Abstract
Renaissance pastoral clearly focuses the division characteristic of the period. Like the prose debates on solitude, it attempts to reconcile opposites or modify them to a point of similarity, but offers, instead of argument, an aesthetic resolution of the tension between sociability and solitude, between the active and contemplative lives. Pastoral portrays a way of life associated with the contemplative ideal, with retirement, privacy, reflectiveness and simplicity; but it presents this contemplative ideal in a social context, showing a microcosmic society, instead of an individual, retiring from public life to the woods. In this way the absolutes of contemplative solitude and active civil life are qualified to the point where they meet in the middle, in the ethos of an introspective society, withdrawn from the world of business, free both to enjoy the pleasures of company and to substitute meditation and self-examination for the burdens of public life. Sidney describes the ability of pastoral to lessen the distance between extremes in a very literal way when he writes that the houses in Arcadia are ‘all scattered, no two being one by th’other, & yet not so far off as that it barred mutual succour: a shew, as it were, of an accompanable solitarines & of a civil wildnes’.1 Oxymorons emphasise the convergence of opposites.
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Notes
See R. Williams, The Country and the City (1973), Appendix.
R. Ellis, ‘The Fool in Shakespeare: A Study in Alienation’, CritQ, 10 (1968), 245–68, p. 260.
T. F. Connolly, in ‘Shakespeare and the Double Man’, SQ, 1 (1950), 30–5, has written on the idea of two characters completing a single self.
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© 1981 Janette Dillon
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Dillon, J. (1981). ‘For other than for dancing measures’: As You Like It . In: Shakespeare and the Solitary Man. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04996-7_7
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