Conclusion: Newgate Pastoral — John Gay and The Beggars Opera

Abstract

Pastoral, like comedy, shifted irrevocably in tone and meaning during the last years of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth. The pastoral controversy, as the discussion surrounding this shift is sometimes called, could be summed up as an opposition of ‘simple’ pastoral to ‘complex’.¹ The complex—promoted by, among others, Pope, Gay and Swift—exploits the fictiveness of pastoral; its location in impossible time and place, the artifice of its action its characters’ ambiguity of social class. This kind of pastoral is at once traditional and abstract; that is, it imitates, builds on and complicates classical and Renaissance models and in so doing it exposes the formal elements of pastoral as isolable devices, flexible by virtue of their limitations, not in spite of them. Simple pastoral, of the kind that writers like Addison, Phillips and Purney developed belongs to a shift in literary taste that, as Earl Wasserman has put it ‘tended to reject the aesthetics based upon authority and pre-established definitions of the genres, and to evolve one logically from the nature of the human mind and the sources of its enjoyment’.² Its main dynamic, in other words, is to depict and thus to reproduce the pleasure an urban readership may take in a limited and distanced encounter with country life and country people. Its tone tends, to use an apt term of Purneÿ s, to ‘the Soft’.³