The historical importance of the Queen’s Arcadia, as the first play to exhibit on the English stage the direct and unequivocal influence of the Italian pastoral drama, is evident to the critic in retrospect, and it is not impossible that it may have lent some extraneous interest to the performance even in the eyes of contemporaries; but the zest of the play for a court audience in the early years of the reign of James I was very possibly the satirical element.  The shadowy fiction of Arcadia and its age of gold quickly vanished when the actual or fancied evils of the day were exposed to the lash.  The abuse of the practice of taking tobacco flattered the prejudices of the king; the quack and the dishonest lawyer were stock butts of contemporary satire; Colax and Techne, the he and she coney-catchers, have maintained their fascination for all ages.  Pistophanax, the disseminator of false doctrine, who had actually presumed to reason with the priests concerning the mysteries of Pan, was perhaps the favourite object of contemporary invective.  The term ‘atheist’ covered a multitude of sins.  This character appears in the final scene only, and even there he is a mute but for one speech.  He is indeed treated in a somewhat different manner from the other subjects of satire in the play.  Thus the discovery that he is wearing a mask to hide the natural ugliness of his features passes altogether the bounds of dramatic satire, and carries us back to the allegorical manner of the middle ages.  Apart from these figures, who bear upon them the form and pressure of the time, and who are, it must be remembered, the main-spring of the action, there is little of note to fix the attention in this first fruit of the Arcadian spirit in the English drama.

In every way superior to its predecessor is the second venture in the kind made by Daniel after an interval of nearly a decade.  Instead of being a patchwork of motives and situations borrowed from the Italian, and pieced together with more or less ingenuity, Hymen’s Triumph is as a whole an original composition.  The play is preceded by a prologue in which Daniel departs from his models in employing the dialogue form, the speakers being Hymen, Avarice, Envy, and Jealousy[252].  In the opening scene we find Thirsis lamenting the loss of his love Silvia, who is supposed to have been devoured by wild beasts while wandering alone upon the shore—­we are once again on the sea-board of Arcadia—­her rent veil and a lock of her hair being all that remains to her disconsolate lover.  Their vows had been in secret owing to the match proposed by Silvia’s father between her and Alexis, the son of a wealthy neighbour[253].  In reality she has been seized by pirates[254] and carried off to Alexandria, where she has lived as a slave in boy’s attire for some two years.  Recently an opportunity for escape having presented itself, she has returned, still disguised, to her native country, where she has entered the service of the shepherdess Cloris,