ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the positioning of English pastoral at a crucial stage, and the work of two of its most significant practitioners, Alexander Pope and Ambrose Philips, against the detailed context of late Stuart aesthetic and political controversies: party politics, contemporary religious agendas and in particular, the dominant issue between 1704 and 1710 of the union of the parliaments of England and Scotland. Offering a dialectical reading of the Pope/Philips pastoral wars, the chapter shows how Pope picks up the bestiary of sheep and wolves he found in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar,deploying it against Philips in a recapitulation of Elizabethan differences of opinion. Though early eighteenth-century sheep and wolves derived their significance from the constitutional settlement of 1688 and their religious connotations reflected that, such animal symbolism was deployed at a time when sensitivities about Englishness ran equally high in the context of similar issues about the succession, and when a devotion to courtly as against rustic pastoral could again be interpreted to have political valencies. Examining Pope’s early drafts and the 1709 volume of Miscellanies in which the poems first appeared in print, I suggest that Pope and Philips were initially on the same side, their eventual opposition being orchestrated by Tonson and by the cultural politics of the post-1710 period.
