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Guarini's Pastor Fido at Billingbear and The Winter's Tale

Mixed Needs Review evidence packet

Topic: Guarini's Pastor Fido at Billingbear and The Winter's Tale

Research Result

The 1780 Billingbear catalogue records Battista Guarini's Il pastor fido, Venice, 1602. The local Billingbear/Audley End workbook associates it with English Heritage object 81035057: Il Pastor Fido, 1602, calf, octavo, recorded at Audley End House, FR/19 Library, Case M, Shelf 6.

The edition can now be identified more fully. It is the elaborate twentieth impression printed at Venice by Giovanni Battista Ciotti in 1602: the author-corrected, definitive form of the play, enriched with annotations and engravings and accompanied by Guarini's Compendio della poesia tragicomica. A complete 606-page public scan has been downloaded and checked. The title page itself announces both the XX. impressione and the Compendio.

This creates a substantial new Shakespeare research avenue. Robert Greene's Pandosto is the recognized narrative source for The Winter's Tale and already supplies its jealousy, adultery accusation, Delphic oracle, lost child, shepherd fosterage, recognition, and dynastic marriage. But Shakespeare radically changes Greene's ending and dramatic form. Greene's Bellaria really dies; Pandosto later desires his unrecognized daughter and kills himself, explicitly closing “the comedie with a tragicall stratageme.” Shakespeare removes the incestuous desire and suicide, preserves Hermione for a staged return, embeds the recognition within pastoral festivity, and turns catastrophe toward reunion.

Guarini's play and theory provide a precise contemporary vocabulary for that transformation. The Compendio says tragicomedy takes from tragedy great persons, serious passions, and danger—but “not death”—and from comedy modest pleasure, the contrived knot, and “the happy reversal.” The Winter's Tale does not mechanically obey this formula: Mamillius and Antigonus die. But its revision of Greene moves in exactly the direction Guarini describes, tempering tragic terror and constructing a joyful reversal without erasing loss.

The access history is unusually concrete. Pastor Fido was printed in Italian in London in 1591. An English translation appeared in 1602, printed by Thomas Creede for Simon Waterson, with a commendatory sonnet by Samuel Daniel. It was dedicated to Sir Edward Dymoke, Queen's Champion, and the publisher says the deceased translator was his kinsman. The 1562 Lincolnshire visitation shows that Frances Dymoke, wife of Henry Neville's close correspondent and “loving kinsman” Thomas Windebank, was Sir Edward Dymoke's aunt. The Guarini route therefore joins a Billingbear book, an English theatrical translation, Daniel's literary world, and a documented Neville-Windebank-Dymoke family network.

Source-Control Findings

1. Billingbear and Audley End

The checked Billingbear catalogue image reads:

Il Pastor Fido del Guarini _______________ Ven. 1602

See billingbear_IMG_8184_pastor_fido_1602.png and the Billingbear Book List Transcription:642.

The combined spreadsheet row records:

The locally preserved English Heritage export/email adds the recorded location FR/19 Library, Case M, Shelf 6.

These fields make a strong edition-level match to the Ciotti octavo. They do not yet demonstrate that object 81035057 contains the appended Compendio, nor do they date its acquisition by the Neville family. A physical collation is required.

2. The exact Ciotti edition

The complete Internet Archive witness is Giovanni Battista Guarini, Il pastor fido, tragicommedia pastorale, Venice: Giovanni Battista Ciotti, 1602, IA identifier ilpastorfidotrag00guar_0.

Its guarini_1602_pdf_page_7.jpg states:

Ora in questa XX. impressione di curiose, & dotte Annotationi arricchito, & di bellissime Figure in rame ornato.

It also promises:

Con un Compendio di Poesia tratto da i duo Verati…

The guarini_1602_pdf_page_14.jpg begins with Arcadia's annual sacrifice to Diana and prints the oracle around which the action is organized.

3. England already had the text

The Folger catalogue records an Italian Pastor Fido and Tasso's Aminta printed in London by John Wolfe at Giacomo Castelvetro's expense in 1591: STC 12414, ESTC S103501. This was an Italian text printed in England only about a year after the first Italian publication.

The first English translation followed in 1602: TCP A02284, ESTC S103502, STC 12415, printed by Thomas Creede for Simon Waterson. The translation is not dependent on the survival of the Billingbear copy as an access route; it independently establishes English theatrical and print availability.

Quoted Source Passages

1. Guarini's oracle, sexual-faith law, and sacrificial plot

The Ciotti Argomento prints the oracle:

Non haurà prima fin quel, che v'offende,

Che duo semi del ciel congiunga Amore,

E di Donna infedel l'antico errore

L'alta pietà d'un PASTOR FIDO ammende.

Working translation: The affliction will not end until Love joins two descendants of heaven and the high devotion of a faithful shepherd repairs the ancient fault of an unfaithful woman.

The 1602 English translation renders the governing prophecy:

no end there is to that which you offends

till two of heauens issue loue vnite

and for the auncient fault of that false wight

a faithfull shepheards pittie make amends

Guarini's Arcadia is governed by a sexual-faith law: a woman judged unfaithful is condemned unless another voluntarily dies for her. Corisca engineers compromising appearances; Amarilli cannot establish her innocence and is sentenced; Mirtillo offers himself in her place. The recognition of Mirtillo's parentage transforms the intended sacrifice into the oracle-fulfilling marriage.

This is not the narrative source of Hermione's trial; Greene supplies that. Its value lies in the larger tragicomic configuration: sexual accusation, oracle, threatened death, concealed descent, interpretation, marriage, and communal release.

2. A child carried away by water and restored to his father

At the climax Carino reveals that Mirtillo was found as an infant after water carried his cradle away. The Ciotti text describes the cradle as a little vessel deposited in a thicket. Montano then recognizes the child he lost in a flood and learns that the intended victim is his own son.

The 1602 English translation makes the reversal explicit:

this is the childe the floud so bare away

and:

this was the secret which the fates did hide

this is that happy day with so much bloud

so many teares we did expect

The Winter's Tale uses Greene's sea-borne exposed infant rather than Guarini's cradle carried by a torrent. Yet Guarini supplies a staged dramatic model in which foster parentage is corrected, the biological father is restored, an oracle is reinterpreted, and marriage converts imminent death into communal joy.

3. Guarini defines tragicomedy as danger without terminal catastrophe

The most important passage appears on printed p. 12 of the Compendio, guarini_1602_pdf_page_550.jpg. Guarini explains what the dramatist takes from tragedy:

le persone grandi, & non l'azione: la favola verisimile, ma non vera: gli affetti mossi, ma rintuzzati nel diletto; non la mestizia: il pericolo, non la morte.

Working translation: great persons, but not the tragic action; a probable but invented plot; emotions aroused but blunted into pleasure; not grief; danger, not death.

From comedy he takes:

il riso non dissoluto, le piacevolezze modeste, il nodo finto, il rivolgimento felice, & sopra tutto l'ordine Comico…

Working translation: laughter without dissoluteness, modest pleasures, the contrived knot, the happy reversal, and above all comic ordering.

This is not an exact recipe followed by Shakespeare. The deaths of Mamillius and Antigonus prevent a simple “no death” description. But Hermione's supposed death becomes preserved life, and Greene's final incest/suicide is replaced by recognition, repentance, marriage, and return. Shakespeare tempers rather than abolishes the tragic material.

4. Greene deliberately ends comedy with suicide

The EarlyPrint text of Pandosto, TCP A02143, preserves Greene's ending. After the child is recognized and the young lovers marry, Pandosto remembers that jealousy caused Bellaria's death and that he lusted after his own daughter. Greene concludes:

to close vp the comedie with a tragicall stratageme hee slewe himselfe

Shakespeare discards that conclusion. Leontes lives through repentance; the daughter is not the object of his desire; Hermione's apparent death becomes the final theatrical wonder. Guarini's theory helps name the direction of Shakespeare's transformation, even though Greene remains the direct narrative source.

5. Shakespeare's oracle and suspended ending

Folger The Winter's Tale 3.2:

OFFICER [reads] Hermione is chaste, Polixenes blameless,

Camillo a true subject, Leontes a jealous tyrant,

his innocent babe truly begotten; and the King shall

live without an heir if that which is lost be not

found.

This wording comes substantially through Pandosto. The Guarinian question begins with what Shakespeare does after receiving it: he delays fulfillment across sixteen years, relocates the action into pastoral, uses concealed rank to create an apparently unequal marriage, and makes the discovery of the child unlock both dynastic and emotional restoration.

Folger 5.1 retains the oracle as a live constraint:

For has not the divine Apollo said,

Is 't not the tenor of his oracle,

That King Leontes shall not have an heir

Till his lost child be found?

6. Pastoral disguise and the marriage barrier

Florizel appears as the shepherd Doricles and Perdita as an apparent shepherd's daughter. Folger 4.4:

Your high self,

The gracious mark o' th' land, you have obscured

With a swain's wearing, and me, poor lowly maid,

Most goddesslike pranked up.

The lovers face the king's opposition because their social identities appear unequal. Recognition reveals that the lowborn shepherdess is a king's daughter. Guarini's Mirtillo is likewise raised under mistaken parentage, and the revelation of his descent makes the desired marriage the very union required by the oracle.

The resemblance is structural, not a distinctive verbal borrowing. A normalized n-gram comparison between the 1602 English Pastor Fido and the Folger Winter's Tale, with Pandosto overlaps excluded, found no meaningful shared six-word sequence and only common five-word fragments. The present case should therefore be developed through source transformation, genre, plot mechanics, book history, and access—not phrase matching.

The Dymoke-Windebank-Neville Route

The translation's preliminaries

The 1602 English translation opens:

To the right worthie and learned Knight Syr Edward Dymock Champion to her Maiestie

Samuel Daniel's commendatory sonnet says that through the translator's hand Guarini “comes to light” and is made to speak English. The translator's own sonnet calls Sir Edward his “kinsman.” Simon Waterson's letter says the work was committed to him for publication and refers to “the nearenesse of kinne to the deceased translator.”

The translator is not named in the book. Earlier catalogues proposed John or Charles Dymoke; recent scholarship proposes Tailboys Dymoke. Until a direct identifying witness is found, the packet retains “a deceased kinsman of Sir Edward Dymoke.”

The visitation pedigree

The lincoln_visitation_1562_dymoke_pedigree_pdf95.jpg, printed p. 42 / PDF page 95, records the children of Sir Edward Dymoke of Scrivelsby. They include:

The pedigree then places the younger Sir Edward Dymoke, married to Katherine Harrington, beneath Sir Robert. The dedicatee of 1602, Queen's Champion, was therefore Frances Dymoke Windebank's nephew.

Neville's connection

Henry Neville's corpus preserves eight letters to Thomas Windebank between 1594 and 1606. Neville's 1615 inquisition/will recital calls Windebank “my lovinge kinsman,” and includes him among the people taking up the burden of executing Neville's will. Thomas's wife Frances thus connects Neville's trusted correspondent and family agent directly to the Dymoke household honored by the English Pastor Fido.

This does not establish that Windebank sent the book to Neville or that the translator worked with him. It does establish a much more concrete English social route than a generic assertion that educated readers knew Italian pastoral.

Scholarship and Interpretation

Robert Henke's “The Winter's Tale and Guarinian Dramaturgy” argues that Shakespeare takes the romance material of Pandosto and reorganizes it into tragic, pastoral, and comic movements characteristic of Italian pastoral tragicomedy. His later Pastoral Transformations extends the inquiry across Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest.

The local primary evidence makes that scholarship unusually relevant to the Neville project:

The research question is not whether Guarini replaces Greene. It is whether Guarini's play and theory help explain the form into which Shakespeare transforms Greene's story.

Further Research Avenues

Examine Audley End object 81035057

The volume should be collated against the public Ciotti copy. The key questions are whether it contains [32], 488, [12], 64 pages, the engraved title, annotations, plates, and complete Compendio. Photograph the title page, endpapers, binding, bookplates, shelf marks, all inscriptions, and these locations:

Reconstruct the Dymoke translation circle

The next archival targets are wills and family papers for Sir Edward Dymoke, Tailboys Dymoke, Charles Dymoke, and the Windebanks; the publisher's papers are unlikely to survive, but dedications and other Creede/Waterson books may identify the unnamed intermediary who committed the translation to press.

Compare the late plays as a group

Guarini's formula should be mapped against Cymbeline and The Tempest: noble protagonists, apparent or threatened death, chastity under suspicion, concealed identity, oracle or prophecy, pastoral removal, controlled comic material, recognition, and marriage. The purpose would be to identify a sustained reading program rather than accumulate isolated resemblances.

Study the appended annotations

The Ciotti edition does more than present a play. Its annotations moralize Mirtillo as a figure of virtue and analyze court life, passion, imitation, and mixed form. A chapter-level inventory may reveal connections with Neville's political, courtly, and philosophical writings beyond the late plays.

Citations

Notes on Access