Transforming Work: Early Modern Pastoral and Late Medieval Poetry

Notes

notes Introduction 1. This list can only be partial given the great number of studies of pastoral. For the first category, see William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (New York: New Directions, 1974); Patrick Cullen, Spenser, Marvell, and Renaissance Pastoral (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970); the essays by Louis Montrose (on which see note 3); and Susan Snyder, Pastoral Process: Spenser, Marvell, Milton (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). For the second, see Paul Alpers, What Is Pastoral? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) and Judith Haber, Pastoral and the Poetics of Self-Contradiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Two studies move relatively seamlessly between classical and Renaissance poets: Renato Poggioli, The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975) and Andrew Ettin, Literature and Pastoral (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), thus obscuring the absence of the medieval period. Both Annabel Patterson’s Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) and W.W. Greg’s Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama (London: Bullen, 1906) claim to address the medieval period, but the focus is on Petrarch (Patterson) or Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Mantuan (Greg) rather than on English texts. Helen Cooper’s Pastoral: Mediaeval into Renaissance (Ipswich: Brewer, 1977) is, of course, an exception, and I will discuss it further below. 2. Paul Alpers, “Pastoral and the Domain of Lyric in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender,” Representations 12 (1983): 83–100. 201 3. See Louis Montrose, “‘The perfect paterne of a Poete’: The Poetics of Courtship in The Shepheardes Calender,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 21(1979): 34–67; “‘Eliza, Queene of shepheardes,’ and the Pastoral of Power,” English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980): 153–82; and “Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form” ELH: English Literary History 50 (1983): 415–59. 4. For the first printings of Virgil, see Bucolica Virgilii (London, 1512; STC 24813) and (London, 1514; STC 24814). For the popularity of Mantuan and the use of his eclogues as a school text, see the introduction to the edition by Wilfred P. Mustard, ed., The Eclogues of Baptista Mantuanus (Baltimore , MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1911), 35–40. See also Lee Piepho, Holofernes’ Mantuan: Italian Humanism in Early Modern England (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 45–92. 5. Cooper, Pastoral, 8. The appendix included by Christopher Baswell in his study of the Aeneid in England indicates that the Eclogues survive along with the Aeneid in quite a number of manuscripts (Virgil in Medieval England [Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1995], 285–308). And yet, they seem to have generated little interest among writers in the vernacular. Baswell notes that the Eclogues did not have “topical appeal” for medieval writers (5). 6. Greg, Pastoral Poetry, 18. Indeed, Cooper includes very few examples of a “vernacular pastoral tradition” in English: “bergerie is thinly scattered among lyrics and poetic homilies, and even the great literary flowering of the reign of Richard II produced little apart from the metrical romance of King Edward and the Shepherd. English bergerie reaches its perfection, however, in the mystery plays, and in the work of the Wakefield Master in particular, whose shepherds represent the very best of the native English part of the tradition” (49). In other words, her claim for a medieval pastoral in England rests on essentially one play of uncertain date. 7. Cooper, Pastoral, 48–49. 8. Montrose quite briefly compares the late medieval shepherd plays to Elizabethan pastorals but finds them to be entirely at odds: “the social milieu and informing spirit of the Nativity pageants are alien to Elizabethan pastorals” (Montrose, “‘Eliza, Queene of Shepheardes,’” 161). 9. Although Cooper begins by claiming that “the foundations of the great achievements of Renaissance pastoral were laid” in the Middle Ages (100), she later notes that the Italian, Arcadian version of pastoral “came to displace the mediaeval traditions almost entirely” (105) and consistently points out the novelty of Italian pastoral. 10. Alexander Barclay, The Eclogues of Alexander Barclay from the Original Edition by John Cawood, ed. Beatrice White, Early English Text Society, original series, vol. 175 (1928; repr., London: Oxford University Press, 1960), lxii–lxiii; Cooper, Pastoral, 124–25; Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calen202 Notes to Pages 1–3 der, in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram, Einar Bjorvand, Ronald Bond, Thomas H. Cain, Alexander Dunlop, and Richard...