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This is a companion to Pastoral poetry of the English Renaissance: An anthology (2016), the largest ever collection of its kind. The monograph-length Introduction traces the course of pastoral from antiquity to the present day. The historical account is woven into a thematic map of the richly varied pastoral mode, and it is linked to the social context, not only by local allegory and allusion but by its deeper origins and affinities. English Renaissance pastoral is set within the context of this total perspective.
Besides the formal eclogue, the study covers many genres: lyric, epode, georgic, country-house poem, ballad, romantic epic, drama and prose romance. Major practitioners like Theocritus, Virgil, Sidney, Spenser, Drayton and Milton are discussed individually.
The Introduction also charts the many means by which pastoral texts circulated during the Renaissance, with implications for the history and reception of all Early Modern poetry. The poems in the Anthology have been edited from the original manuscripts and early printed texts, and the Textual Notes comprehensively document the sources and variant readings. There are also notes on the poets and analytical indices of themes, genres, and various categories of proper names. Seldom, if ever, has a cross-section of English Renaissance poetry been textually annotated in such detail.
Pastoral Poetry of the English Renaissance 1 Theocritus Idyll viii Translated anonymously from the Greek From Sixe Idillia ... chosen out of ... Theocritus (1588). This idyll is part of the core Theocritus canon, though scholars have doubted his authorship; some have suggested that the poem amalgamates what were originally separate pieces. The viii. Idillion. Argument Menalcas a Shephearde, and Daphnis a Netehearde, two Sicilian lads, contending who should sing best, pawne their whistles, and choose a Gotehearde, to be their Iudge. Who giueth sentence on Daphnis
This is a companion to Pastoral poetry of the English Renaissance: an anthology (2016), supporting the earlier volume with a range of critical and textual material.
The book-length Introduction traces the course of pastoral from antiquity to the present day. The historical account is woven into a thematic map of the richly varied pastoral mode. Pastoral is linked to its social context, in terms of not only direct allusion but its deeper origins and affinities. English Renaissance pastoral is set in this total perspective. Besides the formal eclogue, the study covers many genres: lyric, epode, georgic, country-house poem, ballad, romantic epic, drama, prose romance. Major practitioners like Theocritus, Virgil, Sidney, Spenser, Drayton and Milton are individually discussed. The Introduction also charts the many means by which pastoral texts circulated in that age, with implications for the history and reception of all Early Modern poetry.
All poems in the Anthology were edited from the original manuscripts and early printed texts. The Textual Notes in the present volume comprehensively document the sources and variant readings. There are also notes on the poets, and analytical indices of themes, genres, and various categories of proper names.
Dubbed 'the English Virgil' in his own lifetime, Edmund Spenser has been compared to the Augustan laureate ever since. He invited the comparison, expecting a readership intimately familiar with Virgil's works to notice and interpret his rich web of allusion and imitation, but also his significant departures and transformations. This book considers Spenser's pastoral poetry, and the genre which announces the inception of a Virgilian career in The Shepheardes Calender. It also considers to which he returns in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, throwing the 'Virgilian career' into reverse. The book first makes a case for taking seriously the allegorical mode of reading Virgil's Eclogues prominent in the commentary tradition from Servius to the Renaissance. It then examines how The Shepheardes Calender seeks to replicate the Virgilian dynamic of bargaining with power in its opposition to the D'Alencon match. When 'Colin Clouts Come Home Againe' is read in conjunction with 'Astrophel', it becomes clear that they have in common not only their central themes but also their major intertexts, both in Virgil and in Spenser's other works. They are in fact complementary parts of the same project, constructing their meaning and their poetic programme through allusive dialogue both with Virgil and with each other.
was revived in the late Middle Ages by Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio (chiefly the latter two), they insisted that allusion was intrinsic to pastoral. Through the ensuing Renaissance and beyond, ‘pretty tales of wolves and sheep’ (in Sidney’s phrase)1 were conventionally held to conceal deep hidden meanings – biographical, political, didactic, 1 Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry (The Apologie for Poetrie), in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973, 95.3–4. xx Pastoral Poetry of the
124 A companion to pastoral poetry Textual notes Unless otherwise stated, the control text is the first printed version of the poem. All substantive variants in other versions have been noted, unless stated to the contrary. Variants in lineation, spelling and punctuation, and some unquestionable misprints, have not been noted except in special cases. A detailed account of the choice of texts and other editorial decisions is given under ‘Practices and Conventions’ in the Anthology (pp.xiii–xiv). Variant readings of the same word(s)/line(s) are separated by
246 A companion to pastoral poetry Notes on authors Names of the original authors of translated works are in italics. All titles are in modernized spelling and standardized format. Alabaster, William (1568–1640), scholar, poet and clergyman. MA and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Converted to Roman Catholicism, underwent periods of persecution and imprisonment between sojourns on the continent, but seems finally to have made his peace with the authorities and even spied on Catholics. His religious sonnets were written when he first turned to Catholicism
grass doth grow, my Corn and wheat, My fruit, my vines thrive by their heat. (#216.29–32) 1 A number preceded by # indicates a poem number in the Anthology. 2 A companion to pastoral poetry (The ‘starry twins’ are the beloved’s eyes.) Most apparent shepherds of pastoral convention do not, in actuality, either own sheep or look after others’ flocks. Their shepherd’s role is a trope for their true identity, and the landscape they populate is only metaphorically rural. Pastoral is the most disingenuous of literary modes. It is neither folk literature nor popular
your poet to have sung, while he sits and weaves a basket of slender hibiscus.’] As Servius points out, the basket stands for the eclogue-book itself. Virgil is announcing that he has sung enough pastoral poetry, and he closes with the injunction surgamus; solet esse gravis cantantibus umbra (‘let us arise: the shade is wont to be oppressive to singers’, 10.75). Umbra, shade, is a figure which recurs frequently throughout the book and has come to stand metonymically for Virgil’s pastoral poetry; surgamus seems to indicate an intention to ‘rise’ to ‘higher’ genres or
interesting and challeng3 Disclosed poetics ing pastoral poetry being written in English today is by women. In short, the modern pastoral should be about challenging conventions – an engagement with the ‘traditional’, yes, but also with the innovative. It has always been political, and has remained so. The pastoral of orbital roads, railway tunnels, the window box, the back garden – all are part of it. But it is, possibly most significantly, a process for comparison – of producers, fetishisers and consumers, of destruction and profit, of the gaps and similarities in the