In pastoral literature, the countryside is not simply a place
In pastoral literature, the countryside is not simply a place. Rather, it takes on symbolic weight for it reflects certain dreams and values of the author. What does the Forest of Arden symbolize in As You Like It?
In pastoral literature, the countryside is not simply a place
In pastoral literature, the countryside is not simply a place. Rather, it takes on symbolic weight for it reflects certain dreams and values of the author.
Firstly,what does the Forest of Arden symbolize in As You Like It?(There are various possible answers to this question, so you only need to offer a plausible interpretation.)
Lastly,i will attach the play from Shakespeare.Also,need some evidence from text in the short essay
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The tradition was pass on, through Bion, Moschus, and Longus, from Greece to Rome, where Virgil (who transferred the setting from Sicily to Arcadia, in the Greek Peloponnese, now the symbol of a pastoral paradise) used the device of alluding to contemporary problems—agrarian, political, and personal—in the rustic society he portrayed. His Eclogues exerted a powerful effect on poets of the Renaissance, including Dante, Petrarch, and Giovanni Boccaccio in Italy; Pierre de Ronsard in France; and Garcilaso de la Vega in Spain.
Old and New Testaments
These were further influence by medieval Christian commentators on Virgil and by the pastoral scenes of the Old and New Testaments (Cain and Abel, David, the Bethlehem shepherds, and the figure of Christ the good shepherd).During the 16th and 17th centuries, too, pastoral romance novels (by Jacopo Sannazzaro, Jorge de Montemayor, Miguel de Cervantes, and Honoré d’Urfé) appeared, as did in the 15th and 16th centuries the pastoral drama (by Torquato Tasso and Battista Guarini).
Pastoral literature
In English poetry there had been some examples of pastoral literature in the earlier 16th century, but the appearance in 1579 of Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, which imitated not only classical models but also the Renaissance poets of France and Italy, brought about a vogue for the pastoral. Sir Philip Sidney, Robert Greene, Thomas Nash, Christopher Marlowe, Michael Drayton, Thomas Dekker, John Donne, Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Heywood, Thomas Campion, William Browne, William Drummond, and Phineas Fletcher all wrote pastoral poetry.
Shakespeare
This vogue was subject to some satirical comment in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It—itself a pastoral play.)The first English novels, by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge, were written in the pastoral mode.Also,apart from Shakespeare, playwrights who attempted pastoral drama included John Lyly, George Peele, John Fletcher, Ben Jonson, John Day, and James Shirley.