Introduction

Summary

Thou wilt not find my Shepherdesses idly piping on oaten Reeds, but milking the Kine, tying up the Sheaves, or if the Hogs are astray driving them to their Styes. My Shepherd gathereth none other Nosegays but what are the growth of our own Fields, he sleepeth not under Myrtle shades, but under a Hedge, nor doth he vigilantly defend his Flocks from Wolves, because there are none, as Maister Spencer well observeth.

(John Gay, ‘Proeme’, The Shepherd's Week, 1714)

There are, as Gay says, no wolves in the English countryside. The Scottish poet James Thomson had to let his muse wander as far as the mountains of southern Europe, to find wolves for the machinery of sublime terror in his poem ‘Winter’. But their absence from the British Isles is not just of literary significance; it played a key part in the nation's history, for the wealth on which the rise of England as an economic power was based came above all from wool; and one of the first conditions for successful sheep husbandry is the absence of Canis lupus, the most destructive predator of sheep in temperate and subarctic areas. By isolating the absence of wolves, and patting Spenser on the back for having noticed this, Gay means to mock the drawing together of history and literature, and the assignation of literary value according to economic and patriotic criteria.