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Updated: June 15, 2025
No doubt the imitation of Tasso and Guarini is an important element in the subsequent history of pastoralism in this country, and to trace and define that influence will be not the least important task of the ensuing chapters.
It will therefore be more convenient and more appropriate to postpone consideration of the piece until we have followed out the influence of that tradition, and watched its effect in the wide field of the romantic drama, and come at the end ourselves to face the question of the meaning and the merits of pastoralism as a literary creed.
On the one hand the spontaneous and popular impulse towards a form of pastoralism appears to have been stronger and more consistent than elsewhere; on the other the foreign and literary influence never acquired the same supreme importance.
The absurdities of the style were patent, and did not escape uncomplimentary notice from the writers of the day, for both Cervantes and Lope de Vega, in spite of their own excursions into this kind, pilloried the fashion in their more serious and enduring works. In France the interest of pastoralism, from our present point of view, is summed up in the work of one man Clément Marot.
The absurdities of the conventional pastoral did not, indeed, pass altogether unnoticed in their own day, for early in the sixteenth century Teofilo Folengo composed his Zanitonella in macaronic verse. It consists of eclogues and poems in hexameter and elegiac metre ridiculing polite pastoralism through contrast with the crudities of actual rusticity.
The first point of importance for the interpretation of Fletcher's pastoralism is to be found in the quaintly self-confident preface which he prefixed to the printed edition.
From the court it passed into circles of learning, and grave jurists and administrators, poets and scholars, set about the refining of language and literature decked out in all the fopperies of the fashionable craze. One is tempted to wonder whether anything more serious than light loves and fantastic amours can have flourished amid eighteenth-century pastoralism.
The idea of pastoral current among the playwrights, and no doubt among the audience too, was largely derived from novels such as the Arcadia, and, as we have seen, the tradition of these works was one rather of polite chivalry and courtly adventure than of pastoralism proper.
The other writer is William Warner, well known from his Albion's England, published in 1586, who left a work entitled Pan his Syrinx, which appeared in 1584; but in this pastoralism does not penetrate beyond the title-page.
Sannazzaro was content to transfer certain personages from real life into his imaginary Arcadia, while in the Spanish romances the whole mise en scène consists of the actual surroundings of the author disguised but little under the veil of pastoralism.
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