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The Golden Age of the Spenserian Pastoral
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Modernity has taught us, with some reason, to laugh at pastorals. Nevertheless there is deep humanity in those artificial songs of shepherds and shepherdesses. With the frigid pipings of Thyrsis and Corydon we are indeed out of tune. Since, however, the pastoral fascinated Theocritus, Virgil, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Spenser, who wrote for ail time, we ought to approach the outworn form in a spirit of serious sympathy. Even proud idealists sometimes waver. Poetry must furnish, at times, an escape from life—not always the clarion call to life's struggles. Men took the pastoral in order to flee for a moment into Arcadia, to clothe in pleasant vagueness confessions of the delightful miseries of calf-love, though strife stole too often even into Arcadia and goaded the shepherds into worldly bickerings. We have the same aspirations to-day as those poets when they wrote their pastorals,—moods that are not mere toys; but because hope is edged with doubt, we trifle with our dreams in ways no less artificial than the pleasant game of pastoral-making. We have not outgrown the pastoralist's moods.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1910
References
page 242 note 1 Sidney, Harvey, Puttenham, Webbe, Meres, Drayton, practically all of the contemporary critics, welcomed the Calender at sight. In a more sceptical day, Dryden liberally meted out praise.
page 245 note 1 Act 2, Sc. iv.
page 246 note 1 Drayton's revisions must be considered carefully. Mr. Oliver Elton has done much painstaking work of this kind in his Michael Drayton (London, 1907). He notes changes in the ordering of the eclogues in the second edition. No. 4 becomes No. 6, No. 6 No. 8, No. 8 No. 4, and No. 9 No. 10. The added eclogue becomes No. 9. He notes also certain changes in the material of the eclogues which do not concern us here. For my own purposes, however, I am forced to transcribe variations in the readings wherever any question of the waxing or the waning of Spenser's influence is involved. If I understand Mr. Elton aright, he feels that Drayton in his later work tended to draw away somewhat from Spenserian influence, an impression which, without the slightest derogation of Drayton's remarkable qualities, I cannot share, even in the case of these pastorals. Many of Drayton's latest works, notably his most ambitious poem, the Polyolbion, are full of Spenser. The Mooncalf, again, is an elaborate imitation of Mother Hubberds Tale. As for the pastorals, the reader can form his own opinion from my footnotes. For my standard text I use Drayton's first version, both because I consider it to be the best poetry and because I am trying, as far as possible, to employ the chronological method. A, B, and (1 stand in my notes for the editions of 1593, 1606, and 1619 respectively.
page 247 note 1 Quoted from the argument. Drayton prefixed arguments, in the manner of Spenser's doggerel labels for each canto of his “Faërie Queene,” to each eclogue in A but omitted them in B and C. Compare ll. 1 and 2 in each edition:
A: “Now Phoebus from his equinoctial Zone,
Had task'd his teame unto the higher spheare.“
B: “Phoebus full out his yearly course had run,
Whom the long winter laboured to outweare.“
C: “Phoebus full out his yearly course had run
(The woeful Winter labouring to outweare).“
Line 2 in C is thoroughly in the manner of the Shepheards Calender.
page 247 note 2 B and C are more Spenserian:
“Stay Thames to heare my song, thou greate and famous flood.”
Compare Spenser's Prothalamion:
“Sweete Themmes! runne softly till I end my song.”
Drayton's poem bristles with happy thefts from Eliza.
page 247 note 3 Compare the Song to Eliza:
“Bring hether the Pincke and purple Cullambine,” etc.
page 250 note 1 This is retained as No. 10 in B and C.
page 250 note 2 Added as No. 9 in B and C.
page 250 note 3 I supplement the footnotes which have been quoted from the different editions with a few other characteristic examples of Drayton's revisions:—
Eclogue 1.
A. “Rejoycing all in this most joyfull tide:
C. “Highly rejoicing in this goodly tide.”
Some critics, I imagine, would call the play on words in A a Spenserian trick.
Drayton shows an occasional tendency to revise quaint words or spellings that had doubtless been suggested by the Shepheards Calender or directly borrowed from it. Thus:
A. “Now am I like the knurrie-bulked Oke.”
B. & C. “Now am I like the knotty aged Oak” (Eclogue 2.)
I may note here that Drayton, in my opinion, when he eliminates Spenserian touches, tends to strike out mere affectations rather than more skillful borrowings. His apparent sensitiveness in this matter often leads him to replace picturesque phrases with smooth commonplace.
A Latin motto, like those affixed to each eclogue in the Shepheards Calender, appears at the end of A but is omitted in B and C.
In the sixth eclogue B and C have some very Spenserian lines which do not appear in A.
“Nay stay, good Gorbo, Virtue is not dead,
Nor ben her friends gon al that wouned here
But to a nymphe for succour she is fled,
Which her doth cherish and most holdeth deare,“ etc.
Eclogue 7.
A. “Why liest thou here, then, in thy loathsome care” in B and C the Spenserian “ligs't” replaces “liest.”
It is not worth while to multiply these examples. They seem to me to show: (1) that Drayton added as many Spenserian touches as he struck out; (2) that he never departed from the deepest influence of Spenser except in his imitation of the “Dido” elegy in his lament for Elphin, which he struck out entirely.
page 251 note 1 Constable's period of active writing and publishing seems to have been in the early nineties.
page 252 note 1 Cf. Cuddie:
“Ah, foolish old man! I scorne thy skill,
………
But were thy yeares greene, as now beene mine,
To other delights they would encline:
Tho wouldest thou learne to caroli of love,
And hery with hymnes thy lasses glove:
Tho wouldest thou pype of Phyllis prayse.“
Note also that the poet here mistakenly uses the name “Thenot” from Spenser instead of his own “Wrenock.”
page 253 note 1 The Poetical Works of William Basse now for the first time collected and edited with an introduction and notes by R. Warwick Bond. London, 1893, Ellis and Elvey.
page 253 note 2 F. Q.: bk. 2, c. ix. Basse: Elegie, ii. This canto of Spenser was also the source of Phineas Fletcher's Purple Island. The resemblance between the passage in Basse's elegy and Spenser's is noted by Mr. Bond in his edition of Basse: P. 58, footnote.
page 255 note 1 William Fairfax's annotations on his father's pastorals are preserved in a letter from Brian Fairfax to Bishop Atterbury (1704). William Fairfax says that they were written in the first year of King James. They were never published during Fairfax's lifetime, at least.
page 256 note 1 Besides general similarity of flowers note the particular phrase “loved lillies” in Spenser's Song to Eliza.
page 256 note 2 Arguments of this type precede each eclogue as in the Faërie Queene and the Shepheards Garland of 1593.
page 258 note 1 In the stanza ababbcbcdd used by Basse, discussed in note above (p. 253).
page 259 note 1 Two of its five eclogues had appeared in Browne's Shepheards Pipe (1614).
page 260 note 1 See his lyric To My Beloved Thenot in Answer of His Verse.
page 261 note 1 See To Mr. Jas. Tomkins. These poems were published in Poeticall Miscellanies (1633) along with the Piscatorie Eglogs, but they clearly fell within his earliest period, from his first verses to the time when the Eglogs were begun.
page 261 note 2 The Purple Island, too, was published in 1633. But though I believe Fletcher to have begun it in a very early period, I feel certain that it was continued throughout his literary career, and was, in its last form, his maturest product.
page 261 note 3 To the ab ab bc bc stanza Spenser added his final alexandrine, C. Fletcher often adopted the same method of adding an alexandrine to current forms. In these eclogues he uses ababcC. ababb, ababB, ababbccC, abbaabb, ababcc, abaabbecc, ubababccC, ababbaaccC. Fletcher's stanza-forms are well discussed by Prof. E. P. Morton. The Spenserian Stanza before 1700, Modern Philology, May, 1907.
page 262 note 1 Said to have been published during Q's lifetime without his consent.
page 262 note 2 Eclogue 5. The allegory of the grain and the husks.
page 263 note 1 Eclogue 7. The allegory of Kephalos or the Isle of Man.
page 263 note 2 Spenser's model for this eclogue, as Thomas Warton noted, was Bion.
page 263 note 3 Cf. March:
“At length within an Yvie todde,
(There shrouded was the little god),
I heard a busy bustling.“
Also:
“Where in a bush he did him hide,
With wings of pirple and of blewe;“
and;
“With that sprang forth a naked swayne.”
At's snowy back the boy a quiver wore
Right fairly wrought and gilded all with gold;
A silver bow in his left hand he bore.“1
page 264 note 1 Cf. March:
“His gylden quiver at his backe
And silver bowe which was but slacke.“
page 264 note 2 I choose this place to interject a few vagabond references:—
Richard Braithwaite's Shepheards Tales (1621) are formal eclogues which show some Spenserian influence but which do not seem to me to have either the quality or the significance which would warrant detailed treatment.
Dr. William Bedell, Bishop of Kilmore, wrote an imitation of the Shepheards Calender called A Protestant Memorial of The Shepheards Tale of the Powder-Plott, which was not published till 1713. Unfortunately I have been unable to obtain this work. My only information concerning it is in Todd's edition of Spenser, vol. 1, p. clxxxii (1805).
Bishop Hall, the satirist, wrote a pastoral lyric in praise of Bedell's imitation which itself owes something to Spenser's eclogues. See Hall's poems, Grossart edition. Prof. Schelling (Elk. Drama, 1, 15) notes the influence of the Calender on Rollinson's comedy Sylvanus and W. W. Greg (Pastoral and Pastoral Drama, p. 360), quotes lines from Rutter's pastoral drama The Shepherds Holiday (1635) as reminiscent of Spenser. These may be grouped with my observations on Peele and John Fletcher as showing the occasional incursion of the Spenserian eclogue on the pastoral drama.
page 267 note 1 On the classical and Spenserian influences on Lycidas cf. Dr. J. H. Hanford, Pastoral Elegy, to appear in these Publications, xxv, 3.