ABSTRACT
For over a century, the exquisite poetry of The Faithful Shepherdess has been admired while its dramatic qualities have been denigrated; generations of literary critics have judged it to be more suitable for private reading than public performance. In addition, the play’s various generic identities – poetic pastoral, allegory, chastity manifesto – would seem to render it out of key with twenty-first-century taste. The evidence of the play’s four modern productions, however, suggests that its combination of poetry, spectacle and an underlying, energetic sexuality make it more potent in performance than has generally been realized. Examining the staging and reception of the productions by the Pastoral Players (1885), Mermaid Society (1903), Phoenix Society (1923) and Commonwealth Theatre (1933), this chapter argues that the play has much to recommend it to present-day practitioners and audiences.
