Pastoral Poetry & Pastoral Drama A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration Stage in England — Text and Context

The Architecture of the Argument

The book’s forty text sections move from Italian origins to English adaptations, but Greg repeatedly interrupts historical narrative with theoretical digressions. One such interruption occurs when he examines Fletcher’s preface to The Faithful Shepherdess (c. 1610). Here, Greg pauses to dissect Fletcher’s definition of tragi-comedy—‘a representation of familiar people, with such kind of trouble as no life be questioned’—and traces its debt to Guarini’s Compendio della poesia tragicomica. This layered analysis, where a single passage triggers a chain of source-hunting, typifies Greg’s method: he treats each document as a node in a network of influence, not as an isolated artifact.

Recurring Images: Garments, Glades, and the Satyr’s Gaze

Greg notes how Italian pastoral drama relies on a limited set of visual and conceptual motifs: the ‘honest human desire’ of characters like Mirtillo and Amarillis contrasts with the ‘mere sensuality’ of Corisca and the satyrs. He quotes Corisca’s motto—‘Molti averne, uno goderne, e cangiar spesso’ (to have many, enjoy one, and change often)—to illustrate how the courtesan figure treats lovers as ‘so many changes of garment.’ This sartorial metaphor recurs in Greg’s own prose when he describes Fletcher’s characters as ‘selected’ for ‘abstract qualities,’ as if they were costumes awaiting a plot. The image of the satyr, half-human and half-beast, becomes a shorthand for the genre’s unresolved tension between rustic innocence and urban sophistication.

Movement Between Scenes: From Arcadia to the Court

Greg’s analysis of Fletcher’s dramaturgy highlights a distinctive structural feature: the playwright ‘appears to have left [his characters] free to evolve a plot for themselves, a thing they signally failed to do.’ This failure, Greg argues, stems from the pastoral’s inherent static quality—its idealized landscapes resist the forward thrust of dramatic action. The movement between scenes in Fletcher’s work is not geographical but tonal, shifting from lyrical set-pieces to moments of near-tragedy that ‘wants deaths.’ Greg’s own prose mirrors this oscillation, moving from broad historical surveys to tight close readings of individual lines, as when he unpacks the audience’s sarcastic definition of pastoral tragi-comedy as ‘a play of country hired shepherds in gray cloaks, with curtailed dogs in strings.’

The Limits of Evidence: What the Excerpts Leave Unsaid

The excerpts provided break off before Greg reaches the English pre-Restoration stage, his stated main subject. We see him establishing the Italian background and Fletcher’s critical debts, but not the promised analysis of native drama. This incompleteness is itself instructive: Greg’s method of ‘preliminary inquiry’ threatens to overwhelm the central argument, a risk he acknowledges in the preface. Readers should approach the book as a work in progress, where the scaffolding of European context sometimes obscures the English building it was meant to support. The downward limit of 1642 is mentioned but not explored in these pages, leaving the transition from Elizabethan to Caroline pastoral drama largely inferred.

Greg’s study rewards readers who attend to its digressions as much as its main lines. The footnotes, moved to the end in this edition, contain further source citations and textual cruces. For those tracing the genealogy of a single motif—say, the ‘curtailed dogs’ of the stage shepherd—the index of names and works will prove essential. Approach the book not as a finished monument but as a working notebook of a scholar who let his subject dictate its own shape.

Reading Greg’s careful tracing of pastoral conventions, I thought of a long afternoon in a library basement, where I first met the shepherd’s artificial grief as a stage device—never real, yet oddly moving. That same peculiar warmth surfaced in Francis Beaumont: Dramatist A Portrait, with Some Account of His Circle, Elizabethan and Jacobean, And of His Association with John Fletcher — Context and Discussion, where friendship felt as formal as any stage plot, yet tender in its restraint.