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And the fact that Guarini saw fit seriously to oppose a scholastic's moral figment to the poet's age of gold may serve as a sufficient measure of the soul of the pedant. When Battista Guarini entered the service of the Duke of Ferrara in 1567 he was already married and had attained the age of thirty, being seven years older than Tasso.
Beaumont and Fletcher draw the subjects of comedies and tragedies alike from the Italian novelists. Fletcher in his 'Faithful Shepherdess' transfers the pastoral style of Tasso and Guarini to the North.
If we had known what Milton knew, namely, to how large an extent 'Paradise Lost' was not the child of his own imagination, and therefore not so precious in his eyes as 'Paradise Regained, we might have understood his prejudice. Certain parts of 'Paradise Lost' are drawn, as we all know, from other Italian sources, from Sannazario, Ariosto, Guarini, Bojardo, and others.
The name of the translater does not appear, but the heading runs: 'Il pastor fido, di signor Guarini ... recitata in Collegio Regali Cantabrigiae. The title is so scrawled over that it would be impossible to say for certain whether the note of performance referred to the present play, were it not for an allusion casually dropped by the anonymous recorder of a royal visit to Oxford, which not only substantiates the inference to be drawn from the manuscript, but also supplies us with a downward limit of August, 1605.
He had a place assigned him among the musicians and jugglers, and was regarded as one of the common domestics of the establishment. Guarini, the well-known author of the Pastor Fido, contemporary with Tasso, met with much indignity in the service of Alphonso II.; while Panigarola and several other distinguished men were compelled to leave the service of the ducal family by persecution.
Guarini would hardly have acknowledged his indebtedness to Tasso in the way of art, but he drew on all sources for the incidents of his plot, and, since he appears to have valued a reputation for scholarship above one for originality, he recorded a fair proportion of his borrowings in his notes. The Pastor fido was the talk of the Italian Courts even before it was completed.
Guarini, who is said to have supplied a prologue for the revival of the piece, bore out Beccari's claim when he wrote in his essay on tragi-comedy: 'First among the moderns to possess the happy boldness to make in this kind, namely the pastoral dramatic tale, of which there is no trace among the ancients, was Agostin de' Beccari, a worthy citizen of Ferrara, to whom alone does the world owe the fair creation of this sort of poem .
And accordingly, the Pastoral Dramas of Tasso, Guarini, and Fletcher, however they may have been commended by the critics, and admired by that credulous train who clap and stare whenever they are bid, have when the recommendation of novelty has subsided been little attended to and little read. But the great Milton has proved that this objection is not insuperable.
By the bones of God, but he served a great lord of that city Guarino Guarini by name, whose blade was the longest, the oftenest out, and the cleanest cutter, as himself was the lightest heart, and most trenchant carver of men in Borso's fief. The good captain carried his loyalty to the edge of his simplicity, and left it there for Olimpia to handle.
Tasso used the pastoral machinery to idealize the court; Guarini accepted the pastoral convention of the superiority of the 'natural' life of the country, and used it as a means of pouring out his bitterness of soul.
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