From the archive: Allan Ramsay, Scotland’s Pastoral Poet 13 August, 1949

Published on 13/08/2012 01:30

THE uproarious success of Tyrone Guthrie’s production of a 16th-century morality play, Sir David Lindsay’s The Three Estaites”, at the Edinburgh Festival in 1948, has emboldened the authorities to present another Scottish period piece under his guidance this year.

The paucity of old Scots drama made the selection of Allan Ramsay’s pastoral, The Gentle Shepherd, an obvious choice. It has the dubious advantage of being familiar to a sprinkling of the native public and the more solid one of an easily understood form and dialect. For the rest, Tyrone Guthrie’s treatment will probably decide the issue. The immense success of the first performance in 1729 may or may not be repeated. In his day Allan Ramsay was acclaimed Scotland’s greatest poet and even in England and farther abroad his name was coupled with such weighty contemporaries as Pope and Addison.