls 1 in which we see an encounter of a shepherd and a goatherd who meet in the pastures.
Traditionally, pastoral refers to the lives of herdsmen in a romanticized, exaggerated, but representative way. In literature
, the adjective 'pastoral' refers to rural subjects and aspects of life in the countryside among shepherd
s, cowherds and other farm workers that are often romanticized
and depicted in a highly unrealistic manner. The pastoral life is usually characterized as being closer to the Golden age
than the rest of human life. The setting is a Locus Amoenus
, or a beautiful place in nature, sometimes connected with images of the Garden of Eden
. An example of the use of the genre is the short poem by the 15th-century Scottish
makar
Robert Henryson
Robene and Makyne
which also contains the conflicted emotions often present in the genre. A more tranquil mood is set by Christopher Marlowe
's well known lines from The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
:
"The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" exhibits the concept of Gifford's second definition of pastoral. The speaker of the poem, who is the titled shepherd, draws on the idealization of urban material pleasures to win over his love rather than resorting to the simplified pleasures of pastoral ideology. This can be seen in the listed items: "lined slippers," "purest gold," "silver dishes," and "ivory table" (lines 13, 15, 16, 21, 23). The speaker takes on a voyeuristic point of view with his love, and they are not directly interacting with the other true shepherds and nature.
Pastoral shepherds and maidens usually have Greek
names like Corydon or Philomela, reflecting the origin of the pastoral genre. Pastoral poems are set in beautiful rural landscapes, the literary term for which is "locus amoenus" (Latin for "beautiful place"), such as Arcadia
, a rural region of Greece
, mythological home of the god Pan, which was portrayed as a sort of Eden
by the poets. The tasks of their employment with sheep and other rustic chores is held in the fantasy to be almost wholly undemanding and is left in the background, abandoning the shepherdesses and their swains in a state of almost perfect leisure
. This makes them available for embodying perpetual erotic
fantasies. The shepherds spend their time chasing pretty girls — or, at least in the Greek and Roman versions, pretty lads as well. The eroticism of Virgil
's second eclogue
, Formosum pastor Corydon ardebat Alexin ("The shepherd Corydon burned with passion for pretty Alexis") is entirely homosexual, although the use of that term is anachronistic due to a lack of any idea of sexual identity in the times in which Virgil was writing.
Pastoral literature continued after Hesiod with the poetry of the Hellenistic Greek Theocritus
, several of whose Idylls are set in the countryside (probably reflecting the landscape of the island of Cos
where the poet lived) and involve dialogues between herdsmen. Theocritus may have drawn on authentic folk traditions of Sicilian shepherds. He wrote in the Doric dialect
but the metre he chose was the dactylic hexameter
associated with the most prestigious form of Greek poetry, epic
. This blend of simplicity and sophistication would play a major part in later pastoral verse. Theocritus was imitated by the Greek poets Bion and Moschus
.
The Roman poet Virgil
adapted pastoral into Latin with his highly influential Eclogues. Virgil introduces two very important uses of pastoral, the contrast between urban and rural lifestyles and political allegory most notably in Eclogues 1 and 4 respectively. In doing so, Virgil presents a more idealized portrayal of the lives of shepherds while still employing the traditional pastoral conventions of Theocritus. He was the first to set his poems in Arcadia, an idealized location to which much later pastoral literature will refer.
Horace
's The Epodes, ii Country Joys has "the dreaming man" Alfius, who dreams of escaping his busy urban life for the peaceful country. But as "the dreaming man" indicates, this is just a dream for Alfius. He is too consumed in his career as a usurer to leave it behind for the country.
Italian poets revived the pastoral from the 14th century onwards, first in Latin (examples include works by Petrarch
, Pontano and Mantuan
) then in the Italian vernacular (Boiardo). The fashion for pastoral spread throughout Renaissance Europe. In Spain, Garcilaso de la Vega
was an important pioneer and his motifs find themselves renewed in the 20th century Spanish language poet Giannina Braschi
. Leading French pastoral poets include Marot
and Ronsard.
The first pastorals in English were the Eclogues (c. 1515) of Alexander Barclay
, which were heavily influenced by Mantuan. A landmark in English pastoral poetry was Spenser
’s The Shepheardes Calender
, first published in 1579. Spenser's work consists of twelve eclogues, one for each month of the year, and is written in dialect. It contains elegies
, fable
s and a discussion of the role of poetry in contemporary England. Spenser and his friends appear under various pseudonyms (Spenser himself is "Colin Clout"). Spenser's example was imitated by such poets as Michael Drayton
(Idea, The Shepherd's Garland) and William Browne (Britannia's Pastorals). During this period of England's history, many authors explored "anti-pastoral" themes. Two examples of this is Sir Philip Sidney's “The Twenty Third Psalm” and “The Nightingale” focus on the world in a very anti-pastoral view. In “The Twenty Third Psalm,” Nature is portrayed as something we need to be protected from, and in “The Nightingale,” the woe of Philomela is compared to the speaker's own pain. Additionally, he wrote Arcadia which has is filled with pastoral descriptions of the landscape. "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd
" (1600) by Sir Walter Raleigh also comments on the anti-pastoral as the nymph responds realistically to the idealizing shepherd of The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
by embracing and explaining the true course of nature and its incompatibility with the love that the Shepherd yearns for with the nymph.
In the 17th century came the arrival of the Country house poem
. Included in this genre is Aemilia Lanyer’s The Description of Cooke-ham in 1611, in which a woman is described in terms of her relationship to her estate and how it mourns for her when she leaves it. In 1616, Ben Jonson
wrote To Penshurst, a poem in which he addresses the estate owned by the Sidney family and tells of its beauty. The basis of the poem is a harmonious and joyous elation of the memories that Jonson had at the manor. It is beautifully written with iambic pentameter, a style that Jonson so eloquently uses to describe the culture of Penshurst. It is very important to note the insertion of Pan and Bacchus as notable company of the manor. Pan, Greek god of the Pastoral world, half man and half goat, was connected with both hunting and shepherds; Bacchus
was the god of wine, intoxication and ritual madness. This reference to Pan and Bacchus in a pastoral view demonstrates how prestigious Penshurst was, to be worthy in the company with gods, notions of just how romanticized the estate was. "A Country Life", another 17th century work by Katherine Philips
, was also a country house poem. Philips focuses on the joys of the countryside and looks upon the lifestyle that accompanies it as being “the first and happiest life, when man enjoyed himself.” She writes about maintaining this lifestyle by living detached from material things, and by not over-concerning herself with the world around her. Andrew Marvell
's “Upon Appleton House
” was written when Marvell was working as a tutor for Lord Fairfax's daughter Mary, in 1651. The poem is very rich with metaphors that relate to religion, politics and history. Similar to Jonson's “To Penshurst”, Marvell's poem is describing a pastoral estate. It moves through the house itself, its history, the gardens, the meadows and other grounds, the woods, the river, his Pupil Mary, and the future. Marvell used nature as a thread to weave together a poem centered around man. We once again see nature fully providing for man. Marvell also continuously compares nature to art and seems to point out that art can never accomplish on purpose what nature can achieve accidentally or spontaneously.
Robert Herrick
's The Hock-cart, or Harvest Home was also written in the 17th century. In this pastoral work, he paints the reader a colorful picture of the benefits reaped from hard work. This is an atypical interpretation of the pastoral, given that there is a celebration of labor involved as opposed to central figures living in leisure and nature just taking its course independently. This poem was mentioned in Raymond Williams
', The Country and the City. This acknowledgment of Herrick's work is appropriate, as both Williams and Herrick accentuate the importance of labor in the pastoral lifestyle.
The Pastoral Elegy
is a sub-genre that uses pastoral elements to lament a death or loss. The most famous pastoral elegy in English is John Milton
's "Lycidas
" (1637), written on the death of Edward King, a fellow student at Cambridge University. Milton used the form both to explore his vocation as a writer and to attack what he saw as the abuses of the Church. Also included is Thomas Gray
's, "Elegy on a Country Churchyard" (1750).
The formal English pastoral continued to flourish during the 18th century, eventually dying out at the end. One notable example of an 18th century work is Alexander Pope
's Pastorals (1709). In this work Pope imitates Edmund Spencer's Shepheardes Calendar, while utilizing classical names and allusions aligning him with Virgil
. In 1717, Pope's Discourse on Pastoral Poetry was published as a preface to Pastorals. In this work Pope sets standards for pastoral literature and critiques many popular poets, one of whom is Spencer, along with his contemporary opponent Ambrose Phillips. During this time period Ambrose Phillips, who is often overlooked because of Pope, modeled his poetry after the Native English form of Pastoral, employing it as a medium to express the true nature and longing of Man. He strove to write in this fashion so as to not stray from what he thought was the original intent of Pastoral literature. As such, he centered his themes around the simplistic life of the Shepherd, and, personified the relationship that humans once had with nature. John Gay
, who came a little later was criticized for his poem's artificiality by Doctor Johnson
and attacked for their lack of realism by George Crabbe
, who attempted to give a true picture of rural life in his poem The Village. In 1590, Edmund Spenser also composed a very famous pastoral epic called The Faerie Queene
, in which he employs the pastoral mode so as to accentuate the charm, lushness, and splendor of the poem's (super)natural world. Spenser alludes to the pastoral continuously throughout the work and also uses it so as to create allegory in his poem, with the characters as well as with the environment, both of which are meant to have symbolic meaning in the real world. It is composed of six books but Spenser intended to write twelve. He wrote the poem primarily to honor Queen Elizabeth. William Cowper
addressed the artificiality of the fast paced city life in his poems Retirement (1782) and The Winter Nosegay (1782). Pastoral nevertheless survived as a mood rather than a genre, as can be seen from such works as Matthew Arnold
's Thyrsis (1867), a lament on the death of his fellow poet Arthur Hugh Clough
. Robert Burns
can be read as a Pastoral poet for his nostalgic portrayals of rural Scotland and simple farm life in To A Mouse and The Cotter's Saturday Night. Burns explicitly addresses the Pastoral form in his Poem on Pastoral Poetry. In this he champions his fellow Scot Allan Ramsey as the best Pastoral poet since Theocritus
.
Another sub-genre is the Edenic Pastoral, which alludes to the perfect relationship between God, man, and nature in the Garden of Eden
. It typically includes biblical symbols and imagery. In 1645 John Milton wrote L'Allegro
, which translates as the happy person. It is a celebration of Mirth personified, who is the child of love and revelry. It was originally composed to be a companion poem to, Il Penseroso
, which celebrates a life of melancholy and solitude. Milton's, On the Morning of Christ's Nativity
(1629) blends Christian and pastoral imagery.
, one of the few Pastoral epics ever written. A notable part of Paradise Lost is book IV where he chronicles Satan’s trespass into paradise. Milton’s iconic descriptions of the garden are shadowed by the fact that we see it from Satan’s perspective and are thus led to commiserate with him. Milton elegantly works through a presentation of Adam and Eve
’s pastorally idyllic, eternally fertile living conditions and focuses upon their stewardship of the garden. He gives much focus to the fruit bearing trees and Adam and Eve's care of them, sculpting an image of pastoral harmony. However, Milton in turn continually comes back to Satan, constructing him as a character the audience can easily identify with and perhaps even like. Milton creates Satan as character meant to destabilize the audience’s understanding of themselves and the world around them. Through this mode, Milton is able to create a working dialogue between the text and his audience about the ‘truths’ they hold for themselves.
. The most influential Italian example of the form was Sannazzaro's Arcadia (1504). The vogue for the pastoral romance spread throughout Europe producing such notable works as Bernardim Ribeiro
"Menina e Moça" (1554) in Portuguese, Montemayor
's Diana (1559) in Spain, Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia (1590) in England, and Honoré d'Urfé
's Astrée (1607–27) in France.
s. Poliziano
's Orfeo (1480) shows the beginnings of the new form, but it reached its zenith in the late 16th century with Tasso
's Aminta
(1573), Isabella Andreini
's Mirtilla (1588), and Guarini's Il pastor fido (1590). John Lyly
's Endimion (1579) brought the Italian-style pastoral play to England. John Fletcher
's The Faithful Shepherdess, Ben Jonson
's The Sad Shepherd and Sidney's The Lady of May
are later examples. Some of Shakespeare's plays contain pastoral elements, most notably As You Like It
(whose plot was derived from Thomas Lodge
's pastoral romance Rosalynde) and The Winter's Tale
, of which Act 4 Scene 4 is a lengthy pastoral digression. The forest in As You Like It can be seen as a place of pastoral idealization, where life is simpler and purer, and its inhabitants live more closely to each other, nature and God than their urban counterparts. However, Shakespeare plays with the bounds of pastoral idealization. Throughout the play, Shakespeare employs various characters to illustrate pastoralism. His protagonists Rosalind
and Orlando
metaphorically depict the importance of the coexistence of realism and idealism, or urban and rural life. While Orlando is absorbed in the ideal, Rosalind serves as a mediator, bringing Orlando back down to reality and embracing the simplicity of pastoral love. She is the only character throughout the play who embraces and appreciates both the real and idealized life and manages to make the two ideas coexist. Therefore, Shakespeare explores city and country life as being appreciated through the coexistence of the two.
, his shepherds often play the syrinx
, or Pan flute
, considered a quintessentially pastoral instrument. Virgil's Eclogues were performed as sung mime in the 1st century, and there is evidence of the pastoral song as a legitimate genre of classical times.
The pastoral genre was a significant influence in the development of opera
. After settings of pastoral poetry in the pastourelle
genre by the troubadour
s, Italian poets and composers became increasingly drawn to the pastoral. Musical settings of pastoral poetry became increasingly common in first polyphonic and then monodic madrigal
s: these later led to the cantata
and the serenata, in which pastoral themes remained on a consistent basis. Partial musical settings of Giovanni Battista Guarini
's Il pastor fido were highly popular: the texts of over 500 madrigals were taken from this one play alone. Tasso
's Aminta was also a favourite. As opera
developed, the dramatic pastoral came to the fore with such works as Jacopo Peri
's Dafne
and, most notably, Monteverdi's L'Orfeo. Pastoral opera remained popular throughout the 17th-century, and not just in Italy, as is shown by the French genre of pastorale héroïque
, Englishman Henry Lawes
's music for Milton's
Comus
(not to mention John Blow
's Venus and Adonis
), and Spanish zarzuela
. At the same time, Italian and German composers developed a genre of vocal and instrumental pastorals, distinguished by certain stylistic features, associated with Christmas Eve.
The pastoral, and parodies of the pastoral, continued to play an important role in musical history throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. John Gay
may have satirized the pastoral in The Beggar's Opera
, but also wrote an entirely sincere libretto for Handel
's Acis and Galatea. Rousseau's Le Devin du village
draws on pastoral roots, and Metastasio
's libretto Il re pastore
was set over 30 times, most famously by Mozart. Rameau was an outstanding exponent of French pastoral opera. Beethoven also wrote his famous Pastoral Symphony, avoiding his usual musical dynamism in favour of relatively slow rhythms. More concerned with psychology than description, he labelled the work "more the expression of feeling than [realistic] painting". The pastoral also appeared as a feature of grand opera
, most particularly in Meyerbeer's operas: often composers would develop a pastoral-themed "oasis", usually in the centre of their work. Notable examples include the shepherd's "alte Weise" from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde
, or the pastoral ballet occupying the middle of Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades
. The 20th-century continued to bring new pastoral interpretations, particularly in ballet, such as Ravel's Daphis and Chloe, Nijinsky's use of Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune
, and Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps and Les Noces.
The Pastorale
is a form of Italian folk song
still played in the regions of Southern Italy where the zampogna
continues to thrive. They generally sound like a slowed down version of a tarantella
, as they encompass many of the same melodic phrases. The pastorale on the zampogna can be played by a solo zampogna player, or in some regions can be accompanied by the piffero (also commonly called a ciaramella, 'pipita', or bifora
), which is a primitive key-less double reed oboe
type instrument.
is perhaps the most famous painting in this style. Later, French artists were also attracted to the pastoral, notably Claude
, Poussin
(e.g. Et in Arcadia ego
) and Watteau (in his Fêtes galantes). Thomas Cole
has a series of paintings titled The Course of Empire
, and the second of these paintings (shown on the right) depicts the perfect pastoral setting.
, George Puttenham
, William Empson
, Frank Kermode
, Raymond Williams
, Renato Poggioli
, Annabel Patterson, Paul Alpers, and Ken Hiltner.
George Puttenham
was one of the first Pastoral theorists. He did not see the form as merely a recording of a prior rustic way of life but a guise for political discourse, which other forms had previously neglected. The Pastoral, he writes, has a didactic duty to “contain and enforme morall discipline for the amendment of mans behaviour”.
Friedrich Schiller
linked the Pastoral to childhood and a child-like simplicity. For Schiller, we perceive in nature an “image of our infancy irrevocably past”.
Sir William Empson spoke of the ideal of Pastoral as being embedded in varying degrees of ambivalence, and yet, for all of the apparent dichotomies, and contradicting elements found within it, he felt there was a unified harmony within it. He refers to the pastoral process as 'putting the complex into the simple.' Empson argues that ". . . good proletarian art is usually Covert Pastoral", and uses Soviet Russia's propaganda about the working class as evidence. Empson also emphasizes the importance of the double plot as a tool for writers to discuss a controversial topic without repercussions.
Raymond Williams
argues that the foundation of the pastoral lies in the idea that the city is a highly urban, industrialized center that has removed us from the peaceful life we once had in the countryside. However, he states that this is really a "myth functioning as a memory" that literature has created in its representations of the past. As a result, when society evolves and looks back to these representations, it considers its own present as the decline of the simple life of the past. He then discusses how the city's relationship with the country affected the economic and social aspects of the countryside. As the economy became a bigger part of society, many country new-comers quickly realized the potential and monetary value that lay in the untouched land. Furthermore, this new system encouraged a social stratification in the countryside. With the implementation of paper money came a hierarchy in the working system, as well as the "inheritance of titles and making of family names".
Poggioli
was concerned with how death reconciled itself with the pastoral, and thus came up with a loose categorization of death in the pastoral as 'funeral elegy', the most important tropes of which he cites as religion (embodied by Pan); friendship; allegory;and poetic and musical calling. He concedes though that such a categorization is open to much misinterpretation. As well, Poggioli focused on the idea that Pastoral was a nostalgic and childish way of seeing the world. In The Oaten Flue, he claims that the shepherd was looked up to was because they were “an ideal kind of leisure class."
Frank Kermode
discusses the pastoral within the historical context of the English Renaissance. His first condition of pastoral poetry is that it is an urban product. Kermode establishes that the pastoral is derived as an opposition between two modes of living, in the country and in the city. London was becoming a modern metropolis before the eyes of its citizens. The result of this large-scale urban sprawl left the people with a sense of nostalgia for their country way of living. His next argument focuses on the artificiality of poetry, drawing upon fellow theorist, Puttenham. Kermode elaborates on this and says, "the cultivated, in their artificial way, reflect upon and describe, for their own ends, the natural life". Kermode wants us to understand that the recreation or reproduction of the natural is in itself artificial. Kermode elaborates on this in terms of imitation, describing it as "one of the fundamental laws of literary history" because it "gives literary history a meaning in terms of itself, and provides the channels of literary tradition". Kermode goes on to explain about the works of Virgil and Theocritus as progenitors of the pastoral. Later poets would draw on these earlier forms of pastoral, elaborating on them to fit their own social context. As the pastoral was becoming more modern, it shifted into the form of Pastourelle. This is the first time that the pastoral really deals with the subject of love.
Annabel Patterson emphasizes many important ideas in her work, Pastoral and Ideology. One of these is that the pastoral mode, especially in the later 18th century, was interpreted in vastly different ways by different groups of people. As a result, distinctive illustrations emerged from these groups which were all variations of the understanding of Virgil’s Eclogues. Patterson explains that Servius' Commentary is essential to understanding the reception of Virgil's Eclogues. The commentary discusses how poets used analogy in their writings to indirectly express the corruption within the church and government to the public. When speaking of post-Romanticism, it is imperative to take into consideration the influence and effect of Robert Frost
on pastoral ideology. His poem, Build Soil is a critique of war and also a suggestion that pastoral, as a literary mode, should not place emphasis on social and political issues, but should rather, as Patterson says, "turn in upon itself, and replace reformist instincts with personal growth and regeneration". William Wordsworth
was a highly respected poet in the 1800s and his poem, Prelude, published in 1805, was an excellent example of what a dream of a new golden age might materialize as or look like.
Paul Alpers, In his 1997 book, What is Pastoral?, describes the recurring plot of pastoral literature as the lives of shepherds. With William Empson's notion of placing the complex into the simple, Alpers thus critically defines pastoral as a means of allegory. Alpers also classifies pastoral as a mode of literature, as opposed to a genre, and he defines the attitude of pastoral works maintaining a humble relationship with nature. Alpers also defines pastoral convention as the act of bringing together, and authors use this to discuss loss. He says the speakers in pastoral works are simple herdsmen dramatized in pastoral encounters. However, authors like Herrick changed the herdsmen to nymphs, maidens, and flowers. Thus, achieving a mode of simplicity but also giving objects voice. This is done by personifying objects like flowers. Moreover, authors that do this in their works are giving importance to the unimportant. Alpers talks about pastoral lyrics and love poems in particular. In regards to lyrics he says "a lyric allows its speaker to slip in and out of pastoral guise and reveal directly the sophistication which prompted him to assume it in the first place″. In other words, he claims pastorals lyrics have both pastoral and not pastoral characteristics, perhaps like in the comparisons between urban and rural, but they always give importance to and enhance on the pastoral. Alpers talks about love poems and how they can be turned into pastoral poems simply by changing words like lover to shepherd. And he mentions Shakespeare as one of the authors who did this in his works. Furthermore, Alpers says the pastoral is not only about praise for the rural and the country side. For instance, Sidney dispraises the country life in The Garden. Pastoral can also include the urban, the court, and the social like in L’Allegro. In regards to pastoral narration, Alpers says that pastoral narration contradicts “normal” narrative motives and that there is a double aspect of pastoral narration: heroic poetry and worldly realities with narrative motives and conventions. And in respect to pastoral novels, Alpers says pastoral novels have different definitions and examples depending on the reader. Also, the pastoral novel differs from Theocritus and Virgil’s works. He says there are pastoral novels of the country life, of the longing for the simple, and with nature as the protagonist. And says the literary category of pastoral novels is realistic and post-realistic fiction with a rural theme or subject based on traditional pastoral.
In What Else Is Pastoral?, Ken Hiltner argues that Renaissance pastoral poetry is more often a form of nature writing than critics like Paul Alpers and Annabel Patterson give it credit for. He explains that even though there is a general lack of lavish description in Renaissance Pastoral, this is because they were beginning to use gestural strategies, and artists begin to develop an environmental consciousness as nature around them becomes endangered. Another argument presented in the book is that our current environmental crisis clearly has its roots in the Renaissance. To do this we are shown examples in Renaissance pastoral poetry that show a keen awareness of the urban sprawl of London contrasted to the countryside and historical records showing that many at the time were aware of the issue of urban growth and attempted to stop it.
Herd
Herd refers to a social grouping of certain animals of the same species, either wild or domestic, and also to the form of collective animal behavior associated with this or as a verb, to herd, to its control by another species such as humans or dogs.The term herd is generally applied to mammals,...
ing livestock around open areas of land
Landscape
Landscape comprises the visible features of an area of land, including the physical elements of landforms such as mountains, hills, water bodies such as rivers, lakes, ponds and the sea, living elements of land cover including indigenous vegetation, human elements including different forms of...
according to season
Season
A season is a division of the year, marked by changes in weather, ecology, and hours of daylight.Seasons result from the yearly revolution of the Earth around the Sun and the tilt of the Earth's axis relative to the plane of revolution...
s and the changing availability of water and pasturage. It also refers to a genre
Genre
Genre , Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture, e.g. music, and in general, any type of discourse, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time...
in literature, art or music that depicts such shepherd life in an idealized manner, for urban audiences
Urban culture
Urban culture is the culture of towns and cities. In the United States, Urban culture may also sometimes be used as a euphemistic reference to contemporary African American culture.- African American culture :...
. As a noun, a pastoral refers to a single work of such art, poetry, music or drama.
An alternative word for pastoral as a genre, both in adjectival and noun form, is bucolic, from the Greek βουκóλος, meaning a cowherd.
Pastoral literature in general
Pastoral is a modeMode (literature)
In literature, a mode is an employed method or approach, identifiable within a written work. As descriptive terms, form and genre are often used inaccurately instead of mode; for example, the pastoral mode is often mistakenly identified as a genre...
of literature in which the author employs various techniques to place the complex life into a simple one. Paul Alpers distinguishes pastoral as a mode rather than a genre, and he bases this distinction on the recurring attitude of power; that is to say that pastoral literature holds a humble perspective toward nature. Thus, pastoral as a mode occurs in many types of literature (poetry, drama, etc.) as well as genres (most notably the pastoral elegy).
Terry Gifford defines pastoral in three ways. The first way emphasizes the historical literary perspective of the pastoral in which authors recognize and discuss life in the country and in particular the life of a shepherd. This is summed up by Leo Marx
Leo Marx
Leo Marx is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an author known for his works in the field of American studies. Marx's work in American studies examines the relationship between technology and culture in 19th and 20th century America. He graduated from Harvard University...
with the phrase "No shepherd, no pastoral". The second type of the pastoral is literature that "describes the country with an implicit or explicit contrast to the urban". The third type of pastoral depicts the country life with derogative classifications.
In Hesiod
Hesiod
Hesiod was a Greek oral poet generally thought by scholars to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer. His is the first European poetry in which the poet regards himself as a topic, an individual with a distinctive role to play. Ancient authors credited him and...
's Works and Days
Works and Days
Works and Days is a didactic poem of some 800 verses written by the ancient Greek poet Hesiod around 700 BC. At its center, the Works and Days is a farmer's almanac in which Hesiod instructs his brother Perses in the agricultural arts...
we see the concept of a golden race of men in which human beings lived together with nature in harmony. This Golden Age
Golden Age
The term Golden Age comes from Greek mythology and legend and refers to the first in a sequence of four or five Ages of Man, in which the Golden Age is first, followed in sequence, by the Silver, Bronze, and Iron Ages, and then the present, a period of decline...
shows that even before Alexandria
Alexandria
Alexandria is the second-largest city of Egypt, with a population of 4.1 million, extending about along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in the north central part of the country; it is also the largest city lying directly on the Mediterranean coast. It is Egypt's largest seaport, serving...
, ancient Greeks had sentiments of an ideal pastoral life being something that is lost to them. This is the first example of literature that has pastoral sentiments and may have began the pastoral tradition. Ovid's Metamorphoses is much like Hesiod's "Works and Days" with the description of ages (golden, silver, brazen, iron and human) but with more ages to discuss and less emphasis on the gods and their punishing. Here nature acts as the main punisher. Another example of the mention of this perfect relationship between man and nature is Theocritus
Theocritus
Theocritus , the creator of ancient Greek bucolic poetry, flourished in the 3rd century BC.-Life:Little is known of Theocritus beyond what can be inferred from his writings. We must, however, handle these with some caution, since some of the poems commonly attributed to him have little claim to...
' poem Idylls 1 in which we see an encounter of a shepherd and a goatherd who meet in the pastures.
Traditionally, pastoral refers to the lives of herdsmen in a romanticized, exaggerated, but representative way. In literature
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
, the adjective 'pastoral' refers to rural subjects and aspects of life in the countryside among shepherd
Shepherd
A shepherd is a person who tends, feeds or guards flocks of sheep.- Origins :Shepherding is one of the oldest occupations, beginning some 6,000 years ago in Asia Minor. Sheep were kept for their milk, meat and especially their wool...
s, cowherds and other farm workers that are often romanticized
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
and depicted in a highly unrealistic manner. The pastoral life is usually characterized as being closer to the Golden age
Golden Age
The term Golden Age comes from Greek mythology and legend and refers to the first in a sequence of four or five Ages of Man, in which the Golden Age is first, followed in sequence, by the Silver, Bronze, and Iron Ages, and then the present, a period of decline...
than the rest of human life. The setting is a Locus Amoenus
Locus Amoenus
Latin for "pleasant place", locus amoenus is a literary term which generally refers to an idealized place of safety or comfort. A locus amoenus is usually a beautiful, shady lawn or open woodland, sometimes with connotations of Eden...
, or a beautiful place in nature, sometimes connected with images of the Garden of Eden
Garden of Eden
The Garden of Eden is in the Bible's Book of Genesis as being the place where the first man, Adam, and his wife, Eve, lived after they were created by God. Literally, the Bible speaks about a garden in Eden...
. An example of the use of the genre is the short poem by the 15th-century Scottish
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
makar
Makar
A makar is a term from Scottish literature for a poet or bard, often thought of as royal court poet, although the term can be more generally applied. The word functions in a manner similar to the Greek term which means both maker and poet...
Robert Henryson
Robert Henryson
Robert Henryson was a poet who flourished in Scotland in the period c. 1460–1500. Counted among the Scots makars, he lived in the royal burgh of Dunfermline and is a distinctive voice in the Northern Renaissance at a time when the culture was on a cusp between medieval and renaissance sensibilities...
Robene and Makyne
Robene and Makyne
"Robene and Makyne" is a short poem by the 15th-century Scottish makar Robert Henryson. It is an early example of Scottish pastourelle written in a form of ballad stanza and is almost unique of its kind. Very simple in structure and plot, yet highly compressed, multi-layered and open in possible...
which also contains the conflicted emotions often present in the genre. A more tranquil mood is set by Christopher Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe was an English dramatist, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. As the foremost Elizabethan tragedian, next to William Shakespeare, he is known for his blank verse, his overreaching protagonists, and his mysterious death.A warrant was issued for Marlowe's arrest on 18 May...
's well known lines from The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
"The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" is a poem written by the English poet Christopher Marlowe and published in 1599 . In addition to being one of the most well-known love poems in the English language, it is considered one of the earliest examples of the pastoral style of British poetry in the...
:
- Come live with me and be my Love,
- And we will all the pleasures prove
- That hills and valleys, dale and field,
- And all the craggy mountains yield.
- There will we sit upon the rocks
- And see the shepherds feed their flocks,
- By shallow rivers, to whose falls
- Melodious birds sing madrigals.
"The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" exhibits the concept of Gifford's second definition of pastoral. The speaker of the poem, who is the titled shepherd, draws on the idealization of urban material pleasures to win over his love rather than resorting to the simplified pleasures of pastoral ideology. This can be seen in the listed items: "lined slippers," "purest gold," "silver dishes," and "ivory table" (lines 13, 15, 16, 21, 23). The speaker takes on a voyeuristic point of view with his love, and they are not directly interacting with the other true shepherds and nature.
Pastoral shepherds and maidens usually have Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
names like Corydon or Philomela, reflecting the origin of the pastoral genre. Pastoral poems are set in beautiful rural landscapes, the literary term for which is "locus amoenus" (Latin for "beautiful place"), such as Arcadia
Arcadia
Arcadia is one of the regional units of Greece. It is part of the administrative region of Peloponnese. It is situated in the central and eastern part of the Peloponnese peninsula. It takes its name from the mythological character Arcas. In Greek mythology, it was the home of the god Pan...
, a rural region of Greece
Greece
Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....
, mythological home of the god Pan, which was portrayed as a sort of Eden
Garden of Eden
The Garden of Eden is in the Bible's Book of Genesis as being the place where the first man, Adam, and his wife, Eve, lived after they were created by God. Literally, the Bible speaks about a garden in Eden...
by the poets. The tasks of their employment with sheep and other rustic chores is held in the fantasy to be almost wholly undemanding and is left in the background, abandoning the shepherdesses and their swains in a state of almost perfect leisure
Leisure
Leisure, or free time, is time spent away from business, work, and domestic chores. It is also the periods of time before or after necessary activities such as eating, sleeping and, where it is compulsory, education....
. This makes them available for embodying perpetual erotic
Erotica
Erotica are works of art, including literature, photography, film, sculpture and painting, that deal substantively with erotically stimulating or sexually arousing descriptions...
fantasies. The shepherds spend their time chasing pretty girls — or, at least in the Greek and Roman versions, pretty lads as well. The eroticism of Virgil
Virgil
Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English , was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues , the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid...
's second eclogue
Eclogue
An eclogue is a poem in a classical style on a pastoral subject. Poems in the genre are sometimes also called bucolics.The form of the word in contemporary English is taken from French eclogue, from Old French, from Latin ecloga...
, Formosum pastor Corydon ardebat Alexin ("The shepherd Corydon burned with passion for pretty Alexis") is entirely homosexual, although the use of that term is anachronistic due to a lack of any idea of sexual identity in the times in which Virgil was writing.
Pastoral poetry
Theocritus
Theocritus , the creator of ancient Greek bucolic poetry, flourished in the 3rd century BC.-Life:Little is known of Theocritus beyond what can be inferred from his writings. We must, however, handle these with some caution, since some of the poems commonly attributed to him have little claim to...
, several of whose Idylls are set in the countryside (probably reflecting the landscape of the island of Cos
Kos
Kos or Cos is a Greek island in the south Sporades group of the Dodecanese, next to the Gulf of Gökova/Cos. It measures by , and is from the coast of Bodrum, Turkey and the ancient region of Caria. Administratively the island forms a separate municipality within the Kos peripheral unit, which is...
where the poet lived) and involve dialogues between herdsmen. Theocritus may have drawn on authentic folk traditions of Sicilian shepherds. He wrote in the Doric dialect
Doric Greek
Doric or Dorian was a dialect of ancient Greek. Its variants were spoken in the southern and eastern Peloponnese, Crete, Rhodes, some islands in the southern Aegean Sea, some cities on the coasts of Asia Minor, Southern Italy, Sicily, Epirus and Macedon. Together with Northwest Greek, it forms the...
but the metre he chose was the dactylic hexameter
Dactylic hexameter
Dactylic hexameter is a form of meter in poetry or a rhythmic scheme. It is traditionally associated with the quantitative meter of classical epic poetry in both Greek and Latin, and was consequently considered to be the Grand Style of classical poetry...
associated with the most prestigious form of Greek poetry, epic
Epic poetry
An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form...
. This blend of simplicity and sophistication would play a major part in later pastoral verse. Theocritus was imitated by the Greek poets Bion and Moschus
Moschus
Moschus , ancient Greek bucolic poet and student of the Alexandrian grammarian Aristarchus of Samothrace, was born at Syracuse and flourished about 150 BC...
.
The Roman poet Virgil
Virgil
Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English , was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues , the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid...
adapted pastoral into Latin with his highly influential Eclogues. Virgil introduces two very important uses of pastoral, the contrast between urban and rural lifestyles and political allegory most notably in Eclogues 1 and 4 respectively. In doing so, Virgil presents a more idealized portrayal of the lives of shepherds while still employing the traditional pastoral conventions of Theocritus. He was the first to set his poems in Arcadia, an idealized location to which much later pastoral literature will refer.
Horace
Horace
Quintus Horatius Flaccus , known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus.-Life:...
's The Epodes, ii Country Joys has "the dreaming man" Alfius, who dreams of escaping his busy urban life for the peaceful country. But as "the dreaming man" indicates, this is just a dream for Alfius. He is too consumed in his career as a usurer to leave it behind for the country.
Italian poets revived the pastoral from the 14th century onwards, first in Latin (examples include works by Petrarch
Petrarch
Francesco Petrarca , known in English as Petrarch, was an Italian scholar, poet and one of the earliest humanists. Petrarch is often called the "Father of Humanism"...
, Pontano and Mantuan
Baptista Mantuanus
Baptista Spagnuoli Mantuanus was an Italian Carmelite reformer, humanist, and poet.-Biography:Mantuan was born of a Spanish family that had settled in Mantua, the northern Italian city that gave him his most commonly used English name...
) then in the Italian vernacular (Boiardo). The fashion for pastoral spread throughout Renaissance Europe. In Spain, Garcilaso de la Vega
Garcilaso de la Vega
Garcilaso de la Vega was a Spanish soldier and poet. He was the most influential poet to introduce Italian Renaissance verse forms, poetic techniques and themes to Spain.-Biography:...
was an important pioneer and his motifs find themselves renewed in the 20th century Spanish language poet Giannina Braschi
Giannina Braschi
Giannina Braschi is a Puerto Rican writer. She is credited with writing the first Spanglish novel YO-YO BOING! and the poetry trilogy Empire of Dreams , which chronicles the Latin American immigrant's experiences in the United States...
. Leading French pastoral poets include Marot
Clément Marot
Clément Marot was a French poet of the Renaissance period.-Youth:Marot was born at Cahors, the capital of the province of Quercy, some time during the winter of 1496-1497. His father, Jean Marot , whose more correct name appears to have been des Mares, Marais or Marets, was a Norman from the Caen...
and Ronsard.
The first pastorals in English were the Eclogues (c. 1515) of Alexander Barclay
Alexander Barclay
Dr Alexander Barclay was an English/Scottish poet.-Biography:Barclay was born in about 1476. His place of birth is matter of dispute, but William Bulleyn, who was a native of Ely, and probably knew him when he was in the monastery there, asserts that he was born "beyonde the cold river of Twede"...
, which were heavily influenced by Mantuan. A landmark in English pastoral poetry was Spenser
Edmund Spenser
Edmund Spenser was an English poet best known for The Faerie Queene, an epic poem and fantastical allegory celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. He is recognised as one of the premier craftsmen of Modern English verse in its infancy, and one of the greatest poets in the English...
’s The Shepheardes Calender
The Shepheardes Calender
The Shepheardes Calender was Edmund Spenser's first major poetic work, published in 1579. In emulation of Virgil's first work, the Eclogues, Spenser wrote this series of pastorals to begin his career. However, Spenser's models were rather the Renaissance eclogues of Mantuanus. M. Y. Hughes. Virgil...
, first published in 1579. Spenser's work consists of twelve eclogues, one for each month of the year, and is written in dialect. It contains elegies
Elegy
In literature, an elegy is a mournful, melancholic or plaintive poem, especially a funeral song or a lament for the dead.-History:The Greek term elegeia originally referred to any verse written in elegiac couplets and covering a wide range of subject matter, including epitaphs for tombs...
, fable
Fable
A fable is a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, mythical creatures, plants, inanimate objects or forces of nature which are anthropomorphized , and that illustrates a moral lesson , which may at the end be expressed explicitly in a pithy maxim.A fable differs from...
s and a discussion of the role of poetry in contemporary England. Spenser and his friends appear under various pseudonyms (Spenser himself is "Colin Clout"). Spenser's example was imitated by such poets as Michael Drayton
Michael Drayton
Michael Drayton was an English poet who came to prominence in the Elizabethan era.-Early life:He was born at Hartshill, near Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England. Almost nothing is known about his early life, beyond the fact that in 1580 he was in the service of Thomas Goodere of Collingham,...
(Idea, The Shepherd's Garland) and William Browne (Britannia's Pastorals). During this period of England's history, many authors explored "anti-pastoral" themes. Two examples of this is Sir Philip Sidney's “The Twenty Third Psalm” and “The Nightingale” focus on the world in a very anti-pastoral view. In “The Twenty Third Psalm,” Nature is portrayed as something we need to be protected from, and in “The Nightingale,” the woe of Philomela is compared to the speaker's own pain. Additionally, he wrote Arcadia which has is filled with pastoral descriptions of the landscape. "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd
The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd
"The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd" was written by Sir Walter Raleigh in response to Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love"...
" (1600) by Sir Walter Raleigh also comments on the anti-pastoral as the nymph responds realistically to the idealizing shepherd of The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
"The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" is a poem written by the English poet Christopher Marlowe and published in 1599 . In addition to being one of the most well-known love poems in the English language, it is considered one of the earliest examples of the pastoral style of British poetry in the...
by embracing and explaining the true course of nature and its incompatibility with the love that the Shepherd yearns for with the nymph.
In the 17th century came the arrival of the Country house poem
Country house poem
A country house poem is a poem in which the author compliments a wealthy patron or a friend through a description of his country house. Such poems were popular in early 17th century England...
. Included in this genre is Aemilia Lanyer’s The Description of Cooke-ham in 1611, in which a woman is described in terms of her relationship to her estate and how it mourns for her when she leaves it. In 1616, Ben Jonson
Ben Jonson
Benjamin Jonson was an English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. A contemporary of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satirical plays, particularly Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, which are considered his best, and his lyric poems...
wrote To Penshurst, a poem in which he addresses the estate owned by the Sidney family and tells of its beauty. The basis of the poem is a harmonious and joyous elation of the memories that Jonson had at the manor. It is beautifully written with iambic pentameter, a style that Jonson so eloquently uses to describe the culture of Penshurst. It is very important to note the insertion of Pan and Bacchus as notable company of the manor. Pan, Greek god of the Pastoral world, half man and half goat, was connected with both hunting and shepherds; Bacchus
Bacchus
Bacchus is the Roman name for Dionysus, the god of wine and intoxication.Bacchus can also refer to:* Temple of Bacchus, a Roman temple at a large classical antiquity complex in Baalbek, Lebanon...
was the god of wine, intoxication and ritual madness. This reference to Pan and Bacchus in a pastoral view demonstrates how prestigious Penshurst was, to be worthy in the company with gods, notions of just how romanticized the estate was. "A Country Life", another 17th century work by Katherine Philips
Katherine Philips
Katherine Philips was an Anglo-Welsh poet.-Biography:Katherine Philips was the first Englishwoman to enjoy widespread public acclaim as a poet during her lifetime. Born in London, she was daughter of John Fowler, a Presbyterian, and a merchant of Bucklersbury, London. Philips is said to have read...
, was also a country house poem. Philips focuses on the joys of the countryside and looks upon the lifestyle that accompanies it as being “the first and happiest life, when man enjoyed himself.” She writes about maintaining this lifestyle by living detached from material things, and by not over-concerning herself with the world around her. Andrew Marvell
Andrew Marvell
Andrew Marvell was an English metaphysical poet, Parliamentarian, and the son of a Church of England clergyman . As a metaphysical poet, he is associated with John Donne and George Herbert...
's “Upon Appleton House
Upon Appleton House
Upon Appleton House is a poem written by Andrew Marvell for Thomas Fairfax, 3rd Lord Fairfax of Cameron. It was written in 1651, when Marvell was working as a tutor for Fairfax's daughter, Mary...
” was written when Marvell was working as a tutor for Lord Fairfax's daughter Mary, in 1651. The poem is very rich with metaphors that relate to religion, politics and history. Similar to Jonson's “To Penshurst”, Marvell's poem is describing a pastoral estate. It moves through the house itself, its history, the gardens, the meadows and other grounds, the woods, the river, his Pupil Mary, and the future. Marvell used nature as a thread to weave together a poem centered around man. We once again see nature fully providing for man. Marvell also continuously compares nature to art and seems to point out that art can never accomplish on purpose what nature can achieve accidentally or spontaneously.
Robert Herrick
Robert Herrick
Robert Herrick may refer to:* Robert Herrick , American novelist* Robert Herrick , English poet...
's The Hock-cart, or Harvest Home was also written in the 17th century. In this pastoral work, he paints the reader a colorful picture of the benefits reaped from hard work. This is an atypical interpretation of the pastoral, given that there is a celebration of labor involved as opposed to central figures living in leisure and nature just taking its course independently. This poem was mentioned in Raymond Williams
Raymond Williams
Raymond Henry Williams was a Welsh academic, novelist and critic. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts...
', The Country and the City. This acknowledgment of Herrick's work is appropriate, as both Williams and Herrick accentuate the importance of labor in the pastoral lifestyle.
The Pastoral Elegy
Pastoral Elegy
The Pastoral Elegy is a hymn from the "Old Missouri Harmony Songbook". The Town of Corydon, Indiana is named after a person in this hymn. The mournful, period song tells the tale of a young shepherd boy named Corydon who died....
is a sub-genre that uses pastoral elements to lament a death or loss. The most famous pastoral elegy in English is John Milton
John Milton
John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...
's "Lycidas
Lycidas
"Lycidas" is a poem by John Milton, written in 1637 as a pastoral elegy. It first appeared in a 1638 collection of elegies, entitled Justa Edouardo King Naufrago, dedicated to the memory of Edward King, a collegemate of Milton's at Cambridge who drowned when his ship sank in the Irish Sea off the...
" (1637), written on the death of Edward King, a fellow student at Cambridge University. Milton used the form both to explore his vocation as a writer and to attack what he saw as the abuses of the Church. Also included is Thomas Gray
Thomas Gray
Thomas Gray was a poet, letter-writer, classical scholar and professor at Cambridge University.-Early life and education:...
's, "Elegy on a Country Churchyard" (1750).
The formal English pastoral continued to flourish during the 18th century, eventually dying out at the end. One notable example of an 18th century work is Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope was an 18th-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson...
's Pastorals (1709). In this work Pope imitates Edmund Spencer's Shepheardes Calendar, while utilizing classical names and allusions aligning him with Virgil
Virgil
Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English , was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues , the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid...
. In 1717, Pope's Discourse on Pastoral Poetry was published as a preface to Pastorals. In this work Pope sets standards for pastoral literature and critiques many popular poets, one of whom is Spencer, along with his contemporary opponent Ambrose Phillips. During this time period Ambrose Phillips, who is often overlooked because of Pope, modeled his poetry after the Native English form of Pastoral, employing it as a medium to express the true nature and longing of Man. He strove to write in this fashion so as to not stray from what he thought was the original intent of Pastoral literature. As such, he centered his themes around the simplistic life of the Shepherd, and, personified the relationship that humans once had with nature. John Gay
John Gay
John Gay was an English poet and dramatist and member of the Scriblerus Club. He is best remembered for The Beggar's Opera , set to music by Johann Christoph Pepusch...
, who came a little later was criticized for his poem's artificiality by Doctor Johnson
Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson , often referred to as Dr. Johnson, was an English author who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer...
and attacked for their lack of realism by George Crabbe
George Crabbe
George Crabbe was an English poet and naturalist.-Biography:He was born in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, the son of a tax collector, and developed his love of poetry as a child. In 1768, he was apprenticed to a local doctor, who taught him little, and in 1771 he changed masters and moved to Woodbridge...
, who attempted to give a true picture of rural life in his poem The Village. In 1590, Edmund Spenser also composed a very famous pastoral epic called The Faerie Queene
The Faerie Queene
The Faerie Queene is an incomplete English epic poem by Edmund Spenser. The first half was published in 1590, and a second installment was published in 1596. The Faerie Queene is notable for its form: it was the first work written in Spenserian stanza and is one of the longest poems in the English...
, in which he employs the pastoral mode so as to accentuate the charm, lushness, and splendor of the poem's (super)natural world. Spenser alludes to the pastoral continuously throughout the work and also uses it so as to create allegory in his poem, with the characters as well as with the environment, both of which are meant to have symbolic meaning in the real world. It is composed of six books but Spenser intended to write twelve. He wrote the poem primarily to honor Queen Elizabeth. William Cowper
William Cowper
William Cowper was an English poet and hymnodist. One of the most popular poets of his time, Cowper changed the direction of 18th century nature poetry by writing of everyday life and scenes of the English countryside. In many ways, he was one of the forerunners of Romantic poetry...
addressed the artificiality of the fast paced city life in his poems Retirement (1782) and The Winter Nosegay (1782). Pastoral nevertheless survived as a mood rather than a genre, as can be seen from such works as Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold was a British poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator...
's Thyrsis (1867), a lament on the death of his fellow poet Arthur Hugh Clough
Arthur Hugh Clough
Arthur Hugh Clough was an English poet, an educationalist, and the devoted assistant to ground-breaking nurse Florence Nightingale...
. Robert Burns
Robert Burns
Robert Burns was a Scottish poet and a lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland, and is celebrated worldwide...
can be read as a Pastoral poet for his nostalgic portrayals of rural Scotland and simple farm life in To A Mouse and The Cotter's Saturday Night. Burns explicitly addresses the Pastoral form in his Poem on Pastoral Poetry. In this he champions his fellow Scot Allan Ramsey as the best Pastoral poet since Theocritus
Theocritus
Theocritus , the creator of ancient Greek bucolic poetry, flourished in the 3rd century BC.-Life:Little is known of Theocritus beyond what can be inferred from his writings. We must, however, handle these with some caution, since some of the poems commonly attributed to him have little claim to...
.
Another sub-genre is the Edenic Pastoral, which alludes to the perfect relationship between God, man, and nature in the Garden of Eden
Garden of Eden
The Garden of Eden is in the Bible's Book of Genesis as being the place where the first man, Adam, and his wife, Eve, lived after they were created by God. Literally, the Bible speaks about a garden in Eden...
. It typically includes biblical symbols and imagery. In 1645 John Milton wrote L'Allegro
L'Allegro
L'Allegro is a pastoral poem by John Milton published in 1645. L'Allegro is invariably paired with the contrasting pastoral poem, Il Penseroso , which depicts a similar day spent in contemplation and thought.-Background:It is uncertain when L'Allegro and Il Penseroso were composed because they do...
, which translates as the happy person. It is a celebration of Mirth personified, who is the child of love and revelry. It was originally composed to be a companion poem to, Il Penseroso
Il Penseroso
Il Penseroso is a vision of poetic melancholy by John Milton. Presented in the 1645 folio of verses, The Poems of Mr. John Milton, both English and Latin, Il Penseroso was presented as a companion piece to L'Allegro, a vision of poetic Mirth...
, which celebrates a life of melancholy and solitude. Milton's, On the Morning of Christ's Nativity
On the Morning of Christ's Nativity
On the Morning of Christ's Nativity is a nativity ode written by John Milton in 1629 and published in his Poems of Mr. John Milton . The poem describes Christ's Incarnation and his overthrow of earthly and pagan powers...
(1629) blends Christian and pastoral imagery.
Pastoral Epic
Milton is perhaps best known for his epic Paradise LostParadise Lost
Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton. It was originally published in 1667 in ten books, with a total of over ten thousand individual lines of verse...
, one of the few Pastoral epics ever written. A notable part of Paradise Lost is book IV where he chronicles Satan’s trespass into paradise. Milton’s iconic descriptions of the garden are shadowed by the fact that we see it from Satan’s perspective and are thus led to commiserate with him. Milton elegantly works through a presentation of Adam and Eve
Adam and Eve
Adam and Eve were, according to the Genesis creation narratives, the first human couple to inhabit Earth, created by YHWH, the God of the ancient Hebrews...
’s pastorally idyllic, eternally fertile living conditions and focuses upon their stewardship of the garden. He gives much focus to the fruit bearing trees and Adam and Eve's care of them, sculpting an image of pastoral harmony. However, Milton in turn continually comes back to Satan, constructing him as a character the audience can easily identify with and perhaps even like. Milton creates Satan as character meant to destabilize the audience’s understanding of themselves and the world around them. Through this mode, Milton is able to create a working dialogue between the text and his audience about the ‘truths’ they hold for themselves.
Pastoral romances
Italian writers invented a new genre, the pastoral romance, which mixed pastoral poems with a fictional narrative in prose. Although there was no classical precedent for the form, it drew some inspiration from ancient Greek novels set in the countryside, such as Daphnis and ChloeDaphnis and Chloe
Daphnis and Chloe is the only known work of the 2nd century AD Greek novelist and romancer Longus.-Setting and style:It is set on the isle of Lesbos during the 2nd century AD, which is also assumed to be the author's home. Its style is rhetorical and pastoral; its shepherds and shepherdesses are...
. The most influential Italian example of the form was Sannazzaro's Arcadia (1504). The vogue for the pastoral romance spread throughout Europe producing such notable works as Bernardim Ribeiro
Bernardim Ribeiro
Bernardim Ribeiro was a Portuguese poet and writer. His father, Damião Ribeiro, was implicated in the conspiracy against John II of Portugal...
"Menina e Moça" (1554) in Portuguese, Montemayor
Jorge de Montemayor
Jorge de Montemayor was a Portuguese novelist and poet, who wrote almost exclusively in Spanish.-Biography:He was born at Montemor-o-Velho , whence he derived his name, the Spanish form of which is Montemayor....
's Diana (1559) in Spain, Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia (1590) in England, and Honoré d'Urfé
Honoré d'Urfé
Honoré d'Urfé, marquis de Valromey, comte de Châteauneuf was a French novelist and miscellaneous writer.- Life :...
's Astrée (1607–27) in France.
Pastoral plays
Pastoral drama also emerged in Renaissance Italy. Again, there was little Classical precedent, with the possible exception of Greek satyr playSatyr play
Satyr plays were an ancient Greek form of tragicomedy, similar in spirit to burlesque. They featured choruses of satyrs, were based on Greek mythology, and were rife with mock drunkenness, brazen sexuality , pranks, sight gags, and general merriment.Satyric drama was one of the three varieties of...
s. Poliziano
Poliziano
Angelo Ambrogini, commonly known by his nickname, anglicized as Politian, Italian Poliziano, Latin Politianus was an Italian Renaissance classical scholar and poet, one of the revivers of Humanist Latin...
's Orfeo (1480) shows the beginnings of the new form, but it reached its zenith in the late 16th century with Tasso
Torquato Tasso
Torquato Tasso was an Italian poet of the 16th century, best known for his poem La Gerusalemme liberata , in which he depicts a highly imaginative version of the combats between Christians and Muslims at the end of the First Crusade, during the siege of Jerusalem...
's Aminta
Aminta
Aminta is a play written by Torquato Tasso in 1573, represented during a garden party at the court of Ferrara. Both the actors and the public were noble persons living at the Court, who could understand subtle allusions the poet made to that style of life, in contrast with the life of shepherds,...
(1573), Isabella Andreini
Isabella Andreini
Isabella Andreini , also known as Isabella Da Padova, was an Italian actress and writer.Isabella Andreini was a member of the Compagnia dei Comici Gelosi, an important touring theatre company that performed for the highest social circles of Italy and France...
's Mirtilla (1588), and Guarini's Il pastor fido (1590). John Lyly
John Lyly
John Lyly was an English writer, best known for his books Euphues,The Anatomy of Wit and Euphues and His England. Lyly's linguistic style, originating in his first books, is known as Euphuism.-Biography:John Lyly was born in Kent, England, in 1553/1554...
's Endimion (1579) brought the Italian-style pastoral play to England. John Fletcher
John Fletcher (playwright)
John Fletcher was a Jacobean playwright. Following William Shakespeare as house playwright for the King's Men, he was among the most prolific and influential dramatists of his day; both during his lifetime and in the early Restoration, his fame rivalled Shakespeare's...
's The Faithful Shepherdess, Ben Jonson
Ben Jonson
Benjamin Jonson was an English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. A contemporary of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satirical plays, particularly Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, which are considered his best, and his lyric poems...
's The Sad Shepherd and Sidney's The Lady of May
The Lady of May
The Lady of May is a one-act play by the English Renaissance poet Sir Philip Sidney. The play, which draws upon the literary tradition of pastoral, is notable for its allegorical content relating to Queen Elizabeth I, for whom the first production was performed at the Earl of Leicester's country...
are later examples. Some of Shakespeare's plays contain pastoral elements, most notably As You Like It
As You Like It
As You Like It is a pastoral comedy by William Shakespeare believed to have been written in 1599 or early 1600 and first published in the folio of 1623. The play's first performance is uncertain, though a performance at Wilton House in 1603 has been suggested as a possibility...
(whose plot was derived from Thomas Lodge
Thomas Lodge
Thomas Lodge was an English dramatist and writer of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.-Early life and education:...
's pastoral romance Rosalynde) and The Winter's Tale
The Winter's Tale
The Winter's Tale is a play by William Shakespeare, originally published in the First Folio of 1623. Although it was grouped among the comedies, some modern editors have relabelled the play as one of Shakespeare's late romances. Some critics, among them W. W...
, of which Act 4 Scene 4 is a lengthy pastoral digression. The forest in As You Like It can be seen as a place of pastoral idealization, where life is simpler and purer, and its inhabitants live more closely to each other, nature and God than their urban counterparts. However, Shakespeare plays with the bounds of pastoral idealization. Throughout the play, Shakespeare employs various characters to illustrate pastoralism. His protagonists Rosalind
Rosalind (As You Like It)
Rosalind is a fictional character and the romantic female lead in the comedy As You Like It by William Shakespeare.She is the daughter of the exiled Duke Senior and niece to his usurping brother Duke Frederick. After angering her uncle, she leaves his court for exile in the Forest of Arden...
and Orlando
Orlando (As You Like It)
Orlando is a fictional character and the romantic male lead in the comedy As You Like It by William Shakespeare.Orlando is the youngest son of the deceased Sir Rowland de Boys and a brother to Oliver. He was resents the harsh treatment he receives at Oliver's hands and complains that Oliver...
metaphorically depict the importance of the coexistence of realism and idealism, or urban and rural life. While Orlando is absorbed in the ideal, Rosalind serves as a mediator, bringing Orlando back down to reality and embracing the simplicity of pastoral love. She is the only character throughout the play who embraces and appreciates both the real and idealized life and manages to make the two ideas coexist. Therefore, Shakespeare explores city and country life as being appreciated through the coexistence of the two.
Pastoral music
Theocritus's Idylls include strophic songs and musical laments, and, as in HomerHomer
In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...
, his shepherds often play the syrinx
Syrinx
In classical mythology, Syrinx was a nymph and a follower of Artemis, known for her chastity. Pursued by the amorous Greek god Pan, she ran to the river's edge and asked for assistance from the river nymphs. In answer, she was transformed into hollow water reeds that made a haunting sound when...
, or Pan flute
Pan flute
The pan flute or pan pipe is an ancient musical instrument based on the principle of the closed tube, consisting usually of five or more pipes of gradually increasing length...
, considered a quintessentially pastoral instrument. Virgil's Eclogues were performed as sung mime in the 1st century, and there is evidence of the pastoral song as a legitimate genre of classical times.
The pastoral genre was a significant influence in the development of opera
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
. After settings of pastoral poetry in the pastourelle
Pastourelle
The pastourelle is a typically Old French lyric form concerning the romance of a shepherdess. In most of the early pastourelles, the poet knight meets a shepherdess who bests him in a wit battle and who displays general coyness. The narrator usually has sexual relations, either consensual or...
genre by the troubadour
Troubadour
A troubadour was a composer and performer of Old Occitan lyric poetry during the High Middle Ages . Since the word "troubadour" is etymologically masculine, a female troubadour is usually called a trobairitz....
s, Italian poets and composers became increasingly drawn to the pastoral. Musical settings of pastoral poetry became increasingly common in first polyphonic and then monodic madrigal
Madrigal
-Music:* Madrigal , a European musical form of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries** Madrigal dinner, a form of dinner theater incorporating comedy, madrigals, and a feast...
s: these later led to the cantata
Cantata
A cantata is a vocal composition with an instrumental accompaniment, typically in several movements, often involving a choir....
and the serenata, in which pastoral themes remained on a consistent basis. Partial musical settings of Giovanni Battista Guarini
Giovanni Battista Guarini
Giovanni Battista Guarini was an Italian poet, dramatist, and diplomat.- Life :He was born in Ferrara, and spent his early life both in Padua and Ferrara, entering the service of Alfonso II d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, in 1567...
's Il pastor fido were highly popular: the texts of over 500 madrigals were taken from this one play alone. Tasso
Torquato Tasso
Torquato Tasso was an Italian poet of the 16th century, best known for his poem La Gerusalemme liberata , in which he depicts a highly imaginative version of the combats between Christians and Muslims at the end of the First Crusade, during the siege of Jerusalem...
's Aminta was also a favourite. As opera
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
developed, the dramatic pastoral came to the fore with such works as Jacopo Peri
Jacopo Peri
Jacopo Peri was an Italian composer and singer of the transitional period between the Renaissance and Baroque styles, and is often called the inventor of opera...
's Dafne
Dafne
Dafne is the earliest known work that, by modern standards, could be considered an opera. It was composed by Jacopo Peri in 1597, with a libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini.-History:...
and, most notably, Monteverdi's L'Orfeo. Pastoral opera remained popular throughout the 17th-century, and not just in Italy, as is shown by the French genre of pastorale héroïque
Pastorale héroïque
Pastorale héroïque was a type of ballet héroïque, a form of the opéra-ballet genre of French Baroque opera. The first work to bear the name was Jean-Baptiste Lully's final completed opera Acis et Galatée , although musical works on pastoral themes had already appeared on the French stage...
, Englishman Henry Lawes
Henry Lawes
Henry Lawes was an English musician and composer.He was born at Dinton in Wiltshire, and received his musical education from John Cooper, better known under his Italian pseudonym Giovanni Coperario, a famous composer of the day...
's music for Milton's
John Milton
John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...
Comus
Comus (John Milton)
Comus is a masque in honour of chastity, written by John Milton. It was first presented on Michaelmas, 1634, before John Egerton, 1st Earl of Bridgewater at Ludlow Castle in celebration of the Earl's new post as Lord President of Wales.Known colloquially as Comus, the mask's actual full title is A...
(not to mention John Blow
John Blow
John Blow was an English Baroque composer and organist, appointed to Westminster Abbey in 1669. His pupils included William Croft, Jeremiah Clarke and Henry Purcell. In 1685 he was named a private musician to James II. His only stage composition, Venus and Adonis John Blow (baptised 23 February...
's Venus and Adonis
Venus and Adonis (opera)
Venus and Adonis is an opera in three acts and a prologue by the English Baroque composer John Blow, composed in about 1683. It was written for the court of King Charles II at either London or Windsor. It is considered by some to be either a semi-opera or a masque, but The New Grove names it as the...
), and Spanish zarzuela
Zarzuela
Zarzuela is a Spanish lyric-dramatic genre that alternates between spoken and sung scenes, the latter incorporating operatic and popular song, as well as dance...
. At the same time, Italian and German composers developed a genre of vocal and instrumental pastorals, distinguished by certain stylistic features, associated with Christmas Eve.
The pastoral, and parodies of the pastoral, continued to play an important role in musical history throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. John Gay
John Gay
John Gay was an English poet and dramatist and member of the Scriblerus Club. He is best remembered for The Beggar's Opera , set to music by Johann Christoph Pepusch...
may have satirized the pastoral in The Beggar's Opera
The Beggar's Opera
The Beggar's Opera is a ballad opera in three acts written in 1728 by John Gay with music arranged by Johann Christoph Pepusch. It is one of the watershed plays in Augustan drama and is the only example of the once thriving genre of satirical ballad opera to remain popular today...
, but also wrote an entirely sincere libretto for Handel
HANDEL
HANDEL was the code-name for the UK's National Attack Warning System in the Cold War. It consisted of a small console consisting of two microphones, lights and gauges. The reason behind this was to provide a back-up if anything failed....
's Acis and Galatea. Rousseau's Le Devin du village
Le Devin du Village
Le devin du village is an interméde, a one-act opera by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who also wrote the libretto.It was first performed before the court at Fontainebleau on 18 October 1752 and at the Paris Opéra on 1 March 1753. King Louis XV loved the work so much that he offered Rousseau the great...
draws on pastoral roots, and Metastasio
Metastasio
Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi, better known by his pseudonym of Metastasio, was an Italian poet and librettist, considered the most important writer of opera seria libretti.-Early life:...
's libretto Il re pastore
Il re pastore
Il re pastore is an opera, K. 208, written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to an Italian libretto by Metastasio, edited by Gianbattista Varesco. It is an opera seria...
was set over 30 times, most famously by Mozart. Rameau was an outstanding exponent of French pastoral opera. Beethoven also wrote his famous Pastoral Symphony, avoiding his usual musical dynamism in favour of relatively slow rhythms. More concerned with psychology than description, he labelled the work "more the expression of feeling than [realistic] painting". The pastoral also appeared as a feature of grand opera
Grand Opera
Grand opera is a genre of 19th-century opera generally in four or five acts, characterised by large-scale casts and orchestras, and lavish and spectacular design and stage effects, normally with plots based on or around dramatic historic events...
, most particularly in Meyerbeer's operas: often composers would develop a pastoral-themed "oasis", usually in the centre of their work. Notable examples include the shepherd's "alte Weise" from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde
Tristan und Isolde
Tristan und Isolde is an opera, or music drama, in three acts by Richard Wagner to a German libretto by the composer, based largely on the romance by Gottfried von Straßburg. It was composed between 1857 and 1859 and premiered in Munich on 10 June 1865 with Hans von Bülow conducting...
, or the pastoral ballet occupying the middle of Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades
The Queen of Spades (opera)
The Queen of Spades, Op. 68 is an opera in 3 acts by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky to a Russian libretto by the composer's brother Modest Tchaikovsky, based on a short story of the same name by Alexander Pushkin. The premiere took place in 1890 in St...
. The 20th-century continued to bring new pastoral interpretations, particularly in ballet, such as Ravel's Daphis and Chloe, Nijinsky's use of Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune
Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune
Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune , commonly known by its English title Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, is a symphonic poem for orchestra by Claude Debussy, approximately 10 minutes in duration...
, and Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps and Les Noces.
The Pastorale
Pastorale
For Beethoven's Pastoral symphony, see Symphony No. 6 Pastorale refers to something of a pastoral nature in music, whether in form or in mood....
is a form of Italian folk song
Italian folk music
Italian folk music has a deep and complex history. National unification came quite late to the Italian peninsula, so its many hundreds of separate cultures remained un-homogenized until quite recently compared to many other European countries...
still played in the regions of Southern Italy where the zampogna
Zampogna
Zampogna is a generic term for a number of Italian double chantered pipes that can be found as far north as the southern part of the Marche, throughout areas in Abruzzo, Latium, Molise, Basilicata, Campania, Calabria, and Sicily...
continues to thrive. They generally sound like a slowed down version of a tarantella
Tarantella
The term tarantella groups a number of different southern Italian couple folk dances characterized by a fast upbeat tempo, usually in 6/8 time , accompanied by tambourines. It is among the most recognized of traditional Italian music. The specific dance name varies with every region, for instance...
, as they encompass many of the same melodic phrases. The pastorale on the zampogna can be played by a solo zampogna player, or in some regions can be accompanied by the piffero (also commonly called a ciaramella, 'pipita', or bifora
Bifora
The bifora or pifara was a Sicilian double reed instrument of the oboe family, related to the ancient shawm and particularly to the piffero of the northern Italian Apennines. Much larger than the piffero, and made in one piece, it was employed together with drums in ceremonial processions,...
), which is a primitive key-less double reed oboe
Oboe
The oboe is a double reed musical instrument of the woodwind family. In English, prior to 1770, the instrument was called "hautbois" , "hoboy", or "French hoboy". The spelling "oboe" was adopted into English ca...
type instrument.
Pastoral art
Idealised pastoral landscapes appear in Hellenistic and Roman wall paintings. Interest in the pastoral as a subject for art revived in Renaissance Italy, partly inspired by the descriptions of pictures Sannazzaro included in his Arcadia. The Fête champêtre (Pastoral Concert) attributed to GiorgioneGiorgione
Giorgione was a Venetian painter of the High Renaissance in Venice, whose career was cut off by his death at a little over thirty. Giorgione is known for the elusive poetic quality of his work, though only about six surviving paintings are acknowledged for certain to be his work...
is perhaps the most famous painting in this style. Later, French artists were also attracted to the pastoral, notably Claude
Claude Lorrain
Claude Lorrain, , traditionally just Claude in English Claude Lorrain, , traditionally just Claude in English (also Claude Gellée, his real name, or in French Claude Gellée, , dit le Lorrain) Claude Lorrain, , traditionally just Claude in English (also Claude Gellée, his real name, or in French...
, Poussin
Poussin
Poussin refers to:*Charles Jean de la Vallée-Poussin Belgian mathematician*Charles-Louis-Joseph-Xavier de la Vallée-Poussin Belgian geologist and mineralogist, father of Charles Jean*Nicolas Poussin , French painter...
(e.g. Et in Arcadia ego
Et in Arcadia ego
"Et in Arcadia ego" is a Latin phrase that most famously appears as the title of two paintings by Nicolas Poussin . They are pastoral paintings depicting idealized shepherds from classical antiquity, clustering around an austere tomb...
) and Watteau (in his Fêtes galantes). Thomas Cole
Thomas Cole
Thomas Cole was an English-born American artist. He is regarded as the founder of the Hudson River School, an American art movement that flourished in the mid-19th century...
has a series of paintings titled The Course of Empire
The Course of Empire
The Course of Empire is a five-part series of paintings created by Thomas Cole in the years 1833-36. It is notable in part for reflecting popular American sentiments of the times, when many saw pastoralism as the ideal phase of human civilization, fearing that empire would lead to gluttony and...
, and the second of these paintings (shown on the right) depicts the perfect pastoral setting.
Pastoral theory
In the past four hundred years, a range of writers have worked on theorizing the nature of pastoral. These include Friedrich SchillerFriedrich Schiller
Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller was a German poet, philosopher, historian, and playwright. During the last seventeen years of his life , Schiller struck up a productive, if complicated, friendship with already famous and influential Johann Wolfgang von Goethe...
, George Puttenham
George Puttenham
George Puttenham was a sixteenth-century English writer, literary critic, and notorious rake. He is generally considered to be the author of the enormously influential handbook on poetry and rhetoric, The Arte of English Poesie ....
, William Empson
William Empson
Sir William Empson was an English literary critic and poet.He was known as "燕卜荪" in Chinese.He was widely influential for his practice of closely reading literary works, fundamental to the New Critics...
, Frank Kermode
Frank Kermode
Sir John Frank Kermode was a highly regarded British literary critic best known for his seminal critical work The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, published in 1967 ....
, Raymond Williams
Raymond Williams
Raymond Henry Williams was a Welsh academic, novelist and critic. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts...
, Renato Poggioli
Renato Poggioli
Renato Poggioli was an Italian literary critic and specialist in Russian literature. He is known for his book Teoria dell'arte d'avanguardia of 1962, translated into English as The Theory of the Avant-garde. In it he argued for the strict connection of the avant garde with the legacy of...
, Annabel Patterson, Paul Alpers, and Ken Hiltner.
George Puttenham
George Puttenham
George Puttenham was a sixteenth-century English writer, literary critic, and notorious rake. He is generally considered to be the author of the enormously influential handbook on poetry and rhetoric, The Arte of English Poesie ....
was one of the first Pastoral theorists. He did not see the form as merely a recording of a prior rustic way of life but a guise for political discourse, which other forms had previously neglected. The Pastoral, he writes, has a didactic duty to “contain and enforme morall discipline for the amendment of mans behaviour”.
Friedrich Schiller
Friedrich Schiller
Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller was a German poet, philosopher, historian, and playwright. During the last seventeen years of his life , Schiller struck up a productive, if complicated, friendship with already famous and influential Johann Wolfgang von Goethe...
linked the Pastoral to childhood and a child-like simplicity. For Schiller, we perceive in nature an “image of our infancy irrevocably past”.
Sir William Empson spoke of the ideal of Pastoral as being embedded in varying degrees of ambivalence, and yet, for all of the apparent dichotomies, and contradicting elements found within it, he felt there was a unified harmony within it. He refers to the pastoral process as 'putting the complex into the simple.' Empson argues that ". . . good proletarian art is usually Covert Pastoral", and uses Soviet Russia's propaganda about the working class as evidence. Empson also emphasizes the importance of the double plot as a tool for writers to discuss a controversial topic without repercussions.
Raymond Williams
Raymond Williams
Raymond Henry Williams was a Welsh academic, novelist and critic. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts...
argues that the foundation of the pastoral lies in the idea that the city is a highly urban, industrialized center that has removed us from the peaceful life we once had in the countryside. However, he states that this is really a "myth functioning as a memory" that literature has created in its representations of the past. As a result, when society evolves and looks back to these representations, it considers its own present as the decline of the simple life of the past. He then discusses how the city's relationship with the country affected the economic and social aspects of the countryside. As the economy became a bigger part of society, many country new-comers quickly realized the potential and monetary value that lay in the untouched land. Furthermore, this new system encouraged a social stratification in the countryside. With the implementation of paper money came a hierarchy in the working system, as well as the "inheritance of titles and making of family names".
Poggioli
Renato Poggioli
Renato Poggioli was an Italian literary critic and specialist in Russian literature. He is known for his book Teoria dell'arte d'avanguardia of 1962, translated into English as The Theory of the Avant-garde. In it he argued for the strict connection of the avant garde with the legacy of...
was concerned with how death reconciled itself with the pastoral, and thus came up with a loose categorization of death in the pastoral as 'funeral elegy', the most important tropes of which he cites as religion (embodied by Pan); friendship; allegory;and poetic and musical calling. He concedes though that such a categorization is open to much misinterpretation. As well, Poggioli focused on the idea that Pastoral was a nostalgic and childish way of seeing the world. In The Oaten Flue, he claims that the shepherd was looked up to was because they were “an ideal kind of leisure class."
Frank Kermode
Frank Kermode
Sir John Frank Kermode was a highly regarded British literary critic best known for his seminal critical work The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, published in 1967 ....
discusses the pastoral within the historical context of the English Renaissance. His first condition of pastoral poetry is that it is an urban product. Kermode establishes that the pastoral is derived as an opposition between two modes of living, in the country and in the city. London was becoming a modern metropolis before the eyes of its citizens. The result of this large-scale urban sprawl left the people with a sense of nostalgia for their country way of living. His next argument focuses on the artificiality of poetry, drawing upon fellow theorist, Puttenham. Kermode elaborates on this and says, "the cultivated, in their artificial way, reflect upon and describe, for their own ends, the natural life". Kermode wants us to understand that the recreation or reproduction of the natural is in itself artificial. Kermode elaborates on this in terms of imitation, describing it as "one of the fundamental laws of literary history" because it "gives literary history a meaning in terms of itself, and provides the channels of literary tradition". Kermode goes on to explain about the works of Virgil and Theocritus as progenitors of the pastoral. Later poets would draw on these earlier forms of pastoral, elaborating on them to fit their own social context. As the pastoral was becoming more modern, it shifted into the form of Pastourelle. This is the first time that the pastoral really deals with the subject of love.
Annabel Patterson emphasizes many important ideas in her work, Pastoral and Ideology. One of these is that the pastoral mode, especially in the later 18th century, was interpreted in vastly different ways by different groups of people. As a result, distinctive illustrations emerged from these groups which were all variations of the understanding of Virgil’s Eclogues. Patterson explains that Servius' Commentary is essential to understanding the reception of Virgil's Eclogues. The commentary discusses how poets used analogy in their writings to indirectly express the corruption within the church and government to the public. When speaking of post-Romanticism, it is imperative to take into consideration the influence and effect of Robert Frost
Robert Frost
Robert Lee Frost was an American poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and...
on pastoral ideology. His poem, Build Soil is a critique of war and also a suggestion that pastoral, as a literary mode, should not place emphasis on social and political issues, but should rather, as Patterson says, "turn in upon itself, and replace reformist instincts with personal growth and regeneration". William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads....
was a highly respected poet in the 1800s and his poem, Prelude, published in 1805, was an excellent example of what a dream of a new golden age might materialize as or look like.
Paul Alpers, In his 1997 book, What is Pastoral?, describes the recurring plot of pastoral literature as the lives of shepherds. With William Empson's notion of placing the complex into the simple, Alpers thus critically defines pastoral as a means of allegory. Alpers also classifies pastoral as a mode of literature, as opposed to a genre, and he defines the attitude of pastoral works maintaining a humble relationship with nature. Alpers also defines pastoral convention as the act of bringing together, and authors use this to discuss loss. He says the speakers in pastoral works are simple herdsmen dramatized in pastoral encounters. However, authors like Herrick changed the herdsmen to nymphs, maidens, and flowers. Thus, achieving a mode of simplicity but also giving objects voice. This is done by personifying objects like flowers. Moreover, authors that do this in their works are giving importance to the unimportant. Alpers talks about pastoral lyrics and love poems in particular. In regards to lyrics he says "a lyric allows its speaker to slip in and out of pastoral guise and reveal directly the sophistication which prompted him to assume it in the first place″. In other words, he claims pastorals lyrics have both pastoral and not pastoral characteristics, perhaps like in the comparisons between urban and rural, but they always give importance to and enhance on the pastoral. Alpers talks about love poems and how they can be turned into pastoral poems simply by changing words like lover to shepherd. And he mentions Shakespeare as one of the authors who did this in his works. Furthermore, Alpers says the pastoral is not only about praise for the rural and the country side. For instance, Sidney dispraises the country life in The Garden. Pastoral can also include the urban, the court, and the social like in L’Allegro. In regards to pastoral narration, Alpers says that pastoral narration contradicts “normal” narrative motives and that there is a double aspect of pastoral narration: heroic poetry and worldly realities with narrative motives and conventions. And in respect to pastoral novels, Alpers says pastoral novels have different definitions and examples depending on the reader. Also, the pastoral novel differs from Theocritus and Virgil’s works. He says there are pastoral novels of the country life, of the longing for the simple, and with nature as the protagonist. And says the literary category of pastoral novels is realistic and post-realistic fiction with a rural theme or subject based on traditional pastoral.
In What Else Is Pastoral?, Ken Hiltner argues that Renaissance pastoral poetry is more often a form of nature writing than critics like Paul Alpers and Annabel Patterson give it credit for. He explains that even though there is a general lack of lavish description in Renaissance Pastoral, this is because they were beginning to use gestural strategies, and artists begin to develop an environmental consciousness as nature around them becomes endangered. Another argument presented in the book is that our current environmental crisis clearly has its roots in the Renaissance. To do this we are shown examples in Renaissance pastoral poetry that show a keen awareness of the urban sprawl of London contrasted to the countryside and historical records showing that many at the time were aware of the issue of urban growth and attempted to stop it.
External links
- Two Idylls by Theocritus (English)
- The Eclogues of Virgil
- The complete works of Christopher Marlowe
- Shepheardes Calendar by Edmund SpenserEdmund SpenserEdmund Spenser was an English poet best known for The Faerie Queene, an epic poem and fantastical allegory celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. He is recognised as one of the premier craftsmen of Modern English verse in its infancy, and one of the greatest poets in the English...
- La Castità Conquistata: The Function of the Satyr in Pastoral Drama, by Meredith Kennedy Ray (University of Chicago)
- 'The Pastoral Concert' at the Louvre site