Paul J Hecht. What Rosalind Likes: Pastoral, Gender, and the Founding of English Verse

Abstract

For early modern poets from Sannazaro to Spenser and Sidney, pastoral poetry was a valuable testing ground not only for the formation of their own poetic voices but also, on the model of Virgil, for the emergence of a vernacular literature that might parallel classical Latin. The poems themselves, however, generally feature young ‘unlettered’ shepherds who sing of raw, unsatisfied, and occasionally homoerotic longing in a distinctly Petrarchan idiom. These two aspects of the pastoral tradition, the aesthetic and the sexual—whose at times awkward relationship to one another has not been fully explored—are the twin foci of Paul J. Hecht’s study, What Rosalind Likes: Pastoral, Gender, and the Founding of English Verse. Focusing on three iterations of the character of ‘Rosalind’ from 1579 to 1600—in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, Lodge’s Rosalynde, and Shakespeare’s As You Like It—Hecht’s book thus undertakes two tasks. What he calls ‘the technical history of “Rosalind”’ examines the technical evolution of English verse across these three works, while the ‘biography of poetry’ considers both ‘the development of feminine identity’ and a movement towards ‘the frank and unpejorative portrayal of the homoerotic’ (pp. 3, 11).