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Updated: May 16, 2025
Now the only manuscript translation of Guarini's play extant in English is that of Jonathan Sidnam, whose name gives us the very initials which appear upon the title-page of the printed play. Since the preliminary verses may have been written any time between 1647 and 1655, the vague allusion to the date of composition will quite well fit 1630, the year given in the manuscript.
'But in thèse words, objects Carducci, 'the writer is in no way referring to the Italian eclogues of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The eclogue had passed out of its infancy in the work of Theocritus. Here, however, Carducci appears to me to misinterpret Guarini's meaning in an almost perverse manner.
I only wish to draw attention to one point here, namely, that if Guarini's Silvio is a companion portrait to Tasso's Silvia, she in her turn is but the feminine counterpart of Argenti's Silvio.
Thanks to his pastorals, I could long afterwards enjoy with the double sense requisite for full pleasure in them, such divinely excellent artificialities at Tasso's "Aminta" and Guarini's "Pastor Fido"; things which you will thoroughly like only after you are in the joke of thinking how people once seriously liked them as high examples of poetry.
No attempt is made to clear Amarilli of the compromising evidence on which she had been condemned, but the pair have the favour of the gods, and the chorus makes no difficulty of chanting the virtue of the bride. Such is Guarini's play; a plot constructed with consummate ingenuity, but presented with an almost entire lack of dramatic feeling.
in order to compare them with the use made of the same by Webster when he made Vittoria at her trial exclaim: Casta est quam nemo rogavit! a comparison which at once reveals the gulf fixed between the clairvoyant dramatist and the mere pedantic scholar. And yet the subsequent history of pastoral reminds us that it is quite possible to underestimate Guarini's merits as a playwright.
Fletcher's definition is obviously borrowed from the academic criticism of the renaissance, and bears no relation to the living tradition of the English stage: since his play suggests acquaintance with Guarini's Pastor fido, it is perhaps not fantastic to imagine that in his preface he was indebted to the same author's Compendio della poesia tragicomica.
Randolph, on the other hand, chose a plot closely resembling Guarini's in structure, and even retained much of the scenic arrangement of the Italian theatre.
It is known that Luzzasco Luzzaschi, pupil of Cyprian di Rore, master of Frescobaldi, and composer of madrigals and organ toccatas, wrote the chorals in madrigal style for Guarini's famous "Pastor Fido." There were choruses to separate the acts and two introduced in the action.
But even apart from the elements of farce and comedy there are important aspects in which the Amyntas severs itself from the stricter tradition of the Italian pastoral. Randolph, while adopting the machinery and much of the scenic environment of Guarini's play, made certain not unimportant alterations in the dramatic construction, tending towards greater variety and complicity.
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