Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama by Walter W. Greg

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Ne, certes, mote he greatly blamed be,

says the poet of the _Faery Queen_ recalling the days when he was plain
Colin Clout--but the

perfect pleasures, which do grow
Amongst poore hyndes, in hils, in woods, in dales,

are not allowed to afford more than a temporary solace to the knight; the
robbers break in upon the rustic quietude, rapine and murder succeed the
peaceful occupations of the shepherds, and Sir Calidore is driven once
again to resume his arduous quest. The same idea may be traced in the
knight's visit to the heaven-haunted hill where he meets Colin Clout. In
the

hundred naked maidens lilly white
All raunged in a ring and dauncing in delight

to the sound of Colin's bagpipe, and who, together with the Graces and
their sovereign lady, vanish at the knight's approach, it is surely not
fanciful to see the gracious shadows of the idyllic poet's vision trooping
reluctantly away at the call of a more lofty theme. With this sense of
regret at the vanishing of an ideal long cherished, but at last
deliberately abandoned for matters of deeper and more real import, we may
turn from the work of the most important figure in English pastoral poetry
to his less famous contemporaries.

III

Besides its wider influence on English verse, and the stimulus it gave to
pastoral composition as a whole, the _Shepherd's Calender_ called forth a
series of direct imitations. Of these the majority are but of accidental
and ephemeral interest and of inconspicuous merit; and it is probable that
Spenser himself lived to see the end of this over-direct school of
discipleship. Several examples appeared in Francis Davison's famous
miscellany known as the _Poetical Rhapsody_, the first edition of which,
though it only appeared in 1602, contained the gleanings of the entire
sixteenth century.[108] Of these imitations, four in number, the first,
the work of the editor himself, is a very poor production. It is a love
lament, and the insertion of a song in a complicated lyrical measure in a
plain stanzaic setting is evidently copied from the _Calender_. The other
three poems are ascribed, either in the _Rhapsody_ itself or in Davison's
manuscript list, to a certain A. W., who so far remains unidentified, if,
indeed, the letters conceal any individuality and do not merely stand for
'Anonymous Writer,' as has been sometimes thought. The three eclogues at
any rate bear evidence of coming from the same pen, and the following
lines show that the writer was no incompetent imitator, and at the same
time argue some genuine feeling:

Thou 'ginst as erst forget thy former state,
And range amid the busks thyself to feed:
Fair fall thee, little flock! both rathe and late;
Was never lover's sheep that well did speed.
Thou free, I bound; thou glad, I pine in pain;
I strive to die, and thou to live full fain.

The first of these poems is a monologue 'entitled Cuddy,' modelled on the
January eclogue. The second is a lament 'made long since upon the death of
Sir Philip Sidney,' in which the writer wonders at Colin's silence, and
which consequently must, at least, date from before the appearance of
_Astrophel_ in 1595, and is probably some years earlier. It is in the form
of a dialogue between two shepherds, one of whom sings Cuddy's lament in
lyrical stanzas, thus recalling Spenser's 'November.' These stanzas do not
reveal any great metrical gift. The last poem is a fragment 'concerning
old age,' which connects itself by its theme with the February eclogue,
though the form is stanzaic.[109] Again we find mention of Cuddy, a name
evidently assumed by the author, though whether he can be identified with
the Cuddie of the _Calender_ it is impossible to say. Whoever he was, he
shows more disposition than most of his fellow imitators to preserve
Spenser's archaisms.

But undoubtedly the greatest poet who was content to follow immediately
in Spenser's footsteps was Michael Drayton, who in 1593 published a volume
entitled 'Idea The Shepheards Garland, Fashioned in nine Eglogs. Rowlands
Sacrifice to the nine Muses.' This connexion between the number of the
eclogues and the muses is purely fanciful; Rowland is Drayton's pastoral
name, and Idea, which re-appeared as the title of the 1594 volume of
sonnets, is that of his poetic mistress.[110] It can hardly be said that
the verse of these poems attains any very high order of merit, but the
imitation of Spenser is evident throughout. In the first eclogue Rowland
bewails, in the midst of spring, 'the winter of his grief.' In this and
the corresponding monologue at the end he clearly follows Spenser's
arrangement and likewise adopts his minor key--

Fayre Philomel, night-musicke of the spring,
Sweetly recordes her tunefull harmony,
And with deepe sobbes, and dolefull sorrowing,
Before fayre Cinthya actes her Tragedy.

In Eclogue II a 'wise' shepherd warns a youth against love, and draws a
somewhat gruesome picture of human fate--

And when the bell is readie to be tol'd
To call the wormes to thine Anatomie,
Remember then, my boy, what once I said to thee!

Even this, however, fails to shake the lover's faith in the gentle
passion, and his enthusiasm finds vent in an apostrophe borrowed from
Spenser:

Oh divine love, which so aloft canst raise,
And lift the minde out of this earthly mire.

The next eclogue, containing a panegyric on Elizabeth under the name of
Beta, is closely modelled on the 'April,' and abounds with such
reminiscences as the following:

Make her a goodly Chapilet of azur'd Colombine,
And wreath about her Coronet with sweetest Eglantine:
Bedeck our Beta all with Lillies,
And the dayntie Daffadillies,
With Roses damask, white, and red, and fairest flower delice,
With Cowslips of Jerusalem, and cloves of Paradice.

Here, however, Drayton shows himself more skilful in dealing with a
lyrical stanza than most of his fellow imitators. In the fourth eclogue
two shepherds sing a dirge made by Rowland on the death of Elphin, that is
Sidney. In the next Rowland himself sings the praises of Idea; and in the
sixth Perkin those of Pandora, doubtless the Countess of Pembroke. The
seventh is a singularly unentertaining dispute, in which typical
representatives of age and youth abuse one another by turns; the eighth is
a description of the golden age, a theme Spenser had omitted; and lastly,
in the ninth we return to the opening love-motive, this time, as in the
_Calender_, amid the frosts of winter.

These eclogues were reprinted in a different order in the 'Poems Lyric and
Pastoral' (_c._ 1606) with one additional poem there numbered the ninth.
This describes a rustic gathering of shepherds and nymphs, and contains
several songs. The verse exhibits no small advance on the earlier work,
and one song at least is in the author's daintiest manner. He seldom
surpassed the graceful conceit of the lines:

Through yonder vale as I did passe,
Descending from the hill,
I met a smerking bony lasse;
They call her Daffadill:

Whose presence as along she went,
The prety flowers did greet,
As though their heads they downward bent
With homage to her feete.

Spenser, in spite of the warning he addressed to his book--

Dare not to match thy pype with Tityrus his style,
Nor with the Pilgrim that the Ploughman playde awhyle--

could nevertheless assert in semi-burlesque rime:

It shall continewe till the worlds dissolution;

and his disciple is not to be outdone. Never was truer lover or sweeter
singer--

Oenon never upon Ida hill
So oft hath cald on Alexanders name,
As hath poore Rowland with an Angels quill
Erected trophies of Ideas fame:
Yet that false shepheard, Oenon, fled from thee;
I follow her that ever flies from me.

Thus Drayton endeavoured to follow in the footsteps of a greater than he,
and small success befell him in his uncongenial task. He knew little and
cared less about the moral and philosophical rags that clung yet about the
pastoral tradition. He sang, in his lighter vein at least, for the mere
pleasure that his song could afford to himself and others: the Spenserian
and traditional garb fits him ill. His golden age is rather amorous than
philosophical; he is more concerned that love should be free and true than
that the earth should yield her fruits unwounded of the plough; and even
so he hastens away from that colourless age to troll the delightful ballad
of Dowsabel. The inspiration for this he found, not in Spenser and his
learned predecessors, but in the popular romances, and in it we hear for
the first time the voice of the real Michael Drayton, the accredited bard
to the court of Faery. So again in the barren dispute of the seventh
eclogue, he turns aside from his theme as the shadow of the winged god
flits across his path--

That pretie Cupid, little god of love,
Whose imped winges with speckled plumes been dight,
Who striketh men below and Gods above,
Roving at randon with his feathered flight,
When lovely Venus sits and gives the ayme,
And smiles to see her little Bantlings game.

If these eclogues formed Drayton's only claim upon our attention as a
pastoral poet there would be no excuse for lingering over him. He left
other work, however, which, if but slightly pastoral in subject, is at
least thoroughly so in form and spirit. The _Muses Elizium_ did not appear
till 1630, and it is consequently not a little premature to speak of it in
this place. It is, however, so important as illustrating the freer and
more spontaneous vein traceable in many English pastoralists from Henryson
onwards, that it is worth while to place it for comparison side by side
with the more orthodox tradition as exemplified, in spite of his
originality, in the work of Spenser.

The _Muses Elizium_ is in truth the culmination of a long sequence of
pastoral work. Of this I have already discussed the beginnings when
dealing with the native pastoral impulse; and however much it was
influenced at a later date by foreign models it never submitted to the
yoke of orthodox tradition, and to the end retained much of its freshness.
The early anthologies are full of this sort of verse, the song-books are
full of it, and so are the romances and the plays. To this lyrical
tradition belong Breton's songs, of which one has already been quoted;
there was hardly a poet of note at the end of the sixteenth century who
did not contribute his quota. We find it once more, intermingling with a
certain formal strain, in Drayton's _Shepherds' Sirena_ containing the
delightful song, with its subtle interchange of dactylic and iambic
rhythms, so admirably characteristic of the author of the _Agincourt_
ballad:

Neare to the Silver Trent
Sirena dwelleth,
Shee to whom Nature lent
All that excelleth;
By which the Muses late
And the neate Graces,
Have for their greater state
Taken their places:
Twisting an Anadem
Wherewith to Crowne her,
As it belong'd to them
Most to renowne her.
On thy Bancke,
In a Rancke
Let thy Swanes sing her
And with their Musick
along let them bring her.

In this pervading impulse of pure and spontaneous pastoral the soul of
what is sweet and winning in things common and familiar as our household
fairies blends with the fresh glamour of early love and the dainty
delights of an ideal world, where despair is only less sweet than
fruition, and love only less divine than chastity, where, as Drayton
frankly tells us,

The winter here a Summer is,
No waste is made by time,
Nor doth the Autumne ever misse
The blossomes of the Prime;

The flower that July forth doth bring,
In Aprill here is seene,
The Primrose, that puts on the Spring,
In July decks each Greene,

a world, in short, in which the nymphs may strew the laureate hearse, not
only with all the flowers and fruits of earth, but with the Amaranth of
paradise and the stars of heaven if the fancy takes them. Of a spirit
compounded of these elements and of its quintessence are the 'Nymphals' of
the _Muses Elizium_. There are portions of the work, it is true, in which
the more vulgar strains of the conventional pastoral make themselves
heard, as in the satires of the fourth and tenth Nymphals; but for the
most part we are allowed to wander undisturbed among the woods and
pastures of an earthly paradise, and revel in the fairy laureate's most
imaginative work. There we meet Lirope, of whom

Some said a God did her beget,
But much deceiv'd were they,
Her Father was a Rivelet,
Her Mother was a Fay.
Her Lineaments so fine that were
She from the Fayrie tooke,
Her Beauties and Complection cleere
By nature from the Brooke.

There Naiis sings, roguishly enough, in the martial metre of _Agincourt_:

'Cloe, I scorne my Rime
Should observe feet or time,
Now I fall, then I clime,
What is't I dare not?'

'Give thy Invention wing,
And let her flert and fling,
Till downe the Rocks she ding,
For that I care not';

the song then breaking off into gamesome anapaests:

The gentle winds sally
Upon every Valley,
And many times dally
And wantonly sport,
About the fields tracing,
Each other in chasing,
And often imbracing,
In amorous sort.

There, again, we listen to the litany of the Muses, with the response:

Sweet Muse, perswade our Phoebus to inspire
Us for his Altars with his holiest fire,
And let his glorious, ever-shining Rayes
Give life and growth to our Elizian Bayes;

or else hear the fairy prothalamium, most irrepressible and inimitable of
bridal songs--

For our Tita is this day
Married to a noble Fay.

There, lastly, we behold the flutter of tender breasts half veiled when
Venus and her wayward archer are abroad, and listen as fair Lelipa reads
the decree:

To all th' Elizian Nimphish Nation,
Thus we make our Proclamation
Against Venus and her Sonne,
For the mischeefe they have done:
After the next last of May,
The fixt and peremptory day,
If she or Cupid shall be found
Upon our Elizian ground,
Our Edict mere Rogues shall make them,
And as such, who ere shall take them,
Them shall into prison put;
Cupids wings shall then be cut,
His Bow broken, and his Arrowes
Given to Boyes to shoot at Sparrowes;
And this Vagabond be sent,
Having had due punishment,
To mount Cytheron, which first fed him,
Where his wanton Mother bred him,
And there, out of her protection,
Dayly to receive correction.
Then her Pasport shall be made,
And to Cyprus Isle convayd,
And at Paphos, in her Shryne,
Where she hath beene held divine,
For her offences found contrite,
There to live an Anchorite.

We have here the very essence of whatever most delicately and quaintly
exquisite the half sincere and half playful ideal of pastoral had
generated since the days of Moschus.

How is it then, we may pause a moment to inquire, that in spite of its
crudities of language and even of metre, in spite of its threadbare themes
but half repatched with homelier cloth, in spite of its tedious
theological controversies, its more or less conventional loves and more or
less exaggerated panegyrics--how is it that in spite of all this we still
regard the _Shepherd's Calender_ as serious literature; while with all its
exquisite justness, as of ivory carved and tinted by the hand of a master
and encrusted with the sparkle of a thousand gems, the _Muses' Elizium_
remains a toy? It is not merely the prestige of the author's name: it is
not merely that we tend to accept the work of each at his own valuation.
We have to seek the explanation of the phenomenon in the fact that not
only has the _Shepherd's Calender_ behind it a vast tradition, reverend if
somewhat otiose--the devotion of men counts for something--but also that,
however stiffly laced in an unsuitable garb, it sought to deal with
matters of real import to man, or at any rate with what man has held as
such. It treated questions of religious policy which touched the majority
of men more nearly then than now; with moral problems calculated to
interest the mind of an age still tinged with medievalism; with
philosophical theories of human and divine love. In other words, the
_Shepherd's Calender_ lay in the main stream of literature, and reflected
the mind of the age, while the _Muses' Elizium_, in common with so much
pastoral work, did not. These considerations open up an interesting field
of speculation. Are we to suppose that there is indeed a line of
demarcation between great art and little art wholly independent of that
which divides good art from bad art? Are we to go further, and assume that
these two lines of division intersect, so that a work may be akin to
great art though it be not good art, while, however perfect a work of art
may be, it may remain little art for some wholly non-aesthetic reason? But
we digress.

IV

It will be convenient, in dealing with the considerable volume of English
pastoral verse which has come down to us from the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries, to divide it into two portions, according as it
tends to attach itself to orthodox foreign tradition on the one hand, or
to the more spontaneous native type on the other. To the former division
belong in the main the more ambitious set pieces and eclogue-cycles, to
the latter the lighter and more occasional verse, the pastoral ballads and
the lyrics. The division is necessarily somewhat arbitrary, for the two
traditions act and react on one another incessantly, and the types merge
almost imperceptibly the one into the other; but that does not prevent the
spirit that manifests itself in Drayton's eclogues being essentially
different from that which produced Breton's songs. I shall not, however,
try to draw any hard and fast line between the two, but shall rather deal
first with those writers whose most important work inclines to the more
formal tradition, and shall then endeavour to give some account of the
lighter pastoral verse of the time.

After the appearance of the _Shepherd's Calender_ some years elapsed
before English poetry again ventured upon the domain of pastoral, at least
in any serious composition. In 1589, however, appeared a small quarto
volume, with the title: 'An Eglogue. Gratulatorie. Entituled: To the right
honorable, and renowmed Shepheard of Albions Arcadia: Robert Earle of
Essex and Ewe, for his welcome into England from Portugall. Done by George
Peele. Maister of arts in Oxon.' Like the 'A. W.' of the _Rhapsody_, Peele
followed Spenser more closely than most of his fellow imitators in the use
of dialect, but his eclogue on the not particularly glorious return of
Essex has little interest. His importance as a pastoralist lies elsewhere.

The following year the poet of the _Hecatompathia_, Thomas Watson, a
pastoralist of note according to the critics of his own age, but whose
work in this line is chiefly Latin, published his 'Ecloga in Obitum
Honoratissimi Viri, Domini Francisci Walsinghami, Equitis aurati, Divae
Elizabethae a secretis, & sanctioribus consiliis,' entitled _Meliboeus_,
and also in the same year a translation of the piece into English. The
latter is considerably shorter than the original, but still of tedious
length. The usual transition from the dirge to the paean is managed with
more than the usual lack of effect. The eclogue contains a good deal
beyond its immediate subject; for instance, a lament for Astrophel, a
passage in praise of Spenser, and a panegyric on

Diana, matchless Queene of Arcadie--

all subjects hardly possible for a poet to escape, writing _more
pastorali_ in 1590. Watson also left several other pastoral compositions
in the learned tongue, which, from their eponymous hero, won for him the
shepherd-name of Amyntas. Thus in 1585 he published a work in Latin
hexameter verse with the title 'Amyntas Thomae Watsoni Londinensis I. V.
studiosi,' divided into eleven 'Querelae,' which was 'paraphrastically
translated' by Abraham Fraunce into English hexameters, and published
under the title 'The Lamentations of Amyntas for the death of Phillis' in
1587. This translation, 'somewhat altered' to serve as a sequel to an
English hexametrical version of Tasso's _Aminta_, was republished in 'The
Countesse of Pembrokes Ivychurch' of 1591. Again in 1592 Watson produced
another work entitled _Amintae Gaudia_, part of which was translated under
the title _An Old-fashioned Love_, and published as by I. T. in 1594.[111]

Next in order--passing over Drayton, with whom we have been already
sufficiently concerned--is a writer who, without the advantage of original
genius or brilliant imagination, succeeded by mere charm of poetic style
and love of natural beauty, in lifting his work above the barren level of
contemporary pastoral verse. Richard Barnfield's _Affectionate Shepherd_,
imitated, as he frankly confesses, from Vergil's _Alexis_, appeared in
1594. Appended to it was a poem similar in tone and spirit, entitled _The
Shepherd's Content_, containing a description of country life and scenery,
together with a lamentation for Sidney, a hymn to love, a praise of the
poets, and other similar matters. The easy if somewhat monotonous grace
which pervades both these pieces is seen to better advantage in the
delightful _Shepherd's Ode_, which appeared in his _Cynthia_ of 1595, and
begins:

Nights were short and days were long,
Blossoms on the hawthorn hong,
Philomel, night-music's king,
Told the coming of the spring;

or in the yet more perfect song:

As it fell upon a day
In the merry month of May,
Sitting in a pleasant shade
Which a group of myrtles made,
Beasts did leap and birds did sing,
Trees did grow and plants did spring,
Everything did banish moan,
Save the nightingale alone;
She, poor bird, as all forlorn,
Lean'd her breast against a thorn,
And there sung the dolefull'st ditty,
That to hear it was great pity....
Ah, thought I, thou mourn'st in vain,
None takes pity on thy pain.
Senseless trees, they cannot hear thee;
Ruthless beasts, they will not cheer thee;
King Pandion he is dead,
All thy friends are lapp'd in lead[112];
All thy fellow birds do sing,
Careless of thy sorrowing;
Even so, poor bird, like thee,
None alive will pity me[113].

No particular interest attaches to the four eclogues included in Thomas
Lodge's _Fig for Momus_, published in 1595, but they serve to throw light
on a kind of pastoral freemasonry that was springing up at this period.
Spenser and Sidney, under the names of Colin and Astrophel, or more rarely
Philisides, were firmly fixed in poetic tradition; Barnfield, by coupling
them with these, made Watson and Drayton free of the craft in his
complaint to Love in the _Shepherd's Content_:

By thee great Collin lost his libertie,
By thee sweet Astrophel forwent his joy,
By thee Amyntas wept incessantly,
By thee good Rowland liv'd in great annoy.

Now we find Lodge dedicating his four eclogues respectively to Colin,
Menalcus, Rowland, and Daniel. Who Menalcus was is uncertain; not, it
would seem, a poet. The themes are serious, even weighty according to the
estimation of the author, and befit the mood of the poet who first sought
to acclimatize the classical satire[114]. These eclogues do not, however,
testify to any high poetic gift, any more than do the couple in a lighter
vein found in the _Phillis_ of 1593. Lodge was happier in the lyric verses
with which he strewed his romances--such for instance as the lines to
Phoebe in _Rosalynde_, though these did certainly lay themselves open to
parody[115]. In the same romance Lodge rose for once to a perfection of
delicate conceit unsurpassed from his day to ours:

Love in my bosom like a bee
Doth suck his sweet;
Now with his wings he plays with me,
Now with his feet.

Within mine eyes he makes his nest,
His bed amidst my tender breast;
My kisses are his daily feast,
And yet he robs me of my rest.
Ah, wanton, will ye?

The year 1595 also saw the publication of Francis Sabie's _Pan's Pipe_,
which contains, according to the not wholly accurate title-page, 'Three
Pastorall Eglogues, in English Hexameter.' These constituted the first
attempt in English at writing original eclogues in Vergilian metre, and
the injudicious experiment has not, I believe, been repeated. The subjects
present little novelty of theme, but the treatment illustrates the natural
tendency of English pastoral writers towards narrative and the influence
of the romantic ballad motives. The same volume contains another work of
Sabie's, namely, the _Fishermaris Tale_, a blank-verse rendering of
Greene's _Pandosto_[116].