Dear Professor Oram,
Thank you so much for your insightful post on Marlowe's pastoral, its
sophisticated relation to tradition, and its being conceptually situated
outside the imaginary. I would say sophistication on all levels, especially
linguistic/(past)oral and psychological, is the hallmark of Renaissance
pastoral. This has little to do, I think, with the semantic content of the
signifieds used to describe the garments, caps, and gifts featuring in
pastoral. It has much to do with such structural features as at once
concealing and revealing such as you aptly pointed out.
But, as Deleuze puts it (as it happens, in relation to Shakspeare),
"permanence, succession, and simultaneity are modes or relations of time.
They are fragments of time." The seductive pastoral fragments of Theocritus
and Virgil coincide with those of Marlowe, Spenser, and Shakespeare, and
with the past-orality of all of our souls (and with one another). Coincide
concentrically, with a difference, to be sure: concentricity is the
structure of diapason, of the interval, the structure we find so often when
Renaissance thinkers theorize the cosmos in terms of musical intervals and
passion; and of archaic drives, according to Montrelay.
This diaspasonic difference (between Theocritus and Spenser, between
Spenser and Marlowe) often manifests itself semantically, as in the
examples you mentioned. The diapason of the huamnsits' relation to the
ancients is a repetition with a difference. To be sure, Marlowe's speaker
offers riches to his object of seduction. So does Daphnis to Ganimede in
Barnfield's *Affectionate Shepheard* ("I would put amber Bracelets on thy
wretsts / Crownets of Pearle about thy naked Armes"; "I would make Cabinets
for thee (my Love) /Sweet smelling Arbours made of Eglantine /Should be thy
shrine, and I would be thy Dove). And think of all the riches the youth
offers the maiden in Shakespeare's pastoral "A Lover's Complaint."
But all of this makes pastoral, in any epoch, as you so aptly conclude,
anything but imaginary, and, in terms of Renaissance
rhetorical/psychological theory, anything but metaphor. Pastoral has the
structure of our souls.
my best wishes to you,
Shirley Sharon-Zisser
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