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Updated: June 10, 2025
In 1506 Castiglione and Cesare Gonzaga, in the disguise of shepherds, recited an eclogue interspersed with songs before the court of Duke Guidubaldo at Urbino. The Duchess Elizabeth was among the spectators. The Tirsi, as it is called, begins with the simple themes of pastoral complaint, whence by swift transition it passes to a panegyric of the court and the circle of the Cortegiano.
In the meanwhile he detains Mopso with an account of his love for a nymph he met the day before, and sings a canzona: The boy Tirsi now returns, having with much trouble driven the strayed calf back to the herd, and narrates how he saw an unknown nymph of wondrous beauty gathering flowers about the hill.
With the exception, indeed, of one or two in Boccaccio's Ameto, it is doubtful whether any vernacular eclogues had appeared at the time. The character of Tirsi belongs to rustic tradition, and must be an experiment contemporary with, if not prior to, Lorenzo's Nencia. The portion before the canzone is in terza rima; that after it, like the prologue, in octaves.
Among them mention may be made of Francisco de Figueroa, the Tirsi of Cervantes' Galatea; Pedro de Encinas, who attempted religious eclogues; Lope de Vega; Alonso de Ulloa, the Venetian printer, who is credited with having foisted the Rodrigo episode into Montemayor's Diana; Gaspar Gil Polo, one of the continuators of that work; and Bernardo de Balbuenas, one of its many imitators, who incorporated in his Siglo de Oro a number of eclogues which in their simple and rustic nature appear to be studied from Theocritus rather than Vergil.
Aristeo recognizes from this description the object of his love, and, leaving Mopso and Tirsi to shake their heads over his midsummer madness, goes off to find her. So far we might be reading one of the ecloghe rappresentative which we shall have to consider shortly, but of which the earliest known examples cannot well be less than ten or twelve years later than Poliziano's play.
Somewhere in these huge chambers, the courtiers sat before a torch-lit stage, when Bibbiena's "Calandria" and Castiglione's "Tirsi," with their miracles of masques and mummers, whiled the night away.
It is only by hinting that Silvia has secretly instructed Dafne to arrange the tryst that he in the end succeeds in persuading the bashful lover to risk the displeasure of his mistress. At the opening of Act III Tirsi enters lamenting in bitter terms the cruelty of Silvia.
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