pastoral

pastoral, a form of escape literature concerned with country pleasures, which is found in poetry, drama, and prose fiction. Its earliest examples appear in the Idylls of Theocritus in which shepherds lead a sunlit, idealized existence of love and song. The eclogues of Virgil and Longus' romance Daphnis and Chloe blended the idealization with a more authentic picture of country life, and Virgil added an important new feature to the tradition in making his poems a vehicle for social comment. Neglected during the Middle Ages, the pastoral reappeared during the Renaissance when Petrarch and his imitators composed eclogues in Latin and in the vernaculars. It was with the prose romance (Sannazar, Cervantes, Sidney, D'Urfé), and the drama that pastoral attained its peak of popularity: Tasso's Aminto (1581), Guarini's Il Pastor Fido (1590, which served as a model for Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess), Lodge's Rosalynde (the chief source of As You Like It), Jonson's The Sad Shepherd, and Milton's Comus. In the 17th cent. the Theocritean vision gave place to a more realistic dream of enjoying a rural retreat. Poets like James Thomson extolled country pleasures and represented rural trades as enjoyable, until Crabbe showed that their descriptions were divorced from reality, and Wordsworth taught men to seek comfort in a Nature endowed with visionary power. The pastoral in its traditional form died with the rise of Romanticism.