It is a coincidence, but one significant of the nature of the pastoral tradition, if such it can be called, that had sprung up on the English stage, that the next play to claim our notice is again the work of a schoolboy. Love in its Extasy, described on the title-page as ’a kind of Royall Pastorall,’ was written, at the age of seventeen, by a student of Eton College, whom it has been customary to identify with one William Peaps.[335] The date of composition is said in the stationer’s preface to have preceded by many years that of publication, 1649, we may perhaps regard the piece as more or less contemporary with Cowley’s juvenile effort.  There is, it is true, one passage,[336] treating of tyrants and revolutions, which is such as a moderate supporter of ‘divine right’ might have been expected to pen in the later days of the civil war; the publisher’s words, however, are unequivocal, and can hardly refer to a period after 1642.

Love in its Extasy itself cannot, without some straining of the term, be called a pastoral, though there are certain links serving to connect it with pastoral tradition.  The only excuse, beyond that afforded by the title-page, for including it in the present category is that several of the characters, finding it for various reasons inconvenient to appear in their own shapes, take upon themselves a pastoral disguise; but there is no hint of any pastoral background to the action, not even the atmosphere of a rural academy as in Montagu’s play.  The whole piece, however, is in the style of the Hispano-French romance, in which pastoral or pseudo-pastoral plays so large a part.  To enter into the plot in detail is for our present purpose unnecessary.  It is apparently original, and, considered as a romance, would do no small credit to its youthful author.  An exiled king and his lady-love assume the sheep-hook, as do also two princes and the mistress of one of them, the mistress of the other appearing in the disguise of a boy.  Disguisings, potions, feigned deaths, and recognitions, or rather revelations of identity, form the staple elements of the plot.  The play is long, the stage crowded, the plot intricate and elaborated with a superabundance of incident; but it must be admitted that the attention is held and the interest sustained, even to a wearisome degree, throughout; that the characters are individualized, and the action clear.  These are no small merits, as any one whose fortune it has been to wade through any considerable portion of the minor drama will be ready to acknowledge; while the defects of the piece are those commonly incident to immature work.  The most conspicuous are the want of one prominent interest, and the lack of definite climax; at least four equally important threads are kept running through the play, and the dramatic tension is at an almost constant pitch throughout.  These characteristics are those of the narrative romance and of the novel of adventure respectively, and are fatal to the success of the dramatic form.