ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that the phenomenal success of Tasso’s pastoral play, Aminta, and Guarini’s pastoral tragicomedy, Il pastor fido, was not lost on England, although English tragicomedy itself mainly took a non-pastoral turn, if we consider the work of Webster, Middleton, Beaumont and Fletcher, and others. Three English playwrights, however, wrote tragicomedies in the pastoral mode: Samuel Daniel in The Queene’s Arcadia and Hymen’s Triumph; John Fletcher in The Faithful Shepherdess, and Shakespeare in The Winter’s Tale, and, if somewhat less obviously, Cymbeline and The Tempest. Through John Wolfe’s clandestine press, the two Italian pastoral plays were made available to Englishmen in print. Fletcher and apparently Daniel were well aware of Guarini’s theory of tragicomedy, which explores at length how the pastoral mode can function as a hinge between tragedy and comedy. Both the Italian and English playwrights worked within a similar genre system in the early seventeenth century, consisting primarily of tragedy, comedy, and a “third,” tragicomedic genre, which for the Italians was almost always inflected through the pastoral mode, and was so more occasionally for the English. The chapter explores the resonances of Italian pastoral tragicomedy in England, considering the plays of Tasso and Guarini, the dramatic theory of Guarini, other Italian pastoral plays, and the commedia dell’arte “magical pastoral” plays that many have seen as an intertext of The Tempest.
