Notes

Summary

1725 & 1729 texts

If there is a difference in the line numbers in the 1729 edition, it is indicated in parentheses. Notes exclusive to the 1729 edition come after these combined notes.

TITLE PAGE (1725 only)

A Scots Pastoral Comedy: Ramsay uses the word ‘Scots’ in many ways. Sometimes, it refers to Scottishness generally, as in ‘Tartana, or the Plaid,’ in which those who wear an English ‘hood and mantle’ are ‘no more Scots.’ He uses it similarly in his dedication to the 1721 Poems, ‘To the most Beautiful, the Scots Ladies.’ In 1718, he begins publishing small collections called ‘Scots Songs,’ which have only a smattering of Scots in them. However, here, it seems to refer specifically to the dialect of English spoken in Lowland Scotland, as in James Watson, A Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems (1706), who in ‘The Publisher to the Reader’ refers to ‘our own Native Scots Dialect’ (n. pag.). In this vein, Ramsay refers to ‘blyth braid Scots’ in ‘To Josiah Burchet, Esq.’ See the textual introduction to this volume for further discussion of Ramsay's Scots.

‘Pastoral comedy’ is the subtitle Cowley gives to Love's Riddle (1633), which also happens to include the phrase ‘gentle shepherd,’ and Ramsay, we know, was familiar with Cowley (see l.1155/1150). However, Ramsay's source is probably Alexander Pope's ‘Discourse on Pastoral Poetry’ first published in his 1717 Works, in which he credits Torquato Tasso's Aminta for inventing ‘a new sort of poem, the Pastoral Comedy’ (7). Aminta is one of the texts, along with Giovanni Battista Guarini's Il Pastor Fido, that Ramsay looks to ‘cope with’ when he describes the composition of The Gentle Shepherd in his letter to William Ramsay of Templehill (STS IV:174). See the textual introduction to this volume for more on pastoral.

‘The Gentle Shepherd sat besides a spring’: The epigraph is from ‘December,’ the last pastoral in Edmund Spenser's The Shepherd's Calendar, and Ramsay's citation of a page number allows us to find the edition he consulted, volume 4 of The works of Mr. Edmund Spenser (Spenser 1715, 4:1113). Edited by John Hughes, this was the first scholarly edition of Spenser.