SOURCE: Alpers, Paul. “Pastoral Speakers.” In What Is Pastoral?, pp. 185-222. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Alpers identifies Shakespearean characters who, like Melibee and Colin Clout in Spenser's Faerie Queene, assume the role of the traditional literary shepherd to assert pastoral virtues and values. Alpers describes the following characters as “representative shepherds”: Costard in Love's Labour's Lost, Corin in As You Like It, the grave-digger in Hamlet, and Florizel, Perdita, Autolycus, and Polixenes in Act IV of The Winter's Tale.

I

The Virgilian figure of the representative shepherd is inherently capable of fresh interpretation and application. Its possibilities provide one way of accounting for both the importance and the variety of pastoral poetry in the sixteenth century. Even when conventional pastoral genres seem to lose their vitality (roughly, around the turn of the seventeenth century) pastoral retains its capacity for fresh realization and for...