Le berger fidelle

Bilingual edition in Italian with the French text en regard, and illustrated with a frontispiece and five Dutch plates signed Bloote (particularly fine and beautiful), certainly executed by Abraham Blooteling, famous Dutch draftsman and engraver. Title page with sphere device.
Full black morocco binding ca. 1860. Spine with raised bands in Jansenist style with blind-ruled frame. Triple blind fillet frame on boards. Rich interior border. Gilt edges. Very handsome copy, perfectly executed in an unsigned master binding.
Guarini was a diplomat and writer, his most famous work being this play published under the original title Il Pastor fido, a tragi-comic pastoral written in parallel with the work of his friend Tasso's Aminta. It made him very famous and was performed on all the stages of Europe, outlasting Tasso's play, which was more sentimental and lyrical. Several of his poems also met with great success and were set to music during his lifetime in the form of madrigals. Handel made an opera from Pastor fido and Rameau a cantata, such was the renown of this play, published in 1589, still great in the first half of the 18th^th century. One can still see at the château d'Ancy le Franc a trace of this fame in the cycle of paintings illustrating the drama that adorns an entire salon.
The action takes place in Arcadia, threatened by plague. An oracle announces that the evil striking the country will end through the devotion of a faithful shepherd. Several rather complex intrigues finally accomplish the prophecies of the oracle. The author wished to blend various genres, including that of tragedy with that of pastoral, resulting in rather diffuse action, but the great richness of imagination, the antique chorus (then accompanied by instruments), felicitous well-conducted passages, measured affectation, clearly struck contemporary minds and those of the following century.