Conclusion: the emergence of Tasso’s psychobiography

The conclusion traces how the psychoanalytical approach utilised in late twentieth-century Freudian interpretations of Tasso’s life and work, by Margaret Ferguson and Giampiero Giamperi for example, had been pre-empted in English biographical accounts of the poet from the second half of the nineteenth century. J. A. Symonds and Leigh Hunt both focus on the same autobiographical poem, the unfinished Canzone al Metauro, as these later psycho-biographical readings to try to account for Tasso’s troubled relationships with his absent mother and particularly his father Bernardo. The conclusion argues that the absence of a clearly defined vocabulary for psychoanalytical discourse pre-Freud does not diminish the acuity of these earlier biographical observations on the poet.

‘A place pickt out by choyce of best alyue,/That natures worke by art can imitate’: the Bowre of Blisse and Armida’s garden revisited

The second chapter focuses on the best-known and most extensive imitation of Tasso’s poem in all of English literature, Spenser’s re-imagining and re-working of Armida’s enchanted garden in cantos 15 and 16 as the Bowre of Blisse in the final canto of Book 2 of The Faerie Queene (1590). Spenser’s almost immediate engagement with Gerusalemme liberata in his own romantic epic has long seen him acknowledged as ‘the arbiter of Tasso’s glory in the first half century of his life in England’. However, despite the voluminous critical work on Spenser’s episode and its sources, the profound indebtedness to Tasso throughout has, surprisingly, still not been fully appreciated and acknowledged. The second chapter of this study therefore offers a detailed re-appraisal of the complex relationship between the two episodes, to try to underline the sustained imitative virtuosity of Spenser’s emulation of his principal Italian source. The chapter also includes a brief consideration of Milton’s indebtedness to Tasso’s episode, and Spenser’s earlier imitation of it, in the poetic evocation of Eden in Book 4 of Paradise Lost.

‘What enchanting Sound salutes my Ear?’: Gerusalemme liberata and the early development of opera in England

By the 1620s, the romantic episodes in Gerusalemme liberata had become popular as a source for operatic libretti. The story of Rinaldo and Armida proved to be the most popular, and eventually, by the end of the seventeenth century, this phenomenon had reached the stage in England, via Italy, France and even Germany. The fourth chapter explores ambitious musical adaptations of the episode for the London stage in the native form of dramatic opera in John Dennis’s Rinaldo and Armida: A Tragedy (1699), with music by John Eccles, and in the through-sung Italianate form in Handel’s Rinaldo, with a libretto by Giacomo Rossi, first performed to great acclaim in 1711. It will also examine the idiosyncratic interpretation, by Paolo Rolli, of a different romantic episode in Tasso, that of Erminia and Tancredi, as the source for another Italianate London opera, Giovanni Bononcini’s L’Erminia favola Boschereccia (1723). These musical works founded, often closely but sometimes more freely, on the Italian poem demonstrate the breadth of Tasso’s impact in England, both chronologically and across a range of art forms.

‘There are as many Tassos as there are Hamlets’: representations of Tasso’s life in England

During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, attention in England focused increasingly on the troubled life of the poet, who came to be regarded as ‘a prototype of the Romantic poet, loving passionately but hopelessly and above his station, ...chained in a lunatic’s cell’. In the fifth chapter the second principal strand of this study traces and analyses the development of such views about Tasso himself, from the earliest English biographical account by Henry Layng in 1748 to the last at the start of the twentieth century. It also examines the many imaginative engagements with aspects of the poet’s legendary biography, such as his apparent madness and prolonged imprisonment in Ferrara as a result of his supposed love for Leonora d’Este, the Duke’s sister, which were to become a prominent feature of English and European responses to him in the nineteenth century. It focuses particularly on Lord Byron’s impassioned ventriloquisation of the Italian poet’s voice in The Lament of Tasso (1817).

Gerusalemme liberata and the visual arts in England

The third chapter investigates the impact in England of visual depictions of scenes from Tasso’s romantic episodes, featuring both Rinaldo and Armida and the Tancredi and Erminia. Although no native English tradition of pictorial representation of Tasso’s poem ever developed, there is still evidence of a keen interest in such pictures: in the late 1620s Anthony Van Dyck received a commission for Charles I to produce a depiction of the Rinaldo and Armida episode, focused on a less familiar moment from canto 14, which he executed so successfully that it was instrumental in bringing the painter into the service of the king for the final decade of his career. The early eighteenth century witnessed the arrival in England of the first work by the French painter Nicolas Poussin, who repeatedly depicted scenes from a number of Tasso episodes during the 1620s and 1630s: his second version of the Tancredi and Erminia episode in canto 19 was brought to England by the collector Sir James Thornhill, and it soon inspired a detailed evaluation in relation to its literary source by the artist-critic Jonathan Richardson, which is also examined closely.

‘A l’apparir de la beltà novella/nasce un bisbiglio e ’l guardo ognun v’intende’: the arrival of Gerusalemme liberata in Elizabethan England

The first chapter focuses on the literary impact of the enchantress Armida’s arrival in the Italian poem, examining how the poets Abraham Fraunce and Samuel Daniel respond directly to canto 4 of Tasso’s epic. In The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588), the earliest example of English engagement with Gerusalemme liberata, Fraunce draws most heavily on this canto of the Italian poem, and particularly the descriptions of Armida, for his abundant rhetorical illustrations from Tasso’s work. The Complaint of Rosamond (1592) was the first English poem to engage with the figure of Armida herself, demonstrated in Daniel’s frequent allusions to Tasso’s enchantress in relation to his own spectral narrator, many of which have not been previously detected. The first chapter also examines the numerous English poetic responses in the first half of the 1590s to the celebrated song from a later amorous episode, the canto della rosa heard in Armida’s garden in canto 16, in translations and imitations by Robert Southwell, Spenser and Daniel, as well as allusions in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593), to illustrate how swift and pervasive the impact of Tasso’s epic on late Elizabethan verse was.

Introduction: ‘I dote on Tasso’

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.