THE EVOLUTION OF ALLEGORY IN THE PASTORAL ... - Repositories

THE EVOLUTION OF ALLEGORY IN THE PASTORAL
ECLOGUE FROM THEOCRITUS TO MILTON
by
PATRICIA MARTIN OATS, B.A.
A THESIS
IN
ENGLISH
Submitted to the Graduate Faculty
of Texas Tech University in
Partial Fulfillment of
the Requirements for
the Degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
Approved
Direct t'c^
Accepted
D^a/i of th^/Sraduai^ School
August, 1972

{/ 3^ ^ CONTENTS
A'O /Jk5
CHAPTER
PAGE
I. INTRODUCTION
II.
THE CLASSICAL PASTORAL PRECEDENTS
III.
IV.
THE ALLEGORICAL ECLOGUE DURING THE
MIDDLE AGES AND THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 30
THE STATUS OF THE ECLOGUE IN
ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND 66
NOTES 97
BIBLIOGRAPHY 108
11

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
To readers oriented primarily toward contemporary
literature, the Renaissance pastoral genre appears, in general,
rather archaic, dull, artificial and, perhaps, even
maudlin. Superficially this judgment is correct. The antecedent
for this poetic form does indeed lie in the ancient
literature of Greece and Rome; and more often than not, the
eclogue of the Renaissance poet describes a natural setting,
replete with shepherds and rustic elements, completely unknown
to the poet except through his imagination.
Because
he is a poet, the pastoralist expresses strong emotions
which sometimes seem incongruous to his pastoral situation.
At this point, one might ask why the pastoral form deserves
a careful consideration.
To determine the worth of the proliferation
of pastoral writing that occurred in the Renaissance,
however, more than a value judgment or a cursory
reading is necessary.
By placing the pastoral in its proper
literary perspective, we can attempt to understand why it
held so deep a fascination and exerted so wide an influence
among the best poets of the age.
Pastoral has, in many cases, justly been a word
of reproach and ridicule, a synonym for insipid
creations, unreal in feeling, affected in style;
but whether good art or bad it has appeared. Proteuslike,
in numerous forms. Music, sculpture, and
painting have used the pastoral motif; the Good

Shepherd has been for twenty centuries, in the
Christian church, a tender symbol of Divine
Care; and in literature the pastoral has never
really faded away, but has come back again and
again with persistent appeal.!
The rebirth of pastoral poetry, largely abandoned
as a poetic tradition after the late third century, began
in prehumanist Italy with neo-Latin literature imitative
of the best-known classical model, Virgil's Bucolics.
Soon, however, because of the adaptability of the pastoral
form and the spread of nationalism, pastoral poetry was
also being written in vernacular and becoming clearly established
as a literary vogue.
The powerful individualism of the humanists is the
primary reason that the Renaissance eclogue became something
more than a duplication of the classical convention.
The Middle Ages had offered only some clerkly imitations
of Virgilian eclogues which were hardly noteworthy except
for the intermingling of Christian allusions and pagan
mythology.
But the Renaissance man was born of a different
spirit.
The phenomenon known as the Renaissance was more
than the rebirth of Greek and Latin letters; it
was the rebirth of the individual, the awakening
of man to his right to freedom of thought, and
of this the study of the ancient classics was at
once the cause and result.2
The Renaissance poet employed the pastoral as a flexible
and personal medium to express thoughts and feelings on
almost any topic; there was no attempt "to produce a mirror
image of the Virgilian pastoral but to compose a poem

2
that was independently valuable as a creative genre art. "-^
It is only natural that as the pastoral gained
recognition as a congenial mode for Renaissance expression,
the classical confines of the genre were extended and modified
to take on new aspects while neglecting old ones.
The
portrayal of rural scenes and local peasants assumed new
colors and forms, and even the muses who received the tribute
of the primitive shepherd-singers were no longer Sicilian.
Just as Virgil had broadened the pastoral conventions
of Theocritus, the humanist eclogists developed a
new pastoral method while mimicking the classical one.
"Even in close interaction the centuries hang a deceptive
4
veil between the artist and the object of his scrutiny."
This is not to say that all neo-Latin, or even vernacular,
eclogues are of literary value, for surely many are unimaginative
facsimiles.
To avoid a possible confusion in terms, it is advantageous
at this point to distinguish between the different
types of pastoral or bucolic poetry.
The Theocritean
idyll and the Virgilian eclogue are the classical
types of pastoral.
The eclogue differs from the idyll in
motive.
Unlike the eclogue, the idyll is never didactic
or satiric; it merely seeks to paint a picture.
The term
eclogue has been used even more persistently than idyll to
identify any sort of rustic dialogue on down to the twentieth
century.^
For the considerations of this study, only

those Renaissance and Elizabethan pastorals which are
clearly based on the Virgilian type using a form of dialogue
with pastoral names and pastoral imagery and possessing
an ulterior meaning are being designated as
eclogues.
The purpose of this study is to consider some possible
reasons behind the popularity of the pastoral during
that great revival of art, literature, and learning in
Europe; to demonstrate the innovations which occurred in
the genre in its progression from classical times through
the Italian Renaissance into Elizabethan England; and,
finally, to establish the Renaissance pastoral as a convenient
vehicle for satire and personal allegory.

CHAPTER II
THE CLASSICAL PASTORAL PRECEDENTS
Pastoral poetry had its literary beginnings in the
third century B. C. in the Greek Idylls of Theocritus (ca.
310 - ca. 250 B. C). His youth was spent in Syracuse and
Sicily in times disturbed by both civil and foreign wars.
During his manhood after failing to interest the tyrant
Hiero in his work, he became a member of the sophisticated
court of Ptolemy at Alexandria.
Perhaps the confusing
situation at this cosmopolitian court persuaded Theocritus
to leave and choose to spend the remainder of his life in
the simplicity of rural Sicily, where some of his pastoral
idylls were undoubtedly written.
Theocritus' actual sources are obscure, but the
ancestry of the musical herdsman probably preceded Homer's
description of a scene on the shield of Achilles in which
shepherds are rejoicing in the playing of the syrinx, an
instrument invented by Pan.
About 600 B. C. Stesichorus
introduced a type of bucolic poetry into Greek literature.
He composed a choral ode in which he told the story of
Daphnis, an account based on a simple, rustic tale localized
in the vicinity where Stesichorus lived.
The folk
tale becomes a divine myth, for Daphnis is said to be
either the son or the beloved of Hermes and also the tender
of the cattle of Helios.
Our information about the poem is

oth late and imperfect, but we know that an important
section was a lament for Daphnis.
Thus arose the convention
of the lovelorn shepherd, indulging in his own suffering
or wringing sympathy from his friends through his
2
singing.
Whether the origins of pastoral literature are
"folk" or "literary" is a controversy that arose during
the neoclassical period when critical thinking about pastoral
literature became much more prominent than writing
it.
Unfortunately, neither the Pbetics of Aristotle nor
the Ars Poetica of Horace offers any direct comment on pastoral
poetry.
Quintilian makes what is perhaps the earliest
critical comment relating to pastoral in an incidental
and none too favorable remark about Theocritus' "peculiar"
style.
The earliest explanation for the origins of pastorr.l
occurs in the Codex Ambrosianus 222 (c. 1250), the oldest
extant codex containing the poems of Theocritus.
This account
is "neither scientific nor ethical; neither does it
3
contain any critical implications." Although no direct
or notably significant criticism of the pastoral exists in
any of the ancient and medieval sources, the general critical
principles derived from Aristotle, Horace, Quintilian,
Longinus, and Cicero are the sources for later pastoral
4
theories.
Since there was no attempt on the part of Renaissance
critics either to define pastoral or to discuss the

scene, the task of defining befell the methodical neoclassicists,
and the art of discussing went to the empirical
Romanticists.
One of the earliest critics who ventured to
define pastoral was Rene Rapin (1659), who proposed the
"literary" theory of origins, generally accepted by modern
tendencies, in the preface to his own eclogues, "Disser-
5
tatio de Carmine Pastorali." Rapin suggested that this
form of poetry resulted from the ancient way of life and
arose with the advance of civilization.
He felt that the
pastoral did not develope as a formal, literary type until
the nation had attained a state of culture and thereby imparted
some degree of sophistication to the pastoral poet.
According to W. W. Greg (1906), over-sophistication is a
prerequisite of the pastoral, which "arises purely as a
solace and relief from the fervid life of actuality."
Thus the pastoral origin becomes a theory of a natural
evolution of the shepherd's folk songs into a civilized
poet's expression in pastoral terms.
No religious origins
can be clearly established, although there may be some connection
with the primitive agricultural festivals and ceremonial
fertility rites; for pastoral poets have traditionally
identified themselves with Orpheus, a significant
figure in such celebrations.
During the Hellenistic age, bucolic themes appeared
in many kinds of poetry (lyric, comedy, and possibly even
in elegy and dithyramb) before an actual form was given to

a
the pastoral.
The history of the form begins with Theocritus'
Idylls, a collection of thirty short poems so varied
in subject matter that only ten can be classified as truly
p
pastoral. Surely the most important influence on these
earliest-known, extant pastorals was the actual piping and
singing of the Sicilian shepherd in which Theocritus finds
the basis for the recurrent refrain of his bucolic melody,
for the song of the love complaint, for the abundance of
rustic superstitions, and for the arrangement of antiphonal
couplets in the singing match.
Theocritus molds these along
with original additions into a form "that strikes a happy
q
medium between the realistic and the ideal."
It is also possible that during the fourth century
B. C. a school of pastoral poets existed on the island of
Cos who were the first to combine bucolic themes with the
verse form known as the mime, a brief, realistic sort of
poem, quasi-dramatic in form, humorous or ironic in tone,
precise in its observation of detail, and often risque in
expression and content.
These bucolic mimes attained
definitive form in certain of the idylls of Theocritus with
only slight variation.
His formal change in the recited
mime consisted of his using dactylic hexameter, the meter
of the epic.
Idylls (which comes from the Greek word meaning
"little pictures") is not the title Theocritus gave to his
poems, but a label applied by scholiasts.
In classical

times the terms pastoral and idyll were not synonymous,
for Theocritus portrays heroes as well as herdsmen.
An
idyll is any brief poem or story, void of any tragic elements,
with simple happiness revealed dramatically.
Its
only purpose is to "make us enamored of life" and to paint
a "picture of life as the human spirit wishes it to be";
therefore, the bucolic theme easily adapts itself to this
purpose, and the pastoral idyll becomes "a dramatic presentation
of some characteristic scene in the joyous life
of a herdsman."
Some critics, failing to recognize the sincerity
of his purpose, have reprehended Theocritus for being too
sentimental and have censured his rustic portrayals as too
polite.
If he seems affected to them, perhaps they do not
maintain the same enthusiastic sympathies with natural man
that Theocritus possessed.
The primary endeavor of his
idylls is to immortalize the beauty of nature, particularly
of rural Sicily.
In a lyric mood, he lends a dramatic
quality to his works through his use of dialogue.
By
choosing to portray the most picturesque and the most
ideally characteristic moments in the routine of the simple
herdsman, Theocritus reveals himself as a keen observer
of humanity.
He uses a sensual appeal, rather than
a philosophical one; consequently, he relishes minute detail
and vivid images in his reduplication of nature.
His
idylls are the result of a striving for artistic grouping

10
and an undulled perception of rustic beauty.
Theocritus' poetic aura is neither completely realistic
nor ideal.
He offers no praise of the shepherds'
existence as an "age of innocence," nor does he reflect a
12
"philosophical illusion of primitive simplicity."
With
some few exceptions, his shepherds use language appropriate
to their station and experiences, both real and natural.
While exhibiting a fondness for moralizing and an
occasional inclination toward frank indecency, they speak
colloquialisms and proverbs.
Although his rustics lack
dramatic characterization, they seem emotionally appealing
instead of intellectually alluring.
Each one must possess
conventional traits:
sensitivity to beauty, ardent affections,
comradery with his herd, and the supreme gift of
song.
Although Theocritus appears more content than any
subsequent pastoral poet to give a straightforward account
of the bucolic life, he did not always avoid a projection
of his own values and interests into his characters.
Such
an example occurs in the literary mood observable in the
seventh idyll. The Harvest Festival, which sets the precedent
for identification of the poet with the herdsman in
so far as both are singers of song.
The emphasis of this
poem lies in the description of the harvest festival at
Cos and on the fact that the city poets are playing at
being shepherds.
Theocritus engineers a kind of pastoral

masquerade in which he wishes us to recognize the poets of
11
his own circle behind their rustic guise.
The dissonance
he creates between the bucolic simplicity of the pasture
and the literary refinement of the city is never completely
resolved, nor intended to be.
Herein rests the effect of
Theocritus' humor.
By voicing the literary themes of the day, Theocritus
developes the scope of his pastoral song and begins
an eclogue tradition for celebrating contemporary poets
and musicians and even for criticizing contemporary literary
composition.
His association of the pastoral singer
with the contemporary poet was logical at a time when contemporary
kings were closely connected with gods.
Ptolemy
and Zeus were allied in identification, as were Alexander
the Great and Dionysus.
It is the seventh idyll that has caused many critics
to honor Theocritus, not Virgil, as the father of pastoral
allegory.
One should note that allegory in early times consisted
largely in the use of words with a double meaning.
The allegorical tendency of the bucolic masquerade used by
Theocritus may have begun as early as the fourth century
B. C. in a dithyramb with pastoral theme and coloring, the
Galatea of Philoxenus, a court poet of Dionysius I.
Philoxenus' allegory is not confined to poets, however.
Prompted by the conditions at the tyrant's court, he makes
covert allusions to Dionysius and his mistress, whom he

12
represents respectively as the Cyclops and his love,
Galatea.
Philoxenus depicts himself as Odysseus, the successful
lover.
There is also some evidence for this convention
in the eighth mime of Herondas, who reveals his
critics, his rivals, and himself as herdsmen, "while their
rivalry in poetry is represented as rivalry in a rustic
sport. "-"-^
Among his other pastoral idylls, two are distinct
for their contributions to the genre; the second for its
most imitated of themes, unrequited love, and the first
for its important form, the elegy.
The Pharmaceutria (II)
is the love complaint of a betrayed girl seeking to win
back her lover by means of charms and incantations.
The
Lament for Daphnis (I) is a dirge for a dead shepherd, who
was himself a poet and musician.
It is this celebration
of the shepherd-hero Daphnis, which in folklore representee
the annual death of nature, that marks the beginning of the
"pathetic fallacy," a covention by which nature is made to
share human sorrow, m the pastoral tradition.
17
Each of
these idylls retains a heavy following in the English pastoral
tradition.
In the Hellenistic tradition, Theocritus is followed
by Bion and Moschus, two younger contemporaries who
18
helped perpetuate the pastoral genre.
Both are recognized
primarily for their elegies modeled on Theocritus' Lament
for Daphnis.
Moschus' Lament for Bion is essentially

13
important for its introduction of a "sophisticated ennui."
Beginning with Moschus' treatment of the elegy, the emphasis
changes from the poet's conveying a genuine love
of nature to an expression of his own worldweariness.
What more appropriate setting can there be for celebrating
death, "the great and unescapable phenomenon of nature,"
than in natural surroundings?
19
Bion, whose pastoral elegy
is the Lament for Adonis, likewise makes a distinct contribution:
the artificiality of style which becomes the
on
pastoral's "most patent characteristic."
From the time that Theocritus substantiated certain
trends in the pastoral tradition, each convention underwent
a subtle change as each of his ardent admirers practiced
them in his own eclogues.
The result was a lack of any of
the realism observable in Theocritus' Sicilian descriptions
of scenery and character.
In addition, an excessive use
of the "pathetic fallacy" sprang forth from the few traces
found in the Idylls.
But the greatest modification was
the increased use of allegory.
Almost two hundred years after the prime of the
Hellenistic pastoral, an aspiring, young Roman poet chose
to use the Idylls as the springing board for his own pastoral
eclogues, the Bucolics.
Roman artistic and literary
practice prescribed imitation of the Greek models as the
best way to achieve success; therefore, Virgil takes over
Theocritean conventions, assumes many of the Greek names

14
for his characters, and even uses the same meter.
The first pastoral imitations of Theocritus to be
written in Latin were the Eclogues of Virgil.
Most critics
consider not only Virgil's influence but also his achievement
to be much greater than his Greek master's, and he is
credited with giving substance to "a form based upon artificiality
and convention" that remained virtually unchanged
21
for eighteen hundred years.
Virgil's imitations would
not have been successful if he had imitated just the "letter"
and not also the "spirit" of Theocritus; however,
Virgil does manage to evince the same revelry in the senses
and the same protest against sentimentality as Theocritus.
Just as poetic commentators supplied the title for
Theocritus' work, so the term eclogue (from the Greek word
meaning a selection of passages or a short poem) was probably
chosen by critics to signify the pastoral poems of the
Roman poet, Virgil.
The spelling of eclogue was perverted
by early Italian humanists; and the title ultimately
emerged in early English pastorals as Aeglogues, a confusion
which existed from relating the term to the Greek word for
goat and interpreting it to mean a dialogue between goat-
23
herds.
Virgil began his own literary career with a few
light lyrics, some in imitation and at least one in parody
of Catullus.
Not content with these early poetic efforts,
Virgil sought a deeper fulfillment from his writing than

any he had previously garnered and hoped to find such satisfaction
in composing pastoral peotry emulating the Greek
15
model, the Idylls.
Composed between 42 and 37 B. C.,
Virgil's eclogues were the first comprehensive attempt of
a pastoral poet to convey a message as well as to delight.
In all his eclogues except the fourth, Virgil borrowed the
situations and conventions of the Idylls; occasionally he
even used direct paraphrases.
Nevertheless, in his writings
Virgil was able to adopt the Greek conventions while
assimilating and converting them in conjunction with other
materials to subserve his own artistic purpose: Theocritus
is merely his stepping stone.
This Roman poet seems "never
to have regarded the pastoral form as anything but a cloak
24
for matters of pith and moment." He liberates the pastoral
form and revitalizes it with his new approach, which
renders little homage to the ethical and aesthetic ideals
2 S
of Theocritus.
The difference in the inspiring forces
behind these two poets exists in their opposing concepts
of civilization and nature.
To Theocritus the city represents
rational, civilized man; and society complements,
rather than challenges, nature.
To Virgil, the city represents
irrational, power-hungry man; and society, whose
emotions defy logic and ruin man's harmony with his surroundings,
is a threat to nature.
Virgil's Bucolics have often been subjected to a
"devitalizing" approach because of Horace's description of

16
the eclogues as molle atque facetum (smooth and elegant).^^
We cannot presume, however, that Horace was referring to
their content as well as their rhetoric. ^"^ Although several
of the eclogues do reveal the charming life of the
shepherds, not as a practical program but as a happy reverie,
the overall content of Virgil's collection of pastorals
cannot be correctly labeled "escapist."
Virgil
realized that the enchanted picture he paints for us is
quite beyond reach except in our imagination.
By reminding
us "that real escape after all is impossible," he accomplishes
"a fascinating fusion of the realistic and the
28
visionary."
deep involvement in issues.
This fusion is best revealed through Virgil's
An example of such an involvement occurs in the
first eclogue, which divulges a complex issue resulting
from the land confiscations among the tenant farmers of
Mantua for Antony's soldiers after the battle of Philipi.
The situation is disclosed in a conversation between two
shepherds, Meliboeus and Tityrus, the one forced to leave
the bucolic life, the other allowed to remain in his idyllic
existence.
Meliboeus' hopes and incentives have been
destroyed by the political and military conflicts.
The
implication is that if such conflicts could be resolved,
nature would again be kind to him.
He has lost his leisure
and with it his intellectual freedom; his dream has
been shattered by arbitrary control.
For the old man.

Tityrus, the eclogue ends on a note of optimism suggested
by the magic slumber induced by the humming of the Hyblaean
bees near the shady spring, which implies that Tityrus
will be rewarded for his toil.
For Virgil, "pastoral" has an explicit significance
as a literature which realizes "the life of the imagination
and the poet's concerned search for freedom to order es-
29
perience."^^
The tangible symbols of the poetic mind at
work are the landscape and its inhabitants, who voice in
17
their debates the poet's thoughts on poetry and life.
By
stressing "the need for preserving individual freedom if
the highest human values are to survive," Virgil maintains
30
a common ground with fifth century Greek tragedy.
His
purpose is not to offer a retreat into a bucolic paradise
or an evasion through entering a dream world.
Instead, he
endeavors to point out that if poetic imagination is lost,
the integrity and order of personal freedom is likewise
destroyed.
Virgil also wishes to imply what might be
gained "if the two opposite conceptions of 'pastoral' and
31
power, poetry and history, were to live m harmony."
The actual contributions which Virgil makes in the
pastoral field result from his modifications or emphasis
of previously existing conditions.
Those which affect a
definite change in attitudes toward the genre are his expanded
use of allegory (I and IX), the inception of the
characteristic association of the Golden Age with the

18
pastoral life (IV), and the infusion of an epic spirit
projected through political panegyric (IV and V).
To what extent Virgil intentionally meant to employ
allegory cannot accurately be determined.
Theocritus'
seventh idyll is considered "the tangible starting
point of Virgil's intrusion into pastoral of contemporary
poets and courtiers and of Octavian himself, and of double
32
meaning and various covert allusions."
But Virgil makes
no consistent attempt to keep up the pastoral masquerade,
for he often alludes to prominent men by their actual
names.
Virgil employs oblique allusions only to a limited
extent, but even those were easily understood by any informed
reader of his own day; and if not, the enjoyment
33
of the eclogue did not wholly depend on catching allusions.
Conjecture among modern critics largely coincides
in designating the second, third, seventh, and eighth eclogues
as nonallegorical;
the fifth, sixth, ninth, and
tenth as the kinds of allegory used in Theocritus' seventh,
the poet-shepherd masquerade; and the first and ninth as
personal allegory.-"-^
Allegory was a recognizable figure among the ancients.
There is evidence of allegorical interpretations
as early as the fifth century B. C, when philosophers and
later grammarians used allegory to prove that Homer was
the first moral philosopher.
In the earliest Graeco-Roman
tradition allegory probably had a two fold origin:
the

19
popular use of riddles and puzzles and that of ambiguity
in oracular replies.
»
Much closer to Virgil's time was an anonymous document
on rhetoric, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, that distinguishes
three types of allegory:
a series of linked metaphors,
the use of fictional names for historical persons,
and irony.
About a century later the famous rhetorician
and critic, Quintilian, in his Latin work, Institutio
Oratoria, explains allegory as a figure which arouses
enough suspicion to indicate that the meaning is other than
that which the words imply; a hidden meaning left to the
reader to discover.
it may be employed:
He cites three conditions under which
1) if it is unsafe to speak openly;
2) if it is improper to speak openly; and 3) when it is
used for the sake of elegance and lends more pleasure by
reason of its novelty and variety than if it were expressed
in a straight-forward manner.
By the end of the first century A. D., the first,
second, and ninth were interpreted allegorically.
Even
during the times of the poet himself, references made by
his contemporaries indicate that Virgil had alluded to the
incidents of his own life and to the events of the day.
These references are indefinite as to what the actual passages
were, and opinions were divided as to the meaning of
the various lines.

20
In the fourth century, Aelius Donatus explained
the overall meaning of Virgil's works as an allegorical
method indicating the three stages in man's development.
According to Donatus' investigation, the Bucolics represent
the pastoral condition of man; the Georgics convey agricultural
man; and the Aeneid stands for the martial side
of man.
37
From this point until the eighteenth century,
every eclogue was thought to have allegorical significance.
As previously mentioned, the first and ninth are
considered personal allegories, primarily because they express
a much deeper thought than the allegory conveyed
through the pastoral masquerade.
Both of these peoms deal
with the land confiscations which personally involved
Virgil, who lost his estate at Mantua as a result of this
political action, but he is believed to have received compensation
land in Campania as the result of his friendship
with Pollio, Gallus and Varus.
These eclogues possess an
important political function because they stress the paramount
need for peace after the disastrous anarchy of civil
wars.
The ninth eclogue further developes Virgil's idea
of "pastoral."
He comments specifically on the place of
poetry amid the results of civil war.
Poetic creativity is
stifled when the shepherd is deprived of his otium (leisure)
, which Virgil appears to equate with libertas (freedom)
.
As in the first eclogue, Virgil again grapples with

21
the problem of conflict between arbitrary rule and individual
freedom; only this time there is no intervention
by "the new young divinity in Rome" to restore the land
38
to the shepherd. The pastoral world is Virgil's metaphor
for the poet's spiritual state. Only in his fancy
can Virgil imagine a reconciliation between poetic freedom,
which "pastoral" represents, and the challenges of
civilization, war, politics, and the progression of
history.
At first it seems incongruous for topical and
political themes to play a larger role in Virgil's artificial
art than in the more realistic works of Theocritus,
whose shepherds reveal no active participation in the
political quarrels of the day.
To Virgil, political matters
were closely connected with mythical concepts; i.e.,
the Golden Age and Arcadia.
His political expression resuits
from combining and blending myth and reality.
Using mythology in both a mature and transcendental method,
Virgil manipulates it with a greater licence than would
have been possible for a Greek when he stages such close
40
contact between men and the divinities. For this reason,
Virgil must depict his shepherds as more seriousminded
and less comical than the Theocritean herdsmen.
Virgil tones down their crudeness and their coarse ways as
he endows them with polite manners and sensitive feelings.

22
During classical times, myth and allegory shared
an affinity since both were used as rhetorical devices in
persuasive argument.
Allegory was often used by the ancients
as a means of reconciliation between the philosophy
and the mythology (half-poetical, half-religious) of antiquity.
42
Like the Greek Alexandrians, Virgil avoids the
common myths in preference for the more esoteric, often
obscure ones.
Virgil uses myth to reveal an inner or
spiritual significance, and his allegories become a kind
of simplified or partially rationalized version of a myth.
The concept of allegory as used in the Bucolics "hovers
between primitive mythological figurations and more sophisticated
structures of philosophical thought."
According to Honig, "An allegory starts from the
writer's need to create a specific world of fictional
reality."
Perhaps this concept explains Virgil's Arcadian
setting which he establishes in the tenth eclogue as
the bucolic retreat of shepherds and the Golden Age myth
which he recreates as an era of pastoral life.
The mixture of myth and philosophy common to allegory
occurs in Virgil's account of the Golden Age, which
he conceives in terms of a pastoral ideal, representing
to him a perfect peace, and garnishes with the Epicurean
philosophy of Lucretius.
The concept of the first age of
man being the Golden Age originates from Hesiod's Works
and Days, a cosmogony of early Greece.
When the Romans

23
integrated the Greek version of the Golden Age into their
own religion, they linked the Titan Kronos, who presided
over this age of man, to the Roman god of planting, Saturn,
who likewise was reputed the introducer of civilization
and civil order which are inseparably connected with agriculture.
The fourth eclogue of Virgil gives the myth a new
slant:
the Golden Age is not only the first age of man
but also an age very near at hand.
In this way the ages
of man are made to experience the same cyclic regeneration
that nature does, and the element of time connected to the
pastoral life envelopes much more than the passing of seasons:
now the pastoral existence is an age of man and the
most perfect age of all.
Possibly Virgil thought the Golden Age myth appropriate
for his "Pollio" (IV) eclogue because of the influence
of Theocritus' non-pastoral Idyll XVI, a panegyric
praising Hiero for restoring peace to Syracuse.
Virgil
seizes this opportunity to introduce not just the Golden
Age into pastoral, but also panegyric and epic.
He addresses
his poem, a sort of natal ode, to Pollio and proclaims
that a golden age will begin during his consulship
with the birth of a child, part god and part mortal, whom
he calls an Apollo.
It is this prediction that has caused
his fourth eclogue to be called the "Messianic" eclogue,
for medieval churchmen thought Virgil, like Isaiah, was

24
prophesying the birth of Christ.
Also, his portrayal of
the Golden Age was agreeable to church doctrine, since it
concurs with the Christian vision of man in a paradisial
state before Adam's sin and the promise of the same state
45
after man's redemption is complete.
Virgil's Golden Age is a Utopian dream described
in terms of a vernal reverie.
He commends to us a world
born again, whose fertile fields produce fruit without
cultivation, whose goats come with full utters to be milked
of their own accord, and whose herds do not fear to graze
among lions.
All menaces of nature, such as the snake and
poison herbs, no longer exist in this wordly paradise.
The
total absence of labor and of the unkind forces of nature
complete the picture of Virgil's pastoral ideal.
In this
age the shepherd can retain his otium without threat from
intervening forces.
Until Virgil explains that their leadership is
necessary in order to eradicate civil strife and maintain
the peace indigenous to pastoral life, placing heroes and
consuls who represent the authority and military power
that Virgil sees as a challenge to the pastoral otium impresses
us as somewhat paradoxical and sycophantic.
By
combining the golden and heroic eras separated in Hesiod
by the periods of bronze and silver, Virgil hopes to rec-
46
oncile the pastoral otium and heroic virtus. This
combination represents his most optimistic attempt "to

25
harmonize the perfection of natural beauty—emblem of song
and the poet's life—with the Roman necessity of living a
practical life on the highest moral level, a life of heroic
achievement through virtus. "^'^
Virgil seeks the aid of the Sicilian muses in
making his pastoral "woods" worthy of a consul, and with
these words—paulo maiora canamus—he sets the precedent
for the epic quality proper to panegyric.
His subject
matter and verses are heroic, but his humble manner is
pastoral.
The same epic spirit occurs in the fifth eclogue,
a pastoral elegy lamenting the death of the shepherd
Daphnis, who is thought to represent the deified
Julius Caesar.
Menalcas' song reveals how Daphnis became
a star in heaven and was worshiped as a god to whom the
whole country offered sacrifices and rejoicing.
That the
pastoral elegy conceals a real person and ends with the
apotheosis of the departed shepherd is the constituent of
most Virgilian imitations of this eclogue.
Considering
the number and excellence of their imitations, the fourth
and fifth should be considered Virgil's most important
pastoral accomplishments.
Before one considers the individual differences
between the Virgilian and Theocritean models, a general
review of the classical contributions to the pastoral
tradition is helpful.

Theocritus created the acknowledged classic model
26
for pastoral expression, and he bequeathed to this literary
heritage three basic forms:
1) the pastoral masquerade,
2) the dirge or lover's plaint, and 3) the amoebaean singing
match.
His idylls convey the joy produced by sunshine
and man's very existence in nature.
There is very little
to cause melancholy:
only unrequited love and "the awareness
that death brings and end to all pastoral song."^^
With his idylls Theocritus evokes the "ever necessary
reconciliation of man with the simplicity of his own being.
"^^
In the Greek tradition Bion and Moschus follow the
master.
Using the same theme, dialect (Doric), and meter
(hexameter) as Theocritus, they accomplish the task of
developing the pastoral conditions which Theocritus only
outlined and intimated.
These poets produce no new type,
but they give a special prominence to the elegiac form,
which was to find supreme expression in Milton's Lycidas.
Bion, who is regarded by most as more original and vivid
than Moschus, contributes the artificial style of the pastoral.
The elegy which was written for Bion and still
bears the name of Moschus as its author begins the traditional
association of nature with personal grief and
introduces sentimentality.
Virgil goes a step further than Bion and Moschus
in fixing certain Theocritean elements as pastoral

27
conventions.
To a greater extent than any of his Greek
predecessors, Virgil engages "pathetic fallacy," artificiality,
and allegory, the very substance of Renaissance
pastoralism.
His freer indulgence in mythology supplies
both a time and locality for his pastoral writings:
the
Golden Age and the Arcadian setting, which are frequently
used by Renaissance poets.
Another development of this Roman eclegist is the
blending of political panegyric and epic spirit into the
pastoral.
The fourth eclogue, which envelopes both of
these offerings, "gives licence for a new and more authori-
50
tative tone";
for the poet assumes the role of a prophet
of the future, a vates.
In the fifth eclogue, he lends
new vitality to the pastoral elegy by ending it on a note
of joy.
Virgil's real artistic achievement lies in his pastoral
incongruities, the courtly, the artificial, and the
spurious, which he unites with the accepted consistencies
of bucolic poetry to create an expression that offers more
than a relish for the wilds of nature.
"Virgil could absorb
and harmonize the incongruous in a setting of his own
creation; but for many a Virgilian imitator this rash
51
design was fraught with disaster."
Many distinctions can be formulated between the two
most important collections of classical pastorals.
The
didacticism in the Bucolics is not blatantly obvious; but

unlike Theocritus, who observes and describes^Virgil does
28
moralize and philosophize.
The Bucolics symbolize Virgil's
own recognition of "the tense union of reason and emotion
which is his inheritance from Orpheus";^^ therefore, his
poetry tends to be subjective and artificial in contrast
to Theocritus' more objective and realistic approach.
Virgil's eclogues appeal to both the emotion and the intellect;
but, because Theocritus' poetic aim is entertainment,
the Idylls attract the reader's aesthetic appreciation
by an appeal to the senses.
Where an involvement in social and political issues
is concerned, Virgil's eclogues plunge actively into their
midst, whereas Theocritus demonstrates an "almost deliberate
unconcern" for any political involvement in the idylls.
Because of this disparity of subject matter, the Greek
poems reveal more humor than their Latin counterparts.
To
make rustic life more palatable for cultured society,
Theocritus injects his shepherds with courtly behavior.
Nevertheless, in order to keep an element of realism, he
could not polish all their rustic manners; so he neutralizes
their remaining crudities by his comic treatment of them.
"With deliberate irony he makes his Sicilian shepherds
53
live above their intellectual means."
The overall tone of the Bucolics also differs from
that of the Idylls.
Virgil's poems are more serious and
at times even verge on pessimism.
Perhaps it is because

of this seriousness that Virgil minimizes the role of love
29
in his pastoral poems.
Only three eclogues deal with love:
the second and the eighth concern the sorrows of love; and
the tenth concentrates on the love poetry of Gallus which
Virgil views as a threat to pastoral poetry.
Theocritus'
pastorals are lighter and possess a soothing quality of
diversion from urban turrooil.
Neither poet is expressing
a genuine summons back to nature, for this plea would be
in direct conflict with their individual purposes for writing
bucolic poetry.
Each poet accomplishes his poetic
intent because the pastoral life in each of the poets'
work is ideal and remote:
if such an existence were obtainable,
there would be no rationale for writing poetry
of this nature.
The change in spirit from Theocritus to Virgil
marks the most essential difference between these poets.
To Theocritus, the pastoral need only have intrinsic value,
but to Virgil, an ulterior motive was compulsory.
It was
this Virgilian spirit and talent that captured the unswerving
allegiance of Renaissance eclogists and held
dominion over their poetry.

CHAPTER III
THE ALLEGORICAL ECLOGUE DURING THE MIDDLE AGES
AND THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE
After Virgil until the dawn of Humanism, the classical
tradition of pastoral found representation in only a
few scattered efforts, but during this period the firsthand
knowledge of the Bucolics never diminished.
The precedent
furnished in Virgil's fourth eclogue provided the
inspiration for the court-pastorals of Virgil's most immediate
disciples, two post-Augustan poets, Calpurnius
in the first century and Nemesianus in the third century.
Each of these court poets wrote a panegyric in praise of
his ruling emperor; Calpurnius honors Nero, and Nemesianus
praises Carus.
Although Calpurnius' verse flows smoothly and his
diction is correct, he displays no overt effort for originality
in his seven eclogues.
A degree of recognition,
however, must be reserved for him, since he effected the
first direct comparison of the town and the country to
come out in favor of the country.
"The ancient writers of
Greece, when dealing with the contrast between town and
country, never turned it to the advantage of the latter";
nor did Virgil leave the impression that he preferred the
country to the city, although he did relate to the pastoral
state of mind.
30

31
Whether Calpurnius held any influence over Nemesianus
cannot be positively determined; but during his
service in the court of Carus, Nemesianus wrote four eclogues
which have been frequently and mistakenly ascribed
2
to Calpurnius.
His panegyric appears distinct from the
Virgilian type in that he not only praises the accomplishments
of the individual, but also extols his moral qualities.
In the following century the eclogue attains a new
heighth in purpose.
The fourth century marked the culmination
of the conflict between Christianity and Paganism and
a time when the pastoral functioned as an expedient for
3
Christian propaganda. The pastoral had been destined for
Christian conversion ever since Virgil wrote his fourth
eclogue, whose prophecy was applied to the birth of Christ
as early as Constantino, and whose golden age setting was
associated with the garden of Eden from the time of
Lactantius.
Many other circumstances collided to ascertain the
supremacy of Virgil as the model for later pastoral writers
of the middle ages and Renaissance.
The most obvious consideration
rests in the universality of the Latin language
and the relative ignorance of Greek at this time.
Secondly,
the stress in Virgil's eclogues favors content over poetic
quality and enables his simplified verse form to be more
5
readily imitated. Another factor behind the potent

32
influence of Virgil resides in the adaptability of his content
to Christian themes, which prevented the early Church
Fathers from casting such a disparaging eye on his writings
as they did on other pagan literature.
The study of
the classics occupied only a small part of the intellectual
activity in the middle ages, and it was regarded with
suspicion and dislike among the clergy.
Medieval criticism concerning the pastoral was very
limited, the most noteworthy examples being the works of
Fulgentius and of the unknown scholiast of the Codex
Ambrosianus 222.
Fulgentius, a sixth century Latin grammarian,
elaborated on Virgil's purpose in the Bucolics:
the first three eclogues discuss (in this order) the active,
contemplative, and Epicurean ways of living; the
fourth assumes the vaticinii artem, the art of prophecy;
the fifth, sixth, and seventh represent the work, respectively,
of a priest, a musician and physiologist of the
Stoical school, and a botanist; the eighth elaborates on
musicians and magicians.
Fulgentius' comment about the
ninth eclogue is not clear, and we have no mention of his
concerning the tenth.
His method illustrates the standard
measure for medieval literary criticism:
allegorical
exegesis.
A medieval work was judged on four levels of appreciation:
the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and
the anagogical; and this same criterion was applied to the

33
classics.
Virgil's entire works were given an allegorical,
moralistic designation:
the Bucolics represented the contemplative;
the Georgics, the sensual; and the Aeneid, the
7
active. Perhaps it is also this explanation of the
Bucolics as the contemplative way of life, which is the
life most clerical orders recommended as conducive to
salvation, that caused a favorable attitude toward the
pastoral eclogues.
It should be pointed out, though, that allegorical
interpretations had been "applied with equal conviction
and without polemic by pagans and Christians alike, and
the hidden meanings which both discovered in Vergil were
of purely ethical and philosophical character, dealing
generally with the vicissitudes of human life in its aspirations
towards perfection."
Just as the ancients used
allegory to 'bridge the gulf between philosophy and mythology,
so the Christians discovered that allegory adapted
as well to the needs of Christian argument as it had ever
done to those of Greek philosophy.
Most medieval eclogues were highly artificial and
decorative verse exercises in imitation of Virgil. Repre-
9
sentative of this type is the "Conflictus veris et hiemis,"
a debate, written in the pattern of the Theocritean singing
match, between Spring and Winter, with the victory awarded
to Spring.
More original writers during the Carolingian
period produced eclogues of some intrinsic value in their

34
allegorical tendencies.
The court-pastoral appears again
in the poetry of Modoin, who wrote under the pseudonym Naso.
He praises the reign of Charles the Great (800-814 A.D.),
which was signalized by a period of peace in the western
world, a revival of interest in classical literature, and
the patronage of poets and scholars.
In his second eclogue,
Modoin recounts how two shepherds found a song carved in a
tree.
The song praised the sun (the Emperor Charles) for
casting rays which bring peace and prosperity and a return
of the golden age.
Indicative of the theory that a pastoral
should be allegorical, Modoin reveals in the prologue
to his poems that they are a veiled song written with hidden
meanings.
This precedent is later picked up in the
similar admissions of Radbertus and Petrarch.
While promoting the interests of Christianity,
Radbertus rekindles the conventions of the elegiac pastoral
in an eclogue which he appended to his long prose biography,
the Vita of Adalhardus.
In a prose prologue he
acknowledges the idea that pastoral characteristics have
other meanings and provides the reader with a key for understanding
them in his own "Carmen" (Egloga).
In the Egloga,
Radbertus converts the theme of the Vita to pastoral language
and thereby allegorizes it.
"An extensive contemplation
of Death and an execration against it," along with
an exaltation of the virtues of the departed monk, dominates
the first part of the eclogue; the remainder of the

35
elegy is a consolation.
In the first part Radbertus
extends the classical precedents for panegyric by combining
the praises of both the accomplishments of the
man along with his moral character.
More important is
his emphasis on the idea of the Christian consolation
which gives rise to a motif in later medieval and Renaissance
pastorals.
The imagery used in the consolation
motif reveals Radbertus' dual allegiance to Virgil's
account in the "Messianic" eclogue of an earthly paradise
and the Biblical tradition of a heavenly paradise.
The religious note pervasive in this poem lends to the
metaphor of the shepherd and his flock,
"a figure which
in the hands of Petrarch and his followers was to find
12
effective use in church satire."
The medieval eclogue to maintain the longest
period of affluence was the "Theoduli Ecloga," which
was used in a textbook as late as the sixteenth cen-
13
tury.
In this eclogue, Theodulus evinces a pedagogic
concern for teaching mythology while placing it in its
proper Christian perspective.
Using the fiction of the
pastoral debate, he makes the proper distinction between
the pagan and Christian authors listed indiscriminately
in the medieval canon.
The conflict occurs between the
personified abstractions of Pseustic (Falsehood) and
Alithia (Truth) with Phronesis (Judgment) as arbiter.
Pseustis, who hails from Athens, propounds a series of

classical myths which Alithia, a descendant of David (the
first pastoral singer), confutes with counter examples
36
from the Old Testament.
In an exchange of two quatrains.
Truth reveals facts about the garden of Eden which discredit
the fiction of the golden age of Saturn. "^"^
This
eclogue occasions the emphasis placed on exemplary figures
and the paralleling of Biblical and classical imagery.-^^
From only these few examples, a new shift of interest
can be discerned.
The center of gravity for the
medieval pastoral lies in its analogical value, and the
significance of the form revolves around its allegorical
possibilities.-^"
The form and content of the medieval
pastoral passed virtually unchanged from the classical
type because of the great reverence during the middle
ages for adhering to decorum.
Their concept that classical
genres sprang from nature and were therefore discovered,
not invented, by the ancients, prevented their
willfully violating the rules of a kind, a violation
17
which was considered an offense against nature.
Their
content, nevertheless, did find new and different meanings.
The only authentic modification in the medieval
tradition resulted in the underlying purpose for writing
the eclogue.
Gaining favor for the poet himself, glorifying
the ruling emperor, and celebrating the blessings of
Christianity were some of the newly cultivated aims which
insured the survival of the form into the Renaissance.

37
New developments also arose in the frank admission of the
allegorical intention and in the use of classical allusions
with Christian overtones.
Although medieval efforts at writing pastoral do
not reveal the same subtle artistry in imitating Virgil
that he achieved in adapting Theocritus, they do record
"how the memory at least of the classical pastoral survived
1 ft
amid the ruins of ancient learning."
But the Italian
humanists add a new genius and originality of form to the
practically amorphous state of the medieval pastoral.
Pastoralism has continued to be recognized as a
product of urbanization, a situation with which the medieval
man was not too familiar.
Therefore, the medieval man
could never acquire the necessary rapport for the genre
that came so easily for the Renaissance man.
With the
increasing trend toward the urbanization of Europe, the
pastoral was destined for a revival, particularly among
the city-states of Italy.
Suddenly the pastoral form
seemed to hold more potential for expressing the sentiments
of the 'ideal man' of the Renaissance than did any
other genre.
The natural model for the Italian humanists' eclogue
was Virgil's Bucolics; but, perhaps an even closer
bond existed between these two eras of pastoral, since
the world and way of life in pre-humanist Italy embraced
many of the same characteristics of the Italy that Virgil

38
knew.
Rome was still the center of civilization, and as
the seat of the Church enforced a controlling element
among European politics much as Imperial Rome had done as
the seat of military power.
The dissension among their
political factions and the general civil unrest during
both of these periods were also similar.
Because of the
shifting of the population and the increasing complexity
of the society, pastoralism offered what the urban man
needed most:
peace of mind; therefore, the pastoral genre
spread to every European country and left its mark on
almost every aspect of Renaissance culture.
Practically
everyone who aspired to write poetry in the classical
manner attempted the pastoral, for between 1300-1700, over
two hundred neo-Latinists composed anywhere from one to
twenty eclogues apiece.
The Renaissance humanist sought the language and
literature of classical Greece and Rome as a fruitful
basis for education.
His values disagreed sharply with
medieval teachings, which rated ascetic poverty more
highly than civic usefulness, virginity over marriage,
and the contemplative life above the active.
The 'ideal
man' of the Renaissance is secular and lives the active
life.
He attaches an immense importance to education and
a deep faith in his worth as an individual.
"Humanists
were apt to see man as the measure of all things and to
think geocentrally instead of theocentrally as the Middle

39
Ages had done.
Man is still a fallen creature, but at
least his natural element is this world instead of the
next."^-^
It was a forerunner of this great age, Dante
Alighieri, who resurrected the eclogue form, quite by
chance, and instilled it with a spirit so alluring that
other great poets began to explore its capabilities.
Between
1319 and 1320, during his exile at Ravenna, while
completing the Divine Comedy, Dante employed the eclogue
as a poetic form of correspondence with Giovanni del
Virgilio, a professor of poetry at Bologna.
The occasion
for the poem was to answer del Virgilio's proposal that
Dante should compose something "for students," that is
in Latin, and give up his whim of writing on high themes
in Italian, implying the Divine Comedy.
Del Virgilio
advises Dante that if he should do so, he would confer
on Dante the poet's laurel crown at Bologna.
Seeing the humor as well as the pathos of the
situation, Dante responds with tenderness and patience
to the pedant's contempt for the vernacular in addition
to his invitation to Bologna.
With a "gentle undertone
of sarcasm" and a fervid hope that the Paradise "may at
last quench the hostility of Florence," Dante's Latin
eclogue pleads that del Virgilio will accept Italian as
a language worthy of epic themes and capable of provid-
22
ing subject matter "for students."

40
Dante's first eclogue is highly imitative of
Virgil's first.
Each is written in dialogue and possesses
certain autobiographical qualities, and each poet appears
to identify with the character Tityrus.
The setting in
each is typically pastoral, with two shepherds leisurely
lying under a tree, superficially contemplating their
pastoral duties, but in reality having a somewhat philosophical
discussion.
There is no actual attempt at mystery
or profundity in Dante's eclogue, but the genial wit
expressed in this poem suggests the expanding diversity
of the pastoral eclogue.
Dante's aim is not to write a
beautiful poem, but to say something indirectly and wittily
to a close friend.
The mood throughout Dante's epistolary eclogue is
humorous, but not always pleasant; he often appears sarcastic
and sometimes bitter.
A curious example occurs in
the first two lines:
"Vidimus in nigris albo patiente
23
lituris/ Pierio demulsa sinu modulamina nobis." Superficially
Dante says that until now he has been only a
reader and not a composer of pastoral poetry. Allegorically,
however, by considering his political affiliations
and his subsequent exile, a possible reference to the
political opposition between the Blacks and Whites can
be derived. In 1302, the Blacks seized power over the
Whites (with whom Dante was affiliated) in Florence, and
Dante along with other White leaders was exiled. The

41
Blacks or Guelfics supported the authority of the Pope,
while the Whites or the Ghibellines supported the authority
of the emperors.
Dante was bitter about spending the
last twenty years of his life in exile; and perhaps he
could not resist the chance to mention it, for this first
sentence seems to be an appendage added to the rest of
the eclogue.
Dante also uses an image which supports the traditional
idea in the Renaissance that the purpose of pastoral
poetry is allegory, when he calls Maenalus, the
Arcadian mountain where bucolic poetry resides, "the hider
of the sun."
Most of his double meanings and plays on
words are conveyed through mythological allusions or pastoral
descriptions.
Whether Dante's purpose was to delight or merely
to appease del Virgilio, surely he accomplished his end.
Del Virgilio, pleased by the Latin correspondence, sent
back a pastoral eclogue of his own composing in which he
hails Dante as a second Virgil and expresses a warm and
sympathetic understanding for Dante's hope that Florence
might relent.
He makes no mention of the former proposal
of bestowing the poet's crown on Dante, nor does he continue
his insistence that Dante write in Latin; nevertheless,
del Virgilio again extends an invitation for Dante
to visit him at Bologna near the same time that Mussato
is expected.

42
The response to this eclogue was not received by
del Virgilio until after Dante's death.
24
epistle
Dante's second
is transported in the same pastoral vein as his
first poem.
Although it is a gracious effort, it remains
inferior to the first and lacking in inspiration.
Unlike
the first, it adds nothing to our knowledge of the poet's
character.
Before del Virgilio received the second eclogue
from Dante, he had written an epitaph for the poet, which
would have been placed on Dante's tomb if a monument had
ever been erected.
25
In this epitaph, he cites Dante's
three greatest works:
the Divine Comedy, the De^ Monarchia
and the Eclogue addressed to del Virgilio.
The position
he grants this eclogue is amusing, for today it is perhaps
the least known of Dante's works.
In 1325 after Dante's death, del Virgilio wrote an
epistolary eclogue to Mussato in hopes that Mussato might
help him obtain some of the long-sought-for recognition as
a poet that Giovanni so greatly desired.
Political changes
delayed his sending this elaborate showpiece of pastoral
poetry until 1327.
Although Mussato was impressed with the
merits of the poet and teacher, he could do nothing to aid
him, and del Vigrilio died without ever receiving the poet's
laurel crown.
Again, as so many times before, a poet used
the eclogue to seek favor from a patron.

During the years between 1347 and 1353, del Virgilio
and some of his pupils continued a limited correspondence
in epistolory eclogues, none of which held such intrinsic
26
value as those of Dante and del Virgilio.
One of these
pupils was Cecco di Mileto, whose friendship with Giovanni
Boccaccio resulted in arousing his overwhelming interest
in the pastoral tradition and influenced Boccaccio to write
the Bucolicum Carmen, a group of sixteen Latin pastorals
43
composed over a period of twenty years (1350-1370).
The
last ten of Boccaccio's eclogues came under the influence
of his teacher and friend, Francesco Petrarca, who wrote
twelve highly allegorical and recondite pastorals in the
years 1346-1357.
Petrarch and Boccaccio, more than any other pastoral
poets, fostered the Renaissance practice of making the eclogue
form subservient to allegory.
In a letter to his
brother, Gherardo, Petrarch reveals his view that all poetry
is formed from allegory ("poetica omnis intexta est"); thus,
both he and Boccaccio provided clues explaining their allegories
through letters to certain friends.
If these clues
were not extant, most of their pastorals would be totally
incomprehensible to the modern reader.
However, Petrarch
sought to keep the meaning opaque even for^his contemporaries.
His eclogues convey the most medieval kind of
riddling; "the allusions are everything, and the classical
..27
form is wholly incidental to the mystification.

44
Boccaccio explains that they chose Virgil over Theocritus,
who signifies nothing in his pastorals "praeter quod cortex
verborum demonstrat," because Virgil "abscondit" some meaning
"sub cortice nonnullos . . . sensus" and did not wish
the reader always to get the inference.^^
The literary prestige of Petrarch overpowered the
Florentine form of pastoral begun by Dante and established
the cryptic eclogue as standard.
Petrarch's Carmen, one
of the few works he appears to have finished, covers the
same range of themes as those found in the Letters: amorous,
29
personal, political, and occasional. The first eight are
connected with Petrarch's life at Vaucluse, his political
views, and his attitude toward the Papal Court.
The last
four, generally referred to as "the eclogues of sorrow,"
are laments in the form of the Christian consolation of a
belief in God and the hope of heaven.
The general outline of his first eclogue, the
Parthenias, resembles Virgil's first, in which a rustic
peasant, distraught after having been forced from his world,
meets another shepherd, sheltered in his ease and peace of
mind, and they discuss their respective situations.
The
language, meter, and pastoral allusions are definitely
Virgilian, but here the influence ends.
The spirit and
argument of the eclogue are entirely Petrarch's own.
Intimately
autobiographical, it delves into Petrarch's lifelong
conflict:
whether he should devote himself to the

45
secular world or to religious life.
The contrast he draws
between the opposing worlds of these two shepherds symbolizes
the contrary enthusiasms of Petrarch himself and his
brother, Gherardo, who was a member of the Carthusian
monastic order; the contrast, that is, between human and
divine, secular and religious, classical and medieval,
literary and theological.
The poem evolves into a panegyric of poetry, fame,
and Roman antiquity and divulges Petrarch's intimate confession
of his burning love for literature and his preference
to serve the call of the Muses rather than the Church.
He implies that although the refuge offered by the monastery
might seem inviting in moments of failure and despair,
it is far more worthy of a man of intelligence and
energy to pursue a difficult ideal than to waste his talents
in the peace of a contemplative life.
30
This very
attitude is exemplary of the humanist philosophy, which
Petrarch is credited with beginning.
Petrarch also covers the subject of poetry as a
basis for an outlook on life in two other eclogues.
The
theme of the third eclogue is the nature of sacred and
profane love, and the contrast between the sacred and profane
is developed by the representation of the shepherdess
Daphne as symbolic of both of Petrarch's loves, his love
for Laura and his love for the glory offered by the poet's
laurel crown.
The fourth eclogue proclaims Petrarch's

46
belief that poetry is a divine gift of nature and that the
Muses have favored the Italians more than the French with
this gift.
At least four of Petrarch's eclogues have political
considerations.
The second is a eulogy for Robert of
Naples, whose death was the occasion of many woes to his
realm.
The fifth is a panegyric to Cola Rienzo, whose
short-lived revolution "to revive the grandeur that was
Rome" seemed to Petrarch the greatest and noblest adventure
of the age.
The sixth and seventh expose the wickedness
of the Papal court at Avignon, which Petrarch gravely
detested.
In these two pastorals, he developed a motive
implicit in the medieval eclogue:
31
church satire through
personal religious reflections.
The last four of Petrarch's twelve poems are expressions
of sorrow.
Eclogue IX despairs over the disastrous
results of the Black Death, which Petrarch suggests was
sent to punish mankind for its sins.
The tenth and eleventh
eclogues, which are reminiscent of the "Laura sonnets,"
mourn the death of his Laura.
The final eclogue grieves
for John of France, who was captured by the English.
Although his eclogues are full of verbal conceits,
awkward figures, pathetic fallacy, elements of melancholy
love, and the spirit of sentimentality, Petrarch's Latin
retains the classic purity of the language.
The distinguishing
characteristic of his Carmen remains in the covert

47
satire against the Church.
These poems are important evidence
for the life, thought and personality of one of
Europe's greatest literary figures in addition to their
providing historical information about events and personalities
of fourteenth century Italy.
Boccaccio extends the moralizing quality of Petrarchan
allegory even more by assuming a didactic tone.
Since
he could not rival the Latinity or the polished quality of
Petrarch's pastoral collection, Boccaccio's pastoral effort
did not enjoy the early publication or the popularity
of his master's.
But his eclogues are equally as interesting
and valuable for their illumination of the psychological
development of the author.
The length of Boccaccio's eclogues seems to correspond
directly to the subject; the more abstract and
serious the subject, the longer the eclogue.
Eclogues VII-
XVI reflect more serious subjects as the result of the Petrarchan
influence.
The first nine are political allegories;
ten, eleven, fourteen, and fifteen are religious
allegories; twelve and thirteen are concerned with the
nature of poetry; and the last eclogue is a dedication of
the entire collection.
Political allegories employ a technique only slightly
32
different from that of euhemeristic myth. In Eclogue VI,
Boccaccio's adaptation of Virgil's Golden Age myth illustrates
this technique in celebrating the return of Giovanna

48
and her husband, Louis of Taranto, to Naples.
King Louis
of Hungary had driven them from their realm, but he was
later forced to withdraw his armies, an action which secured
the safe return of the couple.
The eclogue begins
with Meliboeus mourning for the exiled Alcestus (Louis of
Taranto), even though it is a festival day.
Amintas brings
him good news:
Poliphemus (the Hungarian King) has retired,
and Alcestus has actually returned.
In joy the two shepherds
sing the Virgilian hymn of the new Golden Age, while
the altars fume, the flocks graze, and the fields remain
in quiet peace.
Alcestus has brought back with him Astraea
(Giovanna), the goddess of justice, and together they have
united the wolf and flock in common toil.
A thorough
knowledge of Neapolitan affairs in the 1340's would be
necessary for the modern student to understand the allegory
unassisted.
A problem arises in this eclogue that is inherent
in political allegory:
the possible loss of effectiveness,
when the events allegorized are so contemporary that succeeding
generations cannot relate to them.
A close adherence
to the myth and a conscious attempt to make the
particulars of the allegory more universal can prevent the
poet from losing his audience.
By speaking in large mythic
images applicable to any auspicious beginning, Virgil
secured immortality for his Golden Age myth.
Most Renaissance
poets failed to acquire any lasting degree of

49
recognition from their political allegories.
Although Petrarch had introduced religious topics
in his pastorals, Boccaccio was responsible for giving the
real impetus to the religious eclogue.
The influence of
Dante's Commedia seems highly prevalent throughout Boccaccio's
religious eclogues.
The tenth offers a gruesome
description of the torments of Hell; the fourteenth envisions
the joys of Paradise; and the fifteenth, an account
of Boccaccio's own religious conversion guided by Petrarch,
depicts the long and painful road to salvation as a sort
33
of purgatory on earth.
The Olympia (XIV) holds a special interest because
of its similarities to the almost contemporary Middle English
dream-vision, the Pearl.
The Olympia is likewise
placed in the medieval framework of the vision, a situation
unique in pastoral.
This eclogue is an elegy for
Boccaccio's young daughter Violante, who had died at age
five, and reveals only vague similarities to the Virgilian
elegiac form.
He does draw from Virgil's description of
the Golden Age for his pastoral representation of Heaven.
His metaphorical allusions, however, are Petrarchan, and
he relies heavily on the Paradise for his description of
the New Jerusalem.
Simultaneous to commemorating Violante's death,
the poem also becomes a didactic homily and an elaborate
consolation, which conveys the same mood found in Petrarch's

50
"eclogues of sorrow."
In the vision, Olympia (Violante)
manifests herself before her father's eyes as a mature
woman, and informs him that she has come to take away his
tears.
With bold authority, Olympia asserts that she has
returned to teach her father a lesson of resignation and
to explain to him the mystic properties of Heaven.
This
saintly portrayal of a woman as a didactic entity is characteristic
of medieval literature; i.e., Dante's Beatrice.
Boccaccio adopts another favorite topic of Dante
and Petrarch for his twelfth eclogue:
the glorification of
poetry.
Aware of his own deficiencies as a poet, Boccaccio
humbly affirms that he is only "a lowly practitioner
of an art which is the essence of wisdom and truth expressed
in the loftiest of diction."
35
He felt it his
duty as a poet to preserve the almost sacred majesty of
poetry from contamination.
"To Dante poetry was a pledge
of reconciliation; to Petrarch it was a vision of beauty,
and characteristically, the key to that glory which he so
ardently desired."^^
Perhaps all Boccaccio lacked was
his self confidence.
The thirteenth eclogue is modeled on the Virgilian
form of the contest between two shepherds in amoebaean
song, and its purpose is to have the rustic judge declare
the superiority of poetry over the pursuit of wealth.
Evidently this theme may be based on an actual argument
37
which Boccaccio had with a wealthy merchant at Genoa.

After Petrarch and Boccaccio, there is another lull,
spanning a little more than a century, in the enthusiasm
51
for pastoral poetry.
A new tradition of the Virgilian
"art-pastoral" began in the 1460's among neo-Latin poets
associated with the Este court of Ferrara and maintained
itself for the next two and a half centuries in Italy and
throughout Europe, until the popularity of the genre faded.
These poets wrote a form of pastoral used to celebrate
greatness and denounce vice, to satirize folly and attack
incompetence, and to commemorate victories and mourn
disasters.
Contemporary with these Ferrarese poets was the
oldest of a group of Mantuan poets, Giovanni Battista
Spagnuoli, most commonly called Mantuan, who extended the
allegorical spirit of Petrarch and Boccaccio.
In his ten
Latin eclogues, published in 1498, Mantuan pursues Petrarch's
bitter ecclesiastical denunciations and Boccaccio's
religious didacticism.
His pastoral collection enjoyed
a phenomenal popularity, rivaled only by Virgil's
Bucolics, and he wrote Latin with such ability and flair
that his eclogues were used as a text for over two hundred
years.
His poems were known and imitated among literary
circles throughout Europe.
Erasmus called him "Christianus
Maro" (a Christian Virgil), and Scaliger complained
that many even preferred him to Virgil.
In Love's Labour's
Lost, Shakespeare makes his pedantic schoolmaster quote

52
from Mantuan's eclogues and praise the author by name.
In the dedication to his pastoral collection,
Mantuan mentions writing the eclogues at a youthful age.
This comment is a likely source for the tradition that
a young poet should begin his career by writing eclogues
before attempting epic or dramatic poetry, since this is
the pattern followed by Virgil.
At least eight of the ten
were written during Mantuan's days as a student at Padua,
before he entered the Carmelite monastery about 1466.
He
also says that he revised these youthful compositions at
age fifty, around 1513 when he rose to be the general of
his monastic order at Mantua.
Even after the revision,
which added much to the value of the poems, Mantuan seemed
to regard them as a frivolous and unimportant piece of
work, and probably never dreamed that they would gain him
39
more fame than his 55,000 lines of other verse.
Every European schoolboy was familiar with Mantuan's
Faustus (I), which is probably the best known neo-Latin
pastoral ever written in Europe.
The didactic tone and the
satirical attitude suggest the future direction of the pastoral.
This poem furnishes a discourse on honest love, but
it does not resist taking some satiric jabs at the courtly
love tradition.
In this eclogue, Fortunatus advises
Faustus, who is in love with Galla, and tries to restrain
him from becoming ensnared by his passion.
The moralizing
proverbs, the homeliness of comparisons, and the strong

53
comic element envelope the most interesting aspects of this
first eclogue.
Fortunatus evokes several sententious comments concerning
love.
When he learns that Galla's mother and married
sister have tried to prevent her marriage, he comments,
"Those with a fully belly can easily praise fast-
40
ing." While advising Faustus that love is no respecter
of persons, Fortunatus cautions him that the lover becomes
a slave to love.
Somewhat irritated, Faustus suggests
that Fortunatus does not speak from experience; and the
latter remarks, "It is a distress common to all:
all played the fool at one time or another."
41
we have
Mantuan uses metaphors and similes which are far
from being the enobling comparisons of the courtly love
tradition.
The strong aversion of Galla's mother and
sister toward Faustus' attempts to win Galla is compared
to the repulsion which cats have for mice.
Faustus describes
himself as a fly trapped in the spider's web of
his lady's charms.
Perhaps Mantuan intends to mock somewhat
the courtly love tradition.
The most significant example of the comic element
is the description of the bagpiper, Tonius, at the rustic
wedding.
While his fingers fly on the chanter and his
elbow works the bag, Tonius' eyebrows raise higher and
higher, and his cheeks, flushed from too much to drink,
expand with air, until his eyes nearly bulge out.

54
In the second eclogue, the moralizing antithesis
of the first, Mantuan resumes the topic of love:
this
time, the unhappy course of illicit love.
The third eclogue
is then a sequel to the second, but it does not revert
to the discussion of illicit love until some fortysix
lines of diversion.
The diversion centers around the recent hail storms
which rendered severe damage on the farms near Verona and
only slight injury to their own farms.
The shepherds
speculate on the possible reasons for the discriminating
forces of nature.
They assume that they have been living
in accordance with nature, whereas the other farmers have
not.
The final portion of this eclogue laments the end of
their friend, Amyntas, the victim of the amatory misadventure
that incited their discussion.
The satirical eclogue common from the early sixteenth
to the late eighteenth century finds its strongest
precedents in Mantuan's pastoral collection.
One of his
best known satires, which earned him the label of a misogynist,
is Alphus (IV), a long-winded locution in the
tradition of medieval satire on the nature of women.
The
fourth and fifth eclogues are Juvenalian satire, and the
topic of the fifth is one which has been thoroughly explored
before Mantuan by Theocritus, Juvenal, Martial, and
Petrarch: the behavior of patrons to poets. Following
Mantuan's treatment, the subject is again canvassed by

55
Barclay's fourth Egloge and Spenser's October Aeglogue in
the English tradition.
Eclogues VI-IX follow the debate between the town
life versus the country life that Calpurnius popularized.
The subject matter, however, is various.
Mantuan composes the ninth and tenth in the Petrarchan
vein of ecclesiastical satire.
Falco (IX) satirizes
the ways of the Roman Curia, the methods of the central
government of the Church, and most likely reflects Mantuan
•s own experience when he had gone to Rome on some
business connected with the Carmelite order.
Eagerly
read by English and German Protestant alike, this eclogue
became the model for many attacks on the Popish prelate
and lent the inspiration for Spenser's September Aeglogue
and Milton's protest against the corrupted clergy in
Lycidas.
In addition to establishing the satiric method in
pastoral, Mantuan composed the earliest devotional eclogues,
his seventh and eighth.
The seventh recounts the
story of Pollux, who was warned in a vision by a "nymph"
of the dangers of the secular world and advised to retire
to the safe retreat of Mount Carmel (the Carmelite order).
The eighth serves as a sort of appendix to the seventh.
After identifying the "nymph" as the Virgin Mary herself,
Mantuan begins a panegyric for her power and generousity
and gives a lengthy versified list and description of

56
those days which must be kept sacred in her honor.
This
poem is closely emulated by Spenser in his July Aeglogue.
Mantuan used allegory in the service of morality,
whose end he attained through either reproof or edification.
By combining the Petrarchan satire and the Boccaccian
spiritual instruction, he achieved a new kind of
allegory, the satiric.
Almost simultaneous to the development of the Mantuan
school of Latin bucolic writers, a group of Italian
pastoralists appeared.
In 1481, their vernacular eclogues,
usually imitative of those in the learned tongue, were
collected into a volume containing an Italian translation
42
of Virgil's Bucolics as well. Soon the practice of eclogue
writing in the vernacular became as diverse as that
of Latin.
The use of Latin had persisted during the Renaissance
for several practical reasons.
By using the same
language as their models, the writers could imitate the
classical masters more closely.
The vernacular was still
undergoing rapid linguistic changes, that made composition
difficult.
Since Latin was a common language throughout
Europe, Latin composition received a wider circulation
than vernacular works.
As the linguistic efficiency of the vernaculars
increased, however, more and more writers chose the vernaculars
over Latin.
A vernacular language gave a country

57
a strong feeling of nationalism; and because of the closer
unity through politics and religion, the rise of vernacular
was wider-spread in powerful countries.
The first vernacular reappearance of either the
pastoral or the romance ideal was Boccaccio's Ameto (c.
1341), which he composed before his Latin eclogues.
This work contains the central idealism of pastoral, without
any political or religious allusions, and sets a basic
pattern pursued in all other Renaissance works of its kind—
a blend of prose narrative with verse interludes, which
• • 1 • 44
raise a simple story into the realm of the imagination.
At least one poem in the Ameto is a strict eclogue,
composed throughout in terza rima, which was destined to
45
become the standard verse-form for the pastoral. This
poem is a debate between an upland and a lowland shepherd
and contains no overtones of topical allusions.
Perhaps
this eclogue contributes to the toning down of the allusive
element in the Italian eclogues, which stress more of an
aesthetic quality rather than the allegorical quality common
to Latin eclogues.
Most likely the de-emphasis of
topical allusions was a judicious move; for the vernacular
poems appealed to a wider, less learned audience, and necessitated
a prudent, less controversial type of subject
matter.
In 1482, using the.Ameto as a guideline, Giacopo
Sannazaro, another great Italian humanist, began linking

58
a few of his scattered eclogues together with prose passages;
and some twenty years later, he completed a highly
successful pastoral romance, the Arcadia.
A pirated edition
of his text first appeared in 1502, during Sannazaro's
46
voluntary exile in France.
Upon his return to Naples in
1504, a more accurate and complete version, containing
twelve (instead of ten) eclogues with their accompanying
prose passages and an Epilogue, was published.
Sannazaro's most notable contribution to pastoralism
is that he fixed once and for all the Arcadian setting
of Virgil as the conventional country of the pastoral.
He
possesses an insight, very similar to Virgil's, that understands
the pastoral life as a representation of the poetic
imagination and peace of mind.
Sannazaro's greatest individual
achievement hinges on his perception that Arcadia
47
is a country of the mind.
Arcadia conveys Sannazaro's sense of a literary
tradition, a tradition of praise for one's homeland and
pride in one's natural origins.
Along with the praise,
however, goes the censure of the complexities which bring
turmoil into this perfect simplicity; he lashes out against
lust, avarice, and envy.
Arcadia symbolizes the poet's dedication to poetry,
to pleasure, to love, and to contemplation.
The ultimate
emphasis falls, as it does in Virgil's pastorals, on the
contrast between the real and the ideal, not only on the

59
gulf which exists between the world of Naples and Arcadia,
but also on the bond between them.
Naples represents worldly vanity, and Arcadia,
pastoral sincerity.
Through poetry, Sannazaro feels that
one can attain that measure of sincerity, because dedication
to poetry is especially well-adapted to a solitary
kind of life and offers the only true diversion from reality.
Like Petrarch and Boccaccio, Sannazaro is celebrating
and exploring his own commitment to poetry, while he examines
the claims that he and his circle can make for admis-
48
sion to the ranks of poets.
Arcadia has been synonymous with the world of
escape ever since Virgil's Eclogue VI, in which Gallus
seeks the Arcadian retreat as a refuge from his unhappy
love affair.
Sannazaro's spokesman is the townsman Sincere,
who escapes from busy Naples in hopes of finding some solace
among the shepherds for his unrequited love.
The diversion,
nevertheless, is only temporary; and at last he is conveyed
back to Naples by a subterranean journey, only to find his
beloved lady dead.
Like Virgil, Sannazaro enhances his rich pastoral
images with heroic, romance, and philosophical overtones.
In their pastorals, both men seek to create a rationale for
life, a reconciliation between public and private virtues,
between the active and the contemplative.
The prose portion
of the Arcadia is a confession of the poet's

60
vacillation between two worlds, and the eclogues, saturated
with motifs from the Golden Age, weigh in favor of
the ideal.
But Sannazaro manages to keep the genres of pastoral
and heroic poetry distinct.
Influenced by the Italian
love poetry and the precedents set by Theocritus and
Virgil, Sannazaro views pastoral as a genre primarily
devoted to love.
In the tradition of the Petrarchan canzone
that looks upon love as a weakness, a snare, and a
delusion, Sannazaro's Arcadia depicts love as a spiritual,
and often a physical, sickness.
"Under such a view, a
genre devoted to the celebration of love may be in some
danger of becoming a celebration of sickness and death."
The last six chapters of the Arcadia with their
strong elegiac strain almost become such a celebration.
As early as Chapter 9, the esoteric and supernatural interests,
characteristic of some of the mystical elements
of the Boccaccian mixture of dream and allegory which dominates
the final chapter of the Arcadia, begin to emerge.
The epilogue continues the plaintive tone and, to the accompaniment
of an oaten flute, laments the death of the
Muses, the withering of laurels, the silence of the woods,
and the disappearance of the nymphs and satyrs:
the loss
of the pastoral ideal.
In later life, regarding his Arcadia as a youthful
indiscretion, Sannazaro introduced the piscatory eclogue.

in which the fisherman is substituted for the shepherd, and
61
the sea replaces the rural countryside.
According to
Scaliger, the five hundred lines of the piscatorials consumed
about ten years of labor for Sannazaro.
It has
been assumed that he originally intended to write ten eclogues
and did not finish before his death.
We have only
five complete poems and a brief fragment of a sixth.
Sannazaro knew Greek; so he was familiar with Theocritus'
Idylls, as well as Virgil's Bucolics, and combined
the best aspects of both.
His images and descriptions are
Theocritean; the diction, manner, and tone, Virgilian.
He
also reveals some of the humanist influence in the topical
allusions overt in the third and fourth piscatorials.
As
in most neo-Latin poems, the piscatorials reveal a mingling
of classical and contemporary, antiquity and Renaissance,
and artifice and realism.
The second, fourth, and fifth of Sannazaro's eclogues
are modeled on Virgil's second, sixth, and eighth
respectively.
Eclogue II concerns the cruelty of Galatea.
In Eclogue IV, there is an epic tone, which Sannazaro clarifies
by stating that he is attempting a loftier theme—
52
"the first honorable beginnings of our dear land." Here
he substitutes Proteus for Virgil's Silenus and has him
act as a guide for two fisheinnan, to whom he tells the legendary
history of the places which they are passing.
Eclogue
V discusses two related subjects:
first, the grief

62
of a lover for his faithless mistress, and then, the efforts
of a forsaken girl to win back her lover.
Like Mantuan's bucolic poems, Sannazaro's piscatorials
were read as widely and as thoroughly as Virgil's
during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and they
were widely imitated in almost every vernacular literature.
By lending new vitality to the pastoral, Sannazaro gave an
original turn to a sometimes hackneyed form.
From this survey of the pastoral genre following
Virgil, one can ascertain the gradual dispersion of pastoralism
to the extent that it becomes more influential in
Renaissance and Baroque European literature than it ever
was in Rome and Greece.
53
The pastoral emerges distinct
from other genres, because it rests on a view of life or
a way of representing it.
The pastoral writer conveys his
own acceptance of his human condition, "a condition in which
the characters understand life in relation not to man's
activity but to the fundamental patterns of the created
54
world: ..."
A conflict or contrast is a necessary catalyst for
the pastoral genre.
The pastoral poet reassesses man's
discontent with his present status and his desire to withdraw
from it as the result of a conflict in values, arising
from a contrast between two different worlds.
The temporary
diversion offered by the pastoral ideal allows the
shepherd to re-emerge from that withdrawal into an isolated

setting, and "to return, strengthened, and enlightened, to
63
active engagement in the imperfect world.
The return distinguishes
significant pastoral.
The resolution of the contrast
and the reconciliation of the ironies are the achieved
end where art imposes order and meaning on nature."^^
The Italian humanists attempted to re-vitalize the
pastoral form and adapt it to their own purposes by either
one or two ways:
by emphasizing and expanding old conventions,
v^ich made them more artificial, or by adding new
ones that developed the didacticism and allegory of Virgil.
Neo-Latin poets began to use the eclogue as a medium to
salute both private and public events.
Some pastorals
dealt with the most varied expressions of their innermost
thoughts and personal interests:
self-analyses, thankofferings,
congratulation on improved health, and even
wishes for a bon voyage.
Another group was formed by poems
of a didactic, satirical, or religious nature, with the content
frequently overlapping from one type to another.
The major innovative steps in the humanistic, neo-
Latin eclogue were taken by Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio,
Mantuan, and Sannazaro.
Dante found a new use for the eclogue
as a form of correspondence to defend his choice of
Italian for his epic.
Petrarch saw the eclogue as a weapon
for bitter ecclesiastical denunciation, in which he stressed
the purpose of moral allegory.
Boccaccio imposed an aura
of mysticism on the eclogue by inserting a mixture of dream

and allegory, and he chose to extend the didacticism of the
64
pastoral allegory.
Mantuan makes both the didactic and
satiric intents of his precursors explicit in his pastorals.
But Sannazaro ventured the boldest attempt at originality
by introducing the piscatorial type of eclogue.
The neo-Latin movement proceeds for a time parallel
with the effort in vernacular pastorals, and some poets,
such as Boccaccio and Sannazaro, wrote both.
The appearance
of eclogues and pastoral romances in vernacular added a new
dimension to the Italian pastoral tradition.
The concern
with allegory and topical allusions, which was paramount
in the neo-Latin eclogue, was reduced in the Italian eclogue
to a point of being almost negligible.
The lyric
quality of pastoral poetry and the aesthetic value of pastoral
expression was elevated to a position which had not
been held since Theocritus' time.
The Elizabethan pastoral
lyric, the French pastourelle, and the Spanish chivalric
romance continued this change in direction.
The pastoral collections of the Italian humanists
are valuable documents for their revealing information about
the characters and personalities of these great writers, and
for their clear reflection of the political and social conditions
in Italy during this period.
These poems enable us
to understand the humanist movement, which is clarified by
the poet's expression of his personal philosophy and his
theory of poetry.
Without a knowledge of the Italian

65
humanists' pastorals, which in most cases held a greater
dominion over later European pastoral traditions than the
classical eclogues, our understanding of the English pastoral
genre would be desperately hindered.

CHAPTER IV
THE STATUS OF THE ECLOGUE IN ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND
The pastoral compositions of the Italian humanists
maintained a large following in the sixteenth century among
vernacular poets throughout Europe.
In Spain, Garcilaso de
la Vega (1503-1536) adapted the pastoral accomplishments of
Virgil and Sannazaro into several long, sweet, and melancholy
eclogues, to which he added a note of chivalric adventure.
In 1560, the pastoral romance, Diana Enamorada,
further enhanced Spanish genre and revealed the authority
which Sannazaro's Arcadia had held over its creator, the
Portuguese Jorge de Montemayor (1520-1561).
In France, the group of poets known as the Pleiade
absorbed the Italian humanists' concepts within their own
pastoral creations.
Clement Marot (1496-1544) was the first
to write French vernacular eclogues and to sing of French
peasants still under the protection of the classical figure.
Pan. His immediate successor, Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585),
surpassed Marot's poetic attempts.
Ronsard began his pastoral
career with a free translation of Theocritus' second
idyll, and he proceeded with six melodious eclogues, partly
drawn from Virgil, Calpurnius, and Sannazaro (who had been
translated into French by Ronsard's friend, Jean Martin,
in 1544).
66

The Italian humanists along with these four European
poets directed the responsibility for the pastoral
67
incentive in England.
"Because the full impact of Humanism
came late to England, often by a circuitous route
through Italy and France, English poetry is often an imitation
of an imitation, modelling itself on those continental
poets who had already imitated the classics, or who had
achieved an equal greatness in their own right."
The sixteenth century also denoted the beginning
of extended passages of pastoral theory, most of which
urge the poet to imitate the ancients in his vernacular
2
language.
The first direct discussion of the pastoral
occurs in Vida's De Arte Poetica (1527), which recommends
that the young poet initially exercise his talents by writing
pastorals.
According to Congleton, Scaliger's Ars
Poetica (1561) contains the most important criticism of
the pastoral in Italy, the earliest formal passage of pastoral
criticism, and the earliest statement of the doctrine
3
of the genre. In keeping with the school of Marot,
Sebillet suggests literary imitation for the pastoral poet
in a short passage from L'Art poetique frangoys (1548),
which encompasses the first significant criticism of the
pastoral in France.
Congleton notes that "English criticism of the pastoral
before the Restoration is more informal and fragmentary
than contemporary pastoral criticism in France and

4
Europe."
Most of the ideas are derived from prefaces and
68
dedications to pastoral works, or from incidental remarks
in the treatises on the art of poetry as a whole.
The
most significant statements are made in Alexander Barclay's
"Prologe" to Certayne Eglogs (c. 1514); "E. K.'s" epistle
and preface, prefixed to Spenser's Shepheardes Calender
(1579); and George Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie
(1589).
Barclay's "Prologe" accords much of his thought to
Horace's Ars Poetica, with an especial interest in the Latin
poets' emphasis on choosing speech appropriate to the
5
speaker.
Barclay begins with a description of the traditional
types of poetry and explains that poets began with
eclogues in order to sharpen their wit before assuming
enough audacity to attempt "thinges of weyght and gravitie."
While tracing the development of the eclogue from Theocritus
to Mantuan, "the best of that sort since Poetes first
began," Barclay also defines the range of its subject
matter:
basically, all those things which give pleasure
to the reader or listener.
"E. K." largely agrees with Barclay's theory, but
he feels that the content of the pastoral should be moral
and allegorical.
His philosophy adheres to a strict sense
of decorum and commends Spenser for his "dewe obseruing
of Decorum euerye where, in personages, in seasons, in
matter, in speach, and generally."
"E. K.'s" primary

69
consideration involves two themes of pastoral criticism—
language and versification, and he defends Spenser's use
of both.
Puttenham's treatment of the pastoral is not comprehensive,
but his discussion of the origin of the pastoral
does introduce a new idea into pastoral theory:
that
pastoral poetry is the product of an urban culture, a contention
generally accepted by modern students of the
8
genre.
The English pastoral is not totally a product of
Renaissance humanism; an interaction with native traditions
exists as well.
In 1546, an Italian humanist collection
of eclogues was published in a little volume by
Oporinus, at Basle, under the "quaint" title. En. habes,
lector, Bucolicorum auctores.
This compilation, which made
available the Latin eclogues of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio,
Mantuan, and others, spurred the inspiration for the primary
movement of English pastoral poets, those who clung
to the eclogue form and the classical conventions of the
genre.
Secondary influences came from the fifth century
prose romance, Daphnis and Chloe, a story of lost aristocrats
and their education, written by the Greek Longus in
Latin; from the medieval French pastourelle, a short, lively
poem, half dialogue and half recital; and from the pastoral
episodes of the Bible.
After Spenser, native elements
gradually engulf the English pastoral, and the eclogue forii.

70
replaced by the pastoral lyric, begins to meet its demise.
Before the appearance of Spenser's Shepheardes
Calender in 1579, the extent of pastoral eclogues composed
in England, in either Latin or the vernacular, was limited.
Alexander Barclay, the translator of Brandt's German work,
the Ship of Fools, composed the first eclogues in English,
which he interjects with local detail and personal references.
The next pastoral collection was Barnabe Googe's
Eglogs Epytaphes and Sonettes (1563), which also included
translations from eclogues in Montemayor's Diana.
The
majority of Googe's eight eclogues are Anglicized versions
and translations of Mantuan, which he tries to adapt to
contemporary conditions in England.
Recalling the Spanish
tradition, Googe borrows the subject matter for his fifth,
sixth, and seventh eclogues from Garcilaso and Montemayor.
Googe exhibits some native inspiration in his partiality
for a type of narrative ballad motive as the subject of
his poems.
In 1567, George Tuberville completed his
translation of the first nine of Mantuan's eclogues into
English fourteeners, an accomplishment which helped promote
the pastoral genre.
All too often, Barclay's eclogues have been totally
disregarded because they lacked an original note.
This
judgment is too severe; for, in addition to promulgating
the satiric tradition of Mantuan for continuance in the
vernacular pastorals of Marot and Spenser, Barclay instilled

71
an element of humor in his pastorals and introduced incidents
indigenous to England.
Perhaps it was his familiarity with Mantuan's collection
of eclogues as a Latin text that intrigued Barclay
to write the first English eclogues.
Of his five eclogues,
the first three are translations of the "Miseriae Curialum"
by Aeneas Sylvius, later known as Pope Pius II; the last two
are a free rendering of Mantuan's fifth and sixth eclogues.
Barclay professes in his Prologue that his poems imitate
"other Poetes olde" and declares their allegorical purpose:
"Closed in shadowe of speeches pastorali/ As many Poetes (as
I have sayde beforne)/ Have used longe time before that I
was borne."
Sarcastically, Barclay also states that he
does not intend to challenge the name of the Poet Laureate,
a direct allusion to John Skelton; he stresses a far greater
concern in a sort of heavenly reward for his poetic labors
and invokes God, the "chiefe shepheard," instead of Clio
or Melpomene, the classical muses.
Barclay's eclogues, as Evans notes, "show that the
humanist concept of the satire as a distinct art form had
entered into England and been understood."
The first
three poems discuss the miseries of life at court with a
bold execution and calculated roughness.
The discourse in
this argument involves Coridon, a young shepherd anxious
to seek his fortune at court, and old Cornix, for whom the
great courtly world has lost its glamour.

In the first eclogue, Cornix "quotes proverbs with
72
the persistency of Sancho Panza,"
in the hope of dissuading
Coridon's rejection of the pastoral life for court life.
Cornix entreats Coridon to consider where he might live more
quietly, and he warns the youth:
"Man all the worlde is
full of misery" (1.314).
But, in citing the benefits of
court life, Coridon argues that he can gain acceptance
through his exceptional skills in archery, athletics, dancing,
piping, and singing—a satirical comment on the leisurely
life of the English courtier.
Cornix agrees that
the shepherd's life is one of abject penury, "But in the
Court is the well of misery" (1.338).
The spiritual and moral overtones are heavy throuchout
this poem, particularly in those passages commemoratir j
the deaths of the Bishops Morton and Alcock, both of whom
served at the monastery at Ely, where Barclay was a Benedictine
monk.
There is some caustic humor in Barclay's
comment that if the people at Ely had been as pleasant as
the place, it would have been a solace and a paradise of
pleasure, where he would have chosen to remain.
This autobiographical
reference is common in eclogues of this type.
The second eclogue seems highly autobiographical,
considering the numerous lines naming the poet's friends
at court.
Using bird imagery, Barclay makes a disparaging
reference to some of these courtiers:

73
The birde of Cornewall, the Crane and the Kite,
And mo other like to heare is great delite.
Warbling their tunes at pleasour and at will.
Though some be busy that therin have no skill.
(11.259-264)
Cornix points out the vices of court to Coridon and begins
a lengthy discourse on the vile women there.
He declares
that every woman will pretend to be as chaste as Penelope;
but, though she were, at court she could not maintain her
chastity for long.
This sarcasm is reminiscent of Mantuan's
fourth eclogue, which preserves the tradition of the medieval
satire on women.
Next, Barclay describes the sycophantic
aspects of court life, the "uncleane penury" of court meals
where "Thy potage is made with wedes and with ashes,"
(11.745) and where ten knives all meet in the common dish
as each hungry courtier fights for his share, so that the
unwary one who forgets his gauntlet may well lose a finger:
"On a finger gnaweth some hasty glutton,/ Supposing it is
a piece of biefe or mutton" (11.983).
The third eclogue persists in the description of
courtly miseries.
Coridon wakes from a bad dream, which
he attributes to sleeping on the hard ground, and asks
Cornix to talk to him to relieve his anxieties.
Much to
Coridon's chagrin, Cornix further recounts the miseries
of the court; this time the most undesirable sleeping conditions.
The accomodations are filthy, with twenty in a
room and any number of unsavory bed fellows:
"So foule
and scabbed, of harde pimples so thin,/ That a man might

74
grate hard crustes on his skin" (III.89-90).
He warns
Coridon to be prepared for flies, gnats, lice, fleas, bugs,
mice, and rats:
"These shall with biting, with stinking,
din and sound/ Make thee worse easement then if thou lay
on ground" (III.78-80).
Barclay deals with the neglect of poets by rich men
in his fourth eclogue and closely follows Mantuan's fifth
poem.
It is in this eclogue that Barclay directs a scathing
satire against Skelton.
The trouble between these two
had begun much earlier, for in his Ship of Fools, Barclay
is preoccupied with the frivolity of "Phyllyp Sparowe" and
the folly of Laureates.
In addition to the satire, Barclay
introduces a long elegy, "The Description of the Towre of
vertue and honour," which he wrote for the son of his
patron, Norfolk.
This poem is in the chivalric tradition,
with holy living, wisdom, godly behavior, justice and
equity being the necessary virtues enabling man to enter
Barclay's "Towre."
The eclogue ends on a bitter note, with
the starving poet Minalcas, wishing that Codrus, his wealthy
patron, would be cursed by Midas' touch:
"For so muche
on golde is fixed thy liking,/ That thou despisest both
vertue and cunning" (IV.1157-1158) .
The last of the eclogues is a debate about the advantages
of country or city life.
Barclay displays his
genial wit in his account of one pastime of the city
dweller:

75
When men be busied in killing of fat swine.
They get the bladder and blowe it great and thin.
With many beanes or peason put within.
It ratleth, soundeth, and shineth clere and fayre.
While it is throwen and caste up in the ayre,
Eche one contendeth, and hath a great delite
With foote and with hande the bladder for to smite.
If it fall to grounde they lifte it up agayne.
This wise to labour they count it for no payne,
Renning and leaping they drive away the colde.
The sturdie plowmen lustie, strong and bolde
Overcommeth the winter with driving the foote ball.
Forgetting labour and many a grevous fall.
(IV.94-106)
An equally clever tale is related, concerning Adam
and Eve, in order to explain the difference between rural
and city men.
Barclay professes that it was easy for Adam
to trust Eve when there were no other men around to incite
his jealousy; yet, as people began to procreate, suspicion
and infidelity grew.
While Adam was away tending the flocc
one day and Eve was home caring for her ever-increasing
number of children. Eve spied the Lord and immediately
realized that if he saw all her children, he would suppose
them a token of too great a carnal lust.
She quickly began
hiding some of them under straw, hay, chaff, in chimneys,
and tubs of draff.
Those who were fair she kept in
sight; when the Lord saw these, each child received a
worldly reward:
a position in the court or in nobility.
Eve was so overwhelmed by his kindness that she decided
to bring in view the rest of her progeny, who were contrastingly
dark-skinned; but, the Lord scorned these for
their uncomely appearance and misshapen stature.
He

placed upon their heads the scorn of the laborer, who must
76
till the fields and tend the flock:
"Thus began honour
and thus began bondage,/ And diversitie of citie and village"
(V,391-392) .
If we are to assume that Barclay has a place of
honor among pastoral eclogists, we must realize that it
is for neither a purity of form nor an abundance of orginality.
Nevertheless, we can admire Barclay for his subtle
sense of humor, vigorous style, simple and direct diction,
which at times is almost racy, and his excellency in moral
proverbs.
His was a pioneering effort; first, in writing
in the vernacular, and second,in adapting the satirical
eclogue form to English conditions.
Three successive vernacular poets, Googe, Sabie,
and Spenser, all of whom wrote eclogues in the sixteenth
century, appear to exhibit no indebtedness to Barclay.
Each element of their poetry common to Barclay's was originally
a proponent of Mantuan.
Although the first eclogues
written in English were almost entirely disregarded and
only negligibly influential, we must indeed credit Barclay
with aiding in the perpetuation of Mantuan's pastoral
poetry as a highly influential and popular art form in the
sixteenth century.
Like Barclay's, Spenser's eclogues conform to the
Renaissance development of a satirical and critical strain.
The singing contests, debates, and love plaints of the

77
shepherds lend themselves readily to masked criticism.
In
the eclogues of Mantuan and the moral fables of Chaucer,
Spenser finds the chief models for his moral allegories.
The Shepheardes Calender has been considered the
most distinguished pastoral poem of the Renaissance, for
it summarizes almost all the elements that had previously
appeared in pastoral poetry and combines them into the most
unified poem of its kind.
With his Calender, Edmund Spen-
13
ser "ushered in the New Poetry of the Elizabethan age."
In a mode which had general European acceptance, he undertook
bold experiments in metrics and language that enabled
him to demonstrate that English verse was capable of complex
effects.
Spenser's pastoral series of twelve Aeglogues, the
Shepheardes Calender, first appeared in 1579, under the
pseudonymn of "Immerito."
Along with these poems, a dedication
to Sir Philip Sidney appeared, in addition to an
epistle to Gabriel Harvey and a "General Argument" for the
entire work by one "E. K. "
"E. K." (probably Edward Kirke,
a college friend of Spenser's) also provides a separate
argument for each eclogue with elaborate glossaries and
commentaries, which often appear more to mystify than to
clarify.
The conventions of this pastoral collection recreate
the Graeco-Roman eclogue, but Spenser's themes
proclaim his dependence on the humanist pastorals in Italy

78
and France.
Spenser adapts the pastorals of Mantuan and
Marot, while achieving classical reminiscences indirectly
through his more immediate models in Politian, Tasso, Baif,
14
Du Bellay, and Ronsard.
By basing his meter, language, humor, and fable
allegories on Chaucerian precedents, Spenser attains a
native quality in his pastorals.
In his prefatory remarks,
"E. K." names Chaucer as Spenser's model and compares
Chaucer to Virgil.
In place of the Customary classical
names, Spenser bestows native English names on his
shepherds, such as Cuddie, Hobbinol, Piers, and Colin,
which he borrows from John Skelton.
Another distinction which Spenser lends to his
15
eclogues is an unprecedented serial unity.
Two basic
devices unify the poem:
a calendar scheme and a love motif.
He attempts to create a "Calender for every year/ That
Steele in strength, and time in durance, shall outweare";
and, throughout the course of this year, he recounts the
romance of Colin Clout and the elusive Rosalind.
"E. K."
suggests two possible moral ends for Spenser's Calender:
one is a kind of catharsis, whereby Spenser's (Colin's)
own love might be mitigated by revealing his passion, and
the other is a sincere desire to warn people about the
follies of love.
By adjusting the moods of the poem to correspond
with the seasons of the year, Spenser increases the

79
unifying effect in the Calender.
His song both ends and
begins on a plaintive note with the December and January
eclogues respectively, which represent the months when
nature despairs because nothing is growing.
The outward
nature of the seasons' annual cycle reflects and consolidates
the emotions, thoughts, and passions of the shepherd.
December echoes the tone of January and concludes
with a renunciation of love:
"Tell Rosalind, her Colin
bids her adieu."
The conflict between mutability and eternity, which
haunted Spenser throughout his literary career, found expression
first in the cyclic pattern of the Shepheardes
Calender.
Here, Spenser tries to reconcile the cosmic
tension between flux and permanence by encompassing time
in his image of the universe.
Through his portrayal of
the year in twelve eclogues, Spenser mirrors the changes
within a year and the change that is a year, while compiling
a calendar for every year.
This conflict can be realized more vividly, when
one considers his attraction to two somewhat incongruous
philosophies.
The main elements in Spenser's philosophy
are derived from the Florentine Platonists.
Neo-Platonism
was especially well-suited for Spenser's conception
of the high function of poetry as philosophy teaching by
example.
This philosophy justifies Spenser's lifting his
allegory out of the scholastic mold and appropriating it

80
for "a searching analysis of men and measures of his
17
time." Yet, another philosophy, which denied the supernatural
(the realm of Platonic ideas) and all mysticism,
formed an interest in Spenser's mind: Epicureanism, which
deals with external nature and the physical realm.
Spenser's Puritan upbringing likewise figures in
the overall expression of his Calender.
Moral allegory was
held dear by the Puritans, and at least five of Spenser's
twelve eclogues qualify in this category, through which he
expresses a central concern with the relative value of
wealth, power, riches, and the contented mind.
The antieroticism
which stains all the love poems is further evidence
of the Puritan mind at work, and the attitude which
remains reasonably constant throughout the poem is likewise
Puritan:
Life is desperate, love fleeting, and art
unrewarding.
Moral allegory was an outgrowth of the exaggerated
19
purpose of the pastoral for religious satire.
In "E. K.'s
< r-, l>
classification of the eclogues, he labels the largest number
as being "Moral:
which for the most part be mixed
with some Satyrical bitternesse."
These moral allegories
are February, May, July, September, and October.
A full
presentation of ecclesiastical abuses occupies three of
the moral allegories. May, July, and September, the last
two of which are indebted to Mantuan.
The bitterness of
February is largely confined to the political and religious

81
implications of the Aesopic fable of the Oak and the Briar.
The Oak most likely symbolizes the true Christian spirit
felled by Roman Catholicism, and the Briar the upstart new
clergy.
The October eclogue is probably the greatest poem
of the work, for it provides us with a definitive statement
of Spenser's poetics.
"E. K. " tells the reader that
October is generally concerned with the "contempt of Poetrie
and pleausant wits"; critics have conjectured that the disdain
which Spenser expresses for patrons may have arisen
from his friendship with Edward Dyer, the disillusioned
court poet, in 1579. To Spenser, the true poet is a moral -
ist, inculcating virtue and truth; a lover, inspired by
the ultimate Platonic idea of beauty; and a vehicle for
divine inspiration.
"E. K." places the group of eclogues (January, Jur \,
November, and December), which deal with the allegory of
Queen Elizabeth as Rosalind and Dido, in the category of
plaintive.
These eclogues offer complaints on a double
level of understanding.
Literally, they lament Colin's
unrequited love for Rosalind and his sorrow over the death
od Dido, the "mayden of greate bloud."
On a second level,
they become political allegories:
"... they mirror
England's sorrow over the contemplated Alencon marriage,
the metaphorical rejection of the English people by the
Queen in favor of a foreign prince, and the prophetic

82
consequences of this marriage—the death of the Queen and
her people in the death of Dido and the approaching death
of Colin."^^
Perhaps a further mention of the November poem,
which "E. K." considers Spenser's best poetic effort, is
warranted.
The pastoral elegy written by Clement Marot
for the death of Madame Loyse de Savage, and designated
as his masterpiece, served as Spenser's model for his
lament over the death of the nymph Dido.
Spenser uses
the conventions of the ancient elegiac tradition and follows
the Christian convention of ending the lament on a
note of consolation.
The remaining eclogues, which "E. K." terms recreative,
concern love or the commendation of special personages.
The allegory in these poems recalls the pastoral
masquerades of Theocritus and Virgil, which conform to a
more personal type of allusion.
Because the subject matter
is less serious in March, April, and August, the recreative
poems, Spenser demonstrates more interest in
21
literary imitations.
March presents a reworking of Bion's
phantasy of the flight of Cupid, who pretends to be a bird
and hides in a bush.
The April panegyric to Elizabeth
reverts to the classical types, but adds courtly manners.
This poem has also been called the most elaborate blazon
in English pastoral poetry.^^
The "blazon," or catalogue
of the lady's beauties, reproduces the style, if not the

83
origin,
• •
of one of the main conventions of the Petrarchan
sonnet in a pastoral adaptation.
August takes the form
of the roundelay and imitates the conventional Theocritean
singing match, by staging a contest between Willye (William
Camden) and Perigot (Philip Sidney), in which Cuddie
(Edward Dyer) judges the song homely and inane.
Spenser wrote the kind of allegory which the Florentines
had revived in their moral exegesis, and his allegory
was equally successful as the result of a careful use
of language, characterization, myth, and meter.
In the Shepheardes Calender, Spenser uses shepherds
in such a way that through their language we may understand
the more serious associations which allegory permits,
23
without feeling that an elevated diction is being used.
Nevertheless, his language has come under constant criticism
for its rough, non-lyrical, and dialectic archaism.,
but it appears appropriate to his purpose.
The shepherd's life is representative of the private
occupations of the mind, as well as social and religious
problems.
But, the learning in most of the satiric
eclogues is carried so lightly upon the double level of
pastoral occupation and moral pre-occupation, that the
24
consciousness of this learning seldom obtrudes. In spite
of "E. K.'s" gloss, some disagreement still exists concerning
the identity of certain of Spenser's shepherds.
Colin Clout's identity, however, seems to be the most

important clue to an understanding of Spenser's allegory.
84
McLane suggests that Colin possesses three possible identities:
"Colin as lover of Rosalind is the English people;
Colin as poet is Spenser; and Colin in the equation of his
life to the four seasons of the year is Everyman."
Spenser aids the clarity of his purpose in his
amazing variety of rhythms, which he uses to distinguish
between the meter in the more serious portions of dialogue
and that of the more lyrical, frivolous narrative descriptions.
He also follows the humanists in his expansive use
of myth for allegorical purposes, for Pan "must do duty
alike for the wood-god of classical myth, for the historic
Henry the Eighth, and for the very person of the Almighty. "^^
Of all the writers of pastoral since Virgil, Spenser
probably effects the most innovations in a single work.
He adapts the pastoral into a new language and enlivens it
with a distinctly native aura; and his preference for using
real English scenery, over the traditional classical setting,
enhances the native quality even more.
He produces a
studied arrangement of the eclogue in a series, a more
unified pastoral than ever before, and adds new zest to
the genre by experimenting with meter and language, by
interjecting an element of humor, and by following the
Chaucerian precedent of moralizing fables.
Although Spenser assured the popularity of the
pastoral in England with his Shepheardes Calender, the

85
bulk of his successors composed a less serious and more
spontaneous song, either in the light, fanciful mood of
Drayton or in the more passionate and romantic spirit of
27
Browne. Consequently, his successors made no permanent
change in the classical eclogue, for they were more strongly
influenced by Spenser's native inspiration.
As a regular feature of his eclogues, Spenser employed
the pastoral lyric or song, which reveals little
connection to the subject of the dialogue and appears
metrically independent.^^
This narrative lyric became the
standard for later English pastoralists, who lifted the
form out of the machinery of the eclogue.
Pastoral miscellanies, such as England's Helicon
and Britannia's Pastorals, produced an abundance of these
lyric poems, singing of love and the good life.
The pastoral
lyric was an extension of the aesthetic purpose begun
by the Italian vernacular pastoralists and the writers
of pastoral romance, and it closely followed the emotional
expression of the Arcadia of Sannazaro, the Renaissance
innovator of pastoral as sentiment.
Soon this hybrid form
of pastoral rivalled the satirical purposes of the eclogue
with "an equally strong tendency in an opposite direction:
29
the utilization of pastoral for generating sentiment."
The most interesting development in the pastoral
mode of the later sixteenth century, however, arises from
the tensions between pastoral and heroic, or pastoral and

tragic, as the pastoral mode makes viable the presentation
of values challenging or excelling the values dominant in
86
the poem's heroic or tragic world.
Sustained efforts of
this development appear in Spenser's Faerie Queene, Sidney's
Arcadia, and Shakespeare's As You Like It.
Each of
these works undertakes "a deeper examination of Nature and
its true relationship to Art and Grace. ""^^
In the last four cantos of the sixth book of the
Faerie Queene, Spenser passes judgment upon the pastoral
ideal, which he recognizes as charming and seductive, but
31
only a temporary solace. "^-^
Shakespeare also criticizes
the philosophy of life underlying the pastoral ideal in
his comedy, As^ You Like It.
The point of the play lies
in the intercourse between the real and the ideal.
Three
sets of characters move on separate levels of meaning to
convey the play's obvious message "that the shepherd's
existence is neither worse nor better than other states:
that, like all ways of life, it has its good sides, but
32
also its bad ones."
The first level includes the exiled Duke and his
retinue, who are forced to enter the rude Arcadia of the
Forest of Arden; unlike the shepherd, they seek its refuge
out of necessity.
Because they possess no pretenses or
illusions about the pastoral life, they are spared from
any disenchantment, when they experience the physical
discomforts of the cold weather and hard labor.

87
The second set of characters consists of Corin,
Phoebe, and Silvius, whose names indicate that they are
the shepherds of the literary ideal.
Corin praises the
pastoral innocence for its moral rewards, but he complains
of the toil and hardship it entails.
William and Audrey constitute the third set of
characters, whose lowly peasant status "prevents their
idealization, and introduces a humorous earthiness into
3 3
the play's sophisticated atmosphere."
These shepherds
are real, and as a group, they are pitted against the
other two as representing an anti-pastoral effect and
stark reality.
Shakespeare uses this play to satirize the pastoral
genre, by presenting the conventional antithesis
between courtier and countryman and by using Touchstone
to burlesque the romantic dream.
Shakespeare's suggestion
that the pastoral is unsuited for the serious business
of life and art exemplifies the change in spirit
which occurred within the pastoral tradition during the
late sixteenth century in England.
Another critical judgment of the pastoral ideal
emerges in the pastoral romance, which Sidney wrote for
his sister, the Countess of Pembroke.
Sidney's Arcadia
draws heavily on Sannazaro's pastoral romance by the same
name, but his outcome is markedly different.
In Book II,
Sidney asks the reader to re-evaluate the significance of

88
a pastoral leisure in the lives of the courtly figures.^^
The tone of his expression moves from one of joy to one
of despair; there is no reconciliation such as occurs in
Sannazaro's Arcadia.
He does not feel that poetic imagination
can reclaim the lost innocence of the past.
Therefore,
the poem must be taken "as a criticism of the uncomplicated
happiness of Sannazaro's Arcadia, and should give
us some indication of why the pastoral section of the
English romance strike a reader so often as un-Arcadian."
Although the eclogues of Sir Philip Sidney's
Arcadia are not equal to Spenser's in achievement, they
are comparable in their importance to the development of
36
English poetry. Sidney's metrical experiments are more
radical and more extensive than Spenser's, and he even
takes an academic approach by giving little diagrams of
37
the accents in his different meters.
Again, he differs
from Spenser in his greater dependence upon the dramatic
expression of his speaker's feelings and less on tone.
At
times his eclogues are as comical and satirical as Spen-
38
ser's; and in his revised edition of the Arcadia (1593),
his eclogues even assume a moralizing approach, unobservable
in the first edition.
As mounting political and religious pressures of
the later sixteenth century began to demand a more direct
form of literary treatment than had ever been necessary
before, allegory gradually faded into the background of

89
the pastoral tradition.
The final blow was dealt with the
Restoration, when neoclassical poets using the authority
of Aristotle instead of Plato, tended to use drama as a
model for poetry; and, consequently, had to require clarity
everywhere, since the audience in a theater is unspecial-
3Q
ized and cannot "puzzle out" a text.
For Spenser's generation, the "essence of poetry
was an exuberant fiction emancipated from the truth of a
foolish world and expressing its own deeper truths through
images and settings far removed from everyday life."
In the seventeenth century, one last example of this type
of expression recurs in the poetry of John Milton.
Following Spenser, there is no other instance of
true pastoral allegory in the form of an eclogue, until
Milton's Lycidas (1638), which is considered to be the
most accomplished pattern since the form was first invented
by Virgil.
Lycidas is Milton's only Latin poem to
reveal Virgilian influence, and it comprises the "most
perfect example in England of the pastoral elegy raised
41
to a lyrical height hitherto unattained."
The poem, however, is not to be read primarily as
an elegy.
On one level of meaning, the sorrow expressed
for Edward King's death is totally irrelevant.
This level
establishes the conflict between the pleasures and ardors
of song.
AS Milton reflects upon the drowning of his
virtuous young friend, his references become intimately

90
personal and revealing about himself and his reactions
to life.
The poem's emotional power releases Milton's
feelings about God's will and the value of life, if one
is cut off before he achieves fame.
in this digression
he pays special tribute to poetry.
Milton's Lycidas takes a critical look at the "place
and meaning of poetry in a world which seems at many points
42
mimical to it."
Since he uses the conventional guise
of the shepherd representing the poet, Milton's conclusion
about poetry is revealed in his estimation of the pastoral
ideal.
Just as Spenser, Sidney, and Shakespeare before
him, Milton exposes the imperfections of the pastoral life,
a situation which he uses to symbolize the fame gained by
a poet.
He concludes that an eternal life in heaven holds
the only true promise for a perfect peace.
Two of the most famous passages from this elegy
serve to establish Milton's judgment on the pastoral ideal:
the catalogue of flowers, which closely resembles the one
in Spenser's April eclogue, and the ecclesiastical attack,
which has pastoral precedents from Petrarch, Mantuan, Barclay,
and Spenser.
The passage on flowers allows Milton
a short respite from his own inner conflict and implies
that the pastoral ideal offers only a temporary escape,
not a solution.
Milton's strident reproach on the clergy
is directed through the voice of St. Peter, who reminds us
that the shepherd's life is not merely one of singing and

meditating the muse, for after all, there are sheep to be
91
fed and protected.
In this allegory, Milton exposes the
pastoral existence (dedication to writing poetry) for what
it really is:
a life of arduous labor, while he also
chastises the clerics for being too lax in their duty to
their religious charges.
This poem universalizes Milton's personal struggle
between poetic fame and spiritual faith.
It becomes a
Christian consolation with the reconciliation of this conflict
and the realization that true fame can be assessed
only by God and enjoyed only in heaven.
During the poem,
Milton undergoes a kind of tragic catharsis.
In the first
paragraph, he expresses a deep, almost fearful concern for
the relationship of the poet to the forces of nature, the
forces which brought about King's death.
Throughout the
poem, Milton depicts the indifference of nature.
There
is a negative pathetic fallacy, for nature does not participate
in the lament for the dead poet.
The final paragraph, however, concludes with a
radiant vision of promise.
Milton, purged from his prior
fear, now understands nature in its normal, peaceful order
as a symbol for the promise of Christian rebirth.
The poet
is able to resign himself to nature's destructive violence
by acknowledging God's control over it; and in the last
line, he appears to turn his back upon death and face life
with renewed faith.

92
Milton practices a device common to the medieval
eclogue:
a pervasive interweaving of pagan pastoralism
with the Christian motives that oppose, accept, or transcend
it.
Another important element of his style is his
effective use of imagery, especially water, to aid the
unity of the poem.
Since King met his death by drowning
in a shipwreck, the sea becomes an important part of the
water imagery.
By drawing upon the descriptions and language
common to the piscatory eclogues, Milton avails
himself of a natural effect in the allusion to the shipwreck
and the role of the sea.
In spite of its infinitely
complex and dissonant associations between landscape
and sea, Cambridge and Paradise, British lore and
classical myth, and Christian and pagan symbols, Lycidas
emerges as an harmonious whole.
Milton's pastoral poetry belongs to the kind written
in the sixteenth century, when rapid change was the
hallmark of England, as the country was being overcome by
the renascent spirit which had already swept across the
continent.
When religion and the state began making ever
increasing demands on the individual, the British subject
found himself highly susceptible to the ideas of humanism.
England's literature reflected the impact of the Florentine
Platonists, who "had literally revived all the ancient
theories of allegory and mystery common in the Roman
44
Empire."

93
This Platonic revival was responsible for arousing
a religious idealism, which inevitably elevated and enhanced
the concept of the divinity of man, since he was
capable of conceiving of God. ^
The Florentine humanists
also gave new force and currency to the theory that classical
mythology concealed the wisdom—especially the Pla-
46
tonic wisdom—of the ancients.
England readily adopted
the humanistic literary concept of pastoralism as fundamentally
allegorical; a method of concealing truth under
a known and fitting veil of mythology.
They were likewise
in agreement with the Florentine Platonists' philosophical
47
and psychological justification for allegory.
These Platonists
considered the pastoral to be one distinct kind of
allegory, of the order, if not the gravity, of tragedy.
During the Renaissance, imitation became one of
the cardinal principles of writing, a principle which controlled
the attitude toward poetic art; thus the poetry
of the Elizabethans is filled with echoes of their reading
in the classics.
The Renaissance critics stressed the
chief requirements of a poet as being "Art, Imitation, and
Exercise," all of which might be acquired through a knowledge,
study, and practice of the best models and methods
48
of the medium, in addition to some native genius.
Kermode is careful to warn the modern reader not to judge
too harshly this Renaissance concept, for imitation is one
of the fundamental laws of literary history and arises

94
whenever a poet contemplates poetry.^^
In the later sixteenth century, the poet undertakes
a measure to elevate the conception of poetry by exacting
an esteem for the serious poet as a vates, "the divinely
inspired Maker civilizing barbarous nations with his eloquence,
" and by dispelling the role of poetry, primary in
the middle ages, as the supplier of honest recreation.^^
The sixteenth century poet seeks a cure in his poetry for
the moral incertitude of the age, which his poems so vividly
reflect.
Elizabethan England associated the same meaning
with the pastoral as that assigned to classical antiquity's:
a positive ideal—of the good life, contentment,
and mental self sufficiency.
51
Nevertheless, most of the
classical influence on Elizabethan poetry was indirect.
Not even the French Pleiade surpassed the Elizabethan taste
for classical mythological lore, but they, too, derived
their learning from indirect sources, which for the most
part were Italian.
In England, the arts came to exert more dependence
on a knowledge of foreign culture, a knowledge more readily
available to the aristocracy; consequently, among all but
the aristocracy, the strong Puritan disparagement for the
arts prevailed.
By Dryden's time, the impulse of the rustic pastoral
had vanished, and the allegorical tradition in which

95
it had existed was forgotten.
Human needs remained the
same, but current ideas reduced the relevance of the old
pastoral genre.
Rationalism replaced humanism, and Puritanism
dealt its blow to poetry.
By this time, pastoral
poetry had dispersed itself in so many directions that
there was no longer a sufficiently firm base for controlling
its conventions and no place for a reasonable suiting
of style to subject.^^
In the later seventeenth century, the pastoral succumbed
to the literary satire, although a mock pastoral
had appeared as early as 1602 in Davison's "A Song, in
praise of a Begger's life."
Without some of its ideal suggestive
coloring, the pastoral becomes burlesque, but there
is a great variety between the extremes.
As a feeling for the conventional use of shepherds
declined, a preoccupation with them caused the pastoral to
become more artificial.
53
Without a knowledge of the history
of the conventions of the genre, most pastoral poetry
seems insipid, ornamental mimickry.
As in the case of any
art that depends mainly on reproduction, "the pastoral was
in a constant state of menace from the artificial elements
in it; the liberal use of conventions threatened conventionality;
the poetry was always on the point of degener-
54
ating into a mere literary exercise."
Throughout the history of the pastoral genre, we
have observed many attempts to revitalize the tradition.

96
as it approached decadence:
1) elements alien to pastoral
were introduced; 2) the pastoral life was treated as a
symbol for the inner workings of the poetic mind; 3) personal
and autobiographical allusions were employed; 4)
political, social, or religious allusions were allegorized
and then satirized; and 5) tendencies of human nature were
demonstrated through the poet's "twin faculties of imagination
and observation; the instincts towards realism and
55
idealism."

NOTES
CHAPTER I
Martha H. Shackford, "A Definition of the Pastoral
Idyll," PMLA, 19 (1904), 591.
^Florence Gragg, Latin Writings of the Italian
Humanists (New York: Scribner's, 1927), p. vii.
^W. Leonard Grant, Neo-Latin Literature and the
Pastoral (Chapel Hill, N. C.: Univ. of North Carolina
Press, 1965), p. 117.
"^Frank Kermode, English Pastoral Poetry (1952;
rpt. Freeport, N. Y. : Books for Libraries Press, 1969) ,
p. 29.
^Shackford, p. 588.
CHAPTER II
1951).
Iliad 18.525, in Lattimore's translation (Chicago,
^Bruno Snell, "Arcadia: The Discovery of a Spiritual
Landscape," in The Discovery of the Mind, trans.
T. G. Rosenmeyer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press,
1953), p. 285.
3
J. E. Congleton, Theories of Pastoral Poetry in
England: 1684-1798 (1952; rpt. New York: Haskell House,
1968), p. 14.
"^Ibid. , p. 296.
^Rene Rapin, "A Treatise de Carmine Pastorali,"
Idylliums of Theocritus, trans. Thomas Creech (1684;
rpt. Ann Arbor: Augustan Reprint Society, 1947), pp.
4-6.
^W. W. Greg, Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama
(1906; rpt. New York: Russell and Russell, 1959), p. 17.
97

98
T. P. Hamblin, The Development of Allegory
in. the Classical Pastoral, Diss. Univ. of Chicago 1928
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1928), p. 6.
%ost critics consider the first ten idylls to
be pastoral since these are the poems which Virgil most
closely imitates in his Bucolics. Other critics exclude
the second and add the eleventh in their designation of
the pastoral idylls.
Marion K. Bragg, The Formal Eclogue in Eighteenth
Century England (Orono: Univ. of Maine Press, 1926), p. 5.
^^Grant, Neo-Latin Literature, p. 63.
^^Shackford, "A Definition," pp. 586-587.
^^Greg, p. 10.
''-'^Shackford, p. 591.
^"^Snell, p. 286.
15
Hamblm, p. 11.
-•-^The idea for this idyll came most likely from
the previously mentioned choral ode of Stesichorus in
which the Daphnis legend is given the same status as a
myth which tells of heroes and heroic deeds.
^"^Kermode, English Pastoral Poetry, p. 21.
-^^The authorship of the elegy written for Bion
was once wrongly attributed to a student of his by the
name of Moschus. Since the identification of the actual
poet has not been made, Moschus' name is still attached
to the elegy and the pastoral tradition.
•'-^Bragg, p. 8.
^Qlbid.
21
Grant, p. 77.

22,
-Virgil himself refers to his poems in the fourth
georgic as the "Pastorum carmen." Grammarians referred to
them as bucolics, as a result of the etymological association
with the Greek word for herdsman.
23
According to Congleton, Petrarch proposed the
spelling egloga, since he found no relation between the
etymological meaning of eclogue and pastoral poetry, and
since most of the characters in Theocritus' idylls are
goatherds. The Elizabethans for the most part followed
Petrarch. Barclay, Googe, Mantuan, "E. K. , " Spenser,
Webbe, Lodge, Sabie, Drayton, Wither, Basse, and many
others thought the correct form was eglora.
^^Greg, p. 14.
^%ichael Putnam, Virgil' s Pastoral Art (Princeton,
N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), p. 5.
99
1883) .
26 Satire 1.10.44, from Palmer's edition (London,
27
Putnam, p. 3.
2^M. E. Taylor, "Primitivism in Virgil," Pja. Jour.
of Phil., 76 (1955), 274.
2Q /-.
Putnam, Virgil's Pastoral Art, p. 8.
30Ibid., p. 9.
^^Ibid.
"^^Henry W. Prescott, The Development of Virgil's
Art (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1927), p. 82.
^^Grant, Neo-Latin Literature, p. 87.
^'^The critic's designation of these eclogues as
non-allegorical appears to be based on these poems being
the most derivative from Theocritus' Idylls.
^^irgil's use of allegory was largely restricted
to personal allusions and to isolated mythological references.
His was not the full-blown allegory of the

personified abstractions that became synonymous with the
Elizabethan genre.
36
Institutio Oratorio, IX.ii.66 ff., paraphrased
from the Butler translation in the Loeb edition.
37
D. Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, trans.
E. F. M. Benecke (1909; rpt. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books,
1966), p. 56.
38
Putnam, p. 339.
^Snell, "Arcadia," p. 291.
40
Ibid., p. 283.
"^^Ibid. , p. 288.
42
Comparetti, p. 118.
43
Edwin Honig, Dark Conceit (Evanston, 111.:
Northwestern Univ. Press, 1959), p. 25.
"^"^Ibid. , p. 113.
45
Kermode, English Pastoral Poetry, p. 27.
46
Putnam, p. 145.
"^"^Ibid. , p. 152.
°H. A. Musurillo, Symbol and Myth in Ancient
Poetry (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 1960), p. 37.
"^^Shackford, "A Definition," p. 592.
5°Kenaode, p. 27.
^-^E. K. Rand, The Magical Art of Virgil (Hamden,
Conn.: Archon Books, 1966), p. 164.
^^Putnam, Virgil's Pastoral Art, p. 13.
^"^Snell, "Arcadia," p. 286.
100

101
CHAPTER III
iRenato Poggioli, "The Oaten Flute," Harvard Lib.
Bull., 11, No. 2 (Spring, 1957), 148.
^Greg, Pastoral Poetry, p. 17.
Hamblin, The Development of Allegory, p. 81.
4 J •
Edwin W. Tayler, Nature and Art in Renaissance
Literature (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1964), p. 95.
5 Greg, p. 18.
See p. 6 of this work.
7 Comparetti, Vergil, p. 117.
^Ibid., p. 107.
^This eclogue has been traditionally ascribed to
either the Venerable Bede or Alcuin. W. W. Greg suggests
that it is more probably the work of Dodus, a disciple of
Alcuin. This assumption would date the work around the
early ninth century.
-^^Thomas P. Harrison, The Pastoral Elegy (Austin:
Univ. of Texas Press, 1939), p. 7.
As Harrison points out, this metaphor is
strengthened by Christ's declaration in John 10.11.
•j 2
Harrison, p. 7.
-'••^Tayler, p. 93.
-'- Harry Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age in the
Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1969),
p. 34.
-'-^E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the
Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1953), p. 93.

102
1 c
Tayler, p. 94.
^"^Ibid., p. 96.
18
Greg, Pastoral Poetry, p. 19.
•••"Levin, p. 37.
20
'^'^Grant, Neo-Latin Literature, p. 20.
^•^Maurice Evans, English Poetry in the Sixteenth
Century (London: Hutchinson, 1955), p. 12.
2 2
^'^P. H. Wicksteed and E. G. Gardner, Dante and
Giovanni del Virgilio (1902; rpt. Freeport, N. Y.: Books
for Libraries Press, 1971), p. 124.
23lbid., p. 152.
24
Although the authenticity of this second eclogue
has been questioned, according to Wicksteed, the scholiast
of the Laurentian MS. accepts the authorship of both by
Dante; and so do Boccaccio and Leonardo Bruni in their
biographies of Dante.
^^wicksteed, p. 130.
2^Grant, p. 80.
^"7Ibid., p. 87.
^^Congleton, Theories of Pastoral Poetry, p. 15.
2^Thomas G. Bergin, Petrarch (New York:
1970), p. 141.
Twayne,
^^Grant, p. 88.
•^-'-Harrison, Pastoral Elegy, p. 8.
^^Michael Murrin, The Veil of Allegory (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 117.
•^^Grant, p. 109.

103
Harrison, p. 8.
^^Grant, p. 104.
^^Ibid.
^"^Ibid., p. 105.
38
Love's Labour's Lost IV.ii.95 ff., from Hardin
Craig's edition (Glenview, 111.: Scott, Foresman, 1961).
39
Wilfred P. Mustard, ed.. The Eclogues of Baptista
Mantuanus (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1911),
p. 35.
40
Grant, Neo-Latin Literature, p. 128.
41Ibid.
42
^''Greg, Pastoral Poetry, p. 30.
^"^Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition (London:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1949), p. 167.
^^ibid.
^^Greg, p. 31.
46
Ralph Nash, ed., Arcadia and Piscatorial Eclogues
(Detroit: Wayne State University, 1966), p. 20.
Ibid., p. 23.
"^^Ibid., p. 24.
"^^Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age, p. 43.
^^Nash, p. 20.
^•^Nash, p. 11.
^^Grant, p. 212.

104
^^Highet, p. 170.
54
Eleanor T. Lincoln, ed., Pastoral and Romance
(Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), p. 2-3
55
Lincoln, p. 2.
CHAPTER IV
-•-Evans, English Poetry, p. 28.
2
"^Congleton, Theories of Pastoral Poetry, p. 296.
^Ibid., p. 17.
^Ibid., p. 37.
5 Beatrice White, ed.. The Eclogues of Alexander
Barclay, from the original edition by John Cawood (London:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1928), p. 3. References made to lines
from this text will hereafter be cited parenthetically.
^Ibid., p. 4.
"^Ernest de Selincourt, ed., Spenser' s Minor Poems
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), p. 3.
^George Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, ed.
Gladys Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1936), pp. 38-39.
^Evans, p. 9.
l^Greg, Pastoral Poetry, p. 82.
l^Evans, p. 43.
1 2
White, "Introduction," p. Ixi.
1 Q
Hallet Smith, Elizabethan Poetry (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1952), p. 33.

105
l^Highet, The Classical Tradition, p. 172.
^Paul E. McLane, Spenser's Shepheardes Calender
(Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1961), p. 323.
1 6
A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and
the Renaissance Epic (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,
1966), p. 239.
•^'Edwin A. Greenlaw, "Spenser and Lucretius,"
Studies In Philology, 17 (1920), 439-464.
18
Don Cameron Allen, Image and Meaning (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Press, 1968), p. 15.
l^Simeon K. Heninger, "The Renaissance Perversion
of Pastoral," Journal of the History of Ideas, 22, No. 2
(Apr.-Jne. 1961), 256.
20
McLane, p. 315.
21ibid., p. 318.
22smith, p. 26.
^"^Dorothy S. McCoy, Tradition and Convention (The
Hague: Mouton, 1965), p. 74.
24
25
McLane, p. 322.
^^E. K. Chambers, English Pastorals (1895; rpt.
New York: Scribner's 1969), p. xxvi.
^'^Greg, p. 103.
^^"E. K." places Theocritus' ability for writing
pastorals over Virgil's. Perhaps these lyrical songs
explain his reasoning, for they are similar to the idyll
in tone and subject matter.
29
Heninger, p. 259.

106
30
Kermode, English Pastoral Poetry, p. 41.
^^Greg, pp. 100-101.
32
Poggioli, "The Oaten Flute," p. 182.
^^Ibid., p. 181.
34
David Kalstone, "The Transformation of Arcadia:
Sannazaro and Sir Philip Sidney," Comp. Lit., 15, No. 3
(Summer 1963), 244.
^^Ibid., p. 245.
36
Smith, Elizabethan Poetry, pp. 51.
37
Evans, English Poetry, p. 90.
Smith, pp. 52-53.
39
Murrin, The Veil of Allegory, p. 196.
40
Evans, p. 157.
Elizabeth Nitchie, Virgil and the English Poets
(New York: AMS Press, 1966), p. 108.
42
Cleanth Brooks and John Hardy, Poems of Mr. John
Milton (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), p. 172.
4%arrison, The Pastoral Elegy, p. 289.
44
Murrin, p. 13.
45
Evans, p. 14.
4-6
Richard Cody, The Landscape of the Mind (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1969), p. 4.
^'Murrin, p. 20.
48
Kermode, p. 23.

107
49
Kermode, p. 43.
50
Evans, p. 22.
^^Smith, p. 2.
52
McCoy, Tradition and Convention, p. 42.
53
Kermode, p. 13.
54
Chambers, English Pastorals, p. xxxiii.
55
Ibid., pp. xxxiv-xxxvii.

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