A short life of the author
Torquato Tasso (11 March 1544 – 25 April 1595) was an Italian poet whose Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, completed 1575, published 1581) is the last great epic poem of the Italian Renaissance and one of the supreme achievements of European literature. The poem tells the story of the First Crusade — Godfrey of Bouillon’s conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 — but its real subject is the conflict between duty and desire, between the Christian warrior’s obligation to his cause and the seductions of love, magic, and the enchanted world. Tasso’s life — brilliant, tormented, marked by seven years of confinement in a hospital for the insane — became a Romantic legend almost as famous as the poem itself.
Life
Tasso was born in Sorrento, the son of Bernardo Tasso, a poet and courtier. He was educated at Jesuit schools and at the universities of Padua and Bologna, where he studied philosophy and published his first poem, Rinaldo (1562), at eighteen — a chivalric romance that announced his ambition to rival Ariosto.
He entered the service of Cardinal Luigi d’Este and later of Duke Alfonso II of Ferrara, where he spent the most productive years of his career. He completed Gerusalemme liberata by 1575 and circulated it privately, but his anxieties about the poem — its orthodoxy, its moral propriety, its relationship to classical epic rules — grew into a full-scale psychological crisis. He submitted the poem to the Roman Inquisition for review, requested and then rejected their criticisms, and was tormented by doubts about his own religious faith and his work’s acceptability.
In 1579, after increasingly erratic behaviour (including a public outburst at the court of Ferrara), Duke Alfonso had him confined in the Hospital of Sant’Anna, where he remained for seven years (1579–1586). The nature of his illness — melancholy, religious mania, paranoia — has been debated for centuries. Whether Alfonso was protecting Tasso from himself or punishing him for political indiscretions (possibly including an inappropriate attachment to Alfonso’s sister) remains unclear.
He was released in 1586 and spent his last years wandering between Italian courts and monasteries, revising his epic into a less passionate, more doctrinally orthodox version — Gerusalemme conquistata (Jerusalem Conquered, 1593) — that is universally regarded as inferior. He died in Rome, at the monastery of Sant’Onofrio, on the day before he was to be crowned with a laurel wreath by the Pope.
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)
The poem is in twenty cantos of ottava rima (the eight-line stanza that Boccaccio, Boiardo, and Ariosto had made the standard form of Italian narrative poetry). Its nominal subject is the Christian conquest of Jerusalem, led by Godfrey of Bouillon, but its emotional centre lies in the episodes of romantic and magical enchantment that divert the crusaders from their mission.
Rinaldo, the most valiant Christian knight, is lured to the enchanted island of the sorceress Armida, where he languishes in erotic captivity — a crystallisation of the epic’s central tension between duty and desire. Clorinda, a Muslim warrior maiden, is loved by Tancred, a Christian knight, who kills her unknowingly in single combat — one of the most devastating scenes in Italian poetry. Erminia, a Saracen princess in love with Tancred, wanders through pastoral landscapes in search of a peace that the epic world denies her.
The poem’s achievement is to hold these romantic and elegiac elements in tension with its epic and religious framework — to give the enchanted garden and the sorceress’s love the same imaginative weight as the walls of Jerusalem and the Christian obligation to conquer them.
Aminta (1573)
Tasso’s pastoral drama — a play about the shepherd Aminta’s love for the nymph Silvia — is one of the masterpieces of Renaissance pastoral. Written in unrhymed verse of remarkable musicality, it influenced Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido and the entire tradition of European pastoral drama and opera. Its chorus “O bella età de l’oro” (“O beautiful golden age”) is one of the most famous passages in Italian poetry.
Influence
Tasso’s influence on European literature was immense. Spenser drew on him for The Faerie Queene. Milton’s descriptions of Eden in Paradise Lost owe debts to Armida’s garden. Handel composed operas based on episodes from Gerusalemme liberata. Monteverdi set his poetry to music. Goethe wrote a play about Tasso’s life (Torquato Tasso, 1790) that made him a symbol of the artist crushed by society. Byron made the pilgrimage to his cell at Sant’Anna.
Collecting Tasso
Early editions of Gerusalemme liberata are among the great prizes of Italian book collecting. The first authorised edition (Ferrara, 1581, by Febo Bonnà) brings five-figure sums. Sixteenth-century Italian editions range from $2,000–$20,000 depending on edition and condition. English translations — particularly Edward Fairfax’s Godfrey of Bulloigne (1600) — are collected by English literature enthusiasts. The Fairfax first edition is extremely rare.