Pastoral, temperance, and the unitary self in
Wroth's Urania; Sandy, Amelia
Zurcher
Studies in English Literature, 1500 - 1900
01-01-2002
Pastoral, temperance, and the unitary self in Wroth's Urania
Byline: Sandy, Amelia Zurcher
Volume: 42
Number: 1
ISSN: 00393657
Publication Date: 01-01-2002
Page: 103
Type: Periodical
Language: English
Mary Wroth's
Urania is usually described as a "pastoral romance," but there has been
little attention given to that qualifying adjective other than to say
that Wroth's work is a reworking of Philip
Sidney's (at least partly) pastoral Arcadia. Wroth's
deployment of pastoral is certainly in part an answer to Arcadia's one
oft-noted example is her decision to open the romance with a
declaration of presence by a shepherdess with the same name as she
whose absence is lamented so eloquently by Strephon and Claius in the
opening of the New Arcadia-but Urania's exploration of pastoral as a
narrative tool is also firmly rooted in Jacobean theories of pastoral
and tragicomedy. In this essay, I want to read Urania's pastoralism not
as a gesture of nostalgia for a dying Elizabethan mode, but instead as
an intervention in what critics and historians have recently been
demonstrating to be a thriving Stuart debate about the scope and
abilities of pastoral.2 Wroth's romance
proposes its version of pastoral temperance as a way for women in
particular to embrace an ideal of constancy that allows for both rigor
and openness to the flux of experience, and for pastoral itself, in a
sometimes hostile climate, to maintain some of its time-honored
virtues.
It is a critical commonplace that pastoral is
fundamentally about people who have one foot in the pastoral world and
one foot in another, and thus are at once both implicated in, and
separate from, the place from which they speak. Pastoral as an
adjective may describe an entirely bucolic scene, but pastoral as a
literary form also implies the presence of some figure, even if only
the narrator, who does not entirely participate in its cultural logic,
and therefore has a perspective in some way dual. This idea extends
back to Virgil's poet in exile, but the paradox of simultaneous
implication and alienation seems to be felt with particular force in
the Renaissance. Jacopo Sannazaro's Arcadia offers its readers an
insight that it presents as part ironic joke and part secret-that some
of the rhetorical forms and techniques that seem most suited to the
life of shepherds in the countryside actually originate in the highly
artificial world of the city. What interests Sidney, in his own version
of Arcadia, is not so much the literary as the social implications of
this pastoral idea. The later Arcadia takes for granted Sannazaro's
blurring of the boundaries between natural and artificial, but it
wonders, probably partly in response to contemporary criticism about
pastoral's decorum, how real shepherds can produce sophisticated
literary forms-- how pastoral figures can at once be of the countryside
and above it.3 In the first few pages of Wroth's
romance, the character Urania makes the quintessential pastoral move of
turning herself from actual into metaphorical shepherdess, remarking
that she "delighted before to tend a little Flocke," but now that she
has learned she is a foundling "am I troubled how to rule mine owne
thoughts. 114 When she learns that her real parents are not shepherds,
Urania changes from herder of sheep to herder of thoughts, maintaining
pastoral ways of thinking even as she leaves literal pastoral action
behind. This shift into metaphor signals a bifurcation in identity that
at least at this moment Urania perceives as a loss. Upon discovering
that she is a foundling, Urania relinquishes both parents and place; no
longer subject to the rule of these definers of identity, she in turn
cannot rule, herd toward a single end, the thoughts that should
properly be her own subjects. Urania is here what Paul Alpers calls a
"representative pastoral figure" not only because she figures her
thoughts as sheep, not even because she is both of and not of her
pastoral world, but because she has taken the division between her
identity and its genealogy into her consciousness, where her thoughts
exhibit that peculiarly pastoral trait of simultaneous belonging to and
alienation from what she would call her self.5
This
self-conscious doubleness is at the heart of pastoral, but it is also
the reason that the genre has invited moral judgments from its readers
as few other Renaissance genres have. In The Faerie Queene, to cite one
well-known example, Edmund Spenser presents Pastorella imprisoned by
brigands in what Annabel Patterson calls "ethical obscurity," in a cave
in which flickering candles "delt / A doubtfull sense of things. 116
Trying to persuade her captors to leniency, "She thought it best, for
shadow to pretend / Some shew of fauour, by him gracing small," thus
using her capacity to feign for pure political expediency, and perhaps
also betraying pastoral as particularly susceptible to corruption by
power.' Even Sidney's Arcadia suspects that pastoral may be the
handmaid of political expedience: Musidorus explicitly puts on pastoral
guise for "free access," not only to his love but also, of course, to
Basilius's throne, and his near rape of Pamela in the Old Arcadia leads
the reader to wonder whether his professed love for Pamela is really
the motivation behind his marital ambitions.' In all of these examples
pastoral figures an anxiety about the potential split between politics
and belief, action and identity. Urania's perception of a gap between
who she is and where she finds herself turns here into an omnipresent
potential for duplicity, a threat that to be divided may inevitably
lead to bad faith.
Curiously, this Renaissance anxiety about
pastoral's doubleness is replicated in modern criticism. It is
frequently said that pastoral is about "suspension," of the decision
between two alternatives and often of the time and change that would
make decision necessary.9 This observation, basically an extension of
the same doubleness I have been describing, then leads to the
conclusion that pastoral is morally irresponsible because it is an
escape from the real world (or, in generic terms, of the laws of epic
or tragedy). Most careful readers understand that pastoral's
self-consciousness protects it from being naive, but they then make
what often seems like the only other possible conclusion about a form
so interested in doubleness, that it must be sentimental and
duplicitous.10 The long critical tradition, beginning with William
Empson's extremely influential Some Versions of Pastoral and running
through Kenneth Burke and Raymond Williams, viewing pastoral as an
attempt to hide real rural labor and significant class resentment
behind aristocratic convention, works at least partly according to this
logic. Critics who want to defend pastoral thus usually find themselves
denying doubleness and arguing, as both Louis Montrose and Alpers do in
important revisionary work, for a pastoral that is in one way or
another unitary. So Alpers writes, for example, that truly pastoral
characters must submit to "the limited power of action" of real
shepherds, and that correspondingly pastoral can achieve "expressive
clarity, loveliness, and coherence" only "at the cost of autonomous
utterance, full expression, and direct dramatic representation."12
Similarly, Montrose holds that "if the [pastoral] poet's task was to
celebrate, the critic's task is to understand the uses of
celebration."13 Both argue for a version of pastoral strictly
circumscribed, for Alpers by the shepherd's lack of autonomy, and for
Montrose by the absence of self-consciousness, which he ascribes,
instead, to the critic. Yet as Judith Haber argues, this move itself
might be seen as a version of pastoral, in that the distance from
pastoral that Montrose claims as critic is also the basis of his claim
for his own ideological purity. Since Montrose underestimates
Renaissance pastoral's "fundamental self-contradictoriness" and
"self-consciousness," he does not see that the position of judicious
distance he is adopting is one that pastoral has already written for
him. 14 To try to "rescue" pastoral by arguing that its simplicity is
its main virtue, Haber shows, is to condescend to the form, to fail to
understand that even as it celebrates, before the critic ever arrives
on the scene, pastoral is already fundamentally self-critical.
This
general anxiety about what might be called pastoral irony is at least
part of the reason, recent New Historicist arguments suggest, that
James I's increasingly absolutist court entertainments try to make
pastoral increasingly monovocal. Over the decade from 16 10, pastoral
settings in court masques shift their function from metaphor for the
court to source for royal authority, communicating ever more strongly
that the king's power flows from nature. Stephen Orgel, Martin Butler,
and others argue that pastoral fails here to live up to what Butler
calls its "possibilities for dialectic,"15 and this reading is
consistent with larger arguments from such critics as Patterson and
Anthony Low that in the Stuart period pastoral essentially dies in
England, subsumed by the new interest in land use that Low calls the
"georgic revolution."16 Against this landscape, Urania's deployment of
pastoral looks like a double anomaly, both for existing at all and
because it not only holds on to pastoral's traditional double view but
insists that double vision can produce moral enlightenment. Near the
end of Urania, the Venetian knight calls Great Brittany "this blessed
Realme, the flower of peace, beauty, honour, venue, happinesse, and
most of Shepheardesses" (p. 654). He is biasedhe nurses a violent,
unrequited passion for a shepherdess-but his judgment that England is
above all a place of pastoral women is the starting point for this
essay's examination of Stuart pastoral as a serious literary form still
alive and capable of more than royal propaganda.
I open my
account of pastoral in Urania with a story that illustrates
elliptically but vividly the power the romance accords to pastoral
figures. Near the end of the second book, a group of shipwrecked ladies
happens upon a stone theater that Pamphilia is determined to enter
despite warnings from her more sensible cousin Urania that she fears
"an inchantment." When the ladies venture onto the "Throne" at the
center of the theater, "instantly the sweetest musicke, and most
inchanting harmony of voyces, so overruld their sences, as they thought
no more of any thing." The gate of the theater locks behind them, and
they sit enraptured before visions of their true loves "smiling, and
joying in them" (p. 373). Love here is a delusion that hides its own
operation, that causes its victims to become insensible to their
plight, and it is not limited to those unhappy lovers, such as
Pamphilia, who might seem particularly vulnerable. Over the next few
weeks many lords and ladies attempt to rescue the trapped ladies, but
all are subsumed into the enchantment themselves until most of the
romance's plot lines have converged at this impasse. What finally
liberates the romance's characters is the arrival onto the scene of
pastoral, which brings each lover back to consciousness of herself.
When the shepherdess/princess Veralinda opens the gate and touches the
lovers with a rod, each realizes that her happy private vision is
false. At once the throne vanishes, and in its place appears a pillar
of gold with a book hanging on it. Veralinda and Urania together open
the book, and find in it their own parallel stories of being stolen
from their kingdoms as young princesses and raised as shepherdesses.
Pastoral in this allegory has the powerful ability to counter what the
narrator calls "flattering love" (p. 373) of the self-love as a kind of
indulgence not only of desire but of the self uncritically acquiescing
to it-which produces stasis and insensibility in its victims. In order
to make sense of this power, we need to look more closely at Urania's
development of the ideas that this episode allegorizes. What are the
delusions that passion creates, and why is pastoral so effective at
countering them? Or, to ask the question in different terms, what
stalls plot and its agents in the romance, and what in pastoral is able
to start it again?
The character Pamphilia, the central Wroth
figure in Wroth's
roman et clef, develops a much-noted strategy of constancy above all in
Urania, fiercely pledging herself to maintain her own passion no matter
how fickle her beloved Amphilanthus proves. The advantages of this
strategy for Pamphilia are many: she turns the achievement of a
traditional feminine virtue into a heroic process of trial and
purification; she settles her loyalty on her own virtue, as an object
more worthy than her inconstant lover; and she outdoes everyone else in
the romance in her singlemindedness, which is clearly meant to be read
as admirable. 17 Her unwavering passion, says the narrator, is "not
like the small come that yeelds forth many staulks, and many eares of
wheat out of one," but "one in truth, and being as come from one rote,
or graine of matchlesse worth, brought forth but one flower, whose
delicacy, and goodnesse was in it selfe" (p. 317). This unitariness, so
extreme that it cannot be described except by itself, tends toward the
ideal of an identity not derived from attachment, and it accounts for
the fact that Pamphilia is the worthiest lady (and the only sustained
character to be queen in her own right) in the romance. But if
Pamphilia here embodies Montrose's vision of pastoral as a mode whose
subjects are free from self-doubt and divided consciousness, her
predicament within the romance's plot diagnoses some of the costs of
this kind of purity. Pamphilia finds herself in a terrible stasis; her
entire identity is caught up in her love, and when it is thwarted she
has nothing else to fall back on. Because in seeking to maintain her
status as a virtuous woman she cannot command her lover's fidelity, she
is then left with only two choices: she can enter the kind of delusion
described in the enchantment, in which she sits transfixed by a false
vision, unable to liberate herself or her story from her overwhelming
desire, or she can fall into private despair.
When she does
become so overwhelmed that she finds herself unable to rule or even to
speak, on two separate occasions, it is the pastoral Urania who "[sees]
her passion, and the assurance of her end if thus she continued," and
manages to persuade her that even if she will not alter her love, she
must alter her behavior (p. 467). "Thus did the divine Urania againe by
her excellent wit conquer," concludes the narrator after the second of
these episodes, making sure that we understand the real cause of
Pamphilia's recovery (p. 471). As a kind of pastoral principle, Urania
liberates Pamphilia from a notion of constancy tending toward
stagnation, pushing her toward a duality of action and belief-she may
function in the world despite her despair-that in fact sustains
constancy, by allowing its subjects a place larger than its narrow
scope. If for Urania the move into pastoral doubleness was a
distressing predicament, for Pamphilia, in this later stage of the
romance's argument, it has become also a liberation, a way to mediate
and thus to temper the power of monomania.
In its customary
style, Urania provides amplification of Pamphilia's diagnosis with
another queen figure, one whom we are meant to see both as distinct
from and as on a continuum with Pamphilia. Nerena, "absolute lady" (p.
192) of an island and seduced by her power into the kind of hubris
Pamphilia would never succumb to, falls in love with a prince and takes
a "Knightlike ... search in hand" to find him (p. 194). Soon she gets
lost in the woods, where she must fight off a love-crazed shepherd
before growing properly humble by being reduced to eating nuts and
seeds in solitude. The episode's humor, some of the sharpest in the
romance, comes from the confrontation between the shepherd Alanius's
pastoral expectations and insights and Nerena's obliviousness to them,
"her wit lying another way," in the narrator's dry phrase (p. 200). In
sharp contrast to Urania's other noble characters, who speak readily
and courteously to the shepherds and shepherdesses they meet in the
countryside, Nerena will have nothing to do with Alanius. When he first
approaches her she calls him "villaine" (p. 197), which means tenant
farmer or serf, and indicates that she is ignorant of the current
pastoral distinction that shepherds, unlike most rural people, are free
men, owners of their sheep. 18 Believing in his madness that the
haughty Nerena must be a goddess of the woods, Alanius resolves "to
have her in her owne shape out of those [court] vestures," and he
enacts a kind of reverse metamorphosis in which he strips her to
petticoat and stockings, rolling them down so they can "serve for
buskins" (pp. 197, 198). The next morning he is convinced that she is
the nymph Arethusa, "having taken againe [her] owne shape, and resumd
[her] naturall body from that Metamorphosis" (p. 200), and he begs her
to help him gain his love. Nerena, however, refuses to join the
pastoral play. "Never having heard of any such thing as a
Metamorphosis," she insists that she is a princess and may not be
approached (p. 200). As she stands in her new clothes she "almost
hat[es] herself in this estate," and when she comes to a spring, "the
picture of her owne selfe did so amaze her, as she would not goe so
neere unto her metamorphos'd figure" (p. 198). Unlike Milton's Eve a
few decades later, in her narcissistic selflove Nerena refuses to gaze
at her reflection, and in Wroth this mistake
is at the heart of all her problems. Like Pamphilia, at the opening of
her story, Nerena cannot accept a split in herself between feeling and
action. Unlike Pamphilia, however, she refuses to deflect her desire
from her beloved to an abstracted virtue, and Alanius's disciplining of
her thus follows a predictable logic: he forces on her an outrageous
pastoral double, a parody of her royal identity. As we would expect,
she is too proud to accept parody or to see the value of a double, and
so she remains alone in the woods, her quest stalled and her kingdom
lost. Along with the imprisoned ladies in the second enchantment, she
is so focused on her own desires that she is unable to get any distance
from herself, to step back and look at herself through the slightly
alienated eyes that pastoral offers. Nerena's comic fear of an
alternate self suggests the value of fluidity in social roles and helps
explain the power of pastoral as social corrective. That she cannot see
herself as ridiculous indicates not only that Nerena is a snob, but
also that she is ignorant of a literary convention that has the power
to do her moral good.
When Pamphilia goes into groves and
woods, she goes to lament, and to write passionate poetry. Veralinda,
Urania, and Alanius tell us that this move is not truly pastoral, that
pastoral's function is instead to temper overmastering passion. To be
unitary, to pledge oneself to absolute constancy to one lover, is
admirable, but for women, who are not supposed to be the agents in
love, it also begins to risk arrogance, as the example of Nerena
suggests. Pastoral's offer of self-consciousness, put forward in the
figure of another version of the self set slightly apart, mitigates
that risk, at least for those who want to be virtuous, by opening up a
space between the self and passion, and thus diverting the threat that
passionate Pamphilia (and by implication, the passionate Wroth
that she figures) might seem to pose. The pastoral Urania (who, by
another useful enchantment, is the only woman lover in the romance to
switch lovers and maintain her virtue) provides Pamphilia with a way to
change and not to change at once, to maintain her constancy and at the
same time mediate its constricting focus on the self. Pastoral's role
as a rebuke to arrogance and self-indulgence probably explains why most
often in Urania the pastoral landscapes are not delightful and
pleasurable, as the tradition dictates, but harsh and trying. The lady
Pastora, for instance, presumably an embodiment of what Urania
considers pastoral to be, lives in solitude on a "Rocke as hard as her
fortune, and as white as her faith" (p. 421), a "sad and desolate"
place to which she has sailed because she has been jilted by her lover
(p. 415). In her old life, when she was still called Silvarina, she was
an "ill example," says the narrator, "that a woman who could contemne
all passions, must yet be such a slave to one, and one that slavishly
used her" (p. 419). Now that she has come to her solitary island and
taken on her new identity, she has greater control over her feelings.
When her lover happens to wash up on her island with a new paramour
after a storm at sea, Pastora finds that "the storme of her torment
[has] passed" likewise, and "thus without passion, but with true
friendship they parted, who could not in times pass'd have said
farewell but in teares" (p. 420). Pastora bears her name not because
she herds sheep or lives in a place of great natural beauty or bounty,
but because she has shed the violence of her passion and taken on a new
identity. The barrenness of her island, rather than undercutting her
pastoral life, enhances it, because it helps promote in her an
emotional austerity that fosters temperance. While Nerena had been
caught in one of the classic paradoxes of Renaissance tyranny,
imprisoned by her own arrogance, in Pastora's story, the embrace of
external limitations produces a kind of perverse freedom, an
indifference to the passion that makes Pamphilia at once so productive
and so dangerous. 19 Pastoral here, in other words, externalizes the
internal prison of self-absorption in the same way that Nerena's
alienated reflection might have if she had let it, distancing and thus
disciplining desire. Peter Lindenbaum, in his study of antipastoral
sentiment in the Renaissance, repeats a familiar criticism of pastoral
in his complaint that it cannot be the site of real grief and pain,
that it dilutes strong emotion to the strength of mere sentiment.10 In
Urania this dilution of emotion becomes precisely pastoral's point. By
countering passion with discipline, whether internal (constancy as an
end in itself, as for Pamphilia) or external (a harsh pastoral
landscape, as for Pastora), the romance sidesteps what it defines as
the constriction of selfindulgence, gesturing toward a duality that
might not necessarily be duplicitous.
It is precisely
pastoral's ability to move its lovers out of static passion, so clearly
allegorized in the theater enchantment, that makes it possible for the
romance to have a plot, and this belies recent critical pronouncements
of the incompatibility between pastoral and narrative. Haber argues
that romance "best represents the problems and the possibilities [of
pastoral] for poets of the English Renaissance" and that "the general
movement towards narrative" in the English Renaissance "is most fully
realized in the romance."21 In her discussion of individual narrative
romances, however, pastoral repeatedly fails to carry out its central
work of suspension precisely because narrative's forward motion through
time is too strong. Sidney's Arcadia, for instance, works to find both
"a passion that is past time" and "a pastime that is effective"-or, in
other terms, "a union of the lyric and the dramatic . stasis and
motion"22--but it fails because of a "formal" problem, its inability to
achieve a truly suspended pastime.21 Ultimately, I think, all narrative
must fail Haber's pastoral test, because her version of pastoral
actually requires not that stasis and motion "unify" but that stasis
fight motion to the death in order to achieve, as Haber says, "a lyric
moment that will last forever."24 Alpers also disqualifies most
narrative from being pastoral by his definition of pastoral character
as always already completely constituted. When "real" pastoral
shepherds, says Alpers, recount their histories, they understand those
situations as unchanging: "in telling what has happened to them, they
define what they are," matching action to identity and precluding any
split in consciousness. In contrast, Alpers concludes, when characters
"[represent] their lives as part of ongoing and as yet uncompleted
actions," then neither they nor their narratives are pastoral.25 Like
Haber, Alpers sees pastoral as an essentially static form. His sense
that pastoral is a way of delivering narration in retrospect does hold
true in Urania-one of the purposes of the second enchantment is to
verify and publish stories that have already happened elsewhere, such
as the pastoral accounts of Urania's and Veralinda's childhoods as
shepherds. But the enchantment's pastoral characters also have the
ability to liberate the lovers from their emblematic representations,
from the paralyzed state in which, in Alpers's words, "what has
happened to them . .. [is] what they are."26 Perhaps what the second
enchantment represents is an effort to free pastoral from a
constriction that is as much narrative as psychological, to imagine a
mode that allows not only Alpers's "loveliness" but also the freedom of
plot yet to come.
Having suggested this large claim, however,
in pastoral fashion I want to temper it. As it is for Nerena and
Pastora, pastoral in Urania is often about the discipline of
deprivation. The term "pastora" in Wroth,
used several times in reference to ladies who dress up to attempt the
second enchantment, is parallel to but distinct from "shepherdess,"
apparently implying a similar retreat from the accoutrements of court
life, but with greater isolation and more difficult living conditions.
If pastoral offers its characters a story yet to come, it is a story
whose possibilities are severely circumscribed by Urania's anxiety that
passion will always veer to one extreme or the other unless held in
check. Alpers awards Melibee the distinction of being the one truly
pastoral character in The Faerie Queene, because he has been at court
and chooses powerlessness, the shepherd's lack of "strength relative to
world."2" But Urania labors to show the opposite, that pastoral
frankness and persuasiveness are gifts of fate. Wroth's
pastoral characters have more agency than Alpers would credit them
with, but they do not have the power to choose pastoral in the first
place. Many ladies put on shepherdess or pastora costumes to fill the
requirement of the second enchantment for "the sweetest and loveliest
creature, that poore habits had disguised greatnesse in" (p. 373), but
all fail because their disguises are "forced" (p. 412). That Urania's
and Veralinda's pastoral habits are not forced can only be because they
have worn them longer, and because they did not have the choice to put
them on. Despite what Alpers says, this seems to me consistent with
pastoral in general, in which the models for change, metamorphosis and
natural mutability, rarely have anything to do with human will or
choice but bow instead to necessity. Perhaps, in this context, Urania's
efforts to make pastoral characters and scenes one of its engines of
narrative are marred by internal contradiction-or perhaps pastoral,
like the narrator's well-noted fragmenting of the Wroth
figure into multiple personae, is a cover, a way to embrace change and
avow constancy at the same time.
Urania's
insistence on temperance as the cardinal virtue of pastoral fits neatly
in the context of the seventeenth-century connection between pastoral
and the new form of tragicomedy. Modeled on Torquato Tasso's 1580
Aminta (the first English translation was published in 1591, in The
Countess ofPembroke's Ivychurch, by Abraham Fraunce) and Giovanni
Guarini's IL Pastor Fido (1590) (anonymous English translation
published in 1602), plays such as Samuel Daniel's The Queen's Arcadia
(1606) and Hymen's Triumph (1615), John Fletcher's famous failure, The
Faithful Shepherdess (16 10), and perhaps scores more coterie
productions such as Wroth's Love's Victory
(162?) set the new mixed form of tragicomedy in a pastoral landscape
peopled by nymphs, shepherds, and satyrs. The link between pastoral and
tragicomedy is so strong that the title page of Ben Jonson's Works
(1616) presents the figure of Tragicomedy flanked by a satyr and a
shepherd. Several critics have pointed out the connection between
pastoral drama and the dialogic pastoral eclogue that preceded it, but
few have tried to account for what Joseph Loewenstein calls the
"persistent if apparently peculiar alliance" between pastoral and
tragicomedy.28 The best known description of Renaissance tragicomedy in
England is Fletcher's, in his preface to the published edition of The
Faithful Shepherdess, which defines the form by the genres it is not:
"it wants deaths, which is inough to make it no tragedie, yet brings
some neere it, which is inough to make it no comedie. "29 Guarini makes
explicit one of the implicit binary pairs in this definition when he
compares tragicomedy to Plato's Republic in his Compendium of
Tragicomic Poetry, observing that both mix "noble and the base" and
wondering, "Why cannot poetry make the mixture, if politics can do
it?"30 As James Yoch notes, for Guarini the goal of both poetic and
political mixture was temperance, a word repeated throughout Guarini's
commentary. His new mixed form, by finding a middle course between "the
excesses of tragic melancholy and comic relaxation," was to teach both
self-moderation, a neostoic avoidance of extremes "in order to endure
gracefully," and also political tolerance, "a friendly harmony" between
classes.31 (Of course, as a form for apprentices, who had not yet
reached mastery of tragic emotions, pastoral was usually also
understood not to temper grand passion, as I am arguing, but to eschew
it altogether, for the simple reason that apprentices lacked the
capability to master it.) But pastoral's strongest link to tragicomic
temperance is probably its mingling of social classes. As tragicomedy
mixes the low and high of comedy and tragedy, and of the commoners and
nobles who populate them, so pastoral mixes humble shepherds with
exalted aristocrats, and thus participates in tragicomedy's production
of a temperate self and a temperate state. Urania adapts pastoral
temperance to its own particular ends, as I have argued, but perhaps in
claiming temperance to be the central contribution of pastoral, the
romance is also taking part in a larger Jacobean redefinition of the
mode.
If Urania's efforts to make temperance a worthy end of
pastoral, rather than merely evidence of the form's apprentice
affiliations, owe a debt to the new mixed form of tragicomedy, the
romance also sets on pastoral mixture a crucial limitation that opens a
distance between tragicomic temperance and its own version of the
virtue. Pastoral romance before Wroth, as I
have suggested, is somewhat nervous about the decorum of its social
mixture, and poses its possibilities and virtues as an open question.
Urania, in contrast, closes the problem down, dispensing with real
mixture by turning all of its pastoral characters into refugee nobles.
Gaspar Gil Polo's continuation of George of Montemayor's Diana assures
its aristocratic readers that the beautiful "quavers" and "conceits" in
shepherdess Diana's voice "rather seemed to be fetcht from some
majesticall court, then knowen in the homely countrey," and accounts
for this by the wonderful power of love, which is "able to make the
simplest Shepherds discourse of high and learned matters."32 Montemayor
himself, however, is not so sure; in the first part of Diana there is
an odd scene in which the noble Felicia opines that "persons of valour
and dignitie, are ... better lovers, then those of baser condition and
estate," then is compelled, because she does not want to give the
shepherd Sylvanus, her guest, "anie occasion of discontent," to recant,
saying instead that the best lovers need only good judgment, quick wit,
and "thought tending to high and stately things." Sylvanus proclaims
himself "satisfied" that she does not "take valour and vertue to be
onely in noble personages," but the reader, aware as Sylvanus is not
that she has offered the correction at least partly out of courtesy,
cannot be as certain about what she thinks, nor who comes out on top in
the debate.33 Sidney's Arcadia comes down more firmly on the side of
"persons of valour and dignitie," insisting, as I noted before, that
Arcadian shepherds own their sheep and suggesting that the
pseudo-"stranger shepherds" are better poets than those who really herd
sheep for a living.34 But in the third eclogues of both Arcadian
Philisides also sings the fable of the beasts, a parable against
tyranny that takes the part not only of "the nobler beasts" but also of
the "smallest birds, and meanest herd."35 Philisides may be a would-be
peer in disguise, but part of the pastoral work of that disguise is to
point toward the same fluidity in social roles that so threatened
Nerena, and thus to suggest, at least, the virtues of fellow feeling
among rich and poor.
In Urania, in contrast, not only the
pastoral speakers but almost every shepherdess and shepherd, every
forester, every nymph bathing in a pastoral brook comes originally from
the court. Urania, Veralinda, Pastora, Mirasilva, and Liana are all
royalty or court ladies. Amphilanthus plays "the Shepheard knight" (p.
167), and the "Forrest Nimph" (p. 340) and lover that Amphilanthus and
Polarchus encounter are actually part of the entourage of their king,
who out of love for a "Lady living in a Forrest, and wholy affecting
that life," urged his entire court to take "the estates of Forresters
on them" (p. 344). Even the simple shepherds who raised Urania are
descendants of Pantaleria, an "ancient worthie Lord" who "having
receiv'd some discontent in his owne Countrie . came hither... having
ever since in great quiet and pleasure remained here; himselfe and all
the rest taking the manner and life of shepheards upon them" (p. 22).
This story of nobility taking on pastoral weeds, repeated almost
compulsively in Urania, declines even to consider the problems raised
by real shepherds in a courtly form, and it means that pastoral in the
romance cannot have the old Empsonian goal of fostering a "beautiful
relation between rich and poor."36 When Urania's pastoral presents the
lives of "`simple,' low people" to "refined wealthy people," to use
Empson's terms, it does so to show not that these people are like us,
as Empson would have it, but rather that these people are us, at least
these particular people-which is a move with dramatically different
implications.37 In Empson's version of pastoral, poets and other
courtly observers look at the rural poor and see reflections of
themselves, and this false but reassuring vision convinces them that
they are united with country laborers in a coherent community. In
Urania, pastoral observers make no pretense of looking at real rural
people but cut right to the work of finding their own reflections. I am
not suggesting that Urania demystifies Renaissance pastoral-in fact,
that the romance seems to take for granted that pastoral's purpose is
to reflect the self suggests that for Renaissance readers there may
have been little to demystify. Rather, Urania locates entirely within
the self the pastoral drama that before had taken place at least partly
between the self and others. Wroth's romance
understands temperance to be a goal not for the community, nor for the
individual in relation to a community, so much as for the individual in
and of herself, as she struggles to bring her unruly passions into line
with what her culture has deemed feminine virtue. As it reconfigures a
form that, in Alpers's words, is dependent on "convening," on the
sublimation of individual desires and motives into the consensus of the
group, to express instead an ideal of individual self-mastery and
temperance, Urania shows us that despite the proliferation in it of
lords and ladies and their stories, Wroth's
work is not really interested in community-in the bonding together of
those with shared experiences, or in any kind of collective action-but
in the construction of the individual by herself, independent of all
but her passions.311 Urania is usually read as celebrating, both
thematically and formally, a tightly knit and non-hierarchical
community among women.39 I would argue, however, that the romance's
exploitation of pastoral suggests the opposite. That human beings must
live with others is seen in Urania not as leading to a set of problems
that must be solved but as a predicament that cannot be avoided, and
rather than trying to promote productive interaction, the romance
imagines ways to emerge unscathed and inviolate. Perhaps, in this
context, pastoral is attractive to Wroth
precisely because it is also, despite what Alpers says, not about
convening, because people who own their own sheep and fight no wars are
disengaged enough from others that they can actually take the
opportunity to investigate their own reflections.
FOOTNOTE
NOTES
FOOTNOTE
I An exception is Naomi J. Miller, "Engendering Discourse: Women's
Voices in Wroth's Urania and Shakespeare's
Plays," in Reading Mary Wroth:
Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Miller and Gary
Waller (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1991), pp. 154-72.
2
See, for instance, Martin Butler, "Ben Jonson's Pan's Anniversary and
the Politics of Early Stuart Pastoral," ELR 22, 3 (Autumn 1992):
369-404; Jane Tylus, "Jacobean Poetry and Lyric Disappointment," in
Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century
English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 174-98; and James J. Yoch,
"The Renaissance Dramatization of Temperance: The Italian Revival of
Tragicomedy and The Faithful Shepherdess," in Renaissance Tragicomedy:
Explorations in Genre and Politics, ed. Nancy Klein Maguire (New York:
AMS Press, 1987), pp. 115-38.
3 Philip Sidney's solution is to
delineate very clearly the gap between "real" rustics and
pastoral-hence the large amount of space his Arcadia spends ridiculing
Dametas, Miso, and Mopsa-and to elevate what he calls in the Old
Arcadia "stranger shepherds," mysterious men (Philisides, Strephon, and
Claius among them) who do not quite fit into any of Arcadia's social
worlds and thus manage to bridge the gap between noble and base (The
Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia [The Old Arcadia], ed. Jean Robertson
[Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973], p. 245). Paul Alpers points out
Sidney's use of the term "stranger shepherds" in What Is Pastoral?
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 119. Peter Lindenbaum calls
these men "literary shepherds" and suggests they mediate between the
heroic and rural worlds (Changing Landscapes: Anti-Pastoral Sentiment
in the English Renaissance [Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1986], p.
30). Lindenbaum tries, unsuccessfully I think, to distinguish the
literariness of these shepherds from that of the native-born Arcadians.
Sidney's term better suggests the distinction, which as even Lindenbaum
acknowledges is one of class: the stranger shepherds are also part of
court culture (p. 90).
' Mary Wroth,
The First Part of The Countess of Montgomery's Urania, ed. Josephine A.
Roberts (Binghamton: State Univ. of New York, Center for Medieval and
Early Renaissance Studies, 1995), p. 16. All subsequent citations will
be to this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text
according to page number.
FOOTNOTE
5 See Alpers, chap. 4, pp. 137-84.
s
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (New York:
Longman, 1977), book 6, canto 10, stanza 42; Annabel Patterson,
Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valery (Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press, 1987), p. 131.
7 Spenser, 6.11.6. "Sidney, p. 105.
FOOTNOTE
9
For an overview of the use of the term to describe pastoral, see Judith
Haber, Pastoral and the Poetics of Self-Contradiction (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994).
10 For a representative example
of these two views, see Ralph Nash's introduction to his translation of
Jacopo Sannazaro's Arcadia and Piscato
FOOTNOTE
rial Eclogues
(Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1966); David Kalstone, "The
Transformation of Arcadia: Sannazaro and Sir Philip Sidney,"
Comparative Literature 15, 3 (Summer 1963): 234-49; and S. K. Heninger
Jr., "The Renaissance Perversion of Pastoral," JHI 22, 2 (April-June
1961): 254-61.
II William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1950); Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969); Raymond Williams, The
Country and the City (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973); Louis Adrian
Montrose, "Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan
Pastoral Form," ELH 50, 3 (Fall 1983): 415-59, and Montrose, "`Eliza,
Queene of shepheardes,' and the Pastoral of Power," ELR 10, 2 (Spring
1980): 153-82. 1 am indebted for this very quick genealogy of pastoral
criticism to reviews in Montrose, "Of Gentlemen and Shepherds," pp.
415-21; and Alpers, pp. 8-43.
"Alpers, p. 87.
11 Quoted in Haber, p. 3.
FOOTNOTE
11
Haber, p. 2. Interestingly, in his own survey of recent criticism of
Renaissance pastoral, Montrose suggests that "in an increasingly
technocratic academy and society . . . the study of pastoral may have
become a metapastoral version of pastoral" ("Of Gentlemen and
Shepherds," p. 415).
"Butler, p. 395. Also see Orgel, The Illusion of Power (Berkeley: Univ.
of California Press, 1975), pp. 49-55.
"Anthony Low, The Georgic Revolution (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,
1985).
FOOTNOTE
11 On Pamphilia's constancy, see Elaine V. Beilin, "Heroic Virtue: Mary Wroth's
Urania and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus," in Redeeming Eve: Women Writers
of the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987),
pp. 208-46; and Mary Ellen Lamb, "The Heroics
of Constancy in Mary Wroth's
Countess of Montgomery's Urania," in Gender and Authorship in the
Sidney Circle (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1990), pp. 142-93,
esp. 163-7.
"I OED, 2d edn., s.v. "villaine," la: peasant
occupier or cultivator. The Arcadian eclogues are of high quality
because Arcadian shepherds "were not such base shepherds as we commonly
make account of, but the very owners of the sheep themselves, which in
that thrifty world the substantiallest men would employ their whole
care upon" (Sidney, p. 56). See also John Fletcher, preface to The
Faithful Shepherdess (16 10): "Understand therefore a pastorall to be a
representation of shepheards and shephearddesses, with their actions
and passions, which must be such as may agree with their natures... But
you are ever to remember Shepherds to be such, as all the ancient Poets
and moderne of understanding have receaved them: that is, as the owners
of flockes and not hyerlings" (The Faithful Shepherdess by John
Fletcher: A Critical Edition, ed. Florence Ada Kirk [New York: Garland
Publishing, 1980], p. 15). Wroth notes
numerous times that Urania's shepherds and foresters are court refugees
or descendants of them (see for example pp. 246-7, 344, 570). All of
these assertions are in part answers to a concern that pastoral, as a
noble form about ignoble people, lacks decorum; see Bernard Weinberg, A
History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols.
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961), 2:1074-105.
19 In
Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English
Renaissance, Rebecca Bushnell discusses the Platonic connection between
FOOTNOTE
tyranny and excessive desire and the Renaissance
"commonplace" that offering the tyrant a reflected image of himself may
present a cure for tyranny ([Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press,, p. 1).
11
This discussion is primarily in reference to Sincero's wish to return
to Arcadia, at the end of Sannazaro's Arcadia, when he learns that his
mistress has died. So pastoral poetry, says Lindenbaum, is "to deal
primarily... with lamenting and with unhappy emotion but with bearable
or supportable unhappiness," not harsh death (p. 11).
FOOTNOTE
11 Haber, p. 53. 11 Haber, p. 67. 11 Haber, p. 88. 24 Haber, p. 67. 11
Wipers, p. 352. 26 Ibid.
27 Alpers, p. 185.
FOOTNOTE
28
Joseph Loewenstein, "Guarini and the Presence of Genre," in Renaissance
Tragicomedy: Explorations in Genre and Politics, pp. 33-55, 33. For the
link between pastoral drama and the dialogic pastoral eclogue, see for
instance Barbara K. Lewalski, "Mary Wroth's Love's Victory and Pastoral Tragicomedy,"
in Reading Mary Wroth,
pp. 88-108, 89-91.
19 Fletcher, "To the Reader," in The Faithful Shepherdess, pp. 15-6. 30
Quoted in Yoch, p. 115.
" Yoch, p. 117.
FOOTNOTE
12
Gaspar Gil Polo, Enamoured Diana, in A Critical Edition of Yong's
Translation of George of Montemayor's Diana and Gil Polo's Enamoured
Diana, ed. Judith M. Kennedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp.
243-418, 290. This work was first published in Spain in 1564, and
translated into English by Bartholomew Yong, as was Diana; it appeared
as the second and third parts of Diana in 1598.
FOOTNOTE
33 George of Montemayor, Diana, in A Critical Edition of Yong's
Translation, pp. 1-242, 137.
3
For a helpful comparison of the love poetry of Lalus, a "real"
shepherd, and Dorus, who is of course Musidorus, see Lindenbaum, pp.
28-30.
35 Sidney, pp. 258-9. 36 Empson, p. 196. 17 Empson, p. 195.
FOOTNOTE
38
Alpers, p. 80. Alpers argues that pastoral is so conventional a form
because it takes convening as its reason for being: "as opposed to epic
and tragedy, with their ideas of heroic autonomy and isolation, it
takes human life to be inherently a matter of common plights and common
pleasures" (p. 93).
19 See for example Naomi J. Miller, "'Not Much to Be Marked': Narrative
of the Woman's Part in Lady Mary Wroth's Urania," SEL 29, 1 (Winter 1989): 121-37;
Lewalski; and Lamb, esp. pp. 172-6.
AUTHOR_AFFILIATION
Amelia
Zurcher Sandy, assistant professor of English at Marquette University,
is completing a book on allegory, gender, and the ethics of agency in
seventeenth-century English prose romance.
Copyright Studies in English Literature c/o Rice University Winter 2002