What truth there may be underlying this theory will, I think, be best explained upon a different hypothesis.  Let us in the first place endeavour, so far as may be possible after the lapse of nearly three centuries, to realize the mental attitude of the author in approaching the composition of his play.  In order to do this a closer analysis of the piece will be necessary.

The first point of importance for the interpretation of Fletcher’s pastoralism is to be found in the quaintly self-confident preface which he prefixed to the printed edition.  Throughout our inquiry we have observed two main types of pastoral, to one or other of which all work in this kind approaches; that, namely, in which the interest depends upon some allegorical or topical meaning lying beneath and beyond the apparent form, and that in which it is confined to the actual and obvious presentment itself.  Of the former type Drayton wrote in the preface to his Pastorals:  ’The subject of Pastorals, as the language of it, ought to be poor, silly, and of the coursest Woofe in appearance.  Neverthelesse, the most High and most Noble Matters of the World may bee shaddowed in them, and for certaine sometimes are[268].  In his preface to the Faithful Shepherdess the author adopts the opposite position, as Daniel, in the prologue to the Queen’s Arcadia, and in spite of the strongly topical nature of that piece, had done before him.  Fletcher in an often-quoted passage writes:  ’Understand, therefore, a pastoral to be a representation of shepherds and shepherdesses with their actions and passions, which must be such as may agree with their natures, at least not exceeding former fictions and vulgar traditions; they are not to be adorned with any art, but such improper [i.e. common] ones as nature is said to bestow, as singing and poetry; or such as experience may teach them, as the virtues of herbs and fountains, the ordinary course of the sun, moon, and stars, and such like.’  His interest would, then, appear to lie in a more or less realistic representation, and he appears more concerned to enforce a reasonable propriety of character than to discover deep matters of philosophy and state.  This passage alone would, therefore, make the theory we glanced at above improbable.  Fletcher next proceeds, in a passage of some interest in the history of criticism:  ’A tragi-comedy is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy, which must be a representation of familiar people, with such kind of trouble as no life be questioned; so that a god is as lawful in this as in a tragedy, and mean people as in a comedy.’  One would hardly have supposed it necessary to define tragi-comedy to the English public in 1610, and even had it been necessary, this could hardly be accepted as a very satisfactory definition.  The audience, ’having ever had a singular gift in defining,’ as the