Early Modern Spain

[Close Print-Friendly Version]

Some Uses Of Pastoral In Don QuijoteThis paper was originally given under the title 'Telling the Sheep from the Goats: Cervantes's use of Pastoral in Don Quijote' at a one-day conference on the Pastoral held at the Institute of Romance Studies on 3 March 1995. The text has been extensively revised for publication, but several members of the original audience said that they enjoyed hearing Cervantes's text quoted from three of the classic English translations of Don Quixote by Motteux (1700), Jarvis (1742), and Smollett (1755). This feature of the original paper has therefore been retained in the text. The editions referred to are: Don Quixote de la Mancha, trans. Peter Motteux, revised J. Ozell, 2 vols (London, Nonesuch, 1930); The Life and Exploits of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha, trans. Charles Jarvis, 2 vols (London, S.A. and H. Oddy, 1809); The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote trans. Tobias Smollett, 3rd ed. corrected, 4 vols (London, T.Osborne et al, 1765). The Spanish text is cited in the notes from the edition in two volumes by Martín de Riquer (Barcelona, Juventud, 1958).

I

In spite of Cervantes's assertion in the prologue that Don Quijote is 'one continued satire upon books of chivalry', ² the pastoral was never very far from his or from Don Quixote's imagination. Towards the end of his third and last sally, on the way back from Barcelona, Quixote first raises the possibility that, when the time comes for him to retire from his career as a knight errant, he and Sancho might take up a new occupation as shepherds:

'I will buy sheep, and all other materials necessary for the pastoral employment; and I calling myself the shepherd Quixotiz, and you the shepherd Panzino, we will range the mountains, the woods and meadows, singing here, and complaining there, drinking the liquid crystal of the fountains, of the limpid brooks, or of the mighty rivers. The oaks with a plentiful hand shall give their sweetest fruit; the trunks of the hardest cork-trees shall afford us seats; the willows shall furnish shade, and the roses scent; the spacious meadow shall yield us carpets of a thousand colours; the air, clear and pure, shall supply breath; the moon and stars afford light, in spite of the darkness of the night; singing shall furnish pleasure, and complaining yield delight; Apollo shall provide verses, and love conceits; with which we shall make ourselves famous and immortal, not only in the present, but in future ages.' ³

Once again, Quixote has lost no opportunity to display the breadth and depth of his reading, and Sancho is quite taken with his evocation of the idyllic commonplaces of the pastoral. But there are at least a couple of ironic commentaries. Quixote's proposal that they should consider taking up a second career as shepherds is prompted by the fact that the two heroes have now arrived on their return journey at the very spot where, nine chapters earlier, on their outward leg, they had met some of the Duke and Duchess's retainers posing as shepherds and shepherdesses in the episode of the false Arcadia. That incident ended with Quixote and Sancho being trampled by a herd of bulls (II, 58). Don Quixote's resolve to become a false shepherd himself also leads to his being trampled, this time by a herd of six hundred hogs (II, 68). As we shall see, stampeding livestock are, for Cervantes, a frequent hazard of the pastoral lifestyle.

In spite of these indignities, Don Quixote and Sancho by no means abandon their pastoral ambitions. On finally making it home from his wanderings, the knight returns to his resolve with all seriousness, telling Sansón Carrasco and the priest that:

'he had resolved to turn shepherd for that year, and to pass his time in the solitude of the fields, where he might give the reins to his amorous thoughts, exercising himself in that pastoral and virtuous employment; beseeching them, if they had leisure, and were not engaged in business of greater consequence, to bear him company; telling them he would purchase sheep and stock sufficient to give them the name of shepherds; acquainting them also, that the principal part of the business was already done, he having chosen for them names as fit as if they had been cast in a mould. The priest desired him to repeat them. Don Quixote answered, that he himself was to be called the shepherd Quixotiz; the bachelor, the shepherd Carrason: the priest, the shepherd Curiambro, and Sancho Panza, the shepherd Panzino. ⁴

Their astonishment at this fresh manifestation of Quijote's madness is tempered only by the need to prevent him from rambling once more from the village, and resuming his chivalric career. In the hope that he might be cured within the year, they reluctantly fall in with this new project, and agree to join him. Sansón Carrasco displays his learning by discoursing on the need to find shepherdesses to whom they might give 'the names we find in print, of which the world is full, as Phillises, Amarillises, Dianas, Floridas, Galateas, and Belisardas' (Jarvis, II, 73, p. 604). Quixote, however, as he points out, is spared this aspect of the game, already having 'the peerless Dulcinea del Toboso, the glory of these banks, the ornament of these meads, the support of beauty, the cream of good humour, and, lastly, the worthy subject of all praise, be it never so hyperbolical'. ⁵

II

It should not surprise us to find pastoral themes and incidents recurring in Don Quijote. We know that Cervantes was a great admirer of the genre, and even if he had not been, his fascination, even obsession, with the interplay of genres would have led him to include elements of classical, renaissance and home- grown Spanish pastoral literature in what is, after all, the classic example of a book about books. Cervantes wrote his own pastoral novel, the Galatea, published in Alcalá de Henares in 1585. It had a limited success, but was clearly important in his literary apprenticeship, and a number of the characters, situations and incidents turn up again in others of his works, including Don Quijote.

As has already been indicated, Part II of Don Quijote in particular contains a number of pastoral interludes, such as the false Arcadia, most of which occur during the long masque-like section of the narrative (chapters 30-57) when Quixote and Sancho are guests of the Duke and Duchess and are on the receiving end of numerous charades and confidence tricks, many of which have classical literary origins. The Altisidora episodes are frequently pastoral in feel, and there are several oblique and overt references to Virgil, such as the wild boar hunt and the allusions to Dido and Aeneas sheltering from the storm in chapter 34.

What is more, there is in each of Parts I and II a fully-fledged self-contained pastoral narrative among the interpolated stories which are such a feature of Don Quijote. In Part II, there is the story of Camacho's wedding, deriving from an episode in Cervantes's own Galatea, and, in Part I, the narrative on which I will want to focus towards the end of this paper, the episode of Grisóstomo and Marcela, in chapters 11-14.

We know, also, that Don Quixote himself was an avid reader of pastoral romances. There were several in his library, which is subjected to such rigorous scrutiny by the priest and the barber in chapter 6 of Part I. Chief among these were the twin peaks of Spanish pastoral romance: the Diana of Jorge de Montemayor, published in Valencia, probably in 1559, and the Diana enamorada of Gaspar Gil Polo, also published in Valencia, in 1564. ⁶ Though the priest and the barber have misgivings about some aspects of the Diana, both works survive the bonfire, though very much against the niece's better judgment:

'And so opening one, it happen'd to be the Diana of Montemayor; which made him say (believing all the rest to be of that Stamp) these do not deserve to be punish'd like the others, for they neither have done, nor can do that Mischief which those Stories of Chivalry have done, being generally ingenious Books, that can do no Body any Prejudice. Oh! good Sir, cry'd the Niece, burn 'em with the rest, I beseech you; for should my Uncle get cur'd of his Knight-Errant Frenzy, and betake himself to the Reading of these Books, we should have him turn Shepherd, and so wander thro' the Woods and Fields; nay, and what would be worse yet, turn Poet, which they say is a catching and an incurable Disease. The Gentlewoman is in the Right, said the Curate, and it will not be amiss to remove that Stumbling-block out of our Friend's Way; and since we began with the Diana of Montemayor, I am of Opinion we ought not to burn it, but only take out that Part of it which treats of the Magician Felicia, and the inchanted Water, as also all the longer Poems; and let the Work escape with its Prose, and the Honour of being the First of that Kind. Here's another Diana, quoth the Barber, the second of that Name, by Salmantino; nay, and a third too, by Gil Polo. Pray, said the Curate, let Salmantino increase the Number of Criminals in the Yard; but as for that by Gil Polo, preserve it as charily as if Apollo himself had wrote it.' ⁷

III

Although the appearance of these two works by Montemayor and Gil Polo marked the coming of age of pastoral prose fiction in sixteenth-century Spain, there had, of course, been many precedents, and the vogue of the pastoral in Spain was as widespread and as dependent on classical and Italian models as anywhere else in Europe. Virgil's Eclogues and Theocritus's Idylls were well known and much alluded to, Petrarch and Boccaccio were influential, but perhaps the most effective catalyst for the writers of prose was Sannazaro's Arcadia, originally published in 1504, but not appearing in Spanish until 1549.

There were also a number of more home-grown precedents: the medieval serranillas, the many pastoral interludes in Spanish fiction before the mid-century, especially the romances of chivalry, some of the early court dramas, and the eclogues of Garcilaso de la Vega, the second of which may well have been intended to be staged as a masque. The shepherdesses who confront Don Quixote in the episode of the false Arcadia tell him that they have prepared two eclogues, neither of which they have yet performed ('representado'), one by the famous poet Garcilaso, and the other by the most excellent Camoens (II, 58, p. 958).

As we might expect, the Spanish pastoral, as evidenced in these and similar examples, draws heavily on conventions which were common across renaissance Europe. The world of Arcadia is a private, abstract world largely existing in the mind. Only love and its attendant emotions matter. The bucolic outer shell is there purely to give the abstractions some form. The landscapes are of no real significance except for their residual allegorical function: the pleasures and pains of love being represented by pleasant if rather bland landscapes bordering on occasion on the rocky and the barren. There is no serious attempt to create a sense of a real physical landscape -all the trees tend to be leafy, all the grass is green, and all the brooks are babbling, a geographical implausibility which was a particular gift to those in Spain, and there were many of them, who were inclined to mock. ⁸ The shepherding itself is never of any real significance. Time and space do not matter beyond the daily passage of the rising and setting sun, or the allegorical journey in search of a solution for the trials of love.

In Spain, as elsewhere in Europe, the pastoral world was essentially a place where intellectual debates about the nature of love were held. The lovers who gain access to this world do so by virtue of their sufferings in love, and when they enter, they leave behind the material preoccupations of everyday social life and wander about distraught, sometimes in communion with nature, more often alienated from it. Arcadia is a mental landscape of emotional distress.

Within this artificial world of debates about love, Montemayor and Gil Polo, though only five years apart in terms of publication, could not have been further apart in ethos. ⁹ Montemayor's view of love was essentially a conservative one, despite the fashionable gloss he tried to give it by including an extensive summary and quotations from Leone Ebreo's neoplatonist treatise on love, the Diálogos de amor. For Montemayor, love is a destiny against which it is useless for the lover to struggle, an irrational force, hostile to reason. Love entails suffering and jealousy. The suffering can be ennobling to an extent, but the jealousy is destructive. Readers of Spanish poetry are used to this rather unedifying perspective on love from the cancioneros of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Because love is so extreme, so variable and so fickle, the characters fall in and out of love at the slightest provocation, and love is rarely if ever reciprocated. In the structure of his plot, Montemayor presents us less with an eternal triangle than with an eternal polygon, in which each character loves another, who loves a third, who loves a fourth, and so on. Everyone is miserable, everyone unrequited. ¹⁰

If the underlying philosophy of Montemayor's Diana can be summed up in one of his verses:

Amor loco ¡ay amor loco!
yo por vos y vos por otro,

¹¹

Gil Polo takes on his predecessor at a polemical level and sets out to correct his assumptions using the same generic constraints, and often the same narrative structure and characters. What is impressive about Montemayor is his technical facility at generating and maintaining complex plots, a feature which must have appealed to Cervantes. The basic plot is constantly interrupted by interludes, interrelated sub-plots, and self-contained short stories. All these elements are skilfully woven together to provide a strong sense of accumulation as the characters successively join in the pilgrimage, not to see the Wizard of Oz, but to visit the wise Felicia, who they hope will be able to sort out all their problems. But, for Montemayor, the wise Felicia can only cure the lovers' ills, which are irrational, by recourse to a magic potion, which is also irrational. This, as we have seen, was what Cervantes objected too, and wanted removed from the novel if it was to stay in Quixote's library. But Gil Polo makes Felicia more of a counsellor than a witch doctor. Her solutions are carefully prepared and psychologically more convincing, and depend, crucially, on the characters being honest with themselves and with each other.

If Gil Polo's novel is to be preserved 'as charily as if Apollo himself had wrote it' it is undoubtedly for the strong humanist values which it promotes and which were so much to Cervantes's liking. It will not surprise us, then, if we find more than a trace of Gil Polo's muscular rationalism in some of Cervantes's own treatments of the genre.

IV

The vogue of the pastoral in Spain; the popularity and publishing success of Montemayor's pastoral romance; the attractiveness to Cervantes of Gil Polo's humanistic treatment of the theme; Don Quixote's own fondness for these books and the bucolic alternative they offer for his old age: these are all reasons why the pastoral should occupy such a prominent place in what is essentially a romance of chivalry. But there is another important consideration: the fact that any knight errant venturing forth in early modern Spain could not have gone far without coming across a sheep, if not several thousand of them. And this is exactly what happens in chapter 18 of Part I, not long after the start of the second sally:

'Thus they went on discoursing, when Don Quixote, perceiving a thick Cloud of Dust arise right before 'em in the Road, the Day is come, said he, turning to his Squire, the Day is come, Sancho, that shall usher in the Happiness which Fortune has reserv'd for me: This Day shall the Strength of my Arm be signaliz'd by such Exploits as shall be transmitted even to the latest Posterity. See'st thou that Cloud of Dust, Sancho? It is raised by a prodigious Army marching this Way, and composed of an infinite Number of Nations. Why then, at this Rate, quoth Sancho, there should be two Armies; for yonder's as great a Dust on t'other Side: With that Don Quixote look'd, and was transported with Joy at the Sight, firmly believing that two vast Armies were ready to engage each other in that Plain: For his Imagination was so crowded with those Battles, Inchantments, surprizing Adventures, amorous Thoughts, and other Whimsies which he had read of in Romances, that his strong Fancy chang'd every thing he saw into what he desir'd to see; and thus he could not conceive that the Dust was only rais'd by two large Flocks of Sheep that were going the same Road from different Parts, and could not be discern'd till they were very near.' ¹³

Don Quixote might have been transported with joy at the sight, but there were many whose hearts would have sunk at what was a common feature of the Spanish landscape, the great herds of sheep being driven seasonally between summer and winter pasture.

The Spanish economy had been dominated by live-stock farming since the introduction of the merino sheep with its fine, high-quality wool into Andalusia from North Africa in the early fourteenth century. ¹⁴ It made a lot of sense, in a country which enjoys or suffers from extremes of climate and terrain, to develop an agricultural system which made large stretches of land productive which were not suitable for arable cultivation. The successful prosecution of the reconquest helped to create the conditions in which this economy could flourish. Extensive tracts of new land became available in the south and opened up possibilities of large-scale seasonal migration across the peninsula which ensured maximum advantage to the sheep-farming aristocracy. Exports grew to northern Europe, especially to the Flemish weavers who dealt with Spanish suppliers through a network of established fairs, the local textile industries also flourished, and the crown had a source of ready money through taxation of the trade which was organised by the great live-stock guild, the Mesta.

It made a kind of sense, therefore, for the crown to protect the rights and privileges of the Mesta when there were conflicts, as there often were, with arable farmers. ¹⁵ Sheep farming was compatible with long- standing aristocratic attitudes to industry; it was easy, it was not labour-intensive, it released manpower for overseas projects in Europe and America, it was lucrative for a monarchy that was always strapped for cash. The Catholic Monarchs declared that 'the breeding and preservation of livestock ought to be the principal substance of these kingdoms.' ¹⁶ Paradoxically, though, the very peace and stability which followed the union of the crowns also produced the conditions in which the imbalance of the Castilian agrarian economy in particular would become progressively serious and ultimately destructive for Spain. By the early sixteenth century, Spain had a stable and growing population which it became progressively more difficult to feed from the low-yielding crops grown in the peninsula. Imports of grain became a significant and permanent feature of the economy.

Conflicts between farmers and cowboys are as old as time, from the first rustic who ever chased away a goat that was nibbling his vines, ¹⁷ to the large-scale ranch wars set to music by Rodgers and Hammerstein in Oklahoma. In early modern Spain, these conflicts were just as serious. Migrations of sheep monopolised vast tracts of land, did serious damage to cultivated areas when they overran their confines, and prevented the enclosure of land for further cultivation: any land which had ever been used for pasture was protected for that purpose in perpetuity. Don Quixote's joy at the sight of two vast flocks of sheep throwing up large dust clouds aligns him indirectly and implicitly, perhaps, but very clearly, with his own class, the land- owing, sheep-farming gentry, and against the peasant farmers, insecurely-tenured, trying to scratch a living from an ungrateful soil in the face of marauding livestock which they viewed with all the enthusiasm they might reserve for a plague of locusts.

But there is a poignancy here. The imbalance of the Castilian economy became critical once the impact of American silver had had its effect. Rapidly rising prices and restrictive legislation made Spanish textiles uncompetitive on the European markets. Foreign weavers continued to buy up raw wool, weave it into superior cloth and sell it back to Spaniards at a considerable profit. While the treasure fleets lasted, the Spaniards could afford to pay, but at a long-term cost. American bullion went out of the country as fast as it came in, and Spain found itself with a massive imbalance of trade. Luis Ortiz, a government accountant, reported to Philip II that by his reckoning, Spain was importing goods at up to ten times the value of its exports, and that in many cases it was exporting to foreign producers the very raw materials that it was re- importing as finished products. ¹⁸

Towards the end of the century, then, and during the lifetime of both Cervantes and Don Quixote, the Spanish wool trade declined rapidly as a result of the price revolution and the shift in European taste away from woollen goods towards cotton and silk. The power of the Mesta also started to fall away rapidly. At its height in the 1520s, it managed flocks of some 3.5 million sheep across the peninsula. Between 1552 and 1564 alone the numbers fell by 20%. By the beginning of the seventeenth century they were down below 2 million.

When Don Quixote looks out across the plain at the two great clouds of dust, then, he is looking at a symbol of decline of which he is himself a part. What he is seeing is the progressive impoverishment of the minor land-owning gentry of which he is a member, the passing of a period in which the values of the once militant nobility, the ideals of chivalry which he represents and tries to uphold, no longer apply; and he is witnessing in a cruel paradox of both history and fiction, the onward march of that hunger which has never been far away throughout the sixteenth century, a hunger which his countrymen are increasingly suffering, and which he and Sancho constantly suffer throughout the book. Cervantes drives home this paradox -sheep everywhere, but nothing to eat- in a telling passage in Part II, chapter 59. Immediately following the episode of the false Arcadia and the stampede of bulls, Don Quixote and Sancho fetch up at an inn. Sancho asks the host what there is for supper, and the host offers whatever they wish. In an exchange reminiscent of that with the proprietor of the celebrated cheese shop which has no cheese, Sancho proceeds to suggest a full range of dishes -chickens, pullets, bacon and eggs- all of which turn out to be off the menu. Sancho has to settle for a pair of cow-heels, which at least are an improvement on their regular diet of acorns and medlars; but, perhaps significantly, there is no mention of mutton or lamb.

V

What I am suggesting here is that, in Spain at least, the pastoral is not a single, undifferentiated phenomenon. ¹⁹ The pretty, bucolic world of make-believe, seen at its most extreme in the episode of the false Arcadia, where we know that the characters are playing a part, has an all too real counterpart in the contemporary world through which Don Quixote makes his way. Like the pigs and the cattle and the goats that roam and trample this rural landscape, the sheep are not just properties in a stagey form of fiction. They are real-life symbols of a nation undergoing a tremendous long-term shift in moral and economic values.

One of Cervantes's great achievements in Don Quijote is to bring together and hold the balance between several versions of pastoral, bringing the genre out of the bucolic vacuum which it frequently inhabits and putting it to work in a contemporary rural context. Sometimes he does this by bringing out the latent artificiality of pastoral, as in the false Arcadia; sometimes he does it in a self-consciously mocking way, as when Don Quixote checks off what he needs to become a shepherd and what he can expect to be doing once he takes up office. But his most subtle handing of the theme comes, significantly, early on in the book, in the episode of Grisóstomo and Marcela.

VI

There is good reason to believe that Cervantes originally intended the episode to come later. If he moved it to give it more prominence, it is not difficult to see why. The opening chapters of Don Quijote are almost unrelentlessly parodic of the chivalresque ideals and behaviour which Quixote embodies. Cervantes clearly felt that, after the conclusion of the battle with the Biscayan, interrupted briefly to introduce the Arabic author Cide Hamete Benengeli, the reader was ready for a change of material and a change of mood. As always with Cervantes, this is carefully prepared and subtly executed.

Don Quixote and Sancho find themselves in the company of a group of goatherds who invite them to share their rustic meal. Inspired by the handful of acorns he has for his supper, Quixote launches into the first of his many after-dinner speeches, in which Cervantes gives the knight his head to develop his philosophy and expound his ideals to the sceptical but often admiring company:

'Happy age, and happy days were those, to which the ancients gave the name of golden; not that gold, which in these our iron-times is so much esteemed, was to be acquired without trouble, in that fortunate period; but because people then were ignorant of those two words MINE and THINE: in that sacred age, all things were in common; no man was necessitated, in search of his daily food, to undergo any other trouble than that of reaching out his hand, and receiving it from the sturdy oak, that liberally invited him to pull his sweet and salutary fruit...' ²⁰

When he finishes his speech, the bathos is really quite crude ('this tedious harangue, which might very well have been spared' (86), ²² and there is no sense that these goatherds are anything other than what they purport to be: rather dim fellows from the real world of the rural poor, who are just looking after goats and know nothing of the literary world that Quixote inhabits. But before long another goatherd comes along, one who we are told can read and write, and who plays the rebec. The musical note marks a subtle transition to a different level. In Part II the episodes at the court of the Duke and Duchess are also heralded by music, as if to emphasise their theatrical quality. The new arrival, Antonio, sits down 'upon the trunk of an ancient oak' (87), ²³ and sings a plaintive ballad at the request of the assembled company.

Next comes another goatherd, Pedro, from the village, with news of the death of Grisóstomo, who has died that morning from unrequited love of a girl called Marcela, 'she that roves about these plains in the habit of a shepherdess' (91). ²⁴ Grisóstomo, we learn, was the son of a rich farmer, had studied at Salamanca, had come home and taken to wandering about with a friend, dressed as shepherds. When his father died, 'he inherited great riches that were in moveables and in lands, with no small number of sheep...and a great deal of money' (93). ²⁵ He represents, then, a rare example of a feigned shepherd who is in reality a sheep-farmer, a young, wealthy landowner who could perfectly well keep sheep without the need to act the part.

Marcela is the daughter of an even richer farmer. Her mother died in childbirth, her father, of grief soon after; she has been brought up by an uncle and now she has grown so beautiful that all the young men are desperately in love with her. Naturally, she spurns them all. Pedro is disdainful of their sighing and complaining, their dirges and ditties, their tears and despair. They who know her are keen to see who, if any, will overcome her disdain, tame such an unsociable humour and enjoy such exceeding beauty. Quixote willingly agrees to join the group on their journey next day to the funeral.

So far, Cervantes has taken us skilfully from a world of goats, via the first bucolic note of the rebec, to a classic narrative of love and disdain, madness and death. But he has made it clear that pastoral is a game that only rich children play. Next there comes an interlude, while chivalresque themes re-enter and the tone becomes ironic again. On the road to the funeral some fellow travellers question Quixote about his armour and all that it entails. Quixote rehearses his thoughts about valour and the need for knighthood in this benighted world, and soon he comes round to the topic of his own love, Dulcinea, and her disdain. Chivalry and pastoral unite around a common theme.

Before long the different worlds of rural poverty and wealth, low pastoral, chivalry and high pastoral finally come together. Don Quixote and the goatherds see a group of shepherds, about twenty of them, descending through a cleft made by two high mountains, clad in jackets of black sheepskin and each crowned with a garland of cypress and yew. They carried a bier strewn with branches and flowers, and having lain down the body, they begin to dig into the rock. One of the group, Ambrosio, turns to Quixote, and in one of those surges of intense which Cervantes conveys so well, delivers himself of an impassioned funeral oration:

'This corse, gentlemen, which you behold with compassionate eyes, was the habitation of a soul, which possessed an infinite share of the riches of heaven: this is the body of Chrysostom, who was a man of unparalleled genius, the pink of courtesy and kindness; in friendship a very phoenix, liberal without bounds, grave without arrogance, gay without meanness; and, in short, second to none in every thing that was good, and without second in all that was unfortunate. He loved, and was abhored; he adored, and was disdained; he implored a savage; he importuned a statue; he hunted the wind; cried aloud to the desart; he was a slave to the most ungrateful of women; and the fruit of his servitude was death...' ²⁶

One of Grisóstomo's songs of despair is read aloud, and Marcela appears on top of a rock above the grave. Ambrosio flings recriminations at her for her cruelty, and she replies, rationally at first and then with growing passion, that it is unreasonable for men to blame her for their affliction. Why should an object which is beloved for its beauty be bound to love its admirer? Patiently she breaks down and exposes the absurdity of the values and the rhetoric which underlie the very game in which she is a star player:

'I was born free, and to enjoy that freedom, have I chosen the solitude of these fields. The trees on these mountains are my companions; and I have no other mirrour than the limpid streams of these crystal brooks. With the trees and the streams I share my contemplation and my beauty; I am a distant flame and a sword afar off: those whom my eyes have captivated my tongue has undeceived; and if hope be the food of desire, as I gave none to Chrysostom or to any other person, so neither can his death, nor that of any other of my admirers, be justly imputed to my cruelty, but rather, to their own obstinate despair. To those who observe that his intentions were honourable; and that therefore I was bound to comply with them, I answer, when he declared the honesty of his designs in that very spot where now his grave is digging, I told him, my purpose was to live in perpetual solitude, and let the earth alone enjoy the fruits of my retirement, and the spoils of my beauty: wherefore, if he, notwithstanding this my explanation, persevered without hope, and sailed against the wind; it is no wonder that he was overwhelmed in the gulph of his rashness.' ²⁷

In spite of her eloquent defence of her position, Marcela has been criticised, as she is in the goatherd Pedro's narration, for her cruelty and insensitivity. ²⁸ It is true, as A. J. Close argues in a short but perceptive account of the importance of this episode, ²⁹ that there is a great deal of ambivalence both in Cervantes's attitude to the pastoral and to the compelling but eccentric behaviour of both Grisóstomo and Marcela; but, taken in the context of the debate about love conducted in the two Dianas, there can be no doubt about where Cervantes's humanistic sympathies lie, and why he felt that Gil Polo's text deserved to be saved from the flames.

VII

The episode of Grisóstomo and Marcela shows how Cervantes, not for the first time, contrives to bring several strands of literary tradition together, and makes them work with and against each other. Each frames the other's image. There is low pastoral and high, the eloquence of Don Quixote's vision of the golden age and the bathos of Sancho's and the goatherds' response; there is the irony of Pedro's commentary on the foolish lovers and the travellers' mockery of Quixote's ideals; the pathos of the funeral oration and the devastating critique of traditional views of love and disdain, passionately argued by the wronged Marcela.

The several strands of the narrative, the interleaving of literary genre and social class, have been beautifully captured in one of the engravings which illustrate the 1765 edition of Smollett's translation. At the top of the picture, perched on a high overhanging rock, is Marcela; below her, Ambrosio utters his fierce condemnation of her cruelty, while Quixote and Sancho, surrounded by the other members of their group, look on; Ambrosio gestures towards the dead body of Grisóstomo, almost reclining in a classical pose and naked but for some drapery; and below, two gravediggers, one grasping a mug of ale, excavate Grisóstomo's final resting place 'in the field, like a Moor (God bless us!) at the foot of the rock, hard by the cork-tree spring'. ³⁰

The interweaving of narrative and generic threads in this way underlines the parallels in Cervantes's mind between this episode, and the pastoral genre for which it stands, and Don Quixote's chivalric designs. Quixote's eccentricity, bordering on madness at times, is mirrored by that of Grisóstomo, who literally goes mad from love and destroys himself in the process, and by that of Marcela, who imprisons herself in solitude in a perverse attempt to preserve her freedom. Let them both be a lesson to Don Quixote, who, for all his ineptitude and inability to bring about a compromise between his ideals and the need to make them work in the real world, does at least manage to stumble through life while avoiding the more catastrophic consequences of his lunacy. Others are less fortunate.

But what is most interesting is that Cervantes's version of pastoral, like his version of the chivalresque, is located in a real world, near a place in La Mancha whose name he cares not to remember, a place where impoverished gentlemen read books and dream dreams and live out the passing of the very values by which they set their store. Cervantes takes his version of pastoral down from the bookshelf and sets it to work in a rural world populated by real livestock. The goatherds in this episode are just one of the ways in which literary pastoral is allowed to grow naturally and almost imperceptibly from the natural landscape of early seventeenth-century Spain.

In doing this, Cervantes provides a very subtle commentary on the central theme of the book. Because there were no knights errant in Cervantes's Spain, Don Quixote's attempt to revive the heroic ideals of chivalry can only seem anachronistically comic, except when, significantly, he recreates them wholly in words. But sheep there were in plenty, even after the heyday of the Mesta was long past, and the counterpoint between real landowners and feigned shepherds gives Cervantes the opportunity to gloss the antics of Don Quixote in a rather less comic vein. Nevertheless, the light he shines on the cuestión de amor of Grisóstomo and Marcela is typically ambivalent. There is irony, there is mockery; but as with the chivalresque, Cervantes turns the pastoral into something which is deeply felt, something whose loss makes us all much the poorer.

Ambrosio mourns the death of Grisóstomo Engraving by G.V. Neisl after F. Hayman in The History and Adventures of Don Quixote, translated by T. Smollett, 3rd edition corrected (London, T. Osborne et al, 1765), volume I, facing page 113

Footnotes
1.		This paper was originally given under the title 'Telling the Sheep from the Goats: Cervantes's use of Pastoral in Don Quijote' at a one-day conference on the Pastoral held at the Institute of Romance Studies on 3 March 1995. The text has been extensively revised for publication, but several members of the original audience said that they enjoyed hearing Cervantes's text quoted from three of the classic English translations of Don Quixote by Motteux (1700), Jarvis (1742), and Smollett (1755). This feature of the original paper has therefore been retained in the text. The editions referred to are: Don Quixote de la Mancha, trans. Peter Motteux, revised J. Ozell, 2 vols (London, Nonesuch, 1930); The Life and Exploits of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha, trans. Charles Jarvis, 2 vols (London, S.A. and H. Oddy, 1809); The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote trans. Tobias Smollett, 3rd ed. corrected, 4 vols (London, T.Osborne et al, 1765). The Spanish text is cited in the notes from the edition in two volumes by Martín de Riquer (Barcelona, Juventud, 1958).
2.		Smollett, I, xxxix; 'todo él es una invectiva contra los libros de caballerías' ('Prólogo', I, p. 24).
3.		Jarvis, II, p. 563; 'Yo compraré algunas ovejas, y todas las demás cosas que al pastoral ejercicio son necesarias, y llamándome yo el pastor Quijotiz, y tú el pastor Pancino, nos andaremos por los montes, por las selvas y por los prados, cantando aquí, endechando allí, bebiendo de los líquidos cristales de las fuentes, o ya de los limpios arroyuelos, o de los caudalosos ríos. Daránnos con abundantísima mano de su dulcísimo fruto las encinas, asiento los troncos de los durísimos alcornoques, sombra los sauces, olor las rosas, alfombras de mil colores matizadas los estendidos prados, aliento el aire claro y puro, luz la luna y las estrellas, a pesar de la escuridad de la noche; gusto el canto, alegría el lloro, Apolo versos, el amor conceptos, con que podremos hacernos eternos y famosos, no sólo en los presentes, sino en los venideros siglos' (II, 67, p. 1025).
4.		Jarvis, II, p. 603; '...tenía pensado de hacerse aquel año pastor, y entretenerse en la soledad de los campos, donde a rienda suelta podía dar vado a sus amorosos pensamientos, ejercitándose en el pastoral y virtuoso ejercicio; y que les suplicaba, si no tenían mucho que hacer y no estaban impedidos en negocios más importantes, quisiesen ser sus compañeros; que él compraría ovejas y ganado suficiente que les diese nombre de pastores; y que les hacía saber que lo más principal de aquel negocio estaba hecho, porque les tenía puestos los nombres, que les vendrían como de molde. Díjole el cura que los dijese. Respondió don Quijote que él se había de llamar el pastor Quijotiz; y el bachiller, el pastor Carrascón; y el cura, el pastor Curambro; y Sancho Panza, el pastor Pancino. Pasmáronse todos de ver la nueva locura de don Quijote; pero porque no se les fuese otra vez del pueblo a sus caballerías, esperando que en aquel año podría ser curado, concedieron con su nueva intención, y aprobaron por discreta su locura, ofreciéndose por compañeros en su ejercicio' (II, 73, pp. 1059-60).
5.		Jarvis, II, p. 604; 'yo estoy libre de buscar nombre de pastora fingida, pues está ahí la sin par Dulcinea del Toboso, gloria destas riberas, adorno destos prados, sustento de la hermosura, nata de los donaires y, finalmente, sujeto sobre quien puede asentar bien toda alabanza, por hipérbole que sea' (II, 73. p. 1060).
6.		For a general account of the Spanish pastoral novel see J.B. Avalle-Arce, La novela pastoril española, 2nd edition (Madrid, Istmo, 1974).
7.		Motteux, I, pp. 52-3; 'Y abriendo uno, vio que era La Diana, de Jorge de Montemayor, y dijo, creyendo que todos los demás eran del mesmo género: --Estos no merecen ser quemados, como los demás, porque no hacen ni harán el daño que los de caballerías han hecho; que son libros de entendimiento, sin perjuicio de tercero. --¡Ay señor! --dijo la sobrina--. Bien los puede vuestra merced mandar quemar, como a los demás; porque no sería mucho que, habiendo sanado mi señor tío de la enfermedad caballeresca, leyendo éstos se le antojase de hacerse pastor y andarse por los bosques y prados cantando y tañendo, y, lo que sería peor, hacerse poeta, que, según dicen, es enfermedad incurable y pegadiza. --Verdad dice esta doncella --dijo el cura--, y será bien quitarle a nuestro amigo este tropiezo y ocasión delante. Y, pues comenzamos por La Diana, de Montemayor, soy de parecer que no se queme, sino que se le quite todo aquello que trata de la sabia Felicia y de la agua encantada, y casi todos los versos mayores, y quédesele en hora buena la prosa, y la honra de ser primero en semejantes libros. --Este que se sigue --dijo el barbero --es La Diana llamada segunda del Salmantino, y éste, otro que tiene el mismo nombre, cuyo autor es Gil Polo. --Pues la del Salmantino --respondió el cura--, acompañe y acreciente el número de los condenados al corral, y la de Gil Polo se guarde como si fuera del mesmo Apolo' (I, 6, pp. 73-4).
8.		See, for example, the opening lines of Góngora's ballad of 1582, no. 10 in the edition of Juan and Isabel Millé y Giménez (Madrid, Aguilar, 1961), 57: 'En la pedregosa orilla del el turbio Guadalmellato, que al claro Guadalquivir le paga el tributo en barro... ...estaba el pastor Galayo.
9.		For a discussion of the two Dianas, see R.O. Jones, A Literary History of Spain. The Golden Age: Prose and Poetry (London, Benn, 1971), 57-63.
10.		Jorge de Montemayor, Los siete libros de la Diana, ed. Francisco López Estrada (Madrid, Espasa Calpe, 1962), 52: [Selvagia is speaking] '¡Ved qué estraño embuste de amor!; si por ventura Ysmenia iva al campo, Alanio tras ella; si Montano iva al ganado, Ysmenia tras él; si yo andava al monte con mis ovejas, Montano tras mí y si yo sabía que Alanio estava en un bosque donde solía repastar, allá me iva tras él.'
11.		ed. cit., 57.
12.		Gaspar Gil Polo, Diana enamorada, ed. Rafael Ferreres (Madrid, Espasa Calpe, 1962), 25.
13.		Motteux, I, p. 140; 'En estos coloquios iban don Quijote y su escudero, cuando vio don Quijote que por el camino que iban venía hacia ellos una grande y espesa polvareda; y, en viéndola, se volvió a Sancho y le dijo: --Este es el día, ¡oh Sancho!, en el cual se ha de ver el bien que me tiene guardado mi suerte; éste es el día, digo, en que se ha de mostrar, tanto como en otro alguno, el valor de mi brazo, y en el que tengo de hacer obras que queden escritas en el libro de la Fama por todos los venideros siglos. ¿Ves aquella polvareda que allí se levanta, Sancho? Pues toda es cuajada de un copiosísimo ejército que de diversas e innumerables gentes por allí viene marchando. --A esa cuenta, dos deben de ser -dijo Sancho-; porque desta parte contraria se levanta asimesmo otra semejante polvareda. Volvió a mirarlo don Quijote, y vio que así era la verdad; y alegrándose sobremanera, pensó sin duda alguna que eran dos ejércitos, que venían a embestirse y a encontrarse en mitad de aquella espaciosa llanura. Porque tenía a todas horas y momentos llena la fantasía de aquellas batallas, encantamentos, sucesos, desatinos, amores, desafíos, que en los libros de caballerías se cuentan, y todo cuanto hablaba, pensaba o hacía era encaminado a cosas semejantes. Y la polvareda que había visto la levantaban dos grandes manadas de ovejas y carneros que, por aquel mesmo camino, de dos diferentes partes venían, las cuales, con el polvo, no se echaron de ver hasta que llegaron cerca' (I, 18, pp. 161-62).
14.		For a general discussion of the wool trade and the Spanish economy see: J.H. Elliott, Imperial Spain 1469-1716 (London, Edward Arnold, 1963), especially pp. 20-21, 108-9; John Lynch, Spain under the Habsburgs, 2 vols (Oxford, Blackwell, 1965), I, 16-19, 114-16, 142-44; John Lynch, Spain 1516-1598. From Nation State to World Empire (Oxford, Blackwell, 1991), 160-62. More detailed and polemical discussions may be found in David E. Vassberg, Land and Society in Golden Age Castile (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984) and in the papers published in I.A.A. Thompson and Bartolomé Yun Casalilla, eds., The Castilian Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994).
15.		Vassberg, Land and Society, 80.
16.		Lynch, Spain 1516-1598, 160.
17.		Virgil, Eclogue X, 6-7; Ovid, Metamorphoses XV, 114-115. See Antonio Vilanova, Las fuentes y los temas del Polifemo de Góngora, 2 vols (Madrid, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1957), II, 691-93.
18.		Lynch, Spain under the Habsburgs, I, 144.
19.		The pastoral has always been characterised by its ambiguity. For a recent discussion of the two kinds of Arcadia, 'shaggy and smooth; dark and light', see Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, (London, Harper Collins, 1995), especially chapter 9, 'Arcadia Redesigned', and the bibliographical note on pp. 620-21.
20.		Smollett, I, p. 84; 'Dichosa edad y siglos dichosos aquellos a quien los antiguos pusieron nombre de dorados, y no porque en ellos el oro, que en esta nuestra edad de hierro tanto se estima, se alcanzase en aquella venturosa sin fatiga alguna, sino porque entonces los que en ella vivían ignoraban estas dos palabras de tuyo y mío. Eran en aquella santa edad todas las cosas comunes; a nadie le era necesario para alcanzar su ordinario sustento tomar otro trabajo que alzar la mano y alcanzarle de las robustas encinas, que liberalmente les estaban convidando con su dulce y sazonado fruto...' (I, 11, p. 104).
21.		'Y agora, en estos nuestros detestables siglos, no está segura ninguna' (106).
22.		'esta larga arenga -que se pudiera muy bien escusar-' (106).
23.		'se sentó en el tronco de una desmochada encina' (107).
24.		'aquella que se anda en hábito de pastora por esos andurriales' (I, 12, p. 110).
25.		'él quedó heredado en mucha cantidad de hacienda, así en muebles como en raíces, y en no pequeña cantidad de ganado, mayor y menor, y en gran cantidad de dinero' (112). The elision in the English text conceals a mistranslation of 'mayor y menor'.
26.		Smollett, I, p.108; 'Ese cuerpo, señores, que con piadosos ojos estáis mirando, fue depositario de un alma en quien el cielo puso infinita parte de sus riquezas. Ese es el cuerpo de Grisóstomo, que fue único en el ingenio, solo en la cortesía, estremo en la gentileza, fénix en la amistad, magnífico sin tasa, grave sin presunción, alegre sin bajeza, y, finalmente, primero en todo lo que es ser bueno, y sin segundo en todo lo que fue ser desdichado. Quiso bien, fue aborrecido; adoró, fue desdeñado; rogó a una fiera, importunó a un mármol, corrió tras el viento, dio voces a la soledad, sirvió a la ingratitud, de quien alcanzó por premio ser despojos de la muerte...' (I, 13, pp. 123-24).
27.		Smollett, I, p. 116; 'Yo nací libre, y para poder vivir libre escogí la soledad de los campos. Los árboles destas montañas son mi compañía, las claras aguas destos arroyos mis espejos; con los árboles y con las aguas comunico mis pensamientos y hermosura. Fuego soy apartado y espada puesta lejos. A los que he enamorado con la vista he desengañado con las palabras. Y si los deseos se sustentan con esperanzas, no habiendo yo dado alguna a Grisóstomo ni a otro alguno, en fin, en ninguno dellos, bien se puede decir que antes le mató su porfía que mi crueldad. Y si se me hace cargo que eran honestos sus pensamientos, y que por esto estaba obligada a corresponder a ellos, digo que cuando en ese mismo lugar donde ahora se cava su sepultura me descubrió la bondad de su intención, le dije yo que la mía era vivir en perpetua soledad, y de que sola la tierra gozase el fruto de mi recogimiento y los despojos de mi hermosura; y si él, con todo este desengaño, quiso porfiar contra la esperanza y navegar contra el viento, ¿qué mucho que se anegase en la mitad del golfo de su desatino?' (I, 14, p. 131).
28.		T. Hart and S. Rendall, 'Rhetoric and persuasion in Marcela's address to the shepherds', Hispanic Review, 46 (1978), 287-98. E.C. Riley agrees: 'Her defence is inviolable; but, as has been pointed out, her want of compassion and tact alienates much of the sympathy her case arouses', Don Quixote (London, Allen and Unwin, 1986), 80.
29.		Cervantes. Don Quixote (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990), 33-35.
30.		Smollett, I, p. 91; 'mandó en su testamento que le enterrasen en el campo, como si fuera moro, y que sea al pie de la peña donde está la fuente del alcornoque' (I, 12, p. 110).

[Close Print-Friendly Version]