As someone still in his shepherd days and just a few years younger than 
Spenser when he wrote the Calender, I'm attracted to pastoral as a medium of 
starting out. But I think of youth in terms of both delightful shelter and 
intense, gnawing ambition. I wonder if the pastoral world which Spenser 
invokes a pairing between medieval nostalgia for the good 'ol days of the 
14th century and an intense imagining of a Calvinist charged future in which 
Spenser hoped to have a fruitful and essential role. I think pastoral, 
especially in the way Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton imagine it, is about 
the tensions between innocent joys and the weight of the future. The 
Shepheardes Calender is full of this, forging a link between the 
versification of Chaucer, probably the biggest English artistic giant to 
Spenser, and the political and religious import of Langland. Invoking Virgil 
and Theocritus as allusions to grandeur, but also bringing in the 
religiously edgy pastoral works of Marot. In Spenser's first entree into 
print in the 1569 Theatre for Worldlings, his translations forge similar 
links in combining Petrarchan translation with Marot and DuBellay's 
controversy--all in a volume desiged to narrate in literary, religious, and 
political terms, England's Calvinist identity and destiny.

Maybe then pastoral, in the way it emerges in the 16th century, is about the 
tensions of past and future, the fissures between the cool air of an 
idealized past and the heat of a politically charged future? The Winter's 
Tale and Two Noble Kinsmen both think of pastoral in terms of homosocial, 
men's schooling: an idealized time that is ruined by the needs of family, 
state, and empire, all which involve breaking up the boy's club to get 
political and reproductive. Sidney, too, in Book III of the Arcadia has 
dynastic ambition actually interrupting pastoral joys. This is probably why 
young men take it up, it fits, as in Lycidas, so perfectly with oxbridge 
quads, a boys' only club full of desire and artistic competition, but in the 
end is altered by the realization of political stress. As a genre so charged 
with pedagogy and a men's only world, the needs of a nascent imperial state 
and an age of consistent upheaval probably needed to take those pastoral 
tropes, as Milton does in the end of Lycidas, to new pastures, to bigger 
projects.

This has been such a great discussion!
Tim Duffy
PhD Candidate
University of Virginia


On Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:05:58 -0400
  THOMAS HERRON <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> When I was younger the ³pastoral² moments I actually lived through, and 
>>hence
>> are most attractive and memorable to me, involved heightened and leisurely
>> conversation in ideal natural surroundings with either sex, friendly and
>> enlightening with clouds floating overhead, or sheltered in lilacs, or 
>>water
>> drifting by, but not competitive at all.  Competition was saved for
>> classrooms, CV¹s and soccer fields... Of course many college campuses
>> interweave the classroom, playing field and landscape as an ideal state of
>> existence, but even so (I should think) the pressures of the one are meant 
>>to
>> be reflected on later while reposing within the other, a transitory state 
>>of
>> meditative discovery heightened by youth and inexperience fast becoming
>> experience, depending on how heady the lilacs are.
>> 
>> Which is funny, in that (as a recent article in The New Yorker notes) 
>>Milton
>> spent much of his time teaching, and this pedagogical focus comes out in 
>>his
>> Eden, full of Adam¹s and Raphael¹s instructions, for example, and in the
>> didactic fervor of the ecclesiastical digression in ³Lycidas,² or that 
>>poem¹s
>> emphasis on the old Cambridge days and praise of tutor Daemetas.  By 
>>analogy
>> any ³meta² could be discourse on poetry or experimentation with its forms 
>>so
>> as to teach the reader about it.  Pastoral is leisurely schooling.
>> Unfortunately and necessarily such teaching implies authority and 
>>experience
>> and constriction:  perhaps Milton and Edward King, or Diodati, had an 
>>equal
>> relationship in the fields, perhaps like Spenser and Bryskett; but how 
>>relaxed
>> a companion is Milton ever with his readers?  --TH
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> A last thought: would young men be so attracted to pastoral if it were not
>> always cast as a kind of contest?
>>  
>> Penny.
>>  
>>  
>>  
>>  
>>  
>> 
> 
> 

------------------
Timothy Duffy
University of Virginia
Department of English