The Labor of Writing in the Pastoral Genre, Philip Sidney's Arcadia
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The Labor of Writing in the Pastoral Genre, Philip Sidney’s Arcadia through John Milton’s Paradise Lost by Ioanna Zlateva Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Maureen Quilligan, Supervisor ___________________________ Leonard Tennenhouse ___________________________ Crystal Bartolovich ___________________________ Srinivas Aravamudan Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2010 ABSTRACT The Labor of Writing in the Pastoral Genre, Philip Sidney’s Arcadia through John Milton’s Paradise Lost by Ioanna Zlateva Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Maureen Quilligan, Supervisor ___________________________ Leonard Tennenhouse ___________________________ Crystal Bartolovich ___________________________ Srinivas Aravamudan An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2010 Copyright by Ioanna Zlateva 2010 Abstract In this dissertation, I argue that the pastoral genre in early modern England is a genre of gentlemanly social mobility that defines itself precisely by denying the political, social, and economic pressures that underlie this mobility. The pastoral world incorporates an ideal balance between pleasure and profit, while warding off the material institutions associated with that pair: courtly culture and patronage, foreign influences and dissipate city manners, and the growing power of domestic and foreign trade. I read Spenser’s deployment of the trope of labor in The Faerie Queen (1596) as a textual operation that distances his poetry from dependence on royal patronage. Sidney’s Old Arcadia (1580) conceives of language and erotic desire as a social credential for aspiring youth. I read moments from Shakespeare’s early romances and the history play Richard II (c.1590) , in order to chart some of the ways in which the pastoral mode redefines language, property, and political sovereignty in dramatic narratives. Finally, Milton’s Comus (1634) and the pastoral scenes in Paradise Lost (1667) provide a cultural critique of the growing power of commerce in the seventeenth century. iv Dedication For my family. v Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... ix 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 1 2. Edmund Spenser and the Pastoral in Book VI of the Faerie Queen (1596) ....................... 20 2.1 The Munster Plantation .................................................................................................... 25 2.2 Patronage and Labor in Book VI of The Faerie Queene ..................................................... 35 2.3 Necessity and the Waning of Providence in Book VI ........................................................ 57 3. The Politics of Uncaught in Philip Sidney’s Arcadia .......................................................... 62 3.1 Desire and Language in Sidney’s Arcadia ........................................................................ 62 3.2 Base and Literate Shepherds in Arcadia ............................................................................ 85 3.3 Pastoral Poetry .................................................................................................................. 92 4. Pastoral Re-fashioning in Shakespeare .............................................................................. 107 4.1 Labor in Midsummer Night’s Dream ............................................................................. 107 4.2 Pastoral Politics in Thomas of Woodstock ...................................................................... 114 4.3 The Notion of Use in Agrarian Literature ...................................................................... 136 4.4 Gardening the State in Shakespeare’s Richard II ............................................................ 140 4.5 The Fortune and Nature of Literacy in Much Ado about Nothing ................................. 147 5. Pricing the Pastoral in Milton’s Comus (1634) and Paradise Lost (1667) ......................... 166 5.1 Commerce and Dispensation in Milton’s Comus ........................................................... 166 5.2 Pastoral Labor in Paradise Lost ....................................................................................... 198 vi 5.3 The Logic of Improvement ............................................................................................... 208 5.4 Gift-giving ....................................................................................................................... 211 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 221 Biography ................................................................................................................................... 232 vii viii Acknowledgements This dissertation would not have been written without the guidance and support of my dissertation committee, and friends and fellow graduate students at Duke and Syracuse. During my graduate studies at Syracuse, Crystal Bartolovich and Christian Thorne created a utopian environment of intellectual support and scholarly inquiry and their example remains a constant source of inspiration. Special thanks are due to my advisor, Maureen Quilligan, whose wisdom, generosity, and unwavering spirit proved vital during all the years at Duke and resurrected this project on more than one occasion. Leonard Tennenhouse provided invaluable feedback and posed important questions that kept this project from stalling, and Srinivas Aravamudan helped at a critical point of the dissertation process. The presence and example of numerous scholars and friends at Duke have made the writing process meaningful and fun. Laurie Shannon and Vin Nardizzi taught me to pay special attention to animals and things of nature. I owe much of the perseverance in those days to Dora Mozes, Shannon Kelley, and Tim Wright who taught me about the Lorax. ix 1. Introduction The pastoral genre during the early modern period is often read as the product of an elite ethos of rustic retirement, a realm of otium and leisure where the routine of shepherding is balanced with dialogues and contemplation, song contests, and rural entertainments, thus creating the semblance of a simple, innocent life that has been spared the vicissitudes of courtly life and the hustle and ambitions of the city. 1 The pastoral appears as a static realm caught up in eternal cycles of eclogues and songs that persists as a remnant of antiquity within the wooded, green periphery of various early modern narratives. The chief representatives of the courtly pastoral during the Elizabethan time, Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser posed the pastoral as alternative realm of the court and a peripheral space where the court met a semantically simpler and more material world. There, the more insulated realms of courtly poetry and virtue came into a confrontation with an ethically and politically marked world defined by a humanist praise of thrift and prudence, the mistrust of commerce and urbanity, or the threats posed by marginal evil characters as pirates or riotous peasants. 1 For an overview of the pastoral genre in early modern England, see Michelle O’Callaghan, “Pastoral,” in A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture , ed. Michael Hattaway (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 307-316. For broader studies that reach to the twentieth century, see Paul Alpers, What is Pastoral? (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996), and Terry Gifford, Pastoral (New York: Routledge, 1999). 1 The sense of demureness and humble dignity projected by the pastoral thus appears transparent and self-explanatory, until one comes across those critical takes on the genre that look at the pastoral as a cultural sham and a social posture. In The Country and the City , Raymond Williams notes the abstract and decorative nature of the rustic settings in the courtly pastoral that bear no trace of the material condition and physical toil of peasant laborers. 2 In Some Versions of Pastoral , William Empson compares the modality of the pastoral genre with “those jazz songs which give an intense effect of luxury and silk underwear by pretending to be about slaves naked in the fields.” 3 For Empson, this constitutes the essence of what he calls “that curious trick of pastoral” which knows how to offer an extreme form of courtly flattery by talking about the poorest sort of people. Empson’s analysis is driven by a suspicion of fraudulence, not strictly a literary but rather a class one: the pastoral genre endows simple folks with a natural sense of aristocratic dignity, which, for Empson, is symptomatic of a bourgeois consciousness that likes to see its labor somehow immune to the realities of commercial exchange. 4 If we zoom in over the paradigmatic Elizabethan pastoral authors, Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Empson’s class terms lose their historical