Pastoral Drama in Early Modern Italy

The Making of a New Genre

Lisa Sampson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351195614
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

"Emerging in Italy in the mid-sixteenth century, pastoral drama is one of the most characteristic genres of its time. Sampson traces its uneven development into the following century by exploring masterpieces by Tasso and Guarini, and many lesser known works, some by women writers. She examines the treatment of key themes of love, the Golden Age, and Nature and Art against the background of the textual and stage production of the plays. An investigation of critical writings associated with the genre further reveals its significance to the contemporary literary scene, by stimulating 'modernizing' attitudes towards the canon, as well as new enquiries into the function and possibilities of art."

Chapter 1
Introduction

Una favola nova pastorale
Magnanimi, e illustri spettatori
Oggi vi s’appresenta. Nova intanto,
Ch’altra qui non fu già mai forse più udita
Di questa sorte recitarsi in scena:
Et nova ancor, perché vedrete in lei
Cose non più vedute.¹

[Today, generous and illustrious audience, you will see a new pastoral play; new in the sense that one of this kind has perhaps never before been heard performed on stage, and new too in that you will see in it things that you have never seen before.]

With these words, Agostino Beccari introduces his Il Sacrificio [The Sacrifice] (performed 1554), which is generally accepted as being the first example of an Italian pastoral play, a dramatic form that enjoyed enormous success with theatregoers and readers well into the seventeenth century. Since then, the genre has however undeservedly been consigned a relatively marginal place in theatre history. From the eighteenth century, and especially post-Romanticism, critics have accused it of artificiality, escapism and repetitiveness. In part, this can be related to negative views on literature generally from the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which is described by De Sanctis, for instance, as being ‘empty of ideas and feelings, a game of [ancient] forms and purely concerned with exters'.² The English critic Greg echoes such sentiments in relation to pastoral drama, agreeing that had it not been for Torquato Tasso’s Aminta (probably first performed 1573; printed 1580/1), which today undoubtedly represents the most famous example, ‘[the genre] must almost necessarily have been stillborn’.

The modern reader cannot so easily dismiss what was one of the most characteristic dramatic genres of its time. Besides Tasso’ Aminta, Battista Guarini's Pastor fido (printed 1589/90) has also widely been acknowledged as a landmark in theatre history, as the first significant example of pastoral tragicomedy. Moreover, studies conducted since the 1960s and my own investigations have uncovered around two hundred further examples, of which most are still relatively unknown, especially to Anglophone scholars³. These indicate not only the scale of the genre’s popularity, which is well attested by contemporaries, but also its variety and broadening appeal over the period. While initially such plays tended to be composed for courtly circles in Italy, they increasingly found success with academic and less elite writers and audiences, especially as they began to appear more frequently in print. Given their romantic content and scope for decorous female roles, they also appealed to female audiences and even proved congenial to the first known women authors of secular drama. Like other kinds of Italian theatre, pastoral drama soon became known to dramatists abroad through translations, starting with Aminta Tasso’s which first appeared in Croatian in 1580, then in French, English, Dutch, Spanish, Latin and German. This and other examples in turn sparked imitations, especially in France from the late 1580s, culminating in the plays of Racan and Mairet in the 1620s. The genre’s impact was generally less widespread or directly felt in Spain and England, given the different socio-political conditions for theatre. Even so, certain tropes and examples were productively drawn upon by dramatists including Lope de Vega, Calderón and Shakespeare. More generally, its themes, ideas and lyric representation of love reveal that it played a significant part in forming a broader European tradition of pastoral literature and art.

This wide appeal of pastoral drama was in many ways due to its versatility and fundamentally mixed nature. Given its heterodox origins, ranging from classical eclogues to medieval romances and lyric poetry, and, later on, courtly pageants and rustic farces, it provided dramatists with a variety of motifs and traditions of sectacle which could be adapted to suit current tastes. Even when given a ‘regular’ or neoclassical five-act form (following Beccari), it therefore remained far less clearly defined than the neo-classical comedy, which had been restored to the Italian stage over a half century earlier by pioneering humanists. It is precisely this generic instability that in my view makes regular pastoral drama such a fascinating subject of investigation, especially since it coincided with significant changes within theatre and Italian culture generally. Although the period is typically associated with the restriction of possibilities for artistic expression following the convocation of the Council of Trent (1545–63), this was in many ways a formative time for modern theatre, with the consolidation of a professional tradition (commedia dell’arte), especially from 1560, and the first experiments with opera a few decades later. Pastoral drama to some extent stimulated the development of both these phenomena. In the later sixteenth century, professional comici performed and adapted popular pastoral plays according to their needs, occasionally writing their own. The genre’s possibilities for plausibly incorporating spectacular stage effects, dance, music, and song, especially in the form of emotional outpourings, also meant it contributed to the development of new, mixed theatrical forms from the late sixteenth century — including the melodramma.

The present study represents the first comprehensive treatment in English of regular pastoral drama as it evolved over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, both on stage and in print. It explores something of the complexity of this genre, which presents the intriguing paradoxes of being in different ways both ‘modern’ and ‘ancient’, engaging in fantasy and yet obliquely reflecting reality, and representing a high as well as a popular art form. This study considers how writers of pastoral drama responded to social, cultural and intellectual pressures and innovations, especially regarding critical attitudes towards theatre and the arts. Through combining these approaches, it thereby aims to add new perspectives to the most extended explorations of Italian pastoral drama hitherto by Louise George Clubb and Marzia Pieri (see also the very recent study of Laura Riccò). Enrico Carrara’s vast exploration of pastoral poetry including drama, though still an important point of reference is dated in its approach, while Robert Henke’s wide-ranging comparative study focuses especially on aspects of Italian pastoral drama that relate to Shakespeare.⁴ Notably, the present book provides a more nuanced historical and sociological understanding of the ways in which pastoral drama responded to external political and religious changes than is presented in Clubb’s authoritative monograph on the three genres of Italian drama, which focuses rather on internal structures and imitative dramatic principles at work. My study also offers extended critical analysis of specific play-texts and discussion of the critical debates on the genre, which are largely avoided in Pieri’s scholarly work in order to focus on the staging tradition of the genre from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. In this way, I aim to investigate the ways in which the genre allowed dramatists to experiment with new ideas and combinations not envisaged by neo-classical conventions, which enabled the process of expanding the existing canon. This will help to cast a clearer light on the general panorama of Italian theatre and culture during a period which felt not only the conservative impact of Counter-Reformation sensibilities, but also, increasingly, the liberating effects of new scientific and other discoveries.

Some challenges to this task are presented from the outset due to the pastoral drama’s elusiveness and inclusiveness. In contrast to the other major dramatic forms of the period, comedy and tragedy, one does not find anything like the ready availability of modern collections or series of plays. And in theoretical terms, it lacks the same kind of unequivocal classical models and authoritative definitions. Pastoral drama could in fact be taken to denote a vast, heterogeneous range of works dating from the late Middle Ages, to be performed or at least envisaged for performance. These could be scripted or unscripted, destined mainly to be enjoyed for their verbal content, or else heavily reliant for their effect on non-verbal, dramatic forms of expression. In many ways this resistance to definition remains part of its attraction, but for the present purposes it has been necessary to establish certain parameters and critical distinctions.

First of all, as mentioned, this study deals above all with ‘regular’ pastoral drama; that is, scripted plays that adopt the five-act form and neo-classical unities typically used for erudite comedy and tragedy. This will allow a more focused exploration of the genre during the period in which critical questions, especially relating to Aristotle's Poetics, became important to drama generally. It was more or less from this time that pastoral drama became considered as having its own distinct structure, characterization, style, and performance practices. Of course, as with any genre, variations are continually evident over time and between authors, and the conventions are at times stretched by individual works.⁵ Even so, regular pastoral plays can be said to display certain broad traits, or ‘theatergrams’, to use Clubb’s key dramaturgical concept — that is, structural units (themes, topoi, situations, character types), which can be repeated, transferred and transformed as they are shared and imitated between genres. Generally, these plays take place in a unified green setting, usually in a clearing with some trees and sometimes huts, a fountain or a temple. This space, often identified as Arcadia, evokes a remote pagan existence presided over by ancient Greco-Roman divinities like Pan, Venus and Diana, who are the object of cult worship and may appear on stage. Magic is also possible in this context. The cast consists mostly of pseudo-noble shepherds and nymphs (mainly understood as shepherdesses) who speak particularly about love and their emotional state in verse, though baser goatherds and satyrs may be introduced too. During such plays we follow the various tormented love affairs of the cast through to the conventional happy ending.

Close discussion of the wide range of earlier pastoral literature and mixed dramatic forms which contributed to such conventions regrettably falls outside the scope of this survey. However, some aspects of early modern ‘pastoralism’ (Greg’s term) are inevitably used to throw light on developments in regular pastoral drama, since dramatists clearly drew much inspiration from other forms of pastoral, including verse, prose, and spectacle. It should be noted that I shall throughout understand the qualifying term ‘pastoral' (pastorale or boschereccia) as referring to a mode rather than a specific genre. Following a useful and by now common critical distinction, a mode especially affects attributes such as tone, style and themes, and can apply across different genres (such as comedy, prose romance, novel), though it may be adapted in particular cases and over time. A mode therefore functions as a somewhat broader concept than genre, though, as Paul Alpers has argued, they share certain features.⁶ The seminal study of William Empson and others have shown how the pastoral mode potentially encompasses an enormously diverse range of literary forms, tones, tooo, and styles⁷ For this reason, it is difficult or even impossible to define this mode too categorically, especially since, as has been noted, it ‘work[s] insistently against itself, problematizing both its own definition and stable definitions within its texts’⁸.

We shall not enter further into this definitional minefield, since concepts relevant to our enquiry will best be developed in context. However, it is worth noting some of the conflicting tendencies in early modern pastoral.⁹ These allow it to reflect a greater range of concerns and values than might at first glance be expected, given its setting and apparently limited subject matter and style. Most commonly, the pastoral mode at this time implies an idealizing and sometimes elegiac perspective, heightened by mythological overtones. It evokes a simple and innocent existence, sometimes equated with a now lost Golden Age, in which shepherds and nymphs can freely discuss and engage in love affairs, hunting and poetic activities, removed from everyday preoccupations. This has frequently resulted in the reductive criticism of pastoral as escapist, since it privileges the aesthetic and sublimates real social and political tensions to portray an ordered harmony, often colluding with the desired image of ruling powers. In more positive terms, though, the less ‘realistic’ setting pastoral drama in a secluded green world, less constrained by strict behavioural codes than the civilized cities and courts, meant that it could more plausibly represent certain areas of emotional and psychological experience than comedy and tragedy — including states of love, madness, and mourning. Furthermore, the pastoral could be used elegantly and self-consciously to explore literary issues, a feature of the mode since its inception with Theocritus’ Idylls.¹⁰ It thereby embodies the paradox of being theoretically simple, yet highly sophisticated and allusive — less about nature than about art, and related ideas of artifice, civilization, and human behaviour.

In addition, pastoral writings have long been recognized as offering possibilities oblique social commentary. Since Virgil’s eclogues (Bucolics), the Arcadian existence has provided a convenient veil under which to allude to real political situations figures.¹¹ From the Middle Ages, moral and religious issues could be associated with the pastoral setting as well. This is evident in some miracle plays (sacre rappresentazioni) and in Latin pastoral eclogues, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• Note on Transcription and Translation
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Earliest Examples of Pastoral Drama: The Self-Conscious Evolution of a New Genre
• 3 Tasso's Aminta: Raising the Profile of the Pastoral Play
• 4 Imitations and Innovations after Tasso's Aminta: Accommodating a Female Voice
• 5 Guarini's Pastor fido: The Establishment of an Ethical and Political Model of Pastoral Drama
• 6 Performing Pastoral Drama
• 7 Pastoral Drama in the Seventeenth Century and Beyond
• Bibliography
• Index