SOURCE: “The Elizabethan Pastoral,” “The Pastoral Drama,” and “The Seventeenth-Century Pastoral,” in The Penguin Book of English Pastoral Verse, introduced and edited by John Barrell and John Bull, Penguin Books, 1974, pp. 13-20; 107-11; 141-48.

In the following excerpts, Barrell and Bull trace the development of English pastoral poetry and its relation to the changing social conditions of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. The critics examine the relations between the conventions of the pastoral mode and the actuality of rural life as well as the evolving historical reality of gentlemen-poets' connection with the land.

The Elizabethan Pastoral

During the Dark and Early Middle ages, the Pastoral all but disappeared in Europe. It did find some form of expression in the troubadour pastourelles in France, poems which reflect the transition from a popular ballad tradition to a sophisticated court culture—and thus have as their dominant theme the conflict between...