“Eliza, Queene of shepheardes,” and the Pastoral of Power

ASTORAL POWER might seem an oxymoronic notion, for pastoral literature is ostensibly a discourse of the powerless in dispraise of power. In his study of Elizabethan poetic kinds, Hallett Smith characterizes the central meaning” of Elizabethan pastorals as “the rejection of the aspiring mind. The shepherd demonstrates that true content is to be found in this renunciation.”* Smith’s perspective on pastoral equates “theme” with “meaning”; my perspective distinguishes “form” from “function.” The repertoire of pastoral forms includes images and metaphors; conventions of person, place, and diction; and distinctive generic features and their combinations. This repertoire was exploited and elaborated by Elizabethan poets and politicians, by sycophants and ideologues, by the Queen herself. My argument is that the symbolic mediation of social relationships was a central function of Elizabethan pastoral forms; and that social relationships are, intrinsically, relationships of power? The Arte of English Poesie, a guide to the practice of courtship and courtly poetry that was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, claims that modern poets have devised pastoral poetry, not of purpose tocounterfait or represent the rustical manner of loves and communication: but under the vaile of homely persons, and in rude speeches to insinuate and glaunce at greater matters and such as perchance had not bene safe to $ 6