Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama by Walter W. Greg

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Subito ordino i premi a coloro, che lottare volessero, offrendo di dare
al vincitore un bel vaso di legno di acero, ove per mano del Padoano
Mantegna, artefice sovra tutti gli altri accorto ed ingegnosissimo, eran
dipinte molte cose: ma tra l' altre una ninfa ignuda, con tutti i membri
bellissimi, dai piedi in fuori, che erano come quelli delle capre; la
quale, sovra un gonfiato otre sedendo, lattava un picciolo satirello, e
con tanta tenerezza il mirava, che parea che di amore e di carita tutta
si struggesse: e 'l fanciullo nell' una mammella poppava, nell' altra
tenea distesa la tenera mano, e con l' occhio la si guardava, quasi
temendo che tolta non gli fosse. Poco discosto da costoro si vedean due
fanciulli pur nudi, i quali avendosi posti due volti orribili di
maschere cacciavano per le bocche di quelli le picciole mani, per porre
spavento a duo altri, che davanti loro stavano; de' quali l' uno
fuggendo si volgea in dietro, e per paura gridava; l' altro caduto gia
in terra piangeva, e non possendosi altrimenti aitare, stendeva la mano
per graffiarlo. (_Prosa_ XI.)

I shall make no attempt at translation. Some versions, really wonderful
in the success with which they reproduce the style of the original, will
be found in Symonds' _Italian Literature_[60]. It is probably unnecessary
to put in a warning that the _Arcadia_ is a work of which extracts are apt
to give a somewhat too favourable impression. In its long complaints,
speeches, and descriptions it is at whiles intolerably prolix and dull,
but it caught the taste of the age and went through a large number of
editions, many with learned annotations, between the appearance of the
first authorized edition and the end of the sixteenth century[61], There
were several imitations later, such as the _Accademia tusculana_ of
Benedetto Menzini; Firenzuola imitated the third _Prosa_ in his
_Sacrifizio pastorale_; while collections of tales and _facetiae_ such as
the _Arcadia in Brenta_ of Giovanni Sagredo equally sought the prestige of
the name. A French translation published in 1544 went through three
editions, and another appeared in 1737, while it was translated into
Spanish in 1547, and again in 1578. It may have been due to the existence
of Sidney's more ambitious work of the same name that no translation ever
appeared in English.

* * * * *

Our survey of Italian pastoralism, in spite of the fact that its most
important manifestation has been reserved for separate treatment later,
has of necessity been lengthy. It was at Italian breasts that the infant
ideal, reborn into a tumultuous world, was nursed. The other countries of
continental Europe borrowed that ideal from Italy, though each in turn
contributed characteristics of its own. It was to Italy that England too
was directly indebted, while at the same time it absorbed elements
peculiar to France and Spain. It will therefore be necessary briefly to
review the forms that flourished in those countries respectively, though
they need detain us but a brief space in comparison with the Italian
fountain-head.

Before proceeding, however, it may be worth while to pause for a moment in
order to take a general survey of the nature of the ideal, we might almost
say the religion, of pastoralism, which reached its maturity in the work
of Sannazzaro. Its location in the uplands of Arcadia may be traced to
Vergil, who had the worship of Pan in mind, but the selection of the
barren mountain district of central Peloponnesus as the seat of pastoral
luxuriance and primitive culture is not without significance in respect of
the severance of the pastoral ideal from actuality.[62] In it the
world-weary age of the later renaissance sought escape from the
materialism that bound it. Italy had turned its back upon mysticism in
religion, and upon chivalry in love; its literature was the negation of
what the northern peoples understand by romance. Yet it needed some relief
from the very saneness of its rationalism, and it found the antidote to
its vicious court life in the crystal springs of Castaly. What the pietism
of Perugino's saints is to the feuds of the Baglioni, such is the Arcadian
dream to the intellectual cynicism of Italian politics.

When children weave fancies of wonderland they use the resources of the
imagination with economy; uninterrupted sunshine soon cloys. So too with
these other children of the renaissance. Their wonderland is a place
whither they may escape from the pressure of the world that is too much
with them; they seek in it at least the virtue that its evils shall be the
opposite of those from which they fly. They could not, it is true, believe
in an Arcadia in which all the cares of this world should end--the golden
age is always a time to be sung and remembered, or else to be dreamed of,
in the years to come, it is never the present--but if they cannot escape
from the changes and chances of this mortal life, if death and unfaith
are still realities in their dreamland as on earth, they will at least
utter their grief melodiously, and water fair pastures with their tears.
Like the garden of the Rose which satisfied the middle age before it, the
Arcadian ideal of the renaissance degenerated, as every ideal must. The
decay of pastoral, however, was in this unique, that it tended less to
exaggerate than to negative the spirit that gave it birth. Theocritus
turned from polite society and sought solace in his no doubt idealized
recollections of actual shepherd life. On the other hand, to the
allegorical pastoralists from Vergil to Spagnuoli, the shepherd-realm
either reflects, or is made directly to contrast with, the interests and
vices of the actual world; in their work the note of longing for escape to
an ideal life is heard but faintly or not at all. In the songs of the late
fifteenth century and in Sannazzaro there is a genuine pastoral revival;
the desire of freedom from reality is strong upon men in that age of
strenuous living. It has been happily said that Mantuan's shepherds meet
to discuss society, Sannazzaro's to forget it. And yet, after all, these
men are too strongly bound by the affections of this world to be able
wholly to sacrifice themselves to the joys of the ideal. Fiammetta must
have her place in Boccaccio's strange apotheosis of love; the foreboding
of Carmosina's death has power to draw her lover from his newly discovered
kingdom along the untrodden paths of the waters of the earth. And so when
Arcadia ceased to be a necessity of sentiment and became one of fashion,
where poets were no longer content to wander with their mistresses in the
land of fancy, alone, 'at rest from their labour with the world gone by,'
there appeared a tendency to return to the allegorical style, and to make
Arcadia what Sicily had already become--the mirror of the polite society
of the Italian courts. Thus it is that in the crowning jewels of Italian
pastoralism, in the _Aminta_ and the _Pastor fido_, we trace a yearning
towards a simpler, freer, and more genuine life, side by side with such
incompatible and antagonistic elements as the reproduction in pastoral
guise of the personages and surroundings of the circle of Ferrara. Not
content with the pure ideal, the poets endeavoured, like Faust at the
sight of Helena, to find in it a place for the earthly affections that
bound them, and at the touch of reality the vision dissolved in mist.

VII

When we turn to the literature of the western peninsula during the early
years of the sixteenth century, we find it characterized by a temporary
but very complete subjection to Italian models. This phenomenon, which is
particularly marked in pastoral, is readily explained by the fact that the
similarity of the dialects made the transference of poetic forms from
Italian to Spanish an easy matter. Thus when among the nations of Europe
Italy awoke to her great task of recovering an old and discovering a new
world of arts and letters, it was upon Spanish verse that she was able to
exercise the most immediate and overpowering influence. Under these
circumstances it was impossible but that she should drag the literature of
that country, for a while at least, in her train, away from its own proper
genius and natural course of development. Other countries were saved from
servitude by the very failure of their attempts to imitate the new Italian
style; and Spain herself, it must be remembered, was not long in
recovering her individuality and in endowing Europe with one of the
richest national literatures of the world.

It is important, however, to distinguish from the pastoral work produced
under this dominating Italian influence certain other work in the kind,
which, while to some extent dependent for its form upon foreign models,
bears at the same time strong marks of native inspiration. In this earlier
and more popular tradition the tendencies of the national literature, the
pastoral possibilites of which appear at times in the ballads, mingle more
or less with elements of convention and allegory drawn from Vergil or his
humanistic followers. Little influence of this popular tradition can as a
rule be traced in the later pastoral work, but it acquires a certain
incidental interest in connexion with another branch of literature. It is,
namely, the remarkable part it played in the evolution of the national
drama that makes it worth while mentioning a few of its more important
examples in this place.[63]

An isolated composition, in which lay not so much the germ of the future
drama as the index of its possibility, is the _Coplas de Mingo Revulgo_,
the composition of an unknown author. It is an eclogue in which two
shepherds, representing respectively the upper and lower orders of Spanish
society, discourse together on the causes of national discontent and
political corruption prevalent about 1472, at the latter end of the weak
reign of Enrique IV. In this poem we find the king's infatuation for his
Portuguese mistress treated much as Petrarch had treated the relations of
Clement VI with the allegorical Epi, except for the striking difference
that the Latin of the Italian poet is replaced by straightforward and
vigorous vernacular. Of far greater importance in the history of
literature are certain poems--_Eclogas_ they are for the most part
styled--of Juan del Encina, which belong roughly to the closing years of
the fifteenth and opening years of the sixteenth century. Numbering about
a dozen, and composed with one exception in the short measures of popular
poetry, these dramatic eclogues, or amoebean plays, supply the connecting
link between the early popular and religious shows and the regular drama.
About half are religious in character; of the rest, three treat some
romantic episode, one is a study of unrequited passion ending in suicide,
and one is a market-day farce, the personae being in each case rude
herdsmen. Contemporary with, though a disciple of, Encina, is the
Portuguese Gil Vicente, who wrote in both dialects, and whose _Auto
pastoril castelhano_ may be cited as carrying on the tradition between his
master and Lope de Vega.

With Lope's dramatic production as a whole we are not, of course,
concerned. He lies indeed somewhat off our track; the pastoral influence
in his work is capricious. It will be sufficient to note that the
influence, where it exists, is external; it is nowhere the outcome of
Christian allegory, nor does it arise out of the nature of the subject as
such titles as the _Pastores de Belen_ might suggest. It is found equally
in the religious or quasi-religious plays--such as the _Vuelta de Egypto_
with its shepherds and gypsies, and the _Pastor lobo_, an allegorical
satire on the church Lope afterwards entered--and in such purely secular,
amorous, and on the whole less dramatic pieces as the _Arcadia_--not to be
confused with his romance of the same name--and the _Selva sin amor_, a
regular Italian pastoral in miniature, both of which were acted, besides
many others intended primarly for reading, though they may possibly have
been recited after the manner of Castiglione's _Tirsi_.

While on the subject of the drama I may mention translations of the
_Aminta_ and _Pastor fido_. Tasso's piece was rendered into Castilian by
Juan de Jauregui, and first printed at Rome in 1607, a revised edition
appearing among the author's poems in 1618. The _Pastor fido_ was
translated by Cristobal Suarez de Figueroa, the best version being that
printed at Valentia in 1609, from which Ticknor quotes a passage as
typical as it is successful. It was to these two versions of the
masterpieces of Italian pastoral that Cervantes accorded the highest meed
of praise, declaring that 'they haply leave it doubtful which is the
translation or original.'[64] There likewise exists a poor adaptation of
Guarini's play, said to be the work of Solis, Coello, and Calderon[65].
The pastoral appears, however, never to have gained a very firm footing
upon the mature Spanish stage, no doubt for the same reason that led to a
similar result in England, namely, that the vigorous national drama about
it overpowered and choked its delicate and exotic growth[66].

Apart from the dramatic or semi-dramatic work we have been reviewing, the
pastoral verse which possesses the most natural and national character,
though it may not be the earliest in date, is to be found in the poems of
Francisco de Sa de Miranda[67]. He appears to have begun writing
independently of the Italian school, and, even after he came under the
influence of Garcilaso, to have preserved much of his natural simplicity
and genuineness of feeling. He probably had some direct knowledge of the
Italians, for he writes:

Liamos....
.... os pastores italianos
Do bom velho Sanazarro.

He may also have been influenced by Encina, most of whose work had already
appeared.

The first and foremost of those who deliberately based their style on the
Italian was Garcilaso de la Vega, whose pastoral work dates from about
1526. To him, in conjunction with Boscan and Mendoza, the vogue was due.
At his best, when he really assimilates the foreign elements borrowed from
his models and makes their style his own, he writes with the true genius
of his nation. The first of his three eclogues, which was probably
composed at Naples and is regarded as his best work, introduces the
shepherds Salico and Nemoroso, of whom the first stands for the author,
while in the other it is not hard to recognize his friend Boscan. This
poem, a portion of which is translated by Ticknor, should of itself
suffice to place Garcilaso in the front rank of pastoral writers. Yet he
does not appear to occupy any isolated eminence among his fellows, and
Ticknor may be right in thinking that, throughout, the regular pastoral
showed fewer of its defects in Spain than elsewhere. It is also true that
it appears to have been endowed with less vital power of development.

Garcilaso's followers were numerous. Among them mention may be made of
Francisco de Figueroa, the Tirsi of Cervantes' _Galatea_; Pedro de
Encinas, who attempted religious eclogues; Lope de Vega; Alonso de Ulloa,
the Venetian printer, who is credited with having foisted the Rodrigo
episode into Montemayor's _Diana_; Gaspar Gil Polo, one of the
continuators of that work; and Bernardo de Balbuenas, one of its many
imitators, who incorporated in his _Siglo de Oro_ a number of eclogues
which in their simple and rustic nature appear to be studied from
Theocritus rather than Vergil.

In spite of the fashion of writing in Castilian which prevailed among
Portuguese poets, we are not without specimens of pastoral verse composed
in the less important dialect. Sa de Miranda has been mentioned above.
Ribeiro too, better known for his romance, left a series of five
autobiographical eclogues[68] dating from about 1516-24, and consequently
earlier than Garcilaso's. They are composed, like some of Sa de Miranda's,
in the short measures more natural to the language than the _terza rima_
and intricate stanzas of the Italianizing poets. Later on Camoens wrote
fifteen eclogues, four of which are piscatorial, and in one, a dialogue
between a shepherd and a fisherman, refers in the following terms to
Sannazzaro:

O pescador Sincero, que amansado
Tem o pego de Prochyta co' o canto
Por as sonoras ondas compassado.
D'este seguindo o som, que pode tanto,
E misturando o antigo Mantuano,
Facamos novo estylo, novo espanto.

Whereas in the case of the verse pastoral the Italian fashion passed from
Spain into Portugal, exactly the reverse process took place with regard to
the prose romance more or less directly founded upon Sannazzaro. The first
to imitate the _Arcadia_ was the Portuguese Bernardim Ribeiro, who during
a two-years' residence in Italy composed the 'beautiful fragment,' as
Ticknor styles it, entitled from the first words of the text _Menina e
moca_. This unfinished romance first appeared, in the form of an octavo
charmingly printed in gothic type, at Ferrara in 1554, though it must
have been written at least thirty years earlier. It differs considerably
from its model, the verse being purely incidental, and the intricacy of
the story anticipating later examples, as does likewise the admixture of
chivalric adventure. It is, indeed, to a large extent what might have
arisen spontaneously through the elaboration of the pastoral element
occasionally to be met with in the old chivalric romances themselves. On
the other hand it resembles the Italian pastoral in the introduction of
real characters, which, though their identity was concealed under anagrams
and all manner of obscurity, appear to have been traceable by the keen eye
of authority, for the book was placed on the Index. Such knowledge of
Sannazzaro's writings as Ribeiro possessed was of course direct, but
before his fragment saw the light there appeared, in 1547, a Spanish
translation of the _Arcadia_. It must be remembered that Sannazzaro was
himself of Spanish extraction, and that he may have had relations with the
land of his fathers of a nature to facilitate the diffusion of his works.

The next and by far the most important contribution made by the peninsula
to pastoral literature was the work of an hispaniolized Portuguese, who
composed in Castilian dialect the famous _Diana_. 'Los siete libres de la
Diana de Jorge de Montemayor'--the Spanish form of Montemor's name and
that by which he became familiar to subsequent ages--appeared at Valencia,
without date, but about 1560.[69] As in the case of its Italian and
Portuguese predecessors, some at least of the characters of the romance
represent real persons. Sireno the hero, who stands for the author, is in
love with the nymph Diana, of whose identity Lope de Vega claimed to be
cognizant, though he withheld her name. The scene is laid in Spain, and
actual and ideal geography are intermixed in a bewildering fashion. Sireno
is obliged, for reasons not stated, to leave the country for a while, and
on his return finds his lady-love married by her parents to his rival
Delio. In his despair he seeks aid from the priestess of a certain temple,
and receives from her a magic potion which drives from him all remembrance
of his passion. This very simple and somewhat unsatisfactory story is
interwoven with a multitude of episodes and incidental narratives,
pastoral and chivalric, and the whole ends with the promise of a second
part, which however never came to be written, the author, as it appears,
being either murdered or killed in duel at Turin in 1561.

Thanks probably to the combination in its pages of the popular chivalric
tradition with the fashionable Italian pastoral, and also to certain
graces of style which it possesses, the _Diana_ held the field until the
picaresque romance developed into a recognized _genre_, and exercised a
very considerable influence on pastoral writers even beyond the frontiers
of Spain. Googe imitated passages from it in his eclogues; Sidney
translated some of its songs, and took it as the model of his own romance;
Shakespeare borrowed from it the plot of the _Two Gentlemen of Verona_. In
the land of its birth its popularity was shown by the number of
continuations and imitations to which it gave rise. Irresponsible
publishers swelled the bulk of their editions with matter purloined from
less popular authors. The year 1564 saw the appearance of two second
parts. One in eight books, by the physician Alonzo Perez, only got so far
as disposing of Delio, and appears to exaggerate all the faults of the
original in compensation for the lack of its merits. The other, from the
pen of Gaspar Gil Polo, is in five books, and narrates, in a style
scarcely inferior to its model, the faithlessness and death of Delio, and
Sireno's marriage with Diana. Both alike promise continuations which never
appeared. A third part was, however, published so late as 1627, as the
work of Jeronimo de Texeda, but it is nothing more than a _rifacimento_
of Gil Polo's continuation, altered apparently with a view to its forming
a sequel to Perez' work. Furthermore, in 1599 there appeared a religions
parody by Fra Bartolome Ponce, and there are said to be no less than six
French, two English, and two German translations, not to mention a Latin
one of Gil Polo's portion at least.

Besides continuations, there are extant nearly a score of imitations of
varying interest and merit. In 1584 appeared the _Galatea_ of Cervantes,
imitated from Ribeiro and Montemayor; which in its turn is supposed to
have suggested the _Arcadia_, written a few years later at the instigation
of the Duke of Alva by Lope de Vega, and published in 1598. Each is more
or less autobiographic or else historical in outline: 'many of its
shepherds and shepherdesses are such in dress alone,' Cervantes confesses
of his romance, while Lope announces that 'the _Arcadia_ is a true
history.' Lastly may be mentioned the Portuguese _Primavera_ of Francisco
Rodrigues de Lobo, which appeared in three long parts between 1601 and
1614, and is pronounced by Ticknor to be 'among the best full-length
pastoral romances extant.'

All these works resemble one another in their general features. The
characteristics of the _genre_ as found in Spain, in spite of a real
feeling for rural life traceable in the national character, are the
elements it borrows from the older chivalric tradition, combined with an
adherence to the circumstances of actual existence even closer than was
the case in Italy. Sannazzaro was content to transfer certain personages
from real life into his imaginary Arcadia, while in the Spanish romances
the whole _mise en scene_ consists of the actual surroundings of the
author disguised but little under the veil of pastoralism. Thus the ideal
element, the desire to escape from the world, is no less absent from these
works than from the Latin eclogues of the renaissance, and the chivalric
pastoral in Spain advances far along the road towards the fashionable
pastoral of France. Not only are knightly adventures freely introduced,
and the devices of disguise and recognition employed, but the hint of
magic in Sannazzaro is developed and made to play a prominent part in the
tales, while the nymphs and shepherds display throughout an alarming
knowledge of literature, metaphysics, and theology. The absurdities of the
style were patent, and did not escape uncomplimentary notice from the
writers of the day, for both Cervantes and Lope de Vega, in spite of their
own excursions into this kind, pilloried the fashion in their more serious
and enduring works.

VIII

In France the interest of pastoralism, from our present point of view, is
summed up in the work of one man--Clement Marot. It is he who forms the
central figure on the stage of French poetry between the final collapse of
the medieval tradition and the ceasing of Villon's song earlier, and later
the full burst of the renaissance in the work of the Pleiade. While
belonging ostensibly to the literary circle of Margaret of Navarre, Marot
appears to have combined in his own person a strange number of conflicting
tendencies. His patroness followed the pastoral tradition in her imitation
of Sannazzaro's _Salices_ and her lament on the death of her brother
Francois I, and rehandled an already favourite theme in her _comedie_ of
human and divine love. Marot, on the other hand, while equally interested
in pastoral, betrayed in his verse little direct influence of the
Italians, and invariably impressed his own individuality upon his subject.
In his early work he continued the tradition of the _Romance of the Rose_;
later he voiced, somewhat crudely may be, the ideals of the renaissance.
By nature an easy-going _bon vivant_, his only real affection appears to
have been for the faithless mistress of his early years, whom a not very
probable tradition identifies with Diane de Poitiers. He had no higher
ambition than to retain unmolested a comfortable post at the court of
Francis. Yet he was destined by a strange irony of fate to pass his days
as a wanderer on the face of the earth, the homeless pilgrim of a cause he
no wise had at heart. He was accused by the Sorbonne, and ultimately
driven into the profession, of the heresy of Calvinism. Expelled from the
bosom of the church, he sought an uncongenial refuge among the apostles of
the new faith, only to be thrust forth from the city, for no more heinous
offence apparently than that playing back-gammon with the Prisoner of
Chillon. He died at Turin in 1544.