Monsters of the Pastoral Stage and the Nature of the Unnatural

Abstract

ALL ENDS WELL in the idyllic hills of the Aminta and Pastor fido. The pastoral stage of the sixteenth century provided an escape from the realities of courtly life and a haven in which even the most dire twists and turns of plot could be resolved into a perky lieto fine. The tragic protagonist of Torquato Tasso’s Aminta, spurned by his beloved, flings himself from a cliff, but in the end he brushes it off, having landed serendipitously in some brush. Battista Guarini’s characters in the Pastor fido are hurled toward a collective tragic fate until they discover a family secret, at which point everything is resolved. Yet the pastoral stage, despite its happy resolutions, is by no means a carefree locus: in both Tasso and Guarini’s plays, darkness and death tinge every scene, displaying the morbid underbelly of the golden pastoral surface and the shadows that lurk in the hillsides. Monsters figure prominently in both the Aminta and Pastor fido. Each play features a satyr—part man, part beast—in crisis, touched by love, but unable to ever be himself loved. As satyrs they are the most visible manifestations of monstrosity but are by no means the only ones. In both works, love is proclaimed as a monstrous force, the worst the world has to offer. It is love that perverts, deprives, and pushes characters toward the inhuman, or the less-than-human. Tasso and Guarini’s vocabulary choices cement the monstrous into language: both plays are lit-