The Faithful Shepherdess - Genre

Genre

Fletcher described his play as a "pastoral 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 and includes characters named Amaryllis (from the Eclogues of Virgil) and Daphnis and Cloe (from the novel of that name by Longus); one of the characters is a satyr. Critics have seen in the play the influence of Renaissance works like Guarini's Il Pastor Fido (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.