special form it assumed on the English stage appear in its true light as
the reasonable and rational outcome of artistic and historical conditions.
Unfortunately perhaps, but at least inevitably, this preliminary inquiry
grew to ever greater and more alarming proportions as I proceeded, till at
last it swelled to something over half of the whole work. Part of this
bulk was claimed by foreign pastoral poetry, the origins of the kind; part
by English pastoral poetry, and the introduction of the fashion into this
country; part by the pastoral drama of Italy, the immediate parent of that
of England. The original title proved too narrow to cover the subject with
which I dealt. Hence the rather vague and perhaps ambitions title of the
present volume. I make no pretence of offering the reader a general
history of pastoral literature, nor even of pastoral drama. The real
subject of my work remains the pastoral drama in Elizabethan
literature--understanding that term in the wide sense in which, quite
reasonably, we have learnt to use it--and even though I may have been
sometimes carried away by the interest of the immediate subject of
investigation, I have done my best to keep the main object of my inquiry
at all times in view. The downward limit of my work is a little vague. The
old stage traditions, upon which all the dramatic production of the time
was at least in some measure, and in different cases more or less
consciously, based, were killed by the act of 1642: the new traditions,
created or imported by a company of gentlemen who had come under the
influence of the French genius during the eleven years of their exile,
first announced themselves authoritatively in 1660. During the intervening
eighteen years a number of works were produced, some of which continued
the earlier traditions, while some anticipated the later. My treatment has
been eclectic. Where a work appeared to me to belong to or to illustrate
the older school I have included it, where not, I have refrained from
doing so. Fanshawe's _Pastor fido_ (1647) will be found mentioned in the
following pages, T. R.'s _Berger extravagant_ (1654) will not.