The multi-perspectivity that characterises Baroque literature precludes a single overarching statement regarding the function of pastoral in this cultural epoch. Nonetheless, the pastoral is a persistent presence in almost every form of creative expression in the Hispanic Baroque. As Ali Smith recently reminded us:

In continuing to function as a locus of poetic debate in the Baroque period, the pastoral offers up its own forum for such dialogue and renewal; here the testing process of forging a poetic voice appropriate to a given context is interrogated with reference to diverse forms of authority. Indeed, we can trace the fluidity of the mode within the trajectories of some of the major writers of the Baroque period. Late in life, Lope de Vega affectionately mocks pastoral convention in La Dorotea, yet poignantly, in ‘straight mode’, exploits it as the vehicle for his touching poetic tribute to Marta de Nevares (Egloga a Amarilis, 1633). As Chapter 1 demonstrated, at points Cervantes’s La Galatea stripped away the saccharine to restore the emotive potential of the shepherd’s lament. At the close of the Quijote, Sancho’s futile longing for a pastoral dream realised presages the knight’s death – aptly, the poignancy of the mode is released in the face of our awareness of its impossibility. We join with Sancho in longing for the absurdities that the living out of this fiction could create. In the poetry, we are not left so bereft – in the absence of an abundance of poetic theory, this remarkably fluid frame emerges as a productive site for poetic experimentation, for reflection on ‘new’ versions of artistry amid Soto de Rojas’s reframing of classical sensuality, shot through with Counter-Reformation anxiety. Luisa de Carvajal engages pastoral’s possibilities as a site for selfdefinition, amid an ambitious project of self-fashioning. Francisco de Quevedo challenges prevailing artistic norms within amorous verse and within Spanish poetry more widely.