Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.

My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.

What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

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Thanks for downloading the In Our Time Podcast.

For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co. UK forward slash radio for. I hope you enjoy

the program. Hello come live with me and be my love and we will all the pleasures prove that valleys, groves,

hills and fields, woods or steepy mountain yields, and we will sit upon the rocks, seeing the

shepherds feed their flocks by shallow rivers to whose falls melodious birds sing

madrigals.

An entreaty from Christopher Marla's passionate shepherd to his love, thought by many to be

the crowning example of Elizabethan pastoral poetry.

The tradition of pastoral poetry, traditions of pastoral poetry, literature and drama can be traced back to the third century

BC and have principally offered a conventionalised picture of rural life, the

naturalness and innocence of which is seen to contrast favorably with the corruption and

artificialities of city and court life. Pastoral literature deals with tensions between nature and

art, the real and the ideal, the actual and the mythical. And although pastoral works have

been written from the point of view of shepherds or Rustics, they've often been penned by sophisticated urban

poets and playwrights. But to what extent does pastoral literature represent a continuous

yearning for a non-existent golden age of innocence? How far did it evolve to reflect the social and political

...