SOURCE: Introduction to The Pastoral Mode: A Casebook, edited by Bryan Loughrey, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1984, pp. 8-17.

In the following excerpt, Loughrey discusses the classical European origins of the pastoral form and surveys its embodiment in works by writers of the English Renaissance.

Pastoral is a contested term which modern critics have applied to an almost bewildering variety of works. In earlier critical discourse, however, it had a fairly limited and stable sense, describing literature which portrayed, often in an idealised manner, ‘the life of shepherds, or of the country’.¹ The genre originated with the Greek poet Theocritus (c. 316-260 bc), who entertained the sophisticated Alexandrian court of Ptolemy with a series of vignettes depicting the countryside and peasantry of his native Sicily. His Idylls are not entirely typical of the later tradition, since they contain considerable elements of realism and sometimes dwell on the harsher aspects of...