02-Oct-2013 15:06
Denis Bellamy
Denis Bellamy
pastoral literature, class of literature that presents the society of shepherds as free from the complexity and corruption of city life. Many of the idylls written in its name are far remote from the realities of any life, rustic or urban. Among the writers who have used the pastoral convention with striking success and vitality are the classical poets Theocritus and Virgil and the English poets Edmund Spenser, Robert Herrick, John Milton, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Matthew Arnold.
The pastoral convention sometimes uses the device of “singing matches” between two or more shepherds, and it often presents the poet and his friends in the (usually thin) disguises of shepherds and shepherdesses. Themes include, notably, love and death. Both tradition and themes were largely established by Theocritus, whose Bucolics are the first examples of pastoral poetry. The tradition was passed on, through Bion, Moschus, and Longus, from Greece to Rome, where Virgil (who transferred the setting from Sicily to Arcadia, in the Greek Peloponnese, now the symbol of a pastoral paradise) used the device of alluding to contemporary problems—agrarian, political, and personal—in the rustic society he portrayed. His Eclogues exerted a powerful effect on poets of the Renaissance, including Dante, Petrarch, and Giovanni Boccaccio in Italy; Pierre de Ronsard in France; and Garcilaso de la Vega in Spain. These were further influenced by medieval Christian commentators on Virgil and by the pastoral scenes of the Old and New Testaments (Cain and Abel, David, the Bethlehem shepherds, and the figure of Christ the good shepherd). During the 16th and 17th centuries, too, pastoral romance novels (by Jacopo Sannazzaro, Jorge de Montemayor, Miguel de Cervantes, and Honoré d’Urfé) appeared, as did in the 15th and 16th centuries the pastoral drama (by Torquato Tasso and Battista Guarini).
In English poetry there had been some examples of pastoral literature in the earlier 16th century, but the appearance in 1579 of Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, which imitated not only classical models but also the Renaissance poets of France and Italy, brought about a vogue for the pastoral. Sir Philip Sidney, Robert Greene, Thomas Nash, Christopher Marlowe, Michael Drayton, Thomas Dekker, John Donne, Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Heywood, Thomas Campion, William Browne, William Drummond, and Phineas Fletcher all wrote pastoral poetry. (This vogue was subjected to some satirical comment in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It—itself a pastoral play.) The first English novels, by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge, were written in the pastoral mode. Apart from Shakespeare, playwrights who attempted pastoral drama included John Lyly, George Peele, John Fletcher, Ben Jonson, John Day, and James Shirley.
The climax of this phase of the pastoral tradition was reached in the unique blend of freshness and learned imitation achieved by the poetry of Herrick and of Andrew Marvell. Later 17th-century work, apart from that of Milton, was more pedantic. The 18th-century revival of the pastoral mode is chiefly remarkable for its place in a larger quarrel between those Neoclassical critics who preferred “ancient” poetry and those others who supported the “modern.” This dispute raged in France, where the “ancient” sympathy was represented in the pastoral convention by René Rapin, whose shepherds were figures of uncomplicated virtue in a simple scene. The “modern” pastoral, deriving from Bernard de Fontenelle, dwelled on the innocence of the contemporary rustic (though not on his miseries). In England the controversy was reflected in a quarrel between Alexander Pope and Ambrose Philips, though the liveliest pastorals of the period were by John Gay, whose mode was burlesque (and whose Beggar’s Opera is ironically subtitled “A Newgate Pastoral”—Newgate being one of London’s prisons).
A growing reaction against the artificialities of the genre, combined with new attitudes to the natural man and the natural scene, resulted in a sometimes bitter injection of reality into the rustic scenes of such poets and novelists as Robert Burns, George Crabbe, William Wordsworth, John Clare, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, George Sand, Émile Zola, B.M. Bjørnson, and Knut Hamsun. Only the pastoral elegy survived, through Shelley and Matthew Arnold.
Encyclopedia Britannica
Alpers employs three main tools to help define pastoral as a set literary mode; and these are the representative anecdote, literary mode, and pastoral convention. He borrows Kenneth Burke’s notion of the representative anecdote, something Burke attempted to use to describe the motivation for all human behavior. Essentially, Alpers uses this concept as a fiction that represents, in the dual sense of depicting and characterizing, pastoral literature. He argues that this anecdote is not the idyllic landscape, as many theorists have thought, but “that we will have a far truer idea of pastoral if we take its representative anecdote to be herdsmen and their lives, rather than landscape or idealized nature” (22). Looking at Virgil’s Eclogues and Theocritus’ Idylls, then, we see this anecdote function very well. If we take the anecdote to be the landscape, then Meliboeus’ departure from his pasture “represents a fantasy that is dissipated by the recognition of political and social realities” (24). However, if we accept Alper’s anecdote, we see that Virgil has reinterpreted Theocritus into the lifestyles of two shepherds. This is not to say the landscapes are not important, but they are rather an interpretation, a selective emphasis determined by individual or cultural motives, of the central fiction that shepherds’ lives represent human lives. To conceive pastoral landscape this way enables us to understand what is clear from the history of pastoral… But whatever the specific features and emphases, it is the representative anecdote of shepherds’ lives that makes certain landscapes pastoral” (27)
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Alpers continues to then discuss Friedrich Schiller and William Empson’s criticism on pastoral. Schiller describes naïve and sentimental poetry, the latter of which can be satirical (if reality is unappealing) or elegiac (if the ideal is sympathetic and desirable). Alpers takes one major issue with Schiller, however, and that is his acceptance (and the subsequent assumptions of many later theorists) for “a longing for the ideal, prompted by a reaction against the ways of civilization, to be at the heart of (pastoral) poetry. Hence when not indulging in pure representations of the ideal (Schiller’s idyll), the pastoral sensibility will either turn to criticism of corrupt or sophisticated ways of life (Schiller’s satire) or will look back nostalgically to a simpler, vanished past (Schiller’s elegy)” (30). Alpers concludes by placing William Empson in conversation with Schiller; Empson’s notion of “putting the complex into the simple,” that is describing the lives of shepherds, provides the process for Alpers’ representative anecdote.
To build upon the categorization of pastoral as a literary mode, Alpers distinguishes between mode and genre. He cites several critics who use the term, “mode,” to define an implicit attitude that exists within texts. He makes the distinction, however, that mode is “the literary manifestation, in a given work, not of its attitudes in a loose sense, but of its assumptions about man’s nature and situation… It is clear that pastoral has consciously modal interests. The figure of the shepherd is felt to be representative precisely in figuring every or any man’s strength relative to the world” (50). Alpers contextualizes this by comparing Marvell’s “The Mower to the Glowworms” to Stanley’s “The Glowworm.” Stanley’s poem is not pastoral, and he cites several instances where the speaker asserts his knowledge and authority over nature. Marvell’s poem, on the other hand, is very pastoral in the modal sense. The speaker presents himself on a very humble level to nature. He describes himself as the nightingale, his interest in the glowworms is sincere- ultimately the mower’s self representation is that of a shepherd, who Alpers has already shown is one of the lower, more simple persons in society. We see this also in comparing Johnson’s “To Penhurst” with Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House.” Johnson’s narrator expresses his knowledge and pseudo-ownership over the estate; and this contrasts Marvell’s speaker, with “his various gestures and usages, the very stanzas themselves- with their even pace, their separateness, and mutual equality- all these manifest the strength relative to world that in more conventional pastoral is represented by the simplicity of the shepherd-singer, whose capacity to dwell in his natural home and voice his relation to it is bound up with the fact that he must accommodate to its realities and that he cannot control it” (66).
Alpers’ third construct is pastoral convention. He defines convention with regard to more traditional meanings; and these reflect not only the definition of an accepted rule or custom, but the earlier meaning of meeting and congregating. This is central to pastoral because, as Alpers states, “Pastoral poems make explicit the dependence of their conventions on the idea of coming together. Pastoral convening’s are characteristically occasions for songs and colloquies that express and thereby seek to redress separation, absence, or loss” (81). When looking at Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” then, Alpers discusses “expression as due to and reflecting felt limitations, and… pastoral conventions as preactices that bring ‘shepherds’ together after a separation or loss. What happens in the Forest of Arden is certainly initiated by the courtiers’ loss of the world in which they belong, but the play is so assured and liberating that by its end we may simply take the world of Arden to be the world itself” (134).
CHAPTER 6 PASTORAL LYRICS AND THEIR SPEAKERS
Paul Alpers views the pastoral as that which puts the complex into the simple. 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.
In this chapter, 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 224″. 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”.
CHAPTER 7 MODERN PASTORAL LYRICISM
In this chapter Alpers introduces what he calls the modern pastoral lyricism and the modern pastoral mode. These are the pastoral works that come from older pastoral works but are renovated a bit. Examples of this are Wordsworth who based some of his works on Virgil’s Eclogues and pastoral elegies that “replicate the generic stability that characterizes older pastorals (287)”. Moreover, Alpers mentions “the dreaming man” in the modern pastoral mode. The “dreaming man” is he who looks at the pastoral as something lost in the past and dreams of a return.
Alpers believes another aspect of pastoral is spiritual calmness and this is shown in passages where we see nature providing rest to humans like shade and rain/mist providing drink. Furthermore, he thinks “the world as analogous to man” and “amenable to human habitation and construction”. In other words, he believes nature and humans work with one another and serve to each other’s needs.
Alpers talks about how landscapes in pastoral works depict the mood of the story. For example, “Virgil’s shepherds project their desires onto various settings, where they stage themselves and other figures (298).” Particular examples of such settings are eroticized landscapes which work for desires, icy regions for suffering, and classical landscapes with natural music presented for plentitude and well-being.
CHAPTER 8 PASTORAL NARRATION
Chapter 8 is about pastoral narratives, which were once the most prominent form of pastoral. A famous pastoral narration example is Sidney’s Arcadia. Alpers says; “most idylls and eclogues have more than one bucolic (characteristic of the countryside) speaker” and “the wooing situation is a staple of Theocritus’s and Virgil’s implied worlds (341)”. Thus, going back to modern pastoral, where new pastoral works derive from older pastoral works. The wooing in most pastoral works is through gifts and main expression of feeling like we saw in Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”.
Alpers mentions in this chapter 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. For instance, Renaissance pastoral is transnational and “reflects cultural histories and interests that belong to specific languages and political-social entities (348)”.
One form of pastoral narration is the pastoral elegy, which is a commemoration of an exceptional dead herdsman. Pastoral elegies serve to ensure the continuity of such herdsmen.
CHAPTER 9 PASTORAL NOVELS
The last chapter of this book is about 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.
Melvyn Bragg In our time BBC Radio 4