Battista Guarini

• Born: 1538
• Birthplace: Ferrara (now in Italy)
• Died: October 7, 1612
• Place of death: Venice (now in Italy)

Other Literary Forms

Although Battista Guarini is primarily known as the author of a pastoral tragicomedy, he also collected his correspondence in the two-volume Lettere (1593-1596); among his nonfiction are Il segretario (1594; the secretary), a dialogue on the obligations of a secretary, and a political treatise, Trattato della politica libertà (1818; treatise on political freedom). He also collected his verse in a book entitled Rime (1598).

Achievements

Battista Guarini’s most famous play, The Faithful Shepherd, was first staged in the city of Crema during the Carnival of 1596 and later in September of the same year in Ronciglione, in the state of the Farnesi. The numerous editions of The Faithful Shepherd in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries and the several translations into French, Spanish, English, German, Greek, Polish, Swedish, and Dutch are clear evidence of the great success of this work. The first translation into English was done by John Dymock in 1602. However, the translation in 1647 by Sir Richard Fanshawe, which uses heroic couplets and remains very close to the original, is still considered to be the best. The 1964 edition of that translation was republished in 1976 with an introduction by John H. Whitfield.

Much to Guarini’s credit, he accompanied his painstaking work of composition and revision with a robust theoretical defense of The Faithful Shepherd and of a hedonistic conception of art, free of moralizing. Guarini built his work on the pastoral tradition of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, on the results of the critical elaboration of Italian sixteenth century drama (tragedy and comedy), and on humanist and Renaissance culture in general. His tragicomedy manifests his expertise in manipulating stage techniques, constructing a complex plot, and employing the traditional tools of tragedy. The theatricality of his work is enhanced by brilliant lyric and dramatic scenes conveyed by a language that strives for musical effects and achieves a balance between the highly stylized and the restrained manner of the dolce stil nuovo. He thus prepares the ground for the pastoral world to become the material for melodrama.

The Faithful Shepherd, a product of Renaissance rhetoric and ideology, has a subtle quality that makes it the vehicle of very important traits of Counter-Reformation and Baroque cultures. Guarini’s pastoral world is fraught with unsuspected signs of crisis: the replacement of Renaissance optimism by a sense of human finiteness in a world of uncertainty, illusion, and disillusionment in which human actions, directions, and plans prove useless and wrong. The pastoral world that he portrays is a metaphor for the human condition, powerless if left to itself and able to reach the truth only with the help of Providence. This leitmotif, commonly found in much theater of the late Renaissance, especially in tragedy, stresses the misguided nature of human enterprises and the need to find solace in the divine. Human error in a pastoral is less serious, and the very notion of a happy ending, unlike the catastrophe in tragedy, implies that Providence is able to achieve a proper and happy resolution of human events.

Biography

Battista Guarini was born in Ferrara in 1538, the offspring of a noble family that had brought honor to the city of Ferrara through its achievements in the literary and political arenas for more than two centuries. Guarini studied law at the University of Padua and in 1557 was professor of rhetoric and poetry at the University of Ferrara. Between 1564 and 1567, he was a member of the Accademia degli Eterei of Padua, where he met, among others, Scipione Gonzaga and Torquato Tasso.

On his return home, he accepted employment with Alfonso II d’Este, duke of Ferrara, and spent twenty-one years as secretary of the Este court. As a diplomat, he was sent on missions to other Italian courts and states (Turin, 1569-1571; Venice, 1572; Rome, 1572), and to Poland (1574, 1575-1576), where he unsuccessfully represented the rights of Alfonso II to the succession to the Polish throne.

After these diplomatic activities, he became the official court poet at Ferrara. Yet service at court, be it in Ferrara, Mantova, Florence, or Urbino, where he was employed after 1588, did not satisfy Guarini. Italian courts in the last thirty years of the sixteenth century provided a very limited role for a courtier or secretary when compared to the political importance assigned to a courtier in the Humanist age. Guarini suffered from this diminished role, in which his high self-esteem, dignity, and decorum were hardly matched by the daily chores, which he found demeaning. In 1580, Guarini began to work on The Faithful Shepherd, which was first published in 1590.

If for Guarini court life was a cause of dissatisfaction and ambivalence that was barely compensated for by the universal accolades received by his masterpiece, his private life as father of eight children did not provide much happiness either. His biographers have pointed out how, in dealing with his children, he proved to be avaricious, litigious, and incapable of balancing paternal sternness with parental affection. He was particularly harsh toward his son Alessandro, whom he forced to marry a rich heiress. He caused both of them much suffering, especially when they challenged his administration of that inheritance.

Guarini’s feisty spirit never yielded, either in court, where he attacked enemies and defended himself against the state, his family, and private individuals, or in the literary field, as when he reacted to the criticism leveled at his The Faithful Shepherd even before its publication. He spent his last years much as he had his earlier life, in continuous feuds. He became ill and died in Venice on October 7, 1612.

Analysis

Italian pastoral drama , generally speaking, deals with a world separated from history. It is an escape into another, more primitive world. It presents also a subworld, or a symbolic world, very much in line with the ideology of the particular culture. Although any kind of classification is somewhat arbitrary, historically one can say that the literary tradition of the pastoral spans more than two centuries, beginning with Il ninfale d’Ameto (1341-1342; also known as Commedia delle ninfe), by Giovanni Boccaccio and reaching a high point in The Faithful Shepherd. The pastoral covers the time from the autumn of the Middle Ages to the crisis of the Renaissance or the beginning of the Baroque age. Even a cursory look at this tradition must include a few milestones, such as Angelo Poliziano’s Orfeo (pr. c. 1480; English translation, 1879; also known as Orpheus), a lyric pastoral with dramatic forms of sacra rappresentazione; and Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia (1504), a romance alternating pastoral eclogues with narrative prose. It was in the first half of the sixteenth century, however, that Italian pastoral drama grew through the study of Aristotle’s De poetica (c. 334-323 b.c.e.; Poetics, 1705) and Greek tragedy. Giambattista Giraldi Cinthio (who also wrote a pastoral drama, Egle, pr. 1545), with his treatise Discorso sopra il comporre le satire atte alla scena (1554; on the composition of satires fit for the stage), was the first to pose the question of the mixture of tragedy and comedy. This form was perfected by Tasso’s Aminta (pr. 1573; English translation, 1591), and by Guarini’s The Faithful Shepherd, the crowning jewels of Italian pastoral drama.

The Faithful Shepherd

The setting of The Faithful Shepherd is Arcadia, the pastoral world par excellence, which is subject to a long-standing curse caused by an unfaithful nymph, Lucrina, who had provoked the death of her beloved shepherd, Aminta. This sin must be atoned for annually by the Arcadians through the sacrifice of a virgin to Diana. Also, the law of the land establishes that any woman who breaks her promise to a lover should be killed. The oracle has prophesied to the people:

Your woe shall end when two of Race DivineLove shall combine:And for a faithless Nymph’s apostate stateA faithful Shepherd supererogate.

The only two people who can end the curse are Silvio and Amarilli, both of divine origin. Their nuptials are wished for by all Arcadia and are prepared by their parents. Yet, typical of pastoral situations, Silvio, who is loved by Dorinda, is not in love with Amarilli and despises love: He is a worshiper of Diana, the goddess of hunting, not of Venus. Amarilli, always a champion of honor and modesty, is secretly in love with Mirtillo, who came to Arcadia only for her and who wants to see her to confess his love. Mirtillo, however, is also loved by Corisca, a scheming, libertine nymph who does her best to destroy her rival, Amarilli. In fact, in order to disguise the real goals of her actions, Corisca brings about a meeting between Mirtillo and Amarilli. Later, however, she persuades Amarilli to enter a cave where she might catch Silvio with another woman. This would give Amarilli a chance to break her promise to Silvio and be free to love Mirtillo. Mirtillo, thanks to Corisca’s machinations, also enters the cave with the intention of catching Amarilli with another man and of publicly denouncing her.

The two lovers are discovered together by the guards, and according to the law, Amarilli must be put to death for breaking her faith to Silvio. Mirtillo prevents this by offering himself in place of the virgin, and the substitution is accepted. The priest Montano is about to perform the execution when it is discovered that Mirtillo is the son of Montano and thus of divine origin, and that Mirtillo’s real name is Silvio. The blind soothsayer Tirenio announces that the words spoken by the oracle have been fulfilled: By marrying Amarilli, Mirtillo-Silvio, the faithful shepherd of divine origin, will free Arcadia. The other Silvio finally falls in love with and marries Dorinda. Corisca, in the end, repents and is forgiven.

When Guarini called The Faithful Shepherd a pastoral tragicomedy, he wanted to stress that it is a combination of tragic and comic motifs within the framework of the pastoral genre. Even before the publication of his work, Guarini had to defend this notion against the negative criticism of sixteenth century commentators of Aristotle’s Poetics. Beginning in 1587, the legitimacy of tragicomic poetry was questioned by Giasone De Nores, a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Padua. De Nores asserted that Aristotle never talked about tragicomedy or pastoral and called the former a monstrous composition and the latter an illicit amplification of the eclogue into a comedy or tragedy with unlikely characters: shepherds who reason like princes or philosophers. Guarini answered with Il verato (1588) and Il verato secondo (1593), two polemical treatises named after a famous actor of the day.

Later, in his Compendio della poesia tragicomica (1601; compendium of tragicomic poetry), Guarini became the most thorough theoretician of the pastoral as a dramatic genre. Deriving from Aristotle the justification for his work, Guarini defined tragicomedy as “a fusion of all tragic and comic parts that with likelihood and decorum can stay together under a single dramatic form.” Tragicomedy borrows from tragedy “great characters and not the plot; a plausible but not a true story; deep but blunted emotions; delight, not sadness; danger, not death” and from comedy “not licentious laughter, [but rather] modest pleasantness; a complete plot, a happy reversal of fortune and, especially, a happy ending.” The peripeteia, or change of fortune, with its “wonderful” reversals produces pleasure, which removes sadness in the audience. This is the tragicomic catharsis.

In reacting against the classicist notion of separation of styles according to genre, Guarini proposed a mixture of styles, more specifically a mixture of the magnificent style, typical of heroes and of the characters of The Faithful Shepherd therefore, and the polished style—namely, the style of Italian lyric poetry. The polemic for or against this genre, one of the most important controversies in European literary history, continued throughout the seventeenth and into the eighteenth centuries because much more than pastoral drama was at stake. A new conception of poetry was here being defended on the basis of the popular response of the day against traditional conception backed by the recognized masterpieces of the past. For Guarini, tragicomedy, and not tragedy or comedy, was the theatrical form that best responded to contemporary taste and that realized a hedonistic conception of art, delectare, and not a moralistic one, prodere, proposed by De Nores.

The source for the antefatto, that is, the curse on Arcadia, is the Ellados Periegesis (c. 150 c.e.; Description of Greece, 1898), of Pausanias, a Greek historian and geographer of the second century. The Faithful Shepherd has similarities also with its most illustrious forerunner, Aminta, such as corresponding scenes (act 1, scene 1), episodes (the stolen kiss episode), and choruses (the ones in The Faithful Shepherd being ideological reversals of those in Aminta), which have been pointed out by critics. Such derivation does not take anything away from Guarini’s masterpiece.

A prologue opens the work, which is divided into five acts. There is a chorus at the end of each act in the form of a poetic song. Lyric, dramatic, and narrative parts are fused within its complex structure. The traditional tragic tools of recognition and peripeteia, or reversal of fortune, are used. The play’s meter consists of hendecasyllables in discursive and narrative sections, with a free alternation of hendecasyllables and septenarii in the lyric parts; rhyme is employed only to create stylistic effects. Guarini operates within the Italian Petrarchan lyric tradition, a reduction of the semantic value of language for the sake of musical qualities. His pastoral was contemporary to the appearance of the first melodrama, La Dafne (1594), based on a pastoral text by Ottavio Rinuccini and accompanied by music by Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini. The search for effects of musicality and euphony, together with the poetics of “wonder,” link The Faithful Shepherd to the next generation of Baroque culture.

Variations on the love theme are a very important feature of The Faithful Shepherd: love and constancy in Mirtillo, love and honesty in Amarilli, sentimental love in Dorinda, pity and love in Silvio, love as brutish instinct in the Satyr, and love without self-restraint in Corisca. Unlike much Italian drama of the sixteenth century, which uses a narrator to relate lyric and dramatic parts, The Faithful Shepherd presents directly on the stage exquisite lyric and dramatic scenes: Dorinda trying her best to be kissed by Silvio, who plays with her feelings; Mirtillo revealing his love to Amarilli, who responds coldly in defense of her honesty; the following scene, in which she is left alone and confesses how much she loves him; and the dramatic confrontation between Corisca and the Satyr, who thinks that he has finally cornered her and can punish her for her infidelity but is left with her wig in his hand after falling.

Critics through the first half of the twentieth century have interpreted The Faithful Shepherd as a work rich in lyricism and sensuality. In the second half of the twentieth century, the studies of Nicolas T. Perella, Norbert Jonard, Louise G. Clubb, Roberto Alonge, Deanna Battaglin, and many other scholars have shed new light on this work, pointing out how it sums up Renaissance culture, directly reflects Counter-Reformation culture, and is the precursor of Baroque culture.

The Faithful Shepherd seems to contradict the Renaissance belief in humankind’s control, through reason, over his environment. As has been argued convincingly by Perella, the tragicomedy shows that both senses and reason are inadequate instruments that fail humankind in its search for the truth. All characters in this pastoral, with the exception of Tirenio, the blind seer, are immersed in total darkness as to the pursuit of their immediate goals. They unconsciously follow the dictates of a superior entity that mysteriously leads them to a happy ending. Silvio, in his passion for hunting, is completely unaware of his feelings about love, which he will discover in the end through no merit of his own. Mirtillo, on the other hand, passionately in love, does not realize that the nature of the love required of him is more than sheer sensuality and will ultimately mean the delivery of Arcadia from the curse. Amarilli, in trying to remain true to her promise to Silvio and by hiding her true feelings from Mirtillo, seems to be moving in a direction contrary to the logic of a woman in love and of a happy resolution of the initial impasse. Corisca herself, so confident in her powers to manipulate reality for her own selfish ends, winds up being the cause of the union of Mirtillo and Amarilli, an end diametrically opposed to what she had set out to accomplish. Even the chorus confesses its inability to understand part of the prophecy of the oracle, clear enough in its semantic value but unclear as to its referent.

Therefore, it is important to notice how a typical situation of the pastoral, with its portrayal of a topsy-turvey human world of people pursuing unrequited loves, has been here invested with a much deeper meaning while illustrating a particular historical and cultural perception of the human condition. The stage has become the visual means by which humankind postulates the presence of a supreme truth, a reality that is above it, and the maladroit groping of the characters on the stage attests humankind’s sense of its limits and of the fallacy of its conviction that people can affect and be master of their destinies. The Arcadia of The Faithful Shepherd is still an idyllic land of refined shepherds; however, it is also the reflection of a disenchanted culture in transition from an optimistic, humanistic notion of the universe to a less optimistic expression of a post-lapsarian state of things. This transition is made more dramatic by humankind’s wanderings in a maze built on its illusory desire to control its destiny or even simply understand itself and its world. Humankind’s ineffectual groping is particularly obvious in the figures of Mirtillo and Amarilli, two dynamic characters in pursuit of their goals: The former, thanks to his intelligence and cunning, has succeeded in stealing a kiss from Amarilli and, against all odds, he is able to have her in his arms; the latter, even if mindful of her maidenly honor, acts to stave off her marriage with Silvio and to realize her dream of marrying Mirtillo. Yet all of their actions are doomed to failure.

Although people are portrayed as unable to break through appearances and reach the truth, they are not totally lost in spite of their errors. The presence of a Divine Providence that acts on behalf of humankind but beyond its senses and reason, sets the record straight in a manner that, although unpredictable to the characters involved, stresses nevertheless a moral undertone and intention that correspond to the ideological climate that prevailed during the Counter-Reformation. The final happy resolution of the tragicomedy rewards the constancy in love of Mirtillo and the honor and modesty of Amarilli. These virtues are elevated to a higher level because they bring about, after all, the salvation of a whole people. The Faithful Shepherd, in spite of its idyllic and sensual moments, as, for example, the episode of the stolen kiss, exalts constancy and honesty through a deft contrast between the beginning and the end of the play. A world in the state of sin is transformed into a redeemed world thanks to the heroic virtues of the two protagonists. Although blind to a destiny that they cannot fathom, all characters are free to act more or less in accordance with the Divine Will. That is why the behavior of Mirtillo and Amarilli will be rewarded with their bliss, while Corisca’s unabashed invitation to enjoy a life dominated by the senses will have no confirmation and will be undermined and repudiated by her failure to win Mirtillo for herself. The denial of what Corisca is and represents means the triumph of what Mirtillo and Amarilli represent.

Bibliography

Donno, Elizabeth Story, ed. Three Renaissance Pastorals: Tasso, Guarini, Daniel. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1993. Three early pastorals—Battista Guarini’s The Faithful Shepherd, Torquato Tasso’s Aminta, and Samuel Daniel’s Queen’s Acadia—are presented and analyzed. Contains bibliographical references.

Niccoli, Gabriel Adriano. Cupid, Satyr, and the Golden Age: Pastoral Dramatic Scenes of the Late Renaissance. New York: P. Lang, 1989. Niccoli examines the works of a number of pastoral dramatists from the late Renaissance, including Guarini’s The Faithful Shepherd. Bibliography and index included.

Perella, Nicolas J. The Critical Fortune of Battista Guarini’s “Il Pastor Fido.” Florence, Italy: L. S. Olschki, 1973. Perella examines the reception of Guarini’s The Faithful Shepherd. Bibliography included.