pastoral

1. 1. Of or relating to shepherds or herders.
   2. Of, relating to, or used for animal husbandry.
2. 1. Of or relating to the country or country life; rural.
   2. Charmingly simple and serene; idyllic. See synonyms at rural.
3. Of, relating to, or being a literary or other artistic work that portrays or evokes rural life, usually in an idealized way.
4. Of or relating to a pastor or the duties of a pastor: pastoral duties; a pastoral letter.

1. A literary or other artistic work that portrays or evokes rural life, usually in an idealized way.
2. Music. A pastorale.

[Middle English, from Old French, from Latin pāstōrālis, from pāstor, shepherd. See pastor.]

adjective

1. Of or relating to the countryside: arcadian, bucolic, campestral, country, provincial, rural, rustic. Informal hick. See urban/rural.
2. Charmingly simple and carefree: idyllic. See calm/agitation, simple/complex.

Definition: peaceful, as the countryside
Antonyms: agitated, bustling, busy, urban

pastoral, a highly conventional mode of writing that celebrates the innocent life of shepherds and shepherdesses in poems, plays, and prose romances. Pastoral literature describes the loves and sorrows of musical shepherds, usually in an idealized Golden Age of rustic innocence and idleness; paradoxically, it is an elaborately artificial cult of simplicity and virtuous frugality. The pastoral tradition in Western literature originated with the Greek idylls of Theocritus (3rd century BCE), who wrote for an urban readership in Alexandria about shepherds in his native Sicily. His most influential follower, the Roman poet Virgil, wrote eclogues (42–37 BCE) set in the imagined tranquillity of Arcadia. In the 3rd century CE, the prose romance Daphnis and Chloe by Longus continued the tradition. An important revival of pastoral writing in the 16th century was led by Italian dramatists including Torquato Tasso and Battista Guarini, while long prose romances also appeared in other languages, notably Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia (1590) and Honoré d'Urfé'sL'Astrée (1607–27). English pastorals were written in several forms, from the eclogues of Edmund Spenser's The Shephearde's Calender (1579) and the comedy of Shakespeare's As You Like It (c.1599) to lyrics like Marlowe's ‘The Passionate Sheepeard to his Love’ (1600). A significant form within this tradition is the pastoral elegy, in which the mourner and the mourned are represented as shepherds in decoratively mythological surroundings: the outstanding English example is John Milton's ‘Lycidas’ (1637). While most forms of pastoral literature died out during the 18th century, Milton's influence secured for the pastoral elegy a longer life: P. B. Shelley's ‘Adonais’ (1821) and Matthew Arnold's ‘Thyrsis’ (1867) are both elegiac imitations of ‘Lycidas’. By the late 18th century, pastoral poetry had been overshadowed by the related but distinct fashions for georgics and topographical poetry, and it came to be superseded by the more realistic poetry of country life written by George Crabbe, William Wordsworth, and John Clare. For a fuller account, consult Terry Gifford, Pastoral (1999).

For more information on pastoral, visit Britannica.com.

Pastoral [for pastoral in the Middle Ages see Pastorela]. The modern pastoral tradition began to reach France in the 1540s through the diffusion of the major classical, Spanish, and Italian texts, and was most popular in the early decades of the 17th c. In prose fiction it was more through translation than imitation that the tradition was sustained during the 16th c. Sannazaro's Arcadia (trans. 1544), Longus' Daphnis and Chloë (trans. 1559), Gil Polo's Diana enamorada (trans. 1582), and above all Montemayor's Diana (trans. 1578) were widely read, but original French imitations were few, the most notable being Belleforest's La Pyrénée et pastorale amoureuse (1571) and Nicolas de Montreux's cumbersomely derivative Les Bergeries de Juliette (1585-98) in five volumes. It was only with d'Urfé's L'Astrée (1607-27) that France produced its own masterpiece in the genre, a text which was to influence the taste, if not the fiction, of generations to come.

Manifestations of the tradition in the theatre were much more widespread and significant. The major Italian pastoral plays, Tasso's Aminta (trans. 1584) and Guarini's II pastor fido (trans. 1595), together with episodes taken from the Spanish romances, inspired many dramatists in the early years of the 17th c.; such plays were uneven in style and quality, and often dominated by extensive lament or implausible plots. Racan's Bergeries (performed c.1619) and Mairet's Sylvie (performed 1626), more refined both in their language and in their analysis of love, saw the beginnings of more accomplished pastoral, and the publication of Mairet's Silvanire (1631), with its important preface, marked the association of the genre with the growing movement towards theatrical reform. Many plays adapted from or modelled on the Italian classics soon followed, often accompanied by theoretical prefaces: Pichou's Filis de Scire (1630), Gombauld's Amaranthe (1631), Baro's Clorise (1630), d'Alibray's Aminte (1632), and Rayssiguier's Aminte (1632), among others. Such plays suggested principles of regularity in dramatic construction to be adopted subsequently in tragedy, but they served also to inspire a new kind of comedy which would ultimately supersede its model: the comedy of Pierre Corneille, Rotrou, and Du Ryer, which transposed basic plots of love and its trials to more modern, urban settings. Tristan's Amarillis (performed 1652), an adaptation of Rotrou's Célimène, represents a successful but brief reawakening of interest in pastoral, but Molière's several experiments in the genre are more of an ironic, self-consciously stylized reminder of an outmoded tradition. More faithful to its spirit, albeit in modified form, are the works of Marivaux.

Pastoral poetry took different forms in the course of the 16th and 17th c. Scève's Saulsaye, églogue de la vie solitaire (1547) is personal and meditative in tone; Belleau's Bergerie (1565) is largely inspired by Sannazaro; and Ronsard's Bergerie (1565) is more overtly political. D'Urfé's derivative, but very popular, Sireine (1604) established a renewal of interest in the genre, and in the course of the 17th c. many poets found inspiration in the tradition. Basic commonplaces survive in the work of the Illustres Bergers, a group centred on Frénicle; Racan's ‘Stances sur la retraite’ (1618) embody and refashion classic Virgilian themes; and the work of Théophile, Tristan, and Saint-Amant offer different meditations on nature and happiness. Sarasin's eclogues mark a rare survival of pastoral in the 1640s, largely dominated by witty salon poetry, but in the second half of the century poets often drew on the tradition in their search for a more direct expression of feelings. Some, like Gilbert, Segrais, or Fontenelle, are pale and unimaginative, but other work is of more significance. La Fontaine's Adonis (1658) is a richly sensuous idyll, and in the poetry of such women poets as La Suze, Villedieu, and particularly Deshoulières, traditions of the bucolic are invested with individual sensitivity.

Traces of the pastoral are to be found in later times, although they tend to be isolated. Imprecise but recurrent echoes haunt the work of J.-J. Rousseau, a self-confessed admirer of d'Urfé, and at the end of the century some familiar themes re-emerge, bathed in sentimentality. Florian's Estelle et Némorin (1788), consciously retrospective, evokes the passing of a golden age, and in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie (1788) the birth of love is explored, innocent and close to nature, yet tinged with melancholy. The poetic idylls of George Sand ( La Mare au diable, La Petite Fadette, François le Champi) represent a creative reworking of the tradition in the following century.

[Jonathan Mallinson]

Bibliography

• J. Marsan, La Pastorale dramatique (1905)
• C. Longeon (ed.), Le Genre pastoral (1980)
• A. Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology (1988)

A work of art that celebrates the cultivated enjoyment of the countryside. The poem “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” by Christopher Marlowe, is a pastoral. Its first stanza reads:

Come live with me, and be my love;

And we will all the pleasures prove

That hills and valleys, dales and fields,

Woods or steepy mountain yields.

Emanating from or pertaining to the use of land for pasture.

• p. rearing — raising of young, after weaning, on pasture where they are more susceptible to nutritional deficiencies and parasitic infestation than young reared indoors.

For other uses, see Pastoral (disambiguation).

"Bucolic" redirects here. For the first of the three major works of Virgil, see Bucolics.

Pastoral, as an adjective, refers to the lifestyle of shepherds and pastoralists, moving livestock around larger areas of land according to seasons and availability of water and pasturage. "Pastoral" also describes literature, art and music which depicts the life of shepherds, often in a highly idealised manner. It may also be used as a noun (a pastoral) to describe a single work of pastoral poetry, music or drama. An alternative name for the literary "pastoral" (both as an adjective and a noun) is bucolic, from the Greek βουκóλος, meaning a "cowherd". This reflects the Greek origin of the pastoral tradition.

Contents 1 Pastoral literature 1.1 Pastoral literature in general 1.2 Pastoral poetry 1.3 Pastoral romances 1.4 Pastoral plays 2 Pastoral music 3 Pastoral art 4 See also 5 References 6 External links

Pastoral literature

Pastoral literature in general

In literature, the adjective 'pastoral' refers to rural subjects and aspects of life in the countryside among shepherds, cowherds and other farm workers that are often romanticized and depicted in a highly unrealistic manner. Indeed, the pastoral life is sometimes depicted as being far closer to the Golden age than the rest of human life.^[1] An intriguing example of the use of the genre is the short poem Robene and Makyne which also contains the conflicted emotions often present in the genre. A more tranquil mood is set by Christopher Marlowe's well known lines from The Passionate Shepherd to His Love:

Come live with me and be my Love,

And we will all the pleasures prove

That hills and valleys, dale and field,

And all the craggy mountains yield.

There will we sit upon the rocks

And see the shepherds feed their flocks,

By shallow rivers, to whose falls

Melodious birds sing madrigals.

Pastoral shepherds and maidens usually have Greek names like Corydon or Philomela, reflecting the origin of the pastoral genre. Pastoral poems are set in beautiful rural landscapes, the literary term for which is "locus amoenus" (Latin for "beautiful place"), such as Arcadia, a rural region of Greece, mythological home of the god Pan, which was portrayed as a sort of Eden by the poets. The tasks of their employment with sheep and other rustic chores is held in the fantasy to be almost wholly undemanding and is left in the background, abandoning the shepherdesses and their swains in a state of almost perfect leisure. This makes them available for embodying perpetual erotic fantasies. The shepherds spend their time chasing pretty girls — or, at least in the Greek and Roman versions, pretty lads as well. The eroticism of Virgil's second eclogue, Formosum pastor Corydon ardebat Alexin ("The shepherd Corydon burned with passion for pretty Alexis") is entirely homosexual.

Pastoral poetry

Georgics Book III, Shepherd with Flocks, Vatican

Pastoral literature began with the poetry of the Hellenistic Greek Theocritus, several of whose Idylls are set in the countryside (probably reflecting the landscape of the island of Cos where the poet lived) and involve dialogues between herdsmen.^[2] Theocritus may have drawn on authentic folk traditions of Sicilian shepherds. He wrote in the Doric dialect but the metre he chose was the dactylic hexameter associated with the most prestigious form of Greek poetry, epic. This blend of simplicity and sophistication would play a major part in later pastoral verse. Theocritus was imitated by the Greek poets Bion and Moschus. The Roman poet Virgil adapted the genre into Latin with his highly influential Eclogues. Virgil presented a more idealised vision of rural life than Theocritus and was the first to set his poems in Arcadia, the favourite location of subsequent pastoral literature. He also included elements of political allegory.^[3]

Italian poets revived the pastoral from the 14th century onwards, first in Latin (examples include works by Petrarch, Pontano and Mantuan) then in the Italian vernacular (Boiardo). The fashion for pastoral spread throughout Renaissance Europe. In Spain, Garcilaso de la Vega was an important pioneer and his motifs find themselves renewed in the 20th Century Spanish language poet Giannina Braschi. Leading French pastoral poets include Marot and Ronsard.

The first pastorals in English were the Eclogues (c.1515) of Alexander Barclay, which were heavily influenced by Mantuan. A landmark in English pastoral poetry was Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender, first published in 1579. Spenser's work consists of twelve eclogues, one for each month of the year, and is written in dialect. It contains elegies, fables and a discussion of the role of poetry in contemporary England. Spenser and his friends appear under various pseudonyms (Spenser himself is "Colin Clout"). Spenser's example was imitated by such poets as Michael Drayton (Idea, The Shepherd's Garland) and William Browne (Britannia's Pastorals). The most famous pastoral elegy in English is John Milton's Lycidas (1637), written on the death of Edward King, a fellow student at Cambridge University. Milton used the form both to explore his vocation as a writer and to attack what he saw as the abuses of the Church. The formal pastoral in English died out in the 18th century, one of the last notable examples being Alexander Pope's Pastorals (1709). The form was parodied by writers such as John Gay (in his Shepherd's Week), criticised for its artificiality by Doctor Johnson and attacked for its lack of realism by George Crabbe, who attempted to give a true picture of rural life in his poem The Village (1783). Pastoral nevertheless survived as a mood rather than a genre, as can be seen from such works as Matthew Arnold's Thyrsis (1867), a lament on the death of his fellow poet Arthur Hugh Clough.

Pastoral romances

Italian writers invented a new genre, the pastoral romance, which mixed pastoral poems with a fictional narrative in prose. Although there was no classical precedent for the form, it drew some inspiration from ancient Greek novels set in the countryside, such as Daphnis and Chloe . The most influential Italian example of the form was Sannazzaro's Arcadia (1504). The vogue for the pastoral romance spread throughout Europe producing such notable works as Montemayor's Diana (1559) in Spain, Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia (1590) in England, and Honoré d'Urfé's Astrée (1607-27) in France.

Pastoral plays

Pastoral drama also emerged in Renaissance Italy. Again, there was little Classical precedent, with the possible exception of Greek satyr plays. Poliziano's Orfeo (1480) shows the beginnings of the new form, but it reached its zenith in the late 16th century with Tasso's Aminta (1573), Isabella Andreini's Mirtilla (1588), and Guarini's Il pastor fido (1590). John Lyly's Endimion (1579) brought the Italian-style pastoral play to England. John Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess, Ben Jonson's The Sad Shepherd and Sidney's The Lady of May are later examples. Some of Shakespeare's plays contain pastoral elements, most notably As You Like It (whose plot was derived from Thomas Lodge's pastoral romance Rosalynde) and The Winter's Tale, of which Act 4 Scene 4 is a lengthy pastoral digression.

Pastoral music

Theocritus's Idylls include strophic songs and musical laments, and, as in Homer, his shepherds often play the syrinx, or Pan flute, considered a quintessentially pastoral instrument. Virgil's Eclogues were performed as sung mime in the 1st century, and there is evidence of the pastoral song as a legitimate genre of classical times.

The pastoral genre was a significant influence in the development of opera. After settings of pastoral poetry in the pastourelle genre by the troubadours, Italian poets and composers became increasingly drawn to the pastoral. Musical settings of pastoral poetry became increasingly common in first polyphonic and then monodic madrigals: these later led to the cantata and the serenata, in which pastoral themes remained on a consistent basis. Partial musical settings of Giovanni Battista Guarini's Il pastor fido were highly popular: the texts of over 500 madrigals were taken from this one play alone. Tasso's Aminta was also a favourite. As opera developed, the dramatic pastoral came to the fore with such works as Jacopo Peri's Dafne and, most notably, Monteverdi's L'Orfeo. Pastoral opera remained popular throughout the 17th-century, and not just in Italy, as is shown by the French genre of pastorale héroïque, Englishman Henry Lawes's music for Milton's Comus (not to mention John Blow's Venus and Adonis), and Spanish zarzuela. At the same time, Italian and German composers developed a genre of vocal and instrumental pastorals, distinguished by certain stylistic features, associated with Christmas Eve.

The pastoral, and parodies of the pastoral, continued to play an important role in musical history throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. John Gay may have satirized the pastoral in The Beggar's Opera, but also wrote an entirely sincere libretto for Handel's Acis and Galatea. Rousseau's Le Devin du village draws on pastoral roots, and Metastasio's libretto Il re pastore was set over 30 times, most famously by Mozart. Rameau was an outstanding exponent of French pastoral opera.^[4] Beethoven also wrote his famous Pastoral Symphony, avoiding his usual musical dynamism in favour of relatively slow rhythms. More concerned with psychology than description, he labelled the work "more the expression of feeling than [realistic] painting". The pastoral also appeared as a feature of grand opera, most particularly in Meyerbeer's operas: often composers would develop a pastoral-themed "oasis", usually in the centre of their work. Notable examples include the shepherd's "alte Weise" from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, or the pastoral ballet occupying the middle of Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades. The 20th-century continued to bring new pastoral interpretations, particularly in ballet, such as Ravel's Daphis and Chloe, Nijinsky's use of Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, and Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps and Les Noces.^[5]

Pastoral art

Idealised pastoral landscapes appear in Hellenistic and Roman wall paintings. Interest in the pastoral as a subject for art revived in Renaissance Italy, partly inspired by the descriptions of pictures Sannazzaro included in his Arcadia. The Fête champêtre (Pastoral Concert) attributed to Giorgione is perhaps the most famous painting in this style. Later, French artists were also attracted to the pastoral, notably Claude, Poussin (e.g. Et in Arcadia ego) and Watteau (in his Fêtes galantes).^[6]

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Pastoral

• Pastorela
• Pastourelle
• Eclogue
• Idyll
• Arcadia
• Pastoralism
• Pastoral (theatre of Soule)

References

1. ^ Bridget Ann Henish, The Medieval Calendar Year, p96, ISBN 0-271-01904-2
2. ^ Introduction (p.14) to Virgil: The Eclogues trans. Guy Lee (Penguin Classics)
3. ^ Article on "Bucolic poetry" in The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (1989)
4. ^ See Cuthbert Girdlestone Jean-Philippe Rameau: His Life and Work, particularly p.377 ff.
5. ^ General reference for this section: Geoffrey Chew and Owen Chander. "Pastoral", Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (accessed 11 August 2007), grovemusic.com (subscription access).
6. ^ Article on "Pastoral" in The Oxford Companion to Art (ed. H. Osborne)

External links

• Two Idylls by Theocritus (English)
• The Eclogues of Virgil
• The complete works of Christopher Marlowe
• Shepheardes Calendar by Edmund Spenser
• La Castità Conquistata: The Function of the Satyr in Pastoral Drama, by Meredith Kennedy Ray (University of Chicago)
• 'The Pastoral Concert' at the Louvre site

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Common misspelling(s) of pastoral

• pastural

Dansk (Danish)
adj. - hyrde-, pastoral
n. - hyrdedigt, pastorale

Nederlands (Dutch)
pastoraal, herderlijk, landelijk, gebruikt als weideland, herderlijk gedicht/toneelstuk, brief van geestelijke

Français (French)
adj. - (GB, École, Univ) pastoral, (GB, École, Univ) de conseiller, (Relig) pastoral
n. - pastorale

Deutsch (German)
adj. - ländlich, pastoral, seelsorgerisch
n. - ländliches Bild, ländliche Szene

Ελληνική (Greek)
adj. - ποιμενικός, βουκολικός, ποιμαντορικός

Italiano (Italian)
pastorale

Português (Portuguese)
adj. - pastoral, bucólico, pastoril

Русский (Russian)
пасторальный, пасторский

Español (Spanish)
adj. - pastoril, pastoral
n. - pastoral, báculo pastoral

Svenska (Swedish)
adj. - idyllisk, herdedikt

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
牧人的, 牧师的, 田园生活的, 牧歌, 田园诗

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
adj. - 牧人的, 牧師的, 田園生活的
n. - 牧歌, 田園詩

한국어 (Korean)
adj. - 양치기의, 전원생활의, 목사의
n. - 목가, 전원시

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 牧歌, 牧者の職責論, 司教教書
adj. - 田園生活の, 牧歌的な, 牧畜に適した, 牧羊者の, 牧者の, 牧師の

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(صفه) مختص برعويه كنيسه, رعوي, ريفي‏

עברית (Hebrew)
adj. - ‮של כומר, שליו, אידילי, פסטורלי, של רועים, של רבי‬
n. - ‮שירת רועים, איגרת הבישוף, רועית או פסטורלה - יצירה מוסיקלית בעלת צביון כפרי-אידילי‬

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