“To O’erthrow Law” and “O’erwhelm Custom”: Shakespeare’s Play with the Pastoral
“To O’erthrow Law” and “O’erwhelm Custom”: Shakespeare’s Play with the Pastoral

Summary/Abstract: The paper proposes a novel outlook on the pastoral mode practiced by early modern authors, with which Shakespeare experimented. We argue that the classical (ancient) pastoral which was replicated by other early modern texts was employed differently by Shakespeare. We first read As You Like It and The Winter’s Tale as examples of this experimentation, which departs from the classical norms of the pastoral, and then we suggest that Shakespeare brings this experimentation to the next level, by working on the evolution of the pattern from the early romantic comedy to the late romance. Thus, following scholarship, we show that, in Shakespeare, the expected idealism of the pastoral is downplayed and nuanced by irony in As You Like It and by a baroque construction in The Winter’s Tale. Our paper then focuses on the evolution of the Shakespearean pastoral from As You Like It (where it focuses on a unique, mythological character, Rosalind-Ganymede, who channels all the energies of the play and orchestrates the entire plot) to The Winter’s Tale (where the pastoral works through multiple subjects, who instrumentalise the plot; even if Perdita-Flora is a central, mythical character, other characters/ instruments are indispensable, like Hermione, Paulina, Autolycus, etc.). Last but not least, the paper demonstrates that Shakespeare’s departure from the classical pastoral norms is not only a literary-aesthetic choice, but an expression of a new early modern awareness about space, which reflects new social, economic and demographic realities.

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