Never on Sunday: John Gay's The Shepherd's Week

Abstract

Never on Sunday: John Gay's The Shepherd's Week JOHN IRWIN FISCHER One's first reaction to John Gay's The Shepherd's Week: In Six Pastorals is likely to be frustration; nothing in the poem seems to work prop­ erly, starting with the title. A week, after all, is seven days long, yet this poem boasts only six eclogues and omits the Sabbath. Gay's "Proeme" explains: "ours being supposed to be Christian shep­ herds," they are "then at church worship."1 This explanation merely begs the question. One still does not know why Sunday was omitted: is church worship ineffable, unimportant, unpastoral, all of the above, or none? The only certain conclusions one can reach are these: Gay wishes to emphasize his omission of a Sunday eclogue and does not wish to tell us why he omitted it. Such frustration is not an occasional effect of The Shepherd's Week; it is continuous, and even the poem's minutiae are confounding. For example, at the conclusion of his poem Gay appends "An Alphabeti­ cal Catalogue of Names, Plants, Flowers, Fruits, Birds, Beasts, In­ sects, and other material things mentioned in these Pastorals." The "Catalogue" is obviously a swipe at index-lovers, but it is also dis­ turbing to anyone who likes order at all, for it is alphabetical, but not quite. Selections from the list of words catalogued under the letter "C" suffice to show the problem. "Calf," "Capon," "Carr," "Cat," "Cicily," and "Clover-grass" begin the list in proper alphabetical or­ der. "Cloddipole" follows "Clover-grass," however, and is itself fol­ lowed by "Churn," "Colworts," and "Clumsilis." The entire list ends 191 192 / FISCHER with "Cuckow," "Cur," "Cyder," and, finally, "Corns." While always somewhat alphabetical, the list exhibits no regular pattern of distor­ tion; it is a perfect foil to linearity: imitating order and simultaneously defying it.2 Critics are usually orderly folks, while Gay's poem is an unusually disordering performance; consequently, one result of most modern efforts to read the poem is that those efforts illustrate sharply the poem's radical alinearity. These efforts can be classed under two heads: those that portray the poem as fundamentally parodic and those that portray it as a "straightforward, accurate, and at times moving rendition of rural actuality."3 Of the readings that stress the parodic elements in The Shepherd's Week, Hoyt Trowbridge's "Pope, Gay, and The Shepherd's Week" is, justly, the most widely known.4 Trowbridge demonstrates that much of the parody in The Shepherd's Week echoes the implied criticism in Pope's Guardian 40 of Ambrose Philip's Pastorals and Thomas Tickell's articles on the nature of pas­ toral. Trowbridge's arguments are strong, but, as Patricia Meyer Spacks notes, his conclusions are overstated. If, as Trowbridge main­ tains, Gay's purpose in The Shepherd's Week "is to reveal the artistic fatuity of Tickell's pastoral theory and Philip's practice,"5 then Gay overshot his mark. For Sir Richard Blackmore, Thomas D'Urfey, and Spenser's E. K. are also satirized in The Shepherd's Week, along with, perhaps, Spenser himself, Theocritus, Virgil, and even Pope. In fact, just because Gay launches so many satiric darts in this poem, many readers have supposed he has no single butt at all. For such readers, what counts about the poem is its fidelity to rural life, especially to the ubiquity of labor in such a life.6 This view of the poem, like Trowbridge's, has its strengths: Gay's shepherdesses do tie sheaves, drive hogs, milk cows, and even arrange to have those cows serviced; the shepherdesses, that is, seem more to live on He­ siod's farm than in Epicurus's garden. Even here, however, the mat­ ter is not clear cut. For example, Gay's milkmaids "with soft stroakings milk the Cow" ("Friday," 118, 1. 154), but cows are in fact only grumblingly lactiferous and, as Charles Beckwith points out, "a milk­ maid quickly develops the grip of a blacksmith."7 Thus, Gay's shep­ herdesses, like his shepherds, are both here and there; they are rep­ resentatively rural but also artificial, just as they are vaguely...