SOURCE: Parnell, Paul E. “Barnabe Googe: A Puritan in Arcadia.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology LX, no. 2 (April 1961): 273-81.

In the following essay, Parnell discusses themes in Googe's eight-part Eclogues, which he considers a moralizing pastoral poem that denounces sensual love as well as the pastoral tradition itself.

In the history of the pastoral, Barnabe Googe occupies a small but interesting place. He represents a moment in the history of taste when one nationality, confronted with an enticing but exotic literary form, experiments with it hopefully in order to adapt it to its own literary climate. The pastoral poem, for a sturdy Protestant like Googe, was full of unpleasant overtones, exactly those that point up the difference between English mortality and Latin sophistication.

The Renaissance pastoral in the Latin countries was built on conventions close to those of courtly love, and transferred to a background rich in...