THE MYTH OF ENCLOSURE: RENAISSANCE PASTORAL FROM SANNAZZARO TO SHAKESPEARE (ITALY, ENGLAND)

For opponents of Battista Guarini's Pastor Fido in late sixteenth-century Italy, pastoral was properly a genre of enclosure. The small private grove overshadowed by a pervasive umbra was more than a physical setting for Virgil's Eclogues: it represented the generic qualities of a poetic "small form" long seen as a model of limitation, constraint, and understatement. The attempt of Guarini and other Renaissance writers to make pastoral as inclusive a genre as possible undermined both the traditional Aristotelian hierarchy of literary kinds and reinterpreted antiquity as a moment of incompleteness rather than a perfect and irretrievable past. By incorporating pastoral poetry within other genres such as georgic, epic, satire, and tragicomedy, Guarini and others turned the academicians' complaint that the eclogue should not trespass "la statura della sua specie" into a literary program that located trespassing at the heart of a supposedly unambitious genre. More importantly, their work blurred the distinctions that supposedly exist between "civilization" and unenlightened pastoral society.;In addressing the pastoral writing of Guarini and his Italian and English contemporaries as variations on a theme of literary transgression, I attempt to situate this comparative study within three critical contexts: the ongoing discussion about the "definition" of pastoral, the relationship of Renaissance writers to the classical world they had lost, and the importance of genres for literary analysis. My thesis begins with a consideration of the pastoral debates in Italy and an assessment of the importance of Ovid and Petrarch for Renaissance treatments of pastoral. In Chapter 2, I discuss Mantuan's and Spenser's redefinition of the pastoral enclosure as a place of poetic labor and exchange; in Chapter 3, I suggest that the Arcadias of Sannazzaro and Sidney devalue pastoral as a conventionally autonomous genre constituted by self-referring signs. Chapter 4 examines Giraldi's satire Egle and Guarini's Pastor Fido vis-a-vis principles of dramatic and "civilizing" mediation. Chapter 5 is devoted to Cymbeline, in which Shakespeare dramatizes invasions into the insular, "pastoral" sphere of England. A brief conclusion suggests that one may approach the late 17th-century debates over pastoral in France and England by way of the earlier polemic.