You have an heate, on which a coldnesse waits,
    A paine that is endur’d with pleasantnesse,
    And makes those sweets you eat have bitter taste: 
    It puts eies in your thoughts, eares in your heart: 
    ’Twas by desire first bred, by delight nurst,
    And hath of late been wean’d by jelousie.

Certain speeches of a sententious nature, on the other hand, remind us rather of Daniel and the sonneteers: 

    To wish the best, to thinke upon the worst,
    And all contingents brooke with patience,
    Is a most soveraigne medicine.

All these characteristics point to an early date, and Mr. Fleay, who regards the piece as forming part of the Five Plays in One, acted at the Rose in April, 1597, may very likely be right.  Of the other pieces printed in the same volume, a few only show any trace of pastoral blending with the general mythological colouring.  Perhaps the most that can be said is that the nymphs are already familiar to us from the pastoral tradition, and must have been scarcely less so to a contemporary audience, fresh from the work of Peele and Lyly.  In Jupiter and Io, which perhaps made part of the same performance as Amphrissa, Mercury disguises himself as a shepherd, in order to cut off the head of Argus.  This he did to such good purpose that record of the trunkless member remains unto this day in the inventories of the Lord Admiral’s company.  Another of these pieces, the character of which can be easily imagined from its title, Apollo and Daphne, ends with a song, which may owe something to the traditions of the mythological pastoral: 

      Howsoe’re the Minutes go,
      Run the heures or swift or slow: 
      Seem the Months or short or long,
      Passe the seasons right or wrong: 
    All we sing that Phoebus follow,
    Semel in anno ridet Apollo.

      Early fall the Spring or not,
      Prove the Summer cold or hot: 
      Autumne be it faire or foule,
      Let the Winter smile or skowle: 
    Still we sing, that Phoebus follow,
    Semel in anno ridet Apollo.

Passing on to the seventeenth century, the first piece that demands attention is the St. John’s Twelfth Night entertainment, Narcissus, performed at Oxford in 1602.  If its pastoral quality is somewhat evanescent, there is another point of view from which the piece has a good deal of interest.  It is, namely, a burlesque production of the nature of the Pyramus and Thisbe interlude in the Midsummer Night’s Dream, and flavoured with something of the comic rusticity of Greene’s Carmela eclogue in Menaphon.  It is needless here to summarize the plot of the ‘merriment’ which the ingenious author, no doubt a student of St. John’s, evolved from Ovid’s account in the third book of the Metamorphoses, and which runs to the respectable length of some eight hundred lines.[342] I may be allowed, however, to note that echo verses, suggested by Ovid, are introduced and handled with more than usual ingenuity; and further to quote two characteristic passages.  In one of these the nymphs Florida and Clois court the affections of the loveless hero.