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

The history of the English masque offers a very interesting study in what may be called literary morphology. Under the influence of the stage the early disguisings and spectacul...

We have seen how there arose in the Italian songs of the fourteenth century a spontaneous form of pastoral independent of the regular tradition, and somewhat similar examples ar...

In approaching a subject of literary inquiry we are often able to fix upon some essential feature or condition which may serve as an Ariadne's thread through the maze of histori...

We have now passed in review the main classes of non-dramatic pastoral both abroad and in this country. Such preliminary survey was necessary in order to obtain an idea of the h...

of the first performance by the ignorance and incompetence of the spectators, but we shall, I think, see reason to come ourselves to a scarcely less unfavourable conclusion. Nor...

Having at length arrived at what must be regarded as the main subject of this work, it will be my task in the remaining chapters to follow the growth of the pastoral drama in En...

We have seen in an earlier chapter what had been achieved within the limits of the mythological drama proper, and also how it had fared with the attempts to introduce the Italia...

while Cowley is much more likely to have been influenced to lay the scene of his play in Sicily by Randolph's example than by his reading of Theocritus, whose influence, if it e...

Among English pastorals there are two plays, and two only, that can be said to stand in the front rank of the romantic drama as a whole. The first of these is, of course, Fletch...

Introduction I. The origin and nature of pastoral II. Greek pastoral poetry III. The bucolic eclogue in classical Latin IV. Medieval and humanistic eclogues V. Italian pastoral...