author sarcastically remarks, concluded a pastoral tragi-comedy ’to be a play of country hired shepherds in gray cloaks, with curtailed dogs in strings, sometimes laughing together, and sometimes killing one another’; and after all, so far as tragi-comedy is concerned, their belief was not unreasonable.  Fletcher’s definition is obviously borrowed from the academic criticism of the renaissance, and bears no relation to the living tradition of the English stage:  since his play suggests acquaintance with Guarini’s Pastor fido, it is perhaps not fantastic to imagine that in his preface he was indebted to the same author’s Compendio della poesia tragicomica.  What is important to note is Fletcher’s concern at this point with critical theory.

Without seeking to dogmatize as to the exact extent of Fletcher’s debt to individual Italian sources, it may safely be maintained that he was familiar with the writings of the masters of pastoral, and worked with his eyes open:  whatever modifications he introduced into traditional characters were the result of deliberate intention.  In general, two types of love may be traced in the Italian pastoral, namely the honest human desire of such characters as Mirtillo and Amarillis, Dorinda, Aminta, and the more or less close approach to mere sensuality found in Corisca and the satyrs.  We nowhere find any approach to supersensuous passion, indifferent to its own consummation; Silvia and Silvio are either entirely careless, or else touched with a genuine human love.  Nor are the more tumultuous sides of human passion represented, for it is impossible so to regard Corisca’s love for Mirtillo, which is at bottom nothing but the cynical caprice of the courtesan, who regards her lovers merely as so many changes of garment—­

    Molti averne, uno goderne, e cangiar spesso.

Fletcher appears to have thought that success might lie in extending and refining upon the gamut of love.  He possessed, when he set to work, no plot ready to hand capable of determining his characters, but appears to have selected what he considered a suitable variety of types to fill a pastoral stage, not because he desired to be in any way allegorical, but because in such a case it was the abstract relationship among the characters which alone could determine his choice.  Having selected his characters, he further seems to have left them free to evolve a plot for themselves, a thing they signally failed to do.  Thus there may be a certain truth underlying the theory with which we started, inasmuch as the characters appear to have been chosen, not for any particular dramatic business, but for certain abstract qualities, and some trace of their origin may yet cling about them in the accomplished work; but that Fletcher deliberately intended to illustrate a set of psychological conditions, not by dramatic presentation, but by the use of types and abstractions, is to my mind incredible.  In the composition of his later plays he had the necessities