Transforming Work: Early Modern Pastoral and Late Medieval Poetry

Afterword

Afterword The Secret History of Pastoral The Renaissance has long been understood as a beginning: of the individual, of historical consciousness, of new literary forms. Although medievalists have tried to modify this defining characteristic by pushing these beginnings back to the Middle Ages, it still remains to be seen whether the Renaissance can ever shake its associations with beginnings or even with modernity itself, an association inherent in the newer term early modern.1 The persistence of the Renaissance’s special status, its distinctness vis-à-vis the Middle Ages, might have something to do with the way the discipline of literature is organized. After all, jobs in English departments still tend to follow traditional period divisions . But it may also be the case that this special status persists because of early modern writers’ own insistence on novelty, as made clear in E. K.’s dedicatory epistle to Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, which he describes as a “new worke” by a “new Poete.”2 Readers can hardly fail to be influenced by repeated claims that the material they are reading is new, even if they might suspect at times that it is not. The pastoral provides compelling evidence for the novelty of the early modern period, at least in terms of literary forms and modes, but on some reflection this novelty should appear to be less a statement of fact than a desire. It has, therefore, been the goal of this study 195 to investigate the nature of that desire by asking what the “new” would set aside or occlude. That is, this study has been interested in uncovering a kind of secret history for pastoral in precisely those kinds of texts from which pastoral writing seeks to distance itself, at least according to most theorists of pastoral: not just “what the country was really like,” a realism that may well have been impossible at the time, but the religious polemic of the Reformation and the outraged rhetoric of the enclosure treatises. My contention has been that this secret history should be read alongside the standard literary histories: the well-known and much-studied rediscovery of Virgil’s Eclogues as well as what is typically, and often dismissively, called the “native tradition” of medieval plowman writings and ecclesiastical pastoral. To read these histories together is to tie pastoral much more closely both to its medieval past and to the rural labor that it so often seems to set aside. These histories are not so much secret because the pastorals themselves repress them but because they have been largely ignored and neglected by theorists who would prefer to see a universal appeal to pastoral, one that transcends time and place. For Paul Alpers, the leading theorist of pastoral, what defines pastoral is precisely the representative quality of shepherds, that they are a kind of disguise that remains consistent in its meaning: the universal concerns of love or the unchanging vulnerability of the humble to the people in power.3 In keeping our focus on the disguise, we always ask what it means for the courtier or poet to dress up as a shepherd; we rarely ask what it means (or could have meant) for the “real” shepherd that others desire to use him as a disguise. Perhaps we cannot do otherwise, but we should at least be aware of what it is we are doing when we see pastoral as its own hermetic literary tradition, set apart from other kinds of writing rural labor. As John Barrell reminds us in describing the landscape painting of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we should ask ourselves whether we do not still, in the ways we admire Gainsborough, Stubbs, and Constable, identify with the interests of their customers and against the poor they portray. I am not suggesting that we should do anything else, merely that we should ask what it is that we do; to identify with the exhausted and underfed labourers is impossible for us, and would be insulting if it were not.4 196 Transforming Work It is still worth noting that even those pastorals that seem most committed to universalizing and generalizing the shepherd, to celebrating the disguise he affords, can offer a meditation on what is at stake in their own invention and on the relationship between the various literary histories that produced this disguise. I’d like to conclude, therefore, with a brief meditation on a...