The diction achieves a pretty balance between ease and suggestiveness. Easy with conventionally appropriate adjectives and fluent cadences, it is full of echoes. At once we are reminded of Vergil, soon of Ovid, Horace, Theocritus, Catullus, and also of their imitators. The great range of this appropriation can be measured by the crowded footnotes of the commentators; but without measuring, sometimes without distinct recognition, we hear a constant accompaniment. Renaissance allusiveness, too often paraded, is here subdued to serve the pastoral mood. Vergil was in this glade. Theocritus set such a jar for the rustic prize. This myth is prettiest in Ovid. But though an allusion lurks under every bush, it will not leap out to detain us. Whatever pastoral poets we know help to make us yield ourselves with at least a wistful “Et ego in Arcadia vixi.” Tasso, indeed, was to outdo him with Aminta; but the difference is in degree, not in method. In 1504 Sannazaro succeeded at the Renaissance task of making literature out of literature.
Dramatic pastoral was one of the forms of Renaissance pageantry. It put shepherds, nymphs, and satyrs on the stage to enhance the celebration of court festivity with scenic device and music. It gave mythology representation without changing the pastoral type.
Though carefully limited in time to secure consecutive action, Tasso’s Aminta[32] is much less dramatic than pastoral. It weaves within the dramatic frame the pastoral tissue of wistful reminiscence. It revives the ancient dream of the Golden Age, not only through scenery and the music of instruments and of verse, but by constant allusiveness of style.
Within twenty-five pages Solerti’s notes record echoes of Sappho, Theocritus, and Achilles Tatius; of Lucretius, Vergil (oftenest), Horace, Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, Seneca, Claudian, Statius, Nemesianus, Calpurnius, Cornelius Gallus; of Dante, Petrarch (oftenest), Boccaccio, Poliziano, Sannazaro, Bembo—but why go on? Even so heavy a charge of reminiscence is managed without overloading. The Aminta is the most consistent, as it is perhaps the most accomplished, example of this form of Renaissance borrowing. Tasso makes discreet use of alliteration and of word-play. His musical verse should be heard, not merely read. The pervasive harmony, various and subtle, can be but suggested by underlining a few recurrences in the opening scene.
L’acqua e le ghiande ed or l’acqua e le ghiande,
Sono cibo e bevanda.
Che tu dimandi amante ed io nemico
La vita s’avviticchia a’l suo marito.
The delicate weaving of sound and sense, allusion and image, has not faded. Few works of the Renaissance have had more modern admirers than the Aminta.
The continuance of the type and the spread of its vogue appear in the twelve eclogues of the Shepherds’ Calendar (1579). Spenser turned to it as to the established European form in which to prove oneself classical and offer one’s poetic encomium. It was the obvious medium by which to win rank as a poet. But at once appears a marked difference. Instead of relying on the pastoral fund of allusion, Spenser provides an apparatus of explanation: a dedicatory epistle, a general argument for the whole series, a prefatory argument for each eclogue, and a gloss. The last explains even obvious classical allusions, interprets the allegory, indicates that this phrase is taken from Theocritus and that from Vergil, and sometimes adds learned references. Did English readers need all this? The answer is not that Sidney, Leicester, Raleigh, Burleigh, Elizabeth herself, had not read Vergil and Mantuan, but rather that Spenser, even while he must still depend for a living on the court, was conscious of a wider audience. There were already English lovers of poetry, and there were soon to be more, who, having less culture than they desired, were glad to be guided in Arcadia.