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This chapter focuses on a major work of the later sixteenth century, Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, whose narrative arc is shaped by the felt need for the poem to free its characters and its author from the burden of history itself, staged through the quest to “liberate” the empty tomb of Christ—symbol of the transcendence of death and the abandonment of the world of history for a haven above and beyond time. That the poem is only able to reach the literal tomb, but not to pass beyond, is a sign of the author's anxious fear that such transcendence is as impossible as it is desirable. Such an interpretation is further confirmed by the poem's deliberate evocation of its place in a literary history that, in addition to its systematic transformation of the Virgil's pagan epic of imperial conquest, includes, on one hand, the overtly transcendent vision of Dante's Commedia and, on the other, Ariosto's fierce parody thereof in Orlando.

The rudderless boat, in which the polluted (such as the offspring of incest or accused women), the politically dangerous (enemies or infant heirs), or potential saints are cast out to sea, is a motif that extends from early saints’ legends through Tasso, Don Quixote and The Tempest: it provides an involuntary equivalent of the quest or pilgrimage. Sixteenth-century usages of the motif typically insist on Providence as a means of salvation, but they put more consistent emphasis on the providentially-guided transfer of power rather than on sanctity. The related motif of the magic ship constructed by a woman is also reformulated in the Renaissance to mythologize colonial expansion.

‘Translation‐as‐desire’ can mutate into ‘translation as fantasy’: this occurs when the translator's imagination is frustrated by the source with the result that he (this is a predominantly masculine mode) goes off into a dream of his own. The mode flourishes in translations of romance: I dwell on Fairfax's Tasso (1600), and give a counter example from translations of Petrarch in Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets (1784). But since translation‐as‐fantasy has its main root in the translator's feelings rather than in the source text it leads beyond the boundaries of translation to enormously elaborative responses like Leigh Hunt's The Story of Rimini (massively expanded from Dante's episode of Paoloa and Francesca) and Swinburne's reveries on Sappho.

This chapter focuses on the themes of love and war in epic poetry. It argues that these principal themes of the romance epic of the early Renaissance are virtually preset. The question facing poets is not what themes to choose, but how to characterize them, how to balance them and link them together, in what style and register to express them, since the solutions to these questions will dictate the extent to which the poem can be seen as reflecting classical epic traditions. The most obvious course for the vernacular poet to follow would have been to privilege warfare at the expense of love, reducing the theme of love to a secondary role and emphasizing the coherence of the theme of war, by creating a major campaign as the backbone of the narrative structure. This is the pattern adopted by Tasso, but it is not the one adopted by any of the poets surveyed in the chapter, nor indeed by Ariosto.

This chapter suggests that the interactions between characters in two Renaissance epics may hint at how we should read the interactions between Renaissance epic and the various traditions on which it draws. It identifies the complex ways in which echoes of Virgil, in particular, may be joined with recollections of later literature. The chapter focuses on the transformation in Renaissance epic of two moments in Virgil where Aeneas encounters a radically altered figure from his past, who tells him to run away and to pursue his imperial quest elsewhere.

During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, attention in England focused increasingly on the troubled life of the poet, who came to be regarded as ‘a prototype of the Romantic poet, loving passionately but hopelessly and above his station, ...chained in a lunatic’s cell’. In the fifth chapter the second principal strand of this study traces and analyses the development of such views about Tasso himself, from the earliest English biographical account by Henry Layng in 1748 to the last at the start of the twentieth century. It also examines the many imaginative engagements with aspects of the poet’s legendary biography, such as his apparent madness and prolonged imprisonment in Ferrara as a result of his supposed love for Leonora d’Este, the Duke’s sister, which were to become a prominent feature of English and European responses to him in the nineteenth century. It focuses particularly on Lord Byron’s impassioned ventriloquisation of the Italian poet’s voice in The Lament of Tasso (1817).

This chapter takes a look at Orlando Furioso (1516, 1532), Gerusalemme Liberata (1581), and The Faerie Queene (1596), which are the recognized epic masterpieces of their eras. They draw in succession on each other and on a wide range of classical and romance texts, many of them known to the first audiences of these three poems. The chapter investigates the ways in which Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, and Edmund Spenser used their predecessors and the different effects they achieved from a shared heritage. It examines the ways in which a series of authors used both their immediate predecessors and their sense of a long tradition of epic writing to create something new. The chapter argues that Ariosto aimed to shock and surprise his audience. Tasso reacted to Ariosto by combining a more serious and unified epic on the lines of the Iliad. Spenser's idea of devoting each book to a hero and a virtue presents a structure which is easier to comprehend than Ariosto's, yet looser and more open to surprises than Tasso's.

This chapter considers Jonathan Richardson’s critical ‘Dissertation’ on Poussin’s painting Tancred and Erminia (c. 1633) as both analysis and ekphrastic representation. It focuses on Richardson’s keen interest in the artist’s visual interpretations of, and additions to, Tasso’s great Italian epic poem, Gerusalemme liberata (1581). It becomes clear that both the French painter and the English critic know the Italian poem well; it is far less certain, however, whether the intended English readership would have shared similar first-hand knowledge of either the picture or its literary source. Richardson’s paragone of the two forms is intended to emphasise Poussin’s ability ‘to make use of the Advantages This Art has over that of his Competitor’; problematically, however, the pre-eminence of the visual medium in this specific example can only be attested to by means of a sustained verbal comparison of the painting and its poetic source, which ultimately seems to imply a more complex, symbiotic relationship in the encounter between the visual and literary arts than Richardson initially admits.

Of all seventeenth-century cultural environments, the court of Louis XIV would seem the most concerned with dictating the terms of social and artistic order. Yet some of the most notable instances of tragédie lyrique—Lully's Armide and Marc-Antoine Charpentier's Médée—end with sorceresses taking to the air on dragon carts, breaking through the frame we would expect to contain their energies. “The Dragon Cart” examines the conditions that made these extraordinary gestures and characterizations viable.

All criticism is speculative, both an open-ended inquiry and, as etymology indicates, a reckoning with and through the “seeing” that structures our thinking so fundamentally. Shepherdson describes narcissism, critical and otherwise, as “deadly,” “disaster,” “catastrophe,” and above all, “trauma.” Freud's examples of such compulsive repetitions included children's games of loss and absence, played over and over, neurotic patients' repetitive acting-out, veterans' recurrent, troubling dreams, and, most importantly for our present concerns, poetry, in a discussion of Tasso that identifies the “moving” quality of his epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata with its figure of a magically repeated wound. Shepherdson notes that the tale of Narcissus is “a story in which blindness and sexual difference are brought together, and a story of punishment as well.”

Chapter 6 shows how, on the one hand, the composer develops his voice as narrator to such a degree that in Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda Monteverdi transforms the epic poetry of Torquato Tasso into a multimedia, semistaged piece. On the other hand, Monteverdi overcomes Petrarchism by creating full-fledged and flesh-and-blood characters well beyond the classic Petrarchan “lover.” In this process he adapts for his own purposes the poetics not only of Tasso but also of Giambattista Marino, the quintessential Baroque poet. Monteverdi's creation of fictional worlds is the result of madrigalistic and operatic techniques subsumed under the term focalization, meaning “perspective” or “point of view.” Narrator and characters project a focalizing effect by acquiring a visual dimension through which they see, perceive, and experience the events of a story, making the audience aware of them. Instrumental music also becomes a factor in this process. As a result, madrigal and opera become, in the hands of Monteverdi, multivocal and multifocal, with the potential of being developed as multimedia artworks.

This essay explores the changing fortunes of Ariosto’s poem in England in mid- to late eighteenth-century criticism through an examination of select passages of the Letters on Chivalry and Romance, by Bishop Richard Hurd (1762), and a close reading of the introduction, notes and commentaries appended to the two translations published in this period: that of William Huggins (1755) with facing-page text and translation into ottava rima; and that of John Hoole (1783) into English heroic couplets. While Huggins is full of enthusiasm for virtually every aspect of the Furioso, both Hurd and Hoole display a certain ambivalence towards Ariosto and his poem, reflecting the negative views of earlier, especially French, critics, the neo-classical preference for Tasso, and the influence of Dryden on the theory and practice of translation of poetry.