Moreover, in Amarilli, Guarini created one really dramatic character and devoted to it one really dramatic scene.  His heroine is probably the best character to be found in the whole of the pastoral drama, and this simply because there is a reason for her coldness towards the lover, upon her love to whom the plot depends.  Unless love is to be mutual the motive force of the drama fails, and consequently, when nymphs insist on parading their inhuman superiority to the dictates of natural affection, they are simply refusing to fulfil their dramatic raison d’etre.  With Amarilli it is otherwise.  She has the right to say: 

    Ama l’ onesta mia, s’ amante sei; (III. iii.)

and there is a pathos in the words which the author may not have himself fully understood; whereas the similar expression of Tasso’s Silvia quoted on a previous page is insufferable in its smug self-conceit.

Of this quality of extravagant virginity noticed as a characteristic of Tasso’s play there is on the whole less in the Pastor fido.  It is also freer from the tone of cynical corruption and from improper suggestion.  These merits are, however, more than counterbalanced in the ethical scale by the elaboration of the spirit of sentimental sensualism, which becomes as it were an enveloping atmosphere, and lends an enervating seduction to the piece.  This spirit, already present in the Aminta, reappeared in an emphasized form in the Pastor fido, and attained its height in the following century in Marino’s epic of Adone.  We find it infusing the scene of Mirtillo’s first meeting with Amarilli, which may be said to set the tone of the rest of the poem.  Happening to see the nymph at the Olympian games, Mirtillo at once fell in love and contrived to introduce himself in female attire into the company of maidens to which she belonged.  Here, the proposal being made to hold a kissing match among themselves, Amarilli was unanimously chosen judge, and, the contest over, she awarded the prize to the disguised youth.  The incident owes its origin, as Guarini’s notes point out, to the twelfth Idyl of Theocritus, and the suggestion of the kissing match is aptly put into the mouth of a girl from Megara, where an annual contest of kisses among the Greek youths was actually held.  Guarini, however, most probably borrowed the episode from the fifth canto of Tasso’s Rinaldo.

The sentimental seductiveness of this and other scenes did not escape sharp comment in some quarters within a few years of the publication of the play.  In 1605 Cardinal Bellarmino, meeting Guarini at Rome, told him plainly that he had done as much harm to morals by his Pastor fido as by their heresies Luther and Calvin had done to religion.  Later Janus Nicius Erythraeus, that is Giovanni Vittorio Rossi, in his Pinacoteca, compared the play to a rock-infested sea full of seductive sirens, in which no small number of girls and wives were said