ABSTRACT
This chapter offers some detached observations and speculations looking toward the re-examination of the particular connections between the firmly established and widely cultivated Italian favola boscareccia and the English drama of the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. At the outset it should be made clear that the Italians draw no essential distinctions among favole pastorali, favole boscarecce, and favole silvestre. The art of the pastoralist—together with such suspense as a play with a prescribed happy ending is capable of—then consists in pushing the ill-assorted pair along the brink of imminent disaster through five acts without once permitting a fatal slip. The English pastoral drama was, at best, but an imperfectly successful adaptation of its foreign original. When all the English examples have been taken into consideration, the fact remains that there never was in England, as there was in Italy, a true vogue of the theatrical pastoral.
