Against Arcadia: English Mock-Pastoral and Mock-Georgic, 1660-1740 by Brad Quentin Boyd A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor James Grantham Turner, Chair Professor Kevis Goodman Professor Mark Griffith Fall 2013 Against Arcadia: Mock-Pastoral and Mock-Georgic in English, 1660-1740 © Brad Quentin Boyd 2013 Abstract Against Arcadia: English Mock-Pastoral and Mock-Georgic, 1660-1740 by Brad Quentin Boyd Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor James Grantham Turner, Chair Against Arcadia: English Mock-Pastoral and Mock-Georgic, 1660-1740 is a study of the receptions of the ancient Greek and Roman genres or modes of pastoral and georgic in the British nations and Ireland by poets of the Restoration and early eighteenth century, in particular Andrew Marvell, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Jonathan Swift, John Gay, and Alexander Pope. It argues that the traditional and still-dominant literary history of pastoral and georgic in English, which sees these poetic forms in terminal decline after the deaths of the “last Renaissance poets,” John Milton and Andrew Marvell, is mistaken, and seeks to reconfigure that history. In the case of pastoral, most readers have proceeded from a mistaken belief that arcadian or soft pastoral, marked by idealizing, sentimental, romance conventions, was the traditional nature of this poetic form and that the waning of poetry of this kind after 1660 thus represented the decline and fall of pastoral. This study argues on the contrary that such arcadian accretions to the main trunk of Graeco-Roman and medieval pastoral in fact date primarily from the widespread popularity of Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia and other “soft” pastoral Renaissance texts, and that Rochester, Swift, Gay, and Pope, by their vibrant retrieval of the thematic and contextual reference of ancient pastoral, especially its paradigmatic practitioners Theocritus and Vergil, reactivate the traditional nature of the genre: pastoral had in fact always been highly ironized, philosophically skeptic, and often scabrously sexualized, surprisingly “modern” almost two thousand years before modernity. In the case of georgic, this study argues, a similar misprision has traditionally led literary history to suppose that the earnest true georgics of the eighteenth century (didactic and landscape-descriptive poems by Philips, Somervile, Thomson, Dyer, Grainger, Jago) were the direct descendants of Hesiodic and especially Vergilian georgic. In fact, this study argues, it is the mock-georgics of Marvell, Rochester, Swift, Gay, and Pope that lay the best claim to that identity, marked as they are not only by ancient georgic’s irony, skepticism of ideas of natural innocence and ease, and consciousness of the dislocations and losses of civil and foreign war, in sharp contrast to the earnest, naturalist or optimist, 1 and progressive themes of eighteenth-century true georgics (which are not in this sense “true” at all). Instead, informed in Marvell’s case by the experience of the defeat of the republican and Whig cause at the Restoration, and in the case of Swift, Gay, and Pope by the aftermath of the Stuart dynasty’s major reverses in 1688 and 1714, they imagine and satirize a landscape, and cityscape, that are gradually descending to political and cultural ruin. 2 in piam memoriam Herley Sterling Boyd and José Ascensión (Chon) Muñoz whose labors were bucolic and georgic, respectively i Against Arcadia: English Mock-Pastoral and Mock-Georgic, 1660-1740 Brad Quentin Boyd Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Chapter One Haymakers, Whore-Writers and “Happy Men”: the Labor of Love in Marvell’s Topographies 21 1. “Let others tell the Paradox”: Upon Appleton House and Protestant parthenogenesis 24 2. “And in the Cherry he does Nature vex”: horticulture and whore-writing in “The Mower against Gardens” 35 3. “Nor am I so deform’d to sight”: “Damon the Mower” and the Labor of Self-Love 38 4. “The Mower’s Song” and “The Mower to the Glo-Worms” 45 Chapter Two “And Reason lay dissolv’d in Love”: Libertine Sociality as Mock-Pastoral in Rochester 49 1. “When neither Head nor Tail perswade”: A Ramble in St James’s Park as genre and intertext 54 2. “And disobedience cease to please us”: theme and context in A Ramble in St James’s Park 66 3. “A Song (Faire Cloris in a Pigsty Lay”) 80 4. “Song (A Young Lady to her Antient Lover”) 83 Chapter Three “But how shall I describe her Arts / To recollect the scatter’d parts”: Juvenalian Pastoral and Ovidian Georgic in Swift 88 1. Swiftian mock-pastoral: “A Description of the Morning” and Juvenalian description 89 2. A short excursus on ekphrasis: Swift’s “Description” and Hogarth’s The Four Times of the Day 93 3. Swiftian mock-georgic: “A Description of a City Shower” and ekphrasis 97 4. “A Town Eclogue” 103 5. “The Progress of Beauty” and “Stella’s Birthday, 1721”: pastoral compliment remodeled 106 6. “A Pastoral Dialogue” 112 ii 7. “The Lady’s Dressing Room” 115 8. “The Reasons that Induced Dr S[wift]”: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Whig mock- pastoral 125 9. “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed”: Ovidian georgic 128 10. “Strephon and Chloe”: Juvenalian city georgic 134 11. “Cassinus and Peter”: Lucretian town eclogue 139 Chapter Four “Court Clowns, or Clown Courtiers”: Pastoral Panegyric and Georgic Satire in Gay 144 1. Idylls of the Queen: The Shepherd’s Week as satiric panegyric 151 2. “The Toilette,” “The Birth of the Squire,” and Gay’s town eclogues 166 3. Unto dust thou shalt return: Trivia as Juvenalian georgic and Georgian politics 175 Chapter Five “To where Fleet-ditch with disemboguing streams / Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames”: Jacobite Georgic and Grubstreet Pastoral in Pope 197 1. “And floating Forests paint the Waves with Green”: form and intertext in Windsor- Forest 199 2. “The Fields are ravish’d from th’industrious Swains”: Windsor-Forest as Jacobite georgic 208 3. The Dunciad: Grubstreet pastoral as Patriot polemic 218 4. “Teach thou the warbl’ing Polypheme to roar”: genre and intertext in The Dunciad 221 5. “Mad Mathesis alone was unconfin’d”: culture-collapse and the metastases of “reason” 225 Bibliography 244 iii It is a pleasure to be able to acknowledge a series of debts, professional and personal, incurred over the years. I wish to thank my undergraduate teachers at Yale, especially Claude Rawson and Murray Biggs, with whom I first studied the Scriblerians and the Renaissance dramatists respectively, and who generously agreed to recommend my admission to graduate school. To (then) Dean Russell Osgood of Cornell Law School and Prof. Adeno Addis I am indebted for kindnesses shown to a law student whose heart was really in the humanities, and to Winthrop “Pete” Wetherbee, whose learned, witty seminars on Chaucer catalyzed a deferred desire to study and teach literature as a profession. At U. C. Berkeley I have benefited from the expertise and kindness of many, including Ian Duncan, who generously shared his encyclopedic knowledge of Scott; Richard Hutson, fellow student of the American West and a model of patient teaching and mentoring; George Starr, who chaired my qualifying examination and whose lectures on Defoe, Richardson, and Smollett taught me a great deal; Nikolaos Papazarkadas, whose patience and civility made Greek 1 seem positively pleasant; and Sumi Furiya, with whom I first studied the Eclogues, and whose precision of reading and writing, and early enthusiasm for my ideas, helped launch this project. I owe particular thanks to the members of my dissertation committee, who have displayed Job-like patience with my research and writing, and offered invaluable assistance: Kevis Goodman, whose interest in the lively “afterlife” of georgic in the eighteenth century has been infectious, and whose balance of careful research with dedicated teaching I take as a model; Mark Griffith, who has generously taken time from his own distinguished research to guide my forays into Greek and Latin poetry, with a mix of erudition and kindness for which I am grateful; and my dissertation director James Grantham Turner, who has encouraged and guided my work since a first-year paper on Goldsmith that got me thinking about pastoral, and whose analytic rigor, breadth and depth of reading, and good humor have been invaluable at every stage. Affectionate thanks also to three old, old friends: Flagg Youngblood, whose irrepressible humor and gift for mimicry are the very essence of the satiric spirit; Josiah Osgood, il miglior fabbro, who has patiently been listening to my speculations ever since we followed Johnson and Boswell through the Highlands as undergraduates; and Andrew Evans, whose open-handed generosity and patience of my curmudgeonliness are the very essence of Christian charity. My greatest debt is to my beloved family, whose affection, strength, and support, moral and material, have been my rock since the very beginning. My late grandmothers, Anna Boyd and Neoma Muñoz, taught me a lot about faith, and the lessons I learned from my late grandfathers are recorded in the dedication to this book. Thanks, for everything, to my dear sister Valerie Kortz, to my nephew Brendan and my niece Makayla, and to Gary and Yvette Boyd, who taught me when I was a boy in Colorado that if the trail gets steep you should lean forward in the saddle, and that if you get bucked off, get back on and keep riding. I’m still riding, Mom and Dad; thanks. iv INTRODUCTION Against Arcadia: English Mock-Pastoral and Mock-Georgic, 1660-1740 Man, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be.