The other work of Cintio with which we are here concerned, a fragment which remained in MS. till published by Carducci in 1896 as an appendix to his essays on the Aminta, may be at once pronounced the most important attempt at writing a really pastoral drama previous to Beccari’s Sacrifizio.  It is found with the heading ‘Favola pastorale’ in an autograph MS., along with several other works of the author, including Egle, but with no indication of the date of composition.  The author survived till 1573, but we may reasonably suppose that the piece was written before his departure from Ferrara in 1558.  It consists of what are apparently intended for two acts, headed respectively Parte prima and Parte quinta, each consisting of several scenes, though these are not distinguished.  The first two form a sort of introduction, in which Cupid and Diana mutually defy one another on account of the nymph Irinda, whom the boy-god has wounded with love for Filicio.  The shepherd returns her love, but finds a rival in Viaste, whose blind passion, though unreturned, will admit no discourse of reason.  It is, however, ultimately discovered that Irinda and Viaste are cousins, a fact which is regarded as a sufficient reason for the infatuated swain to free himself wholly and immediately from his passion, and accept the love of the faithful Frodignisa, who has followed him throughout.[402] The story, which resembles that of Cazza’s Erlusto, is thus of a simple order, and it is chiefly in the composition that the likeness of the play to the regular pastoral is seen.  What the author intended for the middle three acts it is hard to say, since the action at the opening of the fifth is precisely at the point at which the first left it.  Probably they were never written, and the author may even have abandoned his work owing to the difficulty of filling the hiatus.  In both Cintio’s pieces the metre is blank verse (hendecasyllabic), diversified in the case of the Egle with a rimed chorus.[403]

One point becomes, I think, apparent from the foregoing examination; namely, that while the fully developed pastoral owes its origin to the evolution of the eclogue as a dramatic kind, its final form was arrived at, not merely by a natural and inevitable process of growth, but as the result of direct experimenting on certain lines.  The evolution, that is, was at the last conscious, not spontaneous.  While up to a certain point the dramatic germs latent in the eclogue develop upon a natural line of growth, each advance being the reasonable resuit of the action of surrounding conditions upon a previous stage of evolution, there comes a time when authors seem to have felt that the form was in a state of unstable equilibrium, that it was advancing towards a final expression, which it had so far failed to find, but which each individual writer sought to realize in his work.  The supposition of a theoretic preoccupation on the part of these