Arden and Arcadia. Presence of Pastoral Tradition in Shakespeare's "The Tempest" (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Frankfurt (Main) (Institute for English and American Studies), course: Pastoral Conventions, language: English, abstract: Shepherds sitting in nature, singing and making music together and overall enjoying the Golden Age. Those are typical attributes for the pastoral genre. When thinking of Shakespeare's The Tempest (1611) a betrayed sorcerer or maybe the enslaved native Caliban comes to mind, not relaxed shepherds. However, it is a pastoral play which this term paper will prove.

Theocritus and Virgil are considered the founding fathers of this literary genre. Therefore, it is no surprise that The Tempest shows many similarities to the works of these poets. I will compare The Tempest with Theocritus' first and seventh Idyll and Virgil's first, ninth and fifth Eclogue; other pastoral poems of that period will not be discussed. This term paper will present those similarities between the poems and the play and show that Shakespeare's The Tempest was strongly influenced by the pastoral Eclogues and Idylls and is itself a pastoral play. To achieve this, I will closely look at some of the themes of The Tempest and show their relation to the pastoral genre.

The first time the play was performed was in 1611 (Vaughan 1). The date of publications of the Eclogues and the Idylls cannot be determined with certainty, however, Virgil lived between 70 BC (Ziolkowski 356) and 19 BC (Ziolkowski 1), while Theocritus lived around the 3rd century BC (Beloch 582), even though that is only an assumption. Therefore, the poems must have been written around the respective periods. Since there is a gap of over 1500 years between the first performance of The Tempest and the publication of the works of Virgil and Theocritus, it is astounding that there still are many connections between these works and that Shakespeare stayed true to the genre of pastoral.

Firstly, I will closely look at the first and seventh Idyll of Theocritus. There, I will discuss the pastoral items in the poems, like Daphnis, his death and the gifts the shepherds give each other. Second, I will do the same with Virgil's Eclogues. Lastly, I will focus on the play's themes. The Tempest is filled with pastoral themes