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The Italian imagination was not careful to differentiate between field and forest: favola boschereccia was used synonymously with commedia pastorale; drammi dei boschi is a term which covers the whole of the pastoral drama.
His Sacrifizio, styled 'favola pastorale' on the title-page of the first impression, was acted at the palace of Francesco d' Este at Ferrara in the presence of Ercole II and his son Luigi, and of the Duchess Renata and her daughters Lucrezia and Leonora, on two occasions in February and March 1554.
The silvan element, which had been variously present since Tasso styled his play favola boschereccia, was used by Jonson to admirable purpose in the introduction of Robin Hood and his crew.
Alessandro D'Ancona in his monumental work on the sources of the Italian play says: "The 'Favola di Orfeo, although it drew its argument from mythology, was hardly dissimilar in its intrinsic character from the sacred plays, and was moreover far from that second form of tragedy which was later given to it, not by the author himself, but probably by Tebaldeo, to serve the dramatic tastes of Ferrara.
The class of productions known as mythological plays, which powerfully influenced the character of the pastoral drama, sprang from the union of classical tradition with the machinery of native religious representations, in Poliziano's Favola d' Orfeo. This was the first non-religious play in the vernacular, and its dependence on the earlier religious drama is striking.
And then, suddenly, with a rich and splendid basso that seemed to thrill every fibre of the planking, Sparicio joined in the song: "M'ama pur d'amore eterno, Ne deilitto sembri a te; T'assicuro che l'inferno Una favola sol e." ... All the roughness of the man was gone! To Julien's startled fancy, the fishers had ceased to be; lo! Carmelo was a princely page; Sparicio, a king!
It had, too, in embryonic form all that apparatus for the enchantment of the sense and the beguilement of the intellect which in the following century was the chief attraction of a lyric drama, partly opera, partly spectacle and partly ballet. Dr. Poliziano's "Favola Di Orfeo" In the year 1472 the Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga, who had stayed long in Bologna, returned to Mantua.
Translated, the passage runs: 'And why should it not be thought lawful for the eclogue to grow out of its infancy and arrive at mature years, if this has been possible in the case of tragedy? ... Even as the Muses grafted tragedy upon the dithyrambic stock, and comedy upon the phallic, so in their ever-fertile garden they set the eclogue as a tiny cutting, whence sprang in later years the stately growth of the pastoral, that is, of the favola di pastori, or dramatic pastoral, as he elsewhere explains.
Traces of one of these sylvan theatres may still be seen in the grounds of the Villa Madama, on the eastern slopes of Monte Mario near Rome; and one cannot help thinking that a poem so redolent of the open air, so full of Nature and still natural life, which Tasso himself called Favola Boschereccia, or a Sylvan Fable, was better adapted for such a stage than for the heated air and artificial surroundings of the Italian theatres.
At least this is how I read the available evidence. Besides the Cecaria, mentioned above, Epicuro de' Marsi also left a manuscript play entitled Mirzia, which he describes as a 'favola boschereccia, being thus the first to make use of the term later adopted by Tasso.
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