The narrator of the «Prólogo» laments that his will be unlike «otros libros, aunque sean fabulosos y profanos, tan llenos de sentencias de Aristóteles, de Platón y de toda la caterva de filósofos, que admiran a los leyentes y tienen a sus autores por hombres leídos, eruditos y elocuentes» (Don Quijote, ed. Martín de Riquer, 2 vols. [Barcelona: Editorial Juventud, 1974] I, 20). The fact that this need to include «toda la caterva de filósofos» is material for satire indicates that in 1605 the appropriateness of proving one's erudition through copying others' was waning. Nevertheless, «borrowing» from classical and contemporary sources alike was practiced with great zeal by some, like Lope de Vega and Fray Antonio de Guevara. See Francisco Márquez-Villanueva, «Fray Antonio de Guevara o la ascética novelada» in Espiritualidad y literatura en el siglo XVI (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1968), pp. 15-66.

The practice of not identifying one's sources, regardless of the extent upon which they were drawn, was still common in the sixteenth century, perhaps a lingering influence from the communal attitude about literature theoretically held by the long-time guardians of the written word in the Christian world, the religious orders. This copying was not limited to small sections of text or to the pilferage of classical works: Montemayor, for example, translated entirely from St. John Climacus' Scala coeli for the second half of his «Diálogo spiritual», from Lourenço de Caceres for his «Trabajos de los reyes», and included poems by other poets in «his» Cancioneros, without any reference to what he was doing.

As books became marketable items that responded to popular demand (versus their being repositories of irrefutable wisdom), the business of copying was less related to philosophical or artistic admiration and became more a matter of attempting to take material advantage of another's success. The «Prólogo» to the second part of Don Quijote attests to this: «Dile [al autor de la primera continuación] que de la amenaza que me hace, que me ha de quitar la ganancia con su libro, no se me da un ardite» (II, 538). Cervantes' poverty, which distinguished him from theretofore typical gentlemen writers, leads one to wonder if this testy response to Avellaneda only superficially masks a genuine concern about the market value of his own continuation of Don Quijote, then the second to be published. However, Avellaneda was merely repeating history in trying to make a genre out of Cervantes' creation, as had been done with Amadís de Gaula, Celestina, Lazarillo, La Diana, etc.

Critics vary in their preference for «pastoral novel» or «pastoral romance» to describe that category of books which can correctly only be called «libros de pastores», the words used by those who wrote and read them. Although return to the original terminology properly eliminates the anachronistic conflict between romance and novel implied by our modern words, it poses a problem in English, for reference to «shepherds' books» includes a blatant sex marker that detracts attention from the innovative role of women in this type of fiction. A prudent alternative seems to be «pastoral books», which, aside from being a closer representation of «libros de pastores» than pastoral romance or novel, avoids implying the existence of the novel before its time and resists transfer of the English category of romance into a language which does not have a corresponding term. The use of «books» to talk about volumes consisting of «libros», as does La Galatea, is an accurate but awkward translation, since «libros» in this context means «chapters» but are referred to as Book I, Book II, etc. For the problem of novel, romance, and terminology, see Bruce Wardropper's «Don Quixote: Story or History?» In Modern Philology 63 (1965), 1-11, and Alban K. Forcione's Cervantes, Aristotle and the «Persiles» (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970).

Cervantes was never one to mask his awareness of theoretical problems. Indeed, the self-conscious declarations and doubts included in the prologues to all of his prose works make clear his mindfulness of literary rules and categories. The prologue to La Galatea, for example, indicates a keen awareness of what he was supposed to be writing, at the same time that it contains clever reference to his failure to comply. See my «The Poetics of Pastoral: Prologue to the Galatea», in Cervantes and the Pastoral (Cleveland: Cleveland State University, 1986), pp. 169-84.

Quotations from the text of La Galatea are from the edition of Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce (2 vols. [Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1961]), in this case II, 170. I would like to thank Alan Trueblood for calling my attention to Edward W. Tayler's Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), in which the dynamic balance between Nature and Art is studied as the essence of Renaissance pastoral. In his introduction, Tayler points out the same interdependence between the two that Elicio recognizes in his own environment: «Pastoral is by definition implicitly concerned with the discrepancies that may be observed between rural and urban, country and courtly, simple and complex, natural and artificial» (5). Anthony Cascardi considers the role of nature in relation to the problem of genre in his «Genre Definition and Multiplicity in Don Quijote» (Cervantes 6 [1986], 39-49.

Poetry and history are here used in the neo-Aristotelian context in which they were understood in Cervantes' day. Wardropper («Don Quixote: Story or History») defines poetry and history in a manner appropriate for this study, as categories of imitation, wherein poetry deals with universality and history with particularity. Poetry was held in higher esteem for its superior philosophical and moral content, for it ultimately presents the world as it should be. History, however, represents the world as it presents itself to human senses. In his constant use of the word «history» to refer to Don Quijote (which is really not history), Cervantes blurs the distinction between traditional neo-Aristotelian categories, all the while apparently swearing allegiance to the same. Likewise, when he loudly refers to La Galatea as eclogues (I, 5), he means it is a specific type of poetry, the kind based on an idealized vision of the lives of shepherds and shepherdesses. His insistence that La Galatea is poetry is merely an earlier, reversed version of the claim for historicity in Don Quijote, because La Galatea is full of decidedly unpoetic elements.

See Avalle-Arce's fundamental study of La Galatea, «Cervantes», in La novela pastoril española (2nd ed. [Madrid: Ediciones Istmo, 1974]), pp. 229-64 (cited henceforth as NPE). James Stamm developed Avalle-Arce's basic thesis of the text's polarity, pointing out the exaggerated extremes of the poetic and historical elements. See his excellent article «La Galatea y el concepto de género: un acercamiento», in Cervantes: su obra y su mundo (Actas del I Congreso Internacional sobre Cervantes. [Madrid: EDI-6, 1981] pp. 337-43).

What it is that makes the pastoral mode work has puzzled critics for years, and none agree on every detail. In this study, reference to the «pastoral myth» or the nature of pastoral in general refers to characteristics which typify all pastoral literature: shepherds and shepherdesses as representative anecdotes of the human experience; contemplative versus active values, meaning description of emotions and of the sentimental consequences of action, not action itself; focus on the past, usually in an idealized and melancholic fashion; use of a limited natural setting, also idealized, which is described with affection and is physically and psychically removed from urban life. In pastoral books of sixteenth-century Spain, attention should be called to the multiple rather than single or double plots, none of which completely dominates the others. For the theoretical questions in the same context, see my «Prologue to Pastoral».

Avalle-Arce says of the characters in La Galatea: «El concepto de amor... está tan hondamente enclavado en lo íntimo de la personalidad del pastor que no se puede hablar más de teorías sino de sufriente e ilógica humanidad» (NPE, p. 240).