Christopher Marlowe
PASTORAL:
The word means, literally,
having to do with sheep and shepherding.
That’s because the original pastoral poems, like Virgil’s Eclogues, were about this subject, and
that’s why Marlowe chose it: he’s
imitating a classical convention.
But
who cares about sheep? Shepherds? Is that who writes pastoral poetry? Was
Christopher Marlowe a “passionate shepherd?”
No; he was a playwright and probably a spy in the employ of Queen
Elizabeth’s secret police. (He was
killed, at the age of 28, probably as a consequence of his espionage
activities.) What are his plays like? Dr. Faustus is a study of a myth
concerning a learned man who indulges in suspect theology and loses his soul --
nothing pastoral about that.
Are
shepherds the target audience of
pastoral poetry? Obviously not;
shepherds are simple people who live outside society; it’s an assumption that
they can’t, or don’t, read or write? Who
reads poetry, then? Sophisticated
urbanites like you and me? And poets
tend to be members of the literati, too; these days, most poets are also, of
necessity, academics reaching creative writing in university MFA programs. So they’re at home in the world of literary
intellectuals. Allen Ginsberg, who taught
at Brooklyn College, wouldn’t have recognized a sheep if it bit him; the
closest relationship he ever had with one was the last time he ordered leg of
lamb in a French restaurant.
So
we have an odd situation: sophisticated,
urban, literate poets are entertaining sophisticated, urban, literary readers
by writing poems about simple, rural, illiterate peasants.
The
best way to understand the pastoral convention is as a metaphor. The lives of
shepherds are simpler than ours, more natural than ours; they’ve pared their
existence down to its elements. It’s
like King Lear encountering Edgar on the heath, disguised as Poor Tom, a naked
Bedlam beggar: “Thou art the thing
itself!” exclaims Lear -- “Unaccomodated man [that is, man without all the
trappings of civilization that we think we can’t live without, smartphones and Ferraris and Napoleon cognac]
is just such a poor bare forked animal as thou art.” So the shepherds in pastoral literature are
what men could be if they weren’t corrupted by civilization: almost what Adam was before the Fall. They’re innocent. They’re not cynical. They’re passionate. They’re contented with their lot. They’re closer to God. And all the complex problems that we face -- the
recessions, colon cancer and cellulite and technological unemployability and
panic attacks and hack attacks on industrial-military computers and depletion
of the ozone layer and destruction of the rain forests and nuclear
proliferation -- are boiled down to a few simple elemental problems: the wolf, the cold, unrequited love. All of us urbanites sooner or later come to
cherish a secret dream: to get out of
the rat race, get away somewhere where the water isn’t polluted and the air is
still clean and we wake up each morning looking at snow-covered mountains. We see that dream every day in TV commercials
about rich people who use their American Express cards to spend their weekends
in Montana riding horses. And the
pastoral is an expression of that dream, that wish to simplify our lives, rid
ourselves of all the complexities of modern living that corrupt us.
BUT:
At the same time, there’s
another attitude we have toward shepherds that makes its way into pastoral
literature. Shepherds are rude and
crude; they have shit on their boots and they don’t know which fork to use at a
dinner party. They don’t understand
anything because they’ve never watched television or read a newspaper or even
had what we think of as a normal conversation.
And that’s built into the pastoral convention as well -- at least the
possibility that the point of view from which shepherds may be looked at is
faintly contemptuous.
Now,
the pastoral has come to include more than just poems and stories that deal
with the lives of shepherds. All cartoons are versions of the pastoral, in that
sense; Tom and Jerry, The Roadrunner,
Superman are all pastoral. So you
can see how closely pastoral is allied with allegory: both of them are symbolic ways in which the
complexity of human experience -- which is so complex that if it were rendered
in its full complexity it would be unintelligible -- is simplified. All art simplifies, primarily by the process
of selection and exclusion; it imposes order on the flux, the chaos, of
experience.
Marlowe’s
“Come Live With Me” is true pastoral:
that is, it’s a poem about a shepherd swain, who is “passionate” in the
sense that he’s virtually mindless. Of
course, it’s removed from the reader twice:
first because it’s pastoral, and therefore seems quaint and sweet, and
second because it’s an imitation of an archaic literary form, like The Faerie Queene, which is also
pastoral, because it’s allegorical –
that is, its characters are personified abstractions, as their names often
suggest (Excesse in Book 2, for example).
And allegory is a metaphor; it does the pastoral job of simplifying
human life to its basics – only it’s not about the externals of human life but
inner life, our psyches, our emotions, our morals. Temperance good, excess bad – that’s all that’s
in Sir Guyon’s mind, though he’s human enough to respond to the erotic stimulus
of the bathing damsels.
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