SOURCE: Bond, Ronald B. “Labour, Ease, and The Tempest as Pastoral Romance.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 77, no. 3 (July 1978): 330-42.

In the following essay, Bond contends that The Tempest diverges from the pastoral tradition by depicting idleness (otium) as a moral weakness and work or devotion to a task (negotium) as a virtue.

In the last decade, several studies of The Tempest have re-examined the old claim that the play is a pastoral romance. Common to these is the assumption that the play embodies elements of two genres, that it, like much Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, has wedded the impulse of pastoral with its literary antecedents and its sometimes etiolated conventions to the sturdier form of romance, which, though no less traditional in some senses, carries with it the baggage of fewer associations and is thus a freer, less confined mode of the creative imagination.¹ But despite...