SOURCE: Niccoli, Gabriele. “The God of Love in Il Pastro Fido: Blindness in Arcadia.” Cincinnati Romance Review 7 (1988): 36-50.

In the essay below, Niccoli analyzes the Cupid scene in Il pastor fido, focusing on Guarini's use of language games.

In applauding himself on the stage handling of the pastoral Cupid convention and on its cathartic release moderated by a just dosage of verisimilitude and decorum, Giovan Battista Guarini, in his “Annotazioni sopra il Pastor fido,” strongly argues that his staging of the conventional god of love scene in his pastoral play is the actual staging of a miracle (124-28). The miracle is the humanization of Silvio, the unfaithful shepherd, and it lives theatrically through the stage utterances and movements of the actors. The scene deploys, however, a kind of hidden theatricality which relies heavily on what has been termed “language games,” games whose rules are determined by selective verbal...