To what extent these plays were of a pastoral character must, of course, be matter of conjecture.  They may have been pastoral plays of a more or less regular type, they may have been mythological dramas, or they may have been distinguished from the ordinary run of romantic compositions by a few incidental traits of pastoralism only.  Not a few pieces of the latter description have been preserved, pieces in which definite traces of pastoral are to be found, but which cannot as a whole be included in the kind.

We have already had occasion to note the very slight pastoral influence which exists in the short masques or dialogues of Thomas Heywood, in spite of the opportunity afforded by their mythological character.  The same may be noticed in the plays in which he drew his subject from classical legend. Love’s Mistress is the appropriate and attractive title of a dramatization of the last-born fancy of the mythopoeic spirit of Greece, Apuleius’ tale of Cupid and Psyche.  The early editions add to the title the further designation of ‘The Queen’s Masque.’  The work is indeed a composite piece, a masque grown into a play through the accretion of foreign matter, and was probably in its original state a far simpler composition than it now appears.  The writing is in a dainty vein, and had the piece been completed in a manner consonant with the simple and idyllic grace of the earlier scenes, it would have been no such unequal companion to Peele’s Arraignment of Paris.  What the play contains of pastoral belongs to one of the accretions.  It is a rustic element in the interludes, satiric and farcical, supplied by a country clown, some shepherds, and ‘a shee Swaine,’ Amarillis.  In his Ages the pastoral element shrinks to an occasional dance and song.  Thus in the Golden Age the satyrs and nymphs sing a song in honour of Diana, which introduces the disguised Jupiter in his courtship of Calisto.  In the Silver Age, again, the rape of Proserpine by Pluto is preluded by a song of ’a company of Swaines, and country Wenches’ in honour of Ceres.

An unkind and quite worthless tradition, based on a manuscript note in an old copy, has connected Peele’s name with the lengthy and tedious drama of Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes.  It was admitted into the canon of Peele’s works by Dyce, and though Mr. Bullen differed from his predecessor as to the justness of the ascription, he retained it in his edition.  We find in it a coarse, dialect-speaking rustic, named Corin, who at one point succours Clyomon, and with whom Neronis, daughter of the King and Queen of the Strange Marshes, seeks service in the disguise of a boy.  Apart from his name and the profession of shepherd he is a mere countryman, with nothing to connect him with pastoral tradition, though the princess’ action finds, of course, abundant parallels therein.  The Old Wives’ Tale, printed as ‘by G. P.,’ and of which there is no reason to question Peele’s authorship, connects itself with pastoral chiefly through the already mentioned parallel which it affords to Comus.  It also anticipates, in a song of harvesters, the introduction of the ’sunburnt sicklemen’ of the Tempest masque.