Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama by Walter W. Greg

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Although the mythological element is everywhere prominent, the pastoral is
comparatively of rare occurrence in the regular masque literature of the
seventeenth century. This, considering the adaptability and natural
suitability of the form, is rather surprising. Probably the masque as it
evolved itself at the court of James needed a subject possessing a
traditional story, or at least fixed and known conditions of a kind which
the pastoral was unable to supply. Be this as it may, on one occasion
only did Jonson make extended use of the kind, namely, in the masque which
in the folio of 1640 appears with the heading 'Pans Anniversarie; or, The
Shepherds Holy-day. The Scene Arcadia. As it was presented at Court before
King James. 1625. The Inventors, Inigo Jones, Ben. Johnson[344].' Even
here, however, we learn little concerning the condition of pastoralism in
general, from the highly specialized form employed to a specific purpose.
As in all the regular masques of the Jonsonian type the characters and
situations exist solely for the opportunities they afford for dance and
song. Shepherds and nymphs constitute the personae of the masque proper,
while those of the antimasque are supplied by a band of Bocotian clowns,
who come to challenge the Arcadians to the dance. Some of the songs are
very graceful, suggesting at times reminiscences of Spenser, at others
parallels to Ben's own _Sad Shepherd_, but the piece does not possess
either sufficient importance or interest to justify our lingering over it.
Outside this piece the nearest approach to pastoral characters to be found
in Jonson's masques are, perhaps, the satyr and Queen Mab in the fairy
entertainment at Althorp in 1603, Silenus and the satyrs in _Oberon_ in
1611, and Zephyrus, Spring, and the Fountains and Rivers in _Chloridia_ in
1631.

During James I's reign pastoral shows of a sort no doubt became frequent.
While in some cases which remain to be noticed they reached the
elaboration of small plays, in others they probably remained simple
affairs enough. We get an interesting glimpse of the conditions of
production in a note of John Aubrey's.[345] 'In tempore Jacobi,' he
writes, 'one Mr. George Ferraby was parson of Bishops Cannings in Wilts:
an excellent musitian, and no ill poet. When queen Anne came to Bathe, her
way lay to traverse the famous Wensdyke, which runnes through his parish.
He made severall of his neighbours, good musitians, to play with him in
consort, and to sing. Against her majestie's comeing, he made a pleasant
pastorall, and gave her an entertaynment with his fellow songsters in
shepherds' weeds and bagpipes, he himself like an old bard. After that
wind musique was over, they sang their pastorall eglogues.' This was in
1613; Ferraby or Ferebe later became chaplain to the king.

The more elaborate pieces were usually written for performance at schools
or colleges. Such a piece is Tatham's _Love Crowns the End_, composed for
the scholars of Bingham in Nottinghamshire in 1633, and printed in his
_Fancy's Theatre_ in 1640. Small literary interest attaches to the play,
which is equally slight and ill constructed, but is perhaps not
unrepresentative of its class. In spite of its very modest dimensions it
possesses a full romantic-pastoral plot, with the resuit that it is at
times almost unintelligible, owing to the want of space in which to
develop in an adequate and dramatic manner the motives and situations. The
bewildering rapidity with which character succeeds character upon the
stage must have made the representation almost impossible to follow, while
the reading of the piece is not a little complicated by the confusion in
which the stage directions remain in the only modern edition.[346] Some
notion of the complexity of the plot may be gathered from the following
account. Cliton, having in a fit of jealousy sought to kill his love
Florida, is found wandering in the woods by Alexis, who receives his
confession and shows him the way to repentance. Florida, moreover, has
been found and healed by the wise shepherdess Claudia, and is living in
retirement. Meanwhile Cloe (a name which it appears from the rimes that
the author pronounced Cloi) is saved by Lysander from the pursuit of a
Lustful Shepherd, in consequence of which she transfers to him the
affection she previously bore to her lover Daphnes. Next Leon and his
daughter Gloriana appear, together with the swain Francisco, to whom
against her will the maiden is apparently betrothed. They all go off to
view the games in which Lysander, whose heart is also fixed on Gloriana,
proves victor. His refusal to entertain the affection of Cloe drives her
to a state of distraction, in which the nymphs of the woods take pity on
her and bring her to Claudia to be cured. Gloriana in the meantime returns
the affections of Lysander, but the meeting of the lovers is interrupted
by the jealous Francisco and a gang who wound Lysander and carry off
Gloriana. She escapes from her captors, but only after she has lost her
reason, and wanders about until she meets with Cliton, who has turned
hermit and who now undertakes her cure. Throughout the play we find comic
interludes by Scrub, a page or attendant in search of his master, who also
has some farcical business with the Lustful Shepherd, who after being
disappointed of Cloe disguises himself as a satyr, apparently deeming that
role suited to his taste. In the end all the characters are brought
together. Francisco, found contrite, is forgiven by Lysander and Gloriana;
Cliton and Florida love once more; so do Daphnes and Cloe, appropriately
enough. Scrub announces the death of the usurping duke, 'who banished good
old Leon;' Francisco and Lysander reveal themselves as princes who left
the court to win his daughter's love, when he was driven from his land,
and so--love crowns the end.

Through this medley it is not hard to see the various debts the author has
incurred towards his predecessors. The verse, in rimed couplets, whether
deca- or octo-syllabic, ultimately depends on Fletcher; of the comic prose
scenes I have already spoken in dealing with Goffe's _Careless
Shepherdess_, a play the influence of which may perhaps be specifically
traced in the satyr-disguise, the gang who carry off Gloriana, her
unexplained escape, and the songs of the 'Destinies' and a 'Heavenly
Messenger,' who in their inconsequence recall the 'Bonus Genius' of
Goffe's play. Scrub may owe his origin to the same source, though he is
rather more like the page in the _Maid's Metamorphosis_. The usurping duke
recalls _As You Like It_; the princes seeking their love-fortunes among
the shepherd folk suggest the _Arcadia_; while the influence of the
_Faithful Shepherdess_ is not only traceable in the character of the
Lustful Shepherd, but also in certain specific parallels, as where the
wounded Lysander, seeing his love carried off, exclaims:

Stay, stay! let me but breathe my last
Upon her lips, and I'll forgive what's past; (p. 24)

a reminiscence of the lines spoken by Alexis in a similar situation:

Oh, yet forbear
To take her from me! give me leave to die
By her! (_Faithful Shepherdess_, III. i. 165[347].)

The general level of the verse is not high, but we now and again light on
some pleasing lines such as the following:

My dearest love, fair as the eastern morn
As it breaks o'er the plains when summer's born,
Hanging bright liquid pearls on every tree,
New life and hope imparting, as to me
Thy presence brings delight, so fresh and rare
As May's first breath, dispensing such sweet air
The Phoenix does expire in; sit, while I play
The cunning thief, and steal thy heart away,
And thou shalt stand as judge to censure me. (p. 18.)

So again there is some grace in a song which catches perhaps a distant
echo of Peele's gem:

_Gloriana._ Sit, while I do gather flowers
And depopulate the bowers.
Here's a kiss will come to thee!

_Lysander._ Give me one, I'll give thee three!

_Both._ Thus in harmless sport we may
Pass the idle hours away.

_Gloriana._ Hark! hark, how fine
The birds do chime!
And pretty Philomel
Her moan doth tell. (p. 22.)

Another of these miniature pastorals is preserved in a British Museum
manuscript, where it bears the title of _The Converted Robber_.[348] No
author's name appears, but a plausible conjecture may be advanced. The
scene of the piece, namely, is Stonehenge, and it is evident that the
occasion on which it was first performed had some connexion with
Salisbury, for there is obviously a topical allusion in the final words:

Lett us that do noe envy beare um
Wish all felicity to Sarum.

Now in 1636,[349] according to Anthony a Wood, there was acted at St.
John's College, Oxford, a play by John Speed, entitled _Stonehenge_, the
occasion being the return of Dr. Richard Baylie after his installation as
Dean of Salisbury. We can hardly be far wrong in identifying the two
pieces. The only difficulty is that in the manuscript the play is dated
1637. This, however, may either be a mere slip of the scribe, or may
possibly imply that the piece was produced in 1636-7, the scribe adopting
the popular and modern, whereas Wood always adhered to the old or legal
reckoning.

The piece possesses a certain interest from the fact of its forming, in a
stricter sense than any of the other pieces we have examined, a link
between the drama and the masque. In this it somewhat resembles _Comus_,
employing a more or less dramatic plot as the setting for the formai
dances of the masque.[350]

The story is simple enough. A band of robbers and a company of shepherds
and shepherdesses keep on Salisbury Plain in the neighbourhood of
Stonehenge--'stoy[=n]age y^{e} wonder y^{t} is vpon that Playne of
Sarum'--which forms the background of the scene. It chanced that the
shepherdess Clarinda, falling into the hands of the robbers, was saved
from dishonour by their chief Alcinous, an action which won for him her
love, and having escaped, she returned dressed as a boy in order to serve
him. Meanwhile the robbers have decided to make a raid upon the shepherd
folk, and Alcinous, disguising himself as a stranger shepherd, mixes among
them, while his companions Autolicus and Conto lie in wait hard by. During
a festival Alcinous seeks the love of Castina, Clarinda's sister, and
finding her unmoved by entreaty threatens force. At this she attempts to
stab herself, and the robber chief is so struck that he vows to reform and
is converted to the pastoral life. His companions, left in the lurch, fall
upon the shepherds of their own accord, but are soon brought to see reason
by the hand and tongue of their chief, and are content to follow him in
his conversion. Clarinda now discovers herself and marries Alcinous, while
Castina and her fellow shepherdess Avonia consent to reward their faithful
swains, Palaemon and Dorus.

In this piece there is a rather conspicuous absence of motive and dramatic
construction, the author claiming apparently the freedom of the masque.
The verse is mainly octosyllabic, sometimes blank, but the rough accentual
'rime' is also used. Decasyllabics are rare. There is also some prose in
the comic part sustained by Autolicus and Conto and the aged clown Jarbus,
as well as a certain amount of Spenserian archaism, and a good deal of
dialect. Whether comic or romantic, the characters are singularly out of
keeping with their surroundings, while the conceit of paganizing the
Christian worship appears to be carried to ludicrous lengths, until one
recollects that it depends almost entirely upon the substitution of the
name of Pan for that of the Deity--a process no doubt facilitated by false
etymology. Thus Christ, who is spoken of by name, is called 'Pannes blest
babe.' After describing the foundation of Salisbury Cathedral, the old
shepherd proceeds:

But sturdy shepherds brought all the other stones,
And reard up that great Munster all at once,
Wher shepherds each one, both woman and man,
Do come to worship theyr great God Pann.

A rustic show formed the first part of an entertainment witnessed by
Charles and Henrietta Maria at Richmond, after their return from a visit
to Oxford in 1636. A clown named Tom comes in bearing a present for the
queen, and is on the point of being unceremoniously removed by the usher,
when he espies Mr. Edward Sackville, to whom he appeals, and a dialogue
ensues between the two. After he has offered his present, Madge, Doll, and
Richard come in, and the four perform a country dance. They are all plain
Wiltshire rustics who talk a broad vernacular, but at the end a shepherd
and shepherdess enter and sing a duet in a more courtly strain. The author
of this slight production is not known, but it is regarded by the latest
authority on masques as an imitation, in the looseness of its
construction, of Davenant's _Prince d'Amour_.[351]

Little poetic ability was displayed by Heywood on the only occasion on
which he introduced pastoral tradition into a Lord Mayor's pageant. The
'first show by land' of the _Porta Pietatis_, presented by the drapers in
1638 on the occasion of Sir Maurice Abbot's mayoralty, consisted of a
speech by a shepherd, which is preceded in the printed copy by a short
account of the properties, natural history, and general usefulness of
sheep, as well as of their peculiar importance in relation to the craft
honoured in the person of the newly appointed Lieutenant of the city of
London. Heywood was famous for his wide, miscellaneous, and often
startling information.

We have already seen how, in the first blush and budding of the
Elizabethan spring, George Peele treated the tale of the judgement of
Paris; on the same legend Heywood based one of his semi-dramatic
dialogues; it remains to be seen how, in the late autumn of the great age
of our dramatic literature, Shirley returned to the same theme in his
_Triumph of Beauty_, privately produced about 1640. It is a regular
masque, for which the familiar story serves as a thread; the goddesses and
their symbolical attendants, or else the Graces and the Hours with Hymen
and Delight, performing the dances, while a company of rustic swains of
Ida, who come to relieve the melancholy of the princely shepherd, form a
comic antimasque. It has, however, grown to the proportions of a small
play. The comic characters also study a piece on the subject of the golden
fleece, reminiscent, like _Narcissus_, of the _Midsummer Night's Dream_.
This, as Mr. Fleay supposes, may well be satirical of some of the city
pageants, though it is best to be cautious in discovering definite
allusions. But the success of such a piece as the present, in so far as it
was dependent on the _libretto_, demanded a power of light and graceful
lyric versification which was not conspicuous among the many gifts of the
author. The comic business is frankly amusing, but the long speeches of
the goddesses can hardly have appeared less tedious to a contemporary
audience than they do to the reader to-day.

I may also notice here a regular short pastoral in three acts, inserted by
Robert Baron in his romance [Greek: E)rotopai/gnion], _or the Cyprian
Academy_, printed in 1647. It is entitled _Gripus and Hegio, or the
Passionate Lovers_, and relates the loves of these characters for Mira and
Daris; while we also find the familiar roguish boy, less amusing and of
stricter propriety than usual; a chorus of fairies who discourse classical
myth; Venus, Cupid, Hymen, and Echo; and the habitual concomitants of
pastoral commonplace. The romance also contains a masque entitled _Deorum
Dona_, in which figure allegorical abstractions such as Fame, Fortune, and
the like. It is in no wise pastoral.

Another pastoral show of some elaboration, and of a higher order of poetry
than most of those we have been considering, is Sir William Denny's
_Shepherds' Holiday_, printed from manuscript in the _Inedited Poetical
Miscellany_ of 1870. The piece appears to date from 1653, and is only
slightly dramatic so far as plot is concerned. It is of an allegorical
cast, the various characters typifying certain virtues, or rather
temperaments--virginity, love and so forth--as is elaborately expounded in
the preface.

A few slight pieces by the quondam actor Robert Cox, partaking more or
less of the character of masques, possess a certain pastoral colouring.
This is the case, for instance, in the _Acteon and Diana_, published in
1656.[352] The piece opens with the humours of the would-be lover Bumpkin,
a huntsman, and the dance of the country lasses round the May-pole. Then
enters Acteon with his huntsmen, who is followed by Diana and her nymphs.
Upon the dance of these last Acteon, returning, breaks in unawares, and is
rebuked by the goddess, who then retires with her nymphs to a glade in the
forest. They are in the act of despoiling themselves for the bath when
they are again surprised by Acteon. Incensed, the goddess turns upon him,
and he flees before her anger, only to return once more upon the dance of
the bathers in the shape of a hart, and fall at their feet a prey to his
own hounds. The verse, whether lyric or dramatic, is of a mediocre
description, and the piece, if it was ever actually performed, no doubt
depended for success upon the music, dancing, and scenery. It is a curious
fact, to which Davenant's work among others is witness, that the nominally
private representation of this kind of musical ballet was permitted, while
the regular drama was under strict inhibition. At any time, however, it
must have been difficult to represent such a piece as the present without
sacrificing either propriety or tradition.

Another similar composition, headed 'The Rural Sports on the Birthday of
the Nymph Oenone,' is printed together with the above. In it the strains
of the polished pastoral are varied by the humours of the clown Hobbinall,
the whole ending with a speech by Pan and a dance of satyrs.

One obvions omission from the above catalogue will have been noticed. The
reason thereof is sufficiently obvious; and the following section will
endeavour to repair it.

II

In Milton's contribution to the fashionable masque literature of his day
we approach work the poetic supremacy of which has never been called in
question, and whose other qualities, lying properly beyond the strict
application of that term, critics have habitually vied with one another to
extol. No one, indeed, for whom poetry has any meaning whatever, can turn
from the work of Peele, Heywood, and Shirley, of Ben Jonson even, to the
early works of Milton, to such comparatively immature works as _Arcades_
and _Comus_, without being conscious that they belong to an altogether
different level of poetical production. It was no mere conventional
commendation, such as we may find prefixed to the works of any poetaster
of the time, that Sir Henry Wotton addressed to the author of the Ludlow
masque: 'I should much commend the Tragical [i.e. dramatic] part, if the
Lyrical did not ravish me with a certain Dorique delicacy in your Songs
and Odes, wherunto I must plainly confess to have seen yet nothing
parallel in our Language[353].'

The two poems we have now to consider were, in all probability, written
within a short while of one another, and the second anticipated by more
than three years the composition of _Lycidas_. But the connexion between
the two is not one of date only, nor even of the spectacular demand it was
the end of either to meet. It may, namely, in the absence of any definite
evidence, be with much plausibility presumed that the impulse to the
entertainment, of which as we are told _Arcades_ formed a part, originated
with that very Lady Alice Egerton and her two young brothers who, the
following year probably, bore the chief parts in _Comus_. The
entertainment was presented at Harefield in honour of their grandmother,
the Countess Dowager of Derby. This lady, probably somewhat over seventy
at the time, was the honoured head of a large family. The daughter of Sir
John Spencer of Althorpe, born about 1560, she married first Ferdinando
Stanley, Lord Strange, afterwards Earl of Derby, patron of the company of
actors with whom Shakespeare's name is associated; and secondly, after
his early death in 1594, the Lord Keeper, Sir Thomas Egerton, who rose by
rapid steps to be Viscount Brackley shortly before his death in 1617. The
span of a human life appears strange when measured by the rapidly moving
events of the English renaissance. The wife of Shakespeare's patron, who
may have witnessed the early ventures of the Stratford lad at the time of
his first appearance on the London stage--the 'Amarillis' of _Colin
Clout_, with whom, and with her sisters 'Phillis' and 'Charillis,' Spenser
claimed kinship, and to whom he dedicated his _Tears of the Muses_ in
1591--lived to see her grandchildren perform for her amusement in the
reign of the first Charles an entertainment for which their music-master
Lawes had requisitioned the pen of the future author of _Paradise Lost_.

_Arcades_, or 'the Arcadians,' can hardly be dignified by the name of a
masque; it is the mere embryo of the elaborate compositions which were at
the time fashionable under that name, and of which Milton was to rival the
constructional elaboration in his pastoral entertainment of the following
year. It rather resembles such amoebean productions as we find introduced
into the stage plays of the time; and was, no doubt, as the superscription
explicitly informs us, but 'Part of an entertainment presented to the
Countess Dowager of Darby.' Nevertheless it is complete and
self-contained, and to speak of it, as Professer Masson does, as 'part,
and part only, of a masque,' is to give a wholly false impression; for,
whatever the rest of the entertainment may have been, there is not the
least reason to suppose that it had any connexion or relation with the
portion that has survived. This runs to a little over one hundred lines. A
group of nymphs and shepherds, coming from among the trees of the garden,
approach the 'seat of State' where sits the venerable Countess, whom they
address in a song. As this ends their progress is barred by the Genius of
the Wood, who delivers a long speech.[354] This is followed by a song
introducing the dance, after which a third song brings the performance to
a close. It cannot be honestly said that the bulk of this slender poem is
of any very transcendent merit; but the final song stands apart from the
rest, and deserves notice both on its own account and for the sake of that
to which it served as herald:

Nymphs and Shepherds dance no more
By sandy Ladons Lillied banks;
On old Lycaeus or Cyllene hoar
Trip no more in twilight ranks;
Though Erymanth your loss deplore
A better soyl shall give ye thanks.
From the stony Maenalus
Bring your Flocks, and live with us;
Here ye shall have greater grace
To serve the Lady of this place,
Though Syrinx your Pans Mistres were,
Yet Syrinx well might wait on her.
Such a rural Queen
All Arcadia hath not seen.

Here we have, if nothing else, promise at least of the melodies to be, as
also of that harmonious interweaving of classical names which long years
after was to lend weight and dignity to the 'full and heightened style' of
the epic. One other point in connexion with the poem is noteworthy, the
quality, namely, in virtue of which it claims our attention here. It is,
indeed, not a little curious that on the only two occasions on which
Milton was called upon to produce something of the order of the masque, he
cast his work into a more or less pastoral form; and this in spite of the
fact that, as we have seen, the form was by no means a prevalent one among
the more popular and experienced writers. It would appear as though his
mind turned, through some natural bent or early association, to the
employment of this form; an idea which suggests itself all the more
forcibly when we find him, a few years later, setting about the
composition of a conventional lament in this mode on a young college
acquaintance, and producing, through his power of alchemical
transmutation, one of the greatest works of art in the English language.

It was, no doubt, in the earlier months of 1634, while his friend Lawes
was engaged on the gorgeous and complicated staging and orchestration of
the _Triumph of Peace_ and the _Coelum Britannicum_, that Milton composed
the poem which perhaps more than any other has made readers of to-day
familiar with the term 'masque.' In the second of the elaborate
productions just named--a poem, be it incidentally remarked, which does no
particular credit to the pen of its sometimes unsurpassed author, Tom
Carew, but in the presentation of which the king and many of his chief
nobles deigned to bear a part--minor roles had been assigned to the two
sons of the Earl of Bridgewater, namely, the Viscount Brackley and Master
Thomas Egerton. When the earl shortly afterwards went to assume the
Presidency of the Welsh Marches, it was these two who, together with their
sister the Lady Alice, bore the central parts in the masque performed
before the assembled worthies of the West in the great hall of Ludlow
Castle. The ages of the three performers ranged from eleven to thirteen,
the girl, who was the eighth daughter of the marriage, being the eldest.