When they perceyued this shepheard dead and gone,
The okes, elmes and euery sorte of dere
Shronke vnder shadowes, abating all their chere,
The mighty walles of Ely monastery,
The stones, rockes, and towres semblably
The marble pillers and images echeone,
Swet all for sorowe when this good cocke was gone... ( 3 : 469 – 88 )The death of Alcock produces a landscape quick with the sorrows of remem-
brance; he is a benevolent local deity whose loss has plunged the world
into grief. But Barclay’s landscape is also a very textual confection indeed.
Its sweating stones, as White noted, may be borrowed from Book One
of Virgil’sGeorgics, and the temple images which sweat at Caesar’sdeath
( 250 , note to 125 ). The play on Alcock’s name, too, is subject to multiple
influences. Mantuan refers to the papal treasurer Falcone di Sinibaldi, another
“good shepherd,”as“pastor...quadam ducens ex alite nomen,”a shepherd
bearing the name of a bird–a line which, as Wilfred Mustard observed years
ago, is behind Barclay’sallusion.^18 However, there is also a more immediate
reference, as Julie A. Smith notes, to Alcock’s own rebus, the image of a cock
on a globe, resonant with multiple connotations: the prelate’smandateto
preach, Peter’s remorse, Christ as Man of Sorrows.^19
Stephen Guy-Bray notes that Virgilian pastoral inherits from Theocritus
a“largely unbroken spectrum”of homosocial relations; in Virgil’sEclogues
these are fragmented by power and status, so that“the men of the eclogue
meet to mourn when they meet at all.”^20 Barclay brushes against the
intimate and idyllic; at the end of the thirdEclogue, Corydon takes leave
with“Adewe swete Cornix, departing is a payne, / But mirth reneweth
when louers mete agayne”( 3 : 824 – 25 ), while Faustus hastens to return to his
friend as they bed down together under the straw:“After great colde it is full
swete God wot / To tumble in the strawe or in the litter hot”( 5 : 225 – 26 ).
The real erotic weight of theEclogues, however, belongs in the not so
displaced homosocial content of the laments, as two men join in mourning
for a lost father, powerful bonds between male generations and between
shepherd andflock shrunken like the Ely oaks to a bleak fable of failed
patrilineage, dead elders and wayward sons:“the yong be much vnlike the
olde,”says Corydon ( 1 : 516 ). This is a genealogy made not by acts of
begetting, but by disciplined celibacy: as Cornix puts it,“When he
[Alcock] went faded thefloure of all the fen, / I boldly dare sweare this
cocke trode neuer hen”( 1 : 529 – 30 ). In case we miss the point, it is
emphasized with the final member of this paternal group, Roger
Westminster or“the Shephearde Roger”:
Barclay’sEcloguesand Douglas’sPalice of Honour 93