Renaissance literary theory and practice

1. LYRIC

The lyrics of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries show an extensive revival of Augustan measures in Latin. Meantime imitation of Petrarch made him an Italian classic and a European model. Thus, in England, revival from a meager and languid fifteenth century was stimulated in the sixteenth by Italy. But France shows the history of vernacular lyric in clearest stages: (1) in the formalizing of medieval modes by the rhétoriqueurs; (2) in the verse forms and diction of Lemaire and Marot, seeking variety without rejecting tradition; (3) in the Pléiade program of revolt from tradition to classicism, and especially in Ronsard’s experiments with the Greek ode; (4) in the final predominance of the sonnet.

(a) Latin Lyric

Latin lyric was both changed in mode by the Renaissance and increased in volume. The fifteenth century turned from the modes of the medieval Latin lyric to more direct imitation of Vergil and Ovid, Catullus and Horace. Meantime the tradition of writing Latin verse in school continued to make every Renaissance author familiar with this metric. The difference was that he now used it in his own mature composition. For humanism demanded even of vernacular poets such Latin stanzas as might introduce the works of their friends, compliment their patrons, or celebrate state weddings, victories, and solemn entries. Though even published Latin lyrics were often themes, they at least promoted and confirmed two pervasive Renaissance literary habits: control of classical metric, and imitation. Throughout the Renaissance there is to be assumed in the back of a poet’s mind a fund of classical measures and phrases.

But Renaissance Latin lyrics are by no means all themes. For some poets Latin was really the lyric medium. Humanistic anxiety and pretense about classical diction might, indeed, hinder lyric, but could not suppress it. Pontano (1426-1503), whose Latin poems fill nearly seven hundred modern pages, wrote not a few as directly and utterly lyrical as his Naenia. Jan Everaerts of Mechlin, known to literature as Secundus (1511-1536), even started a lyric vogue in Italy and France, and later in England, with his Basia. Obviously inspired by Catullus, they had a quality and influence of their own.

(b) Italy and England

The progress of vernacular lyric was steadiest in Italy because there the vernacular triumph had been recognized earliest and most consistently. The medieval lyric forms derived generically from Provençal—canzone, ballata, sestina, and sonetto—had all been explored by Dante; and one of them, the sonnet, had received from Petrarch a stamp that gave it European currency. Beside the humanist cult of Augustan Latin rose a cult of Petrarch as a vernacular classic. From Petrarch himself and through his fifteenth-century imitators the sonnet became the most widespread lyric mode both for a single, self-sufficient lyric and as a lyric unit in a narrative chain.

In England, where the range of medieval stanzas had been narrower, fifteenth-century lyric was meager. “The age of transition,” as it has been called apologetically, was a period of medieval decadence, of stalling in medieval patterns. Without much stir of ideas, without general sureness in verse technic, it is often diffuse and straggling, as in Lydgate. Skelton’s Latin learning remained quite apart from his slack and boisterous English verse; and English fifteenth-century lyric generally is both conventional and feeble. The sixteenth-century revival that was sought in Petrarch led here, as elsewhere, to the prevalence of sonnets. Its pioneer was Sir Thomas Wiat (1503-1542). Starting with that connection of lyric with music which was to be a preoccupation of Ronsard, appreciating Chaucer, but reading him in imperfect texts, he turned early from a few rondeaux of the Marot type to the Petrarchan sonnet. Two thirds of his sonnets are translations or echoes of Petrarch himself, or are derived from his imitators. Wiat pursued Italian further in octaves and terza rima and seems to have read, besides Ariosto, Alamanni, Navagero, and Castiglione, the Poetica of Trissino (1529). The previous century had brought Italian influences on English learning; Wiat brought the first clearly literary influence since Boccaccio’s on Chaucer. His friend Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547), carried this forward. Similarly following Petrarch and the Petrarchans, and experimenting with terza rima and other stanzas, he made Italian metric more familiar, and in particular helped to establish among the Elizabethans that form of sonnet which is called Shaksperian.

(c) France

France shows most distinctly the whole Renaissance lyric history. The beginning of the history in the medieval vernacular art of refrain stanzas had shown there the most systematic elaboration. In 1501 Antoine Vérard printed at Paris the huge collection of balades, rondeaux, and virelais entitled Le jardin de plaisance et fleur de rhétorique. Rhétorique, or more specifically seconde rhétorique, means the art of verse; the introduction expounds this in an anonymous treatise. Pierre Fabri incorporated the treatise in his Grande et vraie art de pleine rhétorique (Rouen, 1521). The pleine signifies merely the inclusion of both prose (Part I) and verse (Part II). Fullness in any other sense is hardly to be found in the rhétoriques of the period. They furnish mainly figures of speech and verse forms. They are style books; for the so-called school of the rhétoriqueurs was devoted mainly to verbal and metrical ingenuities.

But as Villon had shown in the early fifteenth century that the balade was not dead, so as the century waned Jean Lemaire (1473 to about 1520) was poet enough to be more than rhétoriqueur. True, he continued the jingling iteration. A double virelay composed on two rhymes begins as follows:

But Lemaire usually handled such recurrences with more delicacy.

Using few of the popular medieval stanzas, he acknowledged Petrarch and Serafino d’Aquila (p. 238), composed the first part of his Concorde des deux langages in terza rima, and experimented with Alexandrines. The “enrichment” later proposed by Du Bellay he tried in such Latinisms as aurein, calefaction, collocution, oscultation, congelative, and glandifère. Bits of his pastoral decoration might have been written in the Pléiade.

But the whole allegorical scheme of that poem is as medieval as Chaucer’s in the Parlement of Foules. For Lemaire still uses mythology not for classical allusion, but medievally as an extension of allegory. Chaos and the Furies, Hymen, Erebus, Mercury, and Janus are listed (pp. 172-173) with the personifications Honor, Grace, Victory, and Discord. The medieval adaptation brings from the Roman de la Rose Bel-Accueil to be a sub-deacon in the temple of Venus (p. 252); for the temple, as in Chaucer, is a church and has relics. Even Hippolytus is a “saint martyr” (p. 223); and the three goddesses at the judgment of Paris are domesticated in Flanders by their “venustes corpulences.” Jean Lemaire was not a forerunner of classicism.

Nor was Clement Marot (1495-1544). He learned the sonnet in Lyon and in Italy without discerning either its distinctive value or its future. For him it was merely one more form of the epigram type seen also in the dizaine. He continued the balade, adapted the rondeau, wrote much encomium without ever proclaiming himself a vates. His epistles, elegies, epigrams, his experiments with Alexandrines, his imitations of Martial, suggest a more normal development than the Pléiade change of both emphasis and direction.[25]

For the new day of the sonnet at Lyon we must look to Louise Labé (about 1520-1566). Bourgeoise of the commercial and literary, French and Italian city of Lyon, composing sometimes in Italian and sometimes in French, she speaks the choice language of culture without parade. Her sonnets[26] are directly and utterly lyric. Their literary derivations may, indeed, be found, but are never put forward. Her few classical allusions are all familiar. The simple mythology of her prose Débat de Folie et d’Amour is handled in the Burgundian fashion of Jean Lemaire. Her verse is Petrarchan as it were inevitably, because that was the prevalent mode of her place and time. To call her a precursor of the Pléiade, then, may be quite misleading; for she suggests neither school nor date.

French humanism had still to attempt a stricter classicism, not adapting but imitating, not domesticating but importing. Ancient gods were to be recalled in the style of Vergil or of Ovid. Odes were to be Horatian, and might be Pindaric. Lyric diction was to be “enriched” by the interweaving of correct allusions in classical phrase. The allusive value would thus be heightened by summoning the hearer’s culture to answer the poet’s. Since poetry would be elevated by becoming learned, poets should be docte. As for readers insufficiently educated, they were not to be considered. Ronsard repeated Horace’s Odi profanum vulgus et arceo. Let the poet seek “fit audience, though few.” This whole theory of poetic allusion seems to our age exploded. It comes to us through that standardized eighteenth-century poetic diction which was repudiated by the romantic revolt. Modern readers, consequently out of tune, must approach many Renaissance lyrics with a resolution of tolerance. Aurora leaving the bed of Tithonus, though mere decoration in Vergil and somewhat faded in the Middle Age, was not yet stale to the increasing audience of the sixteenth century. But if the allusion, far from being stale, were unfamiliar, even recondite? Instead of rejecting classical allusions a priori as hindrances to lyric, we may learn to estimate their value from actual Renaissance experience. That the language of poetry should be reminiscent of Greece and Rome was a Renaissance postulate.

Ronsard’s early classicism, revolting from prolonged rhétorique, was reminiscent of Vergil and Ovid of course, of Catullus and his imitator Secundus, sometimes of Claudian and Pontano, but mainly of the Odes of Horace. Sometimes he even paraphrases, as when he composes a French Fons Bandusiae; often he adapts phrases; oftenest he follows the Horatian lyric movement. If he occasionally condescends to a medieval form, he gives it classical style. Further, his study of Greek under Dorat led him to imitate Callimachus and then Pindar. The reminiscences of Callimachus hardly go beyond the usual Renaissance lifting of phrase or allusion, that verbal classicism which was the habit of the time; but from Pindar he learned something different.

The extant poetry of Pindar is almost all encomium of victors at the pan-Hellenic contests. Encomium was a poetic fashion in the Renaissance too, because it was a means of publication. The Greeks had justified it by the poet’s mission to confer fame. Though Ronsard adopts the idea in haughty proclamation of his own high function, he had already ancient warrant enough in Horace. What he learned further from Pindar was technical, a wider range of lyric composition. Encomium, reduced to recipe in late Greek oratory, took definite form earlier in Greek poetry. The main topics for the Pindaric celebration of an Olympian victor are his family line and his native city. Each of these is carried into legend and myth, either by allusions to what the pan-Hellenic audience knew as common tradition, or in the longer odes by verse narrative. The poem often ended on exhortation to live worthily of past and present fame. These conventional motives Pindar carried out metrically in a sequence of strophes and antistrophes. Without examining how strictly Ronsard followed the Greek mode, it is enough to say that his French adaptation proceeds by triads: strophe, antistrophe, epode. Though he usually followed Pindar’s shorter odes, his Ode to the King on the Peace (1550) has ten triads; his Ode to Michel de l’Hospital (1550), twenty-four. In the latter the young Muses sing to Jupiter the battle of the Olympians with the Titans; and there follows an historical vision of the progress of poesy. Thus the Greek scheme invited Ronsard to wider adventures in metric, to more remote recurrences and larger lyric harmonies than were offered by Horace.

Though the metrical experiment ceased abruptly with Ronsard in 1550, it had later fruit in Spenser. Longer poems of occasion, thus introduced from the Greek by so skillful a metrist, were carried by the Pléiade influence to England. But Spenser’s Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion, instead of conforming specifically to Ronsard’s verse system, follow more generally and more variously the idea of larger metrical reach by framing a stanza of eighteen lines.[27]

Why did Ronsard drop such measures in 1550 at the age of twenty-seven? The Pindaric ode recurs sporadically in vernacular poetry, and occasionally has had a limited vogue. More or less Greek, it is often, as with Ronsard, learned and often pretentious with airs of inspiration. One of its rare successes came more than two centuries later in England with Gray. It has never kept its hold in lyric poetry. Ronsard continued to print his Pindarics among his collected poems; but he never again composed in those lyric modes. Had he found them intractable to his language or to his own bent? Having pushed allusiveness beyond the ken of any considerable audience, had he learned that lyric is remote at its peril? We may guess part of the answer from the times.

Renaissance lyric thrived on learning so long as it was addressed to a special audience and sought reputation with patrons to whom learning might be useful in their dependents. The poet courtier naturally flattered princes or their ministers by assuming their familiarity with the classics as he displayed his own. But the printers had been widening the audience. Though 1550 was too early for what we now call a reading public, there was a widening circle, especially in the commercial cities, of readers who had some culture and desired more. Poets could begin to address these directly. Forty years later Spenser, still practicing encomium to win a position in which he could write, felt an English reading public and harmonized a long stanza without exhibiting Greek metric. Though Renaissance lyric remained largely aristocratic, even Ronsard, aristocrat himself, might find the mission of dispensing fame smaller than the opportunity of wider hearing.

For such wider appeal the readiest mode was the sonnet. Accepting Marot’s scheme, Ronsard restricted his own practice to a few types especially suited to music. In thus using the new polyphonic art of voice with string accompaniment he applied the ancient idea of a sung lyric to the actual singing of his time. Modulating his many sonnets expertly, he showed equal control in other stanzas. That these familiar forms became a fitter pattern for Ronsard than the ode seems to us demonstrated by literary history. His Pindarics have been relegated to the museum; his more acclimated Horatian odes have been neglected; but time has not dimmed:

Life is short; “gather ye roses while ye may”; the theme is perennial, a lyric commonplace. The rendering of it has often been conventional, but often, as here, individual because intensely realized. The sonnet is direct, immediate, in renouncing all elaboration and all distraction. There are no allusions, only images. Candlelight, hearth, loom, song, spoken words, are the sharper because they are unmodified. There are few adjectives. The lyric is simplified. But the images of attitude and gesture are iterated to lead the mood: “assise auprès du feu, dévidant et filant,” “à demi sommeillant ... réveillant,” “accroupie.” This is the diction of the lyrics that have no date. For the point is not the abstract superiority of the sonnet as a verse form; it is the appeal of form and diction alike to a wider audience, the communication of poetry rather than its exhibition. Ronsard shows this power of direct appeal in his equally popular Mignonne, allons voir si la rose. Included in his first book of odes, this has no Greek strangeness. By 1550, having explored more remote modes to answer the special demand of his circle and his own bent toward learning, he returned to the lyric forms that had become familiar.

The sonnet sequence, the use of the sonnet as a lyric unit in a progress suggesting narrative, was more distinctly developed in England. Though Ronsard’s sonnets appear in series, as addressed to Cassandre, Marie, or Hélène, the enchaining is more evident in Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella and in Shakspere. Spenser, fully aware of the Pléiade, gave himself no such strict schooling as Ronsard’s. He usually stopped short of ancient stanza and of borrowed phrase. But he relied longer on mythological allusions. Thus he decorated not only the Faerie Queene, but even his lyric triumph, the Epithalamion. Ronsard’s later verse makes slighter and more considerate use of such ornament; Spenser’s last poem still turns to the nymphs, to Jupiter and Leda, and to Hesper. The Renaissance lyric experience may be summed up in these two poets. Devoted to national revival of vernacular poetry, nourished by Latin and by Greek antiquity, expert metrists, they show together the limits of imitative classicism. Responding to the special demands of their time, they used the classics to certify their learning. Thus their lyric medium was surcharged. Its forms were sometimes so strange, its diction often so overloaded, as to sacrifice lyric directness, especially the immediate transmission of sensations. Lyric allusiveness was pushed beyond its lyric value. With lesser poets it often sufficed as an end in itself. Renaissance “enrichment” often became mere decorative dilation. But Ronsard, and then Spenser, lived to fuse their experience of classicism in their appeal to coming lovers of poetry.

2. PASTORAL

Pastoral is an old dream. Classified by modern psychology as escape, it has been in various forms the poetry of the city wistful for the country. The word, denoting shepherds, at the same time connotes that its shepherds are not real, but fictitious. Whether allegorized or otherwise manipulated, they are not the actual men who throughout history have tended beasts by day and night in the open, not actual Sicilians, not even the shepherds who in the Nativity plays brought English toys to the infant Saviour. All these are real; the shepherds of pastoral, wearing shepherd’s clothes, sing other songs. Artificial, indeed, pastoral has often been, and is easily, but not always, not necessarily. The city dream of the country “simple life” is after all a recurrent fact. Though it may be sentimentalized, conventionalized, rhetoricated, so may the other dreams. Instead of ruling out this one, we may examine its literary vitality. Besides, it has a special claim. Pastoral, ranging all the way from lyric through narrative to dramatic, and from Alexandrian Greek to Elizabethan English, offered in its Renaissance vogue a wide school of imitation.

Renaissance taste in Greek inclined to that later literature called Alexandrian: to neo-Platonism, to the rhetoric of Hermogenes, to Callimachus oftener than to Pindar, to the Byzantine imitators of Anacreon and the Byzantine Anthology of epigrams, to the descriptive show-pieces inserted in that late oratory called sophistic and in the “Greek Romances,” both the long melodramas narrated by Apollonius, Heliodorus, and Tatius and the idyllic Daphnis and Chloe of that Longus who was called “the sophist.” But the Renaissance literary creed for Latin was classicism. Inclined rather to the dilation of such later poets as Lucan, and even to Ausonius and Claudian, the Renaissance professed its faith in the artistic restraint of Vergil. Now pastoral had the promise of reconciling Alexandria with imperial Rome. It could turn for decoration both to the sophists and to Ovid. It was both Theocritus and Vergil.

The extant poems of Theocritus are by no means all pastoral. Called Idylls, that is little poems, they are love lyrics (II, III, XX); epigrams, that is, inscriptions of the sort collected in the Anthology (XXVIII and the following); myths (I in part, XI, XIII, XXIV-V); encomia (XIV in part, XVI-XVIII, XXII); and mimes, that is, dramatic dialogues (X, XV). Only seven of those that are surely his are such poetry-matches between shepherds as came to be called eclogues (I, IV-VII, X in part, XIV). Though this charming variety has suggested to modern critics hints for later pastoral development, especially toward drama, the vivacious realistic dialogue (XV) between two city women at the festival of Adonis is essentially different from pastoral. Nor is it true to either poet to say that pastoral with Theocritus was fresh and natural; with Vergil it became artificial. Both poets knew the country, Vergil apparently better than Theocritus; but neither gives it that direct, immediate expression which in modern times has been called nature poetry. Theocritus is specific with wild olive, peas, and acorns; sometimes concrete with a smoky hen-roost, waving green leaves, or a crested lark. For an Alexandrian he is exceptionally free from the dilation of descriptive show-pieces; but he has the Alexandrian habit of seeing nature through art. Gorgo and Praxinoa (XV) are conveyed by their chatter; and the dirge to Adonis describes the putti on the ceremonial coverlet as like fledgling nightingales trying their wings. Sicily is romantic for us with blue sea, wild uplands, and volcanic steeps. The shepherds of Theocritus live nearer to sophisticated Syracuse or Agrigentum, or to the other western cities of ancient Greece. Unlike enough otherwise, Theocritus and Vergil are alike in viewing the country through the eyes of the city.

The Bucolics of Vergil established pastoral in its most familiar pattern. One of the few schoolbooks to hold their place from ancient into modern times, they have drilled into successive thousands the poetic scheme of a lyric contest for some rustic prize, and the idea that this contest, symbolizing some other more momentous, may express the poet’s own hopes and fears. Thus in school, as from time immemorial boys got their first notions of worldly wisdom by memorizing Latin beast-fables, so they learned Latin grammar, with Latin verse, from shepherd rivalries typifying wider struggles. Since many Renaissance boys continued to imitate the Bucolics when they grew up, many Renaissance eclogues are published themes. That Vergil’s eclogues have survived all this is evidence of immortality. They need no further praise; but having been used for grammar, they need to be read again for poetry and for literary history.

The inspiration of Theocritus, gracefully acknowledged by Vergil (IV, VI, X), is hardly of style. The avoidance of descriptive dilation, the preference of specific indication to ornament, are Vergil’s own choice.

More characteristic of his economy is his use of concrete predicates.

More concise than Theocritus in style, and graver, he is quite independent in composition. The Pharmaceutria (VIII) owes to the second idyll of Theocritus little but the subject. The encomium of Pollio (IV), instead of following the sophistic recipe item by item, selects and weaves into an integrated vision of the Golden Age. But such economy of phrase and movement seems to have had less influence in making his eclogues models than his use of shepherd rivalries to suggest larger struggles and personal concerns.

Moralized eclogue was familiar from the schoolbook called Auctores octo. As used at Troyes in 1436, this collection contained, with an Isopet (Aesop’s fables), a Cathonet (maxims of Cato), and other medieval compends, a Théodolet. The work thus familiarly styled is Theodulus (or Liber Theoduli), ecloga qua comparantur miracula Veteris Testamenti cum veterum poetarum commentis. It matches pagan with Christian instances in a contest of Falsehood (Pseustis) with Truth (Alethia) which is judged by Reason (Phronesis). Probably of the ninth century, it was printed as late as the sixteenth.[29] Literary use of Latin eclogues during the intervening centuries is sufficiently indicated by Dante’s in reply to Giovanni di Virgilio. Petrarch’s Vergilian Bucolicum carmen expresses the actual conflict of Christian with pagan poetry. Boccaccio’s eclogues are less distinctive than his Italian prose narrative Ameto. Though this is far longer than any previous pastoral and is dilated with lavish description, it must be remembered not only for its pastoral setting, but for its alternations of verse and for its myth. The successive interviews of the shepherd with the nymphs and demigoddesses symbolize the progress from earthly to heavenly love.[30]

But humanism must have its own eclogues and its own symbolism. The eclogues (1498) of Mantuan (Baptista Spagnolo, known as Mantuanus, 1448-1513) were lifted out of the humanist throng by being adopted for use in school. The imitation thus invited through some two hundred years was the easier because they are far less concise than Vergil’s. Vicar General of the Carmelites, Mantuan doubtless owed some of his vogue to his edification. Nevertheless he admits that classicizing which Erasmus attacked later as paganizing: Tonans, for instance, or Regnator Olympi for God. Eclogue III presents the convention of hopeless, ill-starred love; IX, the conventional contrast of country to city; but X makes the shepherds debate the actual controversy over the Observantists. Eclogue IV finds women still, as of old, servile genus, crudele, superbum. Most of its examples being classical, boys could learn simultaneously to recognize allusions and to beware women. Mantuan occasionally indulges in word-play.

He may overlook an awkward internal rhyme.

But generally he is as accomplished in ease as in classicism.

Six years after Mantuan’s collection, another Italian writer of Latin eclogues, Jacopo Sannazaro (1458-1530), published a vernacular pastoral, Arcadia (1504),[31] so widely popular as to become almost the sixteenth-century type. Though the name is Greek, Arcadia and Arcadian have been ever since reminiscent of Sannazaro. Through him, more than through any other single influence, vernacular pastoral spread over western Europe. For he gathered up in prose narrative with verse interludes most of what pastoral in its long history had become. Saturated in Vergil, familiar among the other Latin poets and with Greek, he had caught the possibilities of Boccaccio’s Ameto; and though he weaves throughout from literature, never directly from life, he was artist enough to weave originally. The Arcadia shows Renaissance imitation at its best.

Such are the prelude to Arcadia and its first eclogue; and so it continues. For the whole book is an alternating series of prose descriptions and lyrics. There is no narrative sequence and arrival. We are bidden to linger in Arcadia, to move only from one grouping to another. The alternation of prose and verse, as old as Boethius, was new for pastoral. For its time the fluent rhythmic prose, at once easy and regulated, was the distinctive achievement. The verse is competent in a considerable range of meters. Both prose and verse, whether in reminiscence of pastoral hexameters or in feeling for a rhythm natural to Italian speech, are largely dactylic. Meter XII ends with a dactyl every one of its 325 lines; but Sannazaro’s habit is no such tour de force. His dactyls are not insistent; they are merely predominant in a pleasant variety. For he is studious of variation. In the first eclogue Ergasto’s reply links some ten tercets by internal rhyme (lines 61-91):

and then resumes the terza rima. In Meter II, lines 86-96, the responses begin by repeating the rival’s last line, somewhat as in the refrains of popular poetry. Sannazaro is a careful artist.

The diction achieves a pretty balance between ease and suggestiveness. Easy with conventionally appropriate adjectives and fluent cadences, it is full of echoes. At once we are reminded of Vergil, soon of Ovid, Horace, Theocritus, Catullus, and also of their imitators. The great range of this appropriation can be measured by the crowded footnotes of the commentators; but without measuring, sometimes without distinct recognition, we hear a constant accompaniment. Renaissance allusiveness, too often paraded, is here subdued to serve the pastoral mood. Vergil was in this glade. Theocritus set such a jar for the rustic prize. This myth is prettiest in Ovid. But though an allusion lurks under every bush, it will not leap out to detain us. Whatever pastoral poets we know help to make us yield ourselves with at least a wistful “Et ego in Arcadia vixi.” Tasso, indeed, was to outdo him with Aminta; but the difference is in degree, not in method. In 1504 Sannazaro succeeded at the Renaissance task of making literature out of literature.

Dramatic pastoral was one of the forms of Renaissance pageantry. It put shepherds, nymphs, and satyrs on the stage to enhance the celebration of court festivity with scenic device and music. It gave mythology representation without changing the pastoral type.

Though carefully limited in time to secure consecutive action, Tasso’s Aminta[32] is much less dramatic than pastoral. It weaves within the dramatic frame the pastoral tissue of wistful reminiscence. It revives the ancient dream of the Golden Age, not only through scenery and the music of instruments and of verse, but by constant allusiveness of style.

Within twenty-five pages Solerti’s notes record echoes of Sappho, Theocritus, and Achilles Tatius; of Lucretius, Vergil (oftenest), Horace, Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, Seneca, Claudian, Statius, Nemesianus, Calpurnius, Cornelius Gallus; of Dante, Petrarch (oftenest), Boccaccio, Poliziano, Sannazaro, Bembo—but why go on? Even so heavy a charge of reminiscence is managed without overloading. The Aminta is the most consistent, as it is perhaps the most accomplished, example of this form of Renaissance borrowing. Tasso makes discreet use of alliteration and of word-play. His musical verse should be heard, not merely read. The pervasive harmony, various and subtle, can be but suggested by underlining a few recurrences in the opening scene.

The delicate weaving of sound and sense, allusion and image, has not faded. Few works of the Renaissance have had more modern admirers than the Aminta.

The continuance of the type and the spread of its vogue appear in the twelve eclogues of the Shepherds’ Calendar (1579). Spenser turned to it as to the established European form in which to prove oneself classical and offer one’s poetic encomium. It was the obvious medium by which to win rank as a poet. But at once appears a marked difference. Instead of relying on the pastoral fund of allusion, Spenser provides an apparatus of explanation: a dedicatory epistle, a general argument for the whole series, a prefatory argument for each eclogue, and a gloss. The last explains even obvious classical allusions, interprets the allegory, indicates that this phrase is taken from Theocritus and that from Vergil, and sometimes adds learned references. Did English readers need all this? The answer is not that Sidney, Leicester, Raleigh, Burleigh, Elizabeth herself, had not read Vergil and Mantuan, but rather that Spenser, even while he must still depend for a living on the court, was conscious of a wider audience. There were already English lovers of poetry, and there were soon to be more, who, having less culture than they desired, were glad to be guided in Arcadia.

The gloss also supports Spenser’s attempt to make his pastoral English. It explains his deliberate archaism; for he tries to recall the language of Chaucer without quite understanding it himself. Though of course he caught Chaucer’s drift, he did not always catch his rhythms, nor even his grammar. Archaism, dubious enough in itself, is thus doubly dubious here. The diction of pastoral has an added strangeness. Sidney deplored this in his Defense of Poesy: “That same framing of his stile to an old rustick language I dare not alowe, sith neyther Theocritus in Greeke, Virgill in Latine, nor Sanazar in Italian did affect it.” Ben Jonson’s dismissal may be blunt; but it is precise: “Spenser in affecting the ancients writ no language.” If such diction may occasionally suggest actual country speech, it is but the farther removed from the pastoral mood.

Spenser’s eclogues are English also in their nationalist fear and scorn of Rome. Cultivated by government policy, this was so widespread as to assure him a response. Moreover pastoral had always expressed controversies beyond shepherds. But pastoral allegory has been most acceptable when it is least local. Mantuan’s Observantist discussion and Spenser’s “Papists” have long been tedious. We might look them up in the footnotes, if they did not seem too remote from the concerns of the Golden Age. For pastoral at its best is not English, nor French, nor Italian; it is Arcadian, translatable readily into any language because it has no country. Its allusiveness breaks down when it sends us to a guidebook.

Otherwise Spenser’s eclogues are not distinctive. Their verbal mythology is discreetly limited to familiar deities; their imitation, except for one paraphrase of Marot, is of the usual authors; their pattern is the Vergilian type. If the April encomium of Elizabeth is fulsome, that was the habit of her court. If the metric is sometimes disappointing with crowded stresses, or padded rhymes, or even jingle, that is because Spenser was experimenting. The significance of the Shepherds’ Calendar is not its pastoral achievement, but its use of the mode to win recognition and its attempt to push pastoral farther than it would go.

In spite of its pastoral title, Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (c. 1583) has a different pattern. Though it has incidental pastoral, its design is that of the long, loose, complicated, melodramatic tales of Alexandria known as the Greek Romances. These decadent Greek prose stories had wide circulation in the Renaissance; and one, the Daphnis and Chloe, is both better organized than most of them and clearly reminiscent of pastoral. Since its vogue was increased by the French translation of Amyot, it may be counted among Renaissance pastoral influences. For pastoral has appeared again and again not as the main intention of a whole work, but as an incidental interest. Though Renaissance imitation was thus sometimes of style, sometimes merely of decoration, it was also quite clearly the study of an ancient literary form.