The First English Pastor Fido (1602)

Giovanni Battista Guarini’s Il pastor fido was a major text of the late European Renaissance, both in itself and as a manifesto of its author’s ideas on pastoral tragicomedy. This edition presents the text of the first English translation of the play, probably by Tailboys Dymock, first published in 1602. While Richard Fanshawe’s royalist version of 1647 is better-known, the process by which Fanshawe’s version was canonized and Dymock’s forgotten was based on false premises, as the introduction to this edition demonstrates. Not only is Dymock’s version the freer of the two, shortening and simplifying Guarini’s text, it also appears to be an attempt to make the play more fitting for the contemporary London stage. Those responsible for the 1602 version decided to work on a play with poetic pedigree, but they made a book that looked like the English playtexts of the time – a compromise which reflects the fluctuating aesthetic values at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The text is presented with modern spelling and punctuation, accompanied by extensive explanatory notes and an introduction discussing both the history of this translation and of Guarini’s original, situating them both in their wider literary historical context, and demonstrating the historical value of the first English Pastor fido in the context of late Elizabethan translation practice, theatrical discourse and theatrical publishing.