SOURCE: “Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form,” in ELH, Vol. 50, No. 3, Autumn 1983, pp. 415-59.

In the following excerpt, Montrose offers an historical prologue to reading the Elizabethan pastoral, and claims that the pastoral embodies the contradictory values of Elizabethan social life.

I Shepherds and Critics

Modern theories of pastoral have a way of turning into theories of literature. Perhaps the most influential of such theories have been those of William Empson and Renato Poggioli. The former isolates the pastoral “process” in verbal strategies for “putting the complex into the simple”; the latter analyzes the pastoral “impulse” as a projective mechanism for the sublimation of civilization's discontents.¹ Such generous definitions have encouraged a transformation of virtually every kind of literary text into yet another version of pastoral. Indeed, the rage for pastoral and pastoralization evident in Anglo-American literary studies during the past quarter century seems...