"Along the dimpled brook, and where Let violets blue, and eglantine, With lily from the rill, The cowslip, rose, and pink entwine, Such a stanza as the following reminds one that Mansell had his Midsummer-Night's Dream well in mind: "Now away to sport rove I. Light as summer evening's fly; A mortal here!-why then away." There are many passages as pretty as these. Part of the play is in prose. Henry Woodward's The Seasons is planned in the shape of dramatic tableaux, including representations of spring, summer, autumn, Woodward's winter. The dramatis persona are, "Seasons," Vertumnus, Flora, Mars, Venus, Cupid, 1785. the Graces, Gardeners, March, April, May; Aurora, Vesper, Pan, Ceres, Weavers and Reapers, June, July, August; Plenty, Pomona, Bacchus, Fauns, Satyrs, September, October, November; Comus, Necessity, Saturn, Vesta, Villagers, December, January, February. Many pretty dances are outlined and pretty songs written. This tableau pastoral is really pleasing and worthy attention; the scene is, of course, out of doors. With sufficiently careful costuming, The Seasons could still be given to the delight of many. The verse has no suggestion of high poetic quality, but of its kind it is good. The following lines are illustrative: "Rugged March at thy appearing Pleas'd his low'ring brow unbends ; Learmont's Unequal Rivals in many ways reminds one of Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd: the Scots dialect, the homely moralizing, and finally, the noble-birth dénouement. There is sound worth in the Unequal Learmont's "Unequal Rivals," 1791. Rivals; it is not marred by any of that vulgarity, triviality, and triteness so common to most eighteenth-century pastorals. The story is simple. Jamie and Minny are in love. Patria, a rich young laird, falls in love with Minny, and connives with Geordy, Jamie's brother, to get her by means foul or fair. Jamie at the right moment rescues Minny and is sent to prison. Minny turns out to be the older laird's daughter, and Jamie the son of an influential man. The young laird is disinherited for his conduct, and Jamie marrying Minny becomes the laird's heir. One or two little by-plots strengthen the play. If any criticism 1 falls to be made, it is that the pastoral is too long, and that there is, perhaps, too much moralizing. The pastoral nomenclature is not over strong, but then the rural homely Scots dialect creates an atmosphere far more suggestive of the country than could any number of fountains, rills, bleating flocks, and lamenting swains. The play has a sense of the dignity of the poor, which is sincere and reminds one of a greater poet-Robert Burns. V IN CONCLUSION HE audience for whom these pastoral plays THE The audience for whom were written was not the audience for whom the Aminta, the Pastor Fido, or, for that matter, the Faithful Shepherdess were written. The majority of the plays seem to have been these plays composed largely for the delight of orange-wenches rather than for the delight of a beauty-loving and cultivated society. The spawn of minor dramatists, their authors were not Tassos, Guarinis, or Fletchers, but men whose names are now forgotten. were written. The satisfac pastoral Following in the steps of greater dramas but without their poetic qualities, these plays were produced primarily to please. Their pretion found in ferment of operatic form shows how much they were subject to that arbiter populi-Fad; at least one-third of the entire number of dramatic pastorals which appeared after the beginning of the eighteenth century were operas. Quite different from the quality of this popularity was another cause for the favour they plays. 124 found either as serious or as burlesque literature. The pastoral, circumscribed by certain rules and regulations, appealed to the period's love of regularity. The hue and cry of the Restoration was imitation of nature, an assumed simplicity which has been aptly termed "wax-work literalness" in the making of poem or play. In the pastoral there was a superficial expression of the same theory which led Dryden to centre his All for Love in the palace at Alexandria, and to cut out the spaces of the Mediterranean. Adaptations. It was characteristic also of the early part of this period especially, to work over other men's plays; it was an age of redacteurs rather than of original authors, such as the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries had been. Pastoral plays offered an excellent page for mediocrity to re-write, a page which contained no real perplexities of plot or character delineation. It does not seem to have occurred to the English mind that its "bastard imitations" could be anything but an improvement upon the original. There is no begging the fact that the point of view of the ordinary English adapter was a conceited one; even the best of French plays, into which he introduced indecencies and incongruities, he was convinced the English version had much bettered. It is necessary to read only the preface to Motteux's translations (?) 1 Margaret Sherwood: Dryden's Dramatic Theory and Prac tice, p. 19. |