Pastoral Poetry & Pastoral Drama Part 20

or:

O Stesias, what a heavenly love hast thou!

A love as chaste as is Apolloes tree, As modest as a vestall Virgins eye, And yet as bright as Glow wormes in the night, With which the morning decks her lovers hayre; (IV. i.)

or yet again:

When will the sun go downe? flye Phoebus flye!

O, that thy steeds were wingd with my swift thoughts: Now shouldst thou fall in Thetis azure armes[225], And now would I fall in Pandoraes lap. (IV. i.)

Nor are these isolated pa.s.sages; from the opening lines of the prologue to the final speech of Nature the verse has the appearance of being the work of a graceful if not very strong hand writing in imitation of Marlowe's early style. We must, therefore, it seems to me, take the words of the prologue as signifying not that the play was the first work of the author, but that it was his earliest adventure in verse.

The plan of the work is as follows. The shepherds of Utopia come to dame Nature and beg her to make a woman for them. She consents and fas.h.i.+ons Pandora, whom she dowers with the virtues of the several Planets. These, however, are offended at not being consulted in the matter, and determine to use their influence to the bane of the newly created woman. Under the reign of Saturn she turns sullen; when Jupiter is in the ascendant he falls in love with her, but she has grown proud and scorns him; under Mars she becomes a vixen; under Sol she in her turn falls in love, and turns wanton under Venus; she learns deceit of Mercury when he is dominant, and runs mad under the influence of Luna. At length, since the shepherds will no longer have anything to do with the lady, Nature determines to place her in the heavens. Her beauty makes each planet desire her as companion.

Nature gives her the choice:

Speake, my Pandora; where wilt thou be?

_Pandora._ Not with old Saturne for he lookes like death; Nor yet with Jupiter, lest Juno storme; Nor with thee Mars, for Venus is thy love; Nor with thee Sol, thou hast two Parramours, The sea borne Thetis and the rudy morne; Nor with thee Venus, lest I be in love With blindfold Cupid or young Joculus; Nor with thee Hermes, thou art full of sleightes, And when I need thee Jove will send thee foorth.

Say Cynthia, shall Pandora rule thy starre, And wilt thou play Diana in the woods, Or Hecate in Plutos regiment?

_Luna._ I, Pandora.

_Pand._ Fayre Nature let thy hand mayd dwell with her, For know that change is my felicity, And ficklenesse Pandoraes proper forme.

Thou madst me sullen first, and thou Jove, proud; Thou b.l.o.o.d.y minded; he a Puritan: Thou Venus madst me love all that I saw, And Hermes to deceive all that I love; But Cynthia made me idle, mutable, Forgetfull, foolish, fickle, franticke, madde; These be the humors that content me best, And therefore will I stay with Cynthia....

_Nat._ Now rule, Pandora, in fayre Cynthias steede, And make the moone inconstant like thy selfe; Raigne thou at womens nuptials, and their birth; Let them be mutable in all their loves, Fantastical, childish, and foolish, in their desires, Demaunding toyes: And stark madde when they cannot have their will.

Now follow me ye wandring lightes of heaven, And grieve not, that she is not plast with you; Ail you shall glaunce at her in your aspects, And in conjunction dwell with her a s.p.a.ce. (V. i.)

And so Pandora becomes the 'Woman in the Moon.' The play, in its topical and satiric purpose, and above all, in its utilization of mythological material, bears a distinct relations.h.i.+p to the masque. The shepherds are in their origin philosophical, standing for the race of mankind in general, rather than pastoral; Utopian, in fact, rather than Arcadian.

These early mythological plays stand alone, in that the pastoral scenes they contain are apparently uninfluenced by the Italian drama. The kind attained some popularity as a subject of courtly presentation, but it did not long preserve its original character. The later examples, with which we shall be concerned hereafter, always exhibit some characteristics which may be immediately or ultimately traced to the influence of Ta.s.so and Guarini. This influence we must now turn to consider in some detail, as evidenced as well in translations and imitations as in the general tone and machinery of an appreciable portion of the Elizabethan drama.[226]

II

In any inquiry involving the question of foreign influence in literature it is obviously necessary to treat of the work done in the way of translation, although when the influence is of at all a widespread nature, as in the present instance, such discussion is apt to usurp a position unjustified by its intrinsic importance. In most cases, probably, the energy devoted to the task of rendering the foreign models directly into the language they influenced is rather useful as supplying us with a rough measure of their popularity than itself significant as a step in the operation of that influence. We may safely a.s.sume that, in the case of the English pastoral drama, the influence exercised directly by the Italian masterpieces was beyond comparison greater than that which made itself indirectly felt through the labours of translators.

Having thus antic.i.p.ated a possible misapprehension it will be worth our while to devote some little attention to the history of the attempts at translation in this line. The first English writer to venture upon the task of turning the choice music of Ta.s.so into his native language was the eccentric satellite of the Sidneyan circle, Abraham Fraunce, fellow of St.

John's College in Cambridge. It so happened that he was at the time pursuing that elusive phantasm, the application of the laws of cla.s.sical versification to English poetry. The resuit was at least unique, in English, at any rate, namely a drama in hexameter verse. It also occurred to him that Watson's _Lamentations of Amyntas_, a translation of which he had himself published in 1587, might be made to serve as an appendix to Ta.s.so's play. With this object in view he changed the name of the heroine from Silvia to Phillis. This appears to have been the exact extent to which he 'altered S. Ta.s.soes Italian' in order to connect it with 'M.

Watsons Latine Amyntas' and 'to make them both one English.'[227] Certain other changes were, however, introduced upon other considerations. Various unessential points were omitted, notably in connexion with Tirsi, whose topical character disappears; the name Nerina is altered to Fulvia; frequent allusions are introduced to the nymph Pembrokiana, to whom among other things is ascribed the rescue of the heroine from the bear which takes the place of the wolf in Ta.s.so. Lastly, we have the addition of a whole scene immediately before the final chorus. Phillis and Amyntas reappear and carry on a conversation, not unamiably, in a sort of hexametrical stichomythia. The maiden modestly seeks to restrain the amorous impatience of her lover, and the scene ends with a song between the two composed in 'Asclepiades.'[228] Of this literary curiosity Amyntas' opening stave may be quoted:

Sweete face, why be the hev'ns soe to the bountifull, Making that radiant bewty of all the starrs Bright-burning, to be fayre Phillis her ornament?

And yet seeme to be soe spytefuly partial, As not for to aford Argus his eyes to mee, Eyes too feawe to behould Phillis her ornament?

It is, perhaps, not a little strange that the pedant who made the preposterous experiment of turning the _Aminta_ into English hexameters should nevertheless have been capable of clearly perceiving, however incapable he was of adequately rectifying, the hopelessly undramatic character of the last act of Ta.s.so's play. As an example of the style of the translation we may take the following rendering of the delicate _Chi crederia_, with which the original prologue opens:

Who would think that a G.o.d lay lurking under a gray cloake, Silly Shepheards gray cloake, and arm'd with a paltery sheephooke?

And yet no pety G.o.d, no G.o.d that gads by the mountaines, But the triumphantst G.o.d that beares any sway in Olympus: Which many times hath made man-murdring Mars to be cursing His blood-sucking blade; and prince of watery empire Earth-shaking Neptune, his threeforckt mace to be leaving, And Jove omnipotent, as a poore and humble obeissant, His three-flak't lightnings and thunderbolts to abandon.

This is in some respects not wholly inadequate; indeed, if it happened to be English it might pa.s.s for a respectable translation, for the exotic pedantry of the style itself serves in a way to render the delicate artificiality of the original, and such an expression as a 'G.o.d that gads by the mountaines' is a pithy enough paraphrase of _dio selvaggio_, if hardly an accurate translation. The unsatisfactory nature of the verse, however, for dramatic purposes becomes evident in pa.s.sages of rapid dialogue; for example, where Daphne tells the careless nymph of Amyntas'

resolve to die.

_Phillis._ As to my house full glad for joy I repayred, I met thee Daphne, there full sad by the way, and greately amased.

_Daphne._ Phillis alas is alive, but an other's gone to be dying[229].

_Ph._ And what mean's this, alas? am I now so lightly regarded, That my life with, Alas, of Daphne must be remembred?

_Da._ Phillis, I love thy life, but I lyke not death of an other.

_Ph._ Whose death?

_Da._ Death of Amyntas.

_Ph._ Alas how dyed Amyntas?

_Da._ How? that I cannot tell; nor yet well whether it is soe: But noe doubt, I beleeve; for it is most lyke that it is soe.

_Ph._ What strange news doe I heare? what causd that death of Amyntas?

_Da._ Thy death.

_Ph._ And I alive?

_Da._ Thy death was lately reported, And he beleevs thy death, and therfore seeketh his owne death.

_Ph._ Feare of Phillis death prov'd vayne, and feare of Amyntas Death will proove vayne too: life eache thing lyvely procureth. (IV. i.)

Even in such a pa.s.sage as this, however, those strong racy phrases which somehow find their way into the most uninspired of Tudor translations, are not wholly wanting. Thus when the careless nymph at last goes off to seek her desperate lover, Daphne in the original remarks:

Oh tardi saggia, e tardi Pietosa, quando ci nulla rileva;

a pa.s.sage in translating which Fraunce cannot resist the application of a homely proverb, and writes:

When steedes are stollen, then Phillis looks to the stable.

It may, at first sight, appear strange that at a time when the Italian pastoral was exercising its greatest influence over the English drama this translation by Fraunce of Ta.s.so's play should have satisfied the demand for more than thirty years. The explanation, of course, is that the widespread knowledge of Italian among the reading public in England rendered translation more or less superfluous[230], while at the same time it should be remembered that in this country Ta.s.so was far surpa.s.sed in popularity by Guarini. So far as we can tell no further translation of the _Aminta_ was attempted till 1628, when there appeared an anonymous version which bibliographers have followed one another in ascribing to one John Reynolds, but which was more probably the work of a certain Henry Reynolds[231]. However that may be, the translation is of no inconsiderable merit, though this is more apparent when read apart from the original. It bears evidence of having been written by a man capable of appreciating the poetry of Ta.s.so, and one who, while unable to strike the higher chords of lyric composition, was yet able to render the Italian into graceful and una.s.suming, if seldom wholly musical or adequate, verse.

Thus the version hardly does itself justice in quotation, although the general impression produced is more pleasing and less often irritating than is the case with translations which many times reveal far higher qualities. The following is a characteristic specimen chosen from the story of Aminta's early love for Silvia.

Being but a Lad, so young as yet scarce able To reach the fruit from the low-hanging boughes Of new-growne trees; Inward I grew to bee With a young mayde, fullest of love and sweetnesse, That ere display'd pure gold tresse to the winde;...

Neere our abodes, and neerer were our hearts; Well did our yeares agree, better our thoughts; Together wove we netts t' intrapp the fish In flouds and sedgy fleetes[232]; together sett Pitfalls for birds; together the pye'd Buck And flying Doe over the plaines we chac'de; And in the quarry', as in the pleasure shar'de: But as I made the beasts my pray, I found My heart was lost, and made a pray to other. (I. ii.)

Many a translator, moreover, has failed to instil into his verse the swing and flow of the following stanzas from the golden age chorus, which, nevertheless follow the metrical form of the original with reasonable fidelity[233]:

O happy Age of Gould; happy' houres; Not for with milke the rivers ranne, And hunny dropt from ev'ry tree; Nor that the Earth bore fruits, and flowres, Without the toyle or care of Man, And Serpents were from poyson free;...

But therefore only happy Dayes, Because that vaine and ydle name, That couz'ning Idoll of unrest, Whom the madd vulgar first did raize, And call'd it Honour, whence it came To tyrannize or'e ev'ry brest, Was not then suffred to molest Poore lovers hearts with new debate; More happy they, by these his hard And cruell lawes, were not debar'd Their innate freedome; happy state; The goulden lawes of Nature, they Found in their brests; and them they did obey. (Ch. I.)

Before leaving the _Aminta_ it will be worth while straying beyond the strict chronological limits of this inquiry to glance for a moment at the version produced by John Dancer in 1660, for the sake of noting the change which had come over literary hack-work of the kind in the course of some thirty years. Comparing it with Reynolds' translation we are at first struck by the change which long drilling of the language to a variety of uses has accomplished in the work of uninspired poetasters; secondly, by the fact that the conventional respectability of production, which has replaced the halting crudities of an earlier date, is far more inimical to any real touch of poetic inspiration. Equally evident is that spirit of tyranny, happily at no time native to our literature, which seeks to reduce the works of other ages into accordance with the taste of its own day. Thus, having 'improved' Ta.s.so's apostrophe to the _bella eta dell'

oro_ almost beyond recognition, Dancer complacently closes the chorus with the following parody:

We'l hope, since there's no joy, when once one dies We'l hope, that as we have seen with our eies The Sun to set, so we may see it rise. (Ch. I.)

Again, while all the spontaneity and reverential labour of an age of more avowed adolescence has disappeared, there is yet lacking the justness of phrase and certainty of grammar and rime, which later supply, however inadequately, the place of poetic enthusiasm. The defects of the style, with its commonplace exaggeration of conceits, the thumbed token-currency of the certified poetaster, are well seen in such a pa.s.sage as the following: