TASSO, Torquato (LITERATURE)

Born: Sorrento, territory of Naples, 11 March 1544; son of the poet Bernardo Tasso. Education: Educated at a Jesuit school in Naples; at Court of Urbino with his father, 1557-60; studied law at University of Padua, 1560-62, and in Bologna, 1562-64; joined Accademia degli Eterei (under Scipione Gonzaga), Padua, 1564-65. Career: In household of Cardinal Luigi d’Este, Ferrara, 1565-70, and Paris, 1570-71; in Duke Alfonso d’Este’s household, 1572-78; fearful of persecution, fled to Sorrento, 1577, and on to Rome, Mantua, Padua, and Venice, returning to Ferrara for medical treatment, 1579; confined as insane to hospital of Sant’Anna, 1579-86; released into care of Duke of Mantua, and spent remaining years wandering through Italy, to Naples, Rome, Florence, and Mantua; granted pension by Pope Clement VIII, 1595. Died: 25 April 1595.

Publications

Collections

Opere, edited by Luigi Bonfigli. 3 vols., 1934-36.

Opere, edited by Bruno Maier. 1963.

Verse

Rinaldo. 1562; edited by Luigi Bonfigli, 1936, and by Michael Sherberg, 1990; as Rinaldo, translated by John Hoole, 1792.

Gerusalemme liberata. 1580 (as Il Goffredo); complete version, 1581; revised edition, 1581; edited by G. Casoni, 1625, S. Barbato, 1628, and by Lanfranco Caretti, in Tutte le poesie, 1957: as Godfrey of Bouillon: The Recovery of Jerusalem, translated by Edward Fairfax, 1600, edited by Kathleen M. Lea and T.M. Gang, 1981; as Tasso’s Jerusalem, translated by Henry Brooke, 1738; as Delivery of Jerusalem, translated by P. Doyne, 1761; several translations as Jerusalem Delivered, including by John Hoole, 1763, Jeremiah H. Wiffen, 1826, J.R. Broadhead, 1837, Alexander Cunningham Robertson, 1853, Charles Lesingham Smith, 1874, John Kingston James, 1884, Joseph Tusiani, 1970, and Ralph Nash, 1987; translated by Anthony M. Esolen, 2000.


Gerusalemme conquistata. 1593; edited by Luigi Bonfigli, 1934.

Le sette giornate del mondo creato. 1607; edited by Giorgio Petrocchi, 1951; as Creation of the World, translated by Joseph Tusiani, 1982.

Tasso’s Sonnets, translated by Charles Chorley. 1866.

Opere minori in versi, edited by Angelo Solerti. 3 vols., 1891-95.

Rime, edited by Angelo Solerti. 3 vols., 1898-1902.

Later Work of Torquato Tasso, translated by Henry Cloriston. 1907.

Plays

Aminta (produced 1573). 1581; edited by B.T. Sozzi, 1957, and by C.E.J. Griffiths, 1972; in The Countess of Pembroke’s Ivychurch, translated by Abraham Fraunce, 1591; as Aminta, translation attributed to John Reynolds, 1628; also translated by John Dancer, 1660, P.B. Du Bois, 1726, William Ayre, 1737, Percival Stockdale, 1770, Ernest Grillo, 1924, and Louis E. Lord, 1931; as Amyntas, translated by Leigh Hunt, 1820, and Frederic Whitmore, 1900; translated by Pastor Fido in Three Renaissance Pastorals: Tasso-Guarini-Daniel, edited and annotated by Elizabeth Story Donno, 1993.

Il Re Torrismondo. 1586; edited by Bartolo T. Sozzi, in Opere 2, 1956; as King Torrismondo, translated by Maria Pastore Passaro, 1997.

Intrighi d’amore (produced 1598). 1604; edited by Enrico Malato, 1976.

Other

Rime e prose. 1581.

Discorsi dell’arte poetica (lecture). 1587; revised version, as Discorsi del poema eroico, 1594; both versions edited by Luigi Poma, 1964; as Discourses on the Heroic Poem, translated by Mariella Cavalchini and Irene Samuel, 1973.

Lettere, edited by Cesare Guasti. 5 vols., 1852-55.

Prose diverse, edited by Cesare Guasti. 2 vols., 1875.

Tales from Tasso, translated by G. Grinnell Milne. 1909.

Dialoghi, edited by Ezio Raimondi. 3 vols., 1958; as Tasso’s Dialogues: A Selection, with Discourse on the Art of the Dialogue, edited and translated by Carnes Lord and Dain A. Trafton (bilingual edition), 1982.

Prose, edited by E. Mazzali. 1959.

Critical Studies:

Tasso and His Times by William Boulting, 1907; From Virgil to Milton by C.M. Bowra, 1945; Interpretazione del Tasso by Giovanni Getto, 1951, revised edition, 1967; Studi sul Tasso, 1954, and Nuovi studi sul Tasso, 1963, both by B.T. Sozzi; Ariosto e Tasso by Lanfranco Caretti, 1961; Tasso: A Study of the Poet and of His Contribution to English Literature by C.P. Brand, 1965; Il manierismo del Tasso e altri studi by F. Ulivi, 1966; Prospettive sul Tasso by F. Bruni, 1969; Torquato Tasso by W. Moretti, 1973; The Textual Problems of Tasso’s ‘ ‘Gerusalemme conquistata” by Anthony Oldcorn, 1976; Torquato Tasso: Epos, parola, scena by C. Varese, 1976; Tasso by G. Baldassarri, 1979; Torquato Tasso: L’uomo, ilpoeta, il cortigiano by F. Pittorru, 1982; Ad nubes—The Horation Ode of Torquato Tasso by Hannu Riikonen, 1982; Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry by Margaret W. Ferguson, 1983; The Genesis of Tasso’s Narrative Theory: English Translations of the Early Poetics and a Comparative Study of their Significance by Lawrence F. Rhu, 1993; Rinaldo: Character and Intertext in Ariosto and Tasso by Michael Sherberg, 1993; Tasso (Torquato Tasso) by Goethe, translated by Robert David MacDonald, 1994; Musical-dramatic Productions Derived from Ariosto and Tasso in the City of Paris, 1600-1800 by Charles Townsend Downey, 1998; The Epic Rhetoric of Tasso: Theory and Practice by Maggie Gunsberg, 1998; Armida and Rinaldo in Eighteenth-Century Vienna: Context, Content, and Tonal Coding in Viennese Italian Reform Operas, 1761-1782 by Susanne E. Dunlap, 1999; Renaissance Transactions:Ariosto and Tasso, edited by Valeria Finucci, 1999.

Although best known for his epic poem Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered), Torquato Tasso was a typical man of his age in that he wrote important works in virtually all of the literary genres practised in Italy during the late Renaissance. Like his father Bernardo, who was also a poet of some prominence, Tasso spent most of his adult life as a courtier. It was in this capacity that he wrote the lyric, religious, and occasional verse, epic poetry, plays, dialogues, letters, and literary criticism that poured from his pen throughout a productive but unhappy life. Though clearly not the misunderstood, persecuted, and consequently mad poet his 19th-century admirers thought him, Tasso was certainly neurotic, in today’s terms, and in certain periods of his life severely unbalanced. Indeed, there were times when his extreme susceptibility and the fears of persecution that plagued him for much of his adulthood led him to behaviour so politically injudicious that his worried patron had him placed in protective custody and eventually imprisoned. Tasso was a man of great learning and sophistication who at the same time was emotionally torn by doubts of his own worth and orthodoxy. Misgivings of this sort help explain his sometimes aberrant behaviour and were behind his incessant request that his religious views be examined by the Inquisition. They were also responsible for his insistence that the text of his poem be scrutinized by the leading literary arbiters of the day for traces of possible offence to linguistic, literary, or moral propriety.

The tensions and contradictions that made Tasso’s life a legend even in his own time give his poetry its unmistakable aura of high drama and intensity. In the Jerusalem Delivered, discipline and indulgence, piety and sensuality, jealousy and magnanimity, hope and disillusionment, love and solitude, cowardice and valour, calculation and ingenuousness, history and invention, theatricality and simplicity, the epic and the lyric all combine in an impassioned poetic texture that is unique in the tradition of chivalric epic. In this work, Tasso’s characters excite admiration not so much for their virtues or heroic accomplishments as for their capacities for intense feeling. Some of the most celebrated moments in the poem—the combat of Tancredi and Clorinda, for example, or the episode of Erminia and the shepherds—find their true dynamic in a barely repressed eroticism pulsing beneath an ostensibly heroic or idyllic surface. Partly from temperament, partly because of the uncertainties of the age in which he lived, Tasso was acutely aware of the fragility of virtue, the evanescence of even the best of human emotions, and the potential insidiousness of an imperfectly understood natural environment. The importance allotted to magic in his poem is indicative of his belief in the fundamental mysteriousness of life and the universe in which the human drama unfolds. Tasso is a poet of desire rather than satisfaction, and his best writing is characterized by anxiety and melancholy, a longing for liberation from the contingencies to which the human condition is subject.

Jerusalem Delivered is an epic poem in 20 cantos of ottava rima. Much of its action concerns the fall of Jerusalem in 1099 to Godfrey of Boulogne and his European allies during the First Crusade. Unlike the previous chivalrous epics written for the Ferrarese court by Boiardo and Ariosto, Tasso’s poem is an overtly serious work, stoutly Christian and explicitly moralistic, and deeply concerned from its inception with such theoretical matters as the relation of truth to invention and the problem of historical authenticity. Its subject-matter, a protracted military contest between Christians and Muslims, was not without contemporary significance in a time of continuing struggle between the Italian states and the Ottoman Empire for commercial domination of the eastern Mediterranean. Moreover, the themes of loyalty and treachery and the conflicting claims of public and private obligation, so important for Renaissance epic in general, were still pertinent to the court ethos and interstate political rivalry characteristic of the age in which Tasso lived. In the poem, the blood and gore of antique epic (the ”aspra tragedia dello stato umano,” as Tasso called it) are mitigated by idyllic and lyric passages which derive more from Petrarch and the Greek and Latin elegiac and erotic poets than from Homer or Tasso’s own sometimes rough-hewn epic forbears. The women of Tasso’s poetry, in particular, and the love interests they give rise to provide a more complex foil to the traditional military skirmishing and bravado, in part because all of Tasso’s characters are more fully realized and psychologically developed than those of his predecessors.

Second in importance to Tasso’s epic poetry are his plays. They too come at the end of a long and glorious Ferrarese tradition. There are three of these: Aminta, a pastoral; Il Re Torrismondo (King Torrismondo), a tragedy on the Aristotelian-Sophoclean model; and Intrighi d’amore, a comedy whose authorship has only recently been securely attributed to Tasso. Of the three, the most important and influential is the Aminta. An apparently naive story of a shepherd in love with a reluctant nymph, this ”woodland fable” was first produced in 1573 for the delectation of the Ferrarese court, many of whose members are alluded to or depicted in it. The play is permeated by a kind of Counter-Reformation Weltschmerz that gives it its special sweetness; its charm derives in part from Tasso’s indulgent smile at the simplicity of his rustic characters and the impossible world of innocence and fantasy they inhabit.

Tasso wrote over 1,500 occasional poems or rime on a very wide variety of subjects. In addition to the sonnets, ballads, canzoni, and sestine of tradition, these include a large number of madrigals, a relatively new form that was particularly well-suited to his sensual and musical poetic imagination. In these lyrics one finds not the chaste introspection of Petrarch, but rather an unabashed though sometimes bittersweet delight in amorous attraction and the physical world.

Tasso’s prose works include letters, dialogues, and literary discourses. These last are elegant examples of the neo-Aristotelian theory of the day and deal primarily with epic poetry; first composed in the late 1560s and published as the Discorsi dell’arte poetica [Discourses on the Art of Poetry], they were then reworked and expanded and in 1594 republished as the Discorsi del poema eroico (Discourses on the Heroic Poem). The Dialoghi (Dialogues) are part of a long Renaissance tradition and treat such fashionable subjects as nobility, courtesy, jealousy, dignity, and piety. The letters, especially those from confinement, are often extremely moving. Generally lucid and elegant, Tasso’s prose works are considered by many to be among the most accomplished that the century produced. Tasso also wrote devotional verse, especially at the end of his life, including Le sette giornate del mondo creato (Creation of the World), which was known and admired by John Milton.

Tasso belongs to the end of the Renaissance, a time when many were inclined to agree with Dafne’s remark in the Aminta, ”Il mondo invecchia, / E invecchiando intristisce” (”the world grows old and growing old grows sad”). His personal inquietude and problematic character both mark his own peculiar genius and herald a succeeding age that would quickly claim him as the dawn of a new, baroque era.

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