Pastoral Poetry

Pastoral Poetry professes to delineate the scenes and incidents of shepherd life. As an attempt to realise an imaginary and highly idealised state of society it is a completely artificial form, and it has already disappeared from literature, never to be revived. The delightful Dorsetshire poems of Barnes exhibit the only natural method in which pastoral society can give subjects to modern poetic art. The pastorals of our modern literatures are essentially a humanistic revival of the Greek idyl of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, and the Latin eclogue of Virgil, and first made their appearance in Tuscany in the 16th century. The earliest dramatic pastoral is the Favola di Orfeo of Politian, performed at the court of Mantua in 1472, but the first complete pastoral was Agostino Beccari's comedy, Il Sacrificio, played at Ferrara in 1554. Its finest and most famous successors were the Aminza of Tasso, represented at the court of Ferrara in 1573, and Guarini's Pastor Fido. The earliest non-dramatic pastoral was G. Sannazaro's Arcadia (1504), which through Sidney's famous romance with the same title exercised a great influence upon English literature. In Spain the pastoral flourished during the 16th century, some of the most notable names being Gil Vicente, Jorge de Montemayor (Diana, 1524), and Cervantes (Galatea, a pastoral romance, 1584). In France we already find Remy Belleau's miscellany, La Bergerie (1565), and the writing of pastorals was practised long after even by the great Richelieu. After Honoré d'Urfé's Astrée (1610), came a long succession of lengthy pastoral romances by Mdlle. de Scndéry, La Calprenède, and Gomberville. In England we had already had Alexander Barclay's translations of Baptist Mantuan, and Barnaby Googe's Eglogs, Epytaphes, and Sonnettes (1563), before the twelve charming eclogues composing Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar (1579) formed once for all a faultless model for posterity. The poem is appropriately dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, whose pastoral romance of Areidia outstrips in point of literary beauty all other fictions of that class. Its successors were Robert Greene's Morando (1584) and Menaphon (1589), Lyly's Gallathea (1584), Peele's Arraignement of Paris (1584), and, most famous of all, Lodge's Rosalynde (1590). Spenser's poetical idealisation of pastoral life, again, gave rich inspiration to Drayton, Daniel, Barnfield, Marlowe, Nicholas Breton, Wither, William Browne, Herrick, Ben Jonson (Sad Shepherd), and Fletcher (Faithful Shepherdess, 1610, the finest of all pastoral plays). An 18th-century revival gave us the pastorals of Ambrose Philips and of Pope, and awakened a pretty quarrel between the two ill-matched champions; Gay's Shepherd's Week was much better poetry than either, and was brightened by glimpses of genuine country life. Allan Ramsay also achieved a success in his Gentle Shepherd, which is almost as good as Gay, though far behind Spenser. See E. K. Chambers's English Pastorals (1895).