Antipetrarkizam i de(kon)strukcija pastorale u Gorskoj Arkadiji Shakespearea i Držića
Antipetrarchism and De(con)struction of Pastoral in The Bitter Arcady of Shakespeare and Držić

Summary/Abstract: Both Marin Držić and William Shakespeare included in their generic repertoire the pastoral, which reached its heyday during the Renaissance. However, while working within its conventions, both authors transformed this genre to a great extent. As the analysis of the two of their pastoral comedies, Držić’s Grižula and Shakespeare’s As You Like It, shows, this rather overused literary genre was similarly modi fied in both comedies, in accordance with the Mannerist literary poetics, to which these, as well as other plays by the same authors, are often said to belong. Not only does the locus amoenus in these comedies cease to be the idealised pastoral setting reminiscent of the Golden Age and dominated by the pleasure principle, but the plays employ an anti-Petrarchan strategy to question and parody the traditional love poetry, as well as the entire pastoral semantics of love. In such mannerist de(con)struction of the pastoral, not only love poetry as a literary signifying practice, but referentiality in poetry as well as in language itself, are called in to question. Further more, this anti-Petrarchan stance suggests that love, as the driving force behind the pastoral plot, has been replaced by Girard’s ’mimetic desire’, an ambivalent relationship of love and envy, in which the object and model of desire merge in to one. By un settling the pastoral allegory of love, the se two comedies call in to question both the relationship between reality and fiction, as well as the position and function of the pastoral in Renaissance society.

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