Of Oaten Flutes and Magic Potions: Montemayor's Diana as PastoralRomance

Schneider, Regina.

Narrative, Volume 10, Number 3, October 2002, pp. 262-276 (Article)

Published by The Ohio State University PressDOI: 10.1353/nar.2002.0020

For additional information about this article

Access provided by University Of South Florida Libraries (17 Apr 2013 11:05 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nar/summary/v010/10.3schneider.html

Regina Schneider is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at theUniversity of Fribourg, Switzerland. She is currently preparing a book on Renaissance genres and Sid-ney’s Arcadias as well as working on the historical development of free indirect discourse in Englishprose fiction since 1558.

NARRATIVE, Vol. 10, No. 3 (October 2002)Copyright 2002 by The Ohio State University

Of Oaten Flutes and MagicPotions: Montemayor’s Dianaas Pastoral Romance

The importance of Jorge de Montemayor’s Siete Libros de la Diana for the de-velopment of novelistic writing in Western Europe has variously been pointed out;evidence to its instant popularity with readers and writers alike is furnished by thelarge number of editions that appeared in various languages in the decades followingits first publication around 1559.1 The reasons for its success were probably mani-fold and explanations have been attempted. Carroll B. Johnson, for example, tracesthe popularity of this early modern bestseller to its unique balancing of lyrical con-ventions of the traditional pastoral with narrative elements of the Greek romance.The presence of such devices as the in medias res beginning or the novella-like ret-rospective narratives of some characters “saves the work from becoming an endlesseclogue” (26). Ruth El Saffar is one of the few critics who note that this symmetrydoes not extend far beyond the surface of the seven books; she finds it “more re-warding to find in the work’s imperfections a reflection of the author’s states of mindin a love situation the inherent dualism of which he was never able to transcend”(186). I agree with El Saffar about the general imbalance of the Diana. Her argumentis, however, like that of Johnson and earlier critics, thematic rather than structural,and I contend that a close analysis of some of the narrative devices that Montemayoremployed reveals not only a clear shift of the text’s genre from pastoral to romance(and not a number of narrative parentheses within a pastoral frame, as Juan BautistaAvalle-Arce argues [79]), but also shows that this shift was the result of artistic in-tention rather than of a lack of poetic skill. The following article, then, aims to in-vestigate the poet’s particular manipulation of point of view and narrative voice, and,at the same time, to argue for a new approach to pinpointing the rather elusive pas-toral as a genre instead of as a mode, as Paul Alpers has done.2

For the uninitiated, it would probably be helpful to start with a synopsis of the

Regina Schneider

Diana. The seven books begin with the encounter of two shepherds, Sireno and Syl-vano, and a beautiful shepherdess, Selvagia, who lament their amorous misfortunes to-gether. On the second day, their songs are joined by those of three beautiful nymphs,but the pastoral idyll is rudely interrupted when three savages appear and try to rape thenymphs. At the last minute, the helpless nymphs and shepherds are rescued by thebeautiful Amazon-shepherdess Felismena, who happens to be roaming the area insearch of her unfaithful lover. After their successful rescue, the nymphs invite Felis-mena and the shepherds to the palace of their mistress Felicia, the wise keeper of a tem-ple devoted to the goddess Diana, who will, as they promise, cure all their miseries. Ontheir way to this temple, which is in the nearby woods, the group picks up another beau-tiful but unhappy maiden, Belisa. When they arrive at the palace, the group is warmlywelcomed and entertained for a couple of days. Following some hearty feasting andconversation, Felicia decants a magic potion for the three shepherds, whose miseriesare, after a deep slumber, transformed into general happiness: Sylvano and Selvagia in-stantaneously fall in love with each other, while Sireno forgets about his unfaithfulbeloved, Diana. Fascinated, Felismena and Belisa wish to partake of the magic draughtas well, but Felicia tells them that their problems will be solved by destiny itself. Theshepherds then return home, and Belisa stays at the palace with Felicia while Felismenacontinues her search for the unfaithful Don Felix. Among the various people she meetson her way are Belisa’s lost lover, Arsileo, whom she directs to Felicia’s palace for theirreunion, as well as an unknown knight, whom she rescues from a bloody combat. As itturns out, this knight is the repentant Don Felix, and the two of them also return to Fe-licia’s palace, where all the couples get happily married—end of story.

At first glance, this may seem to be just another ordinary, slightly incrediblepastoral romance as they abounded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Itsformal arrangement, however, deserves more detailed attention. The first three booksare pastoral in the conventional sense: with the exception of the short incident withthe savages in Book II,3 Montemayor portrays lovelorn and unhappy shepherds andshepherdesses who utter their laments, in the vein of Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia(1504), “the better to passe away the burning heate of the day” (Montemayor, SevenBooks 51).4 The magic potion, however, dispensed at the beginning of Book V, setsnew standards for pastoral lovers—or what shepherd before Sireno ever “forgot” tolove the object of his affection? In the second part, especially in Books VI and VII,the author also seems to be more interested in those characters who do not really be-long to the pastoral world (Belisa, Arsileo, and Felismena) than in the native shep-herds (Sireno, Sylvano, and Selvagia). This change of allegiance corresponds toseveral striking differences on the formal level of the book, because the magic po-tion, an indispensable feature of many Renaissance narratives, influences not onlythe plot but also the way in which the story is told. In the first three books, the audi-ence has no privileged insight into the characters’ situation. Virtually everything thereader knows about the thoughts, feelings, or background of Sireno and his compan-ions in the main text must be inferred from what they tell each other, be it in verse, insongs and poems, or in prose, in the form of a retrospective narrative. In the absenceof the help of an overt omniscient narrator, the necessary background informationthat enables the reader to understand these events (especially the relationship ofSireno and Sylvano) is not provided by the story itself, but by the “Argument of the

Montemayor’s Diana as Pastoral Romance 263

first Seven Bookes.” This “Argument,” which precedes the story and forms a kind ofprologue rather than an actual summary of the events to follow, removes the narra-tive burden from the main text and thus allows for a more purely mimetic mode.5

The first part of the Diana, then, is told from the external point of view of an(imaginary) detached camera, which merely registers perceptible data without anyexplanatory or interpretative interference of an overt narrator.6 Thus, the attention ofthe audience is distributed evenly and not focused by a narrative voice that evaluatesthe characters or weighs their actions; the field of vision is panoramic. In addition,this point of view is stable, because the imaginary camera is—at least in Books I andII—fixed upon a particular meadow where the shepherds meet and which the variouscharacters enter and leave as they would the stage in a theatrical performance. Hence,the distance between observer and observed remains rather great but constant. Thisstable point of view is established in the very first sentence of Book I: “Downe fromthe hils of Leon came forgotten Syrenus” (10).7 The use of “came” rather than “went”implies a movement towards the spectator and moreover creates the impression of awide camera angle, which is able to take in the whole mountain range at once. Whenthe shepherds, nymphs, and Felismena eventually do walk towards Felicia’s palace inBook III, the “camera” stays with the group as a whole, at the same distance as be-fore, while the landscape seems to pass by, as it does in some early silent films. Thisexternal point of view, however, coincides neither with Franz K. Stanzel’s “externalperspective” (49, 58–59), which implies omniscience, nor with Gérard Genette’s“external focalization” (188–90), which employs a much more limited angle and issupposed to be located on the scene of action rather than removed from it. I shalltherefore consider this perspective, which I should like to call theatrical for the timebeing, an independent combination of focal aspects, which to my knowledge has notyet been described explicitly in any of the current narratological models.8

In the second part of the Diana, the narrative situation changes. For the first time inthe story, the imaginary camera leaves the stage, and the reader’s attention is focused ona single protagonist at a time, that is, we now follow the movements of individual char-acters rather than those of the whole group. Thus the reader witnesses some kind of ac-tion directly on the main level of the text rather than by the vicarious hearsay of the insetnarratives. Moreover, this figural point of view in Books V to VII is located on the sceneitself: the distance between the camera and the unfolding events has been decreased andthe field of vision limited. This restriction in scope, however, is balanced by an in-creased depth of view.9 As soon as our attention is limited to an individual character, weare allowed insight into his or her thoughts and feelings: “And faire Felismena (who hadthat day put on again her Shepherdesses weeds) taking her leave of the sage Ladie . . .went that way that they did direct her. Felismena went not alone, neither did her imagi-nations give her leave so to do: for on the one side she went thinking of that, which thewise Ladie had told her; and considering on the other, what little hap and lesse successe,she had yet in her love, which made her doubt of her future happines” (189–90).10 Thistransparency of the characters’ minds further reduces the distance between reader andcharacter and calls for our empathy with the respective protagonists. But Felismena isnot the only character on whom our attention is focused; part of the tale is dedicated toBelisa, her lover Arsileo, and others. Since there is more than one focal character, anomniscient narrator is needed to switch between the various scenes of action:

264 Regina Schneider

And with talking of these and other matters, they were come to their village bythat time the Sunne had hidden all his beames, and taking leave of one another,they went to their owne houses. . . .

But comming to Arsileus againe, who went with great joye and desire to-wards the wood where Dianas Temple was, to see his Shepherdesse, he came toa little brooke. (202–203 my emphasis except for names)11

Also, after the events at the palace, this narrator first steps out of the obscurity of beingmerely an abstract mediating instance and speaks up himself: “The ShepherdesseDiana came thither by chance, to seeke a lambe that had runne out of the foulde,which Sylvanus had tyed to a myrtle tree, for when they came thither, they founde itdrinking at the cleere spring and by the marke knewe it to be faire Dianas. But beingcome (as I say) and curteously welcommed of the newe lovers, they sat them downeupon the greene grasse” (217 my emphasis).12 In the first half of the story, there is nosuch overt narratorial voice that addresses the audience directly; from Book V on-wards, however, it accompanies the reader through the rest of the story. Even if thisvoice remains mostly in the background and only rarely addresses the audienceovertly, once alerted to its existence, the reader stays aware of its continued presence.One can thus say that the first part of the Diana, that is, what happens before the eventsat Felicia’s palace, is marked by a fixed point of view as well as an essentially mimeticnature and displays a very static quality. The perspective in the last three books, on theother hand, is characterized by its concentration on individual protagonists and the ac-count of their different experiences by an omniscient narrator; this narrator no longeremploys a bird’s-eye perspective but seems to accompany his characters on their wan-derings. This mobile point of view, which largely corresponds to Stanzel’s “figuralperspective” (49, 58–59) and Genette’s “vision with” (188–90), makes this secondpart of the work much more dynamic. It is not by coincidence that Felismena leavesthe pastoral wood with its nymphs and wonders in Book VII: her journey to Coimbrareflects and concretizes this independent point of view on the level of the plot. The fea-tures of the two parts of the Diana can then be grouped as follows:

Montemayor’s Diana as Pastoral Romance 265

Books I to III: Books V to VII:

• panoramic view; wide angle • focus on individual characters; limited scope

• fixed point of view • changing points of view• stable distance • flexible distance• description of setting and speech • added description of action or events

situation• “action” consists in telling stories • narrative in the true sense of the word• no access to the characters’ thoughts • privileged information• no overt omniscient narrator • overt omniscient narrator guides

through the story, switches betweendifferent points of view

• essentially static • essentially dynamic: progressionthrough various settings

The narrative situation defined in the left column is intrinsically scenic; that is, thereader’s position is that of a spectator in the theater. The situation defined in the rightcolumn, on the other hand, is inherently narrative. It resembles more that of a cinemaaudience: what the spectator sees is determined by the camera with its different an-gles and abrupt cuts between scenes. In the second part, as in any modern novel, di-alogue and the scene of speaking are still used, but as modules among other kinds ofdiscourse—such as the description of objects and the narration of events—and nolonger as a predominant structural device. The transition between these two perspec-tives is effected in and by Book IV. Although this middle book is dominated by Feli-cia and the description of her estate, in my view, neither she nor the palace have anytransforming power in themselves, as Judith M. Kennedy (xxviii) and Johnson (27)claim. Book IV is important to the structure of the whole work, indeed, in that itforeshadows transformations on various levels: the description of Felicia’s palace asthe figures approach and amble through her estate is characterized by an increasedattention to architectural details, which implies that the hitherto-distant camera hasmoved closer to the objects of its attention; the distance between observer and ob-served has decreased. But the camera still does not pierce the surface of these ob-jects: what we see is still two-dimensional in the sense that a painting of the samescene would give us the same amount of information. Only Orpheus’s subsequentsong about the Spanish ladies foreshadows the appearance of the overt omniscientnarrator, when the narrative function of his song is stressed by the author: “The songof renowned Orpheus was so pleasant in Felismenas eares, and in all theirs, thatheard it, that it held them in such a suspence, as if they had passed by no other thingbut that, which they had before their eies” (153).13 Since the song consists of a seriesof close-ups that focus on individual statues, it also prepares the reader for the per-spective that will follow in remaining three books—much as the banquet, with itscourtly conversations about love, is a preparation for the decanting of the magic po-tion and for its effects. Similarly, the fact that Felismena is briefly singled out inBook IV and led by Felicia to a separate room for a change of costume (Mon-temayor, Diana 138; Siete Libros 243–44) announces the split of the party intosmaller groups from Book V onwards as well as the increased emphasis on Felis-mena’s experiences in the remaining books. The role of the descriptive Book IV,then, is one of transition rather than of transformation in that it prepares us for the ef-fect of the “agua encantada” from Book V onwards.

As mentioned, the narrative situation described in the left column of the abovechart corresponds to that of the audience of a theatrical performance: the scene is sta-tic, and access to the characters’ inner world is limited to the spoken word. The situ-ation described on the right is characterized by the combination of a perspectivelimited to individual characters with an accordingly increased amount of informationabout them dispensed by an omniscient narrator. These two columns thus not onlyrepresent the difference between the two parts of the Diana, but, more generally, thedifference between two basic literary modes: drama and narrative.14 Considering theresemblance that the structure of the first half bears to that of other works of the pas-toral tradition (such as Virgil’s or Mantuan’s Eclogues), I will even go a step furtherand suggest that the static, discourse-based scene, with its fixed point of view and

266 Regina Schneider

lack of insight into the protagonists, is typical of the pastoral genre, whereas the om-niscient narrator, combined with a variable focus and access to the characters’ innerworld, seems to be characteristic of the romance in general. These different perspec-tives reflect the equally different kinds of “plot” the two genres express. I have al-ready mentioned that Felismena’s leaving Diana’s wood in Book VII is a realizationof the mobile point of view in the second part of the tale. By contrast, the static formof the pastoral reflects its aversion to any kind of change and thus the virtual absenceof plot. As Paul Alpers has pointed out, pastorals are always about a situation, andpastoral figures perceive their condition as stable and unalterable; they only lamenttheir unhappy state, but they never try to redress it: “When ‘real’ shepherds . . . re-count their histories, they not only mean to explain their present situations, they alsoregard these situations as unchanging: in telling what has happened to them, they de-fine what they are” (352). Similarly, death (in the sense of “being dead”) is the quin-tessential image of an irrevocable state and thus represents absolute stasis, which iswhy laments for dead shepherds play another important role in pastoral poetry. Thefundamental experience of sudden change, on the other hand, is symbolized by theact of falling in love as portrayed in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for example, and as ef-fected by the magic potion in the Diana. Unlike the neoplatonic pastoral lover, thelover in a romance wants nothing more than the consummation of his love, and mar-riage, the most obvious dramatization of such a consummation, requires the physicalpresence of the loved one. Accordingly, women seem to appear as characters only inromances but not in pastorals.15 The very notion of a “happy ending” implies achange for the better, and is thus narrative by definition. Given the resistance of thepastoral against change of any kind, marriage therefore has to be considered a motifthat is characteristic only of the romance genre, but not of the pastoral form, even ifthe wedding is celebrated in a rural environment.16 Characteristically, the single-most important disharmony in the first part of the Diana is created by the fact thatSireno’s bride did get married. However, this background information is given in thenarrative prologue rather than in the pastoral Book I.

The association of the pastoral with a quasi-dramatic point of view also con-forms to concepts of literary criticism current in the mid-sixteenth century: due tothe mimetic nature of the eclogue, the quintessential pastoral poem, theorists such asJulius Caesar Scaliger (I 92) and Giovanni Giorgio Trissino (224) classified the pas-toral as a dramatic genre even if it was written to be read rather than to be performed.The romance, by contrast, was considered a modern form of the classical epic: “Andit does not take much to convince me that this manner of composing Romances inour time replaces the heroic compositions of the Greeks and the Romans. Because asthese wrote down the famous feats of strong knights in their languages, so those whohave devoted themselves to writing Romances deal with invented stories about whatis commonly called errant knights” (Giraldi Cinthio 5–6 my translation). The epic,however, was inherently narrative, and the romance, with its idea of quest, impliedmovement and adventure as well as emotional and psychological trials of the hero.Moreover, the figural perspective that I postulate for the Renaissance romance showsthe same structural characteristics that Dieter Mehl, for example, identified in me-dieval (English) romances: their episodic structure reflects a variety of locations be-

Montemayor’s Diana as Pastoral Romance 267

tween which an overt narrator has to switch with the help of some commonplace for-mulas. Due to the originally oral performance of the romances, the voice of the nar-rator frequently appears in the form of direct addresses to the audience; andcommentaries on the characters are given some prominence (22–28). Last but notleast, “the greater part of the action is told from the point of view of the hero. Thenarrator . . . describes every episode as it appears to the hero whose surprise and as-tonishment we are encouraged to share” (27). It is this alignment of the reader’s per-spective with that of the characters that enables her identification with their plightsand that seems to have made the romances so popular with the general public.17

This clear structural division of the Diana into mimetic representation in thepastoral first three books and diegetic narration in the last three leads me to conceiveof the work’s genre as “pastoral followed by romance” rather than as “pastoral mod-ified by romance.” It seems to be not so much a question of balance, as Johnsonclaims (“[Montemayor’s] triumph consists in keeping it moving for an appropriatelength without ever really losing the equilibrium between the pastoral-lyrical and thenovelistic-narrative” [35]), as one of sequence. His insistence on the Diana’s sym-metrical structure hinges on its “epic” in medias res beginning. In my view, however,plunging right into a story without any preliminary information is what happens indramatic as much as in epic poetry.18 Furthermore, the opening of Book I is told fromwhat seems to be an omniscient perspective: “Downe from the hils of Leon came for-gotten Syrenus, whom love, fortune, and time did so entreate, that by the least greefe,that he suffered in his sorrowfull life, he looked for no less then to loose the same.The unfortunate shepherd did not now bewaile the harme, which her absence didthreaten him, and the feare of her forgetfulnes did not greatly trouble his minde, bi-cause he sawe all the prophecies of his suspicion so greatly to his prejudice accom-plished, that now he thought he had no more misfortunes to menace him” (10).19 Butthese two sentences are the only instance of privileged information the reader is al-lowed in the first three books, and they can be explained precisely by their pastoralcontext without interfering with the external theatrical perspective that I postulateabove. In the “Argument” that immediately precedes this opening, it is claimed thatthe following events “have truly happened, though they goe muffled under pastorallnames and style” (10),20 and in her introduction Kennedy assures us that “Sireno ispositively identified as Montemayor” (xvii). Her view conforms to the customarypastoral practice of the poet inscribing himself in his own work by means of a per-sona.21 The events in the Diana, then, are supposed to represent Sireno’s/Montemayor’s recollections, much as the Italian Arcadia consists of Sincero’s/San-nazaro’s memories, albeit in the third rather than in the first person. The assumptionthat the tale represents a fictionalized account of the poet’s own experiences is un-derpinned by the fact that, although we see Sireno from quite a distance, at the be-ginning we are allowed as much information as he would have at his disposal. Forexample, only the names of those characters who are familiar to him are given in thebody of the text: “About this time . . . Syrenus might perceive a Shepherd commingdowne pace by pace, and staying awhile at every step. . . . Syrenus knew him by andby” (15). But other characters, like the nymphs, have to introduce themselves: “Butbicause we may knowe what thou art (which is our chiefe desire) we will inforce that

268 Regina Schneider

favour with this small desert, by telling thee first what we are” (79). Or, like Selva-gia, they have to be introduced by characters who know them: “Whereupon Syrenus,who had not of a long time fed in those vallies, asked Sylvanus what she was” (28).22

The thoughts of his persona, however, are accessible to the poet-narrator without histransgressing the boundaries of verisimilitude or undermining the otherwise imper-sonal perspective, in which the thoughts and feelings of his fellow characters remainopaque. Further, considering that the opening sentences directly follow the “Argu-ment,” which was understood as a representation of the author’s voice (see for exam-ple Giraldi Cinthio 2[47]–48), I would argue not only that they conform to thedetached pastoral perspective (rather than represent an alien epic-narrative element),but also that they operate as a transition from the extradiegetic to the diegetic leveland must not be considered as setting the dominant perspective for the books to follow.

The early separation of “who speaks” from “who sees” that indeed constitutesthe essence of the pastoral persona could thus be said to embody the Renaissanceequivalent to Genette’s basic concept of focalization. Philip Sidney, who used theDiana as one of the models for his Arcadias and who was always alert to the theo-retical implications of narrative devices, cleverly inserted this curious constellationas an operating element in the plot of the revised version. There he has Musidorustell Pamela “as of a third person, the tale of mine own love and estate” (New Arcadia129)—only to have him promptly run into trouble when his version does not corre-spond to what Pamela has heard (137). The form of third-person narration for whatis really a first-person account may seem a rather unusual way of telling one’s story,but it was precisely the conscious detachment of the narrator from his experience,the shift from first- to third-person narration, that allowed the poet to recollect a sup-posedly painful past and that was a crucial element of the pastoral experience in gen-eral. In Books V to VII, however, this concept of the pastoral persona also fallsvictim to the magic potion: from Book V onwards it is the disembodied “I” ratherthan Sireno who acts as a narrator. The forgetfulness that Felicia’s draught induces inSireno not only cancels his unhealthy attachment to the shepherdess Diana, but alsoseems to interfere more generally with his ability to channel the poet’s pastoral rec-ollections, thus depriving him of his narrative authority. Once Montemayor intro-duces the omniscient “I” in order to switch between locations and starts to speak upin his own story, Sireno loses his privileged status as the poet’s persona and becomesa character like all the others. By changing from speaking through a third-personpersona to using the first-person pronoun, however, the text ultimately and irrevoca-bly turns from mimetic to diegetic, from dramatic to narrative.

By changing his narrative perspective, then, Montemayor made the movementthrough the seven books, the journey from the pastoral meadow to the city of Coim-bra, symbolic of the transition from a pastoral focus on the group to the more indi-vidual perspective in the romance. This unidirectional shift, however, representsmore than a mere change of narrative devices; it embodies a whole new set of values.Writers of pastoral poetry attempted to reinvent a golden world that was not subjectto the hazards of ongoing change—political, economical, religious—that governedthe brazen world of reality in Augustan Rome as much as in sixteenth-century

Montemayor’s Diana as Pastoral Romance 269

England or Spain. Any change to this paradise equalled a reenactment of the Fall ofMankind. Romance, on the other hand, started from the alchemistic idea that changecould mean an ennobling transformation and that improvement was possible as longas human beings believed in themselves, as Felismena and Belisa are told. Thelamenting pastoral characters, who lack this kind of self-reliance, need a magic po-tion to achieve this quantum leap. The shift in point of view that we can trace in theDiana is therefore not only one in the basic sense of the word, in which a more mod-ern, individualized way of storytelling won the day over the more distanced and im-personal one reflected in the pastoral, but also one in its figurative sense as signifyinga reorientation from lamenting the mutability of life to perceiving it as a chance forthe better. Ultimately, the change of “perspective” symbolizes the transition from astatic, essentially medieval world picture to a more modern and dynamic view oflife, in which everyone can mould her own destiny. This holds especially true for thefemale protagonists, who are no longer absent objects of desire but become, like Fe-lismena (or later Rosalynde), active agents in rewriting their own destinies.23 Ac-cordingly, the title of Montemayor’s tale points precisely to this (especially female?)potential of changing shape. As the goddess of domestic animals, Diana is the nat-ural deity to revere in pastoral surroundings, and her name befits the—mostly ab-sent—shepherdess for whom Sireno is pining initially. As the goddess of the moon,Diana also alludes to the fickleness of which the shepherd accuses his beloved. Onthe other hand, Felicia, the priestess of the Diana temple, seems to favor Felismena,the chaste maiden who uses her bow so skillfully to kill the savages in Book II.Given that Diana is also the goddess of the hunt, Montemayor’s title thus announceswho will absorb most of the narrator’s interest in Books V to VII and who is the trueheroine of the work. At the same time, the proverbial inconstancy of the moon alsorecalls the figure of unreliable Fortuna and her wheel (in this case embodied by themagic potion), thus reminding the reader that the pastoral tranquillity cannot be up-held forever.

Nevertheless, despite the clear shift in narrative perspective, Montemayor didnot write a romance per se but kept the pastoral first half, so that we have to ask our-selves what reasons he could have had for combining the two perspectives in a singletext. Was it simply a change of heart as he was writing his tale? Or a matter of show-ing the contrast between the two perspectives? Given the genre’s aversion to changeor conflicts of any kind, the pastoral was an essentially static form, as we have seen.What came closest to a “plot” in pastoral poetry was a singing contest, but even therean amicable solution was often preferred to an actual decision that would upset thedelicate balance in the golden world.24 Accordingly, the pastoral “action” was lim-ited to various self-contained forms of discourse, mostly to set pieces in the form ofpoems and songs or philosophical debates. By using dialogue as a framing device,the impact of change could be dispersed and banned from the pastoral world lest itdisrupt its harmony and stability (even if it was the promise of a story that first andforemost aroused and sustained narrative interest). The only events that are presentedto the reader in pastorals are “things done in former time or other place” (Sidney,“Defence” 114). The disadvantage of concentrating exclusively on the “scene ofspeaking” was, however, that there were only so many variations of the same theme,

270 Regina Schneider

as Jon R. Snyder has pointed out: “What kind of action can possibly be representedby a dialogue between speakers sitting in the shade of a tree or at a banquet table?”(33). Moreover, the narrative distance between reader and characters, caused by thedetached point of view of the pastoral perspective, limited the audience’s emotionalinvolvement with the story in spite of the shepherds’ heartfelt laments. The romance,on the other hand, with its multiplicity of characters and scenes of action and with itsendless complications, fascinated the audience but could barely be unified by a sin-gle narrative voice, no matter how insistent that narrator was.25 Now, through Mon-temayor’s combination of the two genres, the pastoral gained narrative interest andplot from the romance. The omniscience and flexible point of view of the romancenarrator helped overcome the stasis of the traditional pastoral. Moreover, by reduc-ing the distance between observer and observed and by giving the reader access tothe thoughts and feelings of the characters, the romance perspective allowed for thereader’s emotional identification with the characters and their joys and sufferings.The essentially mimetic pastoral, with its stationary point of view and unity of place,on the other hand, offered structural stability to the highly volatile romance: with apastoral scaffolding integrated into it, the romance’s sprawling form gained a stablecenter in which the errant protagonists found a place to rest and the poet a model fora more unified plot. By keeping the pastoral perspective in the first half of the Diana,finally, Montemayor paid tribute to his predecessor Sannazaro before pointing be-yond the traditional form towards new narrative possibilities.

To conclude, what I have defined as the pastoral and the romance perspectivesare mutually exclusive because they are determined by unequivocal decisions: eithera story is focused on particular characters or it is not; either we as readers have ac-cess to the inner world of characters or we do not. Paradoxically, the static, unfo-cused point of view of the pastoral, with its largely unmediated presentation, allowsfor the representation of alternative perspectives on life (Alpers 115), while the mul-tiple focus of the romance calls for a mediator and thus the filter of a single-voiced—and ideologically biased—omniscient narrator. I believe, however, that rather thanbeing deterministic and reductive, the precise nature of such distinctions facilitatesthe analysis of texts, not their definition. For example, in Sidney’s Old Arcadia, oneof the texts most closely linked to the Diana in theme and structure, the applicationof my criteria shows that only the Eclogues are governed by the pastoral perspective,with its fixed point of view, wide angle, and lack of character transparency, whereasthe five “Books or Acts” of the main text, with their omniscient narrator and mobilepoint of view, are modelled upon the romance perspective of the Diana’s secondhalf. Sidney seems to have been very aware of the potential inherent in this perspec-tive, indeed, since large parts of the intrigue rely precisely on the fact that the variouscharacters are in different places (the two lodges, the cave, various parts of thewoods) and cannot see each other, whereas the nocturnal entertainments of the inter-ludes serve as a rallying point to assemble the various characters in a single location.Like Montemayor, Sidney uses both perspectives in the same text, although by split-ting the Eclogues into four interludes, his structure achieves the balance that is ab-sent from his predecessor’s work. And yet, such a balancing act would probably havediminished the Spaniard’s achievement. By moving the conventional pastoral so

Montemayor’s Diana as Pastoral Romance 271

decisively into the realm of romance as he did, Montemayor rendered the omniscientnarrator and the presence of strong women characters such indispensable features ofRenaissance prose fiction that modern critics consider them as dominant characteris-tics of pastoral romances (see, for example, Rhodes 352).

The analysis of point of view in this Renaissance text further shows that thescenic approach, that is, the lack of privileged information, is by no means a typi-cally modern narrative perspective, although modern narratologists usually citeErnest Hemingway’s impersonal and distanced descriptions in short stories such as“Killers” or “Hills like White Elephants” as prime examples. Renaissance literarytheorists such as Scaliger even postulated that the pastoral (and thus the externalpoint of view) represented the earliest form of poetry (I 94). Although his explana-tions may sound rather fantastic and/or naïve to modern ears, it is easy to understandhow theorists like him came to this conclusion: the scenic nature of Theocritus’s andVirgil’s pastoral represents the fundamental discursive situation of storytelling, andits impersonal dramatic perspective embodies the idea of verisimilitude in that wecan never know what another person thinks or feels unless he or she tells us so. Thefact that current narrative typologies (such as those of Genette or Stanzel) do not de-scribe this variant seems due to the fact that so many narratologists develop theirconcepts on the basis of nineteenth- and twentieth-century narratives, in which theparticular combination of wide-angle and limited insight into the characters’ innerworld no longer appears. Nevertheless, what I have termed the “pastoral perspective”represents a basic narrative situation that may resurface at any point in literary his-tory, depending on the prevailing view of the human condition—and on an artist’swhim. To isolate a particular “pastoral perspective” that differs from its romanticcounterpart, then, also allows us to define the pastoral as a proper genre beyond itsmodal functions and independent of literary fashions. Mantuan’s Eclogues, San-nazaro’s Arcadia, Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, and Sidney’s “Eclogues” thusqualify as “pastorals,” while the Diana and Sidney’s Arcadias do not—of course,such a statement does not imply any kind of value judgment. Montemayor’s achieve-ment indeed consists in having been the first to express his view of the world bycombining pastoral and romance structures in a text that proved immensely influen-tial and that was copied by dozens of writers all over Europe. The magic potionopened not only the eyes of the shepherds to their true happiness, but also those ofwriters and readers alike to the potential inherent in combining scenic presentationbased on dramatic dialogue with a refined insight into the characters’ emotional con-flicts and an independent narrator. Compared to the later novel, romances may stillhave taken place in a fantasy world in which “nothing happens,” as Hamilton be-lieves (288), but compared to the stasis and unearthliness of the locus amoenus of theearlier pastoral, the romance definitely brought Arcadia to the real world. Mon-temayor’s Seven Books of the Diana provided a fruitful stimulant to writers of narra-tive fiction and eventually paved the way for the later development of the modernnovel. Even if it looks hopelessly dated from a modern perspective, at the time it wasvery up-to-date and excitingly new—fashions in literary history come and go like thegrazing sheep of the inconstant shepherdess Diana.26

272 Regina Schneider

ENDNOTES

1. For a discussion of the date of the earliest printed version of the Diana, see Montemayor (Siete Libros23–26). All references to the Spanish text of the Diana will be to this edition; Julián Arribas also pro-vides an extensive annotated list of all the Spanish editions of the Diana as well as of its translationsthroughout Europe from the mid-sixteenth to the present day (Montemayor, Siete Libros 21–83). Allreferences to its English translation will be to Montemayor, Seven Books. Bartholomew Yong appar-ently translated the book into English as early as 1583, although it was not published until 1598(Kennedy xxxi).

2. “Literary pastoral . . . includes not only the whole range of formal eclogues—pastoral elegies, lovecomplaints, singing-contests and the like—but also pastoral romances, pastoral lyrics, pastoral come-dies, and pastoral novels. If all these are pastoral, then we are certainly right to say that pastoral is nota genre. Rather it seems to be one of those types of literature—like tragedy, comedy, novel, romance,satire, and elegy—which have generic sounding names but which are more inclusive and general thanproper genres. We seek to recognize that pastoral is one of these literary types, when we say that it isnot a genre, but a mode” (46).

3. A thoughtful discussion of the artistic functions of this scene can be found in Avalle-Arce (72–74).See also Wardropper (141).

4. The original Spanish is “para después passar la calorosa siesta” (165). For a discussion of pastoralchronography in more general terms, see also Ettin (136–45).

5. That the “Argument” is meant to refer only to what happens in the very first book, not to the wholestory, is stated in the text itself: “and here begins the first book” [“y de aquí comiença el primerolibro”] (125); accordingly, the title in the Spanish original reads “Argumento deste libro” [“argumentof this book”]. When relating this “Argument” to the whole of the Diana, Yong seems to have hadSannazaro’s “Prologue” in mind, which is meant to frame all of the Arcadia. How strong an impres-sion Montemayor’s model made on later poets can be inferred from the fact that in his 1567 transla-tion George Turberville prefixed a verse “Argument” to each of Mantuan’s Eclogues. UnlikeMontemayor’s “Argument,” however, those of Turberville sum up the content of the following verserather than provide background information.

6. Rather than in its figurative sense the term, “point of view” is used here in its basic meaning of “posi-tion from which thing is viewed” (OED). See also Chatman, “A New Point of View on ‘Point ofView’” (Coming To Terms 139–60).

7. The original Spanish is “Baxava de las montañas de Leon el olvidado Sireno” (125).

8. Of course, one might argue that this theatrical perspective is simply a case of free focalization inwhich the narrator for the most part refuses to give the reader any access to the minds of his charac-ters. To subsume this stance under a category that can be stretched to cover a large number of differ-ent perspectives with varying degrees of distance, however, would be to deny these first three bookstheir particular narrative flavor. Below I shall give further reasons why I prefer to abstain from such aclassification, even in view of the privileged information given at the very beginning of Book I. For adiscussion of the term “free focalization,” see Susan S. Lanser (213–14) and William Nelles (80–81).

9. Unlike Chatman, I use the term “depth” not to refer to the amount of description provided by the nar-rator, but rather to whether or not the reader is allowed access to a particular character’s inner world,his or her transparency so to speak (Story and Discourse 155).

10. The Spanish is: “Y la hermosa Felismena, que ya aquel día se avía vestido en trage de pastora, des-pidiéndose de la sabia Felicia . . . se partió por el camino donde la guiaron. No yva sola Felismenaeste camino, ni aún sus imaginaciones le davan lugar a que lo fuesse. Pensando yva en lo que la sabiaFelicia le avía dicho y, por otra parte, considerando la poca ventura que hasta allí avía tendo en susamores, le hazía dudar de se decanso” (272).

Montemayor’s Diana as Pastoral Romance 273

11. Here is the Spanish original:

Y hablando en estas y otras cosas, llegaron al aldea a tiempo que de todo punto el sol avía escondidosus rayos; y despidiéndose unos de otros se fueron a sus posadas. . . .

Pues bolviendo a Arsileo, el qual con grandissimo contentamiento y desseo de ver su pastoracaminava hazia al bosque donde el templo de la diosa Diana estava, llegó junto a un arroyo. (284 myemphasis)

12. Montemayor’s original Spanish is: “llegó acaso la pastora Diana, que venía en busca de un corderoque de la manada se la avía huydo, el qual Sylvano tenía atado a un myrtho, porque quando allí lle-garon le halló beviendo en la clara fuente, y por la marca conocío ser de la hermosa Diana. Puessiendo, como digo, llegada y recebida de los dos nuevos amantes con gran cortesía, se assentó entre laverde yerva” (298 my emphasis).

13. The original reads: “La canción del celebrado Orpheo fue tan agradable a los oydos de Felismena yde todos los que la oyan que assí los tenía suspensos, como si por ninguno de ellos uviera passadomás de lo que presente tenían” (259). The last part of the sentence especially seems to be a referenceto Horace’s well-known Ars Poetica: “Less vividly is the mind stirred by what finds entrance throughthe ears / than by what is brought before the trusty eyes, / and what the spectator can see for himself”(464–65, ll. 180–82).

14. In line with the sixteenth-century theorists to whom I refer below, the terms “drama” and “dramatic”are here used in the Renaissance sense for texts “in which the poet does not speak for himself butbrings in characters to speak instead” (Trissino 224). See also Note 21.

15. In spite of the numerous articles stressing the importance of women in the pastoral romance, in noneof the “pure pastorals”—that is, eclogues written in the classical tradition such as those by Virgil,Mantuan, Sannazaro, Spenser, or even Sidney—do we find any female characters participating in theactual singing. The character “Ofelia” in the Italian Arcadia is referred to as “he” despite the feminineending of his name (see Sannazaro 53, 96, 122). The only female figure, an unnamed nymph, appearsin Chapter 12 accompanying Sincero on his journey back to his home town, which is no longer partof the pastoral world proper. In the Eclogues of Sidney’s Arcadia, the only “female” participantCleophila/Zelmane is, of course, the prince Pyrocles in disguise. The appearance of Selvagia in BookI of the Diana thus functions as an early signal that a generic shift is going to follow.

16. The courtship and marriage of Faustus in Mantuan’s first eclogue, for example, are removed from thepastoral present in time—they are supposed to have taken place “these iiij yeares space, or ij at least”(fol. 1v [l. 17])—and in mode, in that they are not directly portrayed but only recounted. Similarly,Lalus’s courtship of Kala may be described at the beginning in Sidney’s Third Eclogues, but againthis is supposed to have happened before the actual festivities in which only the male shepherds takepart, while “the women (for such was the manner of that country) kept together to make good cheeramong themselves” (Old Arcadia 245). Even in later pastoral romances, marriage is still occasionallyreserved to non-pastoral characters. In Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde for example, Corydon introduceshimself and his companion Montanus with the words: “A shepherd I am, and this is a lover” (133); ac-cordingly Montanus gets married to Phoebe in the end, whereas Corydon remains alone. On thescarcity of women in and the absence of marriage from the pastoral world, see also Ettin (149).

17. See also A. C. Hamilton: “Romance seeks to involve the readers directly, inviting them to identifywith the characters and vicariously to experience their sufferings” (290).

18. Here as elsewhere in this paper I use the term “poetry” as it was used in the Renaissance, that is, forfiction in general and not just for the lyric kind.

19. Here is the Spanish: “Baxava de las montañas de Leon el olvidado Sireno, a quien amor, la fortuna, eltiempo tratavan de manera que del menor mal que en tan triste vida padescía no se esperava menosque perdella. Ya no llorava el desventurado pastor el mal que la ausencia le prometía, ni los temoresdel olvido le importunavan, por que vía cumplidas las prophecías de su recelo tan en perjuyzio suyoque ya no tenía más infortunios con que amenazalle” (125).

274 Regina Schneider

20. This is the original Spanish: “y en los demás hallarán muy diversas hystorias de casos que verdada-mente an sucedido, aunque van disfraçados debaxo de nombres y estilo pastoril” (125).

21. See, for example, Trissino: “It remains, then, to treat the imitation of actions and traits less dignifiedand of a worse sort, which may be done by deriding and censuring them, and in that way teach menvirtue, something usually done by comedies, in which the poet does not speak for himself but, in thesame way as in tragedy, always brings in persons to speak and act. So it is also in pastoral eclogues,though in these there is sometimes utterance by the poet, as is apparent in Theocritus and Vergil”(224).

22. Here is the Spanish: “A este tiempo . . . vio Sireno venir un pastor, su passo a passo parándose a cadatrecho . . . Sireno le conoscío” (129); “‘Pues para que podamos saber de ti lo que tanto deseamos,forçado será merescello primero con dezirte quién somos’” (187); “y preguntando Sireno, comequien avía much que no repastava por aquel valle, quién fuesse, Sylvano le respondió” (143).

23. Characteristically, Lodge’s medieval source, The Tale of Gamelyn, concentrates solely on the tribula-tions of the male hero, in which women do not play any significant role.

24. This unwillingness to declare a winner is poignant in Sannazaro’s Arcadia: in Chapter 5, Selvaggiothe referee “not knowing how to determine which had been the nearer to victory, judged them bothworthy of the highest praise; in which judgment we all concurred with like opinions” (55), and inEclogue 10 Apollo is declared the actual winner of the contest (101).

25. The romance’s generic lack of closure has been discussed by Avalle-Arce, for example: “Mon-temayor’s Diana ends in an inconclusive arabesque, which . . . could be called an ‘open form.’ Thereis no definitive ending to the tale, only an interruption, and the dynamics of the romance point beyondits narrative boundaries. . . . This other type of narrative, which includes almost all chivalric ro-mances, remains open at one end and is characterized by its lack of closure, by the obvious possibil-ity of continuing the represented events. . . . Essentially, the chivalric romance consists of ajuxtaposition of episodes which leaves open every possibility of continuation.” [“La Diana de Mon-temayor se resuelve en un arabesco inconcluso, que . . . se podría llamar una ‘forma abierta.’ No hayfinal categórico, sino una interrupción en el relato, y el dinamismo de la novela se proyecta haciafuera del marco narrativo. . . . Este otro tipo de relato novelado, en el que entra la casi totalidad de lanovela caballeresca, quedaba abierto por un extremo y se caracterizaba por su inconclusión, por laclara posibilidad de continuar las acciones presentadas. . . . El relato caballeresco es, en sustancia, layuxtaposición episódica que se abre a todas las posibilidades de continuación” (83–84 my transla-tion).]

26. Research for this article has been made possible by the generous support of the Swiss National Sci-ence Foundation.

WORKS CITED

Alpers, Paul. What is Pastoral? Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996.

Avalle-Arce, Juan Bautista. La novela pastoril española. Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1959.

Chatman, Seymour. Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction & Film. Ithaca: CornellUniv. Press, 1990

———. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978.

El Saffar, Ruth. “Structural and Thematic Discontinuity in Montemayor’s Diana.” MLN 86 (1971):182–98.

Ettin, Andrew V. Literature and the Pastoral. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1984.

Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1980.

Montemayor’s Diana as Pastoral Romance 275

Giraldi Cinthio, Giambattista. Discorsi intorno al comporre de i romanzi, delle comedie, e delletragedie. Venice, 1554.

Hamilton, A. C. “Elizabethan Romance: The Example of Prose Fiction.” ELH 49 (1982): 287–99.

Horace. Satires, Epistles, Ars Poetica. Translated by H. Rushton Fairclough. 2d ed., 1929. Reprint, Cam-bridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991.

Johnson, Carroll B. “Montemayor’s Diana: A Novel Pastoral.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 48 (1971):20–35.

Kennedy, Judith M., ed. Introduction to A Critical Edition of Yong’s Translation of George of Mon-temayor’s Diana and Gil Polo’s Enamoured Diana, xv–lxxx. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968.

Lanser, Susan Sniader. The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction. Princeton: Princeton Univ.Press, 1981.

Lodge, Thomas. Rosalind. Edited by Donald Beecher. Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1996.

Mehl, Dieter. The Middle English Romances of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. London: Rout-ledge & Kegan Paul, 1978.

Montemayor, Jorge de. The Seven Books of the Diana. Translated by Bartholomew Yong, 1598. In ACritical Edition of Yong’s Translation of George of Montemayor’s Diana and Gil Polo’s EnamouredDiana, edited by Judith M. Kennedy, 1–242. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968.

———. Los Siete Libros de la Diana. Edited by Julián Arribas. London: Tamesis, 1996.

Nelles, William. Frameworks: Narrative Levels and Embedded Narrative. New York: Peter Lang, 1997.

The Oxford English Dictionary. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989.

Rhodes, Elizabeth. “Sixteenth-Century Pastoral Books, Narrative Structures, and La Galatea of Cer-vantes.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 66 (1989): 351–60.

Sannazaro, Jacopo. Arcadia and Piscatorial Eclogues. Translated by Ralph Nash. Detroit: Wayne StateUniv. Press, 1966.

Scaliger, Julius Caesar. Poetices libri septem: Sieben Bücher über die Dichtkunst. Translated by LucDeitz. 5 vols. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1994–.

Sidney, Philip. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia). Edited by Victor Skretkowicz.Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.

———. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia). Edited by Jean Robertson. Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1973.

———. “Defence of Poetry.” In Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten, 65–121. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.

Snyder, Jon R. Writing the Scene of Speaking: Theories of Dialogue in the Late Italian Renaissance.Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1989.

Spagnuoli, Giovanni Baptista [Mantuanus]. Eglogs of the Poet Mantuan. Translated by GeorgeTurberville. London, 1567.

Trissino, Giangiorgio. “Poetica.” In Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden, edited by Allan H. Gilbert,212–32. New York: American Book Company, 1940.

Stanzel, Franz K. Theory of Narrative. Translated by Charlotte Goedsche. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.Press, 1984.

Wardropper, Bruce W. “The Diana of Montemayor: Revaluation and Interpretation.” Studies in Philo-logy 48 (1951): 126–44.

276 Regina Schneider