Eclogue

The eclogue is a subgenre of lyric poetry that is sometimes dialogued as a small theatrical piece in one act. With a love theme, one or several shepherds develop it by telling it in a peasant environment where nature is paradisiacal and music plays a leading role. As a lyrical subgenre it is sometimes developed through a pastoral monologue or, more frequently, through a dialogue.

The eclogue is a composition in which the poet, sacrificed to one or more shepherds, expresses his love in an idealized setting, full of beauty and love.

The first eclogues were the Idylls (in Greek, "little poems" or "little songs") of Theocritus; later they were written by Mosco, Bion of Smyrna and other authors under his influence. The Latin writer Virgil (I century BC) with his Eclogues (in Greek, "selections") or Bucolic added autobiographical elements, making each shepherd an imaginary character that covered up a real character: Gaius Maecenas, Augustus, etc. Some of them came to be staged in Rome. Other Latin authors also wrote eclogues, such as Nemesiano, Calpurnio Siculo or Ausonio.

This innovation passed to the later bucolic one, so that sometimes the characters in the eclogues represented real people. Through Giovanni Boccaccio and with the Renaissance and Arcadia by Jacopo Sannazaro, the genre was recovered again, mixing compositions in verse in a prose narrative framework, and spread throughout the Western world, well in verse, as well as eclogues inserted in any pastoral novel. In Castilian literature, Juan del Encina, Lucas Fernández, Garcilaso de la Vega, Juan Boscán, Lope de Vega, Pedro Soto de Rojas, Bernardo de Balbuena and Juan Meléndez Valdés wrote eclogues. In Valencian we find the égoglas of Vicent Andrés Estellés.