SOURCE: Forker, Charles R. “Shakespeare's Chronicle Plays as Historical Pastoral.” Shakespeare Studies 1 (1965): 85-104.

In this essay, Forker focuses on the pastoral elements in Shakespeare's histories, suggesting that the pastoral functions to raise the issue of natural order and that in his chronicle plays Shakespeare used the contrast between the epic and pastoral genres to develop the contrast between order and chaos.

The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral.

Hamlet, II.ii.415-418

I

The critic who invokes the failing mental powers of Polonius in matters of literary terminology no doubt risks impaling himself upon the point of his own irony. Nevertheless, the risk is worth taking, for there is a sense in which the old counselor's words go beyond their immediate context to describe the modes of Shakespeare's own artistic practice. Elizabethan drama is nearly always “impure art,” and...