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Introduction: ‘I dote on Tasso’

Jason Lawrence

in Tasso's Art and Afterlives: The Gerusalemme Liberata in England

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. ... More

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

Tasso's Silent Lyre

Anthony Welch

in The Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past

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 ... More

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

Renaissance Epics: Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser

Peter Mack

in Reading Old Books: Writing with Traditions

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 ... More

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

With God on Our Side: Gerusalemme liberata

Tobias Gregory

in From Many Gods to One: Divine Action in Renaissance Epic

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 ... More

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

Il primo error: Love-Melancholy and Romance in the Gerusalemme Liberata

in The Secret Wound: Love-Melancholy and Early Modern Romance

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 ... More

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

Liberating the Tomb: Difference and Death in Gerusalemme liberata

Albert Russell Ascoli

in A Local Habitation and a Name: Imagining Histories in the Italian Renaissance

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 ... More

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

Monteverdi, Narrator

Mauro Calcagno

in From Madrigal to Opera: Monteverdi's Staging of the Self

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 ... More

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

Tasso: Patronage and Imprisonment

Richard A. McCabe

in 'Ungainefull Arte': Poetry, Patronage, and Print in the Early Modern Era

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 ... More

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

Pastoral Drama

G. W. Pigman III

in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English: Volume 2 1550-1660

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 ... More

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

Conclusion

Ita Mac Carthy

in The Grace of the Italian Renaissance

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 ... More

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

The Dragon Cart: The Femme Fatale in Seventeenth-Century French Opera

Susan Mcclary

in Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music

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 ... More

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

Orbicular Poetics

Thomas Owens

in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and 'the language of the heavens'

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 ... More

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

Horace Walpole’s Enchanted Castles

Dale Townshend

in Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance, and the Architectural Imagination, 1760-1840

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 ... More

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