In point of dramatic construction the first three acts leave little to be desired; as is so often the case, the weakness of the plot appears in the unravelling.  The double solution of the two threads, neither of which is properly subordinated, and which are wholly independent, is a serious blot on the dramatic merit of the play.  The courtly element, moreover, is but clumsily grafted on to the pastoral stock.  Throughout the debts to predecessors, whether of language or incident, are fairly obvious.  The verse in which the play is written is adequate and well sustained, and if its dependence on Daniel is evident, no less so is the advance in flexibility and expression which the language, as handled by the lesser poets, has made in the course of the twenty years or so that separate the Shepherds’ Holiday from Hymen’s Triumph.  Rutter’s verse also displays a certain nervousness of its own which is wanting in the model, though it preserves the intermixture of blank verse with irregular rimes which Daniel affected.  These peculiarities may be illustrated in a passage which opens with a reminiscence of Spenser: 

    All as the shepherd is, such be his flocks,
    So pine and languish they, as in despair
    He pines and languishes; their fleecy locks
    Let hang disorder’d, as their master’s hair,
    Since she is gone that deck’d both him and them. 
    And now what beauty can there be to live,
    When she is lost that did all beauty give? (I. i.)

Again the opening situation recalls that of Hymen’s Triumph, a resemblance rendered all the more striking by the retention of the actual names, Silvia and Thirsis.  In like manner the name and character of Dorinda are taken from the Pastor fido.  From the Aminta, of course, comes Nerina’s description of how her lover stole a kiss, though little of the sensuous charm of the original survives; from the Pastor fido her confession of love as soon as she finds herself alone.  The opening lines of this speech are, indeed, a direct translation: 

    Alas! my Hylas, my beloved soul,
    Durst she whom thou hast call’d cruel Nerina
    But speak her thoughts, thou wouldst not think her so;
    To thee she is not cruel, but to herself.[333] (II. iii.)

But these borrowings are by no means unskilful, so far at least as the construction is concerned.  The discovery by Cleander that Silvia is his own sister, and the instant effect of the discovery in destroying his love, are of course commonplaces of the minor pastoral drama of Italy, and also occur in some of the plays we have been examining in this chapter.  Verbal reminiscences of the Aminta also are scattered through the play, for instance, the lines in which Nerina protests her hatred of all who seek to win her from her state of unfettered virginity, protestations particularly fatuous, seeing that she is in love with Hylas throughout.  Her father not unreasonably retorts: