The Thematic Metamorphoses Of Shakespeare’s Pastoral Plays

The pastoral convention has occupied a prominent position in the western literature over hundreds of years. From Theocritus on, the shepherd who is living leisurely in an idyllic country turns into the navel of the pastoral tradition. As the most important playwright in this period, Shakespeare also reflects his great achievement in his pastoral works, whose involvement with pastoral elements also represents the pervasive Elizabethan preoccupation with shepherds and shepherdesses. Taking the pastoral tradition in literature as a basis, Shakespeare not only describes the thematic metamorphoses of love, shepherds and Arcadia but also accomplishes the inheritance and perfection of the pastoral tradition in his three plays—As You Like It, The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale. The thematic metamorphoses have embodied the improvement of the traditional pastoral, most importantly, it mirrored the greatness of Shakespeare’s works.The introductory part will sketch out a whole picture of the development of the pastoral literature from antiquity to the Renaissance. By surveying the studies of Shakespeare’s pastoral works, his pastoral attempts in his plays can mainly fall into two groups. Some focuses the similarities exited in his works while others criticize his parody for the traditional pastoral works. Hence, this thesis will devote to present the improvement and perfection of pastoral in the three plays, in light of the pastoral convention.Chapter One intends to state the metamorphoses of love in the three plays which embodies the improvement of pastoral in Shakespeare’s works. In the three plays, Shakespeare draws exile, deception and magic to serve as the main ways for the heroes and heroines to pursue their love. In an exiling circumstance, they employ a series of disguise and magic to awaken their true love. While Shakespeare has an attempt to inject new factors into love, the shepherds’love turns to be a strong and powerful cohesive force which in the end guides the evil to the good; meanwhile, its growth then is produced.Chapter Two focuses on the growth of characters through the metamorphoses of shepherds. Although there are real shepherds in his pastoral plays, Shakespeare does not present them as his heroes and heroines. By transforming the traditional shepherd-image into the rulers, the princesses and the subordinates, the pastoral character-image becomes colourful and varied. Likewise, the infusion of different characters in a pastoral romance reveals Shakespeare’s intention to strengthen the importance and creative power of men in the Renaissance period, during which humanism is the core.Chapter Three further presents how Shakespeare accomplishes the growth of setting by means of changing the setting of Arcadia. It was Virgil who has made Arcadia an ideal pastoral world for shepherds whereas Shakespeare transfers the setting from Arcadia to Arden, Bohemian countryside and a sea-island. This kind of shift mingles in the Utopian world, the religious world and the realistic world together to express his intention of making an earthly nature with a triple meaning. This variation of the setting not only endows the ideal world a real existence but also expresses the importance of a harmonious relationship between man and nature.The conclusion sums up the three different kinds of metamorphoses in the three plays. With such an innovation on the pastoral plays does again prove Shakespeare’s great genius in playwriting. It is the metamorphoses that produce the growth of pastoral in Shakespeare’s plays. Through the metamorphoses of love, shepherds and Arcadia of the traditional pastoral, Shakespeare exhibits a variegated pastoral world in which an eternal harmony has been created between country and city, man and nature, the ideal and the real, which embodies again the core of the Renaissance, that is, humanism. Most importantly, Shakespeare never separates his plays from the pastoral tradition; on the contrary, the metamorphoses he has conducted represent the perfection to this kind of literary tradition.