Pastoral
Pastoral refers to the lifestyle of
shepherds and
pastoralists, moving livestock around larger areas of land according to seasons and availability of water and feed.
In
art, whether
literature,
painting, or another form, it refers to rural subjects such as
villages,
herdsmen, and
milkmaids, that are
romanticized and depicted in a highly unrealistic manner.
A work can contain many pastoral elements mixed with other genres.
Sir Philip Sidney's
Arcadia, though taking place among shepherds in
Arcadia, features the royal family, who have retired to the countryside for peace, and centers on the romances of princes and princesses. The fourth act of Shakespeare's
The Winter's Tale features a pastoral setting, but the focus is on the apparent shepherdess, Perdita, who is actually a foundling and a princess, and the setting is intruded on by her princely lover Florizel, and by his disapproving father the king. Sir Calidore, the Knight of Courtesy in
Edmund Spenser's
The Faerie Queen finds that the Blatant Beast is unknown among the shepherds, but he himself comes from outside, and the shepherdess Pastorella whom he loves is revealed at the end to be a foundling, the daughter of a knight and lady. Indeed, many
foundlings in literature are taken up by the pure and simple folk of the pastoral, but are themselves of higher birth and from civilization, to which they return at the story's end.
Classical origins
The pastoral
genre was invented in the
Hellenistic era by the Sicilian poet
Theocritus, who may have drawn on authentic folk traditions of Sicilian shepherds. The Roman poet
Virgil adopted the invention and wrote
eclogues, which are poems on rustic and bucolic subjects, that set an example for the pastoral mood in literature. Later pastoral poets, such as
Edmund Spenser and
Alexander Pope, typically looked to the classical pastoral poets for inspiration. A typical mood is set by
Christopher Marlowe's well known lines from
"The Passionate Shepherd to His Love":
Come live with me and be my Love,And we will all the pleasures proveThat hills and valleys, dale and field,And all the craggy mountains yield. There will we sit upon the rocks And see the shepherds feed their flocks, By shallow rivers, to whose falls Melodious birds sing madrigals.Pastoral shepherds and maidens usually had
Greek names like Poliphilus or Philomela. Pastoral poems were set in beautiful rural landscapes, the literary term for which is "locus amoenus" (Latin for "beautiful place"), such as
Arcadia, a rural region of
Greece, mythological home of the god
Pan, which was portrayed as a sort of
Eden by the poets. The tasks of their employment with sheep and other rustic chores were held in the fantasy to be almost wholly undemanding and backgrounded, and to leave the shepherdesses and their swains in a state of almost perfect
leisure. This made them available for embodying perpetual
erotic fantasies. The shepherds spent their time chasing pretty girls --- or, at least in the Greek and Roman versions, pretty lads as well. The eroticism of Virgil's second eclogue,
Formosum pastor Corydon ardebat Alexin ("The shepherd Corydon burned with passion for pretty Alexis") is entirely
homosexual.
Other uses of the pastoral setting
A harsher note was struck in
Girolamo Fracastoro's 1530 poem
Syphilis, sive Morbus Gallicus ("Syphilis, or the French Disease"), in which Syphilus ("pig-lover"), a typical pastoral name for a shepherd, is stricken by the disease
syphilis that takes its name from Fracastoro's poem. Fracastoro's poem contains the first recognisable description of the symptoms of syphilis (today, few contemporary physicians announce their discoveries in verse, pastoral or otherwise). Fracastoro has Syphilus the shepherd catch it for having offended
Apollo, a somewhat unusual method of
infection. Fracastoro's
Latin poem was much admired in its day; it was translated into
English heroic couplets by
Nahum Tate:
A shepherd once (distrust not ancient fame) Possest these Downs, and Syphilus his Name; Some destin'd Head t'attone the Crimes of all, On Syphilus the dreadful Lot did fall. Through what adventures this unknown Disease So lately did astonisht Europe seize, Through Asian coasts and Libyan Cities ran, And from what Seeds the Malady began, Our Song shall tell: to Naples first it came From France, and justly took from France his Name. . . Pastoral paintings, likewise, were typically used to give the respectability of the classics to paintings of
nymphs, swains,
satyrs, and other mostly human
legendary creatures frolicking in neatly tended hills and woods in a state of perpetual
déshabillé. In contemporary times, it is a whole genre of
sexual fantasy that fell almost completely out of fashion.
See also:
Et in Arcadia ego, the end of
Don Quixote.
*
Torquato Tasso's
Aminta*
Longus's Daphnis and Chloe*
Sir Philip Sidney's
Arcadia*
Symphony No. 6 (Beethoven) (the Pastoral Symphony)
*
Michel Foucault's concept of
governmentality*
Idyll*
Arcadia*Two
Idylls by Theocritus (English)
*The
Eclogues of Virgil
*The complete works of
Christopher Marlowe*The
Shepheardes Calendar by
Edmund Spenser*
La Castità Conquistata: The Function of the Satyr in Pastoral Drama, by Meredith Kennedy Ray (University of Chicago)*
Syphilis and the Shepherd of Atlantis by
Stephen Jay Gould
