SOURCE: “The Pastoral Element in the English Drama Before 1605,” in Modern Language Notes, Vol. 14,No. 4, April 1899, pp. 114-23.

In the following essay, Thorndike examines the development of the English pastoral drama, noting the introduction of particularly English elements—such as the appearance of comic characters and the satyr type—into the literary form.

Most accounts of the English pastoral drama have begun with Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess or Daniel's Queen's Arcadia. There have been references, of course, to some of Lyly's plays, Peele's Arraignment of Paris and Sidney's May Lady, but there has been no recognition of a continuous and considerable development of the pastoral drama before Daniel and Fletcher introduced the genre already highly developed by Tasso and Guarini.

It is the purpose of this paper to present evidence of such a development before 1605, the date of Daniel's Arcadia; and this evidence will fall naturally into two divisions...