Early Modern Pastoral Drag and Nonprocreative Reproduction

Abstract: This article suggests that the dialogue between Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” and Walter Raleigh’s “The Nymph’s Reply” foregrounds a negotiation of ecological plenitude as a site of erotic possibility. The poems construct and destabilize a reproductive ecological formation through the initial construction of a fecund landscape in “The Passionate Shepherd,” its subsequent denial in “The Nymph’s Reply,” and Raleigh’s gendering of the Shepherd’s beloved as a Nymph, despite the nonreproductive context of her reply. I call this unstable schema “pastoral drag,” a model that expands raw materiality to a symbolic realm, encompassing both the unsettlement and reinstatement of gender around pastoral naturescapes. My article traces how and to what extent environmental fertility stands in for procreation, as well as the gendered implications of this formal strategy. Aiming to illuminate the poetic tools of this negotiation, my analysis ultimately sustains the broader claim that homoerotic forms of desire and nonnormative gendering can constitute generative and often crucial participants in early modern reproductive discourse.