In this chaotic medley it will be observed that the plot is twice ravelled and loosed before the final solution.  In the frequent enlevements by the satyrs, as in the manner in which these deceive their employer, the story distantly recalls Ingegneri’s Danza di Venere.  One feature of importance is the comic character Graculus, who is well fooled by the pretended satyrs, and has an amusing though coarse part in prose.  He seems to owe his origin to the broad humours of the vulgar stage, though he may be in a measure imitated from the roguish pages of Lyly, and so be the forerunner of Randolph’s Dorylas.  The tradition of the comic scenes, usually written in prose, was in process of crystallization, and from the Maid’s Metamorphosis we can trace it onwards through the present piece, and such slighter compositions as the Converted Robber and Tatham’s Love Crowns the End, to Randolph and even later writers.  In the present case it was no innovation, nor is there any reason to suppose that it was unpopular with the audience.[327] What was an innovation was the ’gentleman of Arcadia,’ a character for which the Spanish romance was without doubt responsible.  In the Italian pastoral proper the shepherds are themselves the aristocracy of Arcadia, the introduction of such social hierarchy as is implied in the phrase being a point of chivalric and courtly tradition.  Cleobulus, however, as well as his son Philaritus, is in fact purely Arcadian in character.  Among other personae we find Apollo and the Sibyls, introduced for the sake of an oracle; Silvia, who more or less fills the office of priestess of Pan, and leads the shepherds to his shrine in a sort of masque; and a very superfluous ‘Bonus Genius’ of Castarina.  This mythological element, however, though suggested, is not, any more than the courtly, put to the fore.  I quote Silvia’s song as the best example of the lyrical verse of the play: 

Come Shepherds come, impale your brows
With Garlands of the choicest flowers
The time allows. 
Come Nymphs deckt in your dangling hair,
And unto Sylvia’s shady Bowers
With hast repair: 
Where you shall see chast Turtles play,
And Nightingales make lasting May,
As if old Time his youthfull minde,
To one delightful season had confin’d. (II. i.)

There is one thing that can be said in favour of the pastoral written by Ralph Knevet for the Society of Florists at Norwich, namely, that while adhering mainly to tradition, it is not indebted to any individual works.  Of the author of Rhodon and Iris, as the play was called, little is known beyond the dates of his birth and death, 1600 and 1671, and the bare facts that he was at one time connected in the capacity of tutor or chaplain with the family of Sir William Paston of Oxmead, and after the restoration held the living of Lyng in Norfolk.  The play appears to have been performed at the Florists’ feast on May 3, 1631, and was printed the same year.