The pastoral as a genre dates back to the beginnings of French theatre with Le Jeu d'Adam, and continued to be popular with the upper classes. This play itself is about upper class people dressing up as and playing shepherds and nymphes, which reflects a sort of fantasy of the upper classes for the simplicity of peasant life. This fantasy would be played out a century later by Marie Antoinette when she constructed an entire fake peasant town at Versailles, complete with perfumed sheep. What I found myself thinking about while reading this play was the genre of the pastoral. Comedy and tragedy are easier to define, even with their subcategories of tragicomedy or heroic tragedy or historical drama, etc. The progression of the tragic drama through the ages is fairly easy to track, while comedy is often simply a caricaturized reflection of society. I would argue that the pastoral is an early version of what we today would recognize as the fantasy genre. For a modern audience, the fantasy genre comes in many forms, but high fantasy typically portrays pre-modern agricultural societies, interactions with divine or semi-divine beings, and a sense of moral clarity where good and evil are easily defined. While the line between the pastoral and Tolkein's writing is not as clear as the similarities between Oedipus Rex and Death of a Salesman for example, I think that the pastoral is engaging with this desire for escape into a world which is not our own, a world of magic and gods and pretend for lack of a better term. The characters of this play are quite literally acting out that fantasy by dressing up as different deities and personnages all for a little diversion.
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Jennifer KellettM.A. French Literature Florida State University Archives
June 2021
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