Tasso, Torquato (1544–1595)

Considered the finest Italian poet of the late Renaissance, Torquato Tasso was the son of Bernardo Tasso, a poet and courtier who served as secretary to the prince of Salerno. When the prince was banished by the King of Naples, Torquato and his family lost their property and were forced to move from Sorrento. Torquato lived in Naples and was educated by the new order of Jesuits, the guardians of doctrine and religious expression of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. He learned Latin and Greek before leaving Naples for Rome, where his father was serving the prince of Sorrento in exile. In 1557, at the age of thirteen, Torquato already enjoyed a reputation as a scholar and poet, and was hired as a tutor to the son of Duke Guidobaldo of Urbino. Tasso studied law and philosophy at the universities of Padua and Bologna. He preferred poetry, however, and first won renown in 1562 with Rinaldo, an epic poem of chivalry and courtly manners. He also wrote a didactic work, Discourses on the Art of Poetry. He earned a reputation as a critic and theorist on poetry, while his career as a scholar was cut short at the University of Bologna, where he was ostracized for writing satiric verses about students and professors.

In 1565 Tasso entered the service of the d'Este family of Ferrara as a court poet. He completed Aminta, a pastoral play in verse and music that combined myth and idealized court life, in 1573. This work had an important influence on Italian music and the development of opera over the next two centuries. In 1575, Tasso's famous epic poem Jerusalem Liberated was first published. Written in the poetic form known as ottava rima, in which the poem is divided into eight-line stanzas, Jerusalem Liberated used The Aeneid of the Roman poet Virgil as its model. Tasso described the First Crusade, the exploits of the Christian knight Godfrey of Bouillon and a fictional hero, Rinaldo, and the romantic idylls of several invented characters. Trained in the strictures of the Jesuit order, however, Tasso worried for the rest of his life about the religious propriety of his work. He submitted the poem to several scholars as well as to the church for review. When the poem drew criticism for its structure, characterizations, and religious tone, Tasso began putting it through a drastic revision that drained his creativity as well as his sanity.

In 1576 Tasso began suffering from a mental illness that some modern historians have identified as schizophrenia. He grew suspicious and paranoid, fearing that the Duke of Ferrara and many others meant to do him harm. Outbursts of violent anger alternated with depression. When he assaulted a servant whom he suspected of spying on him, he was sent to a convent by the duke. He escaped to Sorrento but returned to Ferrara in 1579, where Duke Alfonso was celebrating his wedding. On arriving in Ferrara, however, Tasso violently denounced the duke and for this he was imprisoned in a hospital for the next seven years. His epic poem was published in a pirated edition and for the next several years Tasso revised the work, finally bringing out his own edition in 1580.

Tasso wrote hundreds of sonnets, madrigals, dialogues, and canzoni (songs) in verse. His last years were spent traveling from one Italian court to the next in search of patrons and conditions that would allow him the necessary peace of mind to work. He was nominated as the poet laureate of Italy but died just before he was to receive the honor in an official ceremony. In 1600, Jerusalem Liberated was translated into English; the poem would have an important influence on the works of Edmund Spenser and John Milton.

See Also: Ariosto, Ludovico; Milton, John; Spenser, Edmund; Virgil