The labor of writing in the pastoral genre: Philip Sidney's 'Arcadia' through John Milton's 'Paradise Lost'

In this dissertation, I argue that the pastoral genre in early modern England is a genre of gentlemanly social mobility that defines itself precisely by denying the political, social, and economic pressures that underlie this mobility. The pastoral world incorporates an ideal balance between pleasure and profit, while warding off the material institutions associated with that pair: courtly culture and patronage, foreign influences and dissipate city manners, and the growing power of domestic and foreign trade. I read Spenser's deployment of the trope of labor in The Faerie Queen (1596) as a textual operation that distances his poetry from dependence on royal patronage. Sidney's Old Arcadia (1580) conceives of language and erotic desire as a social credential for aspiring youth. I read moments from Shakespeare's early romances and the history play Richard II (c.1590), in order to chart some of the ways in which the pastoral mode redefines language, property, and political sovereignty in dramatic narratives. Finally, Milton's Comus (1634) and the pastoral scenes in Paradise Lost (1667) provide a cultural critique of the growing power of commerce in the seventeenth century.