About the work
Il pastor fido (The Faithful Shepherd) is a pastoral tragicomedy in five acts by Giovanni Battista Guarini, written at the Este court in Ferrara between 1580 and the early 1590s in deliberate rivalry with Torquato Tasso's Aminta. Guarini printed the play in Venice in 1590; a planned performance for the 1585 wedding of the Duke of Savoy in Turin did not take place, by Guarini's own account, because the final scene and choruses were still unfinished. Encyclopaedia Britannica records a carnival performance in Crema in 1595 as the first documented staging.
Plot
Arcadia lies under a curse of the goddess Diana that demands the yearly sacrifice of an unfaithful maiden, until a faithful shepherd atones for a woman's guilt and marries a 'child of heaven'. The shepherd Mirtillo loves the priestess Amarilli, who is betrothed to Silvio, while the schemer Corisca pursues Amarilli with her own designs. Only when Mirtillo is revealed to be the long-lost son of the priest Montano, and thus himself a 'child of heaven', can his willingness to sacrifice himself lift the curse and allow his marriage to Amarilli.
Cultural significance
Il pastor fido is regarded as the culmination of Italian pastoral poetry and a forerunner of Baroque drama; it went through more than a hundred editions and was translated into nearly every European language. Several composers set scenes from it as madrigals, among them Claudio Monteverdi, and George Frideric Handel wrote an opera of the same name based on the play in 1712.