SOURCE: "Pastoral" and "Nature and Art," in The Winter's Tale, edited by Stephen Orgel, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1996, pp. 37-47.

In this excerpt, Orgel explores the importance of Bohemia to Shakespeare's development of pastoral elements, as well as the play's treatment of the relationship between nature and art.

Pastoral

To anyone familiar with the tremendous variety and vitality of Renaissance pastoral (as of its Virgilian and Theocritean models), the modern division of the mode into idyllic and realistic visions, the critical dichotomy of 'soft' and 'hard', will seem absurdly reductive. Indeed, the play that established tragicomedy as a serious genre in the Renaissance was itself a pastoral, Guarini's Il Pastor Fido (1590, first translated into English anonymously in 1602); and for most of the dramatists of Shakespeare's age, pastoral was the mode in which tragedy and comedy became inseparable. The lives of shepherds, Renaissance pastoral assumes, exhibit within a...