WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
Pastoral Poetry & Pastoral Drama / A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration Stage in England cover

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

Chapter 53: Addenda
Open in WeRead

About This Book

The work offers a concise literary inquiry into pastoral as a form, tracing its classical bucolic roots through medieval and Renaissance eclogues and national traditions in Italy, Spain, France, and England. It examines Italian pastoral poetry and drama — including the influence of Tasso and Guarini — then follows English pastoral verse from early examples through Spenser and Milton, and analyzes the stage: origins, significant plays, and the English pastoral drama up to the Restoration. Chapters survey mythological and masque material, editorial method, and bibliography, and conclude with a discussion of pastoral theory and its aesthetic consequences.

Addenda

Page 19.--Even apart from the evidence of the Bucolica Quirinalium, it is, of course, clear that Vergil's eclogues were familiar to the writers of the early middle ages. How far their interest in them was literary, and how far, like that of the mystery-writers, it was theological, may, however, be questioned. It is worth noticing in this connexion that a German translation was projected by no less a person than Notker, and since they are coupled by him with the Andria, we may reasonably infer that in this case at least the writer's concern, if not distinctively literary, was at any rate educational. (See W. P. Ker, The Dark Ages, p. 317.)

Page 112, note 2.--There is an error here. The Passionate Pilgrim version of 'As it fell upon a day' does not contain the couplet found in England's Helicon. I was misled by its being supplied from the latter by the Cambridge editors. Another poem of the same description appears in Francis Sabie's Pan's Pipe. (See Sidney Lee's introduction to the Oxford Press facsimile of the Passionate Pilgrim, p. 31.)

Page 204.--It is perhaps hardly surprising to find Tasso's 'S' ei piace, ei lice' quoted by English writers as summing up the cynical philosophy of those whom they not unaptly styled 'politicians.' In Marston's tragedy on the story of Sophonisba, for instance, the villain Syphax concludes a 'Machiavellian' speech with the words:

For we hold firm, that 's lawful which doth please.
              (Wonder of Women, IV. i. 191.)