Doubleness in English Renaissance Pastoral

Doubleness in English Renaissance Pastoral considers innovations to the Greek and Latin eclogue in works by Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, John Milton, and Andrew Marvell. I argue that these authors were attracted to the classical eclogue for its ability to give complex artistic representation to serious civic, religious, aesthetic, elegiac, and philosophical concerns. As authors incorporated the dialogue-based eclogue form into other genres such as narrative and drama, they also incorporated the traditional pastoral emphasis on thematic binaries, paradoxes, and double perspectives. Chapter 1 introduces the thematically and formally double eclogue between shepherds, derived from Theocritus' Idylls and Virgil's Eclogues, and examines its function within the calendrical structure in Spenser's Shepheardes Calender. Chapter 2 focuses on the hybrid world of courtiers and shepherds in the eclogue books of the narrative Old Arcadia and considers Sidney's movement from dialogue between two speakers to dialogue within the self, a largely unexplored development that, like the humanist dialogue, prompts dialectical habits of thought in the reader. Chapter 3 studies the pastoral interlude in epic and drama and discusses Book VI of Spenser's Faerie Queene as a pattern for Shakespeare's use of pastoral doubleness to renew the non-pastoral world in As You Like It. Chapter 4 explores Shakespeare's use not only of the pastoral interlude but also of the Spenserian seasonal, dialectical structure in The Winter's Tale. Chapter 5 argues that in "Lycidas" Milton's transformation of the conventions of pastoral elegy includes representing the eclogue series within a single lyric poem and using the pastoral opposition of cyclic nature and finite man to respond to death. Chapter 6 considers the pastoral lyric poetry of Andrew Marvell and the ways in which Marvell responds to loss in part by employing eclogue-inspired debate and the double-mindedness of the Mower, and by resolving pastoral doubleness in the single voice of "The Garden." Through the exploration of these works, this dissertation argues for an early modern transition from pastoral as primarily a specific lyric form, the eclogue, to pastoral as a dialectical mode of representing the deep and challenging ambiguities of human experience across literary genres