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ELLEN SPOLSKY, Sent Away from the Garden? The Pastoral Logic of Tasso, Marvell, and Haley

Audiences have been colluding for centuries with the palpable duplicity
of pastoral plays and poems. Though set in a forest or countryside, they
are of course composed by and for literate elites, that is, for audiences
like us who expect them to help us imagine at least marginally illicit
pleasures in a se ing that conventionally and fictionally legitimates
them. The Chorus of Tasso’s Aminta (probably first performed in 1573)
describes an outdoor space of pleasure, of rich sensuality where it is al-
ways springtime, as in Ovid’s Golden Age. Place and time together offer
joyful sweetness, “le liete dolcezze,” where whatever pleases is permit-
ted: “s’ei piace ei lice” (1.2.339, 344). Although the transgression is the
focal a raction for audiences, the friction between law and pleasure
with which pastoral narratives amuse us almost always resolves in favor
1
of civilized restraint. In pastorals from Longus’ preadolescent herders
in Daphnis and Chloe (?late 2nd century c.e.) up to the avatars of juicy
young children offered to pedophiles in Jennifer Haley’s play of 2013,
The Nether, the artist, whose métier, after all, is to produce images of
pleasure, ultimately finds himself representing major ugliness as well,
as he is forced to admit inevitable intrusions into the green world. In
the 16th century, the joyful sweetness is disrupted – Tasso is very spe-
cific here – by “that vain abstraction, empty word, that erring idol of
2
propriety […]Honor […] which now tyrannizes society.” “Honor [... ]
3
stopped plain words [...] stole the gifts that Love for us decreed.” Honor
stops, honor steals, honor rules. Its power is such that even though the
ostensible goal of the play’s action is the satisfaction of sexual desire,
the honor of playwright and audiences seems to have required not only
a moral ending, but also visual purity throughout: no events of a sensual
nature are acted; all physical acts are reported by non-participants.

1 Lisa Sampson provides an up-to-date study of the genre in Pastoral Drama
in Early Modern Italy: The Making of a New Genre (London: Legenda, 2006).
2 “Ma sol perché quel vano / nome senza sogge o, / quell’idolo d’errori, idol
d’inganno…onor…” (52). All Italian and English citations are from Charles
Jernigan and Irene Marchegiani Jones, ed. and trans., Torquato Tasso, Aminta:
A Pastoral Play (New York: Italica Press, 2000).
3 “Onor…ai de i il fren ponesti…o Onore,/ che furto sia quel che fu don
d’Amore” (54).

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