THE PASTORAL DEBATE OF YOUTH AND AGE: GENRE AND LIFE CYCLE IN RENAISSANCE POETRY WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO EDMUND SPENSER'S 'THE SHEPHEARDES CALENDER'

This study argues that the debate of youth and age, a common Renaissance pastoral convention, distills the essential thematic and formal traits of the larger bucolic mode. While offering a rhetorical, historical and psychological analysis of the specific sub-genre, the study proposes a new way of reading all pastoral poetry.;Pastoral ideals take two contrary strains, corresponding to youth and old age. Many bucolic conventions articulate latent desires for adolescence, childhood and infancy; but literary tradition also casts the elderly herdsman in a crucial Arcadian role. He personifies ideals of experience opposite yet complementary to the innocence of youth.;Since pastoral ideals are based on passing stages of life projected as places or states, they are necessarily liable to be outgrown or discredited from alternate temporal points of view. This accounts for the repeated denial of ideals of youth and old age in poems of "anti-pastoral" complaint.;Most bucolic poems share the formal dialectical structure of debate. This structure was explicit in the medieval version of the pastoral eclogue known as debat or conflictus, and it remains submerged in the work of later pastoralists, including Sidney, Shakespeare, Drayton, Marvell, Milton and Blake. The debate structure leads the reader from an idyllic through a dualistic world-view to a disturbing relativity of perspective.;Pastoral is usually regarded as an idealized vision of rustic life generated by a rejection of the city or the court. This study develops the theory that pastoral is generated by a rejection of adulthood and middle-age. The Arcadian world, spatially situated at the peripheries of civilization, represents stages of human development temporally situated at the peripheries of the life cycle.;The overlapping characteristics of pastoral and debate disclose the underlying unity of The Shepheardes Calender. Edmund Spenser shaped his twelve eclogues in conformity with traditional thematic and formal traits of the pastoral debate of youth and age. He also extended that convention to achieve novel purposes: to portray the generational strife of his particular historical moment and the inner conflicts of young men undergoing passage from childhood to maturity in search of personal identity.