Tasso, Torquato (1544–1595)

TASSO, TORQUATO (1544–1595)

TASSO, TORQUATO (1544–1595), Italian poet. Tasso was born in Sorrento, where his father Bernardo was serving as secretary to the prince of Salerno. Like many courtiers, Bernardo had a peripatetic career, and Torquato's childhood included stays in Naples, Rome, Bergamo, and Pesaro. In 1560 Tasso entered the University of Padua to study law, but soon dedicated himself to philosophy and literary pursuits; two years later he transferred to the University of Bologna, but left when he was held responsible for a lampoon identifying homosexual students and faculty. Tasso returned to Padua in 1564 and entered the service of Cardinal Luigi d'Este, brother to Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara. In 1572, the poet entered the duke's service and took up residence at the d'Este court.

Tasso's first years in Ferrara were happy and productive. His pastoral play Aminta was performed at court to great acclaim in 1573, and by 1575 he had largely completed the epic poem on the First Crusade on which he had been working for over a decade. The poem was eagerly awaited, not least by the duke, but Tasso had doubts about its acceptability on both literary and religious grounds, and sent drafts to several prominent intellectuals, soliciting their suggestions. Hoping for reassurance, Tasso instead received detailed criticisms, which exacerbated his doubts. He became bogged down in revising the poem, and during this period his mental health deteriorated sharply. He grew increasingly paranoid and irascible and was tormented by religious anxieties. In May 1577 Tasso turned himself in to the Ferrarese Inquisition for spiritual examination; in June he attempted to stab a servant whom he suspected of spying on him. After this incident, Alfonso imprisoned him within the ducal palace; Tasso escaped and spent the next two years traveling around Italy. In 1579 he returned to Ferrara, but after he directed an abusive outburst at the duke, Alfonso had him locked up in the hospital of Sant'Anna, where he was confined for the next seven years. During Tasso's confinement, a pirated, incomplete text of his epic was printed. Tasso subsequently oversaw the publication of a corrected text, published as Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem delivered) in 1580 and in many editions thereafter. The poem was an immediate pan-European success, although Tasso himself was never satisfied with the Liberata and continued to revise his epic until 1593, when he published a substantially new poem entitled Gerusalemme conquistata (Jerusalem conquered). The Conquistata has never met with the Liberata's success. After his release from Sant'Anna in 1586, Tasso spent his final decade in the courts of Mantua, Florence, Naples, and Rome, never remaining long in one place. He died in the monastery of Sant'Onofrio in Rome shortly before he was to be crowned poet laureate.

Tasso wrote prolifically throughout his life. His works include an early chivalric epic, Rinaldo; a pastoral drama, Aminta; a philosophical poem, Il Mondo Creato; two treatises on poetics, twenty-eight dialogues, and hundreds of lyrics; in addition, over a thousand of his letters survive. It is the Liberata, however, that secures Tasso's reputation as the greatest Italian poet of the latter sixteenth century. In his poem Tasso strove to reconcile Virgilian epic, chivalric romance, and Counter-Reformation Catholicism; the Liberata achieves an uneasy but remarkably successful balance of these three elements. From the moment the Liberata appeared, it has been compared to the other great sixteenth-century Italian epic, Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso (1516). Since Tasso admired and emulated Ariosto's poem, it is misleading to view them as polar opposites, but they do offer different pleasures. Tasso lacks Ariosto's sense of humor and delight in intricate, multiplotted storytelling; but Tasso reaches greater heights of lyricism, and draws his characters with greater psychological subtlety. Whether one prefers Ariosto or Tasso, the Liberata counts among the handful of Renaissance epics of lasting impact. It served as an important model for the two major English Renaissance epics, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) and John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667).

Apart from his literary influence, Tasso's life became the stuff of romantic legend. A play on "Tasso's Melancholy" was performed in London in the 1590s; Goethe and Byron wrote poetic versions of his story, both attributing the poet's mental disturbance to a hopeless love for Duke Alfonso's sister Eleonora. (Tasso's only definitively attested love affairs were with men.) Even stripped of romantic myth, however, Tasso's career makes a poignant story: that of an immensely talented poet who suffered personally and artistically from the insecurities of a life of courtly dependence, and from the chilly cultural climate of the Italian Counter-Reformation.

See also Italian Literature and Language ; Milton, John ; Spenser, Edmund .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Tasso, Torquato. Aminta. In Three Renaissance Pastorals: Tasso—Guarini—Daniel. edited by Elizabeth Story Donno, pp. 1–54. Binghamton, N.Y., 1993. A seventeenth-century translation of Aminta by Augustine Mathews.

——. "Discourses on the Art of Poetry." In The Genesis of Tasso's Narrative Theory: English Translations of the Early Poetics and a Comparative Study of Their Significance, translated by Lawrence F. Rhu, pp. 99–155. Detroit, 1993. Translation of "Discorsi dell'arte poetica" with essays on Tasso's early poetics.

——. Jerusalem Delivered. Edited and translated by Anthony M. Esolen. Baltimore, 2000. Translation of Gerusalemme liberata.

Secondary Sources

Brand, C. P. Torquato Tasso: A Study of the Poet and of His Contribution to English Literature. Cambridge, U.K., 1965.

Getto, Giovanni. Malinconia di Torquato Tasso. Naples, 1986.

Zatti, Sergio. L'uniforme cristiano e il multiforme pagano: saggio sulla "Gerusalemme liberata." Milan, 1983.

Tobias Gregory