''The Faithful Shepherdess'' is a
Jacobean era stage play, the work that inaugurated the playwriting career of
John Fletcher. Though the initial production was a failure with its audience, the printed text that followed proved significant, in that it contained Fletcher's influential definition of
tragicomedy
Tragicomedy is a literary genre that blends aspects of both tragedy, tragic and comedy, comic forms. Most often seen in drama, dramatic literature, the term can describe either a tragic play which contains enough comic elements to lighten the ov ...
. Like many of Fletcher's later tragicomedies, ''The Faithful Shepherdess'' deals with the darker side of sexuality and sexual jealousy, albeit within a comic framework.
Plot summary
The play's eponymous heroine is Clorin, a virgin shepherdess who values chastity and devotion above all. A skilled healer, Clorin has chosen to live in solitude near the grave of her first love. During the course of the play, various couples will find themselves thrown into erotic turmoil, and it is Clorin who heals them and facilitates their reconciliation.
In the first storyline, the shepherd Perigot and the shepherdess Amoret are in love, though their love is unconsummated and pure. The shepherdess Amarillis, however, is also in love with Perigot, and plots to undermine the happy couple. Amarillis enlists the help of the Sullen Shepherd, a libertine villain willing to go to any lengths to obtain his desires or to break the "plighted troths of mutual souls." With the help of a magic fountain, Amarillis takes on the likeness of Amoret. The disguised Amarillis makes advances on Perigot, convincing him that his Amoret is unchaste. Bitterly disappointed in his love, Perigot stabs the real Amoret. He leaves her to die, and the Sullen Shepherd throws her body into the river, but Amoret is saved by the intervention of the river god. Amarillis later confesses her deception to Perigot, but this only leads to further confusion: when the healed Amoret tries to reconcile with Perigot, he believes her to be Amarillis in disguise, and stabs her a second time. A Satyr finds the hurt Amoret and brings her to Clorin to be healed. Meanwhile, Perigot cannot wash Amoret's blood off his hands. Perigot seeks Clorin's help, but even her holy water cannot cleanse him, since his hands are stained with the blood of an innocent maiden. Perigot sees Amoret and begs forgiveness; Amoret pardons him, and his hands become clean.
In the second storyline, the lustful shepherdess Cloe is seeking a lover. Any lover will do; as she declares, "It is impossible to ravish me, I am so willing". She first tries to seduce the modest shepherd Daphnis, but finds him too restrained for her taste. She then turns to the shepherd Alexis, who is eager to comply. They meet at night for their tryst, but are spied upon by the Sullen Shepherd, who suddenly lusts after Cloe himself. The Sullen Shepherd attacks Alexis, and Cloe runs off. The Satyr brings the wounded Alexis to Clorin's cabin. Clorin heals Alexis, and teaches him to abandon his lust. Cloe is also brought before Clorin, and purged of her unruly desire.
In yet another storyline, the shepherd Thenot is in love with Clorin. Since what Thenot admires most is Clorin's constancy to her dead lover, he woos her all the while hoping he will fail in his pursuit. Clorin eventually cures Thenot of his impossible love by pretending to fall in love with him. Repulsed, Thenot loses all desire for Clorin and flees.
By the play's end, Amarillis and the Sullen Shepherd are caught and brought before Clorin. Their crimes are made known and the Sullen Shepherd is banished, but Amarillis repents and is pardoned. Perigot and Amoret, as well as Cloe and Alexis, promise to love faithfully and chastely from now on.
Performance
The play was premiered onstage most likely in
1608, acted probably by the
Children of the Blackfriars, one of the troupes of
boy actors popular at the time. The
King's Men later obtained the rights to the play, and acted it at
Somerset House
Somerset House is a large neoclassical architecture, neoclassical building complex situated on the south side of the Strand, London, Strand in central London, overlooking the River Thames, just east of Waterloo Bridge. The Georgian era quadran ...
before King
Charles I and Queen
Henrietta Maria
Henrietta Maria of France (French language, French: ''Henriette Marie''; 25 November 1609 – 10 September 1669) was List of English royal consorts, Queen of England, List of Scottish royal consorts, Scotland and Ireland from her marriage to K ...
on
Twelfth Night, 6 January
1634. (The production utilized the sumptuous costumes left over from the
1633
Events
January–March
* January 20 – Galileo Galilei, having been summoned to Rome on orders of Pope Urban VIII, leaves for Florence for his journey. His carriage is halted at Ponte a Centino at the border of Tuscany, wher ...
masque
The masque was a form of festive courtly entertainment that flourished in 16th- and early 17th-century Europe, though it was developed earlier in Italy, in forms including the intermedio (a public version of the masque was the pageant). A mas ...
''
The Shepherd's Paradise,'' which Henrietta Maria then donated to the actors.) The King's Men also performed the play in their normal venue, the
Blackfriars Theatre.
Publication
''The Faithful Shepherdess'' was first published soon after its stage premier, in a
quarto
Quarto (abbreviated Qto, 4to or 4º) is the format of a book or pamphlet produced from full sheets printed with eight pages of text, four to a side, then folded twice to produce four leaves. The leaves are then trimmed along the folds to produc ...
issued by the booksellers Richard Bonian and Henry Walley; though the first edition is undated, it almost certainly appeared in
1609
Events
January–March
* January 12 – The Basque witch trials are started in Spain as the court of the Spanish Inquisition, Inquisition at Logroño receives a letter from the commissioner of the village of Zugarramurdi, and ...
. (The partnership of Bonian and Walley is traceable only from late December 1608 to mid-January 1610.)
The first edition contained
commendatory poems by
Ben Jonson
Benjamin Jonson ( 11 June 1572 – ) was an English playwright, poet and actor. Jonson's artistry exerted a lasting influence on English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy of humours; he is best known for the satire, satirical ...
,
George Chapman
George Chapman ( – 12 May 1634) was an English dramatist, translator and poet. He was a classical scholar whose work shows the influence of Stoicism. Chapman is seen as an anticipator of the metaphysical poets of the 17th century. He is ...
,
Francis Beaumont, and
Nathan Field, and dedications by Fletcher to Sir Walter Aston, Sir Robert Townshend, and Sir William Skipwith. It also provided Fletcher's famous and often-quoted address "To the Reader," which includes his definition of tragicomedy. Fletcher states that the original audience, unfamiliar with the term and concept of tragicomedy, expected a play with characters "sometimes laughing together, and sometimes killing each other." For Fletcher, in contrast, "A tragicomedy is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy...."
An entry in the
Stationers' Register shows that Walley transferred his rights to the play to stationer
Richard Meighen on 8 December
1629. Meighen issued a second edition in
1629. Meighen capitalized on the 1634 revival by issuing a third quarto of the text in that year (printed by
Augustine Matthews); subsequent editions followed in 1656 and 1665. The play was also included in the
second Beaumont and Fletcher folio of
1679.
Genre
Fletcher described his play as a "
pastoral
The pastoral genre of literature, art, or music depicts an idealised form of the shepherd's lifestyle – herding livestock around open areas of land according to the seasons and the changing availability of water and pasture. The target au ...
tragicomedy." It was not the first English drama of its type in its time:
Daniel's ''The Queen's Arcadia,'' also labelled a "pastoral tragicomedy," dates from
1605.
Fletcher exploits the traditional elements of pastoral form in his play, which is set in
Thessaly
Thessaly ( ; ; ancient Aeolic Greek#Thessalian, Thessalian: , ) is a traditional geographic regions of Greece, geographic and modern administrative regions of Greece, administrative region of Greece, comprising most of the ancient Thessaly, a ...
and includes characters named Amaryllis (from the ''
Eclogues
The ''Eclogues'' (; , ), also called the ''Bucolics'', is the first of the three major works of the Latin poet Virgil.
Background
Taking as his generic model the Greek bucolic poetry of Theocritus, Virgil created a Roman version partly by o ...
'' of
Virgil
Publius Vergilius Maro (; 15 October 70 BC21 September 19 BC), usually called Virgil or Vergil ( ) in English, was an ancient Rome, ancient Roman poet of the Augustan literature (ancient Rome), Augustan period. He composed three of the most fa ...
) and Daphnis and Cloe (from the novel of that name by
Longus); one of the characters is a
satyr
In Greek mythology, a satyr (, ), also known as a silenus or ''silenos'' ( ), and sileni (plural), is a male List of nature deities, nature spirit with ears and a tail resembling those of a horse, as well as a permanent, exaggerated erection. ...
. Critics have seen in the play the influence of Renaissance works like
Guarini's ''
Il Pastor Fido
''Il pastor fido'' (''The Faithfull Shepherd'' in Sir Richard Fanshawe, 1st Baronet, Richard Fanshawe's 1647 English translation) is a pastoral tragicomedy set in Arcadia (utopia), Arcadia by Giovanni Battista Guarini, first published in 1590 ...
'' (1590) and Antonio Marsi's ''Mirzia''. The play "represents an attempt to integrate Italianate pastoral with the English tradition exemplified by the Spenserians, drawing on both versions of pastoral in ways in which each is complicated and ironised."
The heroine of the play is the shepherdess Clorin; her love has died, yet she remains loyal to his memory and retains her chastity. This point illustrates the essential flaw and limitation of the play: little actually happens in it. "Fletcher glorifies chaste womanhood in a
Spenser-like faery atmosphere...The play is an esthetic, not a moral failure, with lack of plot as its basic fault."
Fletcher would learn from his mistake; the tragicomedies he would later write, on his own and with Beaumont,
Philip Massinger, and other collaborators, tend to be rich with (perhaps, in some cases, over-supplied with) variegated action.
[Philip Edwards, "The Danger not the Death: the art of John Fletcher," in: John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, eds., ''Jacobean Theatre'', London, Edward Arnold Ltd., 1960; pp. 159–78.]
References
External links
Text of the play
{{DEFAULTSORT:Faithful Shepherdess, The
English Renaissance plays
1608 plays
Plays by John Fletcher (playwright)
Charles I of England
Henrietta Maria of France