Author: W. W. Greg

Publisher: Good Press

Published: 2019-12-11

Total Pages: 1255

ISBN-13:

Pastoral Poetry & Pastoral Drama is an analysis of poems by W. W. Greg. Greg was one of the leading bibliographers and Shakespeare scholars of the 20th century, here presenting poems that idealize country life and the landscape they take place in. Excerpt: "Having at length arrived at what must be regarded as the main subject of this work, it will be my task in the remaining chapters to follow the growth of the pastoral drama in England down to the middle of the seventeenth century, and in so doing to gather up and weave into a connected web the loose threads of my discourse. Taking birth among the upland meadows of Sicily, the pastoral tradition first assumed its conventional garb in imperial Rome, and this it preserved among learned writers after its revival in the dawn of the Italian renaissance. With Arcadia for its local habitation it underwent a rebirth in the opening years of the sixteenth century in Sannazzaro's romance, and again towards the close in the drama of Tasso. It became chivalric in Spain and courtly in France, and finally reached this country in three main streams, the eclogue borrowed by Spenser from Marot, the romance suggested to Sidney by Montemayor, and the drama imitated by Daniel from Tasso and Guarini. Once here, it blended variously with other influences and with native tradition to produce a body of dramatic work, which, ill-defined, spasmodic and occasional, nevertheless reveals on inspection a certain character of its own, and one moreover not precisely to be paralleled from the literary annals of any other European nation."