ELH

ELH 68.1 (2001) 29-55

The Obscure Script of Regicide: Ambivalence and Little Girls in Marvell's Pastorals

Victoria Silver

I.

Mr. Dick and I soon became the best of friends, and very often, when his day's work was done, went out together to fly the great kite. Every day of his life he had a long sitting at the Memorial, which never made the least progress, however hard he laboured, for King Charles the First always strayed into it, sooner or later, and then it was thrown aside, and another one begun. The patience and hope with which he bore these perpetual disappointments, the mild perception he had that there was something wrong about King Charles the First, the feeble efforts he made to keep him out, and the certainty with which he came in, and tumbled the Memorial out of all shape, made a deep impression on me. ¹

Like Mr. Dick's Memorial, King Charles's head keeps intruding upon the pastorals of Andrew Marvell, not always as the event itself--although there is talk of beheading, lopping off and such--but as some peculiar violence that compromises and even (dare I say it?) incapacitates the world of the pleasaunce, the green world or, as Harry Berger calls it, the second world of poetic imagination and desire. ² In Theocritus's Idylls, long before Virgil made politics of shepherds, it is always afternoon: everyone has retreated from the heat into the shade, all enterprise has come to a halt, the landscape is emptied of action and effort, except that entailed in contemplating (usually unrequited) love. ³ But the energy devoted to this perpetual problem of human being is not devoted to its solution, only to its meditation, in which there is a certain langorous, sometimes elegiac but always articulate pleasure. Desire is handled by Theocritus as the ordinary predicament of pastoral people, its vicissitudes inspiring nothing desperate in his speakers and nothing profound--no attempt, that is, by human ingenuity and artifice to bridge the gap between what we have and what we wish for. ⁴

Indeed, Thomas Rosenmeyer has observed that, for the critic, there is an impenetrable simplicity to the Idylls which defies our presumption, our desire for deeper meanings, especially since a patent disjunction or incoherence to pastoral utterance obtains in these poems, which [End Page 29] would seem to intimate the presence of more and other ideas. ⁵ It is as if not only his speakers but Theocritus himself cannot be bothered to think the pastoral order of things quite through--to give it an adequate rationale, a principle of meaning that can assuage these incongruities, or at least placate the interpretive urge they tend to provoke in us. The situation puts one forcibly in mind of Erich Auerbach's perplexity in the face of another sort of pastoral world, the one inhabited by Don Quixote, which while it seemingly begs the most serious social commentary, refuses to engage in any more explicit or consecutive criticism than literary parody. ⁶ Like Rosenmeyer with Theocritus, Auerbach confronts in Cervantes what looks like an incorrigible blankness of intent, leaving even that great avatar of continuity nonplussed.

Part of the reason Auerbach wants to make a more profound or at least more acute sense of Cervantes, like that Rosenmeyer wistfully denies Theocritus, is that the pastoral has always stood over against the world of negotium or business in which we ordinarily strive: I refer to that realm of longing and reckoning, toil and vexation, from whose effortful interpretation we cannot desist. It is precisely because the pastoral appears oblivious to the claims of business--claims which we ourselves experience as necessary and ineluctable--that we expect it to reflect upon this different world: we want Theocritus's amorous shepherd folk, nymphs, and cyclopes to comment on the preoccupation they outwardly ignore, even as we wait for Quixote to indict the Spain that in his romantic madness he invariably encounters yet also invariably eludes. We expect our obsession somehow to be theirs, and...