The Potency of Pastoral in the Hispanic Baroque by Anne Holloway

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Potency of Pastoral in the Hispanic Baroque by Anne Holloway Felipe Valencia Anne Holloway. The Potency of Pastoral in the Hispanic Baroque. TAMESIS, 2017. 240 PP. IN HER MONOGRAPH on seventeenth-century Hispanic pastoral poetry, Anne Holloway sets out to illuminate the possibilities that the pastoral mode opened up in a wide array of poetic texts. She proposes that throughout the seventeenth century, on both sides of the Hispanic Atlantic, pastoral “emerges as a productive site for poetic experimentation” (201). The book consists of five chapters and a very brief afterword. Each chapter begins with an overview of relevant scholarship on the author studied or on the appropriate theoretical frame. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction to the book as a whole, stating its scope and aims and providing an overview of each of the chapters. Holloway also identifies the main constants of the early modern interpretation of ancient bucolic models and sets forth three foundational claims for the subsequent chapters. First, she contends that the Renaissance inherited from ancient commentaries on the Bucolics, or Eclogues, by Virgil the “general recognition … of the potential of the pastoral mode for the expression of political concerns” (17). The other two claims have to do with the most famous poems by Luis de Góngora: the Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea (1612) and the Soledades (1613–17), both of which are set in pastoral sites and are epics: the former an epyllion and the latter what Mercedes Blanco has termed an “epopeya de la paz” (Góngora heroico. Las Soledades y la tradición épica, Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2012). Holloway argues that these two poems motivated a wholesale “re-conception of the pastoral” (184) in the Hispanic world, liberating an “epic energy subsumed” in the mode (29), which in fact first arose as a subspecies of the epic (12–13). The other claim is that the cyclopean voice—a recognizable subgenre since the Idylls by the Greek poet Theocritus (ca. 300–260 BCE)—forms the core of Spanish baroque pastoral. Idyll 11 had introduced the cyclops Polyphemus to the pastoral bower: although in Theocritus’s hands he continues to be the object of mockery, as he was in Homer’s Odyssey, he is no longer a fearsome adversary but rather a pathetic and unrequited lover who sings a tender song to woo absent Galatea. After it was taken up by Virgil in Eclogue 2, the cyclopean song presented a [End Page 157] number of stock features, most notably the contemplation and defense of the self as one who is not too unsightly to be loved. Ovid further transformed the myth in book 13 of his Metamorphoses when he fused the Homeric monster and the Theocritean pastoral lover into one and the same: he who entreats Galatea when she favors the strapping Acis instead, and then, upon seeing the lovers in the act, resorts to murderous violence against his rival. Holloway maintains that Góngora’s Polifemo, a retelling of the Ovidian version, plays an “axiomatic role … in Baroque rewritings and critical re-evaluations of pastoral poetry” (6). Chapters 2 and 5 track the impact of Góngora’s cyclopean song, and chapter 4 also makes frequent reference to Góngora’s pastoral legacy. Holloway’s book thus expects its readers to know the Soledades and particularly the Polifemo well. A more systematic overview of them in the first chapter is missing, as well as a brief discussion of gender to seed the extensive treatment of the subject in chapters 2 and 3. The exploration begins in earnest with chapter 2, which centers on the pastoral verse by Pedro Soto de Rojas (1584–1658). Holloway shows how the poet from Granada, long in the shadow of Góngora and neglected by scholars, grapples with the legacy of Petrarch and of Góngora’s Polifemo in the eclogues and pastoral-themed sonnets contained in Desengaño de amor en rimas (1623), his Petrarchan lyrical sequence, as well as in the recently attributed Fábula de Alfeo y Aretusa (6). Holloway directs our attention in those texts to the “increased prominence for female voices in the imitative fables that...