Pondering whereon Amyntas lost his wits. In the meanwhile Amarillis had conceived an unhappy passion for Damon, who in his turn sought the love of the nymph Laurinda, having for rival Alexis.
This is the situation at the opening of the action. In the first act we find Laurinda unable or unwilling to decide between her rival lovers, and her endeavours to play them off one against the other afford some of the most amusing scenes of the piece. Learning from Thestylis of Amarillis' love for Damon, she determines on a trick whereby she hopes to make her choice without appearing to slight either of her suitors. She bids them abide by the award of the first nymph they meet at the temple in the morning, and so arranges matters that that nymph shall be Amarillis, whose love for Damon she supposes will move her to appoint Alexis for herself. In the meanwhile the banished Claius has returned, in order, having heard of Amyntas' madness, to apply such cures as he has learnt in the course of his wanderings. He is successful in his attempt, and without revealing his identity departs, having first privately obtained from Urania the promise that she will vow virginity to Ceres, lest Amyntas by puzzling afresh over the oracle should again lose his reason. The nymphs now appear at the temple, and the foremost, who is veiled, is appealed to by Damon and Alexis to give her decision. She reveals herself as Amarillis, and Damon, fearing that she will decide against him, refuses to be bound by the award of so partial an arbiter. Alexis thereupon goes off to fetch Laurinda, who shall force him to abide by his oath, while Damon in a fit of rage seeks to prevent Amarillis' verdict by slaying her. He wounds her with his spear and leaves her for dead. She recovers consciousness, however, when he has fled, and with her blood writes a letter to Laurinda bequeathing to her all interest in Damon. At this point Claius returns upon the scene, and finding her wounded applies remedies. Damon too is led back by an evil conscience, and Pilumnus likewise appears. Claius, in his anxiety to make Amarillis reveal her assassin, betrays his own identity, to the joy of his old enemy Pilumnus. Alexis now returns with Laurinda, and upon hearing the letter which Amarillis had written, Damon confesses his crime and declares that henceforth his love is for none but her. His life, however, is forfeit through his having shed blood in the holy vale, and he is led off in company with Claius to die at the altar of Ceres. In the fifth act we find all prepared for the double sacrifice, when Amyntas enters, and bidding Pilumnus stay his hand, claims to expound the oracle. Claius' blood, he argues, has been already shed in Amarillis, and has quenched the fire of Damon's love for Laurinda, rekindling it again to Amarillis' self. Moreover, had not the oracle warned them that the recognized guardians of wisdom would fail to interpret truly, and that such a scorned wit as that of the 'mad Amyntas' would discover the meaning? Furthermore, he argues that since Amarillis was the victim the goddess aimed at, her blood might without sin be shed even in the holy vale, while Damon is of the priestly stock to which that office justly pertained. Thus Claius and Damon are alike spoken free, and Sicily is relieved of the goddess' curse. While the general rejoicing is at its height, Urania is brought in to take her vestal vows at the altar. In spite of her lover's remonstrance she kneels before the shrine and addresses her prayer to the goddess. At length the appeased deity deigns to answer, and in a gracious echo reveals the solution of the enigma of the dowry--a husband.
This plot is a mingling of comedy in the scenes of Laurinda's 'wavering'[[277]] and the 'humours' of Amyntas' madness, and of tragi-comedy in the catastrophe. But besides this there is what may best be described as an antiplot of pure farce, in which the main character is the roguish page Dorylas, who in the guise of Oberon robs Jocastus' orchard, tricks Thestylis into marrying the foolish augur, and gulls everybody all round. The humour of this portion of the piece may be occasionally a trifle broad and at the same time childish, but there is nevertheless no denying the genuineness of the quality, while the verse is as a rule sparkling, and the dialogue both racy and pointed, occasionally displaying qualities hardly to be described as other than brilliant.
This comic subplot obviously owes nothing to Guarini, but is introduced in accordance with the usage of the English popular drama, and is grafted somewhat boldly on to the conventional stock. Dorylas is one of the most inimitable and successful of the descendants of Lyly's pages; while the characters of Mopsus and Jocastus, although the former no doubt owes his conception to a hint in the Aminta, belong essentially to the English romantic farce. The scenes in which the page appears as Oberon surrounded by his court recall the introduction of the 'mortal fairies' of the Merry Wives, and that in which Amyntas' 'deluded fancy' takes the augur for a hound of Actaeon's breed may owe something to a passage in King Lear. But even apart from the elements of farce and comedy there are important aspects in which the Amyntas severs itself from the stricter tradition of the Italian pastoral. Randolph, while adopting the machinery and much of the scenic environment of Guarini's play, made certain not unimportant alterations in the dramatic construction, tending towards greater variety and complicity. In the Pastor fido the four main characters, though they ultimately resolve themselves into two pairs, are throughout interdependent, and their story forms but a single plot. That the play should have needed a double solution, the events that bring two couples together having no connexion with one another, was a dramatic blunder but imperfectly concealed by the fact that Silvio and Dorinda are purely secondary, the whole interest being concentrated on the fortunes of Mirtillo and Amarilli. In Randolph's play, on the other hand, there are no less than six important characters. These are divided into two groups, each with an independent plot, one of which contains a telling though somewhat conventional περιπέτεια, while the other, though possessing originality and pathos, is lacking in dramatic possibilities. Thus each supplies the elements wanting in the other, and if woven together harmoniously, should have been capable of forming the basis of a well-constructed play. The first of these groups consists of Laurinda, Alexis, Damon, and Amarillis, the last two being really the dramatically important ones, though their fortunes are connected throughout. It is Laurinda's choice of Alexis that leads to the union of Damon and Amarillis, and it is not till Damon has unconsciously fulfilled the oracle and been freed by its interpretation, that the loves of Laurinda and Alexis can hope for a happy event. Thus Randolph has at least not fallen into the error by which Guarini introduced a double catastrophe into a single plot, though he has not altogether avoided a somewhat similar danger. This is due to the other group above mentioned, consisting of Amyntas and Urania, who, so far as the plot is concerned, are absolutely independent of the other characters. Their own story is essentially undramatic, although it possesses qualities which would make it effective in narrative; and it is, moreover, wholly unaffected by the solution of the other plot. This is obviously a weak place in the construction of the play, but the author has shown great resource in meeting the difficulty. First, by placing the interpretation of the oracle in the mouth of Amyntas, who must yet himself remain hopeless amid the general rejoicing, he has produced a figure of considerable dramatic effect, and so kept the attention of the audience braced, and stayed the relaxing effect of the anti-climax. Secondly, he has amused the spectators with some excellent fooling until, while Io and Paean are yet resounding, it is possible to crown the whole by the solution of the second oracle, and send the hero and his love to join the others in the festive throng. The imperfection of plot is there, but the author has been skilful in concealing it, and it may well be that his success would appear all the greater were his play to be put to the real test of dramatic composition by being actually placed on the boards.
But there is yet another point in which the Amyntas differs not only from its Italian model but from its English predecessors likewise. This is a certain genially humorous conception of the whole, quite apart from and beyond the mere introduction of comedy and farce, which we have never found so marked before, and which has indeed been painfully absent from the pastoral since Tasso penned the final chorus of the Aminta. This humorous tone is never harshly forced upon the attention, and consists, in a measure, merely in the fact of the comic business constantly elbowing the serious action, and thus saving the latter from the danger of becoming stilted and pretentions--a fault not less commonly and quite as justly charged against pastoral literature as that of artificiality. A leaven of humour is the great safeguard against an author taking either himself or his creations too seriously. Randolph's Amyntas, it is true, renounces the high ideality of its predecessors, of the Aminta and the Pastor fido, of Hymen's Triumph and the Faithful Shepherdess; but it makes up for it by human sanity of feeling and expression, by good humour and by wit. It is, moreover, genuinely diverting. Here at least we find no endeavour to attain to the importance and solemnity of a classical tragedy as with Guarini, nor a striving after an utterly unreal, unsympathetic and impossible ideal as with Fletcher. It is, moreover, noticeable and eminently to the credit of the author that the comic scenes, even when somewhat extravagant alike in tone and proportion, seldom clash unpleasantly with the more serious passages, nor derogate from the interest and dignity of the whole.
The play has generally met with a far from deserved neglect, owing in part no doubt to the singular failure on the part of most critics to apprehend correctly the nature and conditions of pastoral poetry.[[278]] Mr. W. C. Hazlitt, who edited Randolph's works in 1875, does not so much as mention the play in the perfunctory introduction, in which he chiefly follows the extravagant, pedantic, and utterly worthless article in the sixth volume of the Retrospective Review.[[279]] The merits of the piece have been somewhat more fully recognized by Dr. Ward and Mr. Homer Smith, but the treatment accorded the play by the former is necessarily scanty, while that of the latter is inaccurate. Throughout a tendency is manifest to find fault with the artificiality of the piece, and to blame the author for not representing the true 'simplicity' of pastoral life. That the pastoral tradition was a wholly impossible, not to say an absurd one, bearing no true relation to nature at all, may be admitted; and it may be lamented by such as love to shed bitter tears because the sandy shore is not a well-swept parquet, or because anything you please is not something else to which it bears not the smallest resemblance. It may or may not be unfortunate that Randolph should have elected to write more pastorali, but to censure the individual work because it is not of a type to which its author never had the remotest intention of making it conform, and to which except for something like a miracle it was impossible that it should even approach, is the acme of critical fatuity. Judged in accordance with the intention of the author the Amyntas is no inconsiderable achievement for a young writer, and compared with other works belonging to the same tradition it occupies a highly respectable place. With Tasso's Aminta and Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess it cannot, in point of poetic merit, for one moment compare, falling as far below them in this as it surpasses them in complexity and general suitability of dramatic construction. A fairer comparison may be made between it and the Pastor fido in Italian or Hymen's Triumph in English, and here again, though certainly with regard to the former and probably with regard to the latter it stands second as poetry, as a play it is decidedly better suited than either for representation on the stage--at least on a stage with the traditions and conventions which prevailed in this country in the author's day.
It is then in the matter of the poetical quality of the verse that Randolph's play appears to least advantage. Living in a polished and cultured literary circle at Cambridge, and enjoying after his remove to London the congenial fellowship of the tribe of Ben, he naturally attained the ease and skill necessary to maintain a respectable level of composition, but he was sparing of the higher flights. He seldom strikes the attention by those purple patches which make many of his contemporaries so quotable, yet, while by no means monotonously correct, it is equally seldom that he sinks much below his general level. The dialogue is on the whole natural and easy, and at the same time crisp and pointed. A few of the more distinctively poetic and imaginative passages may be quoted, in order to give some idea of the style. Laurinda thus appoints a choice to her brace of lovers:
I have protested never to disclose
Which 'tis that best I love: But the first Nymph,
As soone as Titan guilds the Easterne hills,
And chirping birds, the Saints-bell of the day,
Ring in our eares a warning to devotion--
That lucky damsell what so e're she be
[That first shall meet you from the temple gate][[280]]
Shall be the Goddesse to appoint my love,
To say, 'Laurinda this shall be your choice':
And both shall sweare to stand to her award! (III. i.)
Another passage of deliberate poetic elaboration is the monologue of Claius on once again treading his native soil: