The works of Spenser and Virgil are at once aesthetically inventive and conceptually challenging, and nowhere is this more evident than in their use of the pastoral mode. Unfortunately, not all the commentary they have received over the centuries has matched their own intellectual liveliness. Their poems, and pastoral itself, can be traps for the unwary, especially for those with a naively referential approach to metaphor and allegory.

In this volume P. argues, reasonably enough, that Spenser does not in fact model his poetic career on Virgil's, as he tends to suggest and as tradition has largely accepted, but self-consciously departs from it in order to voice criticism of Elizabeth I's regime. In doing so he elevates pastoral above epic, the climax of Virgil's career and the genre which underlined his allegiance to centralised authority. Spenser's main vehicle for this calculated snub to his monarch and the London establishment is the volume Colin Clovts Come Home Againe (1595), which, in addition to the title poem, includes ‘Astrophel’ (an elegy for Sidney) and ‘The Dolefull Lay of Clorinda’. This unexpected return to pastoral whilst still engaged upon his own epic project, The Faerie Queene (published 1590 and 1596), conveys Spenser's ambivalent political relationship with Elizabeth through an equally double-edged ‘intertextual’ relationship with his classical predecessor.

This aside, however, the book offers few discoveries. There are informative accounts of matters such as Virgil's place in Roman society and the political effects of his transition from pastoral (or rather bucolic) to epic; of his practice of reworking material from Theocritus; of his importance in sixteenth-century humanist education; and of differing emphases in conventional refusals of epic by the Roman and Renaissance poets. P. also writes at length about the political parallels which can be identified in the pastoral works she examines. Interesting as this may be, she is too reluctant to consider the nature of pastoral as a literary kind, and thus to acknowledge the problems integral to its appeal, or to register the distinctive forms of expression these problems find in each author. As a consequence, she is unable to explore the full complexity of the Spenser–Virgil connection, becoming bogged-down in a hunt for topical correspondences, in a manner familiar from P. McLane's Spenser's Shepheardes Calender: a Study in Elizabethan Allegory (1961). Statements such as ‘it seems entirely plausible to read this (as many since Paul McLane have done) as allegorizing Elizabeth's turn to a Catholic lover’ (p. 108) and ‘It is possible, therefore, but unprovable, that the “vsage hard” of which the Shepherd of the Ocean complains is the punishment of Ralegh's marriage also fictionalized in Book IV of The Faerie Queene’ (p. 230) are typical.

Rather better is the account of Spenser's questioning of the Virgilian cursus, in ‘Colin Clovt’ and the other 1595 poems, through allusive imitation of Theocritus and Callimachus, and of Bion and Moschus, their later Hellenistic successors. The epyllia, or brief epics, favoured by these writers ‘promoted … the aesthetic ideal of refinement, elegance, slightness – leptotes’ (p. 19), and privileged love over Virgil's ‘growing dependence on and complicity with imperial power’ (p. 23). Along similar lines, the best criticism on offer is the attempt to give ‘Astrophel’ due attention as an integral part of the collection in which it appears. Here, P. relates the poem to Virgil's treatment of love elegy in his tenth eclogue, where ‘the sympathy embodied in Virgil's gift, condoling with Gallus’ sorrows and echoing his songs, is reflected in the pastoral landscape, which … hears and “responds” with echoes to the eclogue itself’ (pp. 186–7). This, in turn, constitutes ‘a meditation on the sympathetic friendship of the pastoral community in Virgil's imaginary Arcadia’ (p. 222). These reflections upon mutuality inspire P. to a more sensitive reading of literary art than she demonstrates elsewhere. It is a pity, though, that the potential ethical and aesthetic force of a commitment to ‘slightness’ is not further expanded upon, and that the social implications of her contrast between Spenser's claim to visionary autonomy and Virgil's shrewd negotiations with Augustus are not explored in more depth.

I must confess, with apologies, that I was disappointed not to find any reference to my own Radical Spenser: Pastoral, Politics and the New Aestheticism (2005) in a study concerned with some closely-related themes in the same author and literary mode. More particularly, I had hoped to see some level of response to my arguments concerning a ‘non-dominative’ logic of Spenserian pastoral, evident in its treatment of social relations, cross-cultural encounters and – especially in respect of early modern Ireland – environmental ethics, all of which are also touched upon by P. For example, she makes worthwhile points about Spenser's construction of Ireland as a ‘pastoral space’, which enables him to question the inherently violent nature of his colonial presence there, and also contrasts Virgil's Orphic animation or teaching of the landscape with Lucretius, in whose writings it is the landscape which does the teaching. Both ideas seem like lost opportunities for productive critical conversation. Similarly, when she takes issue with the notion, in P. Alpers and others, that the defining characteristic of pastoral is ‘suspension’ (without offering any alternative theory), my efforts to devise a more dynamic understanding of the mode go unmentioned.

Conceivably such omissions are the result of hurried writing, as perhaps is the need for greater succinctness. The central thesis would have had more impact in an article, whilst all the essential details could have been retained in a work half as long. Moreover, the paucity of theoretical reflection, and of reference to critics informed by it, makes the argument feel rather hollow. In place of new thinking, P. opts for what she perceives to be a renewal of tradition, employing a version of Servian allegoresis – ‘not so quaint or far-fetched as it is often considered to be’ (p. 264 n. 72) – and even resuscitating numerology, which, unsurprisingly, ‘has fallen out of fashion in Spenser studies as in classics’ (p. 162 n. 7). In fact, this tendency to positivism does not reflect the best elements of P.’s book. In adopting it, she is perhaps influenced unhelpfully by a movement described, in a series blurb printed opposite the title page, as ‘fresh with confidence and curiosity and based on solid historical research’. Its partisans are moved by ‘a general sense … that our ability to interpret texts is becoming limited without the excavation of further knowledge’. Leaving aside the undoubted value of some of the volumes in the Manchester Spenser series, this description reads very much as an anti-theory manifesto. Whilst it would be foolish to suppose that criticism could or should float free of scholarly research, the assumption that ‘knowledge’ can simply pre-exist interpretation, that it is waiting to be dug up by anyone with enough ‘stamina’, is equally dangerous. Even more worrying for academic debate, however, is the practice of simply ignoring work which contradicts or differs from one's own.

Whilst the idea of a subtly subversive Spenser is welcome, it is not new. P.’s monograph neither delivers a properly historicist account of Spenser's encounter with Virgil, nor convinces the reader that the richness of pastoral can be reduced to instrumental allusions and echoes. I prefer to think that Spenser's works, like Virgil's, have the capacity to speak of larger concerns beyond his immediate pragmatic intentions. To fall back on obsolete methods in a quest for the latter is to shy away from a challenge which all pastoral works present: to question apparent divisions and, in doing so, to promote creative dialogue.