ABSTRACT
As one of the most popular literary modes of the English Renaissance, the pastoral has been fodder for much critical rumination over the last half century. Harry Berger and Paul Alpers have documented how its Elizabethan practitioners adapted or transcended classical precedents. Following the lead of Raymond Williams, Louis Montrose, and Annabel Patterson, more recent studies have tended to view it as the ideological musings of Tudor apologists in shepherd’s clothing.2 Their unmasking of the mode as a celebration of aristocratic power over the nation’s biomass resources should continue to energize green readings of the pastoral. Yet much of this criticism has routinely underestimated one of the chief reasons for its appeal: Elizabethans admired it not only as a vehicle for political allegory but also as a continuation of moral philosophy by literary means.
