Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama by Walter W. Greg

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Many a reader of the anonymous quarto of 1579 must have joined in Cuddie's
exclamation:

Sicker, sike a roundel never heard I none!

Sidney, we know, was not altogether pleased with the homeliness of the
verses dedicated to him; and there must have been not a few among
Spenser's academic friends to feel a certain incongruity between the
polished tradition of the Theocritean singing match and the present poem.
Moreover, as if to force the incongruity upon the notice of the least
sensitive of his readers, Spenser followed up the ballad with a poem which
is not only practically free from obsolete or dialectal phrasing, but
which is composed in the wearisomely pedantic _sestina_ form. This song is
attributed to Colin, whose love for Rosalind is again mentioned.

Passing to the 'September' we find an eclogue of the 'wise shepherd' type.
It is composed in the rough accentual metre, and opens with a couplet
which roused the ire of Dr. Johnson:

Diggon Davie! I bidde her god day;
Or Diggon her is, or I missaye.

Diggon is a shepherd, who, in hope of gain, drove his flock into a far
country, and coming home the poorer, relates to Hobbinol the evil ways of
foreign shepherds among whom,

playnely to speake of shepheards most what,
Badde is the best.

The 'October' eclogue belongs to the stanzaic group, and consists of a
dialogue on the subject of poetry between the shepherds Piers and Cuddie.
It is one of the most imaginative of the series, and in it Spenser has
refashioned time-honoured themes with more conspicuous taste than
elsewhere. The old complaint for the neglect of poetry acquires new life
through the dramatic contrast of the two characters in which opposite
sides of the poetic temperament are revealed. In Cuddie we have a poet for
whom the prize is more than the praise[93], whose inspiration is cramped
because of the indifference of a worldly court and society. Things were
not always so--

But ah! Mecaenas is yclad in claye,
And great Augustus long ygoe is dead,
And all the worthies liggen wrapt in leade,
That matter made for Poets on to play.

And in the same strain he laments over what might have been his song:

Thou kenst not, Percie, howe the ryme should rage,
O! if my temples were distaind with wine,
And girt with girlonds of wild Yvie twine,
How I could reare the Muse on stately stage,
And teache her tread aloft in buskin fine,
With queint Bellona in her equipage!

Reading these words to-day they may well seem to us the charter of the new
age of England's song; and the effect is rendered all the more striking
by the rhythm of the last line with its prophecy of Marlowe and mighty
music to come. Piers, on the other hand, though with less poetic rage, is
a truer idealist, and approaches the high things of poetry more
reverentially than his Bacchic comrade. When Cuddie, acknowledging his own
unworthiness, adds:

For Colin fittes such famous flight to scanne;
He, were he not with love so ill bedight,
Would mount as high, and sing as soote as Swanne;

Piers breaks out in words fitting the poet of the _Hymnes_:

Ah, fon! for love doth teach him climbe so hie,
And lyftes him up out of the loathsome myre.

And throughout this high discourse the homely names of Piers and Cuddie
seem somehow more appropriate, or at least touch us more nearly, than
Mantuan's Sylvanus and Candidus, as if, in spite of all Spenser owes to
foreign models, he were yet conscious of a latent power of simple native
inspiration, capable, when once fully awakened, of standing up naked and
unshamed in the presence of Italy and Greece. One might well question
whether there is not more of the true spirit of prophecy in this poem of
Spenser's than ever went to the composition of Vergil's _Pollio_.

The 'November,' like the 'April,' consists for the most part of a lay
composed in an elaborate stanza--there a panegyric, here an elegy. This
time it is sung by Colin himself, and we again find reference to the
Rosalind motive. The subject of the threnody is a nymph of the name of
Dido, whose identity can only be vaguely conjectured. The chief point of
external form in which Spenser has departed from his model, namely Marot's
dirge for Loyse de Savoye, and from other pastoral elegies, is in the use
of a different form of verse in the actual lament from that in which the
setting of the poem is composed. Otherwise he has followed tradition none
the less closely for having infused the conventional form with a poetry of
his own. The change by which the lament passes into the song of rejoicing
is traditional--and though borrowed by Spenser from Marot, is as old as
Vergil. Both Browne and Milton later made use of the same device. Spenser
writes:

Why wayle we then? why weary we the Gods with playnts,
As if some evill were to her betight?
She raignes a goddesse now emong the saintes,
That whilome was the saynt of shepheards light,
And is enstalled nowe in heavens hight.
I see thee, blessed soule, I see
Walke in Elisian fieldes so free.
O happy herse!
Might I once come to thee, (O that I might!)
O joyfull verse!

Although some critics, looking too exclusively to the poetic merit of the
_Calender_ as the cause of its importance, have perhaps overestimated the
beauty of this and the April lyrics, the skill with which the intricate
stanzas are handled must be apparent to any careful reader. As the
_Calender_ in poetry generally, so even more decidedly in their own
department, do these songs mark a distinct advance in formal evolution.
Just as they were themselves foreshadowed in the recurrent melody of
Wyatt's farewell to his lute--

My lute, awake! perform the last
Labour that thou and I shall waste,
And end that I have now begun;
For when this song is sung and past,
My lute, be still, for I have done--

so they in their turn heralded the full strophic sonority of the
_Epithalamium_.

Lastly, in the 'December' we have the counterpart of the January eclogue,
a monologue in which Colin laments his wasted life and joyless, for

Winter is come, that blowes the balefull breath,
And after Winter commeth timely death.

Adieu, delightes, that lulled me asleepe;
Adieu, my deare, whose love I bought so deare;
Adieu, my little Lambes and loved sheepe;
Adieu, ye Woodes, that oft my witnesse were:
Adieu, good Hobbinoll, that was so true,
Tell Rosalind, her Colin bids her adieu.[94]

It will be seen from the above analysis that the architectonic basis of
Spenser's design consists of the three Colin eclogues standing
respectively at the beginning, in the middle, and at the close of the
year. These are symmetrically arranged: the 'January' and 'December' are
both alike monologues and agree in the stanza used, while the 'June' is a
dialogue and likewise differs in metrical form. This latter is supported
as it were by two subsidiary eclogues, those of April and August, in both
of which another shepherd sings one of Colin's lays and refers
incidentally to his passion for Rosalind. It is upon this framework that
are woven the various moral, polemical, and idyllic themes which Spenser
introduces. The attempt at uniting a series of poems into a single fabric
is Spenser's chief contribution to the formal side of pastoral
composition. The method by which he sought to correlate the various parts
so as to produce the singleness of impression necessary to a work of art,
and the measure of success which he achieved, though they belong more
strictly to the general history of poetry, must also detain us for a
moment. The chief and most obvious device is that suggested by the
title--_The Shepherd's Calender_--'Conteyning twelve Aeglogues
proportionable to the twelve monethes.' This might, indeed, have been no
more than a fanciful name for any series of twelve poems;[95] with Spenser
it indicates a conscious principle of artistic construction. It suggests,
what is moreover apparent from the eclogues themselves, that the author
intended to represent the spring and fall of the year as typical of the
life of man. The moods of the various poems were to be made to correspond
with the seasons represented; or, conversely, outward nature in its cycle
through the year was to reflect and thereby unify the emotions, thoughts,
and passions of the shepherds. This was a perfectly legitimate artistic
device, and one based on a fundamental principle of our nature, since the
appearance of objective phenomena is ever largely modified and coloured by
subjective feeling. Nor can it reasonably be objected against the device
that in the hands of inferior craftsmen it degenerates but too readily
into the absurdities of the 'pathetic fallacy,' or that Spenser himself is
not wholly guiltless of the charge.

Winter is come, that blowes the balefull breath,
And after Winter commeth timely death.

These lines bear witness to Spenser's intention. But the conceit is not
fully or consistently carried out. In several of the eclogues not only
does the subject in no way reflect the mood of the season--the very nature
of the theme at times made this impossible--but the time of year is not so
much as mentioned. This is more especially the case in the summer months;
there is no joy of the 'hygh seysoun,' and when it is mentioned it is
rather by way of contrast than of sympathy. Thus in June Colin mourns for
other days:

Tho couth I sing of love, and tune my pype
Unto my plaintive pleas in verses made:
Tho would I seeke for Queene-apples unrype,
To give my Rosalind; and in Sommer shade
Dight gaudy Girlonds was my common trade,
To crowne her golden locks: but yeeres more rype,
And losse of her, whose love as lyfe I wayd,
Those weary wanton toyes away dyd wype.

In the same eclogue we may trace a deliberate contrast between various
descriptive passages. Thus Hobbinol feels the magie of the summer woods--

Colin, to heare thy rymes and roundelayes,
Which thou were wont on wastfull hylls to singe,
I more delight then larke in Sommer dayes:
Whose Echo made the neyghbour groves to ring,
And taught the byrds, which in the lower spring
Did shroude in shady leaves from sonny rayes,
Frame to thy songe their chereful cheriping,
Or hold theyr peace, for shame of thy swete layes.

Closely following upon this stanza we have Colin's lament, 'The God of
shepheards, Tityrus, is dead,' containing the lines:

But, if on me some little drops would flowe
Of that the spring was in his learned hedde,
I soone would learne these woods to wayle my woe,
And teache the trees their trickling teares to shedde.

We have here a specifie inversion of the 'pathetic fallacy.' The moods of
nature are no longer represented as varying in sympathy with the passions
of man, but are deliberately used to heighten an effect by contrast. Even
this inverted correspondence, however, is for the most part lacking in the
subsequent eclogues, and it must be admitted that in so far as Spenser
depended on a cyclic correlation for the unifying of his design, he
achieved at best but partial effect. Another means by which he sought,
consciously or unconsciously, to produce unity of impression was by
consistently pitching his song in the minor key. This accounts for the
inverted correspondence just noted, and for the fact that even the
polemics have an undercurrent of regret in them. In this case the poet has
undoubtedly succeeded in carrying out the prevailing mood of the central
motive--the Rosalind drama--in the subsidiary scenes. Or should we not
rather say that he has extracted the general mood of the whole
composition, and infused it, in a kind of typical form, into the three
connected poems placed at critical points of the complex structure? The
unity, however, thus aimed at, and achieved, is very different from the
cyclic or architectonic unity described above, and of a much less definite
character.

It remains to say a few words concerning the language of the _Calender_
and the rough accentual metre in which parts of it are composed, since
both have a particular bearing upon Spenser's attitude towards pastoral in
general.

Ben Jonson, in one of those utterances which have won for him the
reputation of churlishness, but which are often marked by acute critical
sense, asserted that Spenser 'in affecting the Ancients writ no
Language.'[96] The remark applies first and foremost, of course, to the
_Calender_, and opens up the whole question of archaism and provincialism
in literature. This is far too wide a question to receive adequate
treatment here, and yet it appears forced upon us by the nature of the
case. For Spenser's archaism, in his pastoral work at least, is no
unmeaning affectation as Jonson implies. He perceived that the language of
Chaucer bore a closer resemblance to actual rustic speech than did the
literary language of his own day, and he adopted it for his imaginary
shepherds as a fitting substitute for the actual folk-tongue with which he
had grown familiar, whether in the form of rugged Lancashire or
full-mouthed Kentish. And the homely dialect does undoubtedly naturalize
the characters of his eclogues, and disguise the time-honoured platitudes
that they repeat from their learned predecessors. With our wider
appreciation of literary effect, and our more historical and less
authoritative manner of judging works of art, we can no longer endorse
Sidney's famous criticism:[97] 'That same framing of his stile, to an old
rustick language, I dare not alowe, sith neyther Theocritus in Greeke,
Virgill in Latine, nor Sanazar in Italian, did affect it.'[98] If a writer
finds an effective and picturesque word in an old author or in a homely
dialect it is but pedantry that opposes its use, and it matters little
moreover from what quarter of the land it may hail, as Stevenson knew when
he claimed the right of mingling Ayrshire with his Lothian verse. Even
such archaisms as 'deemen' and 'thinken,' such colloquialisms as the
pronominal possessive, need not be too severely criticized. What goes far
towards justifying Jonson's acrimony is the wanton confusion of different
dialectal forms; the indiscriminate use for the mere sake of archaism of
such variants as 'gate' beside the usual 'goat,' of 'sike' and 'sich'
beside 'such'; the coining of words like 'stanck,' apparently from the
Italian _stanco_; and lastly, the introduction of forms which owe their
origin to mere etymological ignorance, for instance, 'yede' as an
infinitive, 'behight' in the same sense as the simple verb, 'betight,'
'gride,' and many others--all of which do not tend to produce the homely
effect of mother English, but reek of all that is pedantic and
unnatural.[99]

The influence of Chaucer was not confined to the language: from him
Spenser borrowed the metre of a considerable portion of the _Calender_. It
may at first sight appear strange to attribute to imitation of Chaucer's
smooth, carefully ordered verse the rather rugged measure of, say, the
February eclogue, but a little consideration will, I fancy, leave no doubt
upon the subject. This measure is roughly reducible to four beats with a
varying number of syllables in the _theses_, being thus purely accentual
as distinguished from the more strictly syllabic measures of Chaucer
himself on the one hand and the English Petrarchists on the other. Take
the following example:

The soveraigne of seas he blames in vaine,
That, once sea-beate, will to sea againe:
So loytring live you little heardgroomes,
Keeping you beastes in the budded broomes:
And, when the shining sunne laugheth once,
You deemen the Spring is come attonce;
Tho gynne you, fond flyes! the cold to scorne,
And, crowing in pypes made of greene corn,
You thinken to be Lords of the yeare;
But eft, when ye count you freed from feare,
Cornes the breme Winter with chamfred browes,
Full of wrinckles and frostie furrowes,
Drerily shooting his stormy darte,
Which cruddles the blood and pricks the harte:
Then is your carelesse corage accoied,
Your careful heards with cold bene annoied:
Then paye you the price of your surquedrie,
With weeping, and wailing, and misery.[100]

The syllabic value of the final _e_, already weakening in the London of
Chaucer's later days, was more or less of an archaism even with his most
immediate followers, none of whom use it with his unvarying correctness,
and it soon became literally a dead letter. The change was a momentous
one for English prosody, and none of the fifteenth-century writers
possessed sufficient poetic genius to adapt their verse to the altered
conditions of the language. They lived from hand to mouth, as it were,
without arriving at any systematic tradition. Thus it was that at the
beginning of the sixteenth century Hawes could write such verse as:

Of dame Astronomy I dyd take my lycence
For to travayle to the toure of Chyvalry;
For al my minde, wyth percyng influence,
Was sette upon the most fayre lady
La Bell Pucell, so muche ententyfly,
That every daye I dyd thinke fyftene,
Tyl I agayne had her swete person sene.[101]

It is this prosody, dependent usually upon a strong caesural pause to
differentiate it from prose, which may account for the harshness of some
of Wyatt's verse, and which rendered possible the barbarous metre of
Barclay. It was obviously impossible for a poet with an ear like Spenser
to accept such a metrical scheme as this; but his own study of Chaucer
produced a somewhat strange result. The one point which the late
Chaucerians preserved of their master's metric was the five-stress
character of his decasyllabic line; but in Spenser's day all memory of the
syllabic _e_ had long since vanished, and the only rhythm to be extracted
from Chaucer's verse was of a four-stress type. Professor Herford quotes a
passage from the Prologue of the _Canterbury Tales_ as it appears in
Thynne's second edition (1542), which Spenser would inevitably have read
as follows:

When zephirus eke wyth hys sote breth
Enspyred hath every holte and heth,
The tendre croppes, and the yong sonne
Hath in the Ram halfe hys course yronne,
And smale foules maken melodye
That slepen al nyght with open eye, &c.

This certainly bears on the face of it a close resemblance to Spenser's
measure. There are, moreover, occasional difficulties in this method of
scansion, some lines refusing to accommodate themselves to the Procrustean
methods of sixteenth-century editors, and exactly similar anomalies are to
be found in Spenser. Such, for instance, are the lines in the May eclogue:

Tho opened he the dore, and in came
The false Foxe, as he were starke lame.

Now these lines may be written in strict Chaucerian English thus:

Tho opened he the dore, and inne came
The false fox, as he were starke lame,

and they at once become perfectly metrical. Under these circumstances
there can, I think, be little doubt as to the literary parentage of
Spenser's accentual measure.[102]

Like the archaic dialect, this homely measure tends to bring Spenser's
shepherds closer to their actual English brethren. And hereby, it should
be frankly acknowledged, the incongruity of the speakers and their
discourse is emphasized and increased. That discourse, it is true, runs on
pastoral themes, but the disguise and allegory have worn thin with
centuries of use. We can no longer separate the words from the allusions,
and consequently we can no longer accept the speakers in their
unsophisticated shepherd's role. Yet it was precisely the desire to give
reality to these transparent phantasms that led Spenser to endow them with
a rustic speech. Whether he failed or succeeded the paradox of the form
remains about equal.[103]

The importance of the _Shepherd's Calender_ was early recognized, not
only by friendly critics, but by the general public likewise, and six
editions were called for in less than twenty years. Not long after its
appearance John Dove, a Christ Church man, who appears to have been
ignorant of the authorship, turned the whole into Latin verse, dedicating
the manuscript to the Dean.[104] Another Latin version is found in
manuscript in the British Museum copy of the edition of 1597, and after
undergoing careful revision finally appeared in print in 1653. This was
the work of one Bathurst, a fellow of Spenser's own college of Pembroke at
Cambridge.[105]

The _Shepherd's Calender_ was Spenser's chief contribution to pastoral;
indeed it was by so much his most important contribution that it would
hardly be worth while examining the others did they not bear witness to a
certain change in his attitude towards the pastoral ideal.

The first of these later works is the isolated but monumental eclogue
entitled _Colin Clouts come Home again_, of which the dedication to
Raleigh is dated 1591, though it was not published till four years later.
This, perhaps the longest and most elaborate eclogue ever written,
describes how the Shepherd of the Ocean, that is Raleigh, induced Colin
Clout, who as before represents Spenser, to leave his rustic retreat in

the cooly shade
Of the greene alders by the Mallaes shore,

and try his fortune at the court of the great shepherdess Cynthia, and how
he ultimately returned to Ireland. The verse marks, as might be expected,
a considerable advance in smoothness and command of rhythm over the
non-lyrical portions of the _Calender_, and the dialect, too, is much less
harsh, being far advanced towards that peculiar poetic diction which
Spenser adopted in his more ambitions work. On the other hand, in spite of
a certain _allegrezza_ in the handling, and in spite of the Rosalind wound
being at least partially healed, the same minor key prevails as in the
earlier poems. In the spring of the great age of English song Spenser's
note is like the voice of autumn, not the fruitful autumn of cornfield and
orchard, but a premature barrenness of wet and fallen leaves--

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall.

Thus though time has purged the bitterness of his sorrow, the regret
remains; his early love is still the mistress of his thoughts, but years
have softened his reproaches, and he admits:

who with blame can justly her upbrayd,
For loving not; for who can love compell?--

a petard, it may be incidentally remarked, which, sprung within the bounds
of pastoral, is of power to pulverize in an instant the whole artificial
system of amatory ethics.

The most notable points in the poem are the loves of the rivers Bregog and
Mulla, the famous list of contemporary poets, and the presentation of the
seamy side of court life, recalling the more direct satire of the probably
contemporary _Mother Hubberd's Tale_. The first of these belongs to the
class of Ovidian myths already noticed in such works as Lorenzo's _Ambra_.
The subject, however, is treated in a more subtly allegorical manner than
by Ovid's direct imitators, and this mode of presentment likewise
characterizes Spenser's tale of Molanna in the fragment on
Mutability.[106] Browne returned to a more crudely metamorphical tradition
in the loves of Walla and Tavy, while a similarly mythological
_Naturanschauung_ may be traced in Drayton's chorographical epic.

Of the miscellaneous _Astrophel_, edited and in part composed by Spenser,
which was appended to _Colin Clout_, and of the _Daphnaida_ published in
1596, though, like the former volume, containing a dedication dated 1591,
a passing mention must suffice. The former is chiefly remarkable as
illustrating the uniformly commonplace character of the verse called forth
by the death of one who, while he lived, was held the glory of Elizabethan
chivalry. It contains, beside other verse, pastoral elegies from the pens,
certainly of Spenser, and probably of the Countess of Pembroke, Matthew
Roydon, and Lodowick Bryskett. The last-named, or at any rate a
contributor with the same initiais, also supplied a 'Pastorall Aeglogue'
on the same theme. _Daphnaida_ is a long lament in pastoral form on the
death of Douglas Howard, daughter of the Earl of Northampton.

Of far greater importance for our present purpose is the pastoral
interlude in the quest of Sir Calidore, which occupies the last four
cantos of the sixth book of the _Faery Queen_.[107] Here is told how Sir
Calidore, the knight of courtesy, in his quest of the Blatant Beast came
among the shepherd-folk and fell in love with the fair Pastorella, reputed
daughter of old Meliboee; how he won her love in return through his valour
and courtesy; how while he was away hunting she was carried off by a band
of robbers; how he followed and rescued her; and finally, how she was
discovered to be the daughter of the lord of Belgard--at which point the
poem breaks off abruptly. The story has points of resemblance with the
Dorastus and Fawnia, or Florizel and Perdita, legend; but it also has
another and more important claim upon our attention. For as Shakespeare in
_As You Like It_, so Spenser in this episode has, as it were, passed
judgement upon the pastoral ideal as a whole. He is acutely sensitive to
the charm of that ideal and the seductions it offers to his hero--