theatrical world of 1660. In the Bibliography no attempt has been made to do more than record exactly the title-pages of the first editions of English Plays. Incidentally many corrections of dates assigned by Baker and others have been made. A number of plays, not elsewhere mentioned, are entered here for the first time as pastorals. I have been fortunate, too, in finding several unrecorded manuscripts. The Italian and Spanish sections I hope later to amplify to a complete history of pastoral drama. So far, eighteenth-century pastoral drama has, for several reasons, remained practically unexplored. Mr. Homer Smith in his paper, published by the Modern Language Association, entitled Pastoral Influence in the English Drama, takes a side glance at the subject: "While in England, after maintaining an unequal struggle with the virile romantic drama, it was finally laughed out of existence by the burlesques of the eighteenth century." Were these burlesques plays? It would seem not, for there are, all told, not more than a half-dozen deliberate dramatic burlesques among the pastorals. In non-pastoral plays there are numerous "hits" at the mode, but not enough to laugh Colin and Sylvia “out of existence." No, the cause lay much deeper, as I have tried to show. To trace the history of pastoral burlesque is possible, not in the drama, however, but in the ballad. I have found, in the Bodleian and other libraries, literally hundreds of printed and unprinted eighteenth-century ballads burlesquing the pastoral-sufficient to fill a two-volume anthology. For many suggestions I am indebted to Professor Margaret Sherwood, Ph.D. (Yale University), of Wellesley College; some of Miss Sherwood's criticisms and comments I have taken almost verbatim. To Miss Helen M. Cady, M.A. (Wellesley), I am under great obligations for helping me in my bibliographical work at the Boston Public Library and in England. I wish also to express my thanks to President Mary E. Woolley, M.A. (Brown University), L. H.D. (Amherst College), to Dr. Curtis Hidden Page, of Columbia University, and Professor B. K. Young, of Mount Holyoke College, for their careful reading of the manuscript; and to Miss Clara Stafford, B.A., for her work upon the Index. J. M. BEDDGELERT, Wales August 23, 1907 I. ITALIAN PASTORAL PLAYS, 1472-1615 . II. SPANISH PASTORAL PLAYS, 1490-1642 III. ENGLISH PASTORAL PLAYS, 1584-1660 |