Returning to the polite eclogues, we soon find an increase in the dramatic complexity of the form.  Tansillo’s Due pellegrini, which cannot be later than 1528, contains the rudiments of a plot, two lovers bent on suicide being persuaded by a miraculous voice to become reconciled with the world and life.  Poetic justice befalls the two nymphs in an eclogue by Luca di Lorenzo, printed in 1530, the disdainful Diversa being condemned to love the boor Fantasia, while Euridice’s loving disposition is rewarded by the devotion of Orindio.

We now come to what may almost be regarded as the first conscious attempt to write a pastoral play—­an attempt, however, which met with but partial success.  This is the Amaranta, a ‘Comedia nuova pastorale’ by Giambattista Casalio of Faenza, which most probably belongs to a date somewhat before 1538.  In it the mutual love of Partenio and Amaranta is thwarted by the girl’s mother Celia, who destines her for a goatherd.  Partenio is led to believe that his love has played him false, while in her turn Amaranta supposes herself forsaken.  The two meet, however, at the hut of a wise nymph Lucina, through whose intervention they are reconciled and their union effected.  The piece, which attains to some proportions, is divided into five acts, and, while owing a certain debt to the Orfeo, is itself pastoral in character with occasional coarse touches borrowed from the rustic shows.  It is in the Amaranta that we first meet with an attempt to introduce a real plot of some human interest into a purely pastoral composition; we are no longer dealing with a merely occasional piece written in celebration of some special person or festivity, no longer with a mythological masque or pageant, nor with an amorous allegory, but with a piece the interest of which, slight as it is, lies in the fate of the characters involved.

The fifteen years or so which separate the work of Casalio from that of Beccari saw the production of a succession of more or less pastoral works which serve, to some extent at least, to bridge over the gap which separates even the most elaborate of the above compositions from the recognized appearance of the fully-developed pastoral drama in the Sacrifizio.  The chief characteristic which marks the work of these years is a tendency to deliberate experiment.  The writers appear to have been conscious that their work was striving towards a form which had not yet been achieved, though they were themselves vague as to what that form might be.  Epicuro’s Mirzia tends towards the mythological drama; the Silvia written by one Fileno, which, like the Amaranta, turns on the temporary estrangement of two lovers, introduces considerable elements from the rustic performances; in Cazza’s Erbusto the amorous skein is cut by the discovery of consanguinity and an [Greek:  a)nagno/risis] after the manner of the Latin comedy.  Similar in plot to this last is a fragmentary pastoral