Three Renaissance Pastorals: Tasso-Guarini-Daniel.

This volume, which presents reading editions of three Renaissance pastorals, two Italian in translation and one English, will certainly be welcomed by students of the genre because it makes available in modern format three texts with significant lines of connection, or, as Elizabeth Story Donno notes, which are "linked and incremental" (preface). Donno's introductory essay clearly and succinctly suggests how the thematics of pastoral and other important genres of the English Renaissance are established by Tasso's paradigmatic text, the Aminta (first Italian ed., 1581), and how motifs then evolve into a more complicated pastoral fabric in the slightly later work of Battista Guarini, the Pastor Fido (first Italian ed., 1590), and Samuel Daniel's Queenes Arcadia (1604), the first significant exemplar of the pastoral genre in England. Her businesslike introduction, which does not pretend to be a critical analysis of the three texts, provides basic information for a first reading: the interest of the English in Italian authors; the history of the translations of the two Italian texts into English by, respectively, Henry Reynolds and most likely Tailsboys Dymoke; the simplicity of structure and the essential thematic threads of the Aminta; the evolving complexities of structure, and both the social commentary and the "survey of a kind of metaphysics of love" (xx) in the Pastor Fido; and an indication of the ways in which the Italian strains were incorporated into a "Pastoral Tragi-comedie" such as The Queenes Arcadia and accommodated to an English audience.

The two seventeenth-century translations of Tasso and Guarini, the first not published until 1628 and the second in 1602, are "versions" which have a particular significance in themselves, especially for what they reveal about early seventeenth-century essays into rendering, for example, the Italian hendecasyllable and settenario, two fundamental verse forms of the Italian lyric tradition. Donno does not detail the translator's art as revealed in these texts, although she does touch upon certain metrical characteristics of Reynolds' translation of the Aminta, for example. In choosing to include the 1602 version of the Pastor Fido rather than the later and more widely known one by Richard Fanshawe (1647), she facilitates a comparison of two versions, the first of which is not widely known. And one must agree, I think, with Donno's assertion that there is a delicacy in the earlier translation which is often lacking in the later. To cite her own examples from the second-act chorus for comparative purposes: "It is a pretie thing to kisse / The delicate vermillion Rose / Of some faire cheeke . . ." (Reynolds), and "Well may that kisse be sweete that's giv'n t' a sleek / And fragrant rose of a vermillion cheek" (Fanshawe).

The rather sparse notes appended to each text gloss words, clarify references, and point out a number of rhetorical techniques which were favored by the Elizabethans and later. In some cases they compare the English word with the Italian original. The intention seems to have been to keep notes to a minimum but to provide the essentials for understanding the literal meaning of the text. Unfortunately, the text itself does not refer the reader to the notes; consequently he/she has no idea whether or not a term is glossed.

With growing interest in European Renaissance pastoral, witnessed by recent publications such as those of Louise George Clubb and Jane C. Tylus, this volume is timely and useful.

Robert J. Rodini UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON