Colin Burrow
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198117940
- eISBN:
- 9780191671135
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198117940.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata has a very different setting. Most of its action takes place on the clear, open spaces of a plain around the city of Jerusalem. Two opposed camps are set against ...
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Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata has a very different setting. Most of its action takes place on the clear, open spaces of a plain around the city of Jerusalem. Two opposed camps are set against one another in this open space: Jerusalem is occupied by Saracen forces, while a Christian alliance under Tasso's hero, ‘pio Goffredo’, besieges them and seeks to regain the town for his religion. There are a few moments when characters wander from the battlefield into a landscape of trees and greenery, and find a pastoral seclusion that is valued above the polarities of the battle; but these are rare. However, more usually the poem matches its open setting with correspondingly clear indications of which side people are on. This limits the possibilities for the moral and narrative entanglements in which Ludovico Ariosto so delights: the very geography of Tasso's poem suggests a polarized confrontation between Christian virtue and pagan sacrilege.Less
Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata has a very different setting. Most of its action takes place on the clear, open spaces of a plain around the city of Jerusalem. Two opposed camps are set against one another in this open space: Jerusalem is occupied by Saracen forces, while a Christian alliance under Tasso's hero, ‘pio Goffredo’, besieges them and seeks to regain the town for his religion. There are a few moments when characters wander from the battlefield into a landscape of trees and greenery, and find a pastoral seclusion that is valued above the polarities of the battle; but these are rare. However, more usually the poem matches its open setting with correspondingly clear indications of which side people are on. This limits the possibilities for the moral and narrative entanglements in which Ludovico Ariosto so delights: the very geography of Tasso's poem suggests a polarized confrontation between Christian virtue and pagan sacrilege.
Jason Lawrence
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780719090882
- eISBN:
- 9781526128348
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719090882.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The introduction demonstrates the continuing popularity of Tasso’s troubled life and epic poem in England up to the late nineteenth century via a fictional conversation in George Eliot’s final novel. ...
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The introduction demonstrates the continuing popularity of Tasso’s troubled life and epic poem in England up to the late nineteenth century via a fictional conversation in George Eliot’s final novel. It then gives an overview of knowledge of Tasso’s works and life in England by the end of the sixteenth century, using John Eliot’s translated comments in his Ortho-epia Gallica (1593) as a starting point. The final part of the introduction considers Milton’s knowledge of Tasso’s apparent madness in the mid-seventeenth century, probably acquired from his first-hand acquaintance with the great Italian poet’s last patron and earliest biographer, Giovanni Battista Manso.Less
The introduction demonstrates the continuing popularity of Tasso’s troubled life and epic poem in England up to the late nineteenth century via a fictional conversation in George Eliot’s final novel. It then gives an overview of knowledge of Tasso’s works and life in England by the end of the sixteenth century, using John Eliot’s translated comments in his Ortho-epia Gallica (1593) as a starting point. The final part of the introduction considers Milton’s knowledge of Tasso’s apparent madness in the mid-seventeenth century, probably acquired from his first-hand acquaintance with the great Italian poet’s last patron and earliest biographer, Giovanni Battista Manso.
Anthony Welch
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300178869
- eISBN:
- 9780300188998
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300178869.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
This chapter explores Torquato Tasso's crusader epic, Gerusalemme liberate (1581), and its famous agon with Ariosto's Orlando furioso. It argues that the Gerusalemme liberate struggles against the ...
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This chapter explores Torquato Tasso's crusader epic, Gerusalemme liberate (1581), and its famous agon with Ariosto's Orlando furioso. It argues that the Gerusalemme liberate struggles against the role of belated successor to Ariosto's “ancient” original, which not only established itself in some elite circles as a Virgilian literary monument but also enjoyed a wide-ranging oral afterlife that invited comparisons to ancient Greek sung poetry. Tasso's writings strain to link Ariosto's art to the corruptions of modern vocal music, corruptions whose origins Tasso traces back to post-Homeric musical innovators in the ancient Mediterranean. Determined to portray the Cinquecento romance epic as a false site of origin, the Liberata seeks its own authority in a more distant prehistory, one that seems, however, to recede at its approach.Less
This chapter explores Torquato Tasso's crusader epic, Gerusalemme liberate (1581), and its famous agon with Ariosto's Orlando furioso. It argues that the Gerusalemme liberate struggles against the role of belated successor to Ariosto's “ancient” original, which not only established itself in some elite circles as a Virgilian literary monument but also enjoyed a wide-ranging oral afterlife that invited comparisons to ancient Greek sung poetry. Tasso's writings strain to link Ariosto's art to the corruptions of modern vocal music, corruptions whose origins Tasso traces back to post-Homeric musical innovators in the ancient Mediterranean. Determined to portray the Cinquecento romance epic as a false site of origin, the Liberata seeks its own authority in a more distant prehistory, one that seems, however, to recede at its approach.
Peter Mack
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780691194004
- eISBN:
- 9780691195353
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691194004.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, History of Ideas
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Tobias Gregory
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226307558
- eISBN:
- 9780226307565
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226307565.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
This chapter explores the second great vernacular epic of the Italian cinquecento, Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata. It also investigates the question of whether and how Liberata is a tragic ...
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This chapter explores the second great vernacular epic of the Italian cinquecento, Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata. It also investigates the question of whether and how Liberata is a tragic poem. An examination of Tasso's argument for a Christian supernatural in his early poetic treatise, the Discorsi dell'arte poetica, is presented. It then reviews the various instances of divine intervention in the Liberata. In the early Discorsi, Tasso proposes Christian divine action as the solution to a thorny narrative problem. Gerusalemme liberata contains a range of divine action, nearly all of it of classical in origin. Tasso's Satan, whose name is classicized as Plutone, gives voice to a striking discourse of resistance that accuses God of imperialism and describes Christianity as merely the version of the winning side. Tasso's poem exemplifies the narrative tensions intrinsic to Christian epic. In Gerusalemme liberata, the rhetoric of divine partisanship becomes the truth of the poem.Less
This chapter explores the second great vernacular epic of the Italian cinquecento, Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata. It also investigates the question of whether and how Liberata is a tragic poem. An examination of Tasso's argument for a Christian supernatural in his early poetic treatise, the Discorsi dell'arte poetica, is presented. It then reviews the various instances of divine intervention in the Liberata. In the early Discorsi, Tasso proposes Christian divine action as the solution to a thorny narrative problem. Gerusalemme liberata contains a range of divine action, nearly all of it of classical in origin. Tasso's Satan, whose name is classicized as Plutone, gives voice to a striking discourse of resistance that accuses God of imperialism and describes Christianity as merely the version of the winning side. Tasso's poem exemplifies the narrative tensions intrinsic to Christian epic. In Gerusalemme liberata, the rhetoric of divine partisanship becomes the truth of the poem.
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804750462
- eISBN:
- 9780804767446
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804750462.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter examines love-melancholy and romance in Torquato Tasso's epic Gerusalemme Liberata, which tells the story of Tancredi and his obsessive love for Clorinda. When Tancredi finds out that ...
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This chapter examines love-melancholy and romance in Torquato Tasso's epic Gerusalemme Liberata, which tells the story of Tancredi and his obsessive love for Clorinda. When Tancredi finds out that the mysterious adversary whom he has killed is in fact Clorinda, he is transformed at once into a sorrowing lover and never enjoys a release from his melancholy. Tancredi's melancholic love for Clorinda has transformed her into a maternal object whose loss cannot be fully realized. Moreover, the phantasmic reappearance of Clorinda in the enchanted wood is symptomatic of a primo error. Focusing on Tancredi as a melancholic figure, the chapter relocates his story within the early modern medical tradition of love-melancholy and considers in particular the influence of the Lucretian/Ficinian model of an eroticized furor that seeks an impossible fusion with a quasi-maternal figure. It also describes the central episode in the enchanted wood, in which Tancredi's self-defeating pursuit of the phantasmic Clorinda involves him in the kind of melancholic atra voluptas that overwhelms Petrarch.Less
This chapter examines love-melancholy and romance in Torquato Tasso's epic Gerusalemme Liberata, which tells the story of Tancredi and his obsessive love for Clorinda. When Tancredi finds out that the mysterious adversary whom he has killed is in fact Clorinda, he is transformed at once into a sorrowing lover and never enjoys a release from his melancholy. Tancredi's melancholic love for Clorinda has transformed her into a maternal object whose loss cannot be fully realized. Moreover, the phantasmic reappearance of Clorinda in the enchanted wood is symptomatic of a primo error. Focusing on Tancredi as a melancholic figure, the chapter relocates his story within the early modern medical tradition of love-melancholy and considers in particular the influence of the Lucretian/Ficinian model of an eroticized furor that seeks an impossible fusion with a quasi-maternal figure. It also describes the central episode in the enchanted wood, in which Tancredi's self-defeating pursuit of the phantasmic Clorinda involves him in the kind of melancholic atra voluptas that overwhelms Petrarch.
Albert Russell Ascoli
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823234288
- eISBN:
- 9780823241231
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823234288.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Mauro Calcagno
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520267688
- eISBN:
- 9780520951525
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520267688.003.0007
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Colin Burrow
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198117940
- eISBN:
- 9780191671135
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198117940.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
There is no author so prey to double violence against self and past as Torquato Tasso; and there is no author who feels so keenly the tortured energy released by an antiquarianism that seeks vainly ...
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There is no author so prey to double violence against self and past as Torquato Tasso; and there is no author who feels so keenly the tortured energy released by an antiquarianism that seeks vainly to strip away layers of anachronistic misreadings from past texts. The Faerie Queene might seem at first to be written in a quite different spirit. It is a bewildering amalgam of topicality and timelessness, which seems to celebrate the power of the author to blend different periods, different writers, and different idioms into one vast composite, with little sign that such a process is difficult or dangerous. Edmund Spenser's language mingles archaism with contemporary usage, and his imaginary location, Faerie-land, is at once a distant, idealized space, and a parallel version of things going on next door. The poem's allegory ranges from the very recent history of England to an atemporal world of myth.Less
There is no author so prey to double violence against self and past as Torquato Tasso; and there is no author who feels so keenly the tortured energy released by an antiquarianism that seeks vainly to strip away layers of anachronistic misreadings from past texts. The Faerie Queene might seem at first to be written in a quite different spirit. It is a bewildering amalgam of topicality and timelessness, which seems to celebrate the power of the author to blend different periods, different writers, and different idioms into one vast composite, with little sign that such a process is difficult or dangerous. Edmund Spenser's language mingles archaism with contemporary usage, and his imaginary location, Faerie-land, is at once a distant, idealized space, and a parallel version of things going on next door. The poem's allegory ranges from the very recent history of England to an atemporal world of myth.
Jason Lawrence
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780719090882
- eISBN:
- 9781526128348
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719090882.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This interdisciplinary book examines the literary, artistic and biographical afterlives in England of the great Italian poet Torquato Tasso, from before his death in 1595 to the end of the nineteenth ...
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This interdisciplinary book examines the literary, artistic and biographical afterlives in England of the great Italian poet Torquato Tasso, from before his death in 1595 to the end of the nineteenth century. Focusing predominantly on the impact of his once famous epic poem Gerusalemme liberata across a broad spectrum of arts, it aims to stimulate a revival of interest in an undeservedly neglected poetic masterpiece and its author, more than fifty years after the last book-length account of the poet in English.
Tasso’s poem is remembered in Anglophone criticism today, if at all, as a principal model for the celebrated Bowre of Blisse episode in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, a complex literary appropriation which this study re-appraises thoroughly, in relation to both previously undetected contemporary English poetic responses to Tasso’s enchantress Armida, as in Daniel’s The Complaint of Rosamond, and visual representations of the episode across Europe. The book also traces the reception in England of notable seventeenth-century depictions of scenes from Tasso by Van Dyck and Poussin, and explores the Italian poem’s prominent role in the development of opera on the London stage, in works by Dennis and Handel. A second strand focuses on the numerous English responses to Tasso’s troubled life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, biographical and literary, exemplified in Byron’s memorable impersonation of the poet’s voice in The Lament of Tasso.Less
This interdisciplinary book examines the literary, artistic and biographical afterlives in England of the great Italian poet Torquato Tasso, from before his death in 1595 to the end of the nineteenth century. Focusing predominantly on the impact of his once famous epic poem Gerusalemme liberata across a broad spectrum of arts, it aims to stimulate a revival of interest in an undeservedly neglected poetic masterpiece and its author, more than fifty years after the last book-length account of the poet in English.
Tasso’s poem is remembered in Anglophone criticism today, if at all, as a principal model for the celebrated Bowre of Blisse episode in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, a complex literary appropriation which this study re-appraises thoroughly, in relation to both previously undetected contemporary English poetic responses to Tasso’s enchantress Armida, as in Daniel’s The Complaint of Rosamond, and visual representations of the episode across Europe. The book also traces the reception in England of notable seventeenth-century depictions of scenes from Tasso by Van Dyck and Poussin, and explores the Italian poem’s prominent role in the development of opera on the London stage, in works by Dennis and Handel. A second strand focuses on the numerous English responses to Tasso’s troubled life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, biographical and literary, exemplified in Byron’s memorable impersonation of the poet’s voice in The Lament of Tasso.
Richard A. McCabe
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198716525
- eISBN:
- 9780191787744
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198716525.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature, Poetry
This chapter focuses on Tasso’s tortured relationship with Alonso II d’Este and its implications for his major writings, especially the Aminta and Gerusalemme Liberata. It places the poet’s career in ...
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This chapter focuses on Tasso’s tortured relationship with Alonso II d’Este and its implications for his major writings, especially the Aminta and Gerusalemme Liberata. It places the poet’s career in the context of his father’s, and relates his revision of the Gerusalemme Liberata into the Gerusalemme Conquistata, and its corresponding re-dedication to the Aldobrandini, to his changing perception of the aesthetic and moral implications of patronage. The views of courtly service advanced in dialogues such as Il Malpiglio overo de la Corte are argued to give eloquent expression to the sense of entrapment Tasso witnessed in his father’s career, while his own imprisonment in Sant’Anna literalized the loss of personal and artistic ‘liberty’ poets traditionally feared.Less
This chapter focuses on Tasso’s tortured relationship with Alonso II d’Este and its implications for his major writings, especially the Aminta and Gerusalemme Liberata. It places the poet’s career in the context of his father’s, and relates his revision of the Gerusalemme Liberata into the Gerusalemme Conquistata, and its corresponding re-dedication to the Aldobrandini, to his changing perception of the aesthetic and moral implications of patronage. The views of courtly service advanced in dialogues such as Il Malpiglio overo de la Corte are argued to give eloquent expression to the sense of entrapment Tasso witnessed in his father’s career, while his own imprisonment in Sant’Anna literalized the loss of personal and artistic ‘liberty’ poets traditionally feared.
Colin Burrow
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198117940
- eISBN:
- 9780191671135
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198117940.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
Sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century epic writers had to work hard to invent a modern equivalent for the conceptual idiom of classical epic, and laboured both to unpick the idioms of earlier ...
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Sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century epic writers had to work hard to invent a modern equivalent for the conceptual idiom of classical epic, and laboured both to unpick the idioms of earlier imitators and to create in the process a role for epic in their society. They improvised a modern heroic idiom, often while they composed. A sense that they had got epic wrong frequently led them to revise and extend their poems: Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, Michael Drayton, Samuel Daniel, Robert Sidney, and Edmund Spenser all attempted to overcome the prevalent romance view of the Aeneid by revising their epic works, by fracturing and rewriting Virgilian episodes to accommodate rival interpretations, or by continuing their poems in a more ruthless idiom. They had to break away from a part of themselves in order to feel that they could write like authors of the past. And by developing the civic aspect of classical epic they sought to explore and modify the structures of power and of emotion that sustained their society.Less
Sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century epic writers had to work hard to invent a modern equivalent for the conceptual idiom of classical epic, and laboured both to unpick the idioms of earlier imitators and to create in the process a role for epic in their society. They improvised a modern heroic idiom, often while they composed. A sense that they had got epic wrong frequently led them to revise and extend their poems: Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, Michael Drayton, Samuel Daniel, Robert Sidney, and Edmund Spenser all attempted to overcome the prevalent romance view of the Aeneid by revising their epic works, by fracturing and rewriting Virgilian episodes to accommodate rival interpretations, or by continuing their poems in a more ruthless idiom. They had to break away from a part of themselves in order to feel that they could write like authors of the past. And by developing the civic aspect of classical epic they sought to explore and modify the structures of power and of emotion that sustained their society.
G. W. Pigman III
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- March 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199246212
- eISBN:
- 9780191803376
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199246212.003.0023
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
This chapter focuses on translations of two texts that helped shape the theory of tragicomedy as an independent genre. These include Torquato Tasso's Aminta, first performed in 1573 and printed in ...
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This chapter focuses on translations of two texts that helped shape the theory of tragicomedy as an independent genre. These include Torquato Tasso's Aminta, first performed in 1573 and printed in 1580, which initiated a European vogue for pastoral drama. Another is Giambattista Guarini's Il pastor fido. English translations were printed in 1602 while Jonathan Sidnam's (1630) remains in manuscript in the British Library; there is also an anonymous Latin translation done c.1602–5 for performance at Cambridge.Less
This chapter focuses on translations of two texts that helped shape the theory of tragicomedy as an independent genre. These include Torquato Tasso's Aminta, first performed in 1573 and printed in 1580, which initiated a European vogue for pastoral drama. Another is Giambattista Guarini's Il pastor fido. English translations were printed in 1602 while Jonathan Sidnam's (1630) remains in manuscript in the British Library; there is also an anonymous Latin translation done c.1602–5 for performance at Cambridge.
Ita Mac Carthy
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780691175485
- eISBN:
- 9780691189796
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691175485.003.0008
- Subject:
- History, World Medieval History
This concluding chapter explores some of the further transplantations that grace experiences towards the end of the sixteenth century. Emblematic of these transplantations are the work of the ...
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This concluding chapter explores some of the further transplantations that grace experiences towards the end of the sixteenth century. Emblematic of these transplantations are the work of the Ferrarese poet and philosopher Torquato Tasso and the Venetian writer Moderata Fonte. The chapter first examines Tasso's philosophical dialogue, Il malpiglio (1585), as a direct response to Castiglione in whom Tasso identifies some timeless principles while also recognising that Italy and life at court have changed. Forming a contrastive diptych with this nostalgic portrait, Moderata Fonte's Merito delle donne (The Worth of Women, 1592) presents grace not as a privilege of the past but as a keyword of her era — as a mode of surviving and thriving in the world. After pointing out the fickleness of men who align grace with beauty for their own ends, she asserts that women should cultivate internal graces — eloquence and intellect — that will provide pleasure for themselves, that will never fade or grow old, and that will endure as long as life, and beyond.Less
This concluding chapter explores some of the further transplantations that grace experiences towards the end of the sixteenth century. Emblematic of these transplantations are the work of the Ferrarese poet and philosopher Torquato Tasso and the Venetian writer Moderata Fonte. The chapter first examines Tasso's philosophical dialogue, Il malpiglio (1585), as a direct response to Castiglione in whom Tasso identifies some timeless principles while also recognising that Italy and life at court have changed. Forming a contrastive diptych with this nostalgic portrait, Moderata Fonte's Merito delle donne (The Worth of Women, 1592) presents grace not as a privilege of the past but as a keyword of her era — as a mode of surviving and thriving in the world. After pointing out the fickleness of men who align grace with beauty for their own ends, she asserts that women should cultivate internal graces — eloquence and intellect — that will provide pleasure for themselves, that will never fade or grow old, and that will endure as long as life, and beyond.
Susan Mcclary
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520247345
- eISBN:
- 9780520952065
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520247345.003.0011
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Thomas Owens
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- July 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198840862
- eISBN:
- 9780191876479
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198840862.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, Poetry
Chapter 3 recovers the formal lineage of Wordsworth’s ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’ by following it back through Milton’s political sonnets to the Tuscan poets of the cinquecento, pre-eminently ...
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Chapter 3 recovers the formal lineage of Wordsworth’s ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’ by following it back through Milton’s political sonnets to the Tuscan poets of the cinquecento, pre-eminently Giovanni della Casa and Torquato Tasso. It suggests that Wordsworth’s conception of the Miltonic sonnet as a dewdrop exemplifies the relationship between gravity and gravità and asprezza, and proposes that the moral force of Wordsworth’s political achievement across the first decade of the nineteenth century was the result of his intricate negotiation with the actual weight and tendency to downward motion of the sonnet form. The chapter demonstrates the influence of the ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’ on Wordsworth’s political pamphlet the Convention of Cintra, and also discusses Samuel Daniel’s Defence of Rhyme and John Donne’s sonnets in this tradition.Less
Chapter 3 recovers the formal lineage of Wordsworth’s ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’ by following it back through Milton’s political sonnets to the Tuscan poets of the cinquecento, pre-eminently Giovanni della Casa and Torquato Tasso. It suggests that Wordsworth’s conception of the Miltonic sonnet as a dewdrop exemplifies the relationship between gravity and gravità and asprezza, and proposes that the moral force of Wordsworth’s political achievement across the first decade of the nineteenth century was the result of his intricate negotiation with the actual weight and tendency to downward motion of the sonnet form. The chapter demonstrates the influence of the ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’ on Wordsworth’s political pamphlet the Convention of Cintra, and also discusses Samuel Daniel’s Defence of Rhyme and John Donne’s sonnets in this tradition.
Dale Townshend
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- November 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198845669
- eISBN:
- 9780191880780
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198845669.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
Extending the discussion of Walpole’s architectural imagination in Chapter 1, this chapter pays sustained attention to the assumption that the eponymous castle in his The Castle of Otranto (1764) is ...
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Extending the discussion of Walpole’s architectural imagination in Chapter 1, this chapter pays sustained attention to the assumption that the eponymous castle in his The Castle of Otranto (1764) is based on, or inspired by, the author’s architectural work at Strawberry Hill. Having outlined the history of the Otranto/Strawberry Hill relationship, the chapter subjects these presumed correspondences between text and house to careful scrutiny, eventually arguing that if the two are related at all, it is primarily through the language of romance that is common to both. Both the Castle at Otranto and Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, the argument shows, are versions of the ‘enchanted castles’ that Walpole discovered deep in the annals of ‘Gothic story’. The chapter ends with an account of the extent to which Walpole arrogated to himself the ability to call up so many ‘enchanted castles’ in a number of contemporary literary and architectural experiments.Less
Extending the discussion of Walpole’s architectural imagination in Chapter 1, this chapter pays sustained attention to the assumption that the eponymous castle in his The Castle of Otranto (1764) is based on, or inspired by, the author’s architectural work at Strawberry Hill. Having outlined the history of the Otranto/Strawberry Hill relationship, the chapter subjects these presumed correspondences between text and house to careful scrutiny, eventually arguing that if the two are related at all, it is primarily through the language of romance that is common to both. Both the Castle at Otranto and Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, the argument shows, are versions of the ‘enchanted castles’ that Walpole discovered deep in the annals of ‘Gothic story’. The chapter ends with an account of the extent to which Walpole arrogated to himself the ability to call up so many ‘enchanted castles’ in a number of contemporary literary and architectural experiments.