Pastoral novel

An edition of the most important pastoral novel in French literature, L’Astréeof Honoré d'Urfé, of the centuryXVII.

The pastoral novel is an epic narrative subgenre that took shape historically in the Renaissance from the Appearance of the Arcadia by the Italian Jacopo Sannazaro in Italy.

Origin and evolution of the genre

There was already a wide previous tradition that comes from pastoral literature, centered around the lyrical subgenre of the eclogue or poem; Most of the time it consisted of a dialogue in which various idealized shepherds tell each other about their love affairs, lucky or not. The eclogue or pastoral idyll was born with the Greek poet Theocritus, who was followed in this genre by the also Greek Mosco and the Roman poet Virgil, who innovated by making his shepherds a transcript of real characters from his environment: Maecenas, the Emperor Augustus, etc.. Later, in the Middle Ages, Giovanni Boccaccio composed some narrative prose with pastoral and eglogical themes, such as the Ninfale d'Ameto and the Ninfale Fiesolano. But it was Jacopo Sannazaro who, in his Arcadia (1504, translated into Spanish in 1549), definitively configured the genre as a narrative plot intertwined with compositions or songs in verse with a love theme sung by the shepherds.

More than within the novel, Edward C. Riley places this type of narrative within the "romance" genre, some of whose characteristics are:

• (1) romance is usually a love story.
• (2) It's closer to the myth than the novel.
• (3) Characters are psychological simplifications.
• 4) Time and place are not too determined by empirical criteria.
• (5) The description of external details is often abundant, rich and sensual, the verbal style is usually something high.
• 6) The romance is usually very fashionable in its time, composed according to the sensitivity of the century.

These features, plus what was pointed out by Francisco López Estrada (combination of prose and verse that develops a pastoral intrigue, where love is an essential theme, without forgetting the presence of other aspects such as the courtly world, humanistic touches, presented from own experience or from the imagined invention) are those that configure the genre.

The pastoral novel reflects the idealistic and unrealistic vision of the Renaissance, its stylized spirit and its Platonism. The theme is always love, it offers a static vision of nature and a vision of peace. The narration is lazy and slow and the action, which is nevertheless muddled, unfolds swiftly since what is fundamentally important is the analysis of the feelings and passions of the characters and the description of the natural landscape. On the other hand, interruptions with digressions of all kinds or even with other stories unrelated to the main action are frequent, apart from the constant interspersed verses.

There are already typical elements of the bucolic genre in the eclogues of Garcilaso de la Vega, who had attended the Pontaniana Academy in Naples and was therefore very familiar with the work of its member Actius Sincerus, (Jacopo Sannazaro). This is shown in the dialogues of Salicio and Nemoroso. There are also pastoral elements in the final chapters of Amadis of Greece (1530) by Feliciano de Silva, which tells how Prince Florisel of Niquea became a shepherd and adopted the name Laterel Silvestre out of love for the shepherdess Silvia. But the genre passed to Spain already configured by the hand of the seven books of the Italianate Diana (1559) by the Portuguese who wrote in Spanish Jorge de Montemayor. The work achieved enormous success and was translated and imitated throughout Europe (for example, La Astrea by Honoré d'Urfé in France and, also in this same country, but already in the 17th century). XVIII, the Estela of Jean Pierre Claris de Florián, etc.). The genre was later nationalized with the Segunda parte de la Diana by Alonso Pérez and the Diana in Love (1564) by Gaspar Gil Polo, which are continuations of Montemayor's work, the second one set in the Valencian landscape. In the work of Gil Polo, moreover, the introduction of new meters is tested. To these we must add a counterfactum to the divine, the Clara Diana (1580) by Bartolomé Ponce.

The genre had a large number of followers and some twenty-five titles have remained in Spanish. Particularly noteworthy are Los ten libros de Fortuna de Amor by Antonio de Lofraso (1573), El pastor de Fílida (1582) by Luis Gálvez de Montalvo, La Galatea (1585) by Miguel de Cervantes, Desengaño de celos (1586) by Bartolomé López de Enciso, Nymphs and Shepherds of Henares (1587) by Bernardo González de Bobadilla, The Shepherd of Iberia by Bernardo de la Vega (1591), La Arcadia (1598) by Félix Lope de Vega, The Constant Amaryllis (1607) by Cristóbal Suárez de Figueroa (as a tribute to María de Córdoba), and the Golden Age in the jungles of Erifile (1608) by Bernardo de Balbuena, which represents a return to the Italianate tradition of gender in Spanish. There were even versions "a lo divino", such as Los pastores de Belén, 1612, by Lope de Vega. Then he went into crisis.

Chronology of main works

• Eclogae piscatoriae of Jacopo Sannazaro (in Latin)
• Arcadia (1504) of Jacopo Sannazaro
• Menina e Moça or Saudades, by Bernardim Ribeiro (1482-1536), first published in 1554, in Ferrara, Italy.
• The Seven Books of Diana (1559) by Jorge de Montemayor
• Diana in love Gaspar Gil Polo (1564)
• The Ten Books of Fortune of Love (1573) by Antonio de Lofraso.
• Aminta (1573) of Torquato Tasso
• The Shepherd of Fílida (1582) by Luis Gálvez de Montalvo
• The Galatea (1585) by Miguel de Cervantes
• Il pastor fido (1590) by Giovanni Battista Guarini (teatro)
• The Arcadia (1590) by Sir Philip Sidney
• The Arcadia (1598) by Lope de Vega
• The constant Amarilis (1607) by Cristóbal Suárez de Figueroa
• L'Astrée (1607) of Honoré d'Urfé
• Golden Age in the Erifile Forests (1608) by Bernardo de Balbuena.
• Sylvanire (1625) of Honoré d'Urfé (teatro)
• Le Berger extravagant (1627) by Charles Sorel