SOURCE: Chaudhuri, Sukanta. “English Pastoral before Spenser.” In Renaissance Pastoral and Its English Developments, pp. 113-31. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.

In this excerpt, Chaudhuri suggests that Barclay's Eclogues represent significant pastoral works before Spenser's because of their emphasis on the hardship of a shepherd's life.

Barclay's Eclogues: Satire and the Suffering Rustic

Roughly between 1500 and 1513,¹ Alexander Barclay wrote five Eclogues which must be accounted the most important English ones before Spenser's. They are the reverse of Arcadian. Rather, they emphasize the poverty and hardship of the shepherd's life, and are full of satirical and didactic passages. In fact, the first three eclogues are based upon De curialium miseriis, a prose satire of court life by Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II. The two other pieces are modelled on Mantuan V and VI.

The Argument to ‘Eclogue I’ describes the old shepherd Cornix's poverty in spite of a life...