In Our Time - Pastoral Literature

Episode Date: July 6, 2006

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss pastoral literature.Come live with me and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove That valleys, groves, hills, and fields, Woods or steepy mountain yields.And we will sit upon the rocks, Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks, By shallow rivers to whose falls Melodious birds sing madrigals. An entreaty from Christopher Marlowe's Passionate Shepherd to His Love - thought by many to be the crowning example of Elizabethan pastoral poetry. The traditions of pastoral poetry, literature and drama can be traced back to the third century BC and have principally offered a conventionalised picture of rural life, the naturalness and innocence of which is seen to contrast favourably with the corruption and artificialities of city and court life. Pastoral literature deals with tensions between nature and art, the real and the ideal, the actual and the mythical, and although pastoral works have been written from the point of view of shepherds or rustics, they have often been penned by highly sophisticated, urban poets and playwrights. But to what extent does pastoral literature represent a continuous yearning for a non-existent Golden Age of Innocence? How far did it evolve to reflect the social and political preoccupations of its times and what were the real meanings of its much used metaphors of town and country? With Helen Cooper, Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge; Laurence Lerner, former Professor of English at the University of Sussex; Julie Sanders, Professor of English Literature and Drama at the University of Nottingham.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. Come live with me and be my love, and we will all the pleasures prove that valleys, groves, hills and fields, woods or steepy mountain yields,

and we will sit upon the rocks, seeing the shepherds feed their flocks, by shallow rivers to whose falls melodious birds seeing madrigals. An entreated from Christopher Marla's passionate shepherd to his love thought by many to be the crowning example of Elizabethan pastoral poetry. The tradition of pastoral poetry, traditions of pastoral poetry, literature and drama can be traced back to the third century BC

and have principally offered a conventionalised picture of rural life, the naturalness and innocence of which is seen to contrast favourably with the corruption and artificialities of city and court life. Pastoral literature deals with tensions between nature and art, the real and the ideal, the actual and the mythical. And although pastoral works have been written from the point of view of shepherds or rustics, they've often been penned by sophisticated urban poets and playwrights.

But to what extent does pastoral literature represent a continuous yearning for a non-existent golden age of innocence? How far did it evolve to reflect the social and political preoccupations of its times and what were the real meanings of its much-used metaphors of town and country? me to discuss the history and significance of pastoral literature. Helen Cooper, Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. Lawrence Lerner, former Professor of English at the University of Sussex, and Julie Sanders, Professor of English Literature and Drama at the University of Nottingham.

Helen Cooper, can you give us the main characteristics of pastoral literature and poetry? As you've said, it's literature about shepherds or spoken by shepherds, but not written by shepherds. and that's an important difference. It looks at first glance like rural poetry, but it's poetry always that has an ulterior motive. You use the shepherd world to present a simple image of a complex idea or a complex society. It's written by people who live in the cities or the court.

It's used, therefore, very extensively as a form of social criticism, political criticism, even religious criticism. Or sometimes just to, again, for nostalgic purposes, to suggest a dream of innocence that you've lost. Equally, it can quite strongly suggest a dream of innocence that you don't have in a corrupt world. And even something like Marlowe's passionate shepherd, come live with me and be my love,

it very rapidly called forth a response ascribed to Sir Walter Rawley, in which a very cool and wise shepherdess responds by pointing out that the world is not like that at all, and that rather than just sitting on warm rocks, listening to the birds and the melodious, burbling waters, rivers rage, and rocks grow cold. And all the beautiful things that he's offering her

will turn out to be in folly ripe, in reason rotten. But it's his words that remain. It's Marla's words linger on, longer than Roller's words. That is true, but once you've read the Rawley, then they stay in your mind too. And it's going that little bit further, seeing what else is going on, that's really the most remarkable thing about Pastor Land has made it last so long, I think. It wouldn't have survived purely as a kind of fantasy escape.

Can we make a distinction at this point in the programme, so that people are absolutely clear, between what we're going to discuss as pastoral poetry and what people would take to be nature poetry. Let's use words with us the simplest example that people can get held off. Now, what's the big distinction? Because we're not going to deal with that.

We are dealing with something else. Again, I'd say the main difference was the ulterior motive in pastoral. Nature poetry can be about nature. Pastoral poetry may include that along the way, but it's always making some kind of point beyond that. And very often again, creating a world that's, metaphor for the one you've got. When was pastoral poetry first established?

The first big name is Theocritus in the 3rd century BC. He was probably born in Sicily and he sets his idyll idyllia, the idylls there. But by the time he wrote them he was living in Alexandria, one of the

big Mediterranean cities. And so already there's a kind of nostalgia. And already there too, although in many respects, he's more naturalistic than many pastoral poets, because after all, Sicily is warm and does have burbling waters and cool shade and so on.

It's also a mythologised world. His first idyll, which was one of the most influential, is a lament for a fellow shepherd whom he calls Daphnis, who is dying apparently of unrequited love and who is visited by the nymphs and so on, in a line where were ye nymphs that inspires Virgil, Milton, dozens of poets down the ages. And it's also a lament that's done as a formal song

sung by one shepherd for the benefit of another. And that quality of high poetry, again, is always very, very distinctive of pastoral. You only write it deliberately if you're a poet wanting to write poetry with a capital P. Lawrence Lainer, why are Virgil's excellent? clogs are so important in the establishment of the pastoral tradition? Well, they are really important because of their influence, I think. It's very difficult for us looking back to a dead language,

which of course Latin now is to judge really of their poetic quality. But their poetic quality in one sense is for us enormous because so many people read them and imitated them. and it was almost impossible to write pastoral in Renaissance times without somehow having Virgil in the back of your mind. And may I, before I say more about Virgil, agree very much with Helen that pastoral poetry, of course, is not the same as nature poetry,

that they even form a kind of contrast. And a detail that always strikes me about this is that Wordsworth, who is above all a nature poet and not a pastoral poet, actually called his famous poem Michael, which is about a shepherd, a real shepherd, he called it a pastoral poem. And I take it that that was a kind of manifesto on his part,

that he was saying, well, now this is real pastoral, this is not what the literary people think of as pastoral. But to go back to Virgil, in Virgil's very first eclog, we have a dialogue between two shepherds. one has lost his farm and he's gloomily remarking that he's got to leave the land where he had lived previously

and go and live he doesn't know where possibly even as far as Britain he says gloomily the other one has still possesses his farm and explains that he'd been to Rome this great city which had overawed him and a young god had helped him to keep his farm. And of course that's Augustus, because we realize, and Virgil's readers would have realized, that this is about Augustus's policy of settling his veterans on the land, and, if

necessary, dispossessing peasants in order to make, small farmers, in order to make room for them. Now, there's an obvious political dimension to that, which presumably would have been clear to Virgil's original readers, though no doubt the modern reader actually has to be told this. And the entire way in which shepherd life and rural life is seen in this poem is in a sense determined by the contrast between the one who's staying and the one who's leaving. Gives a kind of nostalgia to the way in which rural life is seen because someone is seeing it and losing it at the same time. What's the attraction of the shepherd figure, the shepherd himself?

It seems to me it's very hard to know that because we know so little about the actual expectations of Virgil's original readers. And as you go on through the eclogs, sometimes they seem to be real shepherds, but then they aren't quite real shepherds. I mean, they never do any work, for instance. The sun is always shining.

They carve beautiful beach and bowl. They have singing contests among themselves. And it's the leisure which the townsmen attributes to the fortunate countrymen rather than the hard work that actually takes place there. Julie Sanders, the backlogs are also an exploration of nostalgia and losses, as a long as learners hinted at. How important is this idea of looking back to a golden age for the pastoral tradition? And where did that begin, the golden age notion? It's very interesting. I mean, pastoral is this deeply absorbent genre, and I think this sense of looking back to a golden age is there in the theoctus and in the Virgil. There's a sense that the pastoral life is being corrupted by incomers, figures who arrive from a world elsewhere, bringing with them, be it courtly corruption, warfare, other kinds of values. But in a sense, it's not always just a looking back to a golden age. I think it's also a promise of a golden age of something else.

that might be, the idea that the model of the good shepherd caring for his flocks can be a model for a better kind of government, a better kind of society, a better kind of community. So in some ways it looks both forward and back, the Golden Age in that respect. So in that sense, the pastor could have a political dimension.

Do you find that in Virgil? Absolutely. Can you give us an example of that? Well, I think... Lawrence has already pointed one way, but if you could take it further. Absolutely. And the backlog's, of course, written in the wake of the assassination of Julius Caesar, the factionalism that had broken out a sense of warfare. There are shadows all around Virgil's pastoral Arcadia.

There are shadows on the hillside. There's the threat of warfare. This word shade and shadow figures. And I think that's what subsequent ages become very interested in, the potential of this genre, of the pastoral genre, to offer political commentary in a number of ways, and not just political, but also religious commentary. The good shepherd, but also the bad shepherd, can become a means of talking about a number of social and political and religious ideas. Can you give us an example of one or two of those ideas?

We've already understood that Virgil can be associated with the distribution of land to satisfy the army of Augustus. You've talked about political, religious ideas in these pastoral verses. it would be nice if you could just pick out one or two of them and harden that line up a bit. Yes, well, I mean, there's some pastoral elegy at the heart of both the Euchar and the Virgil, and I think a lament for a lost leader

can be read into that. But Virgil's very clever. I mean, it's not as avert as that. It's not as though it can be simply read as an allegory, this character equals Julius Caesar, or this character equals X. It's a metaphor, it's a way of thinking about ideas. But I do think the idea.

idea of a community living in harmony, values of peace are very important to Pastor and to Virgil's eclogs, and idea of how we might find peace with each other. And so those images of Shepherds piping and Shepherds dancing that we think of very much as conventions, cliches almost, of pastoral literature, nevertheless have a very important kind of social weight, I would say, coming together in a dance, in a round at the end of a working day as a celebration of what community can do. There's a, what seems to be a very nice Helen Cooper elision, but there's also a very powerful elision between the shepherd in classical literature and then the shepherd in, let's call it the Bible, in the Judaic Christian settlement that comes in in the Christian sense, I've been there in the Judaic sense for many, many years before, comes in just after Virgil, who seems to prefigure it in one of his eclogues. He said to her, prefigured it. Now, was that at the time, and we have both the Garden of Eden and the Golden Age? So those two deep backgrounds have great similarities.

Can you, as you were, take this argument forward to the shepherd in the Bible and the development of how that affected the development of pastoral poetry? Yes, it was absolutely crucial for the way pastoral developed. And even the Golden Age indeed came to be thought of as a kind of mythological misunderstanding of the Garden of Eden. and they represented the same idea and ideals. But once you'd got a Christianised Roman Empire and a Christian West, then the two traditions from Virgil and the Bible really coincided and melded,

and those ideas of the good shepherd became central. And there's a lot in the Bible that you can pick up, from God's favour to Abel the shepherd right back early in Genesis. God's favour of shepherds. God favours shepherds, yes, over the tillers of the earth. And Abraham and others of the patriarchs were shepherds. King David started out as a shepherd. The shepherds were the first to hear the news of the birth of Christ.

And then, of course, there are many, many metaphors of the good shepherd. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. God as chief shepherd, and who sets the model of how you should act in your behaviourist. especially if you're a ruler, an image of responsibility rather than escapism. And of course everything Christ has to say about himself as the good shepherd, the instruction to Peter to feed my sheep, the parable of the good shepherd who searches for the lost sheep until it's found against the bad shepherd who just wants to steal it or eat it.

And the two merge very strongly and helped by that, fourth echelog of Virgil, which was taken as a prophecy of the birth of Christ. It's certainly the prophecy of a miraculous child. Someone will come from heaven. Someone will come from heaven. And this is just a few years before the birth of Christ. It's just a few years before the birth of Christ. And it was sufficiently close to mean that Virgil gets incorporated into the ranks of prophets of the birth of Christ. And Dante chooses him to take him. And Dante chooses him. And indeed Dante gives some space to Virgil and the fact that he has this half-understood apprehension of Christ, and indeed Dante is one of the many people who writes eclogues as well.

Lawrence Lennel. Well, I just wanted to say that there is, of course, one important difference between the Garden of Eden and the Golden Age, and that is that the Garden of Eden was lost suddenly, and it was lost by the sin that was coming. committed by Adam and Eve. There's an absolutely clear break between that and the corrupt life which follows. Whereas the Golden Age was not so much lost by sin,

but simply by the passage of time, and it gradually fades. The earliest version we have of the Golden Age is in the Greek Proetheziad, and it's followed by a silver age, and then a Levin Age. That's 700 BC, isn't it? Yes, he's almost as old as Homer, not quite.

But the idea of the Golden Age, which then gets taken over into a lot of the pastoral tradition, is of something which is not lost through anybody's fault or through sin. It's simply lost by the world getting worse because things are always getting worse. And therefore the Golden Age is a kind of good old days, which exists in that mysterious region, which is sort of the past, but also sort of mythological. and it really therefore has nothing to do with sin. And if I may pick up a point of Julie's as well,

it seems to me that, although it's quite true, that the idea of a golden age can be used for the future also, there is a big difference there as well. There's a fascinating poem by Orden in his Horacekennonic eye, in which he contrasts what he calls the person whose ideal is Eden with the person whose ideal is the New Jerusalem. And the person whose ideal is Eden is a kind of amiable, almost non-moral, quaint, attractive creature.

Orden feels a lot of sympathy for him. And the New Jerusalem, that is the person whose ideal lies in the future, is very dangerous. and he, the Orden says, we both of us, see the lights in the city's skyscrapers at night. And I think, oh dear, you know, if we were really peaceful, people wouldn't have to be busy at night.

And he thinks one fine day our boys will be working up there. So that the idea of putting the Golden Age into the future causes it not to be the golden age anymore, but for Orden, and I must say I tend to agree with him, something that could be very, very dangerous and very different from the pastoral idyll. I just want to go to the Middle Ages with Julie, Helen, and maybe you can pop in after that.

Julie, let's talk briefly about the mystery plays and what they did with the idea of the shepherd and how they took Virgil's idea and what happened there. Absolutely. Well, I mean, the perfect example for me is the second Shepherds play from the Wakefield cycle. The mystery plays. Wakefield near Bethlehem. Indeed.

This opening stage direction that contemporary editors often put in, you know, a field near Bethlehem, but actually they're speaking in a local northern dialect. It's clearly British weather. They have all kinds of local pay complaints. And I think that's what's so interesting about Arcadia, the Golden Age, that often it's also a present, actually. We've talked about past and future. These are Our Horizons.

It's said in a number of texts from the Second Shepherd's play through to Sydney's Arcadia and onwards. But here you have this remarkable, obviously, performed version by civic guilds and local people of the Nativity's story. So you have literal shepherds, but you have the biblical shepherds who are going to follow the stars, see the birth of Christ.

But they're also clearly local shepherds with local issues, who people in the audience would have recognised. So again, we've got pastoral operating on this incredibly layered and interesting way. In other parts in Italy with Petrarch, for instance, the pastoral idea is being continued and revived and again used in Petrarch's case, not for the obvious reasons, but much more politically, as I understand it.

Much more politically. Petrarch writes a series of Latin eclogues, highly allegorical. This is the high Middle Ages, yeah. Yes, in the 14th century. And some of them are about Italian politics, which were incredibly complicated in the 14th century. But he includes a couple on the corruption of the papacy. And that's picking up on, again, quite a longstanding tradition of using pastoral for satire, which implicitly compares the Golden Age idea what things might be like with what they're actually like in practice.

and the Pope is a very, very corrupt shepherd. And that, of course, is an idea that comes through from the Bible. The Latin for shepherd is pastor. And it's the word we still use for priest, especially in Protestant churches. But for them, it combined the church hierarchy with pastoral literature, and it invited, again, the use of the metaphor of the shepherd for the priest. And the Pope is a very, very bad priest who spends all.

all his time playing at the Golden Age and consorting with his mistresses and so on, when he ought to be looking after his flock. And even the free love idea that you have in classical Golden Age pastoral, here becomes very much a matter of what you should not do. And it's very bitter indeed. And the flocks suffer. And there in Petrarch it's the flocks who represent your average Christian in the mystery plays that Julie was just talking about,

they represent the common man much more directly and literally because there you've got a much more realistic, non-allegonical kind of shepherd. And they function to go back to the opening question of what's rural poetry, what's realistic and what's pastoral, because again they stand for something more in the first of the Wakefield Shepherds' plays, unusually there, there are two. One of the shepherds actually quotes Virgil's, fourth eclog and expounds it. And the other shepherds rib him rather about the fact that he's

talking in this peculiar language that they don't understand. But there's an idea too that shepherds are out at night, they can contemplate the stars, they have wisdom, they can teach. But at the same time, they are the ordinary suffering peasants. And the landscape now around Wakefield is very much not the Italian or Arcadian or. Sicilian one. It's the kind of Oxfam version of pastoral where the shepherd's responsibility shows up much more by the contrast.

Lawrence Lerner, can I ask you about Spencer's Shepard's Calendar and what that contributed to the pastoral tradition? Well... That's in the late 16th century. Sure. The Shepherds' calendar, of course, is written in similar kind of conventions to those that Virgil used, that is to say a great deal of contemporary politics is brought in

under the guise of Shepherds actually speaking to one another. One of the most interesting moments in the Shepherds' calendar is actually in the notes which were appended to it. We don't even know for sure whether Spencer wrote these notes himself or whether a friend wrote them, in which he talks about the Great Pan. And that is a moment at which we can explore the way the classical and the Christian traditions merge, but also contrast,

because the remark, Great Pan is Dead, was legendally supposed to have been called out at the moment of the birth of Christ. Well, now, that can have, or rather perhaps of the crucifixion of Christ, because he's dead. Now, that can mean two things. Christ can be the Great Pan, and it can refer to the fact that he has been crucified,

in which case the classical and the Christian are seen in a kind of parallel, and the one is an allegory for the other. But of course, it can also mean the classical gods are dead because they have been replaced by Christianity, and a very interesting note is put by Spencer or E.K. Or whoever it was, discussing the possibility of these two interpretations. And that is a point at which I feel you can see the two contrasting relationships between Christianity and the pagan classical tradition,

confronting each other almost in a single phrase. Julia, can you briefly, Julie Sanders, tell us why the fairy queen, Spencer's Fairy Queen, why it's such an important example in the pastoral tradition. One of the things about the Fairy Queen and the Shepherd's calendar is that you see Spencer, absorbing, remaking Virgil very consciously as a model for his own career. And so in the Fairy Queen, this long, epic poem in many books, we have elements of all kinds of genres, heroism, romance. Pastoral particularly in Book 6, where we have the Knight Caledore,

encountering pastoral, where she's been fostered by a good shepherd, and this kind of model of people from elsewhere taken into the shepherds, community. And again, Spencer, in the model of Virgil, working through political allegory, but also playing with the genre, with the possibilities of the genre, the shepherd who has adopted pastoral, has very significantly, I think, spent time away, time outside in the world as a hired gardener at the court and talks about the vanity that he saw there. So again, we can see Spencer aware of these virgilian models of political commentary, three. the pastoral mode. We have all the familiar scenes of dancing on the hillside and singing and pipes playing.

Bagpipes. Pipes, yes, indeed. But I've just learned that the shepherds were playing bagpipes which is very of interest to our Highland listeners. Yes, and all kinds of, again, it goes back to Helen's point about sort of the common man, the idea of the bagpipe and who would play particular kinds of instruments that these are, in a sense, popular cultural figures. Can you just develop Helen Cooper, please, when I began the programme with those wonderful lines from Marlowe, the Pashner Shepherd, to his love,

come live with me and be my love. And why was that so significant as it seems, maybe I'm wrong here, at the time as well as since? Well, partly simply because they're such magic lines they get into your mind and stay there. I suppose the Elizabethans had

an extraordinary interest in poetry. And poetry had been having a bad time for the previous few decades. Sydney wonders why it is that the English language hasn't really produced any decent poet since Chaucer with the possible exception of Wyatt, who is one of the few who doesn't really write pastoral, in fact. And Marlowe comes in as one of the great people

who helps to set up the Elizabethan Poetic Revolution and that lyric is part of that. He was doing it on the stage too, and his plays just took London by storm. And that lyric too seems to have been something... Did he direct... Sorry, don't interrupt you, and I really do apologise with that, but did he know of Virgius Eccl?

Who would he have read them? So he'd have read them and he'd have fed off them. Everybody who had any kind of Latin education knew Virgil. It's not a very virgilian poem, in fact. But I just wondered whether he rooted back to that. He certainly knew his Virgil. And it seems to... to have caught on the way pop songs do.

In Isaac Walton's Complete Angler, which is written some 60 years later, then the gentlemen who are out angling, hear a milkmaid singing, come live with me and be my love. And although we don't know that that's true, we don't know that it wasn't. Absolutely, yes, she's quite a distraction. And a milkmaid indeed was the English equivalent of the French shepherdess. shepherdesses were,

seemed to have been a genuine phenomenon in France, whereas looking after sheep, it was a much more industrialised process in the sense of big business in England and men looked after the sheep more. Laura Sleana, can I direct our attention to Shakespeare and as you like it, just let's see to as you like it,

the winter's tale also, but as you like it as the example of pastoral imagery and perhaps the best or finest pastoral play ever written. Now, what was he, how many things was he doing with the pastoral tradition in that play? Well, he was doing a lot of things, of course, but I suppose absolutely centrally, he was exploring just how seriously we can take the idea of pastoral.

Because if we use a word like antipastoral to describe the view that the court is much more interesting than these simple country bumpkins and therefore contrasts with the idealising of the country, as you like it, is a constant debate between pastoral and antipastral. In fact, at one point, the debate becomes absolutely explicit. When Touchstone, who thinks it's much better in the court, of course,

and he was in a better place when he was there, and everybody in the country is a clown, and clown is ambiguous, of course, because it can be a term of contempt, but at the same time, Touchstone is a clown because he's a professional fool. And Touchstone and the Shepherd, Corrin, actually have a discussion.

in which Corrin says, how like you this shepherd's life, master Touchstone, and Touchstone teases him constantly by saying, yes, it's very good, but the court is better, and as it were, inviting the audience to change sides all the time. And I often used to say to my students, who wins this debate, and they could never agree, because it's so finely balanced by Shakespeare.

Now, the plot, the main plot of as you like, It is, of course, about the Duke, who is exiled from his dukedom and goes to live in the Forest of Arden. It's off his painted pomp. Yes. And the first thing he says is, aren't we much better off here? He says, you see, here feel me but the penalty of Adam and so on. There's no envy and backbiting here.

Well, of course, at the end of the play, when he gets the chance to get his dukedom back again, he doesn't hesitate. He immediately takes it. And the play is full of all these ambivalent. where we can't be quite sure if we're watching pastoral or if we're watching antiposterol. And for me, that's part of its joy. Julie, were you going to go. It was just to pick up on that fantastic debate between Corrin and Touchstone,

because again we see that sense of the shepherd being able to speak for the common man. Corrin's common sense rationality, you know, the property of rain is to wet and his greasy hands from handling his sheep. There's something amazing about the way we're. which Shakespeare brings that onto the stage and lets these different versions of pastoral. I would prefer not to think of it as pastoral and antipatist, but different kinds of competing pastoral performing for the sake of the audience. There's also in Shakespeare and in other people around, but it's useful that the people,

aristocrats will often go to play at being shepherds and find shepherdesses and fall in love with shepherdesses. But they only marry them really when they find out that these shepherdesses are also the, the children who would be abandoned children of aristocrats. That's the end. That's the end. Yes, but it's still the same thing. The status quo works out perfectly in those terms every time. What do you have to say about that, Helen Cooper? The only exception I know of to that, interestingly, medieval when you'd expect hierarchy to be more faithfully observed.

The patient Griselda story, she starts off in many versions, as a shepherdess and she is married by a Marquis for her virtues. But otherwise we have. But by the time you get to the Renaissance, then yes, it goes with its being an aristocratic mode. It's very seldom revolutionary. It's never revolutionary. It may well be reforming. Again, you want your bad ruler to turn into a good ruler on the model of the good shepherd,

but everybody knows what the model of the good shepherd is like. Can you tell us what Ben Johnson, brought to this in the first half of the 17th century. What brought to this pastoral idea with, say, the sad shepherd. I think Robin Hood appears. The Sad Shepherd is an interesting play. He seems never to have finished it. It's partly a Robin Hood story,

and Robin Hood gets tangled up in ideas of the simple life of the Greenwood. In, as you like it, indeed, they imagine themselves as going off and playing Robin Hood, more or less, at one point. But Johnson uses that, again, an image of how the countryside might and should be idyllic contrasted with how it really is with things going wrong politically in the larger world and with a witch in the inside world of the play who has to be disposed of in the course of the plot. But even there again, it looks at first glance like something escapist, but there's still quite a strong political message.

Julie Sanders, can you just develop the political message in Johnson's work, though? Yes, I mean, Johnson like Virgil in an interesting way, seems to use pastoral in a number of senses. I mean, he'd been writing court masks, which used the pastoral genre in some sense in the service of authority, but the Sad Shepherd is this commercial, at least intended for a commercial performance, and has this remarkable prologue

where he really sets out his stall that this is a different kind of pastoral, and that is a very English kind of pastoral. He's aware of all of the theochitan, Vigilian, Patrarchan, precedence that he has, but this is very much on the banks of the River Trent, this play. And I think there's something very special about the regional inflections, actually, that Johnson wants to bring into it at this time. And again, using that in some sense to comment on the kinds of courtly deployment of pastoral

that he himself had been involved in it. Never let these masks were performing in the court of James I and Charles I. So were the kings looking at a criticism themselves or a reflection of themselves? Both at the same time, they're remarkably complex texts that contain both criticism and compliment. And Pastor was a very protective kind of shield in that way. In some sense there's happy endings that you were talking about, a part of that. You know, they are reforming. Appropriate endings as well as happening.

Yes, absolutely. They contain any threats. But those statements are still there. The criticisms are still present. And one of the interesting criticisms that Johnson is able to explore in the sad chef, is that there are certain kinds of shepherds who are opposing the pastoral life, who don't want the dancing and the festivity, the sourederest sort of shepherds. Clearly the Puritans who in the 1630s are arising to a kind of political prominence.

Milton comes into the frame, into the picture now, Lawrence Lerner. What use did he make of the pastoral? Well, Milton made a great deal of use of the pastoral, and the two really interesting texts, I think, are comus on the one hand and the description of Paradise and Paradise Lost. Now, Comus has something similar to the Sad Shepherd and what it does, except that the contrast, which Julius hinted at, between Puritan and, as it were, the rural sports, on the other hand,

is absolutely explicit in Comus, because Comas himself, who is the villain of the story, briefly the story is very, very simple. story, the sons of the newly appointed Lord Protector of Wales, the two sons and the daughter, they get lost in the forest while they're joining their father,

and then in this wicked spirit, the son of Circe and Bacchus tries to seduce them. Now, everybody remarks that Comus has all the best poetry in the play, and he has the most famous speech of the play, wherefore did nature pour her bounties forth with such a full and unwithdrawing

hand, except to sate and please the curious sense. And the lady who represents a kind of Puritan disdain and who is technically the heroine of the play repudiates this. She could almost be said to walk out of the play. She won't listen to Comus. She's extraordinarily self-righteous, actually,

in the way she says, I didn't even think I would unlock my lips to talk to this low creature. So that the clash between an old, rich, complex, partly pagan form of religion which had been going on all through the Middle Ages and a new, much more austere and rigorous Puritan ethos which sees the world as a simple contrast

between God and the devil, between good and evil. That change is actually, in a sense, taking place in English society. and Milton is chronicling it. Now, Milton is a Puritan and there is a sense in which Milton's theological sympathies

lie with the new, not with the old. But everybody, of course, who reads or sees Comus remarks that the richness of the play comes from Comus himself. And indeed, the attendant spirit who combats Comus

is also a slightly pagan as well as Christian figure who almost fights him with his own weapons. Comus is the best lines, yeah. Yeah. Which used to carry on in Paradise Lost, whereas, of course, the lady, as it were, just walks out of the play.

Julie? I think one of the things about Milton is that this is a very early Milton in Comus in the 1630s. He also writes Lissidas, his great pastoral elegy, again, very conscious of shaping his career in the wake of Virgil, writing,

pastoral. But he's still playing with, I think, all those 1630s, uses, the cavalier uses of pastoral, the carpe diem, this idea of gather you, rosebuds, why you may. I mean, Comist's language is one of seduction and persuasion, and you can see Milton deploying what are the sort of the fashions, the vokes of the day, in very intriguing ways. We're coming, and sadly we come at the end, not too near, we're coming towards it, is there a sense in which we, with, with

Marlow, Shakespeare, Johnson and Milton, that's the apotheosis of the pastoral in English literature, and from then on, it, it It goes in sort of patches or it dies away. Helen, it's probably not a very good question, but could you try this on a salvage an answer out of that question? I think that's true. It's certainly the apotheosis in the sense that it's the richest. It gathers together all those traditions.

Lysidas in particular, it's Theocrity, and in that it's the lament of one poet for another, one shepherd for another, a lament for someone who would have been a good priest, if only he'd lived. Lizardas, based on the death of the friend of... It's the death of Edward King, who was an acquaintance of Milton's,

and who had been going to go into the church. And he's mourned not only by the nymphs, but by St. Peter, who regrets the fact that now only bad shepherds who can't even play a decent tune on their pipes. Only bad shepherds will now go and rule the church because Lissidas is dead. After that, yes, the tradition fragments.

You get a much more purely escapist tradition in which the shepherds are renamed as swains. Shepherdesses tend to turn into nymphs. It becomes very arty and is often condemned. Samuel Johnson, Dr. Johnson, called pastoral easy, vulgar and therefore disgusting, which just about sums up that kind. You still just occasionally get the more engaged kind. But then you get rural poetry, nature poetry

or these different kinds of New Jerusalem poetry that abandon shepherds, eclogs that don't actually explicitly use shepherds and so on and so it's with Milton that that great

coming together of all those traditions, the classical, the biblical, the medieval really all come together and work together in the most amazing ways. Thank you very briefly, Laurence Lano. Well, I just want to say that although people stopped writing parserals after the 18th century,

they didn't, of course, stop having the idea of a contrast between an idyllic, simplified world and the modern, sophisticated world. For me, the best modern farcoral is under milkwood, because it is a golden age

of uninhibited sexuality in an imaginary but also real place. Or perhaps I should say real, but also imaginary. Written and commissioned in the very building in which we sit now, perhaps even produced in this very studio, so there we go. Thank you very much, Helen Cooper, Lawrence Lerner and Julie Sanders.

Next week we'll be talking about Greek comedy, and you retrieve the latest edition of the programme as a podcast, download, that sort of thing. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.uk forward slash radio 4.