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

problems are harder to think through than others; he mentions issues
of “absence” and “unruliness” as hungry for more of what represen-
7
tation in images provides. Surely the counterfactuals of the pastoral
imagination are just such cases.
The recurrence of literary pa erns, on this view, can be accounted
for not by the repeated satisfaction they provide but artists’ dissatisfac-
tion; by their feeling that further thinking is needed. Artists a empt to
refigure, to try again and again to re-present the unruly, the difficult is-
sues for which the tradition hasn’t yet provided satisfaction: why does
bodily happiness continually toggle to abstract thought, to legal prohi-
bition, to death? The challenge remains to find a way of rearranging the
familiar features of a genre or archetype, to add new images, to change
the emphasis, so as to produce a more satisfying representation. The
pastoral motifs don’t reappear because they are pleasant, calming, sat-
isfying experiences; they reappear because they have not been that.
And, as Jennifer Haley’s twenty-first century play, discussed below,
demonstrates, artists are still trying to understand how or even whether
people like us can have the satisfaction of sexual pleasure in a way that
is reconcilable with our own standards of morality and law.
The playwrights working with the pastoral genre over the cen-
turies provide a peek at an imagined Golden Age in its changing forms,
but then admit that we can’t stay there, any more than we can stay in
the theater, although recent technology seems to be bringing audiences
closer to this possibility. There are and always will be laws; but the
genre, within the protection of the theater, keeps trying to suggest a
be er way to live without or just within the law. Tasso’s shepherd, Am-
inta, loves the chaste Silvia, and it’s not hard to imagine what illicit
pleasures are hoped for. She, however, is a chaste acolyte of Diana. Two
cynical elders suggest he surprise her bathing, where, if she should
continue to resist his honest appeal, he might just overpower her. I sup-
pose if there really were no laws in the Garden, then he could indeed
have his pleasure, but of course the play’s audiences will not have shed

7 Clark, Being There: Pu ing Brain, Body, and World Together (Cambridge, Mas-
sachuse s: MIT Press, 1997), 167.

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