Pastoral refers to the lifestyle of shepherds and pastoralists, moving livestock around larger areas of land according to seasons and availability of water and feed.

Pastoral art

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In art, whether literature, painting, or another form, it refers to rural subjects such as villages, herdsmen, and milkmaids, that are romanticized and depicted in a highly unrealistic manner.

A work can contain many pastoral elements mixed with other genres. Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, though taking place among shepherds in Arcadia, features the royal family, who have retired to the countryside for peace, and centers on the romances of princes and princesses. The fourth act of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale features a pastoral setting, but the focus is on the apparent shepherdess, Perdita, who is actually a foundling and a princess, and the setting is intruded on by her princely lover Florizel, and by his disapproving father the king. Sir Calidore, the Knight of Courtesy in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen finds that the Blatant Beast is unknown among the shepherds, but he himself comes from outside, and the shepherdess Pastorella whom he loves is revealed at the end to be a foundling, the daughter of a knight and lady. Indeed, many foundlings in literature are taken up by the pure and simple folk of the pastoral, but are themselves of higher birth and from civilization, to which they return at the story's end.

Classical origins

The pastoral genre was invented in the Hellenistic era by the Sicilian poet Theocritus, who may have drawn on authentic folk traditions of Sicilian shepherds. The Roman poet Virgil adopted the invention and wrote eclogues, which are poems on rustic and bucolic subjects, that set an example for the pastoral mood in literature. Later pastoral poets, such as Edmund Spenser and Alexander Pope, typically looked to the classical pastoral poets for inspiration. A typical 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 had Greek names like Poliphilus or Philomela. Pastoral poems were 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 were held in the fantasy to be almost wholly undemanding and backgrounded, and to leave the shepherdesses and their swains in a state of almost perfect leisure. This made them available for embodying perpetual erotic fantasies. The shepherds spent 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.

Other uses of the pastoral setting

A harsher note was struck in Girolamo Fracastoro's 1530 poem Syphilis, sive Morbus Gallicus ("Syphilis, or the French Disease"), in which Syphilus ("pig-lover"), a typical pastoral name for a shepherd, is stricken by the disease syphilis that takes its name from Fracastoro's poem. Fracastoro's poem contains the first recognisable description of the symptoms of syphilis (today, few contemporary physicians announce their discoveries in verse, pastoral or otherwise). Fracastoro has Syphilus the shepherd catch it for having offended Apollo, a somewhat unusual method of infection. Fracastoro's Latin poem was much admired in its day; it was translated into English heroic couplets by Nahum Tate:

A shepherd once (distrust not ancient fame)

Possest these Downs, and Syphilus his Name;

Some destin'd Head t'attone the Crimes of all,

On Syphilus the dreadful Lot did fall.

Through what adventures this unknown Disease

So lately did astonisht Europe seize,

Through Asian coasts and Libyan Cities ran,

And from what Seeds the Malady began,

Our Song shall tell: to Naples first it came

From France, and justly took from France his Name. . .

Pastoral paintings, likewise, were typically used to give the respectability of the classics to paintings of nymphs, swains, satyrs, and other mostly human legendary creatures frolicking in neatly tended hills and woods in a state of perpetual déshabillé. In contemporary times, it is a whole genre of sexual fantasy that fell almost completely out of fashion.

See also: Et in Arcadia ego, the end of Don Quixote.

See also

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• Torquato Tasso's Aminta
• Longus's Daphnis and Chloe
• Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia
• Symphony No. 6 (Beethoven) (the Pastoral Symphony)
• Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality
• Idyll
• Arcadia

External links

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• Two Idylls by Theocritus (English)
• The Eclogues of Virgil
• The complete works of Christopher Marlowe
• The Shepheardes Calendar by Edmund Spenser
• La Castità Conquistata: The Function of the Satyr in Pastoral Drama, by Meredith Kennedy Ray (University of Chicago)
• Syphilis and the Shepherd of Atlantis by Stephen Jay Gould

Art genres

Pastoral | Sielanka | Пастораль | Pastorale (arte)