Tasso's art and afterlives: The <i>Gerusalemme liberata</i> in England 9781526107893

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Tasso’s poem is remembered in Anglophone criticism today, if at all, as a principal model for the celebrated Bowre of Bliss episode in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, a complex literary appropriation which this study re-appraises thoroughly, in relation to both previously undetected contemporary English poetic responses to Tasso’s enchantress Armida, as in Daniel’s The Complaint of Rosamond, and visual representations of the episode across Europe. The book also traces the reception in England of notable seventeenth-century depictions of scenes from Tasso by Van Dyck and Poussin, and explores the Italian poem’s prominent role in the development of opera on the London stage, in works by Dennis and Handel. A second strand focuses on the numerous English responses to Tasso’s troubled life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, biographical and literary, exemplified in Byron’s memorable impersonation of the poet’s voice in The Lament of Tasso.

Jason Lawrence is Senior Lecturer in English (1500–1700) at the University of Hull

Front cover: Sir Anthony Van Dyck (Flemish, 1599–1641), Rinaldo and Armida, 1629. Oil on canvas, 235.3 × 228.7 cm. The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Jacob Epstein Collection, BMA 1951.103. Photograph by Mitro Hood

L AWR E NC E

The book will appeal to scholars of the early modern period and beyond with an interest in comparative literature, music, and the visual arts.

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his interdisciplinary study examines the literary, artistic, and biographical afterlives in England of the great Italian poet Torquato Tasso, from before his death in 1595 to the end of the nineteenth century. Focusing predominantly on the impact of his once famous epic poem Gerusalemme liberata across a broad spectrum of arts, it aims to stimulate a revival of interest in an undeservedly neglected poetic masterpiece and its author, more than fifty years after the last book-length account of the poet in English.

Tasso’s art and afterlives 

T

Tasso’s art and afterlives The Gerusalemme liberata in England

ISBN 978-0-7190-9088-2

JA S O N L A W R E N C E

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

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Tasso’s art and afterlives

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Tasso’s art and afterlives The Gerusalemme liberata in England J A S O N LAW R E N C E

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Jason Lawrence 2017 The right of Jason Lawrence to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN  978 0 7190 9088 2 hardback First published 2017 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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For Jenny, Maya, and Felicity

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Contents



Acknowledgements

page ix

Introduction: ‘I dote on Tasso’

1

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

17

2 ‘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 55

3 Gerusalemme liberata and the visual arts in England 4 ‘What enchanting Sound salutes my Ear?’: Gerusalemme liberata and the early development of opera in England

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

107 135 173

Conclusion: the emergence of Tasso’s psychobiography

210

Bibliography Index

221 231

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Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the Leverhulme Trust for its generous support during the initial phase of research and writing for this book. I would like to thank my friends and colleagues at the University of Hull (especially Janet Clare, Ann Kaegi, Richard Meek, Stewart Mottram, Veronica O’Mara, and Christopher Wilson) for their patience in listening and responding to various work-in-progress papers on Tasso over the past few years, and also Rob Henke, Michele Marrapodi, Richard McCabe, Selene Scarsi, and especially John Pitcher for reading and commenting helpfully on drafts of some of the material included in the book. Elements of Chapter 1 have appeared in Renaissance Studies, 25 (2011), 648–65, and Renaissance Studies, 27 (2013), 389–406, and most of the first section of Chapter 5 has appeared in Studies in Romanticism, 50.3 (Fall 2011), 475–503, and is reproduced with the permission of the Trustees of Boston University. I would like, finally, to thank very warmly all my friends and family, particularly my father, my wife Jenny, and, of course, Maya and Fliss, for their invaluable love and support throughout the genesis, development, and (eventual) completion of this book.

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Introduction: ‘I dote on Tasso’

An after-dinner conversation in the first part of George Eliot’s final novel, Daniel Deronda, published in 1876, exactly 300 years after the completion of the famous epic poem Gerusalemme liberata, offers an invaluable insight into English, and indeed wider European, attitudes towards the celebrated sixteenth-century Italian poet Torquato Tasso in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The two female speakers are Gwendolen Harleth, the novel’s heroine and the ‘spoiled child’ after whom the first book is named, and Mrs Arrowpoint, the mother of Gwendolen’s new friend Catherine and an author of many as yet unpublished ‘home made books’. In response to Gwendolen’s enthusiasm about her authorship, Mrs Arrowpoint offers to lend the young girl copies of everything that she has written. Gwendolen, in her gratitude, demonstrates exactly how she hopes to benefit from these works, which are evidently biographies of significant literary figures: I shall be so glad to read your writings. Being acquainted with authors must give a peculiar understanding of their books: one would be able to tell then which parts were funny and which serious. I am sure I often laugh in the wrong place. ... In Shakespeare, you know, and other great writers that we can never see. But I always want to know more than there is in the books.1

Despite Eliot’s gentle mockery of Gwendolen, the central premise – that knowledge of an author’s biography might help to elucidate aspects of the work of ‘great writers that we can never see’ – is not necessarily being subjected to ridicule here. Indeed, Mrs Arrowpoint draws attention specifically to her account of an author whose life and work had already proved a constant source of fascination for poets, playwrights, composers, painters, and biographers throughout much of Europe for more than 250 years:

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tasso’s art and afterlives ‘There are things I dare say I shall publish eventually: several friends have urged me to do so, and one doesn’t like to be obstinate. My Tasso, for example – I could have made it twice the size.’   ‘I dote on Tasso’, said Gwendolen.   ‘Well, you shall have all my papers, if you like. So many, you know, have written about Tasso; but they are all wrong. As to the particular nature of his madness, and his feelings for Leonora, and the real cause of his imprisonment, and the character of Leonora, who, in my opinion, was a cold-hearted woman, else she would have married him in spite of her brother – they are all wrong. I differ from everybody.’   ... ‘I know nothing of Tasso except the Gerusalemme Liberata, which we read and learned by heart at school.’   ‘Ah, his life is more interesting than his poetry, I have constructed the early part of his life as a sort of romance. When one thinks of his father Bernardo, and so on, there is much that must be true’.   ‘Imagination is often truer than fact’, said Gwendolen, decisively, though she could no more have explained these glib words than if they had been Coptic or Etruscan. ‘I shall be so glad to learn all about Tasso – and his madness especially. I suppose poets are always a little mad’.2

However glib Eliot might have believed her character’s words to be, they are actually rather apt in describing how Tasso’s life was approached, in England and beyond, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where historical fact was often downplayed or ignored in favour of a more striking legendary biography. Despite the revelation that Tasso’s epic poem was still being studied and learnt by heart in an English girls’ school almost 300 years after Queen Elizabeth I had notably done exactly the same thing in the mid-1580s, Mrs Arrowpoint’s opinion that the poet’s life is more interesting than his work was not an uncommon one by the nineteenth century, even if she believes that the many other chroniclers of this life are wrong in their accounts of the key details. The character’s brief summary of what she views as the central events in Tasso’s life obviously demonstrates Eliot’s own awareness of these biographical ‘facts’, and it also suggests that the novelist expected at least part of her contemporary readership to be as familiar with the Italian poet’s tragic history. Gwendolen is most interested, like so many others, in learning about the ‘particular nature’ of Tasso’s madness, which was inextricably linked to his seven-year confinement, from 1579 to 1586, in the hospital of St Anna in Ferrara at the behest of his patron, Duke Alfonso II d’Este. Despite strenuous attempts by a late eighteenth-century Italian biographer with connections to the Este family to prove otherwise,3 throughout the nine-

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teenth century the most popular explanation for this imprisonment was Tasso’s presumptuous and forbidden love for the duke’s unmarried sister, Princess Leonora. It is not always made clear whether this love was believed to be unrequited, or reciprocated but impossible to fulfil within the close confines of a sixteenth-century Italian ducal court, given the vast gulf in rank between princess and court poet. Mrs Arrowpoint certainly hints at a mutual love, but then, somewhat unreasonably, blames Leonora for not standing up to her elder brother’s objections to the match. The other key figure in her account is Tasso’s father and fellow poet, Bernardo. It was his disastrous banishment from the kingdom of Naples in the early 1550s, as a consequence of his misjudged loyalty to his patron Ferrante Sanseverino, Prince of Salerno, that caused the permanent break-up of the family and loss of its serene home in Sorrento, and the subsequent penury and endless wandering from court to court with his young son, permitting Mrs Arrowpoint to construct Torquato’s early life ‘as a sort of romance’ in which much ‘must be true’. If this description hints at the curious combination of fact and fiction that permeated so many English accounts of Tasso’s life, the emphasis placed on Bernardo mirrors the important shift of attention in them away from the poet’s putative attachment to Leonora, and towards Tasso’s own complex ‘family romance’, to use Strachey’s translation of Freud’s term from his 1909 ‘Family Romances’ essay, as the twentieth century loomed. The origins of Tasso’s apparent love for the Princess Leonora have habitually been traced back to the first detailed biography of the poet, printed some twenty-five years after his death in 1595 by one of his final patrons and benefactors, Giovanni Battista Manso, the Marquis of Villa.4 Manso suggests that Tasso had veiled his real feelings for the princess in amorous verse that could have been addressed to any one of three Leonoras at the Ferrarese court: the other two were Leonora Sanvitale, the Countess of Scandiano, who was to become a significant character in both Carlo Goldoni and Goethe’s eighteenth-century dramatic representations of Tasso’s life, and one of the princess’s ladies-in-waiting, who also features in the intrigue in the Italian comedy Torquato Tasso (1755) as a more socially plausible smokescreen. Manso’s Vita di Torquato Tasso (1621) came to be regarded throughout Europe as the definitive account of Tasso’s life for more than a century and a half, owing mainly to the Neapolitan nobleman’s proximity and kindness to the poet in the final years of his life, rather than to any impartial historical accuracy in the biography itself.

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The suspicion that there was a link between the poet’s ambitious love, his imprisonment, and his perceived madness, however, certainly predated Manso’s biography. The earliest surviving record alluding to it appeared in England in 1593, a couple of years before Tasso’s death, as part of an overwhelmingly positive assessment of the still active Italian poet’s literary achievements. Most of the French text in the chapter ‘Of the dignitie of Orators, and excellencie of tongues’ in John Eliot’s bilingual French language-learning manual Ortho-epia Gallica is taken almost verbatim from the notes added by the Huguenot scholar Simon Goulart to the ‘Babilone’ section in the posthumous edition of Du Bartas’s La Seconde Sepmaine (1591), including his extensive commendation and summary of Tasso’s works, which Eliot merely rendered, with one highly significant addition, in dialogue form and parallel-text English translation: Torquato Tasso, a fine scholer truly, who is yet liuing, the last Italian Poet who is of any great fame in our age, but worthie of the first honour; besides that he is a diuine Poet, he is also a most eloquent Oratour and Rhetoricyan, as his missiue Epistles do shew very well. This Youth fell mad for the loue of an Italian lasse descended of a great house, when I was in Italie.   What other fine books hath he made?   Many: there are three Toomes of his workes printed at Ferrara, wherein there are diuers sorts of verses of all kinds of fine inuentions: a Commedie, a Tragedie, diuers Dialogues and discourses in Prose, all worthie the reading of the wisest and quickest spirits of Europe.   Is that all that he hath written?   No, for he hath the pen in hand euery day.   You haue forgotten his Gierusalemme liberata.   You say true, this child hath written in Heroicall verses one excellent Poeme amongst all other Italian Poesies, intituled as you say, wherein all the riches of the Greeks and Latines are gathered together and enchaced so cunningly past all others skill, with such grace, breuitie, grauitie, learning, liuelinesse, and uiuacitie that is remarqued to haue bene in Virgill the Prince of Latine Poets.5

Although this high praise for Tasso is derived directly from a recently printed French source, it does accurately reflect contemporary knowledge and evaluation of the poet’s work in England. With the exception of the apparent reference to the Lettere poetiche (‘missiue Epistles’), printed in 1587, there is plentiful evidence for the impact in England of all of Tasso’s other notable achievements in both verse and prose by the time when Eliot’s translated survey was published in 1593: the pastoral (tragi-) comedy Aminta (1580) had already been printed, along with Guarini’s Il pastor fido, in Italian in London by John Wolfe and Iacopo Castelvetro

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in 1591, and was translated (into English alliterative verse) in the same year by Abraham Fraunce in The Countesse of Pembrokes Yvychurch; the recently printed tragedy Il Re Torrismondo (1587) had been cited, along with passages from Aminta and, more extensively, Tasso’s already celebrated epic, in Fraunce’s The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588); the prose dialogue Il padre di famiglia (1583) had been translated by Thomas Kyd and printed as The Housholders Philosophie (1588); sonnets and madrigals, collected in the first volume of Tasso’s Rime in various largely unauthorised editions throughout the 1580s, provided Samuel Daniel with direct models for sonnets in his Delia. Contayning certayne Sonnets: with the complaint of Rosamond (1592), which also revealed the English poet’s sustained engagement with key moments from Gerusalemme liberata (1581) in the accompanying female complaint poem, soon after Spenser’s close and extensive imitations of passages from the popular Rinaldo and Armida episode in the epic poem (cantos XIV to XVI) had been included in the first edition of The Faerie Queene (1590). Like Du Bartas and Goulart in France, these English writers did not hesitate to grant Tasso, and particularly his renowned religious epic, a status comparable to that of the greatest ancient poets. Fraunce included more than eighty separate illustrations from Gerusalemme liberata, alongside quotations from Homer, Virgil, and modern European authors, in The Arcadian Rhetorike. The Italian poet could also have found himself placed, alongside his predecessor Ariosto, in similarly elevated company as an epic model in Spenser’s ‘A Letter of the Authors’ addressed to Sir Walter Raleigh at the end of the 1590 Faerie Queene, and, a few years after his death, in Daniel’s A Defence of Ryme (1603), where Tasso’s recent epic achievement in ottava rima verse was cited as decisive proof of the failure of a mid-sixteenth-century Italian experiment with quantitative measures: Nor could it neuer induce Tasso the wonder of Italy, to write that admirable Poem of Ierusalem, comparable to the best of the ancients, in any other forme then the accustomed verse.6

While the emphasis in Eliot’s dialogue is primarily on Tasso’s notable literary achievements, it is the brief, original biographical detail about the poet’s love-induced madness, apparently occurring while the fictional speaker was actually in Italy, which is the most intriguing. It is curious, however, that the dialogue gives no indication of Tasso’s subsequent confinement by his patron, ostensibly as a direct response to this madness. The French essayist Montaigne, who claimed to have witnessed Tasso

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in person during his incarceration on a visit to Ferrara in late 1580, had reacted with an uncharacteristic lack of sympathy for the unnamed poet’s desperate plight, in his meditation on madness in the expanded ‘Apologie de Raymond Sebond’ (1582): Platon dit les melancholiques plus disciplinables et excellens; aussi n’en est-il point qui ayent tant de propension à la folie. Infinis esprits se trouvent ruinés par leur propre force et soupplesse. Qual saut vient de prendre, de sa propre agitation et allegresse, l’un des plus judicieux, ingenieux et plus formés à l’air de cette antique et pure poisie, qu’autre poete Italien aye de long temps esté? N’a il pas dequoy sçavoir gré à cette sienne vivacité meurtrière? à cette clarté qui l’a aveuglé? à cette exacte et tendue apprehension de la raison qui l’a mis sans raison? à la curieuse et laborieuse queste des sciences qui l’a conduit à la bestise? à cette rare aptitude aux exercices de l’ame, qui l’a rendu sans exercice et sans ame? J’eus plus de despit encore que de compassion, de le voir à Ferrare en si piteux estat, survivant à soymesmes, mesconnoissant et soy et ses ouvrages, lesquels, sans son sçeu, et toutesfois à sa veue, on a mis en lumiere incorrigez et informes.7

Eliot may have recalled this passage from Montaigne’s essay when he added to Goulart’s account the telling detail about the madness of the poet, whose identity was subsequently made clear in John Florio’s English translation of the Essayes, printed a decade later in 1603: Plato affirmeth, that melancholy minds are more excellent and disciplinable; So are there none more inclinable unto follie. Diverse spirits are seene to be overthrown by their own force, and proper nimblenesse. What a start hath one of the most judicious, ingenious, and most fitted unto the ayre of true ancient poesie (TORQUATO TASSO), lately gotten by his owne agitation and selfe-gladnesse, above all other Italian Poets that have been of a long time? Hath not he wherewith to be beholding unto this his killing vivacitie? unto this clearenesse, that hath so blinded him? unto his exact and far-reaching apprehension of reasons which hath made him voide of reason? unto the curious and labourious pursute of Sciences, that have brought him unto sottishnesse? unto this rare aptitude to the exercise of the minde, which hath made him without minde or exercise? I rather spited than pittied him, when I saw him at Ferrara, in so pitteous a plight, that he survived himself; misacknowledging both himself and his labours, which unwitting to him, and even to his face, have been published both uncorrected and maimed.8

Knowledge of Tasso’s imprisonment had certainly reached England by the time of Eliot’s survey of the poet’s achievements in 1593. A scurrilous poem in the second book of Sir John Harington’s Epigrams, not printed

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until 1618 but surviving in a presentation manuscript copy recently assigned to the mid-1590s,9 demonstrates the English poet and translator’s keen awareness of his Italian contemporary’s predicament, hinting at his ill-judged love in the ‘one little fault’, for which he had been so harshly punished by his ungrateful patron, and highlighting for the first time a marked disapproval of Duke Alfonso, which was to become such a prominent feature of many later English engagements with Tasso’s life, such as Byron’s ‘Lament of Tasso’ (1817): ‘To Itis, aliasse Ioyner, an vncleanly token convaid in cleanly tearms.’ Torquato Tasso, for one little fault,    that did perhaps merrit some small rebuke,    was by his sharpe and most vngratefull duke, Shut vp close prisoner in a loathsome vault. Where wanting pen and ynke by Princes order    his witt that walls of Adamant could pearse    found meanes to write his mind in exclent vearse for want of pen and ynke in piss and ordure. But thy dull witt damnd by Apollos crew    to Dungeon of disgrace, though free thy boddy    with pen nay print doth publish like a noddy.   ...    thou callst thy self vnproperly a Ioyner, Whose vearse hath quite disservd ryme from reason    Deserving for such rallying, and such bodging,    for this, Torquatos ynck, for that, his lodging. (II, 76, 1–11, 15–18)10

It is also likely that this imprisonment, as a result of his apparent love madness, became a significant element in a sadly lost contemporary English play called Tasso’s Melancholy, which was first performed in August 1594, indicating that the afterlife of his legendary biography in England had actually commenced even before the poet’s death in 1595, a point noted over a century ago by Sidney Lee in his Oxford lectures (1909) as a ‘graphic illustration’ and ‘luminous proof ’ of ‘the active interest which the English public showed, when the English Renaissance was flowering, in the personal experience of great contemporary leaders of continental literature’: Much may be gauged from the fact that the melancholy fortunes of Tasso’s concluding years were, while he was yet alive, the subject of a play, which was several times performed at the chief theatre in Elizabethan London.11

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Lee goes on to detail, with reference to Philip Henslowe’s theatrical records, at least ten performances of the play in 1594 and 1595 alone, including one only weeks after Tasso’s untimely death at the end of April 1595. ‘Tasso’s Robe’ and ‘Tasso’s Picture’ were still listed as part of the inventory of the Rose Theatre in 1598, and the play seems to have been revived and revised, by Thomas Dekker, in 1601, around the time of the first wave of popularity of Hamlet at the rival Globe Theatre. A few years later, in an essay on ‘Tasso and Shakespeare’s England’ (1918), Lee again turned his attention to the lost Tasso’s Melancholy, focusing this time specifically on the early seventeenth-century revival: The playgoer of Elizabethan London was thus offered during the same theatrical season an opportunity of contrasting in mimetic representation the pathetic melancholia of Tasso with the no less moving melancholy of Shakespeare’s Prince of Denmark. ... England well deserves the credit of honouring Tasso’s genius and of lamenting his misfortunes with a promptitude and a sincerity which have few parallels in the contemporary history of literary appreciation.12

In the same essay Lee argues that Tasso’s literary influence could also be detected in contemporary plays intended for the London public stage, suggesting that ‘Tasso’s chronicle of the city’s recovery by Christian warriors furnished the anonymous dramatist with his theme’ for another lost play, Jerusalem (1592).13 While it is impossible to verify any potential indebtedness to Gersualemme liberata in this specific play, there is some evidence to demonstrate the swift impact of Tasso’s epic on the English stage. Lee also draws attention to Thomas Heywood’s The Foure Prentises of London. With the Conquest of Ierusalem, not printed until 1615 but probably dating from the early 1590s,14 in relation to Tasso’s poem. This curious dramatised ‘crusading romance’, in which the historical protagonists of the First Crusade are improbably relocated to London as apprentices in various trades at the start of the play, shares many of its principal characters, such as Godfrey of Bulloigne, Eustace, and Tancred, with Tasso, although Manion has recently suggested that there is no direct source for the play’s plot, and fails even to mention the Italian poem as a possible influence.15 There is, however, one moment that certainly indicates Heywood’s awareness of Tasso’s poem, and particularly the initial impact the alluring enchantress Armida has on her arrival at the Christian camp. When, en route to the Holy Land, the beautiful Bella Franca, an invented sister for Godfrey and his three brothers, becomes a cause of amorous conflict between the chief Christian crusaders, including

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Robert of Normandy, Tancred, and all her unwitting brothers, she is quick to challenge the soldiers about the dissent in the ranks that their competitive behaviour is provoking: Princes, what means this frenzy in your hearts? Or hath some Necromanticke Coniurer Rais’d by his Art some fury in my shape, To worke sedition in the Christian campe? You haue confirm’d by generall Parliament A Statute, that must stand inuiolate: Namely, that mutiny in Prince or Pesant Is death, a Kingdome cannot saue his life: Then whence proceed these strange contentions?16

In canto IV of Tasso’s poem, after the memorable infernal council at the beginning, the pagan magician Idraote determines to send his beautiful niece, the enchantress Armida, to the enemy camp expressly to sow dissension among the Christian soldiers by appealing for their pity, and using her feminine wiles to distract as many of them as possible from their military quest. Although Tasso’s figure of Armida is a real woman rather than a spirit illusion, this is clearly the literary precedent that Bella Franca has in mind when she suggests to the crusaders that they are responding to her as if ‘some fury in my shape’ had been magically summoned to cause similar disruption. In the one clear allusion to Tasso’s epic on the English stage before his death in 1595, it is striking that Heywood was drawn to the first appearance in the poem of the character of Armida, one of the central figures in the later romantic episode that was to prove the most widely imitated and adapted in the entire poem across a range of art forms, verbal, visual, and musical throughout Europe. In one of the two principal strands of this study I will endeavour to trace the reception and artistic afterlives in England, from the 1590s through to the eighteenth century, of this key episode, focused on the amorous interlude of Armida and Rinaldo in her enchanted garden in cantos XV and XVI, after she has kidnapped and unwittingly fallen in love with the Christian hero. The first chapter will concentrate initially, as in Heywood’s contemporaneous allusion, on the literary impact of Armida’s arrival in the poem, examining how the poets Abraham Fraunce and Samuel Daniel both responded to canto IV of Tasso’s poem: in The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588), the earliest example of English engagement with Gerusalemme liberata, only seven years after its appearance in print, Fraunce drew most heavily on this canto of the

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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 fully with the figure of Armida herself, as 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 or acknowledged. The opening chapter will also examine the numerous English poetic responses in the first half of the 1590s to the celebrated song from the later amorous episode, the canto della rosa heard in Armida’s garden in canto XVI, in translations and imitations by Robert Southwell, Edmund Spenser, and Daniel, as well as allusions in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593), to demonstrate how swift and pervasive the impact of Tasso’s epic on late Elizabethan verse was. Spenser’s version of this carpe florem rose song constitutes an important element of the best-known and most extensive imitation of Tasso’s poem in all of English literature, his re-imagining and re-working of Armida’s enchanted garden in cantos XV and XVI as the Bowre of Blisse in the final canto of Book II of The Faerie Queene (1590). Spenser’s almost immediate engagement with Gerusalemme liberata in his own romantic epic has long seen him acknowledged as ‘l’arbitro della gloria del Tasso nel primo mezzo secolo della sua vita in Inghilterra’, ‘the arbiter of Tasso’s glory in the first half century of his life in England’.17 However, despite the voluminous work on Spenser’s episode and its sources, which have, according to Hester Lees-Jeffries, attracted ‘something approaching a canon of criticism, from Lewis to Greenblatt and beyond, which adds to, and indeed almost parallels, the “thick” texture of the passage, the way in which it is overburdened with material deception, amplification, and intertextuality’,18 the profound indebtedness to Tasso throughout has, perhaps surprisingly, still not been fully appreciated and acknowledged. The second chapter of this study will therefore offer a detailed re-evaluation of the relationship between the two episodes, to try to underline the sustained imitative virtuosity of Spenser’s emulation of his principal source, while remaining mindful, in relation to Tasso and his poem specifically, of Wiggins’s pertinent warning, about another significant sixteenth-century Italian epic model and its author, that ‘Spenser criticism too often treats the Orlando Furioso (a great – albeit, in our time, unread – classic of Western literature) as a footnote to The Faerie Queene and leaves Ariosto looking like a minor author’.19 That Spenser regarded Tasso as a major author and Gerusalemme liberata as a significant new epic model is indicated not only in the considerable attention he paid to the

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Rinaldo and Armida episode, but also in the prescient way in which he seems to both reflect and pre-empt its enormous popularity in other artistic media. The emphasis that Spenser places on both the musical and, particularly, the pictorial elements of Tasso’s descriptive verse in his artful poetic elaborations highlights how these very features were already starting to appeal to visual artists and composers across Italy and much of Europe by the end of the sixteenth century. The third chapter will investigate the impact in England of visual depictions of scenes from Tasso’s romantic episodes, featuring both Rinaldo and Armida and the almost equally popular Tancredi and Erminia, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although in England, unlike Italy, France, and the Netherlands, no native tradition of pictorial representation of Tasso’s poem was ever to develop, there is still evidence of a keen interest in such pictures at various moments: in the late 1620s the Dutch artist Anthony Van Dyck received a commission for King Charles I to produce a depiction of the Rinaldo and Armida episode, focused, as I will demonstrate, on a less familiar moment from canto XIV, which he executed so successfully that it seems to have been instrumental in bringing the painter into the service of the English king for the final decade of his career. The early eighteenth century witnessed the arrival in England of the first work by probably the greatest artist to have paid significant visual attention to Tasso’s poem, the French painter Nicolas Poussin, who repeatedly depicted scenes from a number of episodes during the 1620s and 1630s: his second version of the Tancredi and Erminia episode in canto XIX was purchased and taken to England in the early Georgian period by the painter and collector Sir James Thornhill, and it was soon to inspire a detailed and thoughtful evaluation in relation to its literary source by the artist and critic Jonathan Richardson, which I will also examine closely. The influence of Tasso’s poem on Italian composers was no less sudden and momentous. Madrigal settings of stanzas from Gerusalemme liberata began to appear almost immediately after its first printing in 1581, and continued in popularity until at least the 1620s, by which time the poem’s romantic episodes had also started to find favour as a source for operatic libretti. Perhaps inevitably, the story of Rinaldo and Armida proved to be the most popular of these, and eventually, by the end of the seventeenth century, this phenomenon had reached the musical stage in England, via Italy, France, and even Germany. The fourth chapter will explore ambitious musical adaptations of the episode for the London stage in

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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 somewhat 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 visual and musical works, founded often closely but sometimes more freely on the Italian poem, which provide the central focus of the study in Chapters 3 and 4, help to demonstrate the breadth of Tasso’s impact in England, both chronologically and across a range of art forms, but they perhaps also indicate, as Arnaldo di Benedetto has suggested, that ‘i temi della Liberata ebbero una fortuna pittorica (nonché musicale) parzialmente autonoma del testo letterario’, ‘the themes of the Liberata have had a pictorial, not to say musical, fortune partially autonomous from the literary text’.20 By the middle of the eighteenth century interest in Tasso across Europe was beginning to move away from his epic poem and other literary achievements, and back towards the predominantly unhappy events of his life. Although English translations of Gerusalemme liberata continued to appear in print regularly during the eighteenth and indeed nineteenth centuries,21 attention in England was also drawn once again increasingly towards the troubled man, who would come to be regarded by the early decades of the nineteenth century almost as ‘a prototype of the Romantic poet, loving passionately but hopelessly and above his station, the victim of political oppression, maintaining his dignity and essential nobility of heart through intense and prolonged suffering, the hypersensitive creative artist at odds with society, wandering restlessly from court to court or chained in a lunatic’s cell’.22 The second principal strand of this study will trace and analyse, in the fifth chapter and the conclusion, the development of such views about Tasso himself, from the earliest English biographical account in 1748 to the last at the turn of the twentieth century, and also in the many imaginative engagements with aspects of the poet’s legendary biography, such as his prolonged imprisonment in Ferrara, which were to become such a prominent feature of both English and European responses to him in the nineteenth century: L’immagine del Tasso sembra vivere, nella prospettiva della tradizione critica e letteraria, non soltanto per quelle linee e per quelle luci che vengono fuori dalla sua poesia, ma ancora (e con intensità tutta ­particolare,

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che non si ritrova in molti altri scrittori) per quelle suggestioni che derivano dai gesti e dalle vicende della biografia. (The image of Tasso seems to live on, from the perspective of both a critical and literary tradition, not only through those lines and from those lights which issue from his own poetry, but also, and with a particular intensity which is not be found in many other writers, from those suggestions that derive from the actions and the fortunes of his biography.)23

After the initial burst of interest in Tasso’s life before and after his death in 1595, there were to be no further English allusions to his imprisonment and troubled romantic history until towards the middle of the seventeenth century. On this occasion it does appear to have been the first Italian biographer, Manso, who was directly responsible for perpetuating the story of the poet’s attachment to Princess Leonora d’Este. In November and December 1638 John Milton benefitted from the Marquis of Villa’s hospitality during his stay in Naples, and, to demonstrate his gratitude, composed a Latin poem for his host before his departure. The poem Mansus makes much of Manso’s ‘felix concordia’, ‘happy friendship’ (7), with, and patronage of, both Tasso and Giambattista Marino, alluding directly to the Italian’s biographies of both (although that of the latter poet has not survived), and suggesting that these memorials of the poets’ lives will help to ensure Manso’s own literary immortality alongside theirs: Fortunate senex! Ergo quacunque per orbem Torquati decus et nomen celebrabitur ingens, Claraque perpetui succrescet fama Marini, Tu quoque in ora frequens venies plausumque virorum, Et parili carpes iter immortale volatu. (49–53) (Therefore, fortunate old man, wherever Torquato’s glory and great name shall be celebrated throughout the world, wherever the brilliant fame of enduring Marino waxes, your praises too will frequently be on men’s lips, and flying by their side you shall enjoy their immortal flight.)24

Milton’s words proved to be prophetic, certainly in the case of the earlier Italian poet, although whether Manso’s biography has had an entirely beneficial impact on the legacy of Tasso’s ‘nomen’ is perhaps open to question. Milton evidently knew Manso’s Vita, and probably also discussed Tasso’s life directly with its author in Naples. In the second of three Latin epigrams composed while in Italy, and later printed, like Mansus, in the Poemata of 1645, addressed to the Neapolitan singer Leonora Baroni,

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whose captivating voice enchanted the English poet at a performance in Rome, Milton alludes specifically to Tasso’s unhappy love for the other Leonora: Altera Torquatum cepit Leonora poetam, Cuius ab insano cessit amore furens. Ah miser ille tuo quanto felicius aevo Perditus, et propter te, Leonora, foret! Et te Pieria sensisset voce canentem Aurea maternae fila movere lyrae! Quamvis Dircaeo torsisset lumina Pentheo Saevior, aut totus desipuisset iners, Tu tamen errantes caeca vertigine sensus Voce eadem poteras composuisse tua; Et poteras, aegro spirans sub corde quietem, Flexanimo cantu restituisse sibi.

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(Another Leonora captivated the poet Torquato, who for frenzied love of her went mad. Ah, poor unfortunate! How much more happily had he been lost in your times and for love of you, Leonora! He would have heard you singing with Pierian voice as the golden strings of your mother’s lyre moved in harmony. Though he had rolled his eyes more fiercely than Dircean Pentheus, or all insensible had raved, yet you by your voice could have composed his senses wandering in their blind whirl; and, inspiring his distempered heart with peace, you could have restored him to himself with your soul-moving song.)25

Milton, however, is much more explicit in attributing Tasso’s madness to his ‘amore furens’ than Manso ever was in his biography. Whether Milton’s description was informed by the personal views of the Italian patron expressed later in private conversation, or whether it exaggerated the motive and extent of the poet’s madness, imagining him raving insensibly with rolling eyes, in order to emphasise the potentially curative impact of this other Leonora’s singing voice, this epigram was the first work by an English poet to create a vivid verbal picture of the Italian poet driven to distraction by love. In a similar way to Milton’s prophecy of literary immortality for both poet and biographer in Mansus, the poem itself foreshadows the later English and European-wide fascination for imaginative engagement with Tasso’s love-induced madness. Among a host of poems, plays, operas, and paintings, spanning the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries and much of Western Europe, Tasso was to emerge as the central figure in literary and artistic works by Goethe,

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Byron, Leopardi, Delacroix, Baudelaire, and Liszt to name only a few of the most prominent, as I will demonstrate in Chapter 5. By the early years of the twentieth century, however, the fame of Tasso and his work in England had already started to wane. In 1918, only a decade after the publication of the last English biography of the Italian poet, William Boulting’s Tasso and his Times (1907), Sidney Lee appraised the contemporary fortunes of the poet, who he had suggested ‘was for Shakespeare’s England a living force in a sense which fails to apply to any other of the great Italian company’, and was moved to lament that ‘well justified would be a revival in England of that sympathetic interest in the Gerusalemme Liberata and its author, the beginnings of which go back to the day when the work first issued from the press, and first uplifted the spirit of Italy and Western Europe’.26 This study of Tasso’s literary, artistic, and biographical afterlives is expressly an attempt to stimulate such a revival of ‘sympathetic interest’ in a now undeservedly underappreciated epic masterpiece and its fascinating poet, almost a century after Lee’s plea, and half a century since the last book-length account of Tasso’s reception and influence in England. It was a chance encounter some twenty years ago with C. P. Brand’s book Torquato Tasso, published in 1965, which provided a key starting point for my own study: while Brand’s second section still offers an excellent wide-ranging overview of the literary reception of Tasso’s life and work in England, it did not attempt to address, as I have subsequently done, the simultaneous and long-standing impact of the poet’s work, particularly his epic Gerusalemme liberata, on opera and the visual arts. notes  1 George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, ed. Terence Cave (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 46.  2 Eliot, Daniel Deronda, pp. 46–7.  3 See Pierantonio Serassi, La Vita di Torquato Tasso (Bergamo, 1785).  4 Giovanni Battista Manso, Vita di Torquato Tasso (Venice, 1621).  5 John Eliot, Ortho-epia Gallica. Eliots Fruits for the French (London, 1593), pp. 30–1.  6 Samuel Daniel, Poems and a Defence of Ryme, ed. Arthur C. Sprague (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950), p. 141.  7 Michel de Montaigne, Les Essais, 2, ed. P. Villey, V. L. Saulnier, and M. Conche (Paris: Quadrige / PUF, 2004), p. 492. For a consideration of whether Montaigne did actually encounter Tasso directly in Italy, see Ayesha Ramachandran, ‘Montaigne’s Tasso: madness, melancholy and the enigma

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of Italy’, Forum Italicum, 47 (2013), 246–62: pp. 253–4, and Concetta Cavallini, L’Italianisme de Michel de Montaigne (Paris: Presse de l’Université de ParisSorbonne, 2003), pp. 127–41.  8 John Florio, The Essayes of Montaigne, ed. J. I. M. Stewart (London: Nonesuch Press, 1931), p. 438.  9 The Epigrams of Sir John Harington, ed. Gerard Kilroy (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), p. 68. 10 The Epigrams of Sir John Harington, ed. Kilroy,p. 157. 11 Sidney Lee, The French Renaissance in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), pp. 11–12. 12 Sir Sidney Lee, ‘Shakespeare and Tasso’s England’ in Elizabethan and Other Essays, ed. F. S. Boas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929), pp. 169–83: pp. 182–3; see also C. P. Brand, Torquato Tasso: a Study of the Poet and of his Contribution to English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 206. 13 Lee, ‘Shakespeare and Tasso’s England’, p. 181. 14 See Lee Manion, Narrating the Crusades: Loss and Recovery in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 174, and Fenella Macfarlane, ‘“To try what London Prentices can do”: merchant chivalry as representational strategy in Thomas Heywood’s The Four Prentices of London’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 13 (2001), 136–64. 15 Manion, Narrating the Crusades, pp. 187–8. 16 Thomas Heywood, The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood, 2 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), p. 209. 17 Alberto Castelli, La Gerusalemme liberata nella Inghilterra di Spenser (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1936), p. 130. 18 Hester Lees-Jeffries, England’s Helicon: Fountains in Early Modern Literature and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 171. 19 Peter DeSa Wiggins, ‘Spenser’s anxiety’, Modern Language Notes, 103 (1988), 75–86: p. 75. 20 Arnaldo di Benedetto, Tra Rinascimento e Barocco: dal petrarchismo a Torquato Tasso (Florence: Società Editrice Fiorentina, 2007), p. 109. 21 See Brand, Torquato Tasso, pp. 263–72, for details. 22 Brand, Torquato Tasso, p. 205. 23 Giovanni Getto, ‘Approssimazione biografica’ in Malinconia di Torquato Tasso (Naples: Ligouri editore, 1979), pp. 9–26: p. 9. All translations from the Italian in the book are mine, unless otherwise stated. 24 The Latin Poems of John Milton, ed. and trans. Walter MacKellar (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), pp. 156–7. 25 The Latin Poems of John Milton, ed. and trans. MacKellar, pp. 110–13. 26 Lee, ‘Shakespeare and Tasso’s England’, p. 170. Interestingly, Boulting’s biography has been reprinted frequently in the past decade.

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1 ‘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 fame of Torquato Tasso’s long-awaited epic poem Gerusalemme liberata, finally printed in a complete if unauthorised and unrevised edition in Parma in 1581, spread to England almost immediately. By 1584 a Latin translation, by Scipio Gentili, of the opening two cantos and the first part of the fourth canto had been printed in London by John Wolfe, with dedications to the queen and Sir Philip Sidney respectively, and the poem and its imprisoned author had already become the toast of literary circles at court, as revealed in a letter home of the same year by the immigrant language teacher and editor of many of Wolfe’s Italian publications, Iacopo Castelvetro: Nè mi resta altro caldamente pregarla di favorirmi di scrivermi, se il povero Tasso vada tuttavia componendo cosa alcuna, o no: che Vostra Signoria sappia, che un illustre cavaliere me l’ha domandato, dicendo che Sua Maestà gli ha imposto d’informasene; e componendo egli cosa che vaglia, mi farebbe un segnalatissimo favore a mandarmene un esempio, onde ne la prego quanto più posso e so, assicurandola che questa reina non stima meno avventuroso il Serenissimo nostra Duca per aver cotesto gran poeta cantate le sue loda, che sì facesse Alessandro Achille, per avere egli avuto il grande Omero; e mi dicono che ella ne sappia di già molte stanze a mente. (There only remains for me to ask you warmly to do me the favour of letting me know whether poor Tasso is nevertheless continuing to compose anything, or not: you should know that an illustrious knight has asked me about it, saying that Her Majesty ordered him to find out; if he is producing anything worthwhile, you would be doing me a most conspicuous service by sending me an example of it, so I beseech you to my utmost, assuring you that the queen does not regard His Highness our duke any less fortunate to have his praises sung by this great poet than Alexander the Great

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did Achilles to have had the great Homer to praise him; and I’m told that she has already learnt many stanzas off by heart.)1

It would be fascinating to know exactly which parts of the epic were being memorised by Queen Elizabeth in the mid-1580s, particularly as the literary reception of the poem in England shortly thereafter was to follow the pattern already emerging in Italy and France, in focusing primarily on the romantic and pastoral episodes rather than the principal Crusade narrative itself. The episode that was to become the most celebrated and widely imitated in a range of art forms throughout Europe for at least the next 250 years, the amorous interlude of the Christian hero Rinaldo and the pagan enchantress Armida in cantos XIV to XVI, had already started to attract significant literary interest in England within a decade of the poem’s publication. This interest both anticipated and mirrored French literary responses to the poem, best exemplified in Pierre Joulet’s prose refacimento of the episode in Les Amours d’Armide (1596), which had run through ten editions by 1614 and also survives in an early seventeenthcentury manuscript translation into English by the poet and noted translator of Italian and Italianate materials Robert Tofte. The earliest and still most widely recognised example of profound imitative engagement with Tasso’s episode in England can be found in Book II of The Faerie Queene, printed in 1590, as Mario Praz confirmed more than fifty years ago in an important essay on ‘Tasso in England’: It is only, however, through Spenser’s imitations in The Faerie Queene that Tasso really penetrated into English literature, with an accent which was to be found typical of him also in the following centuries, the accent of voluptuous enchantment and elegiac peace, a languorous and suave perfection.2

Although it is undeniable that Spenser, like so many readers after him, was drawn predominantly to the episode best exemplifying the attractive languor and ‘voluptuous enchantment’ of Tasso’s epic verse at its most mellifluous, it is difficult to sustain the argument that this accent is merely reproduced in the English poet’s sustained re-working of the Rinaldo and Armida sequence at key junctures in Book II of his own epic poem, as I will demonstrate in the next chapter. Perhaps the most striking aspect of Spenser’s attention to Tasso’s extended episode focusing on their love is his almost total disregard of Rinaldo and Armida themselves. Many visual and aural elements of Armida’s enchanted garden in cantos XV and XVI can be detected in Acrasia’s Bowre of Blisse,3 but

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Tasso’s beautiful enchantress is herself barely recognisable in the transformation into Spenser’s more sinister soul-sucking witch. The sympathy that Tasso generates, at least partially, for Armida in her love for Rinaldo, and particularly in her Dido-like grandeur in the lament as an abandoned lover in canto XVI, is completely absent in Spenser’s conception of Acrasia. While Tasso’s most celebrated episode marked its advent into English verse in the Bowre of Blisse, it is not quite true that, as Brand suggests, ‘with the exception of Spenser ... the immediate impact of the Liberata on English literature is not obvious’:4 rather it is necessary to look elsewhere, in both Tasso’s poem and English poetry of the early 1590s, to detect the almost simultaneous and yet more obscure arrival of the figure of Armida herself, in the perhaps unanticipated form of the ghost of a long-dead and ambiguously sympathetic royal mistress. The earliest sustained attention to Tasso’s epic in English letters predates Spenser’s imitations, however, and it is noteworthy that the Italian poem was almost immediately granted a status comparable to the ancient epics of Greece and Rome. In The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588) Abraham Fraunce cites passages from Tasso’s poem, alongside illustrations from Homer, Virgil, Sidney, Spenser, Petrarch, du Bartas, Boscan, and Garcilaso, to exemplify particular rhetorical precepts and figures. There are over eighty separate quotations from Gerusalemme liberata in the handbook (alongside others from Tasso’s pastoral drama Aminta, which Fraunce himself translated into English in 1591, and also from the recently printed tragedy Il Re Torrismondo), together constituting well over 300 lines of Tasso’s epic verse. An examination of the passages that Fraunce was drawn to in his search for pertinent rhetorical illustrations offers a revealing insight into the early reception of Tasso’s poem in England. Most of the quotations are either two or four lines long, although single lines are also cited, as are a few complete eight-line stanzas and occasionally even consecutive ones (the longest single quotation runs to twenty-six lines); perhaps unsurprisingly, the majority of illustrations are found in the earlier cantos of the poem, with well over half being taken from the first four cantos (out of twenty in total), although there are only a couple of brief quotations from canto III. Even with this preponderance of attention to the first part of the poem, however, there are indications that Fraunce’s interest in Tasso’s epic foreshadows the earliest literary responses in focusing predominantly on characters involved in the romantic interludes. For example, of the eighteen illustrations from canto II, almost half are from the brief Sofronia and Olindo episode, with Fraunce even citing one line on three separate

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occasions (as an example of polyptoton, exclamation, and communication respectively): ‘Ahi! tanto amò la non amante amata’, ‘Oh! How much he loved the non-loving beloved’ (II, 28, 8).5 The most quoted canto beyond the opening four is canto XII, which relates the fierce battle between Tancredi and Clorinda, resulting in the death of the pagan female warrior, who, as the object of the Christian knight’s unrequited love, dies unwittingly by his hand.6 Most of the eight illustrations from the canto relate to this episode, including a reference to the prolonged addubitation (‘a kind of deliberation with our selves’) of ‘Tancrede, when he perceived that he had slaine Clorinda’ (XII, 73–9 and 81–3).7 Fraunce’s attention, however, was drawn most consistently to the character of Armida. The episode of Rinaldo’s amorous enslavement and subsequent rescue from Armida’s garden in canto XVI is the subject of five illustrations, including a reference to ‘a singular addubitation of Armida when Rinaldo fled’ (XVI, 63–7) and the longest single quotation from the poem, where Fraunce cites in its entirety the speaking parrot’s carpe florem song in her garden as an example of prosopopoeia (XVI, 13–16). This is the earliest reference in England to the celebrated canto della rosa, which was soon to be imitated closely by Spenser in The Faerie Queene, as well as by a number of other English poets in the early 1590s, as will be considered later in this chapter. Fraunce’s principal interest, however, was directed towards the canto in which the pagan enchantress enters the poem for the first time. The seventy-two lines quoted from canto IV by Fraunce, in thirteen separate illustrations, constitute the most from any single canto. Only four of these illustrations relate to the diabolical council at the start of the canto; the remainder all focus on Armida’s initial appearance before the Christian army, where she attempts to persuade Goffredo to assist her by relating a false story of exile from her rightful kingdom, and to create discord among the troops by means of her physical charms, as advised by her uncle in one of Fraunce’s examples of Tasso’s use of metaphor: ‘Vela il soverchio ardir con la vergogna, / e fa’ manto del vero a la menzogna’, ‘veil your overwhelming desire with modesty, and cover your lie with the mantle of truth’ (IV, 25, 7–8).8 Fraunce is certainly responsive to Tasso’s evocation of Armida’s alluring beauty (citing, for example, the description of her mouth in IV, 30, 7–8), but is drawn more towards the powerful poetic representation of her gesture and speech, the means by which she seeks to persuade Goffredo, albeit initially unsuccessfully. He cites an entire stanza (IV, 69) in which the Christian captain explains his reasons for refusing her,

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and a further three consecutive stanzas (IV, 71–3, in two separate quotations illustrating exclamation and addubitation respectively), in which Armida expresses her despair at this refusal so eloquently and pathetically that Eustazio subsequently persuades his brother Goffredo to change his mind. The devastating impact of this ‘finto dolor’ (IV, 77, 1) on the unsuspecting Christian forces is illustrated in two further quotations stressing the enchanting power of her Siren’s voice (‘e in voce di sirena a i suoi concenti / addormentar le piú svegliate menti’, ‘and with a siren’s melody to keep / the most vigilant minds lulled fast asleep’: IV, 86, 7–8), and the image of a golden chain emanating from her lips, which binds the souls of the enchanted soldiers: ‘esce da vaghe labra aurea catena / che l’alme a suo voler prende ed affrena’, ‘from her delightful lips a golden chain / puts their souls under her will’s spur and rein’, IV, 83, 7–8).9 It is worth detailing these illustrations from canto IV at some length, as they indicate a conspicuously strong reaction to Armida’s arrival in the poem by an early English reader, analogous almost to that of the enamoured Christian soldiers within the poem itself. Strikingly the earliest English poem to engage directly with the figure of Tasso’s enchantress draws heavily on this same episode, giving equal emphasis to the methods of feminine allurement that appear to have so enticed Fraunce only a few years earlier. daniel’s ‘the complaint of rosamond’ and tasso’s armida Samuel Daniel’s ‘The Complaint of Rosamond’ was first printed early in 1592 in a debut volume of poetry that frequently advertises the poet’s detailed knowledge of Tasso’s lyric and epic verse. An investigation into the means of Daniel’s acquisition of this knowledge helps to provide specific insight into his discovery of the irresistible charms of Tasso’s Armida. Daniel’s keen and life-long engagement with Tasso’s poetry seems to have begun in earnest during his lengthy sojourn in Italy (from March 1590 to November 1591) with his patron Sir Edward Dymoke.10 Many of the Italian sonnets, by Tasso and other less celebrated sixteenthcentury sonneteers, which Daniel chose to imitate in his Delia sequence, also printed in the 1592 volume, appear to have been first encountered in Italy in miscellaneous verse anthologies, rather than in editions of the works of specific poets.11 One such anthology, with which Daniel was certainly familiar, a Genoese collection edited by Cristoforo Zabata in 1579, was especially notable, as it printed as a coda to the second volume

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the earliest extract from Tasso’s highly anticipated epic poem.12 This extract contained all of canto IV as it was to be printed (with a few additions and revisions) in the first complete editions of Gerusalemme liberata only a couple of years later. Canto IV opens dramatically with the arrival of ‘il gran nemico de l’umane genti’, ‘the great enemy of mankind’ (IV, 1, 3), in the poem and Tasso’s account of Satan’s council in hell, a scene rendered so vividly that its impact on Milton’s poetic imagination in the latter half of the seventeenth century is readily discernible in Paradise Lost.13 The canto is equally memorable, however, for the first appearance of the beautiful enchantress Armida. She is sent in response to diabolical urgings by her magician uncle to cause dissension in the Christian ranks by any means possible: specifically both ‘ogn’arte feminil ch’amore alletti’, ‘every feminine art that entices love’ (IV, 25, 2), and a rhetorical appeal for male pathos in a long feigned tale, which lasts for more than a quarter of the entire canto (some twenty-five out of ninety cantos, as printed in 1579). There is strong evidence in ‘The Complaint of Rosamond’ to suggest that Daniel’s poetic response to Tasso’s Armida was prompted by this initial exposure to her in the canto printed in isolation in Zabata’s collection, although it becomes clear from his first volume as a whole that the English poet had soon familiarised himself with Armida’s wider role in the Italian poem, particularly the celebrated amorous interlude with Rinaldo. It is the combination of affective female persuasion and the ‘sweet silent rethorique’ (121) of feminine beauty, the two most striking aspects of Armida’s first appearance in the poem, that leads Daniel to make the unexpected association between his spectral Rosamond and Tasso’s enchantress. Daniel’s poem opens, in keeping with the English female complaint tradition acknowledged in the early reference to Churchyard’s ‘Shores wife’ (25),14 with the appearance of Rosamond’s spirit, from a conspicuously Classical underworld, where Charon the ferryman has denied her passage to the Elysian fields, ‘and sayes [her] soule can neuer passe that Riuer, / Till Louers sighes on earth shall it deliuer’ (13–14). This need for human pity motivates Rosamond’s decision to seek out the English poet, and the first eight stanzas of the poem constitute her initial (and successful) attempt at rhetorical persuasion, as her ‘myserable ghost’: Comes to sollicit thee, since others faile, To take this taske, and in thy wofull Song, To forme my case, and register my wrong.

(33–5)15

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The plea for help might be made in specifically legal language, as Heather Dubrow has noted,16 but it is the emotional affect of the appeal itself rather than the justice of her case that persuades Daniel’s poet, who is ‘mou’d with a tender care / And pittie’ (57–8) by it, to retell Rosamond’s story in her own words, and thus defend her disgraced reputation. Armida’s prolonged appeal for help from Goffredo and the Christian forces in Tasso’s poem is similarly predicated on this combination of a desire for legal justice and retribution, albeit in relation to a completely false story in her case, and a keen awareness of the emotional impact that the relating of the tale itself might have on its intended male audience. After listening to her story Goffredo does indeed feel pity for her apparent plight (‘in lui pietoso affetto / si desta, che non dorme in nobil petto’, ‘in him the emotion of pity awakens, which never sleeps in noble breast’: IV, 65, 7–8),17 but he still refuses her request for military support, as it would prove a distraction from his divinely-inspired mission to recapture Jerusalem. The majority of the Christian army, however, is much more deeply affected by both the tale and its teller, to the extent that, in the 1579 version, Goffredo eventually overturns his initial decision, with devastating consequences for the subsequent progress of the Crusade: Questo finto dolor da molti elice lagrime vere, e i cor piú duri spetra. Ciascun con lei s’affligge, e fra sé dice: ‘Se mercé de Goffredo or non impetra, ben fu rabbiosa tigre a lui nutrice.’

(IV, 77, 1–5)

(This show of grief lured many a genuine tear, melting the sternest-hearted of the men. Everyone quietly said, grieving with her, ‘If even now she gains no mercy, then a savage tiger gave our captain suck.’)18

This shared emphasis on the persuasive power of female rhetoric on a male audience in the two poems might as yet seem too imprecise an indicator of any direct connection to Tasso’s introduction of Armida in canto IV, but Daniel’s depiction of Rosamond’s physical beauty and her awareness of its power in the story she goes on to relate make explicit his indebtedness. The impact of Rosamond’s arrival at the court of Henry II is conveyed in an image taken directly from Tasso’s description of the first sighting of Armida in the Christian camp:

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Looke howe a Comet at the first appearing, Drawes all mens eyes with wonder to behold it: ... So did the blasing of my blush appeere, T’ amaze the world, that holds such sights so deere. Dopo non molti dí vien la donzella dove spiegate i Franchi avean le tende. A l’apparir de la beltà novella nasce un bisbiglio e’ l guardo ognun v’intende sí come là dove cometa o stella, non piú vista di giorno, in ciel resplende.

(113–19)

(IV, 28, 1–6)

(Only a few days later the girl arrives where the French army has pitched its tents. At the appearance of this new beauty a murmur arises, and everyone’s gaze is averted towards her, as it is towards a comet or a star, which, never before seen by day, shines in the sky.) 19

Daniel’s first borrowing from Tasso in ‘Rosamond’ was recognised almost immediately by at least one contemporary English poet: Francis Davison’s copy of Il Goffredo, overo Gierusalemme liberata (1593), which later entered the collection of William Drummond, contains three separate marginal annotations, possibly made during or soon after a trip to Italy between 1595 and 1597, comparing Italian passages in canto IV to ‘Daniels Rosamonde’, the first of which appears alongside stanza 28.20 However, Davison himself failed to notice that in the following stanza Daniel again turned to Tasso, as Rosamond describes the overwhelming power of her ‘beauty Syren’ (120). Daniel’s stanza is an amalgamation and development of ideas in two consecutive stanzas from later in canto IV, in which Tasso demonstrates ‘ogn’ arte’ that Armida employs to entrap as many Christian lovers as possible in her web of deceit (IV, 87, 1–2), once Goffredo has reluctantly agreed to lend her military support. These ‘arti’ are described as being more powerful than the enchantments of both Circe and Medea, and Armida is said to have the ‘voce di sirena’, ‘voice of a siren’, in her ability to lull the alert senses of those who hear her speak (IV, 86, 4–8); both elements are condensed into Daniel’s opening line: Ah beauty Syren, fayre enchaunting good, Sweet silent rethorique of perswading eyes: Dombe eloquence, whose power doth moue the blood, More then the words, or wisedome of the wise: (120–3)21

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The principal emphasis in Daniel’s stanza, however, is not on the female voice itself, but rather on how the affective power of Rosamond’s silent visual beauty works as a similar but more strikingly potent form of rhetorical persuasion. The apparent incongruity in this extravagant selfdescription was emphasised and parodied mercilessly a few years later in Fastidious Brisk’s absurd appropriation of the lines in the printed text of Ben Jonson’s Every Man Out of his Humour (1600): I will bring you, to morrow by this time, into the presence of the most diuine & acute lady in court: you shall see sweet silent rhetorique, and dumbe eloquence speaking in her eye; but when shee speakes herself, such an anatomie of wit, so sinewis’d and arteriz’d, that ’tis the goodliest modell of pleasure that euer was, to behold. (III, iii, 22–7)22

In his characteristic point-scoring at the expense of Daniel’s verse,23 however, Jonson, like Davison, failed to detect that the two oymora which the English poet uses to convey this paradox in lines 2 and 3 of his stanza are, in fact, developed and, in the second example, translated directly from two analogous lines of Italian poetry describing the effect of Armida’s beauty: ‘e ciò che lingua esprimer ben non pote, / muta eloquenza ne’ suoi gesti espresse’, ‘and what her tongue could not express, her gestures expressed with mute eloquence’ (IV, 85, 5–6).24 The irresistible power of the female narrator’s ‘perswading eyes’ in Daniel’s poem is emphasised again shortly after in terms borrowed directly from Tasso’s Italian. On this occasion it is the great martial king, Henry II, Rosamond’s future paramour, who is ‘vanquisht by a glaunce’ from her eyes, which ‘hotter warres within his bosome breedes’ (164–5). The king’s military triumphs in France are contrasted with his current defencelessness in the face of Rosamond’s beauty: No armour might yet bee founde that coulde defend, Transpearcing rayes of Christall-pointed eyes: (169–70)25

Daniel’s image, and in particular its second line, appears to be a curious re-working of another simile in Tasso describing the effects of Armida’s beauty, which is in itself indebted to a passage in Dante’s Paradiso: Come per acqua o per cristallo intero trapassa il raggio, e no’l divide or parte, per entro il chiuso manto osa il pensiero sí penetrar ne la vietata parte.

(IV, 32, 1–4)

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(As, when through water or a whole crystal a ray of light passes and neither divides nor parts, so thought dares to penetrate beyond the closed mantle to the forbidden parts.)26

The conjunction of ‘Transpearcing rayes’ and ‘Christall’ in Daniel’s line clearly echoes Tasso, confirming that on occasion Daniel’s choice of specific words and images in ‘The Complaint of Rosamond’ was triggered directly by the Italian’s vocabulary, and suggesting either that Daniel had an exceptional facility for recalling Italian poetry or, more probably, that he had ready access to Tasso’s canto during the process of composition. In their respective contexts, the two apparently disparate images in fact describe a very similar effect, although in Tasso’s original it is the ‘amoroso pensier’, ‘amorous thought’ (IV, 31, 6), of the male observer’s gaze that penetrates beyond Armida’s clothing to the ‘occulti secreti’, ‘hidden secrets’ (IV, 31, 8), of her carefully concealed bosom, whereas in Daniel it is the rays from Rosamond’s crystal eyes that are able to pierce even the strongest defences of the king. What these borrowings from Tasso’s canto IV in relation to Rosamond’s physical beauty demonstrate is a significant connection in Daniel’s mind between the pagan enchantress Armida and his conception of the figure of the apparently wronged English royal mistress. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this initial association is the extent to which the two women come to understand the control over male passions that their outstanding physical beauty affords them: What might I then not doe whose powre was such? What cannot women doe that know theyr powre? What women knows it not I feare too much, How blisse or bale lyes in theyr laugh or lower? Queste fur l’arti onde mill’alme e mille prendea furtivamente ella poteo, anzi pur furon l’arme onde rapille ed a forza d’Amor serve le feo. Qual meraviglia or fia s’il fero Achille d’Amor fu preda, ed Ercole e Teseo, s’ancor chi per Giesú la spade cinge l’empio ne’ lacci suoi talora stringe?

(127–30)

(IV, 96, 1–8)

(These were the arts whereby she could surprise their spirits by the thousand, stealthily,

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or rather the arms that took them prisoner and forced them into loving slavery. But if fierce Achilles, Theseus, Hercules fell prey to love, what wonder should there be if those who sheathe the sword of Jesus find themselves caught in the impious Cupid’s bind?)27

The list of Classical figures distracted from their duty by love and feminine wiles serves as an important precedent for, and warning about, the predicaments that many of Tasso’s Christian military heroes will soon encounter in Gerusalemme liberata. Hercules is alluded to again later in the poem, at the beginning of canto XVI, as Carlo and Ubaldo approach Armida’s palace in their attempt to rescue Rinaldo from his equivalent amorous bondage. The story of Hercules’s enslavement at the hands of Iole (Tasso’s substitution for Ovid’s Omphale), in which the effeminised hero is seen weaving while she tries on his weapons, is told ekphrastically in the silverwork on the main entrance to the labyrinth surrounding Armida’s secret garden. The stanza on Hercules (XVI, 3) is immediately followed by a lengthier description of Antony’s flight in Cleopatra’s wake from the battle of Actium (XVI, 4–7), the other scene carved in silver on the gate. Both stories offer a clear analogy for Rinaldo’s own situation with Armida in the poem, but Carlo and Ubaldo are struck merely by the quality of the workmanship, which renders the figures so skilfully that they seem only to lack the power of speech, rather than any parallel with their fellow knight: Fermàr ne le figure il guardo intento, ché vinta la materia è dal lavoro: manca il parlar, di vivo altro non chiedi; né manca questo ancor, s’ a gli occhi credi.

(XVI, 2, 5–8)

(They cast an intense gaze on the figures, wherein the material was surpassed by the workmanship: they lacked only speech, you could not ask them to be any more life-like; indeed they did not even lack this, if you could entirely believe your eyes.)28

The English poem similarly uses an ekphrasis to provide a double Ovidian precedent for Rosamond’s situation after she has finally agreed to accede to Henry II’s advances, and it is the detail of art competing with nature in relation to both Tasso’s gate, and indeed the ensuing description of Armida’s garden more broadly, and Rosamond’s casket which seems to

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confirm for the first time that, like Spenser before him, Daniel was fully aware of the enchantress’s wider role in the rest of the poem, particularly the notorious amorous interlude with Rinaldo in cantos XV and XVI. On the eve of Rosamond’s first sexual liaison with the king, as she awaits him at the ‘solitarie Grange’ (366) far from court, Henry sends her a precious gift, one of the many ‘orators of loue: / Which (ah too well men know) doe women moue’ (370–1), the exquisite workmanship of which immediately seizes her full attention: He greets me with a Casket richly wrought So rare, that arte did seeme to striue with nature, T’expresse the cunning work-mans curious thought; The mistery whereof I prying sought. (373–6)29

The ‘richly wrought’ lid of Daniel’s casket, unlike the ‘litel cofre’ in his chronicle sources,30 details at some length the story of Amymone’s futile resistance to Neptune’s unwanted advances (379–99), and the engravings on the casket itself also relate, more briefly, Io’s transformation into a heifer at the hands of Jupiter (400–6), with both tales of a mortal woman overwhelmed by a lustful deity providing a clear parallel to Rosamond’s situation with the Jove-like king, a warning about a fate that she is fully able to comprehend, if unable ultimately to avoid: These presidents presented to my view, Wherein the presage of my fall was showne: Might haue fore-warn’d me well what would ensue, And others harmes haue made me shunne mine owne; But fate is not preuented though fore-knowne. (407–11)31

Although the instructive element of the stories may ultimately prove ineffective in averting Rosamond’s fall, their affective power is still much in evidence, particularly in the account of Amymone’s apparent rape, which leaves Rosamond feeling ‘something moued’ (400).32 The detail that touches her most is the unexpected correlation between Danaus’s daughter’s despair and her powerful physical beauty: There might I see described how she lay, At those proude feete, not satisfied with prayer: Wailing her heauie hap, cursing the day, In act so pittious to expresse dispaire: And by how much more greeu’d, so much more fayre;

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Her teares vpon her cheekes poore carefull gerle, Did seeme against the sunne cristal and perle. Whose pure cleere streames, which loe so faire appeares, Wrought hotter flames, O myracle of loue, That kindles fire in water, heate in teares, And makes neglected beautie mightier proue: Teaching afflicted eyes affects to moue; To shew that nothing ill becomes the fayre, But crueltie, that yeeldes vnto no prayer. (386–99)33

The characteristically Petrarchan conjunction of fire and water in relation to the incendiary effect of Amymone’s crystal and pearl tears on Neptune is actually another condensed translation from Tasso’s canto IV, as Francis Davison detected in his marginal annotations alongside stanzas 74 and 76,34 where the Italian poet describes in identical terms the miraculous impact on the Christian army of Armida’s crocodile tears after Goffredo’s initial rejection of her plea for help: Il pianto si spargea senza ritegno, com’ira suol produrlo a’ dolor mista, e le nascenti lagrime a vederle erano a i rai del sol cristallo e perle. ... Ma il chiaro umor, che di sí spesse stille le belle gote e ’l seno adorno rende, opra effetto di foco, il qual in mille petti serpe celato e vi s’apprende. O miracol d’Amor, che le faville tragge del pianto, e i cor ne l’acqua accende! (IV, 74, 5–8, and IV, 76, 1–6) ([She] took no hold upon her tears, but freely wept and with a kind of angry sorrow shook. Her tears glinted like pearl as they were born or perfect crystals in the brilliant morn. ... But that adornment to her lovely cheek and breast, the glistening of her gathered tears, works like a warmth of secret mystique – a thousand hearts are kindled with desires. O miracle of love! O flame unique, distilled from tears, sprinkling the heart with fires!)35

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Again Daniel has associated the depiction of overwhelming female beauty in his poem with Tasso’s initial presentation of Armida in canto IV, although on this occasion it is transferred to the figure of Amymone rather than to Rosamond herself. While there is no suggestion that the tears in the engraving are either feigned or intended deliberately to inflame male hearts, as they are in the original, there is certainly something unsettling in Rosamond’s interpretation of the image, which seems to emphasise how afflicted, ‘neglected beautie’ can unwittingly heighten further aroused male passions (‘affects’). Indeed, the concluding couplet of the Amymone story, as both Kerrigan and Go suggest,36 can be read as Rosamond’s acknowledgement that a beautiful woman’s decision not to succumb to sustained male amorous advances is a form of demeaning cruelty. In an important recent re-reading of this most widely analysed section of Daniel’s poem Kenji Go argues that the expression ‘heate in teares’ (395) refers specifically to Amymone’s own ‘arising amorous passion’ even as she seems to resist Neptune,37 giving a very different emphasis to the ‘presidents’ that Rosamond might take from the story. The direct allusion to Tasso’s image of the incendiary impact of Armida’s false tears on the Christian forces in Daniel’s description, of which Go is seemingly unaware, makes this particular aspect of his reading less tenable, however, although the association between Tasso’s beautiful enchantress and the apparent victim of a divine rape in Rosamond’s interpretation of the story should be equally disconcerting to the reader. Daniel’s other major addition to the chronicle accounts of the Rosamond story is his invention of the role of the ‘seeming Matrone’ (216), well versed in ‘the smoothest speech, / That Court and age could cunningly deuise’ (218–19), who attempts to convince Rosamond that it is in her best interests to submit to the king’s advances. Even before relating this lengthy speech of rhetorical persuasion (225–301), however, Rosamond’s retrospective account has revealed that it was an ‘ambush to intrap [her] youth’ (213) set by the king, creating a tension between the ostensible female empathy conveyed in the older woman’s words of advice and their intended outcome. The situation mirrors exactly a scene in another celebrated Italian work with which Daniel was certainly familiar by the early 1590s, Battista Guarini’s Il pastor fido (1590),38 in which the older and more worldly-wise nymph Corisca tries to persuade the heroine Amarilli that she should break off her engagement to Silvio in order to pursue her recently confessed love for the hero Mirtillo, with whom Corisca is also secretly in love. Some of the matron’s advice to Rosamond deliber-

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ately echoes Corisca’s argument to convince Amarilli in the central act of Guarini’s play:

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The subtile Citty-women better learned, Esteeme them chast ynough that best seeme so: Who though they sport, it shall not be discerned, Their face bewraies not what their bodies doe. ch’altro alfin l’onestate non è che un’arte di parere onesta. Creda ognun a suo modo: io così credo.

(274–7)

(III, v, 619–21)

(This honesty is but an art to seeme so, Let others as they list beleeue, Ile think so still.)39

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Daniel once again turns to Tasso as a further model for a speech of rhetorical persuasion with a concealed purpose, although on this occasion it is not Armida herself who is the direct source. Instead Daniel alludes closely to the song of the false siren in canto XIV (stanzas 62 to 64), created by Armida to lull Rinaldo to sleep on the mysterious island in the river Oronte, so that the enchantress can take her revenge on the knight for his release of her Christian prisoners: Besides, the law of nature doth excuse them, To whom thy youth may haue a iust appeale: Esteeme not fame more then thou doost thy weale, Fame, whereof the world seemes to make such choyce: Is but an Eccho, and an idle voyce. (255–9) Nome, e senza soggetto idoli sono ciò che pregio e valore il mondo appella. La fama che invaghisce a un dolce suono voi superbi mortali, e par sí bella, è un’ ecco, un sogno, anzi del sogno un’ ombra, ch’ad ogni vento si dilegua e sgombra. (XIV, 63, 3–8) (What the world calls praise and valour is a mere name, and are idols without a subject. That fame which so attracts you proud mortal men with its sweet sound and appears so beautiful is but an echo, a dream, or even a shadow of a dream, that with every wind must dissolve and fade.)40

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Like Tasso’s siren, Daniel’s matron emphasises the youth of her intended victim as the principal motive for seizing the day and following ‘the law of nature’ (‘Solo chi segue ciò che piace è saggio / e in sua stagion de gli anni il frutto coglie’, ‘he alone is wise who pursues that which brings him pleasure, and harvests the fruit of his years when in season’: XIV, 62, 5–6) over the illusory codes of man, although the change of gender in the address to Rosamond (Tasso’s siren song is directed specifically at ‘giovenetti’) creates a level of (false) complicity that is absent from the original. The matron can thus contrast her own unfulfilled age (‘But were I to beginne my youth againe, / I would redeeme the time I spent in vayne’: 251–2) with Rosamond’s untapped potential as a means of emphasising her argument: Fye fondling fye, thou wilt repent too late The error of thy youth.

(236–7)

The apparently familiar theme of the siren’s carpe diem song in Tasso is doubly reinforced by its reoccurrence in a slightly modified key later in the poem, as the canto della rosa, sung by the parrot in Armida’s garden (XVI, 14–15), and its intertextual allusions to Tasso’s contemporaneous chorus ‘O bella età de l’oro’ from his pastoral play Aminta, first performed at Ferrara in July 1573, which also yearns for a time when nature’s law (‘S’ei piace, ei lice’, ‘If it gives pleasure, it is lawful’: 681) predominated, and where tyrant honour, rather than fame, is described as ‘quel vano / nome senza soggetto, / quell’idolo d’errori, idol d’inganno’, ‘that vain name without an object, that idol of errors, idol of deceit’ (669–71).41 Daniel seems to have detected the similarities between the siren’s song and the Aminta chorus, which he went on to translate very skilfully a decade or so later,42 even as he was composing ‘The Complaint of Rosamond’ in the early 1590s: the exploitation of the potential double sense in English of the Italian ‘idolo’ as both ‘idol’ and ‘idle’ in the ‘idle voyce’ of Fame in the early poem reappears in his later translation, as a deliberate pun in place of Tasso’s verbal repetition at exactly this point: ‘That Idle name of winde: / That Idoll of deceit, that empty sound’ (15–16).43 The linguistic and thematic similarities between the false siren’s song and the Golden Age chorus may also have inspired Daniel to attempt an equivalent act of poetic auto-allusion within the matron’s speech. ‘The Complaint of Rosamond’ makes reference on three separate occasions to the sonnet cycle with which it was originally printed in the narrator’s allusions to

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the poet’s love for Delia (at lines 43–5, 525, and 732–3 respectively), and Daniel here seems to be consciously echoing images from his own carpe diem sequence in Delia (sonnets 29 to 34 in the first edition of 1592) as part of the matron’s successful strategy of persuasion. The forewarning against the decrepitude of old age in the matron’s own countenance (‘Reade in my face the ruines of my youth, / The wrack of yeeres vpon my aged brow’: 246–7) recalls the opening quatrains of sonnets XXX (‘I once may see when yeeres shall wrecke my wronge’) and XXXIII (‘When men shall find thy flowre, thy glory passe, / And thou with carefull brow sitting alone’), both imitations of sonnets by Tasso himself first printed in the Rime degli academici eterei in 1567,44 and the comparison between the transience of female beauty and the rapidly withering flower vividly echoes sonnets XXXI and XXXII, the first of which (‘Looke Delia how wee steeme the halfe-blowne Rose’) is itself a condensed translation of Tasso’s canto della rosa, permitting Daniel to allude subtly to both his own contemporary adaptation and the Italian original simultaneously: Thou must not thinke thy flower can alwayes florish, And that thy beautie will be still admired: But that those rayes which all these flames doe nourish, Canceld with Time, will haue their date expyred, And men will scorne what now is so desired: Our frailtyes doome is written in the flowers, Which florish now and fade ere many howers. (239–45)45

The re-working of Tasso’s rose song, first heard in the garden in canto XVI, into a carpe florem warning to Delia in the sonnet sequence re-confirms Daniel’s knowledge of the pagan enchantress’s role in Gerusalemme liberata beyond her introduction in canto IV, and thus further complicates his poetic association of Rosamond with Armida. While there may be some disturbing implications in the exact correlation of Rosamond’s, and indeed Amymone’s, beauty with that of Armida in the early parts of the respective poems, the allusions to Tasso’s poem in relation to the matron’s speech appear rather to create a degree of sympathy for Rosamond’s plight, as on this occasion she can be more readily regarded as a victim, of both false female persuasion and male cunning. The final and most extensive single borrowing from Tasso in ‘The Complaint of Rosamond’, the only one which occurs after the lovers’ sexual consummation, however, makes the strongest direct connection between the two female figures, placing the English mistress at the very heart of Armida’s garden,

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where the effeminised Rinaldo is kept in his amorous bondage. Despite her initial self-loathing immediately after becoming the king’s lover, ‘vse of sinne’ (455) soon emboldens Rosamond, increasing the king’s jealousy to the extent that he decides to have a secret ‘Pallace’ constructed for their furtive liaisons: A stately Pallace he foorthwith did buylde, Whose intricate innumerable wayes, With such confused errors so beguil’d Th’vnguided entrers with vncertaine strayes, And doubtfull turnings kept them in delayes, With bootlesse labor leading them about, Able to finde no way, nor in, nor out. Within the closed bosome of which frame, That seru’d a Center to that goodly round: Were lodgings, with a garden to the same, With sweetest flowers that eu’r adorn’d the ground, And all the pleasures that delight hath found, T’entertaine the sence of wanton eyes, Fuell of loue, from whence lusts flames arise. (463–76)46

If the winding path leading to this confined garden immediately brings to mind the Ovidian tale of Dedalus’s labyrinth at the palace of Cnossos, an association confirmed in both Rosamond’s self-description as ‘the Minotaure of shame kept for disgrace’ (478), and the thread by which the king finds his way there,47 the entire description in fact owes its provenance to the opening stanza of canto XVI of Tasso’s poem, when Carlo and Ubaldo finally reach Armida’s secret bower. Daniel reverses the two quatrains of the original stanza and omits any suggestion of demonic activity in his version, but otherwise he produces an accurate and highly effective translation of the Italian in lines 464 to 473: Tondo è il ricco edificio, e nel piú chiuso grembo di lui, ch’è quasi centro al giro, un giardin v’ha ch’adorno è sovra l’uso di quanti piú famosi unqua fioriro. D’intorno inosservabile e confuso ordin di loggie i demon fabri ordiro, e tra le oblique vie di quell fallace ravolgimento impenetrabil giace.

(XVI, 1, 1–8)

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(The beautiful palace is round; and in its most internal part, which is almost in the exact centre of the building, there is a garden, which is more beautiful than any other garden that ever existed. Around it, the demonic workers built a random and intricate series of loggias, and the garden lies, impenetrable, among the tortuous ways of that deceptive maze.)48

The final three lines of Daniel’s second stanza are not taken directly from the Italian, but they do provide a revealing paraphrase of what the English poet regards as the dangerously alluring impact that Armida’s enchanted garden has on the Christian knights, and indeed on future generations of Tasso’s readers, particularly the initial emphasis on sight (‘the sence of wanton eyes’) and the equation of a pleasure and delight in the apparently natural with inflamed passions. Although in this instance it is the king who is responsible for the construction of the palace, rather than Tasso’s demons, Daniel’s close translation from the Italian makes it difficult to disassociate completely Rosamond’s role in the amorous bower from that of the more active Armida in her garden, which by extension aligns King Henry with the passive figure of Rinaldo, the great military hero whose seduction by the pagan enchantress has left him inert and enfeebled. However, Daniel’s final emphasis on the secret garden as a site associated primarily with lust, like Spenser’s Bowre of Blisse, also marks a significant difference in relation to the central couple in the English poem. The reciprocated love between Armida and Rinaldo in her garden, however unexpected in its origin and indolent in its persecution, is never denied in Tasso’s poem,49 whereas the equivalent relationship between Rosamond and Henry in Daniel’s poem, in spite of the king’s growing affection and intense grief at his mistress’s untimely death, is never allowed to become mutual: When loe I ioyde my Louer not my Loue, And felt the hand of lust most vndesired: Enforc’d th’vnprooued bitter sweete to proue, Which yeeldes no mutuall pleasure when tis hired. Loue’s not constrain’d, not yet of due required, Iudge they who are vnfortunately wed, What tis to come vnto a lothed bed.

(435–41)50

Rosamond’s appeal for empathetic judgement from a readership of women here,51 immediately after her first reluctant sexual encounter with the king, is almost simultaneous with an acknowledgement of the depth of her own sin: ‘Now opened were mine eyes to looke therein,

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/ For first we taste the fruite, then see our sin’ (447–8). The apparent incongruity in these two positions, however, is entirely characteristic of ‘The Complaint of Rosamond’, in which the first-person narrative veers between attempting to elicit sympathy, from male and female readers alike, by emphasising Rosamond’s role as impotent victim, and detailing a clear-sighted recognition of her faults and complicity in the adulterous affair. Daniel’s extensive and carefully considered imitations from cantos IV, XIV, and XVI of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, some of which were detected immediately by contemporaries such as Francis Davison and Edward Fairfax, but all of which have been either missed or ignored by modern readers, add another dimension of interpretative ambiguity to the poem. How would these early readers of the poem have responded to the clear likenesses between Rosamond and the pagan enchantress? While all of Daniel’s allusions to Tasso connect the narrator of his poem to the attractive but dangerous figure of Armida, with whom she shares the art of rhetorical persuasion, both oral and silent, and a physical beauty that grants immense power over male passions, it becomes clear ultimately that the English poet is not making a straightforward equation between his royal mistress and the feigning seductress in the Italian poem. This occasionally uncomfortable association of the two figures, however, certainly marks the earliest sustained engagement in English poetry with one of Tasso’s most enduring and appealing creations. ‘he makes the parrat to speak’: the early reception of the ca n t o d e l l a ro sa in england The most widely recognised stanzas from Tasso’s vivid evocation of Armida’s garden are probably the carpe florem song (XVI, 14–15), which became known almost immediately as the canto della rosa. For example, the longest illustration from Tasso’s poem in Fraunce’s Arcadian Rhetorike (1588) cites the entire song and the preceding stanza, which describes the speaking parrot with its purple beak, as an example of prosopopoeia. Possibly the earliest rendering into English is a sacred translation of the song in the Farnsworth manuscript of Robert Southwell’s verse entitled ‘Optima Deo’. Where the lyric has been accepted as Southwell’s, it has usually been assigned to the earliest apprentice period of his poetic career.52 Christopher Devlin, for example, in his biography of the Jesuit poet suggests that it ‘can be dated most probably between 1581 and 1585’, confirming that ‘the first fourteen lines are a translation of the song in

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Armida’s pleasure-garden ... , which Southwell evidently read at Rome’.53 Devlin argues for a date of composition prior to Southwell’s return to England in 1586, but not in order to account for any perceived shortcomings in this early translation, even in relation to a more widely known later English imitation: Another version of it is Edmund Spenser’s ‘lovely lay’ which was sung as a lascivious invitation to the Bower of Bliss. Robert’s youthful effort is ‘drab’ no doubt (to use Professor C. S. Lewis’s term) by comparison with Spenser’s. But what is interesting is the tranquil ease with which the younger writer turns a temptation to vice into an incitement to virtue.54

It is the two final, original lines of Southwell’s lyric, replacing the carpe florem conclusion to the second stanza of Tasso’s song, that enable this movement from vice towards virtue, a transformation familiar from other apparently later examples of ‘sacred parody’ in Southwell’s verse:55 Cogliam la rosa in su ’l mattino adorno di questo dí, che tosto il seren perde; cogliam d’amor la rosa; amiamo or quando esser si puote riamato amando.

(XVI, 15, 5–8)

(Gather the rose in the beautiful morning of this day, which will soon lose its serenity; gather the rose of love: let us love now, when we can still be loved in return while loving.)56 Then croppe the morening Rose, while it is faire; Our day is short, the evening makes it die; Yeld God the prime of youth, eare it empaire; Lest he the dregges of crooked age denie. (‘Optima Deo’, 13–16)57

If Southwell translated the song in Rome before his return to England then it suggests that, even at a nascent stage of his poetic career, he was beginning to develop the practice of transmuting contemporary secular love poetry towards the ‘beauties of the Divine’.58 The immediate reception in Italy of Tasso’s long-anticipated poem would have provided an important context for the Jesuit poet’s early musings on the conflicting attractions and demands of amorous and religious verse; Gerusalemme liberata is ostensibly a religious epic, celebrating the recapture of Jerusalem by the Crusaders, led by Godfrey of Boulogne, in 1099, but it was already starting to attract critical scrutiny, not least from its troubled and confined author, for its frequent romantic episodes. The most erotically

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charged of these is Armida’s kidnapping of the Christian hero Rinaldo, with whom she has unexpectedly fallen in love, and the subsequent amorous interlude in her enchanted garden. It is in the sensuous description of this locus amoenus in canto XVI that readers, along with the Christian soldiers Carlo and Ubaldo, overhear the invocation to (sexual) love in the canto della rosa, where it is voiced by a male parrot. Southwell’s sacred re-working of the song, from an episode in which a Christian knight is (temporarily) distracted from his divine military duty by the erotic charms of a pagan enchantress, suggests that this is the most appropriate poetic analogue if there is a specific allusion intended in the muchcited lament in the dedicatory poem to Saint Peters Complaynt: Still finest wits are stilling Venus Rose. In paynim toyes the sweetest vaines are spent: To Christian workes, few have their talents lent.

(16–18)59

Tasso himself, in repeatedly submitting his as yet unprinted epic to the scrutiny of the Inquisition in the late 1570s, clearly shared similar ­anxieties about the potential moral and poetic distractions of such amorous verse. Devlin’s suggestion that Southwell’s version dates from his time in Rome would rule out any possibility that it might have been directly indebted to Spenser’s rendering of the same song in the final canto of Book II of The Faerie Queene, first printed in 1590; he does, however, liken it stylistically to another later English translation, which was itself, as Selene Scarsi has recently demonstrated, influenced by Spenser: ‘its graceful economy compares favourably with Edward Fairfax’s translation in Godfrey of Bulloigne (1600). It should be added that Robert’s version is quite clearly taken direct from Tasso..., not from The Faerie Queene’.60 As an extension of this implicit desire to compare Southwell’s adaptation with other more or less contemporaneous English versions, I want to posit a much later date of composition for the poem in England, which would permit the possibility that Southwell was also acquainted with Spenser’s poem. If, as Richard Wilson has argued, the dedicatory poem to Saint Peters Complaynt was composed shortly before Southwell’s arrest in June 1592,61 then the apparent reference to Tasso’s song in the image of ‘Venus Rose’ could also be extended to include two recent English renderings of it, in Spenser’s Bowre of Blisse and in Samuel Daniel’s sequence of love sonnets Delia, which was entered on the Stationers’ Register in February 1592. The specificity of the allusion could thus be broadened

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to encompass the ‘finest wits’ of both recent Italian and contemporary English poetry within its frame of reference, as John Klause has suggested in making the case against Shakespeare’s Ovidian poem Venus and Adonis as its exclusive target.62 If Southwell’s sacred transformation of a famous song promoting the need to surrender immediately to the joys of ‘Venus Rose’ was also written at around the same time as the dedicatory poem, then it would be instructive to consider this lyric as an analogous reproach not only to the author of the Italian original, but also to those English poets who had already been enticed by its illusory charms. The general fidelity to Tasso’s Italian in the first fourteen lines of Southwell’s translation confirms that the original was his principal source, but this does not, of course, rule out his knowledge and use of the other English versions, as Devlin seems to imply. Before the radical alterations to the final couplet, Southwell departs from the Italian on only a couple of occasions: for example, in the second quatrain he ignores entirely the erotic associations of the rose as an emblem of transient female beauty, which are retained in Spenser’s invocation to love before it is too late: Ecco poi nudo il sen già baldanzosa dispiega.

(XVI, 14, 5–6)

(Behold how later, already self-confident, she displays her naked bosom.)63 But in her pride her leaves she doth display. (‘Optima Deo’, 5)64 Lo see soone after, how more bold and free Her bared bosome she doth broad display.

(II, xii, 74, 7–8)65

It is understandable that Southwell, in contrast to Spenser, chooses to eliminate the eroticism of the original in his transformation of Tasso’s song, and yet, perhaps surprisingly given the very different tones and conclusions of the respective English versions, it is in the re-worked endings that there is the strongest indication of a direct connection between the two. The stern warning in Southwell’s version that God might deny ‘the dregges of crooked age’ by plucking the rose, which here becomes a general image of human life rather than female sexuality specifically, in its ‘prime of youth’, before it has the opportunity to decay naturally, seems to be a response to the intensification of the threat of time at the end of Spenser’s song:

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Gather therefore the Rose, whilest yet is prime, For soone comes age, that will her pride deflowre: Gather the Rose of loue, whilest yet is time, Whilest louing thou mayst loued be with equall crime. (II, xii, 75, 6–9)66

The carpe florem motif at the end of the canto della rosa is given still greater urgency in Daniel’s condensed adaptation of it into sonnet form in his Delia sequence, where it forms part of a brief corona of sonnets emphasising to Delia the ravaging effects of ‘tyrant Times desire’ (XXX,  8) on female beauty: No Aprill can reuiue thy withred flowers, Whose blooming grace adornes thy glorie now: Swift speedy Time, feathred with flying howers, Dissolves the beautie of the fairest brow. O let not then such riches waste in vaine; But loue whilst that thou maist be lou’d againe. (Delia (1592), XXXI, 9–14)67

The ninth line of Daniel’s sonnet on ‘the halfe-blowne Rose, / The image of thy blush and Summers honor’ (XXXI, 1–2) offers the most accurate English rendering of two lines from the second stanza of Tasso’s song (‘né perché faccia indietro april ritorno, / si rinfiora ella mai, né si rinverde’: XVI, 15, 3–4), and it is also characteristic of the prominence given to the swift advance of the months and seasons throughout the poems in the corona: the following sonnet again urges Delia to love ‘Now whilst thy May hath fill’d thy lappe with flowers’ and to ‘use [her] Summer smiles ere winter lowres’ (XXXII, 2 and 4). This reinforced emphasis on the fleeting seasons in Daniel’s carpe diem sequence is replicated in Southwell’s version of the song of ‘the modest Rose’ in her ‘somers coate in virgins hew’ (1–2): So with the passing of a sliding day Of mortal life the floure and leafe doth passe; Ne with the new returne of flouring May Doth it renew the bounteous wonted glasse. (‘Optima Deo’, 9–12)68

A direct knowledge of Daniel’s use of Tasso’s song in this part of his sequence might also help to account for Southwell’s only other significant departure from the Italian in the opening fourteen lines of the poem: the slightly obscure image of the rose’s ‘bounteous wonted glasse’, which

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can never be renewed (‘né si rinverde’), has no precedent in Tasso. This might, if arguing for an early date of composition, be interpreted as the only occasion in the translation where Southwell’s search for a suitable rhyme in English prompts him to take liberties with the Italian original; however, the same rhyme is used by Daniel in the sestet of the preceding sonnet, which introduces his corona sequence, where the beloved’s mirror, often regarded in the sonnet tradition as a direct rival to the poet-lover,69 reveals to her the irreversible effects of time (‘Then fade those flowres which deckt her pride so long’: XXX, 8), only to be offered the consolation of the lasting image of her beauty miraculously preserved in verse: When if she grieue to gaze her in her glas, Which then presents her winter-withered hew; Goe you my verse, goe tell her what she was; For what she was she best shall finde in you. Your firie heate lets not her glorie passe, But Phenix-like shall make her liue anew. (Delia, XXX, 9–14)70

The evidence for Southwell’s knowledge of Daniel’s version of the canto della rosa suggests that it extends beyond this sonnet alone to the other carpe diem poems surrounding it in the Delia sequence. This is significant because Daniel’s sonnet sequence, and indeed the entire volume of which Delia forms part, displays the English poet’s sustained indebtedness to contemporary Italian love poetry, and particularly to the works of Tasso. Most of the poems in his corona sequence derive demonstrably from Tasso’s own love sonnets, and, as demonstrated earlier in this chapter, Daniel’s conception of Rosamond in ‘The Complaint of Rosamond’ is heavily influenced by the Armida episodes in cantos IV and XVI of Gerusalemme liberata. If Southwell did become familiar with Daniel’s volume of poetry before his apprehension in June 1592, then it would have been regarded as a prime example of exactly the kind of work that he was soon to lament in the dedicatory verses to his own Complaynt poem on a sacred theme: by neglecting the overtly religious elements of Tasso’s ‘Christian workes’ and incorporating instead the pagan toys of the Armida episodes into both his love sonnets and ‘The Complaint of Rosamond’, Daniel, like Spenser before him, had shown himself to be one of the contemporary Italianate wits in England whose verse was still very much in thrall to ‘Venus Rose’.71 Although both Spenser and Daniel are more plausible targets than Shakespeare chronologically for Southwell’s mournful poetic reproach,

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despite the long critical tradition emphasising the claims of the latter,72 I will go on now to consider Venus and Adonis to argue that this poem also constitutes part of the English poetic response in the early 1590s to Tasso’s canto della rosa, and indeed the increasingly popular episode from which it derives. If Shakespeare was already familiar with Tasso’s epic poem before the publication of Venus and Adonis in the spring of 1593 then he can only have had access to it in Italian, as there were no translations into either English or French available until the middle of the decade.73 I have previously argued that Shakespeare does not appear to have acquired a competent reading knowledge in Italian, with the aid of John Florio’s language-learning manuals, until the latter half of the 1590s, but the evidence for his engagement with Italian romantic epic poetry in the original language in Venus and Adonis suggests that this assertion may need to be revisited.74 Scarsi has recently demonstrated that one of the most popular passages in Shakespeare’s earliest printed work, the erotically charged stanzas in which Venus figures herself as a park and Adonis as a deer who is encouraged to feed wherever he pleases (229–40), borrows directly from a similarly suggestive description of Olimpia in canto XI of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1532), a stanza in which the eroticism is, significantly, minimised in Harington’s English translation, printed by Richard Field in 1591.75 Shakespeare’s apparent knowledge of Ariosto’s poem in the original language by the time he came to compose Venus and Adonis suggests that he would have been equally capable of reading Tasso’s epic in Italian. Shakespeare’s engagement with Italian romantic epic in his erotic narrative poem may therefore open up a previously neglected sphere of influence for its composition and initial reception. The most radical alteration of his Ovidian source, the decision to make Venus’s love for Adonis unrequited, allows Shakespeare to depict the central relationship in the poem in terms of the Petrarchan model for love poetry, so prominent in English verse of the early 1590s, albeit with a significant reversal of the customary gender roles. The allusions to Tasso’s poem in Venus and Adonis work similarly, by drawing the earliest readers’ attention to another example of Italian love poetry, which was becoming increasingly popular with contemporary English poets such as Spenser and Daniel. The appropriateness of the dedication in 1593 of an Ovidian erotic poem to Henry Wriothesley has often been stressed, usually in relation to John Clapham’s earlier Latin poem ‘Narcissus’ (1591),76 but the Earl of Southampton would have been equally responsive to the Italianate elements of

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Shakespeare’s work: he was later commended for his Italian studies as one of the co-dedicatees of Florio’s first Italian dictionary, A Worlde of Wordes (1598), and Frances Yates has demonstrated that the most prominent teacher of Italian in Elizabethan England was a member of Wriothesley’s household in 1594, the year in which Shakespeare dedicated his second Ovidian poem, The Rape of Lucrece, to him.77 The idea that Ovidian elements of Shakespeare’s poem are deliberately overlaid with allusions to more contemporary Italian forms of amorous verse leads specifically to Venus’s use of the carpe florem argument as part of her sustained attempt to persuade Adonis to consent to her seduction: The tender spring upon thy tempting lip Shows thee unripe; yet mayst thou well be tasted. Make use of time, let not advantage slip: Beauty within itself should not be wasted, Fair flowers that are not gathered in their prime Rot, and consume themselves in little time.

(127–32)

Burrow traces the motif back to Ovid’s Ars amatoria, but it is, of course, also exactly the argument of the canto della rosa, replicated recently in both Spenser’s Bowre of Blisse and Daniel’s sonnet sequence. Although the flowers are not explicitly roses in this version, other details in Venus’s speech of persuasion suggest that Shakespeare did have the specific setting of the rose song in Armida’s garden in mind: two stanzas earlier an increasingly desperate Venus urges Adonis to see his beauty reflected in her eyes (‘Hold up thy head, / Look in mine eye-balls, there thy beauty lies: / Then why not lips on lips, since eyes in eyes?’: 118–20),79 another traditional conceit of love poetry certainly, but strikingly one which also follows on closely from the canto della rosa in Tasso’s poem, where a similarly erotically frustrated Rinaldo (‘i famelici sguardi avidamente / in lei pascendo si consuma e strugge’, ‘with his hungry glances avidly devouring her, he was consumed and pined away’: XVI, 19, 1–2) implores Armida to regard him rather than her mirror: 78

Deh! poi che sdegni me, com’egli è vago mirar tu almen potessi il proprio volto; ché il guardo tuo, ch’ altrove non è pago, gioirebbe felice in sé rivolto.

(XVI, 22, 1–4)

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(Ah, rather than scorn me, since it is so beautiful, you could at least look at your own face; for your glance, content with nothing else, would delight to see itself reflected.)80

This image is not reproduced by Spenser in his sustained re-imagining of Armida’s garden as Acrasia’s Bowre, suggesting that Shakespeare was familiar with Tasso’s original, probably in addition to Spenser’s recent English version. His conception of the Ovidian Venus as an unrequited Petrarchan lover is thus granted another dimension through her poetic association with Tasso’s Armida and the more sinister Acrasia, who specifically entraps and seduces the unripe young boy Verdant in Spenser’s poem, although it is important to stress the added element of erotic frustration afflicting Shakespeare’s goddess in relation to these epic models. If Venus is figured by Shakespeare as a kind of thwarted Armida then his Adonis should also correspond to Tasso’s Christian warrior Rinaldo (with hints of Spenser’s Verdant), albeit in this case as a male character restrained in an equivalent locus amoenus expressly against his will: Venus’s account to him of her erotic subjugation of Mars, confined in a chain of roses, calls to mind both the ekphrastic representation of the effeminised Hercules on the entrance gates to Armida’s garden (XVI, 3) and Tasso’s earlier description of the comatose Rinaldo, similarly bound by flowers at the hands of the enchantress: Over my altars hath he hung his lance, His battered shield, his uncontrollèd crest, And for my sake hath he learned to sport, and dance, To toy, to wanton, dally, smile, and jest, Scorning his churlish drum and ensign red, Making my arms his field, my tent his bed. Thus he that over-ruled, I over-swayed, Leading him prisoner in a red-rose chain. Strong-tempered steel his stronger strength obeyed; Yet was he servile to my coy disdain. (103–12)81 Di ligustri, di gigli e de le rose le quai fiorian per quelle piagge amene, con nov’arte congiunte, indi compose lente ma tenacissime catene. Questo al collo, a le braccia, a i piè gli pose: cosí l’avinse e cosí preso il tiene.

(XIV, 68, 1–6)

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(Of lilacs, lilies and roses which flowered there upon the pleasant shore, weaving them with a strange art, she composes a gentle but most tenacious chain. This she puts around his neck and arms and feet, and so enthrals him, and so takes him in hand.)82

Uniquely, however, Shakespeare’s Adonis is granted the power to refuse the amorous advances of the domineering female figure, and it is striking that on two separate occasions he turns Venus’s invocation of the carpe florem argument against her, by stressing both the danger and the offence to nature of picking a flower, or harvesting fruit, before it is ready: Who plucks a bud before one leaf put forth? If springing things be any jot diminished They wither in their prime, prove nothing worth. ‘Fair Queen,’ quoth he, ‘If any love you owe me, Measure my strangeness with my unripe years. Before I know myself seek not to know me. ... No mellow plum doth fall, the green sticks fast, Or being early plucked is sour to taste.

(416–18)

(523–8)83

The fundamental argument of the canto della rosa, that, metaphorically, humans should surrender to their natural instincts before it is too late, is here reversed to stress the inappropriateness of insisting on any kind of sexual relationship before physical maturity has been reached. Despite the rationality of Adonis’s repeated rejections of Venus’s familiar poetic argument, however, his are not the final words on the subject in the poem. After the boy’s death at the hands of the boar, when Venus discoverers Adonis’s maimed body, Shakespeare uses the metamorphosis at the end of his Ovidian source to offer a bold literalisation in his poem of the central metaphor from Tasso’s song: And in his blood that on the ground lay spilled A purple flower sprung up, chequered with white, Resembling well his pale cheeks, and the blood Which in round drops upon their whiteness stood. She bows her head the new-sprung flower to smell, Comparing it to her Adonis’ breath, And says within her bosom it shall dwell, Since he himself is reft from her by death.

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She crops the stalk, and in the breach appears Green-dropping sap, which she compares to tears. (1167–76)84

If it is not quite certain at the end of the poem whether Venus’s untimely plucking of the flower constitutes an act of love or an act of desecration, it should now be clear that in Venus and Adonis Shakespeare was engaging directly, like Spenser, Daniel, and Southwell immediately before him, with Tasso’s celebrated song of the rose and its surrounding episode, and that the conception of his Goddess of Love, who, like the enchantress Armida after her lament, flees in a chariot from the scene of her romantic tragedy, is enriched by this association with a previously unacknowledged Italian poetic model. robert tofte’s ‘romance of armide’ The early English fascination with the figure of Armida was mirrored in the initial French reception of Tasso’ s poem. Pierre Joulet’s Les Amours d’Armide was first printed in 1596, only a year after the appearance of the earliest French translation of Gerusalemme liberata by Jean du Vignau, and had run through ten editions by 1614. In the dedicatory letter to Louise de Lorraine, a direct descendant of Tasso’s patrons in Ferrara,85 Joulet explains the genesis of his prose re-working of ‘l’histoire de tout de qui s’est passé entre Renaud & Armide, durant la vie de leur affection’, ‘the story of everything that happened between Renaud and Armide during the course of their passion’: Gratifiez moy en faveur du Tasso que vous lisez avec tant de plaisir. C’est de luy que i’ay prins le sujet lequel i’ay reduict en Histoire continue, au lieu qu’elle est inegallement espandue dans tous les chants de cest Autheur. Et d’autant qu’il me semble que ce Poete a rendu quelques passions, sinon du tout muettes, au moins un peu plus retenues que leur naturel, ie leur ay laissé la voix libre, & leur ay fait dire ce que i’ay pensé que l’on resent au milieu du desplaisir, ou de la ioye qu’elles nous apportent. (Accept my work on behalf of Tasso, whom you read with so much pleasure. It is from him that I have taken the subject, which I have recounted in a continuous narrative in place of the original, where it is spaced out unevenly throughout the cantos of this author. And in as much as it seems to me that this poet has rendered certain emotions if not entirely mute, then at least a little more restrained than is natural, I have instead given them a free voice, and allowed them to speak what I think that one would experience in the midst of the joys and griefs that they bring us.)86

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The first quarter of Joulet’s Amours consists of a generally faithful if metaphorically expanded rendering of Armida’s arrival in the poem, and the subsequent imprisonment of the Christian soldiers, who are in turn released by Rinaldo, inspiring the enchantress’s hatred. It is only once she has lured the Christian hero to sleep on the banks of the river Oronte in order to exact her revenge that Joulet begins to elaborate consistently on Tasso’s original episode in cantos XIV and XVI. After Armide has unexpectedly fallen in love with the sleeping Renaud and transported him to her enchanted garden, Joulet focuses on the development of their mutual love at great length, inventing long passages of direct speech where there is little or none in Tasso, adding an initial sense of suspicion on the part of Renaud until ‘il iugea bientot que la plus muettes des actions d’Armide estoit suffisante pour luy faire croire qu’elle luy vouloit du bien’, ‘he soon judged that even the most silent actions of Armide were enough to make him believe that she genuinely wished him well’,87 and intensifying in particular the heightened emotions of jealousy and insecurity in Armide’s love for her captive, anticipating Tasso’s great lament at the end of canto XVI after her abandonment. Joulet’s expansion of this principal romantic episode in cantos XIV–XVI of Tasso’s poem constitutes almost exactly half of Les Amours d’Armide. The immediate popularity of Joulet’s rifacimento of Tasso in France appears to have reached England soon after. An accurate translation of Joulet’s prose by Robert Tofte, the Italianate poet and translator of both Boiardo and Ariosto, survives in a manuscript in the Bodleian Library in Oxford (MS Rawlinson D679), where it is entitled the ‘Romance of Armide’. A couple of details in Tofte’s truculent dedicatory poem ‘To the Courteous, and Learned (not Captious or Ignoraunt) Reader’ suggest that it dates from the early seventeenth century: the content of his translation, despite its origins in a romantic interlude from Tasso’s epic poem, is distinguished from the ‘ranke, obscene, or lustfull wordes’ of popular Spanish prose romance, such as Amadis of Gaul and particularly The Mirror of Knighthood, which had been printed in English translation between 1598 and 1601, and is thus deemed a task worthy of the greatest poets and translators in England, a list including Sidney, Harington, Spenser, Daniel, and Drayton, although Tofte acknowledges that, since ‘som of thes rarest Spirites be [dead]’ (Sidney and Spenser, who had died in 1599), it has fallen to him, ‘the Meanest of them All’.88 The translator’s attitude to Joulet’s subject matter expressed in the dedicatory poem seems to reflect its origins in (Italian) epic poetry:

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Of yee, who Lerned be, your pardon craue That I, this labour vndertaken haue; I rather thowght to venter on this Worke Than it showld (still) in vnknowen Sylence lur[ke], And since, for Common Good, not priuate praise I haue bestowed som paines, and spent some Dai[es], I hope, your Censures, will conceit the Best. (30–7)89

The translator envisages a learned readership for whose benefit he is doing a public service by making available a foreign work that deserves to be better known in England. The high-brow tone of the address led Franklin Williams to conjecture that Tofte intended to versify his prose translation before having it printed, in order to make it worthy of such an elevated readership.90 However, the popularity of the prose refacimento in France, which appeared soon after the first complete translation of Tasso’s poem, demonstrates that there was a keen readership for both verse and prose vernacular versions of the Rinaldo and Armida episode. The appearance in print in 1600 of Edward Fairfax’s Godfrey of Bulloigne, the first complete English verse translation of the poem, may have encouraged Tofte towards the ‘common good’ of also making available in English a recent French re-working of this celebrated episode. It is impossible ultimately to know why, unlike Tofte’s other translations, the ‘Romance of Armide’ was never printed, although there may be some clues in Fairfax’s translation itself: in his rendering of the Armida episodes in cantos IV and XVI, Fairfax displays a clear indebtedness to both Spenser’s and Daniel’s earlier English imitations of Tasso in The Faerie Queene and ‘The Complaint of Rosamond’ respectively.91 This may have suggested to Tofte and other alert contemporary readers, such as Francis Davison and William Drummond, that by the end of the sixteenth century the manifold poetic attractions of Tasso’s romantic episodes had already permeated the English literary consciousness directly, without the need to be filtered through a contemporary French prose intermediary. notes  1 The letter, addressed to Lodovico Tassoni, the Duke of Ferrara’s secretary in Modena, is printed in Angelo Solerti, Vita di Torquato Tasso, 2 (Turin and Rome, 1895), pp. 204–5.  2 Mario Praz, The Flaming Heart: Essays on Crashaw, Machiavelli and Other Studies of the Relations between Italian and English Literature from Chaucer to T. S.

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Eliot (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1958), p. 309. For Spenser’s borrowings from and adaptation of Tasso’s episode, see also C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: a Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), pp. 324–40; Judith A. Kates, Tasso and Milton: the Problem of Christian Epic (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1983), pp. 136–44 and pp. 165–70; Alistair Fox, The English Renaissance: Identity and Representation in Elizabethan England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 162–74.  3 See especially Robert M. Durling, ‘The Bower of Bliss and Armida’s palace’, Comparative Literature, 6 (1954), 335–47.  4 C. P. Brand, Torquato Tasso: A Study of the Poet and of his Contribution to English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 226.  5 Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, ed. Lanfranco Caretti (Turin: Einaudi, 1971), p. 51.  6 The episode (XII, 52–62 and 64–8) is given a musical setting in Monteverdi’s Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, first performed in Venice in 1624 and printed in Madrigali guerrieri, et amorosi (1638).  7 Abraham Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetorike (London, 1588), First Booke, cap. 32.  8 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 107.  9 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, pp. 124–5. Translation in Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, ed. and trans. Anthony M. Esolen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), pp. 88–9. 10 See Mark Eccles, ‘Samuel Daniel in France and Italy’, Studies in Philology, 34 (1937), 148–67: p. 165. 11 See Jason Lawrence, ‘Who the Devil taught thee so much Italian?’: Italian Language Learning and Literary Imitation in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 74–5. 12 Cristoforo Zabata (ed.), Della Scelta di Rime, Di Diversi Eccellenti autori, 2 (Genoa, 1579), pp. 361–91. Daniel imitates parts of two of the twenty-one sonnets, madrigals, and canzone by Tasso in the collection, printed from pages 276 to 301, in sonnets XII and XLVII of the first edition of Delia. 13 Milton’s indebtedness in Book II of Paradise Lost to Tasso’s verse account of the council in hell was first noted by Henry Layng in his ‘The Life of Torquato Tasso’ in Several Pieces in Verse and Prose (London, 1748), p. 60. 14 Thomas Churchyard’s account in rhyme royal verse of ‘Howe Shores wife, Edwarde the fowerths concubine, was by kinge Richarde despoyled of all her goodes, and forced to do open penance’ was first printed in the second part of The Mirror for Magistrates in 1563. A revised and expanded version of the poem was printed in 1593, after the first appearance in print of Daniel’s volume, in Churchyard’s Challenge, with a new comparison to the beauty of ‘Rosamond the faire’ in Jane Shore’s narration of her story. 15 Samuel Daniel, Poems and a Defence of Ryme, ed. Arthur C. Sprague (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950), p. 40.

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16 Heather Dubrow, ‘“Lending soft audience to my sweet design”: shifting roles and shifting readings of Shakespeare’s “A lover’s complaint”’, Shakespeare Survey, 58 (2005), 23–33: pp. 24–6. See also John Kerrigan (ed.), Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and ‘Female Complaint’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 28. 17 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 119. 18 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 122; translation in Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, ed. and trans. Esolen, p. 87. 19 Daniel, Poems, ed. Sprague, p. 42; Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 108. 20 See Richard Hatchwell, ‘A Francis Davison / William Drummond conundrum’, Bodleian Library Record, 15 (1996), 364–7. Edward Fairfax also seems to have been aware of Daniel’s borrowing, as, in his complete translation of Tasso’s poem Godfrey of Bulloigne, printed in 1600, he too concentrates on the amazement inspired by the comet alone in rendering the Italian simile in IV, 28. 21 Daniel, Poems, ed. Sprague, pp. 42–3. 22 Ben Jonson, 3, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), pp. 499–500. 23 For other examples of Jonson’s parodic appropriations of Daniel’s verse and attacks on his literary sources, see Lawrence, Who the Devil, pp. 99–100 and p. 110. 24 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 124. 25 Daniel, Poems, ed. Sprague, p. 44. 26 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 109: ‘Per entro sè l’etterna margarita / ne ricevette, com’acqua recepe / raggio di luce permanendo unita’ (II, 34–6: ‘The eternal pearl received us into itself, as water receives a ray of light and remains unbroken’). The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, III: Paradiso, ed. and trans. John D. Sinclair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 34–5. 27 Daniel, Poems, ed. Sprague, p. 43; Tasso, Gersualemme, ed. Caretti, pp. 127–8; translation in Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, ed. and trans. Esolen, p. 91. 28 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 473. 29 Daniel, Poems, ed Sprague, p. 51. The theme of (concealed) art striving to outdo nature, and thereby potentially misleading the observer, is central to Spenser’s re-working of Armida’s garden in the Bowre of Blisse, described in both canto V and canto XII of Book II of The Faerie Queene, something which Daniel appears to have detected himself, as his phrasing here echoes closely one of Spenser’s many variations on Tasso’s original theme: ‘And ouer him, art stryuing to compayre, / With nature, did an Arber greene dispred’ (II, v, 29, 1–2). Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (Harlow: Longman, 2001), p. 200. 30 See Ira Clark, ‘Samuel Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamond’, Renaissance Quarterly, 23 (1970), 152–62: p. 153. 31 Daniel, Poems, ed. Sprague, p. 52. 32 Various commentators on the poem have drawn attention to Daniel’s apparent

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re-interpretation of the myth on the casket lid to emphasise Amymone’s resistance rather than eventual accession to Neptune’s physical assault: see Clark, ‘Daniel’s Complaint’, pp. 155–6, and Kelly A. Quinn, ‘Ecphrasis and reading practices in Elizabethan narrative verse’, Studies in English Literature, 44 (2004), 19–35: pp. 20–1. 33 Daniel, Poems, ed. Sprague, pp. 51–2. 34 Hatchwell, ‘Davison / Drummond conundrum’, pp. 364–7. 35 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, pp. 121–2; translation in Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, ed. and trans. Esolen, pp. 86–7. 36 Kerrigan (ed.), Motives of Woe, p. 178, Kenji Go, ‘Samuel Daniel’s The Complaint of Rosamond and an emblematic reconsideration of A Lover’s Complaint’, Studies in Philology, 104 (2007), 82–122: pp. 94–6. 37 Go, ‘Daniel’s The Complaint of Rosamond’, p. 94. 38 Daniel’s prefatory sonnet to the 1602 English translation of Il pastor fido reveals how the poet had visited Guarini with his patron Sir Edward Dymoke during their stay in Italy in 1590–91. Il pastor fido is also one of the principal sources for Daniel’s first experiment in Italianate pastoral tragicomedy, The Queenes Arcadia, performed at Oxford in 1605 and printed the following year. 39 Daniel, Poems, ed. Sprague, p. 48; Battista Guarini, Il pastor fido, ed. Luigi Fassò (Turin: Einaudi, 1976), p. 103; Anonymous, Il Pastor Fido: or the faithfull Shepheard. Translated out of Italian into English (London, 1602), sig. H4r. 40 Daniel, Poems, ed. Sprague, p. 47; Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 441. 41 Torquato Tasso, Aminta, favola boschereccia, ed. C. E. J. Griffiths (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), p. 42. 42 Daniel’s translation, entitled A Pastorall, was first printed at the end of the folio collection The Works of Samuel Daniel Newly Augmented (1601), where it is placed immediately after the revised Delia sonnet sequence. 43 Works of Samuel Daniel, To Delia, p. 29. 44 For a detailed consideration of the genesis of Daniel’s carpe diem sequence, and his imitations from Tasso in particular, see Lawrence, Who the Devil, pp. 75–84. 45 Daniel, Poems, ed. Sprague, pp. 46–7. 46 Daniel, Poems, ed. Sprague, p. 54. 47 Fairfax again seems to have been aware of Daniel’s earlier rendering of this stanza, as he too suggests, unlike the Italian original, that the demons’ ‘labyrinth’ is ‘like Dedal’s prison’ (XVI, 1, 7–8) in his complete translation of Tasso’s poem. 48 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 473; translation in Selene Scarsi, Translating Women in Early Modern England: Gender in the Elizabethan Verse Translations of Boiardo, Ariosto and Tasso (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), p. 118. 49 Brand suggests, in contrast to Spenser’s version, that ‘the emphasis is not on the sinfulness but on the delight of sensual love’ in Tasso’s representation of the relationship between Rinaldo and Armida: Brand, Torquato Tasso, p. 234.

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50 Daniel, Poems, ed. Sprague, p. 53. 51 On the importance of female sympathy in the complaint tradition, see Kerrigan (ed.), Motives of Woe, p. 30. 52 Nancy Pollard Brown argues that the poems found exclusively in the Farnsworth manuscript ‘suggest Southwell’s hand very strongly’, and that they may have been ‘drafts of some of Southwell’s earliest English lyrics, later set aside as he progressed in literary skills’: The Poems of Robert Southwell, S.J., ed. J. H. McDonald and N. P. Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. lxxxvi. 53 Christopher Devlin, The Life of Robert Southwell: Poet and Martyr (London: Longmans, 1956), p. 16. 54 Devlin, The Life of Southwell, pp. 16–17. 55 Southwell’s lyric ‘What joy to live’ is a sacred re-working of Petrarch’s ‘Pace non trovo’ (Canzoniere, 134), one of the best known of the sonnets describing the oxymoronic experience of romantic love. For an analysis of Southwell’s poem in relation to the Italian original and Thomas Watson’s English adaptation in Hekatomphilia (1582), see Jason Lawrence, ‘“Still finest wits are stilling Venus Rose”: Robert Southwell’s “Optima Deo”, Venus and Adonis, and Tasso’s canto della rosa’, Renaissance Studies, 27 (2013), 389–406: pp. 392–3. Martz was the first critic to describe the ‘campaign to convert the poetry of profane love into the poetry of divine love’ as the ‘art of sacred parody’: Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), p. 184. 56 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 478. 57 Poems of Southwell, ed. McDonald and Brown, p. 110. 58 See Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 75. 59 St Robert Southwell, Collected Poems, ed. Peter Davidson and Anne Sweeney (Manchester: Fyfield Books, 2007), p. 63. 60 Devlin, The Life of Southwell, p. 17. See Scarsi, Translating Women, pp. 114–16. 61 Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 126. 62 John Klause, Shakespeare, the Earl, and the Jesuit (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2008), pp. 41–2. 63 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 478. 64 Poems of Southwell, ed. McDonald and Brown, p. 110. 65 Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 283. 66 Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 283. 67 Daniel, Poems, ed. Sprague, p. 26. 68 Poems of Southwell, ed. McDonald and Brown, pp. 109–10. 69 See, for example, sonnets 45 and 46 of Petrarch’s Canzoniere. 70 Daniel, Poems, ed. Sprague, p. 25. 71 Shell concurs with the idea that Spenser was one of the intended targets of

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the Jesuit’s prose epistle and dedicatory poem when she suggests that ‘Southwell’s verse elicited an agonistic reaction from Spenser’, specifically his neoPlatonic response in the Four Hymnes, printed in 1596, where the two latter hymns, on heavenly love and heavenly beauty, are seemingly intended as a retraction of the two earlier hymns in praise of earthly love and beauty, as Spenser explains in the dedicatory epistle to the Countesses of Cumberland and Warwick: Shell, Catholicism, p. 72. Daniel may also have had access to Southwell’s observations on the state of English poetry even before they were printed shortly after his death: in 1595 he dedicates the first four books of his epic poem The Civil Wars to his new patron Charles Blount, who was certainly present at Southwell’s execution in February 1595, and who is also the most likely candidate to be the nobleman who visited the Jesuit in prison the night before, where he seems to have been given ‘a book designed to teach Poets how to safeguard their talent and employ it as befitted’, which he later showed to the queen when giving an account of the execution: see Devlin, The Life of Southwell, pp. 317–18. 72 The connections between Southwell and Shakespeare have been explored in Michael Wood, In Search of Shakespeare (London: BBC Books, 2003), pp. 151–4 and pp. 162–4; Wilson, Secret Shakespeare, pp. 126–43; Matthew Baynham, ‘“Twice done and then done double”: Equivocation and the Catholic Recusant Hostess in Macbeth’ in Glenn Burgess, Rowlie Wymer, and Jason Lawrence (eds), The Accession of James I: Historical and Cultural Consequences (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), 101–12; Klause, Shakespeare, the Earl; Alison Shell, Shakespeare and Religion (London: A & C Black, 2010). 73 Richard Carew’s bilingual parallel text translation of the first five cantos of the poem Godfrey of Bulloigne was printed in 1594. The earliest French translation, Jean du Vignau’s La Déliverance de Hierusalem, was printed in 1595. 74 Lawrence, Who the Devil, pp. 121–6. 75 Scarsi, Translating Women, pp. 47–8. On the popularity of these stanzas in the seventeenth century, see Sasha Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 73–91. 76 See, for example, Burrow in William Shakespeare, Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 10–12. 77 Frances Yates, John Florio: the Life of an Italian in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934), pp. 124–5. 78 Shakespeare, Complete Sonnets, ed. Burrow, p. 182. 79 Shakespeare, Complete Sonnets, ed. Burrow, p. 181. 80 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, pp. 479–80. 81 Shakespeare, Complete Sonnets, ed. Burrow, pp. 181–2. 82 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 442. 83 Shakespeare, Complete Sonnets, ed. Burrow, pp. 198 and 203. 84 Shakespeare, Complete Sonnets, ed. Burrow, p. 235. 85 Louise of Lorraine, the youngest daughter of Henry I, Duke of Guise, was

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the great grand-daughter of Ercole II d’Este, the father of Tasso’s patron Alfonso II, and Renée of France, the daughter of King Louis XII. 86 Pierre Joulet, Les Amours d’Armide (Rouen, 1614), sig. Aiiiv. 87 Joulet, Les Amours d’Armide, p. 67r. 88 The dedicatory poem is transcribed in Franklin B. Williams, ‘Robert Tofte’, Review of English Studies, 13 (1937), 282–96 and 405–24: p. 424. 89 Williams, ‘Robert Tofte’, p. 424. 90 Williams, ‘Robert Tofte’, p. 423. 91 See Scarsi, Translating Women, pp. 101–4, p. 106, and pp. 109–20.

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2 ‘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 Spenser’s use of Tasso in his creation of the Bowre of Blisse has been acknowledged by critics for well over a century now. Initially his version of the celebrated canto della rosa, ‘translated from the languidly sweet Italian perfection of Tasso into the timid, almost scentless English of Spenser’, according to Violet Paget, writing as Vernon Lee in the mid1880s, was recognised in isolation from the respective episodes in which the songs were first heard.1 Following the contemporaneous discoveries of the German scholar Emil Koeppel,2 however, Spenser’s prolonged engagement with the episode in Tasso’s epic, in which the Christian hero Rinaldo is rescued from the enchantress Armida (Gerusalemme liberata, cantos XV to XVI), in Book II of The Faerie Queene (1590), particularly but not exclusively in the final canto which ‘blazes with spoils from the Garden of Armida’,3 was to become widely and readily accepted by the early decades of the twentieth century. The nature of this imitative engagement, though, particularly in terms of the English poet’s proximity or otherwise to the Italian original, both linguistically and morally, has been subjected to a variety of contested, often contradictory interpretations over the past hundred years. The earliest sustained attention to Spenser’s borrowings from Tasso in Book II encapsulates this bifocal critical response. Ellsworth Cory emphasises both the ‘celestial thieving’ from Tasso and the ‘incomparable originality’ of Spenser’s Bowre, urging his readers to ‘turn to the original and see how Spenser has translated’ Tasso’s poem, particularly the stanzas describing the ‘two wanton damsels’ playing in the fountain. Cory’s comparative evaluation of Tasso’s impact develops from the premise that Spenser was simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by what he chose to imitate:

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The influence of Tasso, which is very strong here, seems to have been only intermittent and momentary as if the English poet ... caught from the more serious Italian [in comparison to his epic predecessor Ariosto] a sense of painful hesitation that awakened his own Puritan apprehensions and drew him hastily back from his luxurious perusals of the creator of the voluptuous and feverish Armida.4

For Cory, it was this religious apprehensiveness which drove the poet to search for ‘that delicacy which enabled him in The Faerie Queene to translate and transfigure one of the most beautiful episodes in Tasso both by freshening Tasso’s uneasy, sultry voluptuousness with a sensuality almost innocent and by rendering Tasso’s trickery of phrase with the triumphant and easy grace which Tasso himself sought’.5 Subsequent commentators have tended to find something very different from a ‘sensuality almost innocent’ in Spenser’s transfiguration of Tasso, but the starting point has often been the same, stemming from the English poet’s perceived sense of moral unease with the erotic, and highly visual, episode that he had read and studied so assiduously in the Italian original. It has become a critical commonplace, in the wake of C. S. Lewis’s highly influential discussion in The Allegory of Love (1936), to place considerable emphasis on both the artificiality of the Bowre and the overly voyeuristic responses to the (misleading) sights witnessed there.6 In this re-evaluation of Spenser’s early, and carefully considered, use of what was to become the most imitated episode in Tasso’s poem across a range of arts, visual and musical as well as literary, I want to shift the emphasis towards a slightly different conception of artfulness in both the Bowre and its immediate source in Tasso’s description of Armida’s palace and garden. While the increased artifice of key elements of the Bowre is undeniable in comparison to its Italian original, pace Lewis, I want rather to pay attention to how Spenser’s intensification of the visual and musical aspects of the ‘goodly workmanship’ (II, xii, 83, 3) on display in the Bowre presciently prefigures in verse wider continental responses to the same episode in Tasso across other artistic forms, both musical and pictorial, which were emerging simultaneously in Italy and France, and were set to continue throughout the seventeenth century and on into the eighteenth. The powerful pictorial quality of the poetry describing the Bowre of Blisse has long been recognised, and it has often been approached in relation to the equivalent visual allure of Armida’s enchanted domain in Tasso:

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Armida’s garden and the Bower of Bliss are constructed primarily as pictures appealing to the senses visually. But heroes and readers are also made to see in the sense of understand both the appeal and danger of the place. In both poems the primary visual presentation of the gardens as a series of spectacles enacts the subtle combination of involvement with and detachment from the scene, necessary if we are going to understand the experience.7

Judith Kates argues that in both poems the visual aspects of the gardens are intended to be observed by character and reader alike, though she notes that there is a significant alteration in ‘Spenser’s narrative strategy’ in his decision to represent ‘these sights as temptations to the central hero’ Guyon rather than from the more ‘distant’ perspective of Rinaldo’s rescuers, the ‘peripheral characters’ Carlo and Ubaldo, in Tasso.8 I want to qualify this assertion that the key visual elements of the Bowre are all presented through the eyes of the Knight of Temperance by means of a close examination of how Spenser responds to the pictorial elements of Tasso’s descriptions in cantos XV and XVI. I also want to re-assert the importance of the sometimes neglected aural effects encountered in both gardens. Once Sir Guyon and the Palmer have arrived immediately outside the Bowre at the mid-point in the final canto of Book II, after an arduous sea voyage which follows the contours of Carlo and Ubaldo’s journey to the Fortunate Isles in canto XV of Tasso’s poem, they are confronted by an ineffectual fence enclosing the garden, and an entry gate ‘wrought of substaunce light, / Rather for pleasure, then for battery or fight’ (II, xii, 43, 8–9). The fence and gate serve no practical protective purpose, and so the poet’s focus switches immediately to the impressive workmanship of the latter: Yt framed was of precious yuory, That seemd a worke of admirable witt.

(II, xii, 44, 1–2)9

Spenser’s ivory gate is placed in exactly the equivalent position to the point of entry to Armida’s labyrinth in Tasso, a gate of silver with golden hinges, on which are carved pictorial representations of the stories of Hercules’s subjection to Iole (in place of Ovid’s Omphale) and Antony’s retreat from the battle of Actium in the wake of Cleopatra’s flight.10 If the two stories, described with an extended ekphrastic flourish in Tasso’s verse, offer clear analogies to the current predicament of Rinaldo, a great

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masculine hero distracted and effeminised by his love, in the Italian poem it is striking that his rescuers are moved only to examine the exquisite and life-like workmanship on the gate, rather than to detect any parallel with their enslaved fellow crusader: Fermàr ne le figure il guardo intento, ché vinta la materia è del lavoro: manca il parlar, di vivo altro non chiedi; né manca questo ancor, s’ a gli occhi credi.

(XVI, 2, 5–8)

(They cast an intense gaze on the figures, wherein the material was surpassed by the workmanship: they lacked only speech, you could not ask them to be any more life-like; indeed they did not even lack this, if you could entirely believe your eyes.)11

Spenser, however, clearly does register the significance of the narrative precedents in Tasso’s ekphrasis, and thus chooses to develop an Ovidian equivalent for his own richly decorated gate: the story of Hercules and Iole is replaced with ‘the famous history / Of Iason and Medea’. In this instance, though, Spenser does not present his own ekphrastic description of the story on the gate directly from the point of view of Guyon. In Tasso the initial gaze of Carlo and Ubaldo switches to the perspective of the reader in the final lines of stanza 2, with the suggestion that the eyes can be deceived by the verisimilitude of the figures displayed, just before the poet describes the carvings themselves in the following four and a half stanzas (Hercules and Iole in stanza 3, and Antony’s sea battle in stanzas 4 to 7), and then returns to the viewpoint of the knights at the end of stanza 7: ‘I due guerrier, poi che dal vago obietto / rivolser gli occhi, entràr nel dubbio tetto’, ‘the two knights, as soon as they turned their eyes away from the beautiful object, entered the mazy summit’ (XVI, 7, 7–8).12 The shorter description of the single Ovidian story on Spenser’s gate begins from a more omniscient, objective vantage point: And therein all the famous history Of Iason and Medea was ywritt; Her mighty charmes, her furious louing fitt, His goodly conquest of the golden fleece, His falsed faith, and loue too lightly flit, The wondred Argo, which in venturous peece First through the Euxine seas bore all the flowr of Greece. (II, xii, 44, 3–9)13

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James Heffernan has noted the ‘strong narrative impulse’ of the first stanza of the ekphrasis,14 where Spenser takes care to indicate that all elements of the story are conveyed on the gate, ‘roughly in the order of the legend’s chief episodes’,15 with the attention initially drawn to the female enchantress rather than the Greek hero, consciously reversing the emphasis of Tasso’s inset stories, where the focus is on the effeminised male figures, and thus prefiguring the centrality of Spenser’s own enchantress Acrasia at the heart of the Bowre. It is perhaps surprising that, in the detailed assessments of this verbal representation of the imaginary visual works on the gate by both Heffernan and John Bender, no comment is made on Spenser’s initial choice of verb in the stanza, which as yet gives no concrete indication of the medium in which the story is being related.16 The second stanza devoted to the description does suggest a more overtly visual representation, and, as such, is introduced by the poet with a direct appeal to the reader’s, rather than Guyon’s, ocular faculties: Ye might haue seene the frothy billowes fry Vnder the ship, as thorough them she went, That seemd the waues were into yuory, Or yuory into the waues were sent; And otherwhere the snowy substaunce sprent With vermell, like the boyes blood therein shed, A piteous spectacle did represent, And otherwhiles with gold besprinkeled; Yt seemd thenchaunted flame, which did Creusa wed. (II, xii, 45, 1–9)17

For Heffernan this stanza indicates clearly that the story is carved into the ivory of the gate, and he observes how ‘the forward momentum of this ekphrastic narrative, however, is reversed ... and suspended by a fixed focus on the carving of the voyage. The lines on this carving richly display a second familiar feature of ekphrasis: representational friction. Ivory masquerades as foam, and vermillion (vermell) as blood. The subject matter and the medium of representation become virtually interchangeable.’18 Bender’s reading of the stanza also detects a ‘representational fiction’, approaching it specifically from the perspective of the poem’s reader, who is interestingly figured here in visual terms: The viewer recognizes waves, blood or flames, yet knows that they are created out of ivory, vermilion, and gold. Progression is orderly in stanza

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forty-four, but in the next stanza Spenser is concerned to represent the randomness of a viewer’s encounter with an illusionistic work of art and uses the indefinite transitions ‘and other where’ or ‘and otherwhiles’. Spenser’s casual subordinate treatment of elements from the Medea story in stanza forty-five works like Focused imagery to build an impression of sensuous discovery; these scenes are noticed because of the imagined craftsman’s skilful use of materials.19

Bender suggests that it is the focus on the workmanship on the gate, emphasising the ‘remarkable visual effects at least as much as the legend of Jason and Medea’, that distinguishes Spenser’s ekphrasis from its model in the Italian, where supposedly ‘the artist’s skilful use of materials is only indirectly Tasso’s subject’.20 A closer examination of Tasso’s ekphrastic description, however, reveals that Spenser was drawn to a moment of exactly this kind of ‘representational friction’ in his source, in the first stanza evoking the naval battle of Actium: D’incontra è un mare, e di canuto flutto vedi spumanti i suoi cerulei campi. Vedi nel mezzo un doppio ordine instrutto Di navi e d’arme, e uscir da l’arme i lampi. D’oro fiammeggia l’onda, e par che tutto d’incendio marzial Leucate avampi.

(XVI, 4, 1–6)

(On the other side is a sea, and observe its azure fields foaming with white waves. See in the midst of it a double line composed of ships and weapons, and lightning issuing from the weapons. The ocean surface flames with gold, and it appears that all of Leucadia is ablaze with martial fire.)21

Spenser transfigures the description from the second of Tasso’s stories to his single Ovidian example, but the vividly rendered image of the disturbed ocean in the Italian, also seen from the reader’s point of view, is certainly invoked directly: the white, blue, and gold of Tasso’s silver gate are transformed into the ‘snowy’ ivory, vermilion, and gold of Spenser’s stanza. It seems, in fact, that the artist’s skill is stressed equally in each case,22 and that what instead distinguishes Spenser’s technique in the second ekphrastic stanza is his more evident explanation of what the colours signify: the vermilion overtly calls to mind the blood of Apsyrtus, Medea’s brother, whose body parts are scattered into the sea by the enchantress to delay her father’s pursuit of the Argo, while the gold, as in Tasso, represents fire, specifically the ‘enchaunted flame’ of

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the garment, which consumes Jason’s new bride after he has abandoned Medea. The English poet stresses that each example of the inhumane and vengeful actions of the enchantress, associated with a skilfully wrought colour, presents ‘a piteous spectacle’ to the reader, who is thus encouraged to feel pathos for her victims.23 Much critical attention has been paid to the workmanship visualised on the entry gate, because it has often been regarded as paradigmatic of both Spenser’s wider descriptive technique and the art of the enchantress within the Bowre itself. Heffernan argues that, by ‘exemplifying the triumph of artificiality, the ivory gate fittingly introduces us to the realm of Acrasia’, and Bender suggests that the second stanza is intended ‘to show transformations of natural substances by art and to represent through images the eerie uncertainties and illusions of the Bowre of Blisse’.24 Such accounts stressing this potentially deceptive artifice, however, have tended to overlook how, immediately after the two descriptive stanzas, the English poet anticipates from the reader a response that goes beyond the initial visual one: ‘All this and more might in that goodly gate / Be red: that euer open stood to all’ (II, xii, 46, 1–2).25 Spenser’s choice of verb is again noteworthy, implying the need to discern the significance of what that has just been observed. Such an interpretative faculty requires the reader to be able to see and then read the (verbal) images in quick succession: The common contrast between texts that take time to read and pictures seen in an instant is entirely specious. Visual art is not instantaneously accessible. An educated eye tracking through a picture in repeated scans picks up impressions, associations, and allusions in a way quite comparable with the procedure of reading.26

It is not simply ‘the randomness of a viewer’s encounter with an illusionistic work of art’ that is being replicated, as the reader is guided by Spenser to respond to the ‘famous history’ on the gate, but also a gradually perceived awareness of the moral significance of the story itself, in the parallel between the disturbing actions of the two enchantresses, Medea and Acrasia. C. P. Brand has suggested that ‘it is in general characteristic of Spenser’s adaptation of Tasso’s style that the imprecision of the Italian is replaced by more carefully defined visual details. Tasso tends to suggest, rather than paint, a picture; he often leaves the reader’s imagination to work on something only hinted at visually’.27 This becomes apparent in the case of the two ekphrastic descriptions, where Spenser is,

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in fact, following Tasso more closely than has been previously acknowledged; paradoxically, however, an increased awareness of this indebtedness helps to stress what the English poet does differently: in his evocation of colour he is much more overt in guiding the reader’s emotional and moral response to the precedent of the Ovidian story than in Tasso’s two examples of effeminised heroes displayed on the silver gates of Armida’s labyrinth, where neither the observing knights nor the reader are encouraged directly to make any connection with Rinaldo’s predicament. The placement of the extended ekphrastic description at the point of entry to Armida’s palace and the Bowre respectively is significant, as it signals the prolonged use of a similar technique by each poet throughout the ensuing evocation of the locus amoenus. In his analysis of artistic depictions of the Rinaldo and Armida episode, Jonathan Unglaub has noted how ‘Tasso maintains the ekphrastic mode he used to describe the reliefs to effectuate his long description of the garden’ itself.28 This had been detected almost immediately by one of the earliest Italian translators of and commentators on Tasso’s poem, Scipio Gentili, who observed the poet’s use of the technique in his annotation alongside stanza 9 of canto XVI, the beginning of the sustained description of Armida’s garden: Il Tasso habbi ottimamente conseguito quello che Hermogene c’insegna nel capitol Della dolcezza: cio e, che ci è licito di descriuere la bellezza d’vn luoco con quella figura, che Ecphrasis si addimanda, e dipingere varie sorte alberi, & herbe e diuersi specie d’acque, e simil’ alter cose, le quali dando piacere a gli occhi, mentre si rimirano & agli orecchi mentre si narrano. (Tasso has optimally adhered to what Hermogenes teaches us in the chapter ‘On Sweetness’: that it is permissible to describe the beauty of a place with that figure, which is called Ekphrasis, and to paint various sorts of trees, and grasses, and diverse bodies of water, and other similar things, which give pleasure to the eyes, while it is beheld, and to the ears, while it is narrated.) 29

Gentili notes the appeal to the senses of sight and hearing by means of ekphrasis, and this dual focus is to be fundamental to the impact of the descriptions in both Tasso and Spenser. The Annotationi di Scipio Gentili sopra La Gierusalemme Liberata di Torquato Tasso were printed by John Wolfe in 1586 in London (albeit with a false imprint of Leiden), and thus may have been available to Spenser as he studied and imitated the Italian poem in Ireland in the mid- to late 1580s.30 Both poets employ the ‘ekphrastic mode’ consistently to emphasise the artfulness of the apparently natural places being described. Spenser,

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however, frequently intensifies the playful sense of rivalry between art and nature in the Italian poem in his creation of the Bowre, by making what appears natural in Tasso more conspicuously a consciously crafted work of art. Robert Durling was the first to notice the structural alterations that Spenser makes to Tasso’s description of Armida’s labyrinth and garden in his conception of the Bowre,31 and it is striking that each of the three different areas of Acrasia’s domain identified by the critic can be reached by Guyon only after passing through or by an ornately wrought artefact, with its attendant (allegorical) figures. This structural plan is more schematic than in Tasso’s poem, but in each case the English poet highlights, and elaborates on, recognisable features of Armida’s enchanted realm. I have already suggested that Spenser does not have to develop significantly the attention paid to the workmanship on the carved gates in Tasso for his own ivory gate, but it is here that the reader first encounters in the Bowre a recurrent pattern of a richly described point of entry, attended by a figure who must be resisted, in order to advance to the next part of the garden. Although the description of the story of Jason and Medea is revealed from the viewpoint of the reader rather than the titular knight, it is Guyon and the Palmer who must resist the allegorical figures, who are, for the most part, Spenser’s additions to his model in Tasso. Michael Leslie has demonstrated how the tripartite structural design of the Bowre, noted by Durling in contrast to the immediate literary precedent in Armida’s garden, mirrors that of contemporary Italian and Italianate gardens, where visitors often encountered a ‘gateway through which [they] must pass in order to be initiated into the garden’s mythic context and into the necessary ways of reading’: Both the reader and Guyon are halted at certain liminal points, halted on thresholds where they must learn, decide, take stock as a result of either inscriptions or of significant iconographical material.32

As Guyon tries to pass through this initial gate of ivory, he encounters ‘Pleasures porter’, the (false) Genius of Acrasia’s garden, ‘That secretly doth vs procure to fall, / Through guilefull semblants, which he makes vs to see’ (II, xii, 48, 5–6); however, he has little trouble in ‘disdainfully’ rejecting the proffered cup of wine, also breaking the staff the porter holds ‘for more formalitee’, so that he can progress to the next stage of the Bowre. As Durling noted, the ‘large and spacious plaine’ (II, xii, 50, 2) seen by Guyon and the Palmer after passing through the first porch is modelled closely on Tasso’s ‘pian su ’l monte ampio ed aperto’ (XV, 53,  4),

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revealed to Carlo and Ubaldo as soon as they reach the Fortunate Isles, with which it shares the illusion of perpetual spring:33 né, come altrove suol, ghiacci ed ardori nubi e sereni a quelle piaggie alterna, ma il ciel di candidissimi splendori sempre s’ammanta e non s’infiamma o verna, e nudre a i prati l’erba, a l’erba i fiori, a i fior l’odor, l’ombra a le piante eternal.

(XV, 54, 1–6)

(Nor, like everywhere else, do frost and heat, cloudy or clear alternate on these hills, but the sky always robes itself with the brightest splendours, and never burns nor freezes, but instead nourishes the meadows with grass, the grass with flowers, the flowers with perfumes, and gives shade to the everlasting plants.)34 Therewith the Heauens alwayes Iouiall, Lookte on them louely, still in stedfast state, Ne suffred storme nor frost on them to fall, Their tender buds or leaues to violate, Nor scorching heat, nor cold intemperate T’afflict the creatures, which therein did dwell. (II, xii, 51, 1–6)35

After this clear transposition of the Italian, Spenser adds a stanza comparing the evergreen plain to various Classical and Biblical paradises and their inhabitants, including Eden itself, most of which, as Hamilton notes, ‘are marred by sin and death’, offering a cautionary indication to the reader that this fertility within the Bowre might not be as positive as it first appears to be.36 The Knight of Temperance’s successful rejection of deceptive pleasure before he even reaches the following plain, however, means that, on this occasion, he is easily able to resist the allure of the seemingly natural beauty he witnesses: Much wondred Guyon at the fayre aspect Of that sweet place, yet suffred no delight To sincke into his sence, nor mind affect, But passed forth, and lookt still forward right, Brydling his will, and maystering his might. (II, xii, 53, 1–5)37

In Spenser’s revised layout, the plain is immediately followed by a second threshold which needs to be crossed in order to progress to the

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next region of the Bowre, ‘the most daintie Paradise on ground’ (II, xii, 58, 1). The poet’s presentation of this second ‘Porch with rare deuice’ follows the pattern of the first closely: an elaborate description, emphasising the artisan’s clever use of colour and materials and developed from a direct model in Tasso’s poem, is followed by Guyon’s contemptuous encounter with an allegorical figure stationed there, before the next locale is viewed directly from his point of view. The initial description is again presented from an objective, rather than from the hero’s, perspective. On this occasion, however, it becomes evident that Spenser is refashioning the material he imitates from the Italian into a more skilfully wrought artefact, which dexterously combines the natural with the artificial: Nel tronco istesso e tra l’istessa foglia sovra il nascente fico invecchia il fico; pendono a un ramo, un con dorata spoglia, l’altro con verde, il novo e ’l pomo antico; lussureggiante serpe alto e germoglia la torta vite ov’è piú l’orto aprico: qui l’uva ha in fiori acerba, e qui d’or l’have e di piropo e già di nèttar grave.

(XVI, 11, 1–8)

(On the same trunk and among the same leaves the budding fig grows alongside the fully ripe one; on one branch hang the new and old apple, one with a golden skin, the other with green; the twisted vine luxuriantly winds above and sprouts where the garden is most open: here the unripe grape is blooming, and there they are of gold and red pyrope, and already laden with nectar.)38

The abundance of Tasso’s stanza, created in fact by Armida’s enchanted ‘aura che rende gli alberi fioriti’, ‘breeze which makes the trees fruitful’ (XVI, 10, 6), is overlooked in the English poem in favour of an exclusive focus on the vine and its fruit. However, Tasso’s suggestions of colour in the second half of the stanza, already metaphorically associated with precious metals and gemstones in the Italian, are extended and intensified in Spenser’s description, where the green, gold, and red of the ripe and unripe fruit in Tasso are transformed into purple and gem-like ruby and emerald grapes: No gate, but like one, being goodly dight With bowes and braunches, which did broad dilate Their clasping armes, in wanton wreathings intricate.

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tasso’s art and afterlives So fashioned a Porch with rare deuice, Archt ouer head with an embracing vine, Whose bounches hanging downe, seemd to entice All passers by, to taste their lushious wine, And did them selues into their hands incline, As freely offering to be gathered: Some deepe empurpled as the Hyacint, Some as the Rubine, laughing sweetely red, Some like faire Emeraudes, not yet well ripened. And them amongst, some were of burnisht gold, So made by art, to beautify the rest, Which did themselues emongst the leaues enfold, As lurking from the vew of couetous guest, That the weake boughs, with so rich load opprest, Did bow adowne, as ouerburdened. (II, xii, 53, 7 – 55, 6)39

The most striking grapes in Spenser’s version are certainly those made ‘of burnisht gold’, which appear to place themselves carefully among the leaves of the vine to avoid being too easily discerned, their weight making the boughs hang down and creating the effect of a porch to be passed under, readily offering its fruit to ‘couetous’ visitors. The apparent agency of the grapes in hiding themselves from view partially conceals the care with which they have been ‘fashioned’: Spenser stresses not only that they are made of gold, but also that they have been worked on or polished (‘burnisht’), presumably to make them appear more natural, although it is not clear who is responsible for either crafting them or positioning them in order ‘to beautify the rest’. Durling focuses on the artfulness of these grapes and their placement to suggest that ‘these lines epitomize the art of the Bower: the golden grapes are formed by craftsmanship, not magic; they are arranged in such a way as to tantalize the cupidity of the guests; they are the instruments of a conscious, calculated, artificial protraction of desire. Spenser omits the details of Tasso’s description which could not apply to an actual vine.’40 If the increased element of artifice in the English stanzas, as emphasised by Durling, is indeed its most noteworthy feature, I would argue that this is achieved not by omitting any aspects of the Italian original not applicable to a real vine, but rather by exaggerating them: the red and golden grapes in Tasso’s stanza are only metaphorically associated with gems and precious metals, whereas Spenser and his artisan choose to entwine artificial golden grapes

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among the ­gem-like real ones to enhance the overall aesthetic effect of the ‘embracing vine’. The prominence given to these golden grapes by Spenser in 1590, the very year in which the first illustrated edition of Tasso’s epic was printed in Italy,41 presciently anticipates later Italian artistic renderings of scenes based on canto XVI: only a decade or so after Spenser’s prolonged transmutation of Tasso’s ekphrastic description, the Bolognese painter Annibale Carracci followed the English poet in choosing to highlight the striking visual impact of the (metaphorical) grapes in the Italian poem in his depiction of Armida’s garden, where a bunch of conspicuously golden-looking grapes appears among the more familiar red ones directly above the heads of the observing Carlo and Ubaldo at the top left side of the canvas.42 Spenser’s extended re-working of Tasso’s stanza in the construction of his porch creates an additional level of visual ambiguity in the English poem, where ‘the eye suddenly seems incapable of making necessary distinctions’ between what is natural and what is artificial, as ‘the viewer’s figurative perception of the other grapes has to be re-examined’ once it has encountered the concealed golden fruit.43 Bender suggests that the reader has to ‘join Guyon in a test of visual discrimination’ at this point, although it should be noted that, once again, Spenser does not present this description of the ‘goodly dight’ porch directly from the point of view of the Knight of Temperance, which suggests that the perspectives of the hero and the reader are not intended to be entirely interchangeable. Christine Coch has argued that, while Guyon himself ‘remains impervious to these delights of the garden’s art’, and so can readily and ‘violently’ resist for a second time an allegorical figure encountered there, Excesse with her golden cup of wine on this occasion, ‘the reader is another matter’ in terms of developing the ability to undertake an aesthetic appreciation of the workmanship witnessed on the overhanging vine.44 It is noteworthy that the description of the elaborate ‘Porch with rare deuice’ is placed before Guyon’s sighting of ‘the most daintie Paradise on ground’ in Acrasia’s Bowre. Spenser again turns to Tasso for his description of this next location, but he deliberately reverses the order from the Italian poem, where the first sighting of Armida’s garden precedes, rather than follows, the stanza describing the fruitful abundance witnessed there (XVI,11), which the English poet has already imitated:45 In lieto aspetto il bel giardin s’asperse: acque stagnanti, mobili cristalli, fior vari e varie piante, erbe diverse,

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apriche collinette, ombrose valli, selve e spelonche in una vista offerse; e quell che ’l bello e ’l caro accresce a l’opre, l’arte, che tutto fa, nulla si scopre. Stimi (sí misto il culto è co ’l negletto) sol naturali e gli ornamenti e i siti. Di natura arte par, che per diletto L’imitatrice sua scherzando imiti.

(XVI, 9, 2 – 10, 4)46

(The garden opens out in happy countenance: still pools, crystal streams, various flowers and plants, diverse shrubs, open hillocks and shady valleys, woods and caves appear in a single glance, and what further increases the beauty and rarity of the work: the art, that fashioned it all, does nowhere reveal itself. / So mingled is the cultivated with the neglected, you would esteem the ornaments and the sites to be purely natural. It seems an art of nature to imitate in jest her impersonator for her own delight.)47

This simple alteration of the order in which the reader first encounters the apparently natural sights observed in the Bowre serves to complicate significantly Tasso’s account of the playful relationship between art and nature in Armida’s garden, which Spenser renders closely into English directly after an expanded evocation of the Italian setting: There the most daintie Paradise on ground, It selfe doth appear to his sober eye, In which all pleasures plenteously abownd, And none does others happinesse enuye: The painted flowers, the trees vpshooting hye, The dales for shade, the hilles for breathing space, The trembling groues, the christall running by; And that, which all faire workes doth most aggrace, The art, which all that wrought, appeared in no place. One would haue thought (so cunningly, the rude And scorned partes were mingled with the fine,) That nature had for wantonesse ensued Art, and that Art at nature did repine; So striuing each th’other to vndermine, Each did the others worke more beautify. (II, xii, 58, 1 – 59, 6)48

Although the ‘daintie Paradise’ is initially viewed from the perspective of Guyon’s ‘sober eye’, Spenser, like Tasso, switches the point of view at the

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beginning of the second stanza, and it is instead the reader’s awareness of the more complex interaction of art and nature in the English stanzas that becomes heightened by having witnessed the carefully concealed combination of the natural and artificial in the vine porch immediately beforehand. Even where the English poet is translating almost literally from the Italian, as he does in the final two lines of stanza 58 and the opening four lines of stanza 59, Spenser makes subtle but telling adjustments to Tasso’s original: as Hamilton observes, the verb ‘aggrace’ is an intensification of the Italian ‘accrese’;49 the cultivated and neglected aspects of the landscape are here combined ‘cunningly’; the delight that drives nature’s imitative playfulness is replaced with the stronger, more ambiguous ‘wantonesse’, with its additional implications of both luxuriance and lasciviousness, as previously hinted at in the ‘wanton wreathings intricate’ of the ‘clasping armes’ of the vine; there is also an amplification of the sense of emulative rivalry in the English poem, where ‘Art’ bemoans nature’s imitation, and where both elements unwittingly render more beautiful ‘the others worke’ by attempting to surpass one another. Spenser’s considered modifications to the initial description of Armida’s garden help to prepare the reader for his most radical expansion of Tasso’s original when the third threshold to be observed and passed, situated at the very heart of the Bowre, is encountered. Lees-Jeffries has suggested that the description of the ‘gorgeous fountain’ is ‘surely one of the most analysed passages in the whole of The Faerie Queene’,50 but, in terms of indebtedness to its specific Italian source, critical attention has tended to focus predominantly on the naked figures Guyon soon witnesses playing there rather than on the fountain itself, which is barely even noticed by the Knight of Temperance. As with the earlier ‘large and spacious plaine’ (II, xii, 50, 2), Spenser transposes details from Carlo and Ubaldo’s arduous approach to Armida’s garden in canto XV into the description of the Bowre itself, on this occasion moving Tasso’s ‘fonte del riso’ (XV, 57, 1), which offers the false hope of assuaging the thirst of the Christian knights after their long climb: Quando ecco un fonte, che a bagnar gli invita l’asciutte labia, alto cader da’ sassi e da una larga vena, e con ben mille zampilletti spruzzar l’erbe di stille. Ma tutta insieme poi tra verdi sponde in profondo canal l’acqua s’aduna, e sotto l’ombra di perpetue fronde

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mormorando se ’n va gelida e bruna, ma trasparente sí che non asconde de l’imo letto suo vaghezza alcuna;

(XV, 55, 5 – 56, 6)

(When behold, a spring, which invites dry lips to bathe themselves, comes spilling over the rocks, and from an abundant pool with a thousand little splashes it sprays the nearby grass. / But all together then, among green banks, the water gathers into a deep channel, and under the shade of everleafy branches it goes by, murmuring, cool and dark, yet so transparent that it does not obscure the beauty of even its deepest bed.) 51

The first threat to the weary knights is from the enticing water of the magical spring and stream, which are given an entirely natural appearance, but, having already been warned about the delirious laughter it brings on by the Mago d’Ascalona in canto XIV, Carlo and Ubaldo are easily able to resist its dangers. In contrast to both the Italian original and the earlier English thresholds, however, there is little pretence of the natural in the long description of the extravagant ornamental fountain observed, exclusively from the perspective of the reader/viewer, in the middle of the Bowre: And in the midst of all, a fountaine stood, Of richest substance, that on earth might bee, So pure and shiny, that the siluer flood Through euery channel running one might see; Most goodly it with curious ymageree Was ouerwrought, and shapes of naked boyes Of which some seemd with liuely iollitee, To fly about, playing with their wanton toyes, Whylest others did them selues embay in liquid joyes, And ouer all, of purest gold was spred, A trayle of yuie in his natiue hew: For the rich metal was so coloured, That wight, who did not well auis’d it vew, Would surely deeme it to bee yuie trew: Low his lasciuious armes adown did creepe, That themselues dipping in the siluer dew, Their fleecy flowers they fearefully did steepe, Which drops of Christall seemd for wantones to weep. Infinit streames continually did well Out of this fountain, sweet and faire to see,

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The which into an ample lauer fell, And shortly grew to so great quantitie, That like a litle lake it seemd to bee; Whose depth exceeded not three cubits hight, That through the waues one might the bottom see, All pau’d beneath with Iaspar shining bright, That seemd the fountaine in that sea did sayle vpright. And all the margent round about was sett, With shady Laurell trees, thence to defend The sunny beames, which on the billowes bett, And those which therein bathed, mote offend. (II, xii, 60, 1 – 63, 4)52

Despite the marked differences, Tasso’s description of the ‘fonte del riso’ still provides a clear starting point for Spenser’s elaboration. The transparency of the water in the Italian is reflected more than once in the English, but it is also amplified in both the jasper used to pave the bottom of the ‘ample’ basin, and the unspecified material ‘of richest substance’ from which the fountain itself is constructed, which is so ‘pure and shiny’ that the ‘siluer flood’ of water can always be seen, leading Bender to suggest that it is ‘most certainly crystal’. This precious material has additionally been worked on ‘with curious ymageree’ to provide an illusion of flying and bathing naked boys playing wantonly in the water, presumably by means of some skilful mechanical engineering, much like the putti often figured in visual depictions of the ekphrastic scene in Armida’s garden.53 The evergreen branches (‘perpetue fronde’), that provide the shade for Tasso’s spring, are doubly evoked in Spenser’s version, in the laurel trees surrounding the fountain and ‘litle lake’ in the final stanza, but also, more strikingly, in the second stanza of the description. As with the preceding vine porch, Spenser’s use of colour here progresses from the apparently figurative to the literal between the first two stanzas, and once again the emphasis is placed on the craftsman’s ‘goodly’ skill in concealing, by means of colouring the ‘purest gold’, the artificial nature of the metal ‘trayle of yuie’ from the observer ‘who did not well auis’d it vew’. The impact of this ‘imitation ivy’ on the potentially unobservant and injudicious reader has been the source of much critical commentary since C. S. Lewis’s withering assessment of Spenser’s readers with regard to this stanza in the 1930s.54 Bender has argued further that the narrative voice of the poet itself seems to become briefly deluded at this point:

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The false ivy is so realistic that it lures even the poet who knows its falsehood momentarily to speak of it with empathy. Because the eye is deceived, the intellect still will not believe what it knows to be true. This paradox, which is central to the Bowre’s challenge and to Spenser’s distrust of its illusionism, allies our experience with Guyon’s and enlists our imaginative sympathy as he approaches his greatest test.55

By repeatedly and problematically aligning the reader’s perception with that of the Knight of Temperance (while seemingly distinguishing between ‘the poet’ and Spenser in this particular case), Bender endorses Lewis’s oft-repeated suspicions about the English poet’s own mistrust of artistic illusion. If Guyon’s ‘greatest test’ is to be his voyeuristic response to the ‘Two naked Damzelles’ observed wrestling in the water, then he is certainly not directly prepared for this by any conflicted aesthetic or moral response to the deceptive artfulness witnessed on the fountain itself, which is conspicuously not presented from his point of view. Paul Alpers has proposed an important alternative perspective, in which the element of deception is essential to the reader’s appreciation and understanding of the artistic effect achieved here, comparing the desired response to the appearance of the artificial ivy to the visual trickery of trompe l’oeil, a suggestion that Catherine Belsey has elaborated on in her analysis of the canto: First one thing, then another, now an object, now a picture of an object. It works only if it persuades as an illusion, deludes; and it works only if we can see that it is an illusion, that we are deluded. The gap between the two moments, Lacan proposes, is the location of desire.56

If the desire of the ‘well auis’d’ viewer is aroused aesthetically by the very process of coming to comprehend this skilfully rendered illusion, then the ‘imaginative sympathy’ that Bender identifies in relation to the stanza should serve to differentiate, rather than ally, the reader’s and Guyon’s points of view at this juncture. Any empathetic reader response to the apparent weeping of the ivy, a plant both sacred to Bacchus and a symbol of lust, however, needs to be balanced against the poet’s proleptic note of warning, immediately before the appearance of the ‘naked Damzelles’ in the water, in the ivy’s ‘lasciuious armes’, which dip into the ‘siluer dew’ of the fountain for ‘wantones’, creating ‘drops of Christall’.57 It is Guyon’s complete inattention to the craftsmanship and implications of the illusory ivy on the ornamental fountain that leaves him unprepared for the sternest visual test of his temperance, unlike the two

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observers in Tasso’s poem, who are forewarned about the specific perils they will face on the approach to Armida’s palace. Towards the end of the preceding canto the Mago d’Ascalono detailed the dangers of the fountain of laughter, the enchanted banquet on its bank, and, above all, ‘le donzelle infide che voce avran piacevole e lasciva / e dolce aspetto che lusinga e ride’, ‘the faithless young girls that will have pleasing and lascivious voices / and a sweet appearance that both flatters and brings laughter’ (XIV, 75, 5–6), which are all recalled by the Christian knights at the first sight of the spring.58 This allows them to prepare themselves, like Ulysses, even before they encounter these ‘false sirene’ and their ‘dolce canto e rio’, ‘sweet and cruel song’ (XV, 57, 5–6). Despite this, neither Carlo nor Ubaldo is able to remain entirely immune to the visual attractions of the two naked swimmers, although Durling suggests that ‘their response seems more aesthetic than sensual’, in keeping with the ‘pictorial beauty’ that he twice identifies in the Italian scene:59 E scherzando se ’n van per l’acqua chiara due donzellette garrule e lascive, ch’or si spruzzano il volto, or fanno a gara chi prima a un segno destinato arrive. Si tuffano talor, e ’l capo e ‘l dorso Scoprono alfin dopo il celato corso. Mosser le natatrici ignude e belle de’ duo guerrieri alquanto i duri petti, sí che fermàrsi a riguardarle; ed elle seguian pur i lor giochi e i lor diletti. Una intanto drizzosi, e le mammelle e tutto ciò che piú la vista alletti mostrò, dal seno in suso, aperto al cielo; e ’l lago a l’altre membra era un bel velo.

(XV, 58, 3 – 59, 8)

(And, playfully, two joyful and lusty young damsels are racing in the clear waters, now spraying each other’s faces, now competing to see who would be the first to reach a given spot. Sometimes they dive below until finally the head and the back are revealed after the hidden contest. / The nude and beautiful swimmers move the stubborn chests of the two knights somewhat, so that they stop to watch them, as they continue their games and their delights. One rose so high she revealed her full breasts, and all else that could entice the sight from the hips up, open to the sky, while the lake veiled the rest most prettily.)60

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In his recasting of the episode, Spenser ignores the later element of aural temptation in the false sirens’ song in Tasso (XV, 63–4) at this point,61 choosing instead to focus entirely on the ocular allurements that confront Guyon: As Guyon hapned by the same to wend, Two naked Damzelles he therein espyde, Which therein bathing, seemed to contend, And wrestle wantonly, ne car’d to hyde, Their dainty parts from vew of any, which them eyd. Sometimes the one would lift the other quight Aboue the waters, and then downe againe Her plong, as ouer maystered by might, Where both awhile would couered remaine, And each the other from to rise restraine; The whiles their snowy limbes, as through a vele, So through the christall waues appeared plaine: Then suddeinly both would themselues vnhele, And th’ amarous sweet spoiles to greedy eyes reuele. (II, xii, 63, 5 – 64, 9)62

In this instance the more self-consciously provocative English bathers, with an emphasis on the actions of both as opposed to only one in the Italian, are observed exclusively from the point of view of the Knight of Temperance, without the shifts of perspective between Guyon and the reader/viewer that have been characteristic of other liminal points already encountered in the Bowre. Despite his previously ‘sober eye’ (II, xii, 58, 2), on this occasion it seems that the ‘greedy eyes’ viewing ‘Their dainty parts’, with a clear inference of sexual intemperance in response to the ‘amarous sweet spoiles’ on display, are those of Guyon alone. Alistair Fox has suggested that ‘Spenser lifts this sequence practically word for word from his source, but subtly re-orientates the meaning, even when he is following Tasso closely’ by making his version ‘more pornographically titillating.’63 I would add that the girls wrestling ‘wantonly’ appear more arousing from Guyon’s perspective because he is unable to register the intensified aesthetic dimensions of Spenser’s description, such as the ‘snowy limbes’ veiled by the ‘christall waues’, the language of which recalls closely the preceding depiction of the decorative ivy. On this occasion the Knight of Temperance’s lack of attention to the elaborate fountain as he ‘hapned by the same to wend’ makes him more susceptible to the deliberately enticing behaviour of the figures encountered there

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than both his forewarned precursors in Tasso and, indeed, Spenser’s own ‘well auis’d’ reader, who is able to appreciate the potential deceptiveness of a beautiful appearance after observing the fountain more carefully. The ‘pictorial beauty’ of the original Italian description, perhaps evoking Botticelli’s Birth of Venus via the description of the goddess in Poliziano’s Stanze (1475–78), is echoed closely in Spenser’s careful rendering of Tasso’s double comparison in the opening six lines of the following stanza: Qual matutina stelle esce de l’onde rugiadosa e stillante, o come fuore spuntò nascendo già da le feconde spume de l’ocean la dea d’amore, tal apparve costei, tal le sue bionde chiome stillavan cristallino umore.

(XV, 60, 1–6)

(Like that morning star which emerges from the waves dewy and dripping, or like the goddess of love as she rises born out of the fertile foam of the ocean, so she appeared, in the same way her blonde locks dripped with moist crystal.)64 As that faire Starre, the messenger of the morne, His deawy face out of the sea doth reare: Or as the Cyprian goddesse, newly borne Of th’Oceans fruitfull froth, did first appeare: Such seemed they, and so their yellow heare Christalline humor dropped downe apace. (II, xii, 65, 1–6)65

This accurate translation, though, is followed by a significant change of perspective in the final lines of the stanza: where Tasso’s Venus-like maiden coyly feigns to notice the Christian knights at this moment, Spenser instead focuses directly on Guyon’s response for the first time, elaborating in the last line on the visually stimulated ‘duri petti’ of Carlo and Ubaldo from the previous stanza in the Italian poem: Whom such when Guyon saw, he drewe him neare, And somewhat gan relent his earnest pace; His stubborne brest gan secret pleasaunce to embrace. (II, xii, 65, 7–9)

Although one of the ‘wanton Maidens’ (II, xii, 66, 1) similarly reacts bashfully when she becomes aware of the knight’s unaccustomed ‘guise’

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towards them (with an aural pun on his gaze?), Spenser concentrates, in an additional, original stanza, on the actions of the other, who deliberately rises up from the water to display to Guyon ‘all, that might his melting hart entyse / To her delights’ (II, xii, 66, 7–8).66 This exhibitionism in turn provokes the shy maiden to reveal herself, as Spenser returns directly to Tasso for the striking description of how she tantalisingly loosens her blonde hair to cover her ivory body: E ’l crin, ch’in cima al capo avea raccolto in un sol nodo, immantinente sciolse, che lunghissimo in giú cadendo e folto d’un aureo manto i molli avori involse. Oh che vago spettacolo è lor tolto! ma non men vago fu chi loro il tolse. Cosí da l’acque e da’ capelli ascosa A lor si volse lieta e vergognosa. Rideva insieme e insieme ella arrossia, ed era nel rossor piú bello il riso e nel riso il rossor che le copria insino al mento il delicato viso.

(XV, 61, 1 – 62, 4)

(And her tresses, tied in a single knot at the top of her head, she immediately released, which, long and luxuriant, cascading down draped the soft ivory of her skin in a golden mantle. Oh, what a beautiful spectacle is denied them! But no less beautiful a sight was that which she is denying them. So, hidden by the water and by her hair, she turns to them happy and timid. / She laughed and at the same time she blushed, and the smile was more beautiful for the reddening, and the reddening for the smile, which covered her delicate face to the chin.)67 And her faire lockes, which formerly were bownd, Vp in one knott, she low adowne did lose: Which flowing long and thick, her cloth’d arownd, And th’yuorie in golden mantle gownd: So that faire spectacle from him was reft, Yet that, which reft it, no lesse faire was fownd: So hidd in lockes and waues from lookers theft, Nought but her louely face she for his looking left. Withall she laughed, and she blusht withall, That blushing to her laughter gaue more grace, And laughter to her blushing, as did fall. (II, xii, 67, 2 – 68, 3)68

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Hamilton notes the verbal proximity of stanza 67 to stanza 61 in the Italian original until the final line, where he suggests that Spenser ‘omits the virgin’s enticing shame of exposure, replacing it in the next line with laughter, for Spenser the mark of lust in any sexual context’. A cursory examination of the start of the following stanza in Tasso’s poem, though, reveals that the simultaneous laughter and blushing in canto 68 are borrowed from the Italian too (with Spenser even echoing the structure of the first line exactly in his repetition of ‘withall’ in place of Tasso’s ‘insieme’); this should not, however, detract from the implication that the ‘wanton meriments’ of Spenser’s maidens are a more overt attempt to stimulate Guyon visually once they detect ‘the secrete signes of kindled lust’ that have appeared ‘in his sparkling face’ after he again slows down to observe them (II, xii, 68, 4–7). Spenser chooses to ignore the alluring siren song that follows immediately in Tasso, and instead he makes the beckoning of the two maidens in the English poem much more explicit in its attempt to arouse the knight’s suppressed erotic desire (‘corage cold’) than the gestures that accompany the song in the Italian: And to him beckned, to approach more neare, And shewd him many sights, that corage cold could reare. (II, xii, 68, 8–9)69

Guyon’s increasingly voyeuristic response to the provocative maidens constitutes the single greatest threat to his temperance in Book II. Despite having been able to resist with ease the invitations of the Genius and Excesse at the earlier thresholds, on this occasion at the fountain Guyon requires the firm intervention of the accompanying Palmer to divert him from the perils of ‘concupiscible intemperance’, as Fox terms it.70 The Palmer is able to detect in him the same ‘secret signes of kindled lust’ that the two maidens have encouraged, rebuking the knight expressly for his ‘wandring eyes’ (II, xii, 69, 2) before directing him on towards the Bowre itself. Despite Brand’s conclusion, in his consideration of Tasso’s impact on the English poem, that ‘the Bower of Blisse stands out as a beautiful but somehow incongruous gem’ because ‘the Italian contribution never quite fits the allegory it serves’,71 this moment helps to elucidate Spenser’s understanding of the allegorical pattern outlined in the author’s ‘Allegoria del poema’, which focuses, in the words of Fairfax’s translation from 1600, on ‘the conflict and rebellion which the Concupiscent and Irefull powers doe make with the Reasonable’:72

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In Tasso’s ‘Allegoria’ for the Gerusalemme liberata, the figurative crux of the whole action is the concupiscible danger of sensual love, expressed in Rinaldo’s subjection to Armida, and his liberation through Goffredo’s supernaturally aided rational intervention.73

In the final stanza of canto XV, immediately before reaching Armida’s palace, Tasso attributes the ability of Rinaldo’s rescuers, Carlo and Ubdaldo, to resist the visual and aural temptations of the ‘false sirene’ directly to the power of a personified reason: E se di tal dolcezza entro trasfusa parte penètra onde il desio germoglie, tosto ragion ne l’arme sue rinchiusa sterpa e riseca le nascenti voglie.

(XV, 66, 1–4)

(And if some transfused sweetness enters and penetrates the parts where desire germinates, immediately Reason, clad in arms, pulls out and dries up these nascent yearnings.)74

In Spenser’s sustained transposition of this episode, Guyon’s rational powers are similarly but more forcefully overwhelmed by the strength of his visually stimulated erotic desire before the Palmer, as an allegorical equivalent of Tasso’s ‘ragion’, intervenes to reprimand him to ‘well auise’ (II, xii, 69, 5) himself, allowing the knight to regain control of his virtue of temperance before approaching and confronting Acrasia herself. Zailig Pollock has suggested that, in this re-working of Carlo and Ubaldo’s encounter with the false sirens, ‘Spenser uses what he has imitated from Tasso to create something entirely new, an allegory of the concupiscible and irascible impulses in a state of intemperance’,75 although in fact this appears to be a considered modification of the allegorical pattern underlying the Rinaldo and Armida episode in the Italian poem, rather than something wholly different from it. As Guyon and the Palmer make their final approach towards the enchantress, Spenser focuses for the first time on the sounds emanating from the Bowre of Blisse. Although the English poet has ignored the enchanting siren song from canto XV, he again turns back to Tasso’s description of Armida’s garden in canto XVI for his expanded evocation of the aural effects experienced in the Bowre: Vezzosi augelli infra le verde fronde temprano a prova lascivette note; mormora l’aura, e fa le foglie e l’onde

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garrir che variamente ella percote. Quando taccion gli augelli alto risponde, quando cantan gli augei piú lieve scote; sia caso od arte, or accompagna, ed ora alterna i versi lor la musica òra.

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(XVI, 12, 1–8)

(Charming birds in the green foliage sing, vying with each other, lascivious songs; the wind murmurs, and causes the leaves and waves to pipe up, as it strikes them differently. When the birds are silent, it answers loudly; when the birds sing, it blows more softly; whether by chance or by art, now it accompanies them, and now it alternates the musical breeze with their verses. 76

Where the Italian stanza focuses solely on seemingly natural sounds, Spenser adds voices and instruments to his soundscape, expanding on the hint of artfulness in Tasso’s ‘arte’, but notably downplaying the lasciviousness of the bird song from the original: The ioyous birdes shrouded in chearefull shade, Their notes vnto the voice attempred sweet; Th’Angelicall soft trembling voyces made To th’instruments diuine respondence meet: The siluer sounding instruments did meet With the base murmure of the waters fall: The waters fall with difference discreet, Now soft, now loud, vnto the wind did call: The gentle warbling wind low answered to all. (II, xii, 71, 1– 9)77

The intermingling of natural and artificial sounds in Spenser’s stanza, where the birds tune their song to angelic voices, which in turn respond to divine instruments, from which a strange silver-like sound emanates, rather than to the musical effects of the breeze and waves as in the original, has led John Hollander to describe this pejoratively as a ‘full brokenconsort music’, in which, according to sixteenth-century theory and practice, different families of instrument are inappropriately combined to create a ‘morally unwholesome blending of its musical categories’.78 However, John Rooks has drawn attention to the ‘very considerable delicacy’ of the merging of ‘instrumental music and pastoral antiphony’ in the stanza, mirrored in its ‘neat construction, line after line’, to counter Hollander’s argument, reinforcing Northrop Frye’s earlier observation that the stanza instead emphasises the ‘harmony and concord’ of the

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music, particularly ‘the concord of the identical rhyme on two meanings of “meet”’ at its centre.79 These opposed critical responses to the nature of the music ­experienced in the Bowre are almost anticipated by the poet in the original preceding stanza, where the difficulty of aural interpretation is itself stressed: Eftsoones they heard a most melodious sound, Of all that mote delight a daintie eare, Such as attonce might not on liuing ground, Saue in this Paradise, be heard elswhere: Right hard it was, for wight, which did it heare, To read, what manner musicke that mote bee: For all that pleasing is to liuing eare, Was there consorted in one harmonee, Birdes, voices, instruments, windes, waters, all agree. (II, xii, 70, 1–9)80

This stanza demonstrates a now familiar switch of perception in response to the ‘melodious sound’ of the Bowre, which is heard by Guyon and the Palmer in the first line, before the difficult task of trying to discern ‘what manner musicke that mote bee’ is presented from the perspective of an unspecified listener in lines 5 and 6. It is striking that Spenser repeats the same verb for this process of aural interpretation as he had used for the viewer’s first act of visual interpretation after the ekphrastic description of the entry gate to the Bowre (II, xii, 46, 2), stressing the importance of striving to ‘read’ correctly whichever sense the art form is appealing to most directly, as on this occasion the almost heavenly melody and harmony of the musical consort inspire pleasure and ‘delight’ in the ‘daintie’ ear of the human listener. Hamilton has argued that the additional elements in Spenser’s music in stanza 71 ‘are inserted to stamp the art of the Bower as his own, perhaps because he so deliberately overgoes Tasso’ in his imitation of the original stanza in Gerusalemme liberata.81 The increase from three sonic elements (bird song, waves, breeze) to five, as the ‘Birdes, voices, instruments, windes, waters, all agree’, certainly amplifies the complexity of the music heard in the Bowre. Hamilton conjectures that the five elements ‘each with its own tonal colour, suggest the pentatonic scale’, though the deliberate choice of a five-part structure indicates that the English poet may also have had a specific contemporary musical form in mind. Frye has observed, with reference to stanzas 70 and 71, that ‘the crucial temptation in Spenser’s Bower of Bliss takes the form of a five-part madrigal’,82

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referring to one of the most popular types of secular Italian vocal music in the second half of the sixteenth century. The polyphonic nature of the music in the stanza does echo the structure of a multi-voice madrigal, although the addition of the instruments in the Bowre differentiates it slightly. Tasso’s own poetry, particularly his recently printed epic, became a frequent source for adaptation into madrigal form in Italy from the early 1580s, and by the middle of the decade this stanza of the ‘Vezzosi augelli’ (XVI, 12) had already been set as both a four-part and a five-part madrigal (by Luca Marenzio in Rome in 1585, and Giaches de Wert in Ferrara in 1586 respectively). It is interesting to speculate whether Spenser may have known about either of these specific musical settings when he chose to elaborate on Tasso’s musical elements in his stanza. In the same way that his added emphasis on the workmanship of the visual artefacts observed in the Bowre seems to pre-empt the late sixteenth-century and seventeenthcentury continental vogue for pictorial representations of Armida’s garden, so this expansion of the artful music heard there mirrors the emerging contemporary Italian habit of adapting stanzas from Tasso’s epic verse into multi-voice musical form. It is certainly conceivable that Spenser was aware of the tradition of setting recent Italian verse in madrigal form as he worked on the final canto of Book II of his epic: the earliest English madrigal book, Nicholas Yonge’s Musica Transalpina, printed in 1588, contained English translations of settings by both Wert and Marenzio and, more pertinently, Thomas Watson’s The first sett, of Italian Madrigalls Englished, printed in the same year as the first edition of The Faerie Queene, drew extensively on Marenzio’s madrigal work, including his setting of this particular stanza from Tasso, translated as ‘Every singing bird, that in the wood rejoices’. Watson, perhaps unwittingly via Marenzio, produced simultaneously with Spenser one of the earliest English renderings of a passage from the celebrated Italian poem. The first evocation of the music in Armida’s garden leads on directly to its most famous expression, in the speaking parrot’s carpe florem song. Spenser in turn imitates the canto della rosa carefully, but he makes a significant adjustment in terms of its impact by transposing elements of Tasso’s description of Carlo and Ubaldo’s first sighting of Armida and Rinaldo to immediately before it. The music in the Bowre seems to emanate precisely from where ‘the fair Witch’ is discovered reclining with a new sleeping lover, who, like Rinaldo in Tasso (XIV, 68–70), has been trans-

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ported to the garden ‘through sorceree / And witchcraft’ (II, xii, 72, 2–4), surrounded by the singing of ‘faire Ladies, and lasciuious boyes’: And all that while, right ouer him she hong, With her false eyes fast fixed in his sight, As seeking medicine, whence she was stong, Or greedily depasturing delight: And oft inclining downe with kisses light, For feare of waking him, his lips bedewed, And through his humid eyes did sucke his spright, Quite molten into lust and pleasure lewd; Wherewith she sighed soft, as if his case she rewd. (II, xii, 73, 1–9)83

Spenser’s stanza is a deliberately more disturbing re-envisaging of Tasso’s account of the enchantress and her captive knight, encountered soon after the Italian rose song: Sovra lui pende; ed ei nel grembo molle le posa il capo, e ’l volto al volto attolle,    e i famelici sguardi avidamente in lei paschendo si consuma e strugge. S’inchina, e i dolci baci ella sovente liba or da gli occhi e da le labra or sugge, ed in quel punto ei sospir si sente profondo sí che pensi: ‘Or l’alma fugge e ’n lei trapassa peregrina’.

(XVI, 18, 7 – 19, 7)

(Over him she hangs; in her soft lap he lays his head, and raises his face towards hers, / and, his hungry looks feeding greedily on her, he is consumed and destroyed. She leans forward, and now sips sweet kisses from his eyes and now sucks them from his lips, and at that moment one hears him sigh so deeply that one thinks: ‘Now his soul takes flight and passes as a pilgrim into hers.’)84

Any hint of the strong mutual infatuation between Armida and Rinaldo in Tasso’s stanza and episode is removed by rendering Verdant asleep throughout the encounter. Where in the Italian poem it is the Christian knight who is feeding hungrily on Armida’s beauty, in Spenser it is the female witch who greedily tries to consume delight from his closed eyes, ingeniously combining the sense of two of the Italian verbs in the second line of stanza 19 in the English ‘depasturing’. This scenario recalls a key moment earlier in Tasso’s poem where the Mago d’Ascalano describes

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how the enchantress, intent on homicidal revenge, had unexpectedly fallen in love with Rinaldo as she gazed on his face as he slept (XIV, 66–7), an event leading to his kidnapping and the amorous interlude in her garden. In this instance, however, the tableau of the enchantress hovering over the comatose knight to extract his soul through his ‘humid eyes’, translating the description of Armida’s own eyes in the previous stanza (XVI, 18, 5), is markedly more sinister, as both Bartlett Giamatti and David Quint have observed: Verdant is unconscious throughout the scene, and Acrasia is seen to ‘sucke his spright’ – literalizing what had only been an erotic metaphor in Tasso (16.19). The posture of Spenser’s couple strongly suggests that Acrasia is a succubus, a demon-witch who causes seminal emissions from sleeping men.85

Giamatti had previously suggested that Acrasia displays a ‘vampirish quality’ here, and both analogies correlate with Anthony Esolen’s conclusion that ‘Acrasia’s action is subtractive: she enervates her victim, sapping him of vitality and manhood’ by extracting essential bodily fluids.86 The resulting stasis, which is much more marked in the English Bowre, is fitting for a location in which ‘otium [is] raised to a fine art’. The apparent pity that the witch feels for her victim in the final line of the stanza, expressed in the sigh that is transferred to her from Rinaldo in Tasso, seems small recompense for the treatment of his spirit, which has been liquefied into a distillation of pure ‘lust and pleasure lewd’ before its forceful removal. It is only after this disconcerting sight, at the heart of the Bowre of Blisse, that Spenser switches his attention to the transposed ‘louely lay’ (II, xii, 74, 1) of the rose. The similarity of the English rendering of the song to its Italian original was the first element of his indebtedness to be detected towards the end of the nineteenth century, originally in isolation from the sustained imitation of Tasso throughout the second half of the canto, as outlined at the beginning of the chapter, and it has continued to be recognised as ‘Spenser’s most famous single borrowing from the Gerusalemme liberata’.87 An ongoing perception of the close correspondence between the two has led to a tendency to downplay some of the subtle adjustments discernible in the English version, including its placement. Alberto Castelli described Spenser’s song simply as a literary translation (‘traduzione letteraria’), and, more recently, Anne Prescott has argued that ‘the closeness of the translation suits an episode that comments negatively on imitation itself ’, even detecting a note of ‘wry self-mockery’ in Spenser’s deliberate proximity to the Italian:88

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– Deh mira – egli cantò – spuntar la rosa dal verde suo modesta e verginella, che mezzo aperta ancora e mezzo ascosa, quanto si mostra men, tanto è piú bella. Ecco poi nudo il sen già baldanzosa dispiega; ecco poi langue e non par quella, quella non par che desiata inanti fu da mille donzelle e mille amanti. Cosí trapassa al trapassar d’un giorno de la vita mortale il fiore e ’l verde; né perché faccia indietro april ritorno, si rinfiora ella mai, né si rinverde. Cogliam la rosa in su ’l mattino adorno di questo dí, che tosto il seren perde; cogliam d’amor la rosa: amiamo or quando esser si puote riamato amando. – (XVI, 14, 1 – 15, 8)89 (He sang, ‘You must see how the rose peeps out of her shy, virginal green, which is half open and still half closed, and, the less she shows, how much more beautiful she is. Later, already self-confident, she displays her naked bosom, and then she languishes, and does not look like something which was just desired by a thousand maidens and a thousand lovers. / So in the course of a single day does the budding and flowering of a mortal life pass away. It can never sprout or flower again, because it cannot reverse and make April return. Gather the rose in the beautiful morning of this day, which will soon lose its serenity, gather the rose of love: let us love now, when we can still be loved in return while loving.’)

The song in Armida’s garden is heard immediately after the music of the ‘Vezzosi augelli’ and breeze, where it is uttered by a multi-coloured male bird with a purple beak, which has artfully acquired a ‘voce sí ch’assembra il sermon nostro’, ‘a voice that closely resembles our speech’ (XVI, 13, 4).90 The origins of the song in the Bowre are less fantastical but also less specific, as Spenser reveals only that ‘some one did chaunt this louely lay’, presumably one of the ‘lasciuious boyes’ that sing around Acrasia and her prone lover:91 Ah see, who so fayre thing doest faine to see, In springing flowre the image of thy day; Ah see the Virgin Rose, how sweetly shee Doth first peepe foorth with bashfull modestee, That fairer seemes, the lesse ye see her may;

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Lo see soone after, how more bold and free Her bared bosome she doth broad display; Lo see soone after, how she fades, and falls away. So passeth, in the passing of a day, Of mortall life the leafe, the bud, the flower, Ne more doth florish after first decay, That earst was sought to deck both bed and bowre, Of many a Lady’, and many a Paramowre: Gather therefore the Rose, whilest yet is prime, For soone comes age, that will her pride deflowre: Gather the Rose of loue, whilest yet is time, Whilest louing thou mayst loued be with equall crime. (II, xii, 74, 2 – 75, 9)92

The metaphorical import of the song is revealed more directly from the start of the English version, indicating immediately that the budding flower represents an ‘image’ of the brevity of human life, where the final carpe florem motif forms part of a familiar strategy of literary seduction, in which the transience of human beauty is emphasised in the comparison with the female rose, as an exhortation to a habitually female addressee to love before it is too late. The first stanza of Spenser’s song also gives far greater prominence to another of the auditor’s senses, by continually urging a visual examination of the rose at the start of its lines: the Italian song begins with a single verb of observation, where the English equivalent is repeated six times in the opening eight lines. A direct appeal to either the aural or visual faculties is characteristic of all of the art encountered in the Bowre, though unusually they are invoked simultaneously on this occasion. There seems little scope for interpretative ambiguity, however, as the singer elaborates on his initial analogy, in the personification of the blossoming rose, which passes from initial diffidence through forthright exhibition to terminal decline in only five lines. The progression from careful concealment, which ‘fairer seemes, the lesse ye see her may’, to ostentatious display of her ‘bared bosome’ intensifies the hint of feigned modesty in Tasso’s original, by mirroring more perceptibly the behaviour of the maidens recently observed at the fountain. The second stanza follows the opening two lines of Tasso’s equivalent stanza closely, but Spenser then begins to amplify the threat of time in his version by telescoping lines 3 and 4 in the Italian into a single line and transferring the final two lines of the first stanza to the middle of his second, adding emphasis to the rose as an emblem of female sexuality by

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stressing how, when briefly in bloom, it was used to decorate the ‘bed and bowre’ of both female and male lovers. A few stanzas later Spenser reveals that Acrasia is herself lying with Verdant ‘vpon a bed of Roses’ (II, xii, 77, 1) in her Bowre, in contrast to Armida, who merely reclines with Rinaldo on the lawn (XVI, 17, 8).93 This direct parallel between the lovers evoked in the song and the enchantress, which is less overt in the Italian, has a clear impact on the modifications that Spenser makes to the final carpe diem section of the song, hinted at in the rhyming of ‘prime’, ‘time’, and ‘crime’ in the last quatrain. After the description of the disturbing sight of Acrasia feeding on the unconscious Verdant, the prominence Spenser places in his version on a deadly sin, ‘pride’, and the desire to love ‘with equall crime’, which Cheney has glossed as ‘a reprobate guilt to be shared by all’, serves to cast the ending of the original in a more negative moral light, as, according to Hamilton, ‘the undercutting phrase places the pagan tradition in a Christian perspective, for “crime” suggests both sin and judgement on it, in contrast to Tasso’s song’.94 The concurrent intensification of the threat of time in Spenser’s quatrain is again notable, but also doubly superfluous. Wendy Hyman has pointed to the ‘incongruity’ of the singer in the Bowre making ‘an exigent claim for carpe florem’ in ‘a landscape inoculated against winter and death, a wondrous greenhouse in which “tender buds” (II, xii, 51, 4) bloom eternally’. This observation, though, is equally true of the original canto della rosa in Armida’s garden, from which Spenser derives the ‘same microclimate of eternal spring’; what renders the song more redundant in Spenser is the fact that, by this point, the reader has been permitted to view, in the preceding vision of the enchantress, how lovers in the Bowre are already perpetually seizing the day: Although they surely avail themselves of physical pleasure, Acrasia and her minions seem to be in no hurry at all: theirs is a languid eroticism that actually belies carpe diem’s materialist rhetoric. ... The urgency of the carpe florem (with its message to do something now) is not just incongruent, but contextually meaningless.95

Despite this incongruity between the theme and argument of the song and the setting in which it is performed in both Tasso and Spenser, in each case the song is met with the endorsement of the surrounding birds: Tacque, e concorde de gli augelli il coro, quasi approvando, il canto indi ripiglia.

(XVI, 16, 1–2)

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(He was silent, and in concord the chorus of birds, as if approving it, then takes up the song again.)

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He ceast, and then gan all the quire of birdes Their diuerse notes t’attune vnto his lay, As in approuance of his pleasing wordes.

(II, xii, 76, 1–3)

Spenser, however, ignores the sensation of love that the song arouses in all the animals and even the trees in the Italian, choosing instead to compress Tasso’s following stanza, which focuses on the impassive response of Carlo and Ubaldo as they finally reach the enchantress and their fellow knight: Fra melodia sí tenera, fra tante vaghezze allettatrici e lusinghiere, va quella coppia, e rigida e costante se stessa indura a i vezzi del piacere. Ecco tra fronde e fronde il guardo inante penetra e vede, o pargli di vedere, vede pur certo il vago e la diletta, ch’egli è in grembo a la donna, essa a l’erbetta.

(XVI, 17, 1–8)

(Through melody so delicate, through so many alluring and enticing beauties, goes this pair, both unwavering and constant, they harden themselves against the charms of pleasure. Behold, between branch and branch, their sight penetrates before them and sees, or seems to see, sees for certain the lover and his darling, that he is in the lap of the lady, and she on the grass.)96 The constant payre heard all, that he did say, Yet swarued not, but kept their forward way, Through many couert groues, and thickets close, In which they creeping did at last display That wanton Lady, with her louer lose, Whose sleepie head she in her lap did soft dispose. (II, xii, 76, 4–9)97

Spenser’s own ‘constant payre’ are equally impervious to both the ‘pleasing wordes’ and the music of the Bowre, and on this occasion there is no need for the Palmer to rebuke Guyon, as they maintain their straight path towards the discovery of Acrasia. Having previously revealed the enchantress and her lover to the perspective of the reader before the rose song, Spenser does not reproduce at this point the imprecision of

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the observers’ vision as they approach Rinaldo and Armida for the first time. Once the object of Carlo and Ubaldo’s quest has come into view, Tasso focuses only briefly on the enchantress before devoting five entire stanzas to the amorous interplay between the lovers. Although Spenser has already re-worked the first ten lines of their interaction into the more disturbing tableau of Acrasia and the prone Verdant in stanza 73, his decision to ignore the reciprocal erotic playfulness between Armida and Rinaldo here reinforces the most significant alteration that the English poet makes to the episode in Tasso. Spenser underlines again in stanzas 76 and 79 that Verdant is asleep throughout, as a result of ‘horrible enchantment’ (II, xii, 80, 9), altering considerably the impact of the relationship between lover and enchantress from the original: although Tasso does emphasise a dynamic of servitude and command between them (‘L’uno di servitú, l’altra d’impero / si gloria’, ‘for servitude the one prides himself, the other for her command’: XVI, 21, 1–2), the Christian hero enters willingly into his amorous bondage in Armida’s garden, allegorically denoting the ireful faculty being temporarily overcome by the concupiscent in the Italian poem.98 Spenser’s Legend of Temperance requires a radical re-imagining of the central roles in Tasso’s episode in relation to his own allegorical pattern: the more sinister Acrasia has to embody both ‘the solipsistic narcissism and sterility of intemperate lust’ in the treatment of her unconscious lover, while the key role of Rinaldo is transferred to the minor and entirely passive Verdant.99 Instead Spenser shifts the focus of his attention to the Knight of Temperance and the accompanying Palmer, who assume roles closer to those of Carlo and Ubaldo in the Italian, as they have to undergo and withstand a series of temptations of their senses as part of their mission, as Goffredo’s divinely appointed agents, to return Rinaldo to the Christian cause in order to ensure the eventual liberation of Jerusalem. The downgrading of the mutual love between Armida and Rinaldo in Spenser’s re-envisaging of the episode is again manifest in the final artistic tableau encountered in the Bowre of Blisse. The English poet makes full use of Tasso’s brief initial depiction of the enchantress in her garden as a starting point for his more extensive pictorial description of Acrasia as she lies motionless alongside Verdant: Ella dinanzi al petto ha il vel diviso, e’l crin sparge incomposto al vento estivo; langue per vezzo, e ’l suo infiammato viso fan biancheggiando i bei sudor piú vivo:

the bowre of blisse and armida’s garden qual raggio in onda, le scintilla un riso ne gli umidi occhi tremulo e lascivo.

89

(XVI, 18, 1–6)

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(She wears her veil loose at the breast, and leaves her hair scattered in the summer breeze; she lies languorously, as is her habit, and beautiful beads of sweat make her enflamed face whiten more vividly: like a ray of light on the waves, a flickering, lascivious smile sparkles in her humid eyes.)100 Vpon a bed of Roses she was layd, As faint through heat, or dight to pleasant sin, And was arayd, or rather disarayd, All in a vele of silke and siluer thin, That hid no whit her alabaster skin, But rather shewd more white, if more might bee: More subtile web Arachne cannot spin, Nor the fine nets, which oft we wouen see Of scorched dew, do not in th’ayre more lightly flee. Her snowy brest was bare to ready spoyle Of hungry eies, which n’ote therewith be fild, And yet through languour of her sweet late toyle, Few drops, more cleare then Nectar, forth distild, That like pure Orient perles adowne it trild, And her faire eyes smyling in delight, Moystened their fierie beames, with which she thrild Fraile harts, yet quenched not; like starry light Which sparckling on the silent waues, does seeme more bright. (II, xii, 77, 1 – 78, 9)101

Spenser focuses more directly on the Italian in his second stanza, but in the first he develops from the merest hint of design in Armida’s open veil and free-flowing locks the artful placement of a ‘silke and siluer’ veil against Acrasia’s ‘alabaster skin’. Bender has twice referred to this stanza to exemplify ‘the distinctive stress [Spenser’s] pictorialism lays upon perceptual contradiction’ by directing the reader’s ‘imagination into an illusory sense of comprehensive detail’.102 The visual ambiguities here, where the veil seems simultaneously to cover and exaggerate the skin’s perfect statuesque whiteness, perhaps mirror the gradually revealed perspectives from the previous stanza in the Italian poem, and they are certainly characteristic of Spenser’s habit of elaborating on Tasso’s use of colour in his imitations, again in relation to a precious material. The veil is not only artfully placed, but the stanza emphasises equally the art that

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has gone into its fabrication in the added comparison of its texture to the delicacy of Arachne’s web. The simile is doubly ominous, hinting at Acrasia’s likeness to a female spider, which entraps and devours her prey, and also summoning to the reader’s mind a figure punished specifically for the precocity and presumptuousness of her craft. At first glance Spenser’s second stanza seems to ignore the image of Armida’s hair being dishevelled by the summer breeze in stanza 18, but in fact it triggers a recollection of Tasso’s account of the striking first appearance of the enchantress in the poem in canto IV, where ‘fa nove crespe l’aura al crin disciolto’, ‘the breeze curls anew her tousled hair’ (IV, 30, 1), key elements of which, such as the whiteness of Armida’s veil (IV, 29, 3), are then incorporated into the English poet’s elaboration of the Italian original. The subtle suggestiveness of Armida’s appearance is intensified here by an allusion to the earlier description in the focus on Acrasia’s exposed ‘snowy brest’, which more actively encourages the attention of ‘hungry eies’: Mostra il bel petto le sue nevi ignude, onde il foco d’Amor si nutre e desta. Parte appar de le mamme acerbe e crude, parte altrui ne ricopre invida vesta.

(IV, 31, 1–4)

(Her beautiful breasts show like uncovered snow, where the fire of Love is nourished and stirred. Part of an unripe and not fully formed breast appears, while another part is covered by envious clothes.)103

The remainder of Spenser’s stanza is modelled closely on the Italian poet’s short description in canto XVI, but with some now familiar embellishments and alterations. Hamilton indicates that Spenser’s ‘languour’ ‘may have been suggested by Tasso’s langue per vezzo (16.18) which also prompts a description of the enchantress’s sweat’.104 These lines in the Italian, however, which drew the particular scorn of Galileo in his unflattering assessment of Tasso as a ‘pittorino poverino’,105 refer to the beads of sweat whitening Armida’s enflamed face, whereas Spenser instead places them trickling down Acrasia’s naked breast, the only visible motion of the scene; he additionally identifies both their transparency and metaphorical likeness to a natural object used for decorative purposes, recalling the earlier descriptions of both the vine porch and the ornamental fountain. Tasso’s brief comparison of Armida’s lasciviously smiling eyes to a ray of light on the water is also expanded, with Spenser turning for a second

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time to the enchantress’s ‘umidi occhi’ (XVI, 18, 6) to develop the impact of the moistened ‘fierie beames’ from Acrasia’s eyes, which are able to penetrate the ‘Fraile harts’ of observers.106 It is striking how twice in this stanza Spenser emphasises that Acrasia’s artfully arranged appearance is designed to stimulate and yet simultaneously to deny full satisfaction of any visual desire. Despite its following on immediately from the discovery by Guyon and the Palmer of the final objective of their quest, Spenser does not present this elaborate description of the enchantress specifically from the point of view of the Knight of Temperance and his guide. There is no suggestion that the ‘hungry eies’ and ‘Fraile harts’ pierced in its second stanza correspond with the ‘greedy eyes’ and ‘melting harte’ of Guyon as he was aroused by the wrestling maidens earlier at the fountain. Bender assumes instead that it is the reader’s senses which are susceptible here, as, for him, the portrayal of Acrasia at the very centre of the Bowre represents the ‘most dangerous’ trial of the visual faculties, though in fact the perspective of the reader is not directly invoked either.107 There is no firm indication that either Guyon or the reader is disproportionately moved by the enchantress’s physical beauty at this point, and the poet’s switch of focus in the following stanzas to the as yet unnamed Verdant, who, like Rinaldo in Armida’s garden (XVI, 30) and Cymochles earlier in the Legend of Temperance (II, v, 28), has discarded ‘his warlike Armes’ and shield (II, xii, 79, 1–4), reveals the true victim of such sensual overindulgence ‘in lewd loues, and wastefull luxuree’ (II, xii, 80, 7). Guyon and the reader manage to avoid a fate similar to that of Verdant for discernibly different reasons, however: where the Knight of Temperance, characterised recently by Lees-Jeffries as ‘neither a careful nor a discerning reader’ in his oblivious response to the beauties of the Bowre,108 has required the firm intervention of the Palmer to turn him away from overt sexual enticement back to the path of temperance, Spenser’s reader, in contrast, has had to learn to decipher, through a continuously attentive visual awareness, the illusory blend of the natural and artificial in the many examples of ‘goodly workmanship’ observed there, and thus to distinguish between art which strives principally to occasion aesthetic pleasure and art which aims solely at arousing erotic desire. Cheney has suggested that ‘one of the most important respects in which Spenser changes his sources is that he uses them as allusions: the images of past epics are presented as part of the landscape of his poem’, an evaluation particularly pertinent for the English poet’s technique here:109 what all the works of

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art encountered within the topography of the Bowre of Blisse, including the depiction of the enchantress herself, have in common is a conspicuous origin in Tasso’s ekphrastic description of Armida’s palace and garden in cantos XV and XVI of Gerusalemme liberata, from which each individual element has, as I have sought to demonstrate in this chapter, been carefully placed and artfully elaborated in Spenser’s sustained re-imagining and re-orienting of the Italian poem. The swift conclusion to Guyon’s quest in Book II marks a significant departure from the ending of the original episode, emphasising again how Spenser has chosen to downplay the mutual love between Rinaldo and Armida evoked by Tasso. The second half of canto XVI, after Ubaldo has shown the ashamed knight his effeminised appearance in the magic shield and rebuked him for neglecting the Christian cause (stanzas 30 to 33), details at length Armida’s vain attempts to persuade him to stay, despite his compassion for her (stanzas 43 to 56), her pathetic lament on the sea shore after she awakes from a faint to find him gone (stanzas 63 to 67), and her subsequent fury, in which she summons demons to destroy the enchanted palace and garden before departing from the Fortunate Isles for ever (stanzas 68 to 72). In contrast, once Guyon and the Palmer have silently approached and entrapped Acrasia and her young lover in ‘a subtile net’ (II, xii, 81, 4), Spenser brings the second book to a close in a mere six stanzas. Where the irredeemable enchantress must remain confined by Guyon ‘in chaines of adamant’, Verdant is soon released, ‘And counsel sage in steed thereof to him applyde’ (II, xii, 82, 6–9).110 It is not entirely clear whether it is Guyon or the Palmer that assumes Ubaldo’s role as moral counsellor here, but it is striking that Spenser does not elucidate the guidance offered him at this point, having already echoed the Christian knight’s words to Rinaldo in the squire Atin’s analogous reproach to Cymochles in the Bowre earlier in Book II: Te solo, o figlio di Bertoldo, fuora del mondo, in ozio, un breve angolo serra; te sol de l’universo il moto nulla move, egregio campion d’una fanciulla. Qual sonno o qual letargo ha sí sopita la tua virtute? o qual viltà l’alletta? Su su; te il campo e te Goffredo invita, te la fortuna e la vittoria aspetta.

(XVI, 32, 5 – 33, 4)

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(You alone, o son of Bertoldo, away from the world, in indolence, are locked in a small corner; you alone the motion of the universe does not move, proud champion of a girl. / What drowsiness or what lethargy has dampened your virtue? What vileness has lured you? Up, up; Goffredo and the battle field call out for you, fortune and victory are awaiting you.)111 What is become of great Acrates sonne? Or where hath he hong vp his mortall blade, That hath so many haughty conquests wonne? Is all his force forlorne, and all his glory donne? Then pricking him with his sharp-pointed dart, He saide; Vp, vp, thou womanish weake knight, That here in Ladies lap entombed art, Vnmindfull of thy praise and prowest might. (II, v, 35, 6 – 36, 4)112

Instead the English poet hastens on directly to describe Guyon’s remorseless destruction of the Bowre itself, an act of ‘paradoxically extreme temperance’, which has consequently ‘figured in criticism as one of the great cruxes of English Renaissance literature’:113 But all those pleasaunt bowres and Pallace braue, Guyon broke downe, with rigour pitilesse; Nor ought their goodly workmanship might saue Them from the tempest of his wrathfulnesse, But that their blisse he turn’d to balefulnesse: Their groues he feld, their gardins did deface, Their arbers spoyle, their Cabinets suppresse, Their banket houses burne, their buildings race, And of the fairest late, now made the fowlest place. (II, xii, 83, 1–9)114

That there is a direct precedent for this destructiveness in Tasso’s poem does help to account for certain apparently perplexing aspects of Spenser’s stanza. Nowhere in the long description of the various stages of the Bowre of Blisse has there been any indication that it contains a palace (with a banqueting house), in contrast to the depiction of the Italian garden, which is situated at the very centre of a magically created ‘ricco edificio’ (XVI, 1, 1): the ‘alberghi’ (XVI, 68, 1 and XVI, 70, 4) of Tasso’s ‘palagio’ (XVI, 68, 7 and XVI, 69, 7), destroyed in turn by Armida’s demons, provide a model for the various ‘buildings’ of Spenser’s ‘Pallace braue’, which are burnt and razed alongside the groves, gardens, arbours, and bowers that have been described in detail. The forceful ‘tempest’ of

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Guyon’s ‘wrathfulnesse’ in the stanza also appears to have been suggested by Armida’s destructive ‘furor’ (XVI, 67, 7) in response to her desertion by Rinaldo. At the very beginning of his poem Tasso had thanked his patron, Duke Alfonso II of Ferrara, for rescuing him, figured as a ship lost at sea, from the storms of fortune (‘furor di fortuna’: I, 4, 2), an image which Spenser went on to imitate directly a few years later in Book VI, when Sir Calidore appeals to the shepherd Melibee to allow him ‘in this shore / To rest [his] barcke, which hath bene beaten late / With stormes of fortune and tempestuous fate’ (VI, ix, 31, 3–5).115 Evidently Spenser also recalled Tasso’s earlier metaphorical association of the Italian word with a storm as he appropriates the enchantress’s ‘furor’ to describe the Knight of Temperance’s equivalent act of destructiveness at the end of Book II. The ‘goodly workmanship’ of the predominantly Italianate art forms encountered throughout the Bowre, including Spenser’s direct literary source in Tasso’s poem, is not enough to save it from eventual annihilation, as the proliferation of verbs of destruction in the second half of stanza 83 firmly demonstrates. Spenser’s favoured adjective is utilised eleven times in the final canto of Book II, and on seven occasions it is used to refer directly to the quality of the art work experienced by the reader; ultimately, though, this can be no match for the ‘goodly frame of Temperaunce’ itself, which begins ‘fayrely to rise’ at the canto’s opening (II, xii, 1, 1–2), as Guyon and the Palmer set out on the final part of their quest. John Watkins has suggested that this act of destruction at the end of Book II signals not only Guyon’s, but also the English epic poet’s final rejection of a dangerously alluring Italian literary model: Episodes like the Bower of Bliss inculcate Virgilian self-denial on both a fictional and a metafictional level. Spenser not only applauds Guyon’s resistance to Acrasia but upholds his own resistance to Tassean romance as a lesson in temperance.116

Even if, finally, Spenser’s Legend of Temperance does have to move beyond the environs of Armida’s enchanted garden, it seems rather, as I have endeavoured to show throughout this chapter, that the poet’s deep engagement with Tasso’s ‘goodly workmanship’ has been much closer in kind to the experience that he anticipates for his ‘well auis’d’ reader, in response to his own artful transfiguration of the Italian episode into Acrasia’s Bowre, than to the limited perspective of the aesthetically purblind Knight of Temperance.

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the garden of armida and milton’s garden of eden

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One early reader of Spenser’s poem who appears not to have shared recent critical concerns about Guyon’s ability to interpret correctly what he sees and hears in the Bowre of Blisse was John Milton, who notably alluded to the episode half a century later in his consideration of ‘fugitive and cloister’d vertue’ in Areopagitica (1644): That vertue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evill, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whitenesse is but an excrementall whitenesse; Which was the reason why our sage and serious Poet Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher then Scotus or Aquinas, describing true temperance under the person of Guion, brings him in with his palmer through the cave of Mammon, and the bowr of earthly blisse that he might see and know, and yet abstain.117

Milton’s ‘astonishing mistake’ in suggesting that the Palmer travels with Guyon on his earlier journey through the Cave of Mammon (Book II, canto vii) has inspired a critical tradition all of its own,118 but far less attention has been paid to the later English poet’s somewhat tendentious reading of the Knight of Temperance’s experiences in the Bowre itself, where he is, at least, accompanied by his moral guide. For Milton, Spenser’s Guyon stands as a native literary exemplar for experiencing and successfully resisting temptation, and it is therefore perhaps no surprise that one of the key locations in this journey towards ‘true temperance’ should return to Milton’s mind as he later contemplates his own epic poem, on an analogous theme of the testing of human virtue by temptation. That reminiscences of Spenser’s ‘bowr of earthly blisse’ should appear most clearly in an evocation of the Garden of Eden might, however, be more surprising, particularly as Milton’s most overt invocation of it in Book IV of Paradise Lost seems to align the setting in which Adam and Eve experience innocent pre-lapsarian sex with the erotic domain of the sinister Acrasia and helpless Verdant:119 Thus talking hand in hand alone they passed On to their blissful bower; it was a place Chosen by the sovereign planter, when he framed All things to man’s delightful use; the roof Of thickest covert was inwoven shade Laurel and myrtle, and what higher grew Of firm and fragrant leaf; on either side

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tasso’s art and afterlives Acanthus, and each odorous bushy shrub Fenced up the verdant wall; each beauteous flower, Iris all hues, roses, and jessamine Reared high their flourished heads between, and wrought Mosaic; underfoot the violet, Crocus, and hyacinth with rich inlay Broidered the ground, more coloured than with stone Of costliest emblem. (IV, 689–703)120

Alistair Fowler has suggested that Milton had Spenser’s ‘groue of mirtle trees’ in the Garden of Adonis (III, vi, 43, 3) in mind here, but the studied artfulness of the apparently natural as framed by the ‘sovereign planter’ is a feature more familiar from another ‘blissful bower’, which had already been evoked earlier in the initial description of Eden, where Milton even echoes Spenser’s habitual adjective for workmanship in its superlative form: And higher than that wall a circling row Of goodliest trees loaden with fairest fruit, Blossoms and fruits at once of golden hue Appeared, with gay enamelled colours mixed.

(IV, 146–9)121

Fowler again points towards the Garden of Adonis rather than the Bowre of Blisse as Milton’s direct English model, but on this occasion he does also acknowledge Spenser’s principal source in Tasso’s description of the garden of Armida as an analogue for ‘the simultaneous concurrence of all stages of growth’ in Eden. He then goes on to suggest both stanza 12 of canto XVI of Gerusalemme liberata and Spenser’s expanded imitation of it in the Bowre (II, xii, 70–1) as specific models for Milton’s evocation of ‘the harmony of bird song, rustling leaves and murmuring waters’ in paradise, and Kates concurs that ‘Milton echoes both Spenser and Tasso in the description of Eden’.122 Although the ‘fruit burnished with golden rind’ (IV, 249) in Milton’s garden certainly recalls, slightly uncomfortably, the grapes ‘of burnisht gold / So made by art, to beautifie the rest’ (II, xii, 55, 1–2) in the Bowre, Kates has argued that ultimately ‘Milton insists that we hear Tasso’s as the dominant voice’ at this point, by demonstrating how the ‘syntactic inversion which causes the potentially ambiguous adjective Luxuriant to spring out in bold relief ’ in his reference to the vine carefully imitates Tasso’s own technique in beginning ‘a new clause in the precise middle of his stanza with a syntactic inversion bringing lussureggiante into similar focus’ in a corresponding context:123

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Another side, umbrageous grots and caves Of cool recess, o’er which the mantling vine Lays forth her purple grape, and gently creeps Luxuriant; mean while murmuring waters fall Down the slope hills, dispersed, or in a lake, That to the fringed bank with myrtle crowned, Her crystal mirror holds, unite their streams. The birds their choir apply; airs, vernal airs, Breathing the smell of field and grove, attune The trembling leaves. (IV, 257–66)124 lussureggiante serpe alto e germoglia la torta vite ov’è piú l’orto aprico: qui l’uva ha in fiori acerba, e qui d’or l’have e di piropo e già di nèttar grave. Vezzosi augelli infra le verde fronde temprano a prova lascivette note; mormora l’aura, e fa le foglie e l’onde garrir che variamente ella percote.

(XVI, 11, 5 – 12, 4)

(Luxuriantly the twisted vine winds above and sprouts where the garden is most open: here the unripe grape is blooming, and there they are of gold and red pyrope, and already laden with nectar. / Charming birds in the green foliage sing, vying with each other, lascivious songs; the wind murmurs, and causes the leaves and waves to pipe up, as it strikes them differently.)125

Milton’s allusions to Tasso’s enchanted garden in his depiction of Eden, both direct and via Spenser’s imitations, prepare the reader for the still more unexpected correspondence between the figures of Armida and Eve in Book IV. A hint of the relationship between the dominant enchantress and submissive warrior in the Italian garden, albeit with the gender roles reversed, was first identified in that of Adam and Eve in Book IV in the Columbia edition of Milton’s works in the 1930s, and this same allusion was later described by Giamatti as ‘a veiled reminiscence of Tasso’, which by negative association ‘implicates Adam and Eve in the theme of the Italian passage. The figure to suffer most by this allusion is Eve, for the narcissism and sensuality of Armida fleetingly touch Eve’:126 L’uno di servitù, l’altra d’impero Si gloria; ella in sè stessa, ed egli in lei.

(XVI, 21, 1–2)

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tasso’s art and afterlives (For servitude the one prides himself, the other for her command; she in herself, and he in her.)

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For contemplation he and valour formed, For softness she and sweet attractive grace, He for God only, she for God in him.

(IV, 297–9)127

There are further troubling hints of this correlation between the enchantress in the Italian poem and Milton’s Eve. Kates has suggested a similarity between’s Eve’s ‘unadorned golden tresses’ and one of Tasso’s two naked maidens observed playing in the fountain by Carlo and Ubaldo in canto XV, 61, but there are, in fact, equally close parallels with the figure of Armida herself: Esolen has cited ‘the apparent artlessness’ of Armida’s golden hair, when she first appears to the Christian forces in the poem (‘Fa nove crespe l’aura al crin disciolto, / che natura per sé rincrespa in onde’, ‘the breeze curls anew her unkempt hair, / which nature by itself re-curls in waves’: IV, 30, 1–2), as a model for Eve’s ‘Dishevelled’ hair (IV, 306),128 and her pre-lapsarian appearance at this point is also unnervingly reminiscent of the enchantress’s artfully seductive control over Rinaldo, as observed by Carlo and Ubaldo in canto XVI: She as a veil down to the slender waist Her unadorned golden tresses wore Dishevelled, but in wanton ringlets waved As the vine curls her tendrils, which implied Subjection. Ella dinanzi al petto ha il vel diviso, e ’l crin sparge incomposto al vento estivo.

(IV, 304–8)129

(XVI, 18, 1–2)

(In front she wears her veil loose to the breast, and her hair spreads wantonly in the summer breeze.)130

Milton, as Spenser had done before him with Acrasia, amalgamates the erotically charged descriptions of Armida in both cantos IV and XVI for his depiction of Eve in Book IV, as demonstrated shortly after in the context of her ‘conjugal attraction unreproved’: And meek surrender, half embracing leaned On our first father, half her swelling breast Naked met his under the flowing gold

the bowre of blisse and armida’s garden

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Of her loose tresses hid: he in delight Both of her beauty and submissive charms Smiled with superior love. Mostra il bel petto le sue nevi ignude, onde il foco d’Amor si nutre e desta. Parte appar de le mamme acerbe e crude, parte altrui ne ricopre invida vesta.

99

(IV, 493–9)131

(IV, 31, 1–4)132

(Her beautiful breasts show like uncovered snow, where the fire of Love is nourished and stirred. Part of an unripe and not fully formed breast appears, while another part is hidden by envious clothes.)

Evidently the charms of Tasso’s Armida and her magical domain continued to fascinate English poets until at least the latter half of the seventeenth century, as the frequent allusions in Book IV of Paradise Lost illustrate. Even though in the mid-1640s Milton had read Spenser’s prior re-imagining of the Italian episode as a lesson in testing ‘true temperance’ through experiencing and resisting temptation, some twenty years later, when he came to compose his own poetic version of an earthly paradise, he was still inescapably drawn to imitating the same late sixteenthcentury Italian epic model as his great English predecessor. notes  1 Vernon Lee, Euphorion, 2 (London, 1885), p. 330. See also J. A. Symonds, Essays Speculative and Suggestive, 2 (London, 1890), pp. 197–224: p. 217: ‘Spenser’s magnificent paraphrase from Tasso follows the original closely’.  2 Emil Koeppel, ‘Die englische Tasso-Übersetzungen des 16. Jahrhunderts’, Anglia, 11 (1889), 341–62.  3 J. C. Smith, Preface to Spenser’s Faerie Queen, ed. J. C. Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), p. xi. Fox has more recently argued that ‘one indication of how important the Rinaldo / Armida episode was to Spenser is his decision to replicate elements from it in five discrete, though closely related episodes’, spanning the whole of Book II, from the dying Amavia’s initial tale of Acrasia and Mortdant in canto i, through Cymochles’s abandonment to the sensual delights of Phaedria in cantos v and vi, to Sir Guyon and the Palmer’s eventual arrival at and destruction of the Bowre in the final canto, which Fox suggests ‘constitutes the climactic and most important sequence in the whole work’: Alistair Fox, The English Renaissance: Identity and Representation in Elizabethan England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 165–6.

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 4 Herbert Ellsworth Cory, Edmund Spenser: a Critical Study (New York: Russell and Russell, 1917), p. 108 and pp. 137–40. See also Sidney Lee, who simultaneously described Tasso’s Armida as ‘the most alluring of all poetic presentments of beautiful witchery’: Sir Sidney Lee, ‘Tasso and Shakespeare’s England’ (1918) in Elizabethan and Other Essays, ed. F. S. Boas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929), pp. 169–83: p. 178.  5 Cory, Edmund Spenser, p. 183.  6 C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: a Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 332. See also Robert Durling, ‘The Bower of Bliss and Armida’s palace’, Comparative Literature, 6 (1954), 335–47: p. 341; Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 170–3; Camille Paglia, ‘Sex’ in A. C. Hamilton (ed.), The Spenser Encyclopedia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), pp. 640–1.  7 Judith A. Kates, Tasso and Milton: the Problem of Christian Epic (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1983), p. 137.  8 Durling, ‘Armida’s palace’, p. 336, also suggests that ‘the Bower of Bliss is described almost entirely from the viewpoint of Guyon and the Palmer’.  9 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (Harlow: Longman, 2001), p. 277. 10 Spenser clearly recalls Tasso’s substitution in these stanzas some years later when he describes Artegall’s subjection to Radigund in Book V:‘Who had him seene, imagine mote thereby, / That whylome hath of Hercules bene told, / How for Iolas sake he did apply / His mightie hands, the distaffe vile to hold’ (V, v, 24, 1–4): Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 542. 11 Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, ed. Lanfranco Caretti (Einaudi: Turin, 1971), p. 473. 12 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 475. 13 Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 277. 14 James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: the Poetry of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 71. 15 John B. Bender, Spenser and Literary Pictorialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 179. 16 See Heffernan, Museum of Words, pp. 70–2, and Bender, Literary Pictorialism, pp. 177–80. 17 Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 277. 18 Heffernan, Museum of Words, pp. 71–2. Davis, however, refers to the story on the entry gate as a ‘frieze’: Nick Davis, ‘Desire, nature and automata in the Bower of Bliss’ in Wendy Beth Hyman (ed.), The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 163–80: p. 168. 19 Bender, Literary Pictorialism, p. 180. Bender defines ‘Focused imagery’ as ‘reiterated visual imagery fixed into sequences analogous to the process of vision’ (p. 4).

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20 Bender, Literary Pictorialism, pp. 178–9. 21 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 474. 22 Bender, Literary Pictorialism, p. 179, concedes that the flaming gold in Tasso ‘can be taken literally or figuratively’. See also Zailig Pollock, ‘Concupiscence and intemperance in the Bower of Bliss’, Studies in English Literature, 20 (1980), 43–58: pp. 50–1. 23 See Hester Lees-Jeffries, England’s Helicon: Fountains in Early Modern Literature and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 173, for the importance of the term ‘spectacle’ in Book II of The Faerie Queene. 24 Heffernan, Museum of Words, p. 72; Bender, Literary Pictorialism, p. 179. See also Jane Grogan, Exemplary Spenser: Visual and Poetic Pedagogy in ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 110–16. 25 Lees-Jeffries does register the significance of the verb in this stanza: Hester Lees-Jeffries, ‘Literary gardens, from More to Marvell’ in Michael Hattaway (ed.), A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, 1 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 379–95: p. 385. 26 Alistair Fowler, Renaissance Realism: Narrative Images in Literature and Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. vi. 27 C. P. Brand, Torquato Tasso: a Study of the Poet and of his Contribution to English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 237. 28 Jonathan Unglaub, Poussin and the Poetics of Painting: Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 102. 29 Scipio Gentili, Annotationi di Scipio Gentili sopra La Gierusalemme Liberata di Torquato Tasso (London, 1586), pp. 217–18; translation in Unglaub, Poetics of Painting, pp. 102–3. 30 See David Scott Wilson-Okamura, ‘When did Spenser read Tasso?’, Spenser Studies, 23 (2008), 277–82. 31 Durling, ‘Armida’s palace’, pp. 336–7. 32 Michael Leslie, ‘Spenser, Sidney, and the Renaissance garden’, English Literary Renaissance, 22 (1992), 3–36; p. 13 and p. 16. 33 Durling, ‘Armida’s palace’, p. 336; Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 278. 34 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 466. 35 Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 279. 36 Bender, Literary Pictorialism, p. 183, suggests that here ‘for the first time, in the Bowre we momentarily follow a lure that Guyon avoids. His sudden rejection is explained not by what we see, but, it seems, by the dark resonance of mythological figures and places that are associated with the plain.’ 37 Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 279. 38 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 477. 39 Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 279. 40 Durling, ‘Armida’s palace’, pp. 345–6. 41 Bernardo Castello’s illustrations for each of the poem’s twenty cantos were first printed in a Genoese edition of La Gerusalemme liberata in 1590.

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42 The golden fruit is displayed even more prominently in a later depiction of the scene by one of Carracci’s apprentices, Domenichino’s Rinaldo and Armida, painted around 1620. 43 Bender, Literary Pictorialism, p. 184; see also Lees-Jeffries, ‘Literary gardens’, p.  387. 44 Christine Coch, ‘The trials of art: testing temperance in the Bower of Bliss and Diana’s Grove at Nonsuch’, Spenser Studies, 20 (2005), 49–76: p. 64. 45 See Kates, Tasso and Milton, pp. 139–40, who mistakenly suggests instead that ‘Spenser has shifted the stanza (XVI, 10) to occur much earlier in the description of the earthly paradise, so that the deceptive merging of art and nature stands like the frontispiece or portal to the Bower rather than along the way.’ 46 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 476. 47 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 477. 48 Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 280. 49 Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 280. Greenblatt, Renaissance SelfFashioning, p. 189, suggests that the verb ‘has virtually a technical significance here’, considering the acquisition of grace in relation to Castiglione’s practice of sprezzatura in Il Cortegiano. 50 Lees-Jeffries, England’s Helicon, p. 177. 51 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 467. 52 Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, pp. 280–1. 53 Bender, Literary Pictorialism, p. 184; see Davis, ‘Desire, nature and automata’, pp. 174–5. Playing and flying putti are prominently displayed in Domenichino’s Rinaldo and Armida, painted around 1620. 54 Lewis, Allegory of Love, p. 325. 55 Bender, Literary Pictorialism, p. 188. 56 Paul J. Alpers, The Poetry of the Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 45; Catherine Belsey, Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 155. See also Davis, ‘Desire, nature and automata’, p. 167, for the suggestion that ‘all trompe l’oeil art seduces’. 57 See also Spenser’s earlier ekphrastic description of ‘a goodly wild vine, / Entrailed with a wanton Yvie twine’ (29–30) on the decorative wooden mazer pledged in the singing match in the ‘August’ eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender (1579), a phrase which recurs in the first evocation of the Bowre in canto v of Book II, where Cymochles is discovered in thrall to Acrasia by his brother’s squire, Atin: ‘And ouer him, art stryuing to compayre, / With nature, did an Arber greene dispred, / Framed of wanton Yuie, flouting fayre’ (II, v, 29, 1–3): Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 200. 58 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, pp. 444–5. 59 Durling, ‘Armida’s palace’, p. 339. 60 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 468. 61 ‘Questo è il porto del mondo; e qui è il ristoro / de le sue noie, e quel piacer si sente / che già sentí ne’ secoli de l’oro / l’antica e senza fren libera gente’ (XV, 63, 1–4), ‘This is the harbour of the world, and here is the respite from

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your troubles, and here you will feel that pleasure that already in the golden age the ancient and free people felt without any restraint.’ Spenser paraphrases elements of this sirens’ song when Guyon hears the mermaids’ song on the voyage to the Bowre earlier in the final canto: ‘O turne thy rudder hitherward a while: / Here may thy storm-bett vessel safely ryde; / This is the Port of rest from troublous toyle, / The worlds sweet In, from paine and wearisome turmoyle’ (II, xii, 32, 6–9). Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 469; Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 275. 62 Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 281. 63 Fox, English Renaissance, pp. 170–1. 64 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 468. 65 Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 281. 66 Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 281. 67 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, pp. 468–9. 68 Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 282. 69 Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 282. 70 Fox, English Renaissance, p. 167. 71 Brand, Torquato Tasso, p. 294. 72 Edward Fairfax, Godfrey of Bulloigne: the Fairfax Translation of Tasso’s ‘Gerusalemme liberata’, ed. Kathleen M. Lea and T. M. Gang (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 90. 73 Kenneth Borris, Allegory and Epic in English Renaissance Literature: Heroic Form in Sidney, Spenser and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 99. 74 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 470. 75 Pollock, ‘Concupiscence and intemperance’, pp. 54–5. In Pollock’s reading water represents the concupiscible impulse, while the irascible is represented by fire. 76 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 477. 77 Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 283. 78 John Hollander, ‘Spenser and the mingled measure’, English Literary Renaissance, 1 (1971), 226–38: p. 228 and p. 230. 79 John Rooks, ‘Art, audience and performance in the Bowre of Bliss’, Modern Language Studies, 18 (1988), 23–36: p. 29 and p. 23; Northrop Frye, Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 132. 80 Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 282. 81 Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 283 and p. 282. 82 Frye, Spiritus Mundi, p. 132. 83 Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 283. 84 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 479. 85 David Quint, ‘Tasso’ in Hamilton (ed.), Spenser Encyclopedia, p. 679. 86 A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 279; Anthony M. Esolen, ‘Spenser’s

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“Alma Venus”: energy and economics in the Bowre of Bliss’, English Literary Renaissance, 23 (1993), 267–86: p. 278 and p. 283. See also Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 182 and p. 189, who adds that ‘even cannibalism and incest which are the extreme manifestations of the disordered and licentious life ... are both subtly suggested in the picture of Acrasia hanging over her adolescent lover’ in what he describes as an ‘uncanny parody of the Pietà suggested by Verdant cradled in Acrasia’s arms’. 87 Donald Cheney, Spenser’s Image of Nature: Wild Man and Shepherd in the Faerie Queene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), p. 93. 88 Alberto Castelli, La Gerusalemme liberata nella Inghilterra di Spenser (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1936), p. 33; Anne Lake Prescott, ‘Sources’ in Bart Van Es (ed.), A Critical Companion to Spenser Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), pp. 98–115: p. 112. 89 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 478. 90 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 477. 91 Kates, Tasso and Milton, pp. 143–4, also observes that, in contrast to Tasso, ‘Spenser leaves the singer unspecified and undescribed, and we therefore concentrate more firmly on the content of the song’. 92 Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 283. 93 Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 284; Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 479. 94 Cheney, Spenser’s Image of Nature, p. 100; Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 283. 95 Wendy Beth Hyman, ‘Seizing flowers in Spenser’s bower and garden’, English Literary Renaissance, 37 (2007), 193–214: pp. 200–1. 96 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, pp. 478–9. 97 Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 283. 98 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 480; Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 284. 99 Fox, English Renaissance, p. 174. 100 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 479. 101 Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 284. 102 Bender, Literary Pictorialism, p. 42, and John B. Bender, ‘Pictorialism’ in Hamilton (ed.), Spenser Encyclopedia, p. 543. See also Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 172: ‘the normal conceptual boundaries are blurred: languor and energy, opacity and transparency, flesh and stone all merge’. 103 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, pp. 108–9. 104 Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 284; see also Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p, 170. 105 For Galileo’s withering assessment of Tasso’s descriptive skills in his Considerazione al Tasso, in which he memorably ‘confesses that the only thing he had seen sweat turn white was the testicles of horses’, see Unglaub, Poetics of Painting, p. 108.

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106 See also II, xii, 73, 7; Grogan, Exemplary Spenser, p. 71, refers to this stanza in relation to Spenser’s use of ‘the extramissive theory of vision’ in his poem. 107 Bender, Literary Pictorialism, p. 195. 108 Lees-Jeffries, England’s Helicon, p. 180. Pugh has also designated Guyon as an inadequate and ‘naive reader’ (p. 84): ‘Guyon is thus presented at the outset [of Book II] as a bad reader, unaware of the true meaning which lies beneath the deceptive surface of the text in which he is embedded, ripe for misdirection.’ Syrithe Pugh, Spenser and Ovid (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 79. 109 Cheney, Spenser’s Image of Nature, p. 97. 110 Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 285. 111 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, pp. 483–4. 112 Spenser, Faerie Queene, p. 201. 113 Lees-Jeffries, England’s Helicon, p. 175; Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 170. 114 Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 285. 115 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 14; Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 664. See Jason Lawrence, ‘Calidore fra i pastori: Spenser’s return to Tasso in The Faerie Queene Book VI’, Spenser Studies, 20 (2005), 265–76: pp. 268–70. 116 John Watkins, The Specter of Dido: Spenser and Virgilian Epic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 4. Pugh, however, offers an alternative perspective to the apparently Virgilian model for the knight’s temperance in Book II by focusing instead on ‘an Ovidian subtext to which Guyon is oblivious [that] provides a critical commentary, revealing the shortcomings and contradictions of his virtue’, suggesting ultimately that ‘to see Guyon’s capture of Acrasia as fully expressing Spenser’s ideal of Temperance is also to limit one’s views as a reader to the reductive narrowness of Guyon’s own’: Pugh, Spenser and Ovid, p. 77 and p. 115. 117 The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Ernest Sirluck, 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), pp. 515–16. 118 See especially Ernest Sirluck, ‘Milton revises The Faerie Queene’, Modern Philology, 48 (1950), 90–6; Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 125–30: p. 127; John Guillory, Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton and Literary History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); George F. Butler, ‘Milton’s “sage and serious Poet Spenser”: error and imitation in The Faerie Queene and Areopagitica’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 49 (2007), 101–24. 119 John King has acknowledged Spenser’s episode as ‘a major literary model for the “bower” of Adam and Eve’, but argues that ‘the rewriting of the Bower of Bliss in the Garden of Eden suggests that Milton is not a slavish imitator, but a thorough-going interpreter and critic of his Spenserian prototype’: John N. King, ‘Milton’s Bower of Bliss: a rewriting of Spenser’s art of married love’, Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, 10 (1986), 289–99: p. 297 and p. 293.

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120 The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alistair Fowler (London and Harlow: Longmans, 1968), pp. 653–4. 121 Poems of Milton, ed. Carey and Fowler, p. 617. 122 Poems of Milton, ed. Carey and Fowler, p. 627; Kates, Tasso and Milton, p. 136. 123 Kates, Tasso and Milton, p. 145. 124 Poems of Milton, ed. Carey and Fowler, pp. 627–8. 125 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 477. 126 Frank Allen Patterson (ed.), An Index to the Columbia Edition of the Works of John Milton, 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), p. 1914; Giamatti, Earthly Paradise, pp. 315–16; see also Selene Scarsi, Translating Women in Early Modern England: Gender in the Elizabethan Verse Translations of Boiardo, Ariosto and Tasso (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), p. 119. For an alternative perspective, see Mindele Anne Treip, Allegorical Poetics and the Epic: the Renaissance Tradition to ‘Paradise Lost’ (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), p. 318: ‘so too, not entirely negatively, is Tasso’s Armida (a seductress who repents) echoed in Milton’s Eve’. 127 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 480; Poems of Milton, ed. Carey and Fowler, p. 631. 128 Kates, Tasso and Milton, p. 146; Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, ed. and trans. Anthony M. Esolen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. 449. 129 Poems of Milton, ed. Carey and Fowler, p. 632. 130 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 108 and p. 479. 131 Poems of Milton, ed. Carey and Fowler, p. 642. 132 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, pp. 108–9.

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Gerusalemme liberata and the visual arts in England

anthony van dyck’s

r i na l d o a n d a r m i da

(1629)

Tasso’s epic poem was to prove an immediate and continued source of inspiration for musical settings and operatic adaptations, as I will trace in the next chapter, and its impact as a source for pictorial representation was hardly less sudden or momentous. The first illustrated edition of Gerusalemme liberata appeared in Genoa in 1590, with engravings for each canto by Bernardo Castello, setting in motion a practice of visually depicting Tasso’s verse which would flourish, particularly in Italy and France, for some two hundred years. Like the literary imitators, and composers of madrigals and operas, painters were drawn predominantly to the romantic episodes in the poem, and, as Jonathan Unglaub has outlined, ‘the scene from the epic that attracted many painters in the early seventeenth century was the embrace of Rinaldo and Armida from Canto XVI’.1 The landscape surrounding the lovers in the enchanted garden is certainly ‘the most vividly pictorial passage of the Gerusalemme liberata’, particularly in its ekphrastic descriptions of the abundant fauna and flora created by Armida’s magic, and Tasso’s poetic focus on the solipsistic lovers at the centre of the garden has been described by Unglaub as a ‘complex network of specularity and voyeurism [that] offered an irresistible challenge to painters’.2 Unglaub and Giovanni Careri have recently traced this early fascination with the scene in Italian art at the turn of the seventeenth century, through works by Lodovico and Annibale Carracci and Domenico Zampieri.3 Unglaub has pondered why some later European painters drawn to Tasso’s poem studiously avoided depicting this specific moment, emphasising ‘the ekphrastic overdetermination of the garden scene’ and suggesting that ‘its pictorial representation could admit only the narrowest interpre-

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tation of ut pictura poesis’, which thus encouraged certain artists to look elsewhere in the Rinaldo and Armida episode.4 His primary focus of critical attention falls on the French painter Nicolas Poussin, who twice in the late 1620s, shortly after his arrival in Rome, chose to depict scenes from canto XIV of the poem, in which the enchantress Armida, intent on taking revenge on the banished Christian knight, suddenly and unexpectedly falls in love with him. The critic notes that ‘Poussin was among the first painters to represent this particular moment of the Rinaldo and Armida episode’,5 but it was an almost simultaneous rendering of the same scene by another young artist with recent first-hand experience of Italy, which helps to establish the earliest connection between Tasso’s poem and the visual arts in England. In the summer of 1628 the Dutch painter Anthony Van Dyck received a commission on behalf of King Charles I for a large mythological painting on a theme from Tasso’s epic poem. The painter was visited at his studio in Antwerp by Sir Endymion Porter, a Spanish-speaking Groom of the King’s Bedchamber, who in 1623 had accompanied the then Prince of Wales and the Duke of Buckingham to Madrid, where the English visitors were exposed to the magnificent art collection in Philip IV’s royal palace, featuring works by Titian, Raphael, and Rubens among others. Robin Blake has argued, in his biography of Van Dyck, that this visit was fundamental to the formation of the future king’s taste in the visual arts. Porter had also previously met Van Dyck on his first visit to London in the early 1620s, and Blake suggests that ‘knowing both the king and the artist as he did, Sir Endymion seems to have formed the idea of bringing them together in the subtlest but most direct way that he could think of, through the medium of a picture’.6 This painting was to be vast, measuring 235 by 229 centimetres, and expensive, costing 300 patacones, or £72, on its completion in December 1629, and it seems to have been conceived ‘in the tradition of Titian’s poesie’ deliberately to appeal to the king’s preference for sixteenth-century Venetian art.7 The specific subject matter, the depiction of an amorous interlude from Tasso’s poem, however, reflected the more modern taste of seventeenthcentury Italian artists, to which Van Dyck, like Poussin shortly after him, was exposed during his sojourn in Italy in the mid-1620s. Blake speculates that Porter himself was instrumental in selecting this specific theme: The subject of Porter’s newly commissioned painting might have been specially chosen to please and flatter both the artist and King Charles. Van Dyck, with his new enthusiasm for Eros, was as hungry to paint more

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mythological works as Charles was to own them. But why did they choose this particular subject, an incident from Torquato Tasso’s Gersulamme Liberata?8

Blake’s question frames the choice as one undertaken jointly by commissioner and artist, and there are both native and continental European contexts which may explain the appropriateness, and popularity, of Tasso’s subject matter in a picture intended for the English king. Christopher Brown states that ‘Van Dyck read Italian poetry and drama with enthusiasm and responded with imaginative sympathy to the romantic worlds of Christian knights and pastoral lovers in the work of Ariosto, Guarini, and Tasso’,9 and indeed the latter two poets, along with Ovid and Homer, provided him with literary sources for four large mythological works painted for Stadtholder Frederik Hendrik of the House of Orange in The Hague at about the same time as Porter’s commission for King Charles: Van Dyck depicted the kissing game between Amarilli and Mirtillo from the central act of Guarini’s celebrated pastoral drama Il pastor fido (1590), and also the already familiar moment from canto XVI in Tasso’s poem, where the Christian knights Carlo and Ubaldo discover and observe Rinaldo and Armida’s playful dalliance in her enchanted garden. It is in these erotically charged mythological paintings reminiscent of Titian’s poesie that Blake detects the Dutch artist’s ‘new enthusiasm for Eros’. Van Dyck’s depiction of the scene most popular with contemporary Italian artists in his work for the House of Orange might also help to explain why he turned elsewhere in Tasso’s poem for the subject matter for his next royally commissioned work. Blake argues that ‘the effect of the Rinaldo was carefully calculated because Van Dyck, ever astute, had taken care to inform himself of what the King liked’.10 The biographer attributes this knowledge of the king’s tastes to both Porter and another English visitor to Antwerp in 1628, the Master of the King’s Music, Nicholas Lanier, who had his portrait painted by Van Dyck as he passed through the city on his return to London, having finally secured the purchase of the impressive art collection of Duke Ferdinando Gonzaga of Mantua for King Charles (for the sum of 68,000 scudi, or around £15,000). Art historians have focused predominantly on the king’s taste in the visual arts in relation to Van Dyck’s commission: both Blake and Brown suggest that the colouring in the completed picture is deliberately reminiscent of the work of Paolo Veronese, while Malcolm Rogers favours another celebrated Venetian painter as the principal visual model:

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The colouring is wonderfully rich in a Titianesque vein calculated to appeal to the King, and there are allusions to Titian’s Worship of Venus in the figure of Armida, and above all the wittily observed amorino, sucking his thumb, who warily watches the spectator, ignoring the adult goingson around him.11

It is perhaps surprising that far less attention has been paid to the specific choice of literary source in relation to the king’s tastes. Despite Blake’s attempt to explain the ‘number of interlocking reasons’ that might account for the choice of a subject from Tasso’s poem, he fails even to mention the most obvious and significant one.12 In 1624, five years before the completion of Van Dyck’s Rinaldo and Armida, John Bill, the King’s Printer, had dedicated the second edition of Edward Fairfax’s Godfrey of Bulloigne, his complete verse translation of Tasso’s poem, originally printed in 1600, ‘To the most illustrious and most excellent Prince, Charles, Prince of Wales’, suggesting that he had undertaken this edition expressly at royal request: The command of his Maiestie, seconded by your Highnesse, hath caused mee to renew the impression of this booke. The former edition had the honour to bee dedicated to the late Queene Elizabeth, of famous memorie, as appeareth by a worthy Elogie, here preserued. I could not leaue this second birth of so excellent an Author, without a liuing Patron; and none could be found fitter, than your Princely selfe, who as you haue highly commended it, so it is to be presumed, you will take it into your safe and Princely protection.13

Later in the seventeenth century a relative of the translator, Brian Fairfax, maintained to Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester, that Godfrey of Bulloigne was King James’s favourite book, and also that it provided consolation to King Charles during his periods of confinement in the late 1640s. Bill’s dedication, however, is the only direct testimony of the popularity of the English translation of Tasso’s epic with both King James and the then Prince of Wales. The printer’s Epistle Dedicatorie displays a good degree of familiarity with the poem and its original author, and also a keen desire to demonstrate its suitability as royal reading matter, suggesting that Tasso ‘may be stiled Homerus Christianus: and this [book] will be as fit to bee found in the hand of a Christian Prince, as Homer was to lie vnder the pillow of that Macedonian Emperor’.14 Bill also implies that the poem contains a direct model for both personal emulation and literary imitation for the Stuart royal family:

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Though Godfrey were the first in this Holy band, Robert of Normandie was not the last, a noble branch of your royall tree: and it were to bee wished, that the same spirit in this latter age inflame all Christian Princes to the like designe, that the Theater of Mars might be erected in the gates of Hierusalem and Constantinople, which now is too much frequented in the territories of Christendome.15

The most recent historical example of such a noble Christian military undertaking was the defeat of the Ottoman fleet in the battle of Lepanto in 1571. This famous victory was commemorated in verse by King James, whose poem Lepanto, written in the early 1590s and later printed in London in 1603, is considered by Bill as a direct literary equivalent to Tasso’s verse celebration of the first crusade in Gerusalemme liberata: A parallel to this enterprise cannot more fitly be giuen, than that of Lepanto, toward which though our Northern Princes gaue no aid, yet your Royall Father, our Soueraigne, hath giuen a perpetuall memorie, by his learned and religious Poeme, worthily imitated in the French, by Du Bartas: wherein Don Juan d’Austria doth not better follow the example of Godfrey, in the acting, than his Maiestie doth Tasso in describing the conquest, which the Christians obtained against the Turkes.16

It is striking that Bill continually stresses the significance of the principal crusade narrative of the poem, focusing on Godfrey, the ‘great Champion of Christendome’, as ‘an example of pietie and valour ioyned together, to redeeme one countrey to the honour of Christ’, rather than on the frequent romantic episodes, which had proved so popular with European writers and artists in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.17 If the dedication of the second edition of Fairfax’s translation to Prince Charles is the strongest contemporary evidence of his esteem for Tasso’s poem, then its dedicatory letter serves to highlight rather different elements of the epic than those explored contemporaneously in the many literary imitations, musical settings, and visual representations of it. Van Dyck’s depiction of two scenes from the Rinaldo and Armida episode is consistent with this preference for the poem’s amorous interludes, but it is also notable that the painting commissioned for King Charles deliberately focuses on a less familiar, and thus more inventive, moment as the source for its representation. A sustained analysis of the composition and execution of the picture in relation to its literary source helps to reveal the scale of the artist’s ambition: in this work Van Dyck

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demonstrates a close attention to the original poem, and his success in managing to convey simultaneously details from nine consecutive stanzas of Tasso’s verse (canto XIV, stanzas 60 to 68). The selected episode focuses on Armida’s plan to enact her revenge on Rinaldo, who has single-handedly released the hundred or so Christian soldiers she had lured to and imprisoned in an enchanted castle, before she unexpectedly falls in love with the knight, and thus decides instead to spirit him away from the conflict to another magical realm on the Fortunate Isles. Initially the curious Rinaldo is lured alone, by the promise of ‘meraviglie maggior l’orto o l’occaso / non ha di ciò che l’isolette asconde’, ‘greater wonders, which the island hides, than can be found in either east or west’ (XIV, 58, 3–4), engraved in gold on a white marble column, to a small island on the river Oronte, where he removes his helmet and settles down to rest.18 At this moment the river starts to bubble, and Rinaldo turns to witness the gradual emergence of a naked female form from the water: e quinci alquanto d’un crin biondo uscio, e quinci di donzella un volto sorse, e quinci il petto e le mammelle, e de la sua forma infin dove vergogna cela.

(XIV, 60, 5–8)

(And now locks of blonde hair rise up, and now the face of a woman appears, and now the chest and the breasts, and from there the whole of her form to the point where shame hides the rest.)19

It is soon made clear by the poet that the figure is not a ‘vera sirena’ (XIV, 61, 3), but rather a beautiful illusion created by the enchantress. Careri suggests that, as an ‘émanation des pouvoir magiques d’Armide, la nymphe incarne de façon exemplaire la junction entre nature et magie érotique’, ‘a creation of the magical powers of Armida, the nymph personifies in an exemplary manner the meeting point between nature and erotic magic’ in the poem.20 Uniquely in the visual representations of Rinaldo and Armida from canto XIV, Van Dyck chooses to depict the false siren. This is perhaps surprising, given the visual opportunities that Tasso’s erotic description of her would seem to provide for painters.21 In his composition Van Dyck places her prominently in the foreground in the bottom right of the canvas, following Tasso’s details of her emerging appearance closely, right up to the discreet splashes of water covering the intimate parts that shame conceals. The indeterminate nature of Armida’s ‘magica larva’, ‘enchanted shadow’ (XVI, 61, 4), in Tasso is perhaps also

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Sir Anthony Van Dyck (Flemish, 1599–1641), Rinaldo and Armida, 1629. Oil on canvas, 235.3 × 228.7 cm. The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Jacob Epstein Collection, BMA 1951.103. Photograph by Mitro Hood.

hinted at in the two scaly limbs clearly visible in the water, which suggest to Van Dyck the appearance of a mermaid rather than the sirens of Greek mythology. If both Rinaldo and the reader are supposed initially to be enticed by the false siren’s appearance, the emphasis in Tasso soon switches to the effects of her beautiful voice, capable of charming even the elements: ‘né men ch’ in viso bella, in suono è dolce, / e cosí canta, e ’l cielo e l’aure molce’, ‘she is no less sweet in her sound than beautiful in her features, / and so she sings, and the sky and the breeze are becalmed’ (XIV, 61, 7–8). It is her voice that gradually lulls the Christian knight to sleep; the

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celebrated carpe diem song of the false siren, encouraging young men to pursue pleasure above all else (‘Solo chi segue ciò che piace è saggio, / e in sua stagion de gli anni il frutto coglie’, ‘He alone is wise who follows that which pleases him, / and harvests the fruit of his years when it is in season’: XIV, 62, 5–6),22 lasts for three complete stanzas in Tasso, and presents a great challenge to the artist in terms of how to represent this aural experience visually. Van Dyck’s ingenious solution is to depict the siren holding in her right hand a slightly creased piece of paper, on which a series of musical notes are clearly discernible, while her extended left hand seems to implore the somnolent Rinaldo above her to follow. Blake attributes this detail to the influence of Nicholas Lanier, the king’s Master of Music, whom Van Dyck painted in Antwerp in June 1628: He may have discussed the subject of the Rinaldo in detail with Lanier, one instance of the help he received being the sheet of music in the waternymph’s hand. It has been proposed that its notes are from Monteverdi’s opera Rinaldo. The opera, now lost, had its première performance in 1628 in Mantua at the very time Lanier was packing up the Duke’s pictures.23

The suggestion that Van Dyck may be alluding to a specific contemporary musical treatment of the siren’s song is an attractive one, but Blake’s explanation is not entirely plausible. The intended first performance in Mantua of Monteverdi’s Tasso opera, probably entitled Armida abbandonata, was cancelled in the wake of the death of Duke Vincenzo II at the end of 1627, and there is no firm evidence that the lost work was performed there or anywhere else, if indeed it was ever completed.24 It seems unlikely therefore that Lanier would have discovered much about Monteverdi’s unperformed work while in Mantua on the king’s business, although this does not necessarily rule out the possibility of his involvement in Van Dyck’s inspired decision to allude to the siren’s song in his picture by means of a visible musical setting for it. The ensuing impact of the song in Tasso’s poem can be more directly referenced by the painter, in the deep slumber of Rinaldo as he reclines against a tree on the left side of the canvas: Sí canta l’empia, e ’l giovenetto al sonno con note invoglia sí soavi e scorte. Quel serpe a poco a poco, e si fa donno sovra i sensi di lui possente e forte; né i tuoni omai destar, non ch’altri, il ponno da quella queta imagine di morte.

(XIV, 65, 1–6)

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(So sings the wicked sprite, and lulls the boy with soft and cunning harmonies to sleep. Writhing into him bit by bit, they cloy his senses in a charm both strong and deep. Thunder could not now wake him or annoy death’s silent looks that over his features creep.)25

If the open-mouthed repose of the Christian hero in Van Dyck’s depiction does not quite evoke the ‘queta imagine di morte’ suggested in Tasso, the profundity of the false siren’s enchantment, which could not be disturbed even by the rumble of thunder, is conveyed by the artist in the ominous dark clouds immediately about Rinaldo’s head. These clouds perhaps also hint at Armida’s original murderous intent, when she appears at exactly this moment in the poem and stands threateningly over the vulnerable knight: ‘Esce d’aguato allor la falsa maga / e gli va sopra, di vendetta vaga’, ‘now from her ambush the false sorceress flies, and looms above him, vengeance in her eyes’ (XIV, 65, 7–8). Armida’s first glimpse of the prone Rinaldo, however, signals the turning point in the episode, as her thoughts turn unexpectedly from revenge to love: ‘e di nemica ella divenne amante’, ‘and from enemy she becomes lover’ (XIV, 67, 8).26 It is this precise moment in the poem that is captured in the most celebrated visual representation of canto XIV, Poussin’s second depiction of the love-struck enchantress observing the sleeping knight, painted in Italy at around the same time that Van Dyck conceived his interpretation of the episode in Antwerp. In his earlier version the French painter, like Van Dyck, had portrayed Armida after she has already fallen in love with Rinaldo, but when he returned to the episode a few years later ‘Poussin attempts to represent Armida’s conversion from avowed murderer to beguiled lover’ by condensing ‘the diachronic progression of the text into a unified, synchronic image’.27 Careri also comments on what he describes as the ‘simultanéité constitutive’ of this picture,28 as the enchantress’s gradual shift of emotional state, lasting for two entire stanzas in Tasso, is skilfully conveyed in Poussin’s depiction, at the centre of the canvas, of Armida, whose knife-bearing right hand is restrained by a winged Cupid, while her extended left hand lightly touches Rinaldo’s right hand, at rest on the top of his head as he reclines asleep. Unglaub emphasises how ‘Poussin improvises Armida’s dagger to compensate for the text’s reticence on how she actually intended to murder Rinaldo’,29 while Careri focuses on Armida’s physical contact with the knight as central to the

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artist’s vivid representation of the transformation of emotions in his later rendering: Arrêté par le petit Amour, son mouvement agressif se transforme progressivement en geste d’amour, la main gauche est abandonée sur la main du héros endormi. Alors que le premier tableau développe le mouvement intensif d’un seul affect, dans celui-ci deux passions contraires s’affrontent en une configuration constrastée et déséquilibrée qui culmine dans une mutation d’affects. (Halted by the little Love, her aggressive movement is gradually transformed into a gesture of love, her left hand abandoned on the hand of the sleeping hero. While the first canvas concentrated on the intensive movement of a single emotion, in this one two contrary emotions are made to confront one another in an unbalanced configuration which results in a transformation of emotional affect.)30

As in Poussin’s earlier depiction of the episode, which bears some uncanny structural resemblances to the later Dutch canvas,31 Van Dyck does not attempt to convey precisely this moment, but this does not make his response to Tasso any less ambitious in its conception. The fundamental simultaneity that Careri and Unglaub have identified and praised in Poussin’s later interpretation of the poem is no less marked in Van Dyck’s composition, which captures details from nine consecutive stanzas in its execution. Armida’s unexpected transformation from avenger to lover is signalled visually by the presence in the top right of the canvas of a winged putto drawing back a bow to shoot, encouraged by another, resting delicately on a cloud below, who points in the direction of the enchantress. As Armida is clearly already enamoured of Rinaldo in the picture, though, it is possible that, if aimed at the enchantress, the arrow, which appears to have a lead rather than a golden head, is intended to foreshadow the unhappy resolution to the episode, when the knight abandons Armida on the Fortunate Isles at the end of canto XVI. Alternatively, Rinaldo may be the intended target of the arrow as a proleptic indication of his amorous confinement by the enchantress once he has been transported in her flying chariot to the enchanted garden. Both the arrow head and the finger of the pointing putto draw the viewer’s attention to the two central figures in the picture by marking a diagonal line from the top right of the canvas, which makes either one a plausible target. One aspect of Armida’s love for Rinaldo in Tasso that is conveyed as strongly in Van Dyck’s depiction as in Poussin’s more celebrated second interpretation is the fundamentally narcissistic nature of this desire.

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Visual representations of the lovers’ dalliance in the garden in canto XVI virtually always include the enchantress’s mirror, with which she is obsessed, much to the chagrin of Rinaldo, who pleads that his eyes offer a far more accurate reflection of her beauty (XVI, 21–2). The origin of this self-regarding desire is vividly conveyed by Tasso at the moment at which Armida unwittingly falls in love, as he focuses on the impact Rinaldo’s eyes have on her, even when they are closed: Ma quando in lui fissò lo sguardo e vide come placido in vista egli respira, e ne’ begli occhi un dolce atto che ride, benché sian chiusi (or che fia s’ei li gira?), pria s’arresta sospesa, e gli s’asside poscia vicina, e placar sente ogn’ira mentre il risguarda; e ’n su la vaga fronte pende omai sí che par Narciso al fonte.

(XIV, 66, 1–8)

(But when she fixed her eyes upon [him] and saw how he was breathing peacefully, and round his pretty eyes a kind of joy though they were shut – and how sweet would they be when opened – she paused in doubt, then sat nearby, and felt her anger melt away as she beheld him. Like Narcissus at the pool she hung upon his lovely face.)32

Although he is ostensibly depicting a slightly later moment in the episode, Van Dyck clearly alludes to key details from this stanza in his painting: he emphasises visually not only the proximity of the faces of the two central figures, as Armida gazes longingly into the reclining Rinaldo’s closed eyes, but also their physical similarity, particularly in the slightly feminine features of the prone hero, which mirror those of the enchantress portrayed in profile directly above him. Rinaldo’s vulnerability to Armida’s advances, initially vengeful and then amorous, is further emphasised in Tasso, as she proceeds to bind the knight in an artfully woven chain of flowers, gathered from the banks of the river: Di ligustri, di gigli e de le rose le quai fiorian per quelle piagge amene, con nov’arte congiunte, indi compose lente ma tenacissime catene.

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(XIV, 68, 1–6)

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(Of lilacs, lilies and roses which flowered there upon the pleasant shore, weaving them with a strange art, she composes a gentle but most tenacious chain. This she puts around his neck and arms and feet, and so enthrals him, and so takes him in hand.)33

This is the final stanza in the episode that Van Dyck elects to depict as he portrays Armida just as she is about to wreathe the neck and arms of Rinaldo with roses. The painter, however, does not fully exploit visually the ambiguous nature of the chain of flowers in Tasso, where it is a symbol of both her love and her entrapment simultaneously. Immediately after she has bound the knight, Armida transports him in her magic chariot to an enchanted palace on the Fortunate Isles, where she can pursue her jealous and shameful desires (‘ingelosita di sí caro pegno, / e vergognosa del suo amor’: XIV, 69, 3–4) covertly, but where she also strives to keep the enslaved Rinaldo far away from the Christian siege of Jerusalem. The image of the defenceless knight bedecked in flowers in the poem brings to the reader’s mind the Ovidian precedents of Mars vanquished by Venus’s amorous wiles, and particularly Hercules subjugated by Iole, a tale alluded to ekphrastically by Tasso on the gate at the entrance to Armida’s garden at the start of canto XVI. Although Van Dyck’s Rinaldo is portrayed wearing an armoured breastplate, there is no indication in the picture, as there is in both of Poussin’s depictions of the episode, of his discarded helmet, an emblem both of his current susceptibility to female charms and of his ambivalence towards his military role at this point in the poem. The garland of roses in Van Dyck’s composition certainly appears as a more straightforward pastoral symbol of love, as it is about to be draped around the knight’s shoulders and arms by Armida, without any clear visual indication that it is also intended as a means of confinement. If, in decisions like this, Van Dyck occasionally underestimates Tasso’s symbolic ambiguity in his depiction, they do not detract unduly from either his originality in choosing a rarely painted episode as his subject matter, or his ambition and skill in attempting successfully to incorporate visual allusions to so many details from the source in his composition. Whoever had been initially responsible for suggesting a mythological painting based on Tasso for the commission for King Charles, it appears

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that Van Dyck’s execution of this carefully chosen subject matter was instrumental in bringing him directly to the attention of the English king and his court, for whom the Dutch painter would go on to work throughout the final and most successful decade of his career. Modern critics have argued that the arrival of the Rinaldo and Armida in London had a significant impact not only on Van Dyck’s subsequent career but also, and perhaps more tellingly, on the development of English taste in the visual arts in the seventeenth century: Rogers claims that ‘nothing of this sophistication had previously been seen in London, and its aesthetic impact can hardly be overstated’: It is not hard to imagine the sensation that this mythology, its subject taken from Torquato Tasso’s romantic epic Gerusalemme liberata, must have caused on its arrival in London in 1630. No more effective advertisement for Van Dyck’s powers could be imagined: full of movement and drama, of powerful emotion and eroticism.34

Blake praises the picture’s scale, colouring, conception, design, and execution as he imagines how ‘it must have awed the king and his friends as they removed it from its packing case’, and he also quotes David Howarth’s equally rapt response to viewing the painting first-hand at an exhibition in the early 1990s: This transcendent picture is one of the greatest creations in the genre of mythology. The time of the reception of the Rinaldo and Armida was a decisive moment in the history of taste in England.35

Where art historians have tended to focus on Van Dyck’s visual and stylistic allusions to great sixteenth-century Venetian art in the completed picture, I have tried rather to emphasise in this analysis that Van Dyck was also consciously working in relation to a more contemporary, predominantly Italian pictorial tradition, and that his original and closely considered response to Tasso’s poem is equally pertinent in explaining its appeal to the English king’s tastes, both artistic and literary. If the arrival of Rinaldo and Armida in London proved to be ‘a decisive moment’ in the development of English aesthetic taste, it also marked the earliest moment of engagement in England with the burgeoning continental practice of depicting the romantic episodes from this celebrated Italian poem, which was still proving highly popular half a century after its first printing.

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‘the painter has made a finer story than the poet’: jonathan richardson’s ‘dissertation’ (1719) on poussin’s

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ta n c r e d a n d e r m i n i a

The next significant English encounter with these seventeenth-century visual representations of Tasso’s poem, however, did not occur for another ninety or so years. In France in 1717 the noted history painter Sir James Thornhill purchased a ‘Capital’ painting from a bankrupt French gentleman for the sum of 2,500 livres.36 The painting, measuring 105 cm by 75 cm and dating from the mid-1630s, was the later of two depictions by Nicolas Poussin of a dramatic moment in canto XIX of Gerusalemme liberata, where the pagan princess Erminia discovers and subsequently revives the wounded Christian knight Tancredi, with whom she is secretly in love. Thornhill’s purchase was the first of Poussin’s paintings to reach England, and it created quite a stir on its arrival in early Georgian London. By 1719 the portrait painter and critic Jonathan Richardson Senior had had the opportunity to study the newly acquired Poussin in detail, and he included his (and some of Thornhill’s) thoughts and observations on it in a letter to the Dutch connoisseur and collector Nicholas Flinck, who had been visited in Rotterdam in 1716 by Richardson’s son, Jonathan Junior. Richardson Senior subsequently included an English translation of part of this letter as an important practical demonstration to his readers of how to judge ‘Of the Goodness of a Picture’ in An Essay on the Whole Art of Criticism as it relates to Painting, the first of his Two Discourses, printed in London in 1719, arguing that ‘such a Dissertation will be a fine Exercise of a Gentleman’s Abilities as a Connoisseur’.37 Carol Gibson-Wood has suggested that ‘because Flinck would not have had the painting before him when he read the letter, the description represents Richardson’s ekphrastic mode at its best, and demonstrates how he adapted it to his methodical critical procedure’, and this would seem to apply equally to the later readership of the printed discourse.38 The ‘Dissertation’ is placed towards the end of the first section of Richardson’s Essay, where it is intended to be read as a practical exemplum of the ‘System of Rules to be apply’d’ in the careful consideration of any painting.39 Richardson suggests adopting an expanded version of Roger de Piles’s recently outlined numerical scale (with marks ranging from 18 down to 1) to assess a painting in relation to seven essential categories: colouring, composition, handling, drawing, and then, more significantly, invention, expression, and finally ‘Grace and Greatness’.40

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Richardson gives a brief demonstration of this numerical scale in relation to his assessment of Van Dyck’s half-length portrait of Frances Brydges, wife of the second Earl of Exeter, before progressing to a more sustained survey of the Poussin picture. After a short account of the painting’s provenance and dimensions, Richardson begins by considering its composition and then invention, one of his key additions to de Piles’s scale, specifically in relation to Poussin’s decision to depict ‘a Story in Tasso’s Gerusalemme Cant. 19’, which the critic summarises for the benefit of the reader: Tancred a Christian Hero, and Argante a Pagan Gyant retire to a Solitary place amongst the Mountains to try their fortune in single combat; Argante is slain, the other so desperately wounded that after he had gone a little way he dropp’d, and fell into a swoon. Erminia who was in Love with him, and Vafrino his ’Squire (by what accident ’tis too long to tell) found him in this condition, but after the first fright perceiving Life in him she bound up his Wounds, and her Veil not being sufficient for that purpose she cut off her fine Hair to supply that defect, and so recover’d him, and brought him safe to the Army.41

Richardson’s familiarity with Tasso’s poem, almost a 140 years after its first printing, from which he quotes directly in Italian later in the ‘Dissertation’, evidently matches Poussin’s own keen interest in the epic nearly a century earlier. Having briefly outlined the scene in the Italian poem, Richardson confronts the difficult task of trying to describe the composition of the picture with sufficient enargeia and detail to bring it vividly before the eyes of his readership:42 Poussin has chosen the instant of her cutting off her Hair; Tancred lyes in a Graceful Attitude, and well contrasted towards one end of the Picture, his Feet coming about the middle, and at a little distance from the bottom; Vafrino is at his head raising him up against a little bank on which he supports himself kneeling on His left knee. Erminia is at his feet, kneeling on the Ground with her Right knee; beyond her at a distance lyes Argante dead; Behind are the Horses of Erminia, and Vafrino; And towards the top at that end of the Picture which is on the left hand as you look upon it, and over the heads of Tancred, and Vafrino are two Loves with their Torches in their hands; the Back-Ground is the Rocks, Trunks of Trees with few Leaves, or Branches, and a Sombrous Sky.43

Following this precise evocation of the painting for the benefit of readers without direct access to it, it is noteworthy that the critic’s immediate instinct is to make a comparison between the visual representation and

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Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), Tancred and Erminia, about 1634. Oil on canvas, 75.5 × 99.7 cm. The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham.

its literary source, emphasising notable differences as much as similarities, in order to illustrate aspects of Poussin’s invention. Richardson was almost certainly unaware that the Thornhill painting was in fact the French painter’s second depiction of the same moment from canto XIX of Tasso’s poem, and indeed at least his fourth based on romantic episodes from the twenty-canto poem painted by the middle of the 1630s, but some of his most acute observations are equally applicable to both of Poussin’s Tancred and Erminia paintings.44 The first point of contrast that Richardson draws between the painting and its poetic source, however, does unwittingly highlight some of the most significant alterations made in Poussin’s later depiction of Tasso’s scene. Richardson attributes the lack of any indication of the intensity of the physical combat between Argante and Tancredi in the picture to Poussin’s sense of decorum, implying that this is a conscious alteration from his source, where the post-combat scene discovered by Vafrino and Erminia is conveyed far more graphically:

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Giunsero in loco a la città vicino quando è il sol ne l’occaso e imbruna l’orto, e trovaron di sangue atro il camino; e poi vider nel sangue un guerrier morto che la vie tutte ingombra, e la gran faccia tien volta al cielo e morto anco minaccia.

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(XIX, 102, 3–8)

(The sun was setting, darkening the whole wood, when they came to a place not very far from town. And here the way is fouled with blood, and in his blood they see a warrior, dead – taking the whole road, turning his face to heaven – and even dead he menaces.)45

In his earlier depiction of the scene, however, Poussin had more explicitly emphasised the bloodshed both around the corpse of Argante in the background and at the feet of Tancred, who remains in full armour, in the foreground of the picture. It is only in the second version of the scene, where, as in Tasso, Tancred’s armour has now been removed, that the aftermath of the violence is made less conspicuous, as Richardson notes: Tancred is naked to the Wast having been stripp’d by Erminia and his ’Squire to search for his Wounds, he has a piece of loose Drapery which is Yellow, bearing upon the Red in the Middle Tincts, and Shadows, this is thrown over his Belly, and Thighs, and lyes a good length upon the ground; ’twas doubtless painted by the Life, and is intirely of a Modern Taste. And that nothing might be shocking, or disagreeable, the wounds are much hid, nor is his Body, or Garment stain’d with Blood, only some appears here, and there upon the ground just below the Drapery, as if it flow’d from some Wounds which That cover’d; Nor is he pale, but as one reviving, and his Blood, and Spirits returning to their usual motion.46

In terms of decorum, the English critic also observes that Poussin has not pursued historical verisimilitude in his choice of costume, and particularly armour, for the characters: The Habits are not those of the Age in which the Scene of the Fable is laid, These must have been Gothick, and Disagreeable, it being at the latter end of the 11th, or the beginning of the 12th Century.47

Tasso indicates that the armour worn by Argante and Tancredi marked them out as pagan and Christian respectively (‘l’uso de l’arme e ’l porta-

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mento estrano / pagan mostràrlo’, ‘the fashion of his arms and his strange bearing / marked him as pagan’: XIX, 103, 1–2),48 but he does not specify any details of the armour itself, so it is left to the painter to decide how to distinguish between the prone warriors. Richardson is particularly struck in the Thornhill version by the helmets of the Christian soldiers, which he describes as ‘probably Poussin’s own Invention’, and Richard Verdi has more recently drawn attention to the importance of ‘Tancred’s shield, adorned with the monogram of Christ, at Erminia’s feet’ in his interpretation of the painting, which he suggests takes ‘the unmistakable form of a Christian lamentation’.49 Tasso’s habitual lack of specificity in his visual descriptions becomes even more significant in relation to Poussin’s key decision to convey the precise narrative ‘instant of her cutting off her Hair’ in both versions of the scene, as perceptively noted by Richardson:50 ’Tis observable that tho’ Tasso says only Erminia cuts off her hair, Poussin was forc’d to explain what she cut it off withal, and he has given her her Lover’s Sword. We don’t at all question but there will be those who will fancy they have here discover’d a notorious Absurdity in Poussin, it being impossible to cut Hair with a Sword; but though it be, a Pair of Scissars instead of it, though much the fitter for the purpose, had spoil’d the Picture; Painting and Poetry equally disdain such low, and common things.51

Tasso reveals that Erminia’s fine veil is insufficient to dress Tancredi’s injuries, declaring only that love and pity are capable of discovering unexpected means to heal, in this case by using the hair that the pagan princess instinctively cuts to dry and bind the Christian knight’s seemingly mortal wounds: Ma non ha fuor ch’un velo onde gli fasce le sue ferite, in sí solinghe parti. Amor le trova inusitate fasce, e di pietà le insegna insolite arti: l’asciugò con le chiome e rilegolle pur con le chiome che troncar si volle.

(XIX, 112, 3–8)

(But she finds nothing near her but her veil to wrap his gashes in these far-off parts. Love taught her with strange swathings to prevail and made her mercy learn unusual arts: she dried and bound up his wounds with her hair, the very tresses she had wished to tear.)52

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Richardson’s most acute observation is that it is the striking absence of visual detail in Tasso’s poetry at this point which enables Poussin’s own pictorial invention and forces him to offer a more concrete, but equally heroic, interpretation of the scene, a point developed further, almost two hundred years later, in Unglaub’s account of Poussin’s earlier depiction of this dramatic moment in Tasso’s epic: Erminia’s heroic gesture is Poussin’s inspired invention in response to the text’s failure ... to picture how the ‘inusitate fasce’ came about. The action Tasso had glossed over for the sake of grandeur and momentum, Poussin reconstructs as a timeless sentimental meditation. While Erminia raises the sword to her hair, the painting is not about this action and its consequences. Rather, its surface radiates the desire and piety that drive Erminia’s love of Tancred. Here, the allusiveness of Tasso’s text is the extreme opposite of the ekphrastic overdetermination of Armida’s garden scene. What Tasso’s poetic language does furnish is the evocation of twilight and the depths of Erminia’s pathos.53

Unglaub describes this earlier version as ‘a painting of mood’ whereas the later depiction is considered instead as a less sentimental narrative painting, where the Christian knight’s ‘imminent revival encourages Vafrino gently to lift Tancred into consciousness and galvanizes Erminia to sever her tresses heroically. Opposed to the meditative elegy of the St Petersburg picture, the Birmingham composition initiates a cycle of cause and effect essential to the emplotment of narrative action.’54 Anthony Blunt concurs that Poussin’s second version is ‘less poetical’ than the earlier one, but draws attention to, and praises, the ‘brilliant effect of movement and countermovement in the placing and drawing of the horses’ in the later rendering.55 Richardson had been similarly struck by the artist’s depiction of the horses, focusing in particular on one apparently minor detail, again with direct reference to the artist’s response to his poetic source in Tasso: We know not whether it will be worth while to observe a small Circumstance; One of the Horses is fasten’d to a Tree; If it be suppos’d to be Erminia’s, and done by her self, ’twould be intolerable, she must have had other Thoughts than to secure her Horse when she dismounted, for ’twas not till Vafrino had found that he who at first sight they took to be a Stranger (as well as Argante) was Tancred, and then she is finely describ’d by Tasso as Tumbling, rather than Lighting from her Horse. Non scese no, precipito di Sella. (XIX, 104, 8)

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But as this may possibly be Vafrino’s, Or if ’twas her’s, perhaps his care was divided betwixt the wounded Hero, and the Lady, to whom it was of consequence to have her Horse secur’d, it will not be thought partiality to suppose so Great a Man as Poussin would not make such a Blunder as This, taking it in the worst Sence; but ’twould be Unjust to determine Otherwise when the most Favourable Opinion is most Probable; and That being taken, here is a Beauty, not a Fault; It amplifies, and raises the Character of Vafrino, tho’ it would have spoil’d that of Erminia. Whether a Painter ought to go so far into these little parts is a question which will bear reasoning upon.56

If this observation initially brings to mind Giovan Pietro Bellori’s caveat about the risk of including too much detail in an ekphrastic description in his influential Le Vite de’ pittori (1672),57 the speculation about Poussin’s motives for tethering one horse, in relation to Tasso’s characterisation of Erminia and Vafrino in the poetic source, again demonstrates Richardson’s confidence in advancing an interpretation that is not deemed to be merely a product of the critic’s own imagination. Two centuries before Unglaub was to focus on the strong narrative impetus of the later depiction of Tancred and Erminia, Richardson had already drawn attention to how Poussin expertly manages to convey narrative and character simultaneously in the second picture, through a sustained analysis of the artist’s use of expression, which he maintains is ‘Excellent throughout’. The artist-critic highlights one of the central and inevitable dilemmas in narrative history painting, in terms of how the artist can best try to represent visually more of the preceding and ongoing narrative than can ostensibly be conveyed in the single moment chosen for representation. In this particular example Richardson praises highly Poussin’s ability to imply much about the combat between Argante and Tancredi and their respective characters earlier in canto XIX merely from his representation of their prone figures when discovered by Vafrino and Erminia: Argante seems to be a Wretch that dyed in Rage, and Dispair, without the least spark of Piety. Tancred is Good, Amiable, Noble, and Valiant. There are two Circumstances in Tasso which finely raise these two Characters. When these Champions withdrew to fight ’twas in the view of the Christian Soldiers whose fury against the Pagan could hardly be restrain’d, Tancred protected him from them, and as they retired together cover’d him with his Shield: Afterwards when he had him at his Mercy, and Tancred would have given him his Life, and in a Friendly manner approach’d him with the offer, the Villain attempted basely to murther him, upon which provocation he dispatch’d him immediately with Scorn, and Fury. These

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Incidents could not be inserted in the Picture, but Poussin has told us by the Airs he has given them that either were capable of any thing in these several kinds.58

Again Richardson’s detailed knowledge of Tasso’s poem matches that of the artist himself, allowing the critic to interpret and appreciate Poussin’s subtle insinuation of character into the picture from beyond the specific moment in the source being represented. Richardson also draws the reader’s attention to the most striking addition to Tasso’s poem, and indeed to the artist’s own earlier depiction of the scene, in his consideration of Poussin’s use of expression to convey a character’s inner emotions in the later version. In his preface to The Art of Painting (1695), John Dryden had observed that ‘to express the Passions which are seated in the Heart, by outward Signs, is one great Precept of the Painters, and very difficult to perform’,59 and Poussin himself had suggested to Bellori that he should focus on the embodiment of the affetti in his ekphrastic descriptions of paintings in Le Vite.60 The later English critic seems to acknowledge Poussin’s achievement in this regard in generously attributing to the new owner of the picture, Sir James Thornhill, the observation that ‘the two Cupidons’ hovering above Vafrino and Tancred in the top left corner of the canvas may have been intended as a visual representation of the conflicting emotions etched in Erminia’s face as she desperately tends to the wounded object of her love: Erminia must appear to have a mixture of Hope, and Fear, Joy, and Sorrow, this being the time she had discover’d Life in her Lover after having suppos’d him dead; to express this ... must be exceeding difficult, and yet absolutely necessary, and that Strongly, and Apparently, that those who look upon the Picture may know to what End she cuts off her hair; and that ’tis not a Transport of Distracted Grief for the Death of him she loved, who is not yet recovered from his Swoon; because this Mistake would lose all the Beauty of the Story. For this reason the two Loves are admirably contrived to serve This purpose; ... One of them, and that the farthest from the Eye has Sorrow, and Fear, the other Joy, and Hope evidently in his Face; and to express this yet more perfectly (and this is Mr. Thornhill’s Observation) the former has two Arrows in his hand to denote those Passions, and their Pungency; but the Quiver of his Companion is fast shut up with a sort of a cap on the top of it.61

Thornhill’s explanation, as related by Richardson, in fact offers a more plausible interpretation of the presence of the Cupids than Verdi’s recent account:

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Tasso abandons the tale of Tancred and Erminia with the rescue and recovery of the knight and provides no indication of the couple’s eventual fate. Poussin, however, includes two putti at the upper left of the Barber Institute picture. Bearing torches and arrows, these foretell the happy outcome of it all and suggest that Tancred and Erminia will eventually be united in love. But this is Poussin’s own invention and one which ... was probably intended to give a deeper, moral significance to the tale.62

This reading underestimates the close attention Poussin paid to Tasso’s poem in its entirety (and perhaps even the poet’s further thoughts on it in his printed letters), though, as Unglaub implies in developing the earlier idea of the painting as echoing a Christian lamentation in his own more nuanced interpretation, in response to Verdi’s suggestion ‘that these putti presage the ultimate union’ of the pair: While Tasso does not divulge what eventually becomes of Erminia, this is not a possible scenario. Tancred, after all, had vowed fidelity to the celestial apparition of his beloved Clorinda, slain by his own hand. Clearly there could be no reneging of this promise. ... Some of Tasso’s censors were displeased that the poet had not resolved the fate of Erminia. Responding to their criticism, the poet contemplated adding ten stanzas detailing Erminia’s conversion and entrance into a convent. This was how Tasso envisioned that Erminia’s love, among all of the ‘amori’ of the epic, would alone have a ‘felice fine’.63 She would wed not Tancred, but the very Saviour his battered, dormant body emulated. While this revision never came to pass, the scene of Erminia sheering her tresses might be viewed as a prefiguration of monastic ordination. While Poussin, of course, does not literally stage Erminia’s conversion, he invests her action with the gravity and intensity of sacred ritual. The way the mythic compositional structure evokes the sacred lamentation formula reinforces this impression. The cutting of a woman’s hair, whether in monastic ritual or not, is an absolute denunciation of female sexual allure, of the concupiscent drive in herself or others. ... The love of Tancred and Erminia is never consummated. It is, however, sublimated to a ritual act of Christian charity, as Poussin realized.64

Richardson’s insistence on the necessity of a viewer of the picture being able to interpret correctly the emotions driving Erminia’s actions in Poussin’s depiction, in order not to ‘lose all the Beauty of the Story’, raises some important issues concerning the circumstances and capabilities of the target readership of his ‘Dissertation’, given that it is highly unlikely that he anticipated that his readership would have direct visual access to the Poussin picture. The Dutch engraver Gerard van der Gucht made a (half-size) reproduction of the original at some point between 1717 and

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1734, while it was still in Thornhill’s possession, but this is not likely to have circulated widely. The critic seems to acknowledge the problem himself towards the end of the ‘Dissertation’ when he admits that ‘there are a great many Beauties we have not mentioned, and some that cannot be expressed in Words, nor known without seeing the Picture’,65 highlighting the difficulty he faces in trying to convey adequately in words the visual beauties that he has studied to a readership that he knows has not. The second issue concerns whether Richardson expected his readership to have any prior knowledge of the poem on which Poussin’s depiction is based. The brief plot summaries of Tasso provided, and the emphasis he places on the viewer’s ability to interpret Erminia’s emotional expression without any frame of reference to the narrative beyond the picture itself, again suggest that he did not. However, if the critic is anticipating no direct knowledge in his readership of either the picture itself or the literary source from which it derives, then it becomes clear that he is asking this readership to put a good deal of faith in his judgement of the painting and, by extension, its relationship to Tasso’s poem: There is such a Grace and Greatness shines throughout that ’tis one of the most desireable Pictures we have yet seen; There is nothing to be Desired, or Imagin’d which it has not, nothing to be Added, or Omitted but would have diminish’d its Excellency.66

Richardson’s final positive judgement on the merits of the picture takes the form of a familiar paragone between the visual and the literary, emphasising Poussin’s ability ‘to make use of the Advantages this Art has over that of his Competitor’ to come down firmly in favour of the painter: We will only observe further the different Idea given by the Painter, and the Poet. A Reader of Tasso that thought less finely than Poussin would form in his Imagination a Picture, but not Such a one as This. He would see a Man of a less Lovely, and Beautiful Aspect, Pale, and all cut, and mangled, his Body, and Garments smear’d with Blood: He would see Erminia, not such a one as Poussin has made her; and a thousand to one with a pair of Scissars in her hand, but certainly not with Tancred’s Sword: The two Amoretto’s would never enter in his Mind: Horses would he see, and let ’em be the finest he had ever seen they would be less fine than These, and so of the rest. The Painter has made a finer Story than the Poet, tho’ his Readers were Equal to himself, but without all Comparison much finer than it can appear to the Generality of them.67

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In his ekphrastic analysis of this notable history painting, though, the pre-eminence of the visual representation over the poetic source can be asserted only by means of Richardson’s detailed verbal description of both, with the enargeia of the description having to convey an image of both Poussin’s picture and Tasso’s original episode to the reader’s imagination. Although the critic’s dissertation on the Thornhill Poussin and its Italian literary source ultimately finds in favour of the visual depiction of the story, the sustained comparison of both throughout seems to imply, if not quite yet openly admit, a more complex, symbiotic relationship between the two art forms. Within a couple of years, in a further essay ‘Of Painting and Sculpture’ included in his Account of Some of the Statues, Bas-reliefs, Drawings and Pictures in Italy, &c (1722), Richardson himself had been moved to modify his position, to acknowledge a more productive and reciprocal encounter between the visual and the literary in his deliberation on ‘whether Painting and Sculpture more want the assistance of Language, than Language of those Arts’.68 Gibson-Wood has argued that, as his career as painter and critic progressed, Richardson came to accept more readily that ‘it is when two or more systems are used simultaneously that the fullest and most perfect transmissions of ideas can take place’,69 as the specific illustrative example chosen in 1722, perhaps recalling his own earlier account of Poussin’s depiction of Tasso’s poem, makes abundantly clear: In many cases any one of several ways of communicating our Ideas would be very Imperfect, and hardly of any use without the assistance of some other: ... and thus tho’ a History-Picture conveys the Idea of Men, Women, &. to understand Fully what the Painter intended, a previous Knowledge of the Story by the help of Words is Absolutely necessary.70

notes   1 Jonathan Unglaub, Poussin and the Poetics of Painting: Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 99.  2 Unglaub, Poetics of Painting, p. 102 and p. 100.   3 Giovanni Careri, Gestes d’amour et de guerre (Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2005), pp. 165–76; see also Giovanni Careri, La fabbrica degli affetti: la Gerusalemme liberata dai Carracci a Tiepolo (Milan: La Saggiatore, 2010); Unglaub, Poetics of Painting, pp. 99–107.  4 Unglaub, Poetics of Painting, p. 103. On the Horatian theory of equivalence between painting and poetry, see W. Rensselaer Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: a Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: Norton, 1967).

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 5 Unglaub, Poetics of Painting, p. 86.   6 Robin Blake, Anthony Van Dyck: a Life (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1999), p. 242.   7 Christopher Brown, Van Dyck (Oxford: Phaidon, 1982), p. 137.  8 Blake, Anthony Van Dyck, p. 243.  9 Brown, Van Dyck, p. 27. 10 Blake, Anthony Van Dyck, p. 246. 11 Blake, Anthony Van Dyck, p. 246; Brown, Van Dyck, p. 137; Malcolm Rogers, Van Dyck, 1599–1641 (London: Royal Academy Publications, 1999), p. 81. 12 Blake, Anthony Van Dyck, p. 243. 13 Edward Fairfax, Godfrey of Bulloigne: the Fairfax Translation of Tasso’s ‘Gerusalemme liberata’, ed. Kathleen M. Lea and T. M. Gang (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 591. 14 Fairfax, Godfrey, ed. Lea and Gang, p. 591. Alexander the Great’s admiration for Homer’s Iliad is recorded in Cicero’s Pro archia poeta and in Petrarch’s sonnet 187, the opening three lines of which are cited in the ‘Glosse’ of the October eclogue of Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender (1579). See Chapter 1 above, p. 17, for the suggestion in the mid-1580s that Queen Elizabeth considered Duke Alfonso II, the dedicatee of Tasso’s epic, no less fortunate to have had this great poet to sing his praise than Alexander the Great did Achilles to have had Homer. 15 Ironically only five years previously Michael Drayton had lamented Tasso’s neglect of this historical figure in his epic in the revised version of The Legend of Robert, Duke of Normandie: ‘O wherefore thou Great Singer of thy dayes, / Renowned TASSO in thy Noble Story, / Wert thou so slacke in this Great Worthy’s prayse, / And yet so much should’st set forth others glory? / Me thinks for this, thou canst not but be sorry, / That thou should’st leaue another to recite / That, which so much Thou did’st neglect to write.’ Michael Drayton, Poems by Michael Drayton (London, 1619), p. 332. 16 Fairfax, Godfrey, ed. Lea and Gang, p. 591. 17 Fairfax, Godfrey, ed. Lea and Gang, p. 591. 18 Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, ed. Lanfranco Caretti (Turin: Einaudi, 1971), p. 439. 19 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 440. 20 Careri, Gestes d’amour, p. 153. 21 In the earlier of his two depictions of the same episode, Poussin paints a naked sea god pouring water into the river rather than portray Tasso’s siren. This invented sea god is placed in a similar position, in the foreground at the bottom right, as the siren in Van Dyck’s picture. 22 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 440. 23 Blake, Anthony Van Dyck, p. 247. 24 See Tim Carter, Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 25 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 441; translation in Max Wickert, Torquato

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Tasso: the Liberation of Jerusalem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p.  269. 26 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 442. 27 Unglaub, Poetics of Painting, p. 90. 28 Careri, Gestes d’amour, p. 222. 29 Unglaub, Poetics of Painting, p. 90. 30 Careri, Gestes d’amour, p. 165. 31 In both pictures the enamoured Armida, surrounded by putti, tends to the sleeping Rinaldo as he reclines against a tree placed in the foreground at the far left of the canvas, and both painters use ominous dark clouds to convey the enchantress’s original murderous intent. The river Oronte is visible at the bottom right of each canvas, with Poussin choosing to paint a naked river god pouring water into the stream, where Van Dyck instead depicts Tasso’s false siren emerging from the water. Poussin adds further details from the Italian poem by representing the inscribed column at the far right of the picture, and also Armida’s enchanted chariot, led by two restless horses, which is placed in the background in the centre of the canvas. 32 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 442; translation in Torquato Tasso, ­Jerusalem Delivered, ed. and trans. Anthony M. Esolen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. 283. 33 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 442. 34 Rogers, Van Dyck, 1599–1641, p. 80. 35 Blake, Anthony Van Dyck, p. 246. 36 Jonathan Richardson, Two Discourses (London, 1719), p. 75. 37 Richardson, Two Discourses, p. 72. 38 Carol Gibson-Wood, Jonathan Richardson: Art Theorist of the English Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 191. In his following work, Richardson explicitly expands his descriptive technique to works of art viewed in person only by his son, arguing in the preface that ‘such a Description Well Made, and Carefully Attended to, may put a Reader Almost upon a Level with him that sees the thing; and in a much Better Situation than thousands who see without Judgment of their Own, or the Assistance of Others to show them what is before their Eyes’: Jonathan Richardson, An Account of Some of the Statues, Bas-reliefs, Drawings and Pictures in Italy, &c (London, 1722), Preface. 39 Richardson, Two Discourses, p. 27. 40 See Roger de Piles, Cours de peinture par principes, avec un balance de peintres (Paris, 1708). 41 Richardson, Two Discourses, pp. 76–7. 42 Krieger suggests that the rhetorical trope ekphrasis is defined primarily by its enargeia, ‘the capacity of words to describe with a vividness that, in effect, reproduces an object before our very eyes (i.e., before the eyes of the mind)’: Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: the Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 68.

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43 Richardson, Two Discourses, pp. 77–8. 44 The earlier depiction, generally referred to today as the St Petersburg picture, probably dates from around 1630, and the later version, purchased by Thornhill and now known as the Birmingham or Barber Institute picture, dates from around 1633–34. 45 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, pp. 603–4; translation in Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, ed. and trans. Esolen, p. 378. 46 Richardson, Two Discourses, p. 78. 47 Richardson, Two Discourses, p. 79. 48 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 604; Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, ed. and trans. Esolen, p. 378. 49 Richardson, Two Discourses, p. 81; Richard Verdi, Nicolas Poussin: Tancred and Erminia (Birmingham: Barber Institute of Fine Arts, 1992), p. 17. 50 ‘It is exactly this paucity of concrete imagery in the Gerusalemme that grants the painter license to select material, to appropriate it through further elaboration, to truly become an imitator in Tasso’s fullest sense’: Unglaub, Poetics of Painting, p. 109. 51 Richardson, Two Discourses, p. 82. 52 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 606; translation in Wickert, Liberation of Jerusalem, p. 366. 53 Unglaub, Poetics of Painting, p. 129. 54 Unglaub, Poetics of Painting, p. 223. 55 Anthony Blunt, Nicolas Poussin: the A. W. Mellon Lectures in Fine Arts, 1958 (London: Phaidon Press, 1967), p. 150. 56 Richardson, Two Discourses, pp. 83–5. 57 ‘Mi sono fermato sopra di alcune con più particolare osservatione; poiche havendo già descritto l’immagini di Rafaelle nelle camera Vaticane, ... fu consiglio di Nicolò Pussino che io proseguissi nel modo istesso, e che oltre l’inventione universale, io sodisfacessi al concetto, e moto di ciascheduna particolar figura, & all’attioni che accompagnano gli affetti. Nel che fare hò sempre dubitato di riuscir minuto nella moltiplicità de’ particolari, con pericolo di oscurità, e di fastidio, havendo la pittura suo diletto nella vista, che non partecipa se non poco all’udito. Et è pessima cosa il ricorrere all’aiuto del proprio ingegno, l’aggiungere alle figure quei sensi, e quelle passioni, che in esse non sono, con divertirle, e disturbarle da gli originali. Mi sono però contenuto nelle parti di semplice traduttore.’ (‘I have dwelt on some with more detailed observation, because, having at an earlier time described the images by Raphael in the Stanze of the Vatican, ... I was advised by Nicolas Poussin that I should proceed in the same manner, and that in addition to the overall intention I should deal with the conceit and movement of each particular figure and with the actions that accompany the affetti. In so doing, I have always been doubtful about going too minutely into the multiplicity of particulars at the risk of being obscure and tedious, for the

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delight of painting resides in sight, which has little to do with hearing. And it is a very bad thing to resort to one’s own imagination, imputing to figures meanings and passions that are not present in them, making them different and distorting them from the originals. I have therefore confined myself to the role of mere translator.’). Giovan Pietro Bellori, Le Vite de’ pittori, scultori, et architetti moderni (Rome, 1672), ‘Lettore’; translation in Giovan Pietro Bellori, The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects, ed. and trans. Alice Sedgewick Wohl, Hellmut Wohl, and Tomaso Montanari (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 50. 58 Richardson, Two Discourses, pp. 85–6. 59 John Dryden, De Arte Graphica. The Art of Painting (1695) in The Works of John Dryden, 20, ed. George R. Guffey and A. E. Wallace Maurer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 69. 60 The Italian term ‘affetti’ is glossed by Bellori’s recent English translator as ‘the outward display of emotions as depicted in art’: Bellori, Lives, ed. Wohl, Wohl, and Montanari, p. 441. 61 Richardson, Two Discourses, pp. 87–8. 62 Verdi, Nicolas Poussin, p. 11. 63 See the associated endnote 58 in Unglaub, Poetics of Painting, p. 256: ‘Solo l’amor d’Erminia par che, in un certo modo, abbia felice fine. Io vorrei anco a questo dar un fine buono, e farla, non sol far Cristiana, ma religiosa monaca’, ‘Only the love of Erminia appears, in a certain way, to have a happy ending. I wanted also to give her a good ending, and make her not only a Christian, but a nun’: Torquato Tasso, Lettere poetiche (1587), ed. Carla Molinari (Parma: Fondazione Pietro Bembo, 1995), no. 44 (to Scipio Gonzaga, Modena, 24th April 1576), pp. 424–5. 64 Unglaub, Poetics of Painting, p. 222. 65 Richardson, Two Discourses, pp. 91–2. 66 Richardson, Two Discourses, p. 91. 67 Richardson, Two Discourses, pp. 92–3. 68 Richardson, An Account, p. 91. 69 Gibson-Wood, Richardson, p. 213. 70 Richardson, An Account, p. 91.

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4 ‘What enchanting Sound salutes my Ear?’: Gerusalemme liberata and the early development of opera in  England In the preface to the printed bilingual libretto of Handel’s Rinaldo, Aaron Hill, the manager of the Queen’s Theatre in Haymarket, explained his choice of an episode from Gerusalemme liberata as the foundation for the first opera in Italian to be written specifically for ‘Theatrical Representation’ on the London stage in February 1711: I could not chuse a finer subject than the celebrated story of Rinaldo and Armida, which has furnish’d OPERA’S for every Stage and Tongue in Europe.1

By the beginning of the eighteenth century Tasso’s epic was already firmly established as a source for operatic libretti. Indeed the poem had proved highly conducive to musical adaptation in Italy from the moment it was printed: the Mantuan court composer Giaches de Wert’s setting of ‘Giunto alla tomba’ (XII, 96–7), in which Tancredi laments over the tomb of his beloved Clorinda, appeared in the same year as the first complete edition of the poem itself in Il settimo libro de madrigali a cinque voci (1581),2 and the same passage (with two additional stanzas) was set by Luca Marenzio, composer at the court of Cardinal Luigi d’Este in Rome, only three years later (XII, 96–9). The attention of the madrigal composers, much like that of the painters discussed in the preceding chapter, focused almost exclusively on the romantic episodes in the poem, including inevitably Rinaldo and Armida’s amorous interlude, but it was also drawn particularly to those passages in which Tasso developed a specifically musical imagery in his verse. For example, both Wert and Marenzio set Tasso’s sensuous description of the ‘melodia sí tenera’ (XVI, 17, 1) between bird song, breeze, and water, which immediately precedes the canto della rosa in Armida’s garden, for five and four voices in 1586 and 1585 respectively:

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Vezzosi augelli infra le verde fronde temprano a prova lascivette note; mormora l’aura, e fa le foglie e l’onde garrir che variamente ella percote. Quando taccion gli augelli alto risponde, quando cantan gli augei piú lieve scote; sia caso od arte, or accompagna, ed ora alterna i versi lor la musica òra.

(XVI, 12, 1–8)

(Charming birds in the green foliage sing, vying with each other, l­ ascivious songs; the wind murmurs, and causes the leaves and waves to pipe up, as it strikes them differently. When the birds are silent, it answers loudly; when the birds sing, it blows more softly; whether by chance or by art, now it accompanies them, and now it alternates the musical breeze with their verses.)3

Marenzio’s setting of this stanza reached England soon after in Thomas Watson’s The first sett, of Italian Madrigalls Englished (1590); his rustic rendering of Marenzio’s madrigal (‘Every singing bird, that in the wood rejoices, / come & assist me, with your charming voices’) constitutes, possi­­ ­bly unwittingly, one of the earliest English translations from Tasso’s epic.4 In the same book, L’ottavo libro de madrigali a cinque voci (1586), dedicated to Tasso’s patron Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara, and largely composed during a sojourn there, Wert also set a longer passage from later in the same canto of Tasso’s poem. His setting of stanzas 43 to 47 constitutes the first rendering of what was to become the most widely used and familiar moment for musical adaptation in all of the poem: Armida’s impassioned lament for the departing Rinaldo, after he has been brought to his senses at the sight of his effeminised self in the magic shield carried by Carlo and Ubaldo.5 It is not only the elevated passions and Dido-like grandeur of the lament itself which suggest the passage’s aptness for such adaptations, but in particular the extended simile with which Tasso introduces it, figuring Armida’s address to her perfidious lover as a self-consciously musical performance, intended specifically to move the emotions of its audience: Qual musico gentil, prima che chiara altamente la voce al canto snodi, a l’armonia gli animi altrui prepara con dolci ricercate in bassi modi, cosí costei, che ne la doglia amara

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già tutte non oblia l’arti e le frodi, fa di sospir breve concento in prima per dispor l’alma in cui le voci imprima.

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(XVI, 43, 1–8)

(As cunning singers, just before they free their voices into high and brilliant song, prepare the listeners’ [minds] for harmony with sweet notes sotto voce, low and long, so in the bitterness of sorrow she did not forget the tricks and art of wrong, but gave a little prelude of a sigh that his soul might be more deeply graven by her voice.)6

Later sections of the lament also proved popular soon after the poem’s publication, with Claudio Monteverdi setting stanzas 59 to 60 and 63, during which Armida faints at the conclusion of her vain appeal to Rinaldo, as ‘Vattene pur, crudel’ in Il terzo libro de madrigali a cinque voci (1592). Tasso’s emotionally affective lament maintained its appeal to composers for vocal settings for well over a century: in 1707, in Rome, Handel used a paraphrase of the episode as the basis for one of his Italian cantatas, Armida abbandonata. The early attention of the madrigalists to Tasso’s poem in Italy prepared the ground for more fully realised musical adaptations of the romantic episodes on stage throughout the seventeenth century, and these soon spread beyond Italy itself, as suggested in Hill’s preface to Rinaldo. Owens has commented, in relation to these early settings from Tasso’s epic, on a familiar characteristic in twentieth-century madrigal criticism for ‘praising Wert’s [way of illustrating the text] for its sense of drama, perhaps because it seems to lead, teleologically speaking, to the new developments of Baroque opera’.7 This type of connection is perhaps most readily apparent in Monteverdi’s Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, performed at the palace of Girolamo Mocenigo in Venice in 1624, as detailed by the composer when the piece was printed some years later in his eighth book of Madrigali guerrieri, et amorosi (1638). The setting of sixteen stanzas from canto XII of Tasso’s poem (stanzas 52 to 62 and 64 to 68) for solo song, performed by a narrator and two armoured knights as they enact the accidental slaying of his pagan beloved Clorinda by the Christian knight, represents a development from the familiar multipart madrigal towards a level of ‘Theatrical Representation’ inherent in the performance of the many opere serie derived from Tasso’s poem. In a

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departure from the madrigal tradition of setting Tasso’s verse directly, however, the libretti for these operas were generally original treatments based on the most popular episodes in the epic. The earliest operatic rendering of the Rinaldo and Armida episode, Francesca Caccini’s Rinaldo innamorato, was performed contemporaneously with Monteverdi’s piece, at the Medici court in Florence in the mid-1620s.8 Other Italian adaptations, Marco Scacchi’s Armida abbandonata and Benedetto Ferrari’s Armida, were performed in Warsaw and Venice respectively at the end of the 1630s, while an anonymous Armida e Rinaldo was performed in Vienna in 1641.9 Some forty years later, from the mid-1680s, the story was revived as an operatic source internationally, with performances of Carlo Pallavicino’s La Gerusalemme liberata, focusing on the Rinaldo and Armida episode, in Venice and Hamburg, and the celebrated premiere of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Armide, with a libretto by the dramatist Philippe Quinault, in Paris on 15 February 1686, exactly a quarter of a century before the debut of Handel’s Rinaldo in London. tasso and english dramatic opera: john dennis’s r i na l d o   a n d a r m i da It was Lully’s final ‘tragédie en musique’ that had the most direct impact on the earliest appearance of a musical setting of the story on the London stage in the final years of the seventeenth century. John Dennis’s Rinaldo and Armida: a Tragedy, a dramatic opera with music by John Eccles,10 was performed with some success by Thomas Betterton’s company at the Lincoln’s Inn Field Theatre in late 1698, starring Betterton himself and Elizabeth Barry in the title roles.11 Its verse prologue is addressed to a theatrical audience who the author anticipated might already be familiar not only with Tasso’s original poem but also with Lully’s French opera: Then all you Sparks who have to Paris Rid, And there heard Lullys Musical Armide; And Ye too, who at home have Tasso read, This in precaution to you must be said;

(5–8)12

The apparent presence of English visitors at some of the many performances of the opera in Paris in the dozen years since its first appearance attests to its international impact and continuing popularity on stage.13 Dennis himself was certainly influenced directly by Lully’s work,14 or

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at the least by Quinault’s printed libretto, in his adaptation of the same episode. The warning to his audience in the verse prologue focuses specifically on the alterations to the eponymous characters in his dramatisation in relation to Tasso’s originals, but one of the most significant additions to the plot, the character of Armida’s confidante Phenissa, is modelled on Quinault’s Phénice, one of two invented female companions in Armide. Phenissa in Dennis’s rendering, however, is much more sinister than her French counterpart, precipitating the tragedy of the final act, where it is revealed by Urania, the guiding spirit of the Christian knights Carlo and Ubaldo, that the apparent companion is in fact ‘Armida’s evil Genius’ and ‘The Sourse of all her woes’.15 Dennis was forced to defend both his drastically altered ending and his characterisation in a prose preface to the printed edition in order to reinforce further the explanations already offered in the stage prologue: Armida’s Picture we from Tasso Drew, And yet it may Resembling seem to few; For here you see no soft bewitching Dame, Using Incentives to the Amorous Game, And with affected, Meretricious Arts, Secretly Sliding into Hero’s Hearts. That was an Errour in the Italian Muse, If the great Tasso were allow’d t’accuse; And to Descend to such enervate Strains, The Tragick Muse with Majesty disdains. The great Torquato’s Heroine shall appear, But Proud, Fierce, Stormy, terribly severe, Such as the Italian has Armida shown, When by the Worlds disorder, she’d revenge her own. (9–22)16

The strong implication is that Dennis felt that, in places, Tasso’s portrayal of Armida was inappropriate for an epic, where the poetic register, like that of the tragic muse, should never ‘Descend to such enervate Strains’ (17). He manages to bypass having to represent directly the most alluring aspects of Armida from the Italian poem by dramatising only the final few hours of her life before her (invented) suicide, focusing on her anger and desire for revenge at Rinaldo’s apparent betrayal, and explaining ‘that before that, the Lovers had been three Months together in the Enchanted Island, where she had entertain’d him with all that is Soft and Engaging in Art and Nature’.17 Indeed, Dennis argues that it is pride and disdain that

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are the essential characteristics of Tasso’s Armida, rather than her feigned physical and rhetorical charms: For Armida, some Gentlemen who have read Tasso, may expect to see that wanton alluring delicious Creature who appears in the fourth Canto of the Gierusalemme, with all that’s tempting in Art; but I desire those Gentlemen to consider that in that Canto she only appears in Masquerade, and Acts a part at the Request of her Unckle.   Fa manto del vero ala Menzogna (She makes a mantle of truth for a lie), making use of Artifices that were contrary to her Nature, in order to the Seducing the Heroes of Godfrey’s Army. The poet gives her true Character in the 38th Stanza of the 16th Canto of that Poem. E cosi pari al fasto hebbe lo sdegno Ch’amo d’esser Amata, odio gli amanti. [She had scorn that was equal to her pride that she loved to be loved, but hated the lovers.] She is by Nature a Proud and a disdainful Beauty, Proud of her Triumphs, yet disdaining the Slaves which adorn’d them, and so much more violent in the Love she bore to Rinaldo, because he was the only Person who had touch’d her Soul with tenderness. And therefore I was oblig’d to show her, as the Nature of her Character and my Subject requir’d. I say not this to Arraign Tasso, who is certainly one of the greatest of Modern Poets; but to defend my self: for I leave it to any Man of Sense to Judge, whether affectation be becoming of a Poem which ought only to express Nature.18

The decision to end his dramatisation of the story with Armida’s suicide obliges Dennis to portray his heroine in a manner and linguistic register that he deems appropriate to ‘the Gravity, and Severity, and Majesty of the Tragick Muse’. Dennis is equally strident in both the stage prologue and the prose preface in his justification of the characterisation of his hero in relation to Tasso’s original: To change Rinaldo’s manners, we had ground, Who in the Italian is unequal found. At first he Burns with fierce ambition’s fire, Anon he Dotes like any feeble Squire, The meer Reverse of all that’s noble in Desire. Then in a Moment leaves the Lovesick Dame, And only Burns, and only Bleeds for everlasting Fame. In a Just Play such Heroes nere have part, For all that offends Nature, offends Art.

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What we have Chang’d, we leave to you to Scan, Yet Judge with all the Candor that you can.

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(23–33)19

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It is the apparent inconsistencies in Tasso’s portrayal of Rinaldo that prompt Dennis’s creation of what he regards as a more dramatically plausible character: I was therefore at Liberty to form a Character from Tasso’s Hint the most agreeable to my Subject that I could.   I design’d Rinaldo then neither a Languishing nor a Brutal Heroe; He is Fond of Armida to the last degree, and yet resolves to leave her; but ow’s that Resolution to the Strength of his Reason, and not the Weakness of his Passion. And as he resolves to leave her out of a sense of his Duty and Honour, and not any Levity or Barbarity of Nature; so upon their meeting in the fourth Act, he demurrs upon executing that Resolution, neither thro’ Fear, nor any tender Infirmity, but something that happen’d which seem’d to Require it from his Goodness, and his Humanity.20

Dennis’s alterations to the principal characters are part of a concerted attempt in his dramatisation to recast Tasso’s episode according to the principles of Greek tragedy, particularly ‘to treat this Subject with something at least of that Sublime at once and Pathetick Air, which reigns in the renown’d Sophocles’. Thus the action of the dramatic opera focuses only on the rescue of Rinaldo from the ‘Enchanted Grove’ and Armida’s passionate response to it, concluding, when she mistakenly thinks that her lover has deserted her for a second time, with the murder of the treacherous Phenissa and tragic action of her suicide, in an attempt ‘to make Terror the prevailing Passion, which is likewise the predominant Passion in that admirable Grecian’.21 In both the theatrical prologue and the prose preface Dennis encourages his audience to judge the work in terms of this avowed Sophoclean tragic model, although it becomes clear at the end of the latter that the imposing of a tragic conclusion in place of Tasso’s original, where Armida, having invoked demons to destroy the enchanted palace, flies off from the Fortunate Isles vowing revenge on Rinaldo, proved deeply unpopular in performance: It may now perhaps be expected that I should say something in defence of the Catastrophe. But the Objection against that being almost Universal, I should be unpardonably Presumptuous, if I should Imagine that I could be in the Right, against the Consent of so many Illustrious Assemblies as Composed the Audiences of this Tragedy. All I shall say in my Defence is this, that perhaps I may one Day Retrench that which displeas’d them.22

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The elaborate defence of the work as a stage tragedy might initially obscure the fact that Dennis has given no indication in the prefatory material to the printed edition that his adaptation of Tasso’s episode is a musical drama. However, in the preface to The Musical Entertainments in Rinaldo and Armida, printed, as was customary with operatic libretti in London, for the benefit of audience members at the initial performances in December 1698 (even though it is dated 1699), the author does describe it as an opera, acknowledging the prominent role of Eccles in composing the music in perfect accordance with his dramatic vision while also trying to emphasise its singularity in relation to contemporary English musical works: Though the Tragedy of Rinaldo and Armida, of which the following Lines are a Part, has gone in the World under the Name of an Opera; yet is neither the Dramatical Part of it, like the Drama of our usual Opera’s, nor the Musical part of it like that which is Sung and Play’d in those Entertainments: For all the Musick in this Play, even the Musick between the Acts, is part of the Tragedy, and for that Reason the Musick is always Pathetick. Now nothing can entertain the Imagination very agreeably but that which moves some Passion, and moves it very much too: For nothing can very much please the Fancy, but that which puts the Spirits into an Extraordinary Motion; which extraordinary Motion is Passion. ... The Design therefore of Musick, as well as Painting and Poetry, being to entertain the Imagination agreeably, nothing in Musick can be extreamly Fine but that which is extreamly Moving: And Experience has confirm’d me in this Opinion, by so much fine Musick as I heard in Italy, both in their Churches and Theatres. Now as nothing can be very Pleasing but what is very Moving, so nothing that is very Moving can be Moving long. For whether it proceeds from a Defect of Mind or Body, the Passions if they are Languid are not Delightful, and if they are Violent are not Lasting. I found therefore, that in a Musical Entertainment of length, Variety of Passion, as well as Passion would be absolutely necessary.   In the following Lines therefore, I design’d not only to move Passion, but as many Passions as I could successively without doing violence to my subject, as Admiration, Love and Joy, Anger, Compassion, Terror, Grief, Horror, Astonishment and Despair. How clearly, how fully, and how admirably Mr. Eccles has expressed those Passions I leave to the World to Judge, which has loudly on this Occasion, done justice to his Merit, even before the Play has been Acted.23

Dennis distinguishes the musical elements in Rinaldo and Armida from contemporary English dramatic opera by incorporating them fully into

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the dramatic illusion of his plot: the music and songs therefore are not simply interludes performed by the company’s musicians and singers, but are rather the creations of (primarily) diabolical spirits, controlled by the enchantress Armida and her ‘evil Genius’ Phenissa, as Kathryn Lowerre has outlined: In the case of Armida, the musicians and singers onstage are spirits she has conjured up, and they function as extensions of her will. Even when she is absent, they obey her wishes (as they understand them) and reflect her moods. Thus nearly all the music in the first four acts of Rinaldo and Armida is overtly part of Armida’s magic.24

The music thus becomes, for Dennis, an essential element in the attempt to create pathos in his theatrical work. The variety of passions conveyed in the musical interludes works on two related levels: Dennis concentrates on the impact that the representation of these ‘Passions’ has on the audience in his preface to the Musical Entertainments, but, within the dramatic illusion, the musical passages are frequently associated with a direct attempt to influence or control the emotions of the characters themselves, particularly the Christian knights, through the power of their enchantment. In this way the music in Dennis and Eccles’s Rinaldo and Armida has an equivalent effect to the synaesthetic appeal to the senses in the description of Armida’s palace and garden in cantos XV and XVI of Tasso’s poem, where the rich evocation of visual and aural detail captivates simultaneously both reader and the observing Christian knights alike. Despite a fundamental difference in the form of English dramatic opera, which favoured the use of the spoken word to advance the plot,25 with passages of instrumental music and song interspersed throughout and between the acts, the musical interludes in Rinaldo and Armida follow the pattern of the divertissements of song and dance in Lully and Quinault’s Armide, which also appear in each of the five acts. Thus the attempt to distract the rescuers Carlo and Ubaldo from their mission in the opening act of Dennis’s work owes as much to Lully as it does to Tasso directly. Urania warns that the ‘Spirits in the Shapes of Shepherds and Nymphs’ who appear to the Christian knights ‘come to try [them], / And with soft Sounds seduce [their] Souls to Pleasure’,26 emphasising the element of aural over visual temptation in ‘this Enchanting Symphony’ during the pastoral entertainment. In Tasso the knights are most moved by the appearance and song of the ‘due donzellette garrule e lascive’, ‘two talk-

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ative and lascivious young girls’ (XV, 58, 4), who are observed playing naked in the water, an incident famously imitated at length by Spenser in the late sixteenth century in the temptation of Guyon as he approaches Acrasia at the heart of her Bowre of Blisse.27 Lowerre has suggested that Dennis chose not to re-create this scene directly in his dramatisation of the rescue of Rinaldo because it had been recently revived, almost exactly a century after Spenser’s imitation, in another English dramatic opera:28 in the fourth act of Purcell and Dryden’s King Arthur, or the British Worthy (1691), the eponymous king wanders in an enchanted wood, hearing ‘Soft Musick’ and ‘the warbling Notes of Birds’, before he is confronted by ‘two syrens [who] arise from the Water; they shew themselves to the Waste, and sing’: Two Daughters of this Aged Stream are we; And both our Sea-green Locks have comb’d for thee, Come Bathe with us an Hour or two, Come Naked in, for we are so; What Danger from a Naked Foe? Come Bathe with us, come Bathe, and share, What Pleasures in the Floods appear;29

The precedent in Tasso’s poem for various episodes in Dryden’s libretto had already been detected by the end of the century,30 and it is clear that both the author and the composer of Rinaldo and Armida were familiar with King Arthur, as in the preface to The Musical Entertainments Dennis was moved to defend Eccles against the malicious accusation that he had plagiarised part of a chorus in the fourth act from ‘the Frost Scene’ in Purcell and Dryden’s opera, adding that Purcell himself had already been accused of borrowing the same music from an earlier Lully opera. While Dryden’s recent use of the naked sirens may have influenced Dennis in his decision not to dramatise such a recognisable moment from Tasso’s poem, propriety and Lully’s more direct example seem to have led him elsewhere in Armida’s garden for his scene of pastoral temptation. In the second act of Armide the enchantress’s demons also appear in pastoral guise ‘sous la figure des nymphes, des bergers et des bergères’, in this instance to chain the sleeping Renaud so that Armide can carry out her intended revenge on the knight, who is the only one impervious to her physical charms,31 for the release of the other Christian prisoners. Quinault’s libretto alludes directly to Tasso’s celebrated false siren’s song (XIV, 62–4) in the naiad’s air in scene iv (‘Pourquoi dans les périls avec empressement / Chercher d’un vain honneur l’éclat imaginaire’, ‘Why

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rush into perils only to seek the imagined glitter of vain honour’: II, iv, 3–4); strikingly, however, it is not, as in Tasso, the song itself which lulls Renaud’s senses, but rather the preceding sounds of natural harmony, conveyed evocatively by Lully on woodwind instruments, that entice the hero to sleep prior to his imprisonment: Les plus aimables fleurs et le plus doux Zephire Parfument l’air qu’on y respire. Non, je ne puis quitter des rivages si beaux, Un son harmonieux se mêle au bruit des eaux Les oiseaux enchantez se taisent pour l’entendre Des charmes du sommeil j’ai peine à me deffendre Ce gazon, cet ombrage frais, Tout m’invite au repos sous ce feuillage épais. (II, iii, 5–12) (The most pleasant flowers and the softest breezes Perfume the air we breathe. No, I can no longer leave such beautiful shores, A harmonious sound mixes with the water’s ripple, Enchanted birds listen to it in silence. The attraction of sleep overcomes me; This grass, this fresh shade, Everything invites me to rest under these thick bushes.)32

Dennis’s setting for the scene of pastoral temptation echoes Lully in emphasising the incantatory effect of the natural sounds of wind, water, and bird song. In doing so, Dennis also returns directly to Tasso’s evocation of the sounds emanating from Armida’s garden on Carlo and Ubaldo’s arrival there: the final songs sung by the shepherd and nymph spirits in the opening act of Rinaldo and Armida also vividly recall Tasso’s stanza describing the ‘Vezzosi augelli’ (XVI, 12), which had proved so popular with Italian madrigal composers at the end of the sixteenth century: Shep. The Jolly Breeze, That comes whistling through the Trees, From all the blissful Region brings Perfumes upon its spicy Wings, With its wanton motion curling. The Crystal Rills, Which down the Hills Run o’er golden Gravel purling.

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Nym. All around Venereal Turtles Cooing, Billing, on the Myrtles; The more they shew their Amorous trouble, More fiercely dart their piercing Kisses, And more eagerly redouble The Raptures of their murmuring Blisses.33

Lowerre has emphasised the synaesthetic appeal of sound and ‘seductive scents’ in the shepherd’s song, which she describes, given its frequent presence in later anthologies, as ‘the single hit song of the entire production’, where the music itself also seems to gesture towards the origins of its lyric in Italian poetry: Eccles sets this as an Italianate air constructed of short sequences and ornamented with satisfyingly active text depiction for all ‘motion’ words in both voice and continuo.34

The nymph’s song which follows it is quoted in full by Brand in his brief consideration of the ‘very free treatment of Tasso’s story’ in Rinaldo and Armida to argue that ‘in spite of this profession of gravity and moral superiority [in the prose preface] Dennis is clearly charmed, like so many others, by Tasso’s sensual paradise’, although the critic gives no indication of the song’s context or indeed the musical elements of the work.35 However popular these songs proved to be in moving the emotions of the theatre audience, the evocation of the sounds of Armida’s garden in the songs of pastoral temptation in the opening act is ultimately unsuccessful on stage: the disguised spirits conspicuously fail to distract Carlo and Ubaldo from their task, as Urania acknowledges when she disperses the ‘Ministers of Hell’ with her wand: Now, Heroes, I observ’d you well, and find That you unmov’d have past a dangerous tryal, And gain’d a glorious Conquest o’re your selves.36

Despite his objections to the apparent inconsistencies in Tasso’s depiction of Rinaldo expressed in both the prologue and the prose preface, Dennis’s own hero undergoes a profound struggle between the conflicting demands of love and military glory in the central acts of his dramatisation of the episode. Dennis attributes Rinaldo’s ability ultimately to abandon Armida and return to the Christian cause to ‘the Strength of his Reason’, but this element of rational control is constantly under threat on stage: even after the call to arms delivered by ‘Fame’s Trumpet and Voices’ at

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the end of act II (‘Straight to the Bow’r of Bliss repair, / Fortune and Fame attend thee there’), Rinaldo’s resolve is challenged when he is alone in ‘The Enchanted Wilderness’ in the following act. Fame’s song, which is the only one not created by Armida or her demons, momentarily revives Rinaldo’s desire for honour, but this is almost immediately suppressed by the demonic ‘Soft Musick’ which emanates from Armida’s bower: Were then those glorious Voices but Delusions, That call’d me with that Pomp of noble Harmony? Fortune they cried, and Fame attended here, But all things here as soft as Lovers Wishes, This Magic Symphony with sweetness sooths me, And ev’ry thing around me Breaths Desire, Which passes thro my Senses to my Soul, And to Armida’s Beauteous Image there Imparts fresh force and new Divinity.37

It is specifically this gentle music, penetrating to the soul through the senses rather than through reason, which weakens Rinaldo’s resolution and makes him vulnerable to Armida’s physical and rhetorical charms when she next addresses him. Their encounter in act III is one of the few moments in Rinaldo and Armida which alludes directly to its Italian source: Rinaldo’s desperate appeal to Armida to look at her beauty reflected in his eyes rather than in her mirror in Tasso is recalled closely by Dennis as his hero speaks ‘To her looking in the Glass’: Why dost thou vainly seek thy likeness there? Can the frail Crystal represent Divinity? Would’st thou behold these Eyes in all their Glories? To see the force of their Celestiall Fire, Turn them on mine all flaming with desire;38 – Volgi, – dicea – deh volgi – il cavaliero – a me quegli occhi onde beata bèi, ché son, se tu no ’l sai, ritratto vero de le bellezze tue gli incendi miei; la forma lor, la meraviglia a pieno piú che il cristallo tuo mostra il mio seno.

(XVI, 21, 3–8)

(The knight said, ‘Turn, you must turn to me these eyes which have the power to bless, that receive, even if you do not realise it, a true reflection of your beauties in my ardour; my heart shows their form and wonder to the full, far more than your mirror does.)39

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Dennis’s Armida interprets Rinaldo’s words as an indication that her power over her lover has been restored, and she thus conjures up another pageant of ‘Musick that may lull Despair’, featuring her spirits as ‘Venus, Cupid, and a Chorus of Loves and Graces’, ‘To drive away all Sorrow from [his] Soul’, but also to re-assert her control by subduing his latent desire for glory. In the preface to The Musical Entertainments Dennis equates music with poetry and painting as sister arts that are designed ‘to entertain the Imagination agreeably’, but the use of music in the dramatic opera itself seems to suggest a more ambivalent attitude to its power, one that perhaps anticipates Dennis’s position in his polemical Essay on the Opera’s after the Italian Manner, printed in 1706, the very year in which the Lord Chamberlain temporarily banned the performance in London of theatrical entertainments that mixed speech and song, where lyrical music, specifically in ‘those Operas which are entirely musical’, is instead regarded as a dangerous rival to poetry. Dennis stresses that the musical passages in his opera are intended to move a variety of passions in the theatre audience, but the effect on stage of this music, created by the enchantress and her spirits, is more questionable, as it encourages the Christian knights to indulge their desire for ‘the bewitching Pleasure of Sense’, at the expense of their rational pursuit of military glory. Although Dennis has deliberately chosen not to stage Armida’s ‘Incentives to the Amorous Game’ (12) in his dramatic representation of Tasso’s enchantress and her captured lover, Eccles’s music is required to perform an equivalent role to that of these ‘affected, Meretricious Arts’ (13) in the Italian poem, working on the emotions of both character and audience simultaneously. In his later essay Dennis maintains that in dramatic opera, where music and poetry are combined, ‘musick may be made profitable as well as delightful, if it is subordinate to some nobler Art, and subservient to Reason’; his own experiment in the genre, however, clearly demonstrates the potential dangers of music when ‘it becomes a mere sensual Delight, utterly incapable of informing the Understanding’, as he maintains it does in through-sung opera, where ‘that Pleasure of Sense being too much indulged, makes Reason cease to be a Pleasure’.40 Dennis expresses most concern about the potentially dangerous impact on English men of ‘that soft and effeminate Musick which abounds in the Italian Opera’, where ‘the whole Man is dissolv’d in the wantonness of effeminate Airs’,41 were it to be performed regularly on to the London stage, but he introduces his argument with a vivid literary illustration of

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the pernicious effect of contemporary French opera on female members of its Parisian audience. The extract and translation from Boileau’s tenth satire, first printed in 1693, which, like Juvenal’s sixth satire, ‘is writ by way of Letter to a Friend, to advise him not to marry’, focuses directly on the dangers of seeing and listening to Lully’s ‘modern Tragedy in musick’, particularly those late operas based on episodes from sixteenthcentury Italian epic poetry: L’épouse que tu prends, sans tâche en sa conduite, Aux vertus, m’a-t-on dit, dans Port-Royal instruite, Aux lois de son devoir règle tous ses désirs. Mais, qui peut t’assurer qu’invincible aux plaisirs, Chez toi, dans une vie ouverte à la licence, Elle conservera sa première innocence? Par toi-même bientôt conduite à l’Opera, De quel air penses-tu que ta sainte verra D’un spectacle enchanteur la pompe harmonieuse, Ces danses, ces héros à voix luxurieuse; Entendra ces discours sur l’amour seul roulants, Ces doucereux Renauds, ces insensés Rolands; Saura d’eux qu’à l’amour, comme au seul Dieu suprême, On doit immoler tout, jusqu’à la vertu même; Qu’on ne saurait trop tôt se laisser enflammer; Qu’on n’a reçu du ciel un coeur que pour aimer; Et tous ces lieux communs de morale lubrique Que Lulli réchauffa des sons de sa musique? Mais, de quel mouvements, dans son coeur excités, Sentira-t-elle alors tous ses sens agités! Je ne te réponds pas qu’au retour, moins timide, Digne écolière enfin d’Angélique et d’Armide, Elle n’aille à l’instant, pleine de ces doux sons, Avec quelque Médor pratiquer ces leçons. (125–48) (The Wife of whom thou art to make choice, having been hitherto unblemish’d in her Conduct, and brought up, as they tell us, within Port Royal, in the Practice of every Virtue, regulates her Passions by Reason’s severe Rule; but who can assure thee that she will still remain victorious over Pleasure, and still preserve her original Innocence, when thou hast once made her Mistress of her own Conduct? As soon as she is usher’d by her Uxorious Husband to the Opera, with what Air dost thou think the young Saint will behold the Harmonious Pomp of an enchanting Spectacle, those wanton Dances, those Heroes with luxurious Voices? With

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what Air does thou think she will listen to a Discourse that rolls upon Love alone, to those mad Orlando’s, and those melting Rinaldo’s; hearing from them that we ought to sacrifice all, nay, even Virtue it self, to Love, as the only supreme Divinity; that we can never suffer our selves to take fire too soon, that bounteous Heaven has bestow’d a Heart upon us only that we might love; and all those common places of slippery Morals, to which Lully has given fresh Fire by the Charms of his Musick? Then how will she be melted, how transported, how will every Sense be shaken in her? I dare not assure thee, that as she comes back, throwing off that Awe which has hitherto been a Restraint upon her, and having all her Soul possess’d with those melting Sounds, she does not instantly withdraw to some convenient Retirement, and with some young Medora bring these fine Speculations to practice.)42

Boileau’s criticism suggests that the effect of Lully’s music, rendered by Dennis specifically in terms of enchantment, is merely to intensify the dangerous ‘common places of slippery Morals’ (141) already to be found in the amorous episodes of both Ariosto and Tasso refracted through the words of Quinault’s libretti, but this association is not really reflected in Dennis’s essay, where poetry and music are viewed rather in an oppositional relationship. It is striking, given Dennis’s indebtedness to Lully’s Armide in his own operatic adaptation of Tasso’s episode, that he misses out the direct allusion to Armida in his later translation of Boileau, who refers to the prospective opera-going wife as a ‘scholar finally worthy of Angelica and Armida’ (146), implying that the art of seduction has been learnt expressly from Lully and Quinault’s depiction of these notorious female characters in Italian epic poetry.43 As has already been noted, Dennis’s own dramatisation of Tasso’s enchantress deliberately avoided representing any of her ‘Incentives to the Amorous Game’; instead he aimed to create a tragic grandeur for his character, by developing Tasso’s hint of Armida’s religious conversion from the final canto of the poem (XX, 136), and, in spite of her suicide, emphasising her repentance at the end of the play: But yet because her Faith, her Truth, her Constancy; Seem’d to have more then humane Virtue in them, And she Expires repentant, Heav’n, that in all its sacred dispensations, Makes the perfection of its Justice shine; A more then mortal Recompence ordains for them.44

Harry Gilbert Paul has described Dennis’s musical adaptation of Tasso as ‘a curious one for a writer who fulminated against music as effemi-

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nating and against the spectacular as ignoble’,45 but in a way his Rinaldo and Armida anticipates rather than contradicts much of the argument in the later Essay on the Opera’s. Dennis’s principal anxiety, that foreign opera poses a threat to native dramatic poetry, which it might eventually drive out altogether by ‘soothing the senses’ of its English audiences to a disastrous degree, has already been prefigured metaphorically in the choice and treatment of Tasso’s episode of the great Christian hero led astray by the pagan enchantress. His defence of ‘exalted Poetry’ in the essay is centred on its ability ‘to teach publick Virtue and publick Spirit’ to ‘a People habituated to these heroick Notions, [who] must be prepar’d and form’d for the performing heroick Actions’, something that can be successfully achieved only if poets are driven by ‘so enthusiastick a Motive as the Love of Glory’.46 This image of the poet as a public-spirited hero aspiring to glory but imperilled and weakened by the influence of a seductive foreign art mirrors exactly the predicament of Tasso’s Rinaldo. However, in the Italian poem Rinaldo does eventually abandon Armida to return as the key warrior in the Christian quest to liberate Jerusalem, just as, in Dennis’s rendering, Rinaldo finally manages to overcome the enervating effects of Armida’s enchantments, conveyed principally through Eccles’s Italianate music, in order to renew his own quest for fame and glory: And now behold! If that our Eyes can bear Immortal Splendor; Behold where hovering on her Golden Wings: Bright Fame illuminates her Godlike Equipage. Heros, and Heroines in the Air assembled, A Thousand Glorious forms that live in pleasures; To mortals inconceivable; With these you shall for ever live.47

tasso and italianate opera on the english stage: handel’s   r i na l d o and giovanni bononcini’s l ’ e r m i n i a Dennis’s concerns about the growing influence and potentially deleterious effects of operas ‘written after the Italian manner’ in his essay were partly realised some five years later with the highly successful appearance on the London stage of Handel’s Rinaldo.48 Aaron Hill, the manager of the company based at the Queen’s Theatre, seems to have been responsible not only for commissioning Handel’s first work to be premiered in

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England, but also for choosing the subject of the opera and for providing the outline of the plot, as well as the translation, of Giacomo Rossi’s Italian libretto.49 It is doubly ironic that the story chosen to fulfil Hill’s desire, expressed in his dedication of the work to Queen Anne, ‘to see the English OPERA more splendid than her MOTHER, the Italian’, should itself derive from a celebrated episode in Italian epic poetry, particularly one that had already been heard on the London stage in a musical adaptation, in Dennis’s favoured form of English dramatic opera, only a dozen or so years earlier. Where Dennis emphasised the variety of ‘Passions’ conveyed in Eccles’s music in their Rinaldo and Armida, in the preface to Rinaldo Hill instead highlights both the aural and visual impact that the performance of Handel’s opera is intended to have on its expectant English audience: The Deficiencies I found, or thought I found, in such Italian OPERA’S as have hitherto been introduc’d among us, were, First; that they had been compos’d for Tastes and Voices, different from those who were to sing and hear them on the English Stage; and Secondly, That wanting the Machines and Decorations, which bestow so great a Beauty on their Appearance, they have been heard and seen to very considerable Disadvantage.   At once to remedy both these Misfortunes, I resolv’d to frame some Dramma, that, by different Incidents and Passions, might afford the Musick Scope to vary and display its Excellence, and fill the Eye with more delightful Prospects, so at once to give Two Senses equal Pleasure.50

This additional focus on the spectacular in performance provided a further ground for criticism of the emerging form of Italianate opera in England; indeed Joseph Addison begins his notorious essay on Rinaldo in an early edition of The Spectator, written before he had even attended a performance, with the dismissive premise that ‘an Opera may be allowed to be extravagantly lavish in its Decorations, as its only Design is to gratify the Senses, and keep up an indolent Attention in the Audience’.51 Although the tone of much of the essay, based only on a perusal of the printed libretto, is humorous, particularly the anecdote about the unruly live sparrows used in performance, Addison’s quick-fire criticism of the popular new opera and, by association, its Italian source went on to have a significant negative impact on Tasso’s literary standing in England in the first half of the eighteenth century. Addison’s invocation of Boileau’s pointed criticism in his ninth satire of ‘the Poet himself, from whom the Dreams of this Opera are taken’, ‘that one Verse in Virgil, is worth all the Clincant or Tinsel of Tasso’,52 is

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ironic, given the ‘Poet’s Privilege’ that Hill applies in his very free treatment of ‘the celebrated Story of Rinaldo and Armida’, where he readily admits that he has ‘vary’d from the Scheme of Tasso, as was necessary for the better forming a Theatrical Representation’.53 Winton Dean and John Merrill Knapp have argued that Hill’s alterations ‘took him a long way from the narrative and spirit of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, though many of the details of the libretto have their origin in the epic’. Hill significantly ‘multiplied the love interest’ in the opera by providing the enchantress Armida, who is designated as both ‘a Queen of the Amazons’ and ‘Regina di Damasco’, with a lover, based on Tasso’s Argante, prior to her (brief ) infatuation with Rinaldo, and by also inventing a chaste object of mutually faithful love for Rinaldo in Goffredo’s daughter Almirena. Dean and Knapp are particularly critical of the role of the latter, suggesting that ‘the presence of a virtuous heroine saps the vitality of the hero’.54 While it is true that Rinaldo’s love for Almirena renders him immune to Armida’s declarations of love in act II, Hill’s modifications do not in fact depart from the central concerns of Tasso’s episode to the extent that Dean and Knapp suggest: the hero’s principal dilemma in Handel and Rossi’s Rinaldo is, as in the Italian poem, negotiating the conflicting demands of military duty and romantic love, as Goffredo outlines to him in recitativo in the opening scene, apparent particularly in Hill’s facing-page rendering of Rossi’s Italian: Chi non Cura il Nemico, I precipizi affretta, O forte Heroe. Sul Sentier della Gloria Tu non devi arrestar’ il Piè nel Corso; Vinta Sion, prende de me la Fede, Almirena ti sia bella Mercede. Undaunted Hero, tho’ no hostile Force, Can shake thy mighty Mind; Yet in the Road to Glory fall not back, But pass by Love when thy fair Fame invites Thee. When Sion, falling, shall more glorious rise, Be Almirena’s Love Rinaldo’s Prize.

(I, i)55

Almirena echoes her father’s warning about the potential distractions of love, emphasising to Rinaldo that ‘la Face d’Amore / Spesso gela nel Sen marziale Ardore’, ‘The Force of Love has Valour oft suppress’d, / And Glory freezes in an amorous Breast’, but, even so, the Christian warrior

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soon finds himself exposed to sensual temptation in ‘a delightful Grove’,56 similar to that which his Italian counterpart experiences. The natural and artificial delights of Armida’s garden in canto XVI are pre-empted and transposed to the opening act in Rinaldo in the scene where Almirena impatiently awaits the arrival of the eponymous hero: in focusing on the song of the notorious birds, which are ‘seen flying up and down’, and the sweet smells carried on the breeze in the opening aria, Rossi’s libretto and Handel’s music, particularly in its prominent use of recorders, evoke Tasso’s already familiar ‘Vezzosi augelli’ stanza (XVI, 12), but also echo the scenes of pastoral temptation in both Lully and Dennis, to create an atmosphere of amorous languor: Augelletti, che cantate, Zefiretti che spirate Aure dolce intorno a me, Il mio ben dite dov’è? Charming Birds thus sweetly singing, Zephyrs, every Odour bringing, All ye Beauties of the Grove, Teach me how to find my Love.

(I, vi)57

The ensuing scene between the two lovers confirms Eustazio’s earlier warning that ‘Ungovern’d Passions easily Rebel’ (I, i), with Rinaldo, ‘charm’d by the Magick of those pow’rful Lips’, struggling to control his ‘scorch’d Desire’ for Almirena, whose reciprocal feelings are expressed in their duet: A mille, a mille. Nel bel Fuoco di quel Guardo, Amor giunge al forte Dardo Care Faville. Love Enchanting all my Senses, To thy Beauties native Fire, Adds a thousand sweet Offences, Which at once bid Hope retire, And invite us to Desire.

(I, vi)58

The sense of love as a powerful form of enchantment is conveyed more strongly in Hill’s English translation than in Rossi’s Italian, making it unsurprising that this it is the exact moment at which Armida and her

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Furies should interrupt the lovers, in order to kidnap Almirena and so delay Rinaldo and the Christian forces in their quest to liberate Jerusalem. In Hill’s schema for the narrative of the opera, it is the hero’s inability to withstand the enchantments of Almirena’s chaste love that makes him immediately vulnerable to Armida’s magic, which in turn renders him ‘immobile, cogli occhi fissi a Terra, e sommerso in una gran Confusione’, ‘immoveable with his Eyes fix’d on the Ground’,59 after he is unable to prevent the kidnapping. The inertia of Tasso’s Rinaldo in Armida’s garden is replicated in the transposed grove in the opening act of Rinaldo, where the hero’s susceptibility to the charms of romantic love similarly distracts him from his military cause. Armida’s capture of Almirena necessitates a rescue mission, echoing that of Carlo and Ubaldo in Tasso, although in this instance it is Goffredo, Eustazio, and initially Rinaldo himself who undertake it. While seeking by boat a magician capable of helping them overcome Armida’s charms, the equivalent of Tasso’s Mago d’Ascalona, the three Christian knights encounter, at the start of act II, ‘A Prospect of a Calm and Sunshiny Sea, with a Boat at Anchor close upon the Shore; at the Helm of the Boat sits a Spirit, in the Shape of a lovely Woman. Two Mermaids are seen Dancing up and down in the Water.’60 Hill’s synopsis and Rossi’s libretto cleverly combine two of Tasso’s scenes of temptation into one at this point. The spirit disguised as a woman who invites Rinaldo to enter her boat in order to find Almirena is an alternative to the false siren in canto XIV of the Italian poem, who rises from the water to lull the hero to sleep with her celebrated song, once he has readily crossed the river Oronte after reading the cryptic message engraved in gold letters on a marble column.61 The song itself is invoked simultaneously by ‘the Mermaids [who] Sing and Dance in the Water’, in one of the few direct allusions to Tasso’s verse in the Italian libretto, where Rossi reproduces the Italian poet’s image of glory or honour as a false ray, though this is ignored in Hill’s amplified English translation: O giovenetti, mentre aprile e maggio v’ammantan di fiorite e verdi spoglie, di gloria e di virtú fallace raggio la teneralla mente ah non v’invoglie!

(XIV, 62, 1–4)

(O young men, now, while April vies with May to deck you in the spoils of leaf and flower, ah! let not Fame’s or Virtue’s [false ray] betray your tender minds to their delusive power!)62

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tasso’s art and afterlives Il vostro Maggio De bei verdi Anni O cori Amanti Sempre costanti Sfiorate in Amor; Nè un falso Raggio D’Honor v’affanni, Ch’e sol beato Chi Amante amato Possede un bel Cor. Your Lovely May Of Life when Gay Youth unheeding Counsel needing Pass away in Love delighting, Fame will leave you, Wealth deceive you, He alone that true Bliss possesses Whom return’d Affection blesses, And the Fair are still inviting.

(II, iii)63

These frolicking mermaids also recall Tasso’s equally memorable ‘due donzellette garrule e lascive’ (XV, 58, 4) playing in the fountain of laughter in the following canto, described by Carlo and Ubaldo as ‘false sirene’,64 whose aural and visual temptations they must resist in order to carry out their rescue of the romantically enslaved Rinaldo. In Rinaldo Goffredo and Eustazio similarly manage to remain impervious to the charms of the mermaids, but they cannot prevent Rinaldo’s sudden departure in pursuit of Almirena, despite their repeated attempts to restrain him physically. It is not the song or the physical charms of the mermaids that tempt Rinaldo directly, however, but a ‘sudden Beam of Love-directing Light’65 that arises in his mind from the false suggestion that the disguised spirit has been sent by Almirena herself to summon him. Once Rinaldo has entered the boat, which immediately sails out of sight, the mermaids disappear, and the confounded leader of the Christian forces and his brother are left to reflect on their hero’s dereliction of duty in his vain pursuit of love rather than military glory: Signor, strano ardimento! Sù i Vortici dell’ Onde,

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All ’Aure di Lusinghe, Fidar la propria Gloria!

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Never was Courage thus misled before! To trust these faithless Waves, and vain Illusions, With all his Load of Glory!

(II, iii)66

After Rinaldo’s impetuous disappearance and subsequent capture by the enchantress’s spirits, the scene shifts, as in Tasso, to ‘A Delightful Garden in the Enchanted Palace of Armida’, but the focus is not immediately on the encounter with her new prisoner. Instead Hill and Rossi invent a brief scene in which Armida’s lover Argante expresses his love for the Christian heroine Almirena, offering to help her escape from her captor’s charms. This declaration of love from an enemy anticipates and parallels Armida’s own emotional transformation in relation to her other captive, where the initial desire for retribution for the military destruction Rinaldo has wrought (‘The mightiest Terrour of our Asian Arms, / Now brought an humble Captive to my Feet, / Shall on the Altars of my fierce Revenge, / Fall a lamented Victim to my Pow’r!’: II, vi) is gradually overwhelmed, as in the Italian poem, by an unaccustomed feeling growing in her heart, conveyed by Rossi in an aside echoing one of Tasso’s own favourite expressions of emotional uncertainty:67 Splende sù quell bel Volto Un non sò che, ch’il Cor mi rasserena. Methinks there shines, I know not what gay something in his Look, That draws me up to wonder!

(II, vi)68

Unlike the Christian warrior in Tasso, though, Handel’s Rinaldo is awake as the previously hard-hearted enchantress falls in love with him, and, like his faithful lover immediately before him, he remains unmoved by the increasingly urgent pleas of a faithless enemy. The setting and mood of Armida’s pleasure garden in canto XVI of Tasso’s poem are evoked verbally and musically in the scene of attempted seduction, where it is the enchantress herself who details, particularly in Hill’s amplified English translation, the natural and artificial wonders that seem to reflect the hero’s sensual abandon in the Italian poem:

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Rinaldo in queste piagge Ogn’ Aura spira Amore; L’Onda, l’Augello, il Fiore T’invitan solo ad amorosi amplessi; Depon quell’ Ira infida, Vinto non più, ma Vincitor d’ Armida; T’amo, O Caro. Rinaldo, in the rosy Bow’rs around thee, The Wings of ev’ry Wind are charg’d with Love; The purling Streams, which trickle through the Grass, The warbling Birds, and odiferous Flow’rs, Invite to Softness, and wou’d fain instruct thee, That only amorous Battels here are fought; Unbend that stormy Brow, and smile upon me, No more my Captive now, but Conqueror; Look kindly, while I sigh how much I love thee. (II, vi)69

This Rinaldo, however, resists all invitations to consent to Armida’s amorous instruction, remaining constant not only in his disdain for her (‘Io t’ abhorro’),70 but also in his love for Almirena. It is the Christian hero’s ability to withstand the invocations to love in this garden, in contrast to his flawed response to the declaration of Almirena’s mutual love in the transposed bower in the first act, which marks a decisive turning point in his eventual return to the pursuit of military glory, once Almirena has been rescued by her father and uncle in the final act. Despite Rinaldo’s resistance to Armida, he is still unable to rescue Almirena single-handedly at this stage. Hill has the spurned enchantress respond to this initial rejection with a Spenserian transformation ‘into the Likeness of Almirena’ (II, vii),71 deceiving Rinaldo into embracing her before revealing, to his horror and amazement, her true identity. Armida repeats the trick, but ultimately the knight is not deceived by her witchcraft on the second occasion: Mà chi tenti Rinaldo! Forse sotto quell Viso V’è l’Inferno co un vel di Paradiso. But hold fond Heart! What wou’d my Madness do? Beneath those Charms There lies a Magick Hell, shaded from sight, By the most tempting Front of Paradise. (II, vii)72

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Rinaldo departs once he has seen through this visual deception, and Armida is briefly left alone to lament. Like her poetic model in Tasso, the abandoned enchantress in Rinaldo combines a desire for revenge (‘Let me rouze slow Vengeance from her Cell’),73 expressed in recitativo, with a moving expression of her grief, sung in a solo aria at the end of scene viii. Rossi and Hill, however, dilute the intensity of this lament with a further transformation at the end of the act: at the approach of her lover Argante, Armida again assumes the shape of Almirena, leading, unwittingly, to his declaration of love for the imprisoned Christian heroine to the disguised enchantress, who then ‘takes her own Shape, and flyes on him with great Fury’ (II, ix). Argante’s amorous betrayal inspires another, if less forceful, summoning of diabolical vengeance to conclude the act (‘Collo sdegno chi m’offende, / Vendicar’ i Torti miei’).74 The start of the final act returns directly to the pattern of Tasso’s poem with its emphasis on the mission to rescue the Christian hero (and additional heroine in this case). Goffredo and Eustazio, the substitutes for Carlo and Ubaldo in the Italian, having already resisted the attractions of the mermaids at the beginning of act II, finally reach the Mago, who furnishes them with ‘fatal Wands’ capable of overcoming Armida’s spirits, as the Christian knights ascend, amid spectacular scenic effects, to the enchanted palace. As they enter the garden Armida is discovered threatening Almirena with a dagger, with Rinaldo transfixed by her charms, but Goffredo and Eustazio immediately disperse the spirits with their wands, and the enchantress vanishes as Rinaldo tries to strike her with his sword. The rescue is complete, but Rinaldo, like his Italian namesake, has to experience a moment of self-realisation before he can return to the Christian cause. Where Tasso’s Rinaldo is forced to view his effeminised self in the reflection on the shield carried by Carlo and Ubaldo (XVI, 29–30), in Rossi and Hill’s version it is Goffredo himself who makes Rinaldo aware of his fault, in valuing his love for Almirena (rather than Armida) above his pursuit of military glory, for which he must now do due penance in the attempt to retake Jerusalem: E tù Rinaldo dei Contaminata da’ tuoi molli Amori, Col sangue dé Rubel purgar la Spada. And you Rinaldo! Stain’d with the Guilt of soft and untim’d Love, Strive with the Blood of our unfaithful Foe, To wash your Bosom to its native Snow.      (III, iv)75

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The remainder of the opera offers a compressed version of the final cantos of Tasso’s poem, in which the Christian forces eventually recapture Jerusalem, with the returned and penitent Rinaldo prominent, both in destroying the enchanted forest that had defeated the grief-stricken, lovelorn Tancredi and in the final battle.76 In Hill’s schema the lovers Armida and Argante are soon reconciled, once he has been convinced that her ‘Cor virile’ will not endanger the masculinity of his forces (‘non tentar d’effeminar gli Heroi’: III, vi), but then are inevitably defeated when Rinaldo storms the city.77 Argante and Armida are captured by Rinaldo and Almirena respectively, and the latter, following the suggestion of the enchantress’s concluding baptism in Tasso (XX, 136), renounces both her magic and her religion, inspiring a similar conversion in her lover: ‘Nò, forse ch ‘al Ciel piacque, / Ch’io spegna al Fin pentita / Il mio Foco infernal colle sacre acque’ (III, xiii).78 The apostasy of the defeated enemies enables a moment of total harmony at the end of the opera, in which, once Jerusalem has been regained, the promised union of Rinaldo and Almirena is blessed by her father and uncle; their marriage permits a final accommodation of the previously irreconcilable demands of romantic love and military glory, recalling the hint of Rinaldo and Armida’s controversial union at the end of Tasso’s poem: Sia Pronuba la Gloria al vostro Amore. Be Love and Glory equally propitious.

(III, xiii)79

The ‘Poet’s Privilege’ that Hill applied in his free treatment of Tasso’s most celebrated romantic episode in the outline for Handel’s Rinaldo is also characteristic of the libretto for the only other eighteenth-century opera based on the Italian poem to be composed for the London stage, Giovanni Bononcini’s L’Erminia favola Boschereccia, first performed by the Royal Academy of Music in late March 1723. Dean and Knapp have suggested that ‘the libretto of Erminia was much altered by [Paolo Antonio] Rolli from an anonymous five-act version produced at Rome in 1719’, demonstrating the international popularity of another of Tasso’s romantic heroines as a source for operatic adaptation.80 Whether this earlier Italian setting was a direct influence for the new three-act pastoral libretto or not, Rolli’s treatment of the story of the pagan princess Erminia and the Christian hero Tancredi departs even more radically from Tasso’s poem than both Rossi and Hill’s and John Dennis’s earlier adaptations of the Rinaldo and Armida episode. The ‘Argument’ in the

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bilingual libretto printed by Thomas Wood, which is attributed to the pseudonymous ‘Eulibio pastore Arcade’, gives a largely accurate summary of the lovelorn Erminia’s pre-history and desperate situation in canto VI of ‘the Poem entituled, Gerusalemme Liberata, by Torquato Tasso’: ERMINIA, Princess of Antioch, in the Conquest of that Kingdom by the Christian Forces, was made Prisoner by Tancred, one of the chief Heroes that went as Volunteers in the conquering Army. Not long before the Siege of Jerusalem by Godfrey of Bulloigne, she had her Liberty generously given by the Conqueror; and retired to the King’s Court in the said City. But there being uneasy, by reason of her Passion for Tancred, and impatient to be with him, and to discover her Affection to him, dress’d herself in warlike Apparel, and in the Night getting out of Jerusalem, that was being besieged, made towards the Camp; but being met by a Party of the Enemy, she fled and being closely pursued, took into the thickest Part of a remote Forest. Tancred being deeply in Love with Clorinda, a beautiful Heroine among the Pagans, and hearing from one of the Leaders of the said Party, that some were in pursuit of an Enemy, which was supposed to be Clorinda, went in Search of her, imagining she might take the Opportunity of the Night to come to the Camp on purpose to meet him.81

In Tasso’s original, Tancredi’s pursuit of the concealed Erminia, who is mistaken for Clorinda because she is wearing the stolen armour of the pagan warrior, is in vain, as he is lured instead to Armida’s enchanted castle by a false messenger. Rolli’s ‘Poetical Fiction’, however, imagines a different situation in which the Christian knight reaches the disguised princess in her pastoral retreat, with what occurs thereafter being ‘the Subject of this Pastoral’. Rolli develops a synopsis for the opera that combines and re-works different episodes from Tasso’s epic, as well as elements from Italian pastoral drama, including Tasso’s own Aminta (1580), creating a libretto that becomes almost a pasticcio of some of the most celebrated moments from the Italian poet’s epic and dramatic verse. The principal plot of the opera takes its pastoral setting from the episode in canto VII that became known as ‘Erminia fra i pastori’, in which the fleeing princess receives hospitality from an old shepherd and his sons. Rolli himself attests to the continued popularity of this canto in Italy in a later work printed in London, his Remarks upon M. Voltaire’s Essay Upon the Epick Poetry of the European Nations from Homer to Milton (1728), in which he corrects the French author by pointing out that it is this episode, rather than the tale of Sofronia and Olindo in canto II, that is habitually sung by the gondoliers of Venice.82 Rolli’s libretto opens with the princess alone in the wood, disguised as Alceste, ‘reading what she had wrote on the Bark of Tree’,83 and delivering as the opera’s first aria a lament of unre-

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quited love taken directly, with only a couple of minor verbal alterations, from an octave of Tasso’s poem (VII, 20), which is given in English on the facing page of the libretto in Edward Fairfax’s recently reprinted late Elizabethan translation:84 Or che tutta e scolpita; in voi serbate Questa dolente Istoria amiche Piante, Perche se fia che alle vostr’ombre grate Giamai soggiorni alcun fedele Amante, Senta svegliarsi al Cor dolce pietate Delle sventure mie sì varie e tante, E dica: ahi troppo ingiusta empia Mercede Diè Fortuna ed Amore a tanta Fede. You happy Trees, for ever keep (quoth she) This woful Story in your tender Rind; Another Day, under your Shade may be, Will come to rest again some Lover kind Who, if these Trophies of my Grief he see, Shall feel dear Pity pierce his gentle Mind. With that she sigh’d, and said, Too late I prove, There is no Troth in Fortune, Trust in Love.

(I. i)85

In Rolli’s version, the pastoral hospitality is offered instead by two sibling nymphs, Flora and Ennone, both of whom fall in love with the apparent warrior Alceste. This confusion of identity becomes central to the development of the opera’s plot on Tancredi’s arrival in the forest. Erminia’s disguise as a pagan soldier leads to her unwitting wounding when challenged in the forest by the Christian knight, echoing another of the most celebrated sequences of Tasso’s epic, Tancredi’s accidental slaying of his beloved Clorinda in single combat in canto XII. In his defence of Tasso in the Remarks upon M. Voltaire’s Essay, Rolli argues that it is Clorinda rather than Argante who is the closest equivalent to Homer’s warrior hero Hector in Tasso’s poem, highlighting the pathos of her death as one of the high points of epic achievement: To be killed by her own most Passionate lover! which tragical Accident is one of the most moving things that ever was imagined by an Epick Poet, and entirely new. Thus Great Men imitate other Great Men, by making the Imitation with some alter’d or additional Circumstances, appear like an Original Thing.86

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Rolli’s own technique in devising the main plot of his libretto is itself effectively an ‘Imitation with some alter’d or additional Circumstances’ of Tasso’s mournful episode. The Italian librettist substitutes one pagan princess for another, but initially maintains Tasso’s sense of suspense, horror, and self-reproach as Tancredi comes to realise, at the moment when his adversary’s helmet is removed, that he has mortally wounded a woman and lover in combat: Tan. Ed io d’Erminia l’uccisore? Oh Dio! Qual pena egual può darsi al Fallio mio? Erm. Il tuo Dolor, soave Rende la mia ferita, Nè il perdere la vita Grave mi sia; ma il perder te m’è grave. Tan. Ah vile Acciaro indegno Che nel sen d’una Donna E di tal Donna t’immergesti, al fianco, Vile mi pendi ancora? Io ti detesto, Ti getto, e ti calpesto. Erm. Ah ch’io sento da me partir la vita Deh mio Tancredi ti ricorda almeno Ch’ Erminia sventurata Tanto, ahi lassa, t’amò; che ne morio. Sian almen gli occhi tuoi Di poco pianto al cener mio cortesi. Addio, Tancredi, addio: Tan. Ah non lasciarmi in abbandono o cara: Vuoi ch’io ti mora accanto.

(II, viii)

Tan. And am I the Murderer of Erminia. Oh ye Gods! What punishment can there be equal to my Crime. Erm. Your Sorrow renders my Wound pleasant to me; nor will the Loss of my Life grieve me like losing you. Tan. Ah! unworthy Sword, that has pierc’d the Breast of a Woman, and of such a one! Ah, base Weapon, do you keep still by my Side; I detest you, cast you away, and trample you under my Feet. Erm. Ah, I am expiring, alas my Tancred, remember that the unfortunate Erminia lov’d you so much, that she died; let your Eyes in Pity bestow some few Tears on my cold Ashes, farewell, Tancred, adieu. Tan. Oh, my Dear, leave me not alone. Shall I die by you?87

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Tancredi’s willingness to die by Erminia’s side in Rolli’s libretto also echoes, and reverses, the dramatic moment in canto XIX of Tasso’s poem when the pagan princess discovers the bodies of Argante and the dying Christian knight after their epic combat, lamenting her undisclosed love for him now that it is apparently too late: – Apri gli occhi, Tancredi, a queste estreme essequie – grida – ch’io ti fo co ’l pianto; riguarda me che vuo’ venirne insieme la lunga strada e vuo’ morirti a canto. (XIX, 110, 3–6) (‘Open your eyes to these last rites’, she cried, ‘I give you, Tancred, with the tears I shed. Look at me; I want to die at your side, I want to go with you on the long road.)88

In Tasso, these tears revive Tancredi, leading Erminia, at the prompting of his page Vafrino, to staunch the flow of the knight’s blood with her cropped hair, and to use her knowledge of herbs to tend to his wounds and thus save his life.89 The unexpected survival of the hero in the Italian poem, which itself recalls and reverses Clorinda’s death after her baptism in canto XII, is mirrored in the libretto, where Erminia is treated by the shepherd Aminta, whose name clearly brings to mind the equivalent scene in Tasso’s own pastoral drama where the eponymous character is revived by the skilful use of herbs after his attempted suicide. Aminta’s survival arouses unexpected feelings of pity and then love in the breast of the previously scornful Silvia, leading to the happy denouement of Tasso’s play.90 Erminia’s dramatic deathbed confession of her love and subsequent recovery after the revelation of her true identity create a similar effect in Rolli’s libretto, inspiring Tancredi, in an aria that is curiously absent from the Italian in the printed bilingual text, to reject his unrequited love for Clorinda in favour of a more rewarding reciprocal love: Love, I know your Meaning, You will have me Change my Affection. You restore the Fair one to Life, That I may love her, and Quench my former Flame.

(II, viii)91

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In this way Rolli constructs a radical re-imagining of Tancredi’s tragic slaying of Clorinda by conspicuously alluding to and combining other elements of Tasso’s work, both epic and dramatic: in his version, the warrior Clorinda becomes the disguised Erminia, whose lovelorn pastoral retreat in the Italian poem is instead the site of an unanticipated romantic fulfilment after her grievous wounding and unexpected recovery by the end of the second act, echoing both the survival of Tancredi himself in the penultimate canto of Gerusalemme liberata and also the sudden reversal and happy ending of Aminta, where the pastoral hero is ultimately united with the initially disdainful nymph. The surprising happy ending to the main plot of the opera at the end of the second act extends into the subplot in the final act, where the remaining multiple love intrigues, so typical of Italian pastoral drama, are also resolved with a flourish. It is in the cottage of the sisters Flora and Ennone that the wounded Alceste is treated and eventually healed, a sequence of events leading to embarrassment for both nymphs when the object of their affections is revealed, in fact, to be a woman. The headstrong Flora has already rejected the constant shepherd Niso’s love in favour of Alceste, but is astonished when he refuses to return her affections once Erminia’s true identity is revealed. The more practical sibling Ennone, who was less overt in her attraction to Alceste, immediately takes the opportunity to seek Niso’s affections for herself, justifying her actions in a carpe florem aria, in which Rolli consciously evokes Tasso’s celebrated canto della rosa, voiced by the talking parrot in Armida’s pleasure garden (XVI, 14–15): Chi lasciato à su la spina Bella Rosa mattutina, Torna poi per quella in vano Altra Mano Il bel Fiore colse già D’un Amante il buon pensiero è un’ affetto passaggiero. Se il momento non è colto; Altro Volto In passar l’arresterà. Who leaves upon the Stalk The Morning Rose, Returns for it in vain; For the sweet Flower has been

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Gather’d by another Hand. A Lover’s Passion is transient, Which not engaged that Instant, Is snatch’d by some other.

(III, iii)92

Flora’s discomfort at her rejection is short-lived, though, as the hunter Silvio, who, like his direct model and namesake in Guarini’s Il pastor fido (1590), has been scornful of love throughout, is persuaded by the example of the amorous warrior Tancredi to seek the affections of a nymph (‘Per Alma Generosa / Nobile Affetto ad Opre belle è sprone’, ‘A noble Passion excites the Soul to generous Actions’: III, vi), choosing Flora, with whom he is conveniently paired off at the end of the act.93 Thus the opera concludes happily with three couples united after various degrees of romantic tribulation, and a choric aria that praises the importance of constancy and faith to such pastoral lovers: Sempre lontano Da Ninfe e Pastor Tieni ’l Dolor, Non lo lasciar Cortese Amor Venir con te: Nè in queste selve più s’odan penar Soli ’n amar Senza mercè. Un’ Alma amante Non può sperar Di mai goder Più bel piacer; Che ritrovar Costanza e Fe. Keep, propitious Love, All Grief and Sorrow For ever distant from These Nymphs and Swains. Let no Complaints of ill rewarded Love be heard more in these happy Groves. The greatest Happiness in Love Is to find Constancy and Faith.

(III, vi)94

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Rolli was replaced as secretary and stage-manager for the Royal Academy of Music in 1722 by another Roman, the cellist, composer, and librettist Nicola Haym, who also collaborated with both Bononcini and Handel while in England. Haym certainly shared Rolli’s passion for Tasso’s epic, editing and dedicating to King George I an elaborate twovolume Italian edition of the poem in 1724. Despite this interest, however, there were to be no further libretti based on episodes from Tasso among the twenty-four operas staged by the Royal Academy during Haym’s six-year tenure. Tasso’s romantic interludes, particularly the story of Rinaldo and Armida, continued to attract the attention of composers and librettists throughout the rest of Europe steadily until the beginning of the twentieth century, when Antonín Dvorˇák’s Armida was premiered in Prague in 1904. However, the brief early eighteenth-century vogue for adaptations from the Italian poem as the source for libretti of Italianate operas intended for the London stage was soon over, until it was revived fleetingly at the start of the current century in Judith Weir’s free re-imagining of the most celebrated episode from Tasso’s poem in her operetta Armida, which was filmed and screened on Channel Four in Britain on Christmas Day 2005. notes  1 Giacomo Rossi and Aaron Hill, Rinaldo, Opera (London, 1711), Preface.  2 Owens suggests that Wert’s earliest setting from Tasso may even have been based on a manuscript copy or pirated (incomplete) edition of the poem printed in 1580: see Jessie Ann Owens, ‘Marenzio and Wert read Tasso: a study in contrasting aesthetics’, Early Music, 27 (1999), 555–74: p. 557 and p. 572.  3 Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, ed. Lanfranco Caretti (Turin: Einaudi, 1971), p. 477.  4 Thomas Watson, The first sett, of Italian Madrigalls Englished (London, 1590), sig. Biiiv. Watson’s madrigal appeared in print in the same year as Spenser’s sustained imitation and occasional translation of Tasso’s description of Armida’s garden in the final canto of Book II of The Faerie Queene: see Chapter 2 above, pp. 78–81.  5 Carter indicates that Tasso’s figure of Armida ‘inspired some 90 operas’, spanning the 1620s to the early twentieth century, when Dvorˇák’s Armida was first performed in Prague in 1904, though the libretti for many of these operas bear little direct resemblance to Tasso’s original episode: Tim Carter, review of Maria Antonella Balsano and Thomas Walker (eds), Tasso, la musica, i musicisti (Florence: Olschki, 1988) in Journal of the Royal Music Association, 115 (1990), 258–61.

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 6 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 487; translation in Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, ed. and trans. Anthony M. Esolen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. 308.  7 Owens, ‘Marenzio and Wert’, p. 569.  8 Monteverdi himself appears to have worked on an opera based on Armida’s abandonment: the intended first performance in Mantua of Monteverdi’s Tasso opera, probably entitled Armida abbandonata, was cancelled in the wake of the death of Duke Vincenzo II at the end of 1627, and there is no concrete evidence that the lost work was performed there or anywhere else, if indeed it was ever completed. See Tim Carter, Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).  9 See the appendix in Biancamaria Brumana, ‘Il Tasso e l’opera nel Seicento’ in Balsano and Walker (eds), Tasso, la musica, i musicisti, pp. 137–64, and the additional list in Carter’s review (1990), pp. 259–61. 10 Knapp and Dean prefer Roger North’s term ‘semi-opera’, which they suggest is less ambiguous: Winton Dean and John Merrill Knapp, Handel’s Operas, 1704–1726 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 141. 11 Lowerre suggests that Dennis and Eccles’s work was the company’s first fully fledged ‘dramatick opera’: Kathryn Lowerre, Music and Musicians on the London Stage, 1695–1705 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), p. 96. 12 John Dennis, Rinaldo and Armida: A Tragedy (London, 1699), sig. Aiiir. 13 See Lois Rosow, ‘Lully’s Armide at the Paris Opera: a performance history, 1686– 1766’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, Brandeis University, 1981), pp. 221–37. 14 Lowerre notes that Dennis visited Paris in the late 1680s as part of a tour of continental Europe: Kathryn Lowerre, ‘Dramatick opera and theatrical reform: Dennis’s Rinaldo and Armida and Motteux’s The Island Princess’, Theatre Notebook, 59 (2005), 23–40: p. 32. 15 Dennis, Rinaldo and Armida, p. 52. 16 Dennis, Rinaldo and Armida, sig. Aiiiv. 17 Dennis, Rinaldo and Armida, sig. Aiir. 18 Dennis, Rinaldo and Armida, sig. Aiv–Aiir. 19 Dennis, Rinaldo and Armida, sig. AiiivAivr. 20 Dennis, Rinaldo and Armida, sig. Aiirv. 21 Dennis, Rinaldo and Armida, sig. Aiii r. 22 Dennis, Rinaldo and Armida, sig. Aiiir. 23 C. H. Wilkinson (ed.), Theatre Miscellany: Six Pieces Connected with the Seventeenth-Century Stage (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963), pp. 105–6. 24 Lowerre, Music and Musicians, p. 116. 25 In the Italian and emerging French operatic traditions narrative was instead conveyed in through-sung recitativo. 26 Dennis, Rinaldo and Armida, p. 6. 27 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 468. See Chapter 2 above for a detailed analysis of Spenser’s imitations of Tasso in his evocation of the Bowre.

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28 Lowerre, Music and Musicians, p. 106. 29 John Dryden, King Arthur, or the British Worthy. A Dramatick Opera (London, 1691), pp. 36–7. 30 See Gerard Langbaine, The Lives and Character of the English Dramatick Poets (London, 1699), p. 45: ‘the Inchanted Wood, as well as the rest of the Wonders of Osmond’s Art, he entirely owes to Tasso; where Rinaldo performs what Arthur does here’. 31 It is Lully’s significant operatic innovation that Renaud is the only Christian knight immune to Armide’s charms: in Tasso Goffredo, Tancredi, and Rinaldo are all resistant to Armida’s beauty when she requests help from the Christian army in canto IV. Dennis follows Lully in having Urania describe in the opening act how all the Christian soldiers ‘dissolv’d in soft desire’ at the first sight of Armida, ‘And left the Field, their Glory and their Gold, / To follow this Enchanting fair, of all / Only Rinaldo still remain’d Invincible’: Dennis, Rinaldo and Armida, pp. 5–6. 32 Philippe Quinault, Armide, tragedie in Le Théâtre de Mr Quinault, 5 (Paris, 1715), p. 402 and p. 401; translation by Louis Forget and Huston Simmons. 33 Dennis, Rinaldo and Armida, p. 7. 34 Lowerre, Music and Musicians, p. 107. 35 C. P. Brand, Torquato Tasso: a Study of the Poet and of his Contribution to English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 258–9. 36 Dennis, Rinaldo and Armida, p. 8. 37 Dennis, Rinaldo and Armida, p. 21 and p. 23. 38 Dennis, Rinaldo and Armida, p. 25. 39 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 480. 40 John Dennis, ‘An Essay on the Opera’s after the Italian Manner’ in The Critical Works of John Dennis. ed. Edward Hooker (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1939), pp. 382–7. 41 Dennis, ‘An Essay’, p. 384 and p. 391. 42 Boileau-Despréaux: satires, ed. Albert Cahen (Paris: Librairie E. Droz, 1932), pp. 148–50; Dennis’s translation in ‘An Essay’, pp. 383–4. 43 Lully and Quinault’s Roland, an operatic adaptation of the central episode of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1532), in which Orlando discovers Angelica’s love for Medoro, was first performed in Paris in January 1685. Conversely, a slightly earlier English verse translation of Boileau’s L’Art Poétique (1674), in Sir William Soames’s rendering of the French poet-critic’s consideration in his third canto of Tasso’s epic poem, adds a specific reference to the figure of Armida, attributing its continued popularity to the numerous romantic episodes, where only Rinaldo, Tancredi, and Argante are mentioned by name in the original: ‘Tasso, you’l say, has done it with applause; / It is not here I mean to Judge his Cause: / Yet, tho our Age has so extoll’d his name, / His Works had never gain’d immortal Fame, / If holy Godfrey in his Ecstasies / Had only Conquer’d Satan on his knees; / If Tancred, and Armida’s pleasing

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form, / Did not his melancholy Theme adorn’ (III, 209–16). Sir William Soames, The Art of Poetry (London, 1683), p. 41. 44 Dennis, Rinaldo and Armida, p. 53. 45 Harry Gilbert Paul, John Dennis: his Life and Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1911), p. 24. 46 Dennis, ‘An Essay’, pp. 387–9. 47 Dennis, Rinaldo and Armida, pp. 53–4. 48 For a record of the early performances of Rinaldo, see Dean and Knapp, Handel’s Operas, pp. 181–3. 49 See Curtis Price, ‘English traditions in Handel’s Rinaldo’ in Stanley Sadie and Anthony Hicks (eds), Handel Tercentenary Collection (London: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 120–37. 50 Rossi and Hill, Rinaldo, Preface. 51 Joseph Addison, The Spectator, 1 (London, 1712), no. 5 (Tuesday 6 March 1711), p. 27. 52 For a consideration of the adverse effect that Boileau’s criticism of Tasso had on the Italian poet’s literary reputation in eighteenth-century England following the publication of Addison’s essay, see A. F. B. Clark, Boileau and the French Classical Critics in England, 1660–1830 (Paris: Edouard Champion, 1925), pp. 337–60. 53 Addison, Spectator, 1, no. 5, p. 31; Rossi and Hill, Rinaldo, Preface. 54 Dean and Knapp, Handel’s Operas, p. 172. 55 Rossi and Hill, Rinaldo, pp. 4–5. 56 Rossi and Hill, Rinaldo, pp. 4–5. 57 Rossi and Hill, Rinaldo, pp. 12–13. 58 Rossi and Hill, Rinaldo, pp. 14–15. 59 Rossi and Hill, Rinaldo, pp. 14–15. 60 Rossi and Hill, Rinaldo, p. 21. 61 The disguised spirit also seems to recall Spenser’s Phaedria, who similarly lures Cymochles into her boat and lulls him to sleep with song: see The Faerie Queene, II, vi, 2–18. 62 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 440; Max Wickert, Torquato Tasso: the Liberation of Jerusalem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 268. 63 Rossi and Hill, Rinaldo, pp. 22–3. 64 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, pp. 467–8. This is the same episode in Tasso’s poem that Dryden had imitated in the fourth act of King Arthur (1691) some twenty years earlier. 65 Rossi and Hill, Rinaldo, pp. 22–3. 66 Rossi and Hill, Rinaldo, pp. 26–7. 67 Brand describes how ‘in his attempt to convey these psychological subtleties Tasso often uses an irrational and illogical language, sometimes consciously ambiguous: characteristic is his “non so che”, which abandons the attempt to be rational’, citing two lines from canto XII of Gerusalemme liberata as an

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example (‘In queste voci languide risuona / un non so che di flebile e soave’: XII, 66, 5–6): Brand, Torquato Tasso, p. 115. 68 Rossi and Hill, Rinaldo, pp. 31–3. 69 Rossi and Hill, Rinaldo, pp. 32–3. 70 Rossi and Hill, Rinaldo, pp. 32–3. 71 Price suggests that this transformation may also have influenced by the representation of magic in an earlier English semi-opera, George Granville’s The British Enchanters (1706): Price, ‘English traditions’, p. 123. 72 Rossi and Hill, Rinaldo, pp. 35–7. 73 Rossi and Hill, Rinaldo, pp. 35–7. 74 Rossi and Hill, Rinaldo, pp. 40–1. 75 Rossi and Hill, Rinaldo, pp. 50–1. 76 Rinaldo’s destruction of the enchanted forest in canto XVIII is staged in an additional scene in the revised 1731 version of the opera: see Dean and Knapp, Handel’s Operas, p. 187. 77 Rossi and Hill, Rinaldo, p. 51. 78 Rossi and Hill, Rinaldo, p. 62. 79 Rossi and Hill, Rinaldo, pp. 62–3. 80 Dean and Knapp, Handel’s Operas, p. 316. The poet, librettist, and translator Paolo Rolli, who instructed the Prince of Wales and his sisters in Italian and was employed by the royal household in England for almost thirty years, was secretary of the newly founded Royal Academy of Music from 1720 to 1722. He is probably now best remembered as the earliest Italian translator of Milton’s Paradise Lost, the first six books of which were printed in 1729, and the complete poem in 1735. 81 Paolo Rolli, L’Erminia favola Boschereccia d’Eulibio pastore Arcade (London, 1723), sig. Biv. 82 Paolo Rolli, Remarks upon M. Voltaire’s Essay Upon the Epick Poetry of the European Nations from Homer to Milton (London, 1728), p. 17. 83 Erminia’s engraving on the bark of a tree in a pastoral setting recalls Angelica’s declaration of love for Medoro in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, the discovery of which by the poem’s protagonist leads to his love madness; a later Orlando in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1599) also expresses his love for Rosalind in the same manner. 84 Fairfax’s Godfrey or Bulloigne, or the Recouerie of Ierusalem was first printed, with a dedication to Queen Elizabeth, in 1600; the second edition, with a dedicatory letter to Prince Charles from the printer John Bill, was printed in 1624, and a third edition, which is the one used for the stanza printed in L’Erminia, was printed in 1687. A further edition of the translation was printed in Dublin in 1726. 85 Rolli, L’Erminia, pp. 4–7. 86 Rolli, Remarks, p. 36. 87 Rolli, L’Erminia, pp. 46–7.

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88 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 606; Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, ed. and trans. Esolen, p. 380. 89 The moment at which Erminia severs her locks is depicted in two celebrated paintings by Nicolas Poussin, dating from the early to mid-1630s. See Chapter 3 above, pp. 121–5. 90 The most recent English translation of Tasso’s play, John Oldmixon’s Amintas a pastoral acted at the Theatre Royal, with a stage prologue by John Dennis, had been performed (unsuccessfully) in London in 1698. 91 Rolli, L’Erminia, p. 48. 92 Rolli, L’Erminia, pp. 58–9. 93 Rolli, L’Erminia, pp. 70–1. 94 Rolli, L’Erminia, pp. 70–1.

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5 ‘There are as many Tassos as there are Hamlets’: representations of Tasso’s life in England imagining tasso’s love, madness, and imprisonment The first account of Tasso’s life in English, by Henry Layng, did not appear until more than a century and a half after his death in a miscellaneous collection with a strong focus on the Italian poet. Along with ‘The Life of Torquato Tasso’, Layng’s Several Pieces in Verse and Prose (1748) also contains translations into couplets of cantos XV and XVI of Gerusalemme liberata, the celebrated episode in which Rinaldo is rescued from his amorous languor in the beautiful garden of the enchantress Armida, and a verse epistle from ‘Tancred to Clorinda’, in which the poet imagines another prominent Christian hero addressing the pagan object of his unrequited love. Layng’s brief account of Tasso’s life is based on what ‘we are told from the best hands’, both the poet’s first Italian biographer Giovan Battista Manso and the French poet Jean-Baptiste de Mirabaud in the Abregé de la Vie du Tasse, printed with his translation of Gerusalemme liberata in 1724, rather than on original research, but the emphasis that he places on key events and personalities in the Italian poet’s story had a lasting impact on how later English writers, such as Byron, were to engage with Tasso’s biography: There is something so entertaining, so noble, so piteous, so marvellous in the fortune of Torquato Tasso, that I know not any man’s story more interesting or more instructive. Nature seems in every step she took relating to him, to have formed him for our admiration.1

In Layng’s biography Tasso emerges above all as a victim of forces beyond his own control. Even the immediate and wide-ranging fame of his great epic poem and ‘the warmth of the glory that blazed around him’ served only to awaken the envy and malice of ‘whole swarms of Dunciad writers’,

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such as various members of the Florentine Accademia della Crusca, who repeatedly criticised the poem in minute detail in the late sixteenth century. This critical hostility towards the poem continued even after Tasso’s death in 1595, before ‘the attack was again furiously renewed by the Partizans for the ancients, under Mons. Boileau in France’ in the latter part of the seventeenth century. Layng, however, cites Dryden in suggesting, by way of response, that Tasso ‘has long since been quietly in Possession of the third Place in the College of Poets’ behind only Homer and Virgil.2 For him, Tasso’s literary immortality is in no doubt, even as interest in the poet starts to switch from his work towards the unhappy events of his life. Layng is quietly convinced that Tasso’s attachment to the Princess Leonora d’Este, his patron’s sister, was reciprocated but remained chaste, fostered by a ‘mutual admiration for the most brilliant accomplishments [which] grew insensibly into a stronger passion’.3 In his opinion, though, it was the betrayal of this amorous secret at court that led directly to the poet’s subsequent misfortunes. In the first part of his Vita, Manso had related how Tasso was betrayed by an unnamed close friend, whom the enraged poet then struck on the face at court in front of the duke. The treacherous friend, later identified in Solerti’s monumental biography of 1895 as Ercole Fucci, challenged Tasso to a duel outside the city gates, which the poet accepted. As the duel began, however, three brothers of the cowardly friend arrived as reinforcements, but Tasso succeeded in dispelling all four men with his sword. Manso’s account of the (probably fictional) duel was designed to demonstrate Tasso’s skills as a courtier beyond his poetry, and indeed he cites an allegedly popular Ferrarese proverb referring specifically to the incident: ‘Con la penna e con la spada / Nessun val quanto Torquato’, ‘With the pen and with the sword / No-one is worthy of Torquato.’ After the duel, however, Tasso was confined briefly to his apartments by the duke ‘non già per modo di castigamento, ma per custodirlo (com’ egli diceva)’, ‘not as a form of punishment, but for his protection (as he said)’, and this action was to have devastating consequences.4 The dramatic potential inherent in the act of betrayal and the challenge was taken up by Goethe in a pivotal scene of his play Torquato Tasso, completed in 1790 (act II, scene iii), where the poet draws his sword and challenges the duke’s secretary of state, Antonio Montecatino, who he feels has slighted his poetry and rejected his offer of friendship, made at the request of Princess Leonora. Tasso’s reaction to his subsequent confinement in Goethe’s play marks the beginning of his mental decline, as he becomes increasingly paranoid about the motives

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of all of his apparent friends at the court, including his patron Alfonso and even Leonora herself. While Layng does not question the motives and behaviour of the princess towards Tasso after his imprisonment, suggesting somewhat prophetically that her feelings could be described in ‘an Epistola Eroicha from Leonora to Tasso’, in his account of the duel and its aftermath Duke Alfonso emerges as the real villain of the piece. He is accused of making ‘use of a Finesse that cou’d hardly escape an Italian politician’ in having the poet confined initially for his own safety, but ‘which by proper degrees ended in an absolute imprisonment’,5 presumably as punishment for Tasso’s inappropriate courtship of his sister, though ostensibly because of his growing madness. Layng conveniently elides this brief period of confinement (in 1577) with the later period of prolonged imprisonment at St Anna (from 1579 to 1586), but his development of the merest hint in Manso’s account of a suspicion of the duke’s motives into an attack on his political wiles sets the tone for the strong antipathy with which Alfonso is approached in many later accounts of Tasso’s woes, apparent particularly in Byron’s animosity towards the ‘miserable despot’ (stanza 36, 320) in the fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818).6 Layng’s ‘Life’ reappeared in Philip Doyne’s blank-verse translation of Tasso’s epic, The Delivery of Jerusalem, printed in Dublin in 1761, and, although this version was never as popular as John Hoole’s Jerusalem Delivered, which first appeared only a couple of years later (with its own ‘Life of Tasso’, also based on Manso) and went through ten editions in fifty or so years, it seems to have had a direct influence on Byron, who, like Layng, was also to focus on Boileau and ‘the Cruscan quire’ (stanza 38, 339–40) as foremost among the other foes of Tasso’s wounded name. Layng’s blatant mistrust of the duke’s motives is not shared by Hoole in his ‘Life of Tasso’, where he merely expresses surprise at Alfonso’s ‘harsh treatment’ of the previously highly favoured court poet.7 Layng concludes his ‘Life’ with a sympathetic account of the poet’s mental torment. While suggesting that ‘Tasso had from a child a spice of madness in his constitution’, he attributes the steady decline of his mind directly to his fall from court favour and the period of prolonged imprisonment: The Loss of the Duke’s favour, a gloomy Apartment in the Prigione di Santa Anna, and a tedious Solitude coinciding with his Temperament, got the better of that Understanding, which had been the Admiration of Mankind, and reduc’d it to a deplorable State of Ruin. A most afflicting Object, when it befalls the truly Great!8

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The only aspect worse than the poet’s loss of reason itself, in Layng’s eyes, was that it was interspersed by periods of lucidity, in which Tasso glimpsed and recorded the extent of his derangement, ‘so that he suffer’d the only addition that cou’d be made to his misery, in a strong, lively perception of it’.9 A growing interest in Tasso’s perceived madness and his own perception of it also marks the latter stages of Hoole’s ‘Life’, first printed in 1763. The translator of Tasso’s epic paraphrases at length Manso’s account of an extraordinary incident (part I, chapter xiv), which the biographer claims, in a letter to the Prince of Conca, to have witnessed with his own eyes, ‘con gli occhi stessi’, during one of the poet’s sojourns with him in the early 1590s after his eventual release from St Anna: In this place Manso had an opportunity to examine the singular effects of Tasso’s melancholy; and often disputed with him concerning a familiar spirit, which he pretended to converse with. Manso endeavoured in vain to persuade his friend that the whole was the illusion of a disturbed imagination: but the latter was strenuous in maintaining the reality of what he asserted; and, to convince Manso, desired him to be present at one of those mysterious conversations. Manso had the complaisance to meet him the next day, and while they were engaged in discourse, on a sudden he observed that Tasso kept his eyes fixed upon a window, and remained in a manner immoveable: he called him by his name several times, but received no answer: at last Tasso cried out, ‘There is the friendly spirit who is come to converse with me: look, and you will be convinced of the truth of all that I have said.’ Manso heard him with surprise: he looked, but saw nothing except the sun-beams darting through the window: he cast his eyes all over the room, but could perceive nothing, and was just going to ask where the pretended spirit was, when he heard Tasso speak with great earnestness, sometimes putting questions to the spirit, and sometimes giving answers, delivering the whole in such a pleasing manner, and with such elevated expressions, that he listened with admiration, and had not the least inclination to interrupt him. At last this uncommon conversation ended with the departure of the spirit, as appeared by Tasso’s words: who turning towards Manso, asked him if his doubts were removed. Manso was more amazed than ever; he scarce knew what to think of his friend’s situation, and waved away any further conversation on the subject.10

Hoole ignores the religious elements in the poet’s attempts to persuade Manso by rational argument that ‘l’amico spirito’ must be angelic rather than diabolic, and he underplays the biographer’s stupefaction and uncer-

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tainty at the end of his account, where his response to the poet’s question is recorded in direct speech:

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Anzi ne sono di nuovo accresciuti, percioché molte cose ho udite degne di maraviglia, e niuna veduta n’ho di quelle che per farmi da’ miei dubbi cessare mi prometeste mostrarmi. (In fact they have increased even more, because I have heard many things worthy of wonder, but seen nothing of what you promised to show me in order to remove my doubts.)11

However, Hoole’s focus on the poet’s visions of this spirit as the product of ‘a disturbed imagination’, rendering Manso’s ‘visione … finte della sua stessa imaginativa, perturbata da fumi malinconici’, ‘visions feigned by his own imagination, unsettled by the fumes of melancholy’,12 struck a chord that was to resonate clearly throughout the Europeanwide Romantic fascination with Tasso’s madness and imprisonment. The continued popularity of this particular incident from Manso’s bio­­ graphy in England is manifest in Thomas Wade’s poetical rendering of it in ‘Tasso’s Spirit: a Sketch’ in his first book of verse, printed in London in 1825, in which the poet suggests that it is a story that ‘may be met with in any LIFE of TASSO’. In the first of the two scenes in the imaginary dialogue the figure of Tasso counters Manso’s scepticism about the nature of these visitations by insisting, as in Manso’s original account, that the (female) ‘friendly Spirit’ who comes to him is an angelic being: ‘nor feel I of the earth / In our sublime communion, but her words / Lift me to Heaven’.13 He also suggests that his friend should visit his bedchamber that evening to see the spirit for himself, giving rise to the second scene, in which Manso enters only to find the entranced poet oblivious to his presence: TASSO continues to gaze steadfastly at the window, without regarding MANSO’S last words, and, after a pause, appears to converse with an invisible being.

Manso is convinced throughout the scene that Tasso’s apparent conversation is a clear indication of his madness, and yet the content of the dialogue between poet and spirit that Wade imagines, focusing on questions of poetic inspiration and the divine nature of the arts, leads ultimately to the sceptic’s grudging acceptance of the good sense conveyed in Tasso’s words: ‘’Tis madness this; but madness wonderful, / And more to be admir’d than scoff ’d withal.’ In Wade’s poem the validity or otherwise of the angelic visitation becomes almost irrelevant: whether it is believed to be genuine or rather the manifestation of a deeply disturbed

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poetic imagination, the impact of the ‘kind Spirit’ on the poet himself seems certainly to be considered beneficial:

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When thou art near, my veins no longer feel To have their usual current; in its stead, Music seems floating thro’ them, and converts Each thought to inspiration.14

If, in most accounts of his life, Tasso’s visions were believed to emanate from his troubled imagination, then it is striking that in the early nineteenth century so many writers, like Wade, sought to engage imaginatively and empathetically with the workings of the mind behind these visions by ventriloquising Tasso’s own thoughts. In the latter part of the eighteenth century Goethe, and to a lesser extent Goldoni before him, had already attempted to render Tasso’s thought processes orally in the frequent soliloquies in their dramatic representations of the poet’s life, but the start of the following century saw the emergence of a different phenomenon. This is perhaps best exemplified in a curious work printed as a bilingual Italian and French edition in Paris in 1800. Le Veglie di Tasso, or The Night Thoughts of Torquato Tasso as it was called in its earliest English translation, also printed in Paris in 1828, purports to be derived from a manuscript in the poet’s handwriting discovered a few years earlier amid the ruins of a sixteenth-century palace in Ferrara by the Italian scholar Giuseppe Compagnoni. In a series of (initially) thirty nightly meditations occurring during his incarceration in St Anna, recorded in an impressionistic prose style, Tasso contemplates repeatedly his various misfortunes, stemming from his love for Leonora and subsequent treatment at the hands of the tyrannous Duke Alfonso, but also encompassing betrayals by friends at court and unscrupulous printers, anxiety about his literary reputation, and an unsettling melancholy presence in his cell: ‘un genio malefico mi pingeva in nero tutte le cose, confondeva i miei sensi, tiranneggiava la mia ragione’, ‘an evil spirit [that] plunges everything about me into black, confounds my senses, and rides roughshod over my reason’ (Veglia XX).15 The work was an immediate success across Europe: the first monolingual Italian edition was printed in Milan in 1803, with an additional four veglie transcribed (with some gaps) by Compagnoni from the original manuscript, concluding now with an optimistic hint of the poet’s incipient release from prison rather than with the anguished prayer to his dead father as in the Parisian edition, and it was followed by a further

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twenty-five editions in the nineteenth century alone. Within a quarter of a century it had been translated into French (for a second time), German, Russian, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese, and English. There are two principal reasons for this initial surge of popularity. Firstly, Le Veglie seemingly offered not only a lost work by a major Italian writer, but also one that is very different stylistically from any of his other voluminous prose and is indeed, according to the anonymous editor of the first Italian edition, almost unique in European literature, revealing, as it does, the workings of a mind under great physical and mental duress at the time of composition: Certo è che questa è la prima volta in cui ci si presenta degno della letteratura il linguaggio di un uomo da malinconica fissazione tratto fuori de mente. Cosí, dopo che le greche, le latine e le italiane lettere, e quelle piú moderne, che usate sono da alter colte nazioni, hanno trattato ogni morale affezione dell’uomo ed egregiamente espressione ogni grado, singular merito è delle nostre l’aver dipinta co’ suoi veraci colori la piú infausta situazione nella quale l’uomo possa trovarsi, e l’averla dipinta in tale per altezza d’ingegno, e per forza di cuore non tanto celebre, quanto per sé stesso valente. (Certainly this is the first time that the language of a man of melancholy disposition, considered to be out of his mind, is presented as being worthy of literature. Therefore, after Greek, Latin, and Italian literatures, as well as the more modern ones of other cultivated nations, have all treated every moral disorder of man and expressed each aspect of them in a distinguished manner, it is to the singular merit of ours to have painted in its true colours the most unfortunate situation in which a man could ever find himself, and to have painted it at the very height of invention, and with a strength of heart not only celebrated, but valorous in its own right.)16

Secondly, it also presented, in Tasso’s own words, a picture of the poet that corresponded almost exactly with the version of his biography favoured by Romantic readers at the start of the nineteenth century. Despite Serassi’s recent efforts to disprove Tasso’s amorous attachment to Leonora and to exonerate Duke Alfonso from any blame,17 the poet himself dwells obsessively on these two figures during his prison musings. The only drawback in the proof of these key elements of the Tasso myth that the meditations in Le Veglie seemed to confirm is, of course, that they were a forgery. Within ten years of publication Compagnoni’s deceit had been exposed in Italy by the Swiss philologist Johann Casper Orelli, largely on the grounds of linguistic anachronism but prompted initially

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by his dismay at the false image of Tasso perpetuated in them. The revelation that Le Veglie was not a genuine work by Tasso, however, seems to have had very little bearing on the number of editions and translations that continued to appear throughout Europe. This prompts the obervation that many readers, unlike Orelli, were more than willing to accept as true the picture of the tormented poet conjured up by Compagnoni, even after the legitimacy of the work itself had been seriously questioned. If, as late as 1828, the anonymous female translator of the first English version could mistakenly claim that ‘no doubt now remains’ about the work’s authenticity,18 it is an interesting irony that she chose to include as part of her volume a more recent and highly influential English act of ventriloquism of the Italian poet, Byron’s ‘The Lament of Tasso’ (1817). Byron, like Compagnoni before him, engages imaginatively with Tasso’s thought processes as he languishes in prison, focusing similarly, although more defiantly, on Leonora, Alfonso, and his own poetic immortality, and it is thus perhaps no surprise that the two works, one ostensibly genuine and the other clearly fictional, should have been linked together by the translator. Certainly only a few years later, in 1832, an Italian translation of Byron’s poem similarly was printed alongside Le Veglie.19 Before examining Byron’s poem and its far-reaching impact in more detail, I want to consider briefly two later examples where poets ventrilo­­­ quised Tasso’s thoughts and voice in their work. In the mid-1820s Giacomo Leopardi began work on an extraordinary series of essays and imaginary prose conversations, printed in 1827 as the Operette morali, including the Dialogo di Torquato Tasso e del suo Genio familiare (‘Dialogue between Tasso and his Familiar Spirit’), in which the imprisoned poet is visited by and converses freely with the friendly spirit already familiar from Manso’s biography and Wade’s English poem. Certain aspects of Leopardi’s vision of Tasso in prison conform to the Romantic precedents of Compagnoni and Byron: the initial focus is on the poet’s continued longing for Leonora (‘Oh potess’ io rivedere la mia Leonora. Ogni volta che ella mi torna alla mente, mi nasce un brivido di gioia’, ‘If only I could see my Leonora again. Each time she comes to my mind, I feel a quivering of joy going through me’), and there is also a strong sense of the enervating effect of prolonged imprisonment on Tasso both physically and mentally: Laddove in questa prigionia, separato dal commercio umano, toltomi eziandio lo scrivere, ridotto a notare per passatempo i tocchi dell’oriuolo, annoverare i correnti, le fessure e i tarli del palco, considerare il mattonato del pavimento, trastullarmi colle farfalle e coi moscherini che vanno

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attorno alla stanza, condurre quasi tutte le ore a un modo; ... perchè di mano in mano la mente, non occupata da altro e non isvagata, mi si viene accostumando a conversare seco medesima assai più e con maggior sollazzo di prima, e acquistando un abito e una virtù di favellare in se stessa, anzi di cicalare, tale, che parecchie volte mi pare quasi avere una compagnia di persone in capo che stieno ragionando. (But in this prison I am without the company of men, I am not even allowed to write, I am reduced to passing the time counting the tickings of the clock, the joists of the ceiling, the cracks and the worm holes in the wood, studying the tiles on the floor, playing around with moths and gnats as they hover about my room, and spending almost every hour in the same way; ... for, slowly, as it isn’t occupied and distracted by anything else, my mind has grown used to talking with itself far more often and with far more relief than in the past; and it has acquired such a habit and such an ability to talk, as a matter of fact, to chat with itself, that many times I almost feel as though in my head there were people arguing with one another.)20

Leopardi’s treatment of these by now staple themes and situations, however, is highly idiosyncratic. For example, the spirit promises to satiate Tasso’s longing for Leonora by creating a dream vision of her in the poet’s sleep, but only after arguing that such an imaginary vision would in fact provide far more pleasure to him than an appearance by the flesh-and-blood Leonora ever could. This gives rise to an abstract, and almost proto-existential, philosophical debate between the two about the existence and nature of pleasure itself and the impossibility of it ever being fully experienced and enjoyed in the present moment, with the spirit concluding that ‘il piacere è sempre o passato o futuro, e non mai presente’, ‘pleasure is clearly either past or future, never present’. Similarly, Leopardi’s description of Tasso’s confinement is intended to illustrate another philosophical concept, this time in words attributed to the poet himself, that ‘tutti gl’intervalli della vita umana frapposti ai piacerie ai dispiaceri, sono occupati della noia’, ‘in human life all the intervals between pleasure and pain are occupied by boredom’.21 According to the spirit, the only possible antidotes to this boredom are sleep, opium, and suffering, and it is thus striking that the increasingly animated conversations with himself (and indeed with the spirit itself ?), which Tasso describes as a direct effect of his imprisonment, are not necessarily viewed negatively as a sign of his growing madness, but rather as an almost inevitable and more positive response to the crushing tedium of his existence. It has often been conjectured that the troubled Leopardi felt a particular

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personal affinity with Tasso,22 already evident in the section on the poet in his Canzone. Ad Angelo Mai of 1820 and his visit to Tasso’s tomb at St Onofrio in Rome a couple of years later, and certainly this vision of the poet and his familiar spirit in conversation, while following the precedent of Tasso in his own Messagiero dialogue, is deeply invested with many of the later poet’s own recurrent anxieties and concerns about the nebulous purpose of human existence: Così, tra sognare e fantasticare, andrai consumando la vita; non con altra utilità che di consumarla: che questo è l’unico frutto che al mondo se ne può avere. (Thus, between dreams and fantasies, you’ll go on whiling away your life with no other advantage except that of whiling it away, for this is the only benefit we can get from it in this world).23

In England, at the same time that Leopardi was working on the essays and fictional dialogues that would comprise the Operette morali, Wade completed his imagined dialogue between Tasso and the familiar spirit, while Walter Savage Landor was also publishing the first volume of his own Imaginary Conversations (1824) between notable historical and literary figures; it is unsurprising that eventually he also touched on Tasso as part of this ongoing project, although not until 1843 when he published a dialogue between the poet and his sister Cornelia in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. In concentrating on Tasso’s reunion with his estranged sister in Sorrento, Landor was following the English (and French) vogue of the late 1830s for another key episode in the poet’s biography. As attention in England was beginning to switch away from the earlier fascination with Tasso’s imprisonment and troubled love towards a new focus on his familial relationships however, a three-part poem on Tasso’s life, which appeared in London but had a more remote geographical point of origin, hearkened back to Compagnoni, Byron, and Leopardi in placing the figure of the imprisoned poet at the heart of the work. Henrietta Prescott’s Poems, written in Newfoundland (1839) owe their unusual provenance to the position of the naval officer Sir Henry Prescott, the young poet’s father, as governor of Newfoundland from 1834 to 1841. Two of the poems in the volume suggest Tasso’s increasing popularity with young Victorian female readers, almost half a century before George Eliot’s Gwendolen Harleth was to express her fondness for the poet in Daniel Deronda (1876). ‘The March of the Crusaders to Jerusalem’ is inspired by the early stanzas of the third canto of Gerusalemme

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liberata, showing Prescott’s familiarity with at least part of Tasso’s epic poem, and the volume opens with the long biographical poem Tasso. The three parts of the poem each focus on a single key episode in the poet’s troubled life: in the first Tasso as a twelve-year-old boy converses with his father Bernardo in Rome, recalling the brief period of happy family life in Sorrento before his father’s banishment and subsequent woes. It is Bernardo’s contention to his young son that poetry alone can provide some solace from such earthly troubles that directly prompts Torquato to pursue his own poetic ambitions: The Poet hath a second being, – A World untouched by care; From life’s o’erwhelming troubles fleeing, He findeth refuge there! (I, ix)24

The consolation that poetry might offer is sorely needed in the long middle section of the poem, set in Ferrara in the early 1580s, where Tasso is now in a more familiar situation, ‘Disgraced, and torn from courts to dwell / A captive in a madman’s cell’ (II, vii).25 The oppressive effects of this prolonged imprisonment are given greater immediacy by Prescott’s sudden switch to a first-person narrative at this moment: ‘The madman’s shriek disturbs my rest, – I shudder as I feel Unearthly terrors at that sound Across my spirit steal; – The horror of this dark abode Makes all my senses reel!’

(II, xviii)26

Relief of sorts does arrive, not necessarily through poetry directly, but in the form of a vision of Leonora and their mutual love, ‘a wild and thrilling dream’ (II, xlviii) conjured up in the poet’s imagination. Here Prescott again demonstrates her knowledge of the early cantos of Tasso’s epic in alluding to one of the most popular nineteenth-century autobiographical readings of a particular episode from the poem.27 It had long been contended that the character of the chaste Sofronia, a figure with no historical precedent who is prepared to sacrifice herself in order to save the other Christian inhabitants of pagan-controlled Jerusalem in canto II, was intended as a thinly veiled portrait of the Princess Leonora, and so it did not require a great stretch of the imagination to suppose that the lovesick Olindo represented the poet himself. At the end of the poet’s vision

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Prescott paraphrases the first of two lines describing Olindo’s unrequited love that became most closely associated with Tasso’s own concealed love for Leonora, ‘brama assai, poco spera, e nulla chiede / né sa scoprirsi, o non ardisce’, ‘he yearns much, hopes little, asks nothing. / He cannot reveal his longing, or cease to love’ (Gerusalemme liberata, II, 16, 4–5).28 In Tasso’s free-standing episode Olindo confesses to a crime that neither Christian has committed in order to be punished in her stead, only for the pagan king Aladino to condemn them both to death at the stake. They are eventually spared in the nick of time after the intercession of the female warrior Clorinda, at which point Olindo’s self-sacrificing love is rewarded with Sofronia’s reciprocal love, going ‘dal rogo a le nozze’, ‘from the funeral pyre to a wedding’ (II, 53, 5), as Tasso’s epic narrator relates. Any autobiographical reading of the episode would clearly have to acknowledge a strong element of wish-fulfilment in its conclusion, which is echoed in the poet’s vision of Leonora’s reciprocal love for him in Prescott’s poem: In future years, Some tender Bard shall tell How once a Princess left a court In cottage lone to dwell And say how great the love and joy That to her portion fell.

(II, xl)29

The idea of a happy pastoral retreat from the court possibly evokes another of Tasso’s lovesick characters from his epic, the pagan princess Erminia, who finds solace from her love for the Christian Tancredi with an elderly shepherd and his family in canto VII. Tasso’s fantastic vision, however, is destined never to provide the same relief: many future bards would indeed relate stories of Tasso and Leonora, but even those who believed that their love was mutual would never be able to contrive a happy ending. Prescott’s poem acknowledges this with the darker conclusion to this section in Tasso’s second vision of Leonora, in which the poet foresees her death. Historically Princess Leonora had indeed died in August 1581, a couple of years into the poet’s prolonged incarceration. In the final section of Prescott’s poem the scene returns to Rome, where Tasso is discovered on his deathbed in the monastery of St Onofrio in 1595. As the poet passes peacefully away his only lament is that there is no hint in the natural world of the magnitude of what is happening,

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suggesting that it will be left instead to future writers to acknowledge the loss of one of Italy’s greatest poets. In focusing on Sorrento, Ferrara, and Rome in the respective parts of her poem, Prescott emphasises the three historical sites that became inextricably linked with the poet when what has been described as a European-wide literary pilgrimage to Tasso shrines started to develop at the end of the eighteenth century.30 While there is no evidence that Prescott herself travelled to Italy before composing her Tasso poem, an increasing number of Italian and foreign visitors in the previous half-century had sought out one or more of these three principal stops on the Tasso tour. Some two hundred years after Montaigne had apparently visited Tasso during his imprisonment in St Anna in the early 1580s, a legendary meeting commemorated in a painting by the French artist Fleury-François Richard at the height of the Tasso pilgrimage in the early 1820s, visitors to Ferrara were again shown a grated window, behind which, supposedly, was Tasso’s subterranean prison cell. One of the earliest recorded visitors, in October 1786, was Goethe, who remained unconvinced about the cell’s authenticity, suggesting in his travel diary that it was in fact only a wood or coal shed. The German poet was more impressed, however, by Tasso’s tomb at St Onofrio, and particularly by the death mask on display in the monastery’s library, when he visited Rome. It was certainly after these visits that Goethe was inspired to re-engage with his play on Tasso’s life, which he had begun in prose in the early 1780s, eventually completing the new version in verse in 1790, although the play remained unperformed until the first decade of the following century. The first of many notable English visitors to Ferrara was Joseph Cooper Walker, who recorded his anguished reaction to the sight of Tasso’s cell in his Historical Memoir on Italian Tragedy: With what mingled emotions of pain and horror did I explore this dungeon in the year 1792! Damp, dimly lighted, and too low in many parts to allow me to stand erect, I could hardly persuade myself that I was visiting the ‘prison-house’ of the greatest modern epic poet, and of a truly amiable and highly accomplished man, whose only crime was ambitious love!31

Walker, unlike Goethe, had evidently been inside the cell, and did not share the German visitor’s scepticism about its authenticity, his sense of disbelief stemming from the poet’s plight and ill-treatment rather than from the locale itself. After a brief respite during the Napoleonic wars, from the mid-1810s English literary figures came in a steady stream to

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Ferrara to pay homage to Tasso at the site of his greatest misfortune. Many of these were equally moved by what they saw, and made written records of their visits and their reactions to the cell. These observations were usually recorded initially in private travel journals or letters to friends in England, but were frequently followed, as in the case of Goethe, by a strong urge to engage artistically with the figure of the tormented poet. The cell also seemed to inspire an overwhelming desire in many tourists either to leave or to retain a physical record of their visit. Anna Jameson, for example, recalls her horrified impressions of the dungeon on a trip to Ferrara in the early 1820s in The Loves of the Poets (1829), adding that ‘upon the plaster outside the grated window, I observed several names written in pencil, among the rest, those of Byron and Rogers’.32 Samuel Rogers, whom Jameson met on a couple of occasions on his later trip to Italy, had first visited Ferrara in October 1814, leaving his written memento outside Tasso’s cell, before heading on to Rome and St Onofrio in December, and then Naples and Sorrento the following March, following and recording each step on the Tasso tour in his travel journal.33 Some years later these impressions were transformed into what became his best-known work, Italy, a Poem (1822, final version 1830), which in turn inspired a brief English vogue for extended first-hand verse accounts of the country in the manner of the fourth canto of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. In the first part of the poem Rogers recalls a young Italian boy Luigi, who acted as his local guide, ‘Dealing out largely in exchange for pence / Thy scraps of knowledge – thro’ the grassy street / Leading, explaining – pointing to the bars / Of TASSO’S dungeon, and the latin verse, / Graven in the stone, that yet denotes the door / Of ARIOSTO’.34 Like Rogers before him and Shelley after him, Lord Byron was inspired by his interest in both Italian epic poets to pass through Ferrara on his way south from Venice in April 1817; he was struck most keenly, however, by the monument to Tasso’s imprisonment, as he observed in a letter to his friend and collaborator John Cam Hobhouse, and then in the printed ‘Advertisement’ to ‘The Lament of Tasso’, composed in Bologna immediately after his visit and sent post-haste to John Murray for publication in London: At Ferrara, in the Library, are preserved the original MSS. of Tasso’s Gierusalemme and of Guarini’s Pastor Fido, with letters of Tasso, one from Titian to Ariosto, and the inkstand and chair, the tomb and the house, of the latter. But, as misfortune has a greater interest for posterity, and little or none for the contemporary, the cell where Tasso was confined in the

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hospital of St. Anna attracts a more fixed attention than the residence or the monument of Ariosto – at least it had this effect on me. There are two inscriptions, one on the outer gate, the second over the cell itself, inviting, unnecessarily, the wonder and indignation of the spectator.35

Byron’s own indignation at the poet’s perceived mistreatment at the hands of the Estes is readily apparent in the stanzas on Ferrara in the fourth canto of Childe Harold, printed by Murray in early 1818, where ‘Tasso is their glory and their shame’ (stanza 36, 316) and the city itself is urged to listen again to his poetry and to consider how even his prolonged imprisonment there was not enough to overthrow his mind or destroy his poetic reputation: Hark to his strain! and then survey his cell! And see how dearly earn’d Torquato’s fame, And where Alfonso bade his poet dwell: The miserable despot could not quell The insulted mind he sought to quench, and blend With the surrounding maniacs, in the hell Where he had plunged it. Glory without end Scatter’d the clouds away; and on that name attend The tears and praises of all time. (stanza 36 and 37, 317–25)36

These stanzas occasioned one of the longest entries in the notes written by its dedicatee to accompany the printing of the final instalment of Byron’s poem, Hobhouse’s Historical Illustrations of the Fourth Canto of Child Harold (1818). His ‘Essay on the Imprisonment of Tasso’ gives a masterly summary in English of the Italian and French scholarship on the potential motives for the poet’s incarceration, with the emphasis again firmly on Duke Alfonso’s tyranny, and also a full account of the period in St Anna, clarifying that the tiny cell with the misleading inscription currently shown as Tasso’s was his only for eighteen months, before he was moved to more spacious apartments in the hospital for the remaining six years of his imprisonment. Hobhouse’s description of the cell itself tends towards the factual, unlike other more emotional English accounts, but it does draw attention to another curious aspect of the conduct of many visitors: Rispettate, O Posteri, la celebrità di questa stanza, dove Torquato Tasso infermo piu di tristezza che delirio, ditenuto dimorà anni VII mesi II, scrisse verse e prose, e fu rimesso in libertà ad instanza della città di Bergamo, nel giorno VI Luglio 1586.

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[Make known, oh posterity, the fame of this room, where Torquato Tasso, sick with melancholy rather than madness, was detained and spent seven years and two months, composed verse and prose, and was set free at the behest of the city of Bergamo, on the sixth day of July 1586.] The dungeon is below the ground floor of the hospital, and the light penetrates through its grated window from a small yard, which seems to have been common to other cells. It is nine paces long, between five and six wide, and about seven feet high. The bedstead, so they tell, has been carried off piecemeal, and the door half cut away by the devotion of those whom ‘the verse and prose’ of the prisoner have brought to Ferrara.37

Hobhouse thus seems to anticipate the modern critical notion of a literary pilgrimage by using the language of religious devotion in relation to these early literary visitors, who were driven to take and preserve their own physical relics from what Byron has the poet himself imagine as ‘a consecrated spot’ (240) at the end of ‘The Lament of Tasso’. In spite of the predominantly Catholic associations of such behaviour, English visitors were evidently not entirely immune to the fevered quasi-religious feelings inspired by the place: Jameson refers to ‘the hallowed associations connected with the spot’ in the early 1820s,38 and at least one such relic from Tasso’s cell had found its way to England only a few years earlier, concealed in a letter written by Shelley in early November 1818, describing his visit to Ferrara and the literary treasures in its library, and promptly sent to Thomas Love Peacock at Marlowe: We went afterwards to see his prison in the hospital of Santa Anna and I enclose you a piece of the wood of the very door which for seven years & three months divided this glorious being from the air & the light which had nourished in him those impulses which he has communicated through his poetry to thousands. The dungeon is low & dark, & when I say it is really a very decent dungeon, I speak as one who has seen the prisons in the Doges palace at Venice. But [it] is a horrible abode for the coarsest & the meanest thing that ever wore the shape of man, much more for one of delicate susceptibilities and elevated fancies. It is low, & has a grated window, & being sunk some feet below the level of the earth is full of unwholesome damps. In the darkest corner is a mark in the wall where the chains were rivetted which bound him hand & foot.39

Peacock soon acknowledged receipt of the gift in ‘your very interesting letter from Ferrara’, assuring Shelley in suitably reverent language that he had already ‘laid up in consecrated paper the morsels of Tasso’s dungeon door’.40

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Shelley’s own elevated poetic fancies are unwittingly revealed in his description of Tasso’s ‘horrible abode’. There is nothing in Manso to suggest that the poet was ever confined in chains during his imprisonment; Shelley’s supposition, perhaps inspired instead by Byron’s Tasso, who defiantly claims in the central section of his ‘Lament’ that ‘The very love which lock’d me to my chain / Hath lighten’d half its weight’ (144–5),41 suggests that this visit briefly re-affirmed his own imaginative empathy with the prisoner’s plight. This had already been evident when, on finishing Manso’s Vita soon after his arrival in Italy six months earlier, he informed Peacock of his plan to compose, like Goethe before him, a tragedy in verse on Tasso’s life. The play was never completed, however, and all that remains of it is a brief fragment of a scene and a single song, in which the confined poet summons up a consolatory vision of the absent Leonora, both of which were printed posthumously. If Shelley’s artistic engagement with the figure of Tasso never came to fruition, even after his visit to Ferrara, the sight of his cell had a much more immediate impact on Byron’s poetry. Byron’s interest in Tasso and his poetry predated his final departure from England as a social exile in 1816, although it certainly intensified during his time in Italy. Byron’s earlier fondness for Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata is demonstrated in his use of the final line of canto X, ‘ma i suoi pensieri in lui dormir non ponno’, ‘but his thoughts in him can find no rest’ (X, 78, 8), as the epigraph to The Corsair, printed in 1814, and particularly in his attachment to the print of Rinaldo and Armida that adorned his apartment at Kinsham Court in Herefordshire during his affair with Jane Scott in late 1812 and 1813. In contemporary letters to Lady Melbourne the poet revealed his playful assumption of the role of Rinaldo to his older paramour’s Armida, referring to the best-known episode in the poem, in which the hot-headed hero is lured away from his military duty to the enchantress’s bower to be seduced.42 In a way this role-play prefigures Byron’s adoption of the voice of the tormented poet a few years later soon after seeing Tasso’s cell. In the space of a single day, only days after this visit in April 1817, Byron composed the entire 247 lines of ‘The Lament of Tasso’. Byron’s poem conveys, more than any other work imagining Tasso’s imprisonment, a direct impression of the effect of the physical space on the poet’s mind. His striking opening and the later portrayals of the poet’s fellow inmates, where ‘each is tortured in his separate hell’ and yet ‘crowded in our solitudes’ (87–8), leave an indelible mark on contempo-

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rary and later generations of readers of the poem across Europe. Jameson’s own visual recollection of the cell, for example, is filtered through Byron’s vivid description of the ‘abhorred grate’, which:

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Marring the sunbeams with its hideous shade Works through the throbbing eyeball to the brain, With a hot sense of heaviness and pain.

(8–10)43

The short third section of the poem focuses exclusively on the other inhabitants of the hospital and their jailors, who are unseen by the poet but whose troubling presence and predicaments are keenly conveyed in the terrifying sounds and sights that Byron imagines emanating from beyond the walls of Tasso’s solitary cell: Above me, hark! the long and maniac cry Of minds and bodies in captivity. And hark! the lash and the increasing howl, And the half-inarticulate blasphemy! There be some here with worse than frenzy foul, Some who do still goad on the o’erlabour’d mind, And dim the little light that’s left behind With needless torture, as their tyrant will Is wound up to the lust of doing ill: With these and with their victims am I class’d, ’Mid sounds and sights like these long years have pass’d; ’Mid sights and sounds like these my life may close: So let it be – for then I shall repose. (65–77)44

Although classed among the insane by his tormentors, Byron’s Tasso consciously sets himself apart from the other inmates, desperately holding on to his reason in spite of his adverse circumstances. If he fully expects to die in prison, and in some ways would welcome the release that only death could bring, he will not actively seek it for himself, refusing to ‘sanction with self-slaughter the dull lie / Which snared me here, and with the brand of shame / Stamp Madness deep into my memory’ (214– 16). The struggle to maintain his reason is a strenuous one, however, as the poet has to ward off the vexations of ‘a strange demon’ (192) in his cell, and resist the growing suspicion that ‘Spirits may be leagued’ (199) with his mortal enemies against him. The silent supernatural presence in Byron’s poem is very different from the friendly spirit who converses with the poet in Manso and Leopardi, and, as Tasso’s sense of earthly and

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heavenly abandonment increases, he comes perilously close to despair, fearing that ‘the Powers of Evil’ might ultimately ‘prevail / Against the outworn creature they assail’ (201–3).45 The best palliative against this despair is poetry itself. Byron, perhaps influenced by the inscription above the cell door referring to Tasso’s continued composition of verse and prose while in St Anna, takes a historical liberty in assigning the completion of his Christian epic Gerusalemme liberata to the period of imprisonment. In the second section of ‘The Lament’ the English poet imagines Tasso blotting with tears the final page of his manuscript, presumably the very one that Byron had recently seen for himself in Ferrara, on the completion of his ‘pleasant task’ (33). The poem had actually been finished by about 1576, the putative date for both Goldoni’s and Goethe’s plays on Tasso’s life, although it was not printed in a complete, albeit unauthorised, edition until some five years later. In reality the imprisoned poet frequently bemoaned the mistreatment of his great poem at the hands of unscrupulous printers, but for Byron’s Tasso it becomes instead his ‘long-sustaining friend of many years’ (34) and his ‘soul’s child’ (37), capable of providing his one constant source of consolation, escape, and even delight amid the ‘long years of outrage, calumny, and wrong’ (3):      I stoop not to despair; For I have battled with mine agony, And made me wings wherewith to overfly The narrow circus of my dungeon wall, And freed the Holy Sepulchre from thrall; And revell’d among men and things divine, And pour’d my spirit over Palestine, In honour of the sacred war for Him, The God who was on earth and is in heaven, For he has strengthen’d me in heart and limb. That through this sufferance I might be forgiven, I have employ’d my penance to record How Salem’s shrine was won, and how adored.

(22–34)46

Byron conveys a very different idea of the effect that the composition of his epic poem has on Tasso’s state of mind from that in an earlier English work by the professional physician and amateur literary critic Nathan Drake. The second of Drake’s Literary Hours, printed in 1798, focuses ‘On the Government of the Imagination: on the Frenzy of Tasso and

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Collins’ in an essay in which Drake is concerned with demonstrating what can happen to the poetic imagination when it becomes unchecked by reason: But should this brilliant faculty be nurtured on the bosom of enthusiasm, or romantic expectation, or be left to revel in all its native wildness of combination, and to plunge into all the visionary terrors of supernatural agency, undiverted by the deductions of truth, or the sober realities of existence, it will too often prove the cause of acute misery, of melancholy, and even of distraction.47

In the case of Tasso, however, he chooses to ignore any connection between the poet’s doomed ‘romantic expectation’ and his perturbed mind, and is thus unique in his disregard of any role for Leonora in Tasso’s misfortunes. Drake lays the blame instead on the process of ‘composition of his immortal epic’ itself, where Tasso gave free rein to the ‘dangerous credulity’ of his imagination in his vivid poetic descriptions of ‘the visionary terrors of supernatural agency’, and on the poet’s ardent ‘hopes of immediate and extensive fame’ for it. In Drake’s view it was Tasso’s ‘keen sense of disappointment’ at the initially critical reception of his great poem, and of the supernatural and amorous episodes in particular, which ‘laid, most probably the foundation of his succeeding derangement’.48 Although Tasso himself had argued, not always entirely convincingly, that episodes such as the council in hell in canto IV and the enchanted forest in canto XIII were essential to the unity of a poem designed to reveal the divine will in its triumph over the many diabolical agents at work in it, Drake sees them rather as unleashing those powerful forces which went on to overwhelm entirely the fragile mind of a poet with ‘an imagination too prone to admit the praeternatural and strange’.49 Where, in Drake’s eyes, the poetic imagination is the catalyst for Tasso’s subsequent spirit visions and distraction, in Byron’s poem it is a primary source of strength in warding off this madness and despair. The only other form of solace for the imprisoned poet is his enduring love for Leonora. This ‘love which knows not to despair’ (111) is, however, depicted by Byron as complex and certainly unrequited. Whereas Shelley, Leopardi, and Prescott all imply a mutual attachment between poet and princess that inspires Tasso’s consoling visions of Leonora in their works, Byron’s poet confronts directly her shame and embarrassment in response to his socially unacceptable love:

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And thou, Leonora! thou – who wert ashamed That such as I could love – who blush’d to hear To less than monarchs that thou couldst be dear.

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(228–30)50

If the imputation of madness against the poet appears to have arisen initially from the discovery of his socially presumptuous love, then the princess’s silence in the poem (‘they call’d me mad – and why? / Oh Leonora! wilt not thou reply?’: 48–9) seems to make her complicit in Tasso’s punishment. There is also, however, the troubling implication that the poet himself may be equally complicit in his own punishment. Byron may be alluding here to the historical Tasso’s cryptic suggestion in a letter cited by Manso, that he had agreed to feign and be treated for his madness in order to save himself from a more severe punishment at the hands of Duke Alfonso, a hint soon to be developed at great length in the work of the Italian scholar Giovanni Rosini; 51 certainly his Tasso is prepared to admit that his unattainable love constitutes a madness of sorts, understanding that ‘A Princess was no love-mate for a bard’ (123): I was indeed delirious in my heart To lift my love so lofty as thou art; But still my frenzy was not of the mind: I knew my fault, and feel my punishment Not less because I suffer it unbent.

(50–4)52

In spite, or perhaps because of, the impossibility of fulfilment and lack of reciprocity in his love, the poet continues to draw strength from his intense feelings towards Leonora. As in many other portrayals of the imprisoned poet, this Tasso is capable of summoning up a vision of the absent beloved to re-ignite his ‘unquench’d’ (112) love, figured by Byron as a bolt of lightning ready to flash forth at the mere sound of her name: My heart can multiply thine image still; Successful love may sate itself away; The wretched are the faithful.

(58–60)53

While the unrequited nature of this love necessarily precludes earthly satisfaction, for Byron’s Tasso it offers a more profound level of natural or even cosmic fulfilment, in which the ineffable ‘One Want’ (168) that has troubled the heart and soul of the poet from his ‘very birth’ resolves itself in the human form of Leonora, binding them inextricably together: ‘And

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then I lost my being, all to be / Absorb’d in thine’ (171–2). It is this allencompassing and everlasting love, revealed unwittingly in the poet’s eyes, that leads directly to his present desperate predicament, and yet, paradoxically, it is this same feeling which allows him to retain his sanity (‘I should be fit for this cell, which wrongs me – but for thee’: 142–3), and indeed ultimately his humanity: Yes, Sister of my Sovereign! for thy sake I weed all bitterness from out my breast, It hath no business where thou art a guest; Thy brother hates – but I cannot detest; Thou pitiest not – but I cannot forsake.

(106–10)54

In the final section of the poem Byron uses the advantage of historical perspective to grant his poet the status of a seer. Writing more than two centuries after the historical Tasso’s death, Byron permits his poet the ability to predict a time when his ‘blighted name’ (217) will have become immortal, and when his miserable abode will eclipse the fame of everything else in Ferrara, regarded by visitors as ‘a consecrated spot’ (239): A future temple of my present cell, Which nations yet shall visit for my sake. While thou, Ferrara! when no longer dwell The ducal chiefs within thee, shalt fall down, And crumbling piecemeal view thy hearthless halls, A poet’s wreath shall be thy only crown, – A poet’s dungeon thy most far renown.

(220–6)55

The second of Tasso’s self-fulfilling prophecies concludes the poem, hinting at the power of poetry itself in immortalising the name of Leonora alongside that of the poet. Tasso himself had written a celebrated sequence of three early sonnets promising to eternise the youth of his unnamed beloved in her old age (although they were probably not intended for Leonora d’Este), which had been transformed successfully into English verse at the end of the sixteenth century in Samuel Daniel’s sonnet sequence Delia;56 it is possible that Byron is recalling these poems at the end of his own. Certainly the element of threat that Kari Lokke has detected in the final address to Leonora is present in Tasso’s own immortality sonnets. Whether or not this second prophecy constitutes ‘a threat or a curse’ rather than an expression of love,57 it certainly imagines a

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future in which poetry has risen to prominence over hereditary status: But Thou – when all that Birth and Beauty throws Of magic round thee is extinct – shall have One half the laurel which o’ershades my grave. No power in death can tear our names apart, As none in life could rend thee from my heart. Yes, Leonora! it shall be our fate To be entwined for ever – but too late!

(241–7)58

Byron soon returned to this theme in the Ferrara stanzas in canto IV of Childe Harold, where the idea of a curse on ‘the antique brood / Of Este’ (stanza 35, 310–11) is referred to directly, implying that Alfonso’s inability to produce a male heir, which led to the reversion of Ferrara and most of the Este territories to papal control on his death in 1597, only two years after Tasso’s own, was some form of punishment for the prolonged mistreatment of his court poet. If his Tasso can generously offer Leonora half of his laurel wreath to ensure her everlasting fame, Byron’s Harold is far more scathing about the survival of Alfonso’s royal name in connection to that of his much-abused poet: While thine Would rot in its oblivion – in the sink Of worthless dust, which from thy boasted line Is shaken into nothing – but the link Thou formest in his fortunes bids us think Of thy poor malice, naming thee with scorn: Alfonso! how thy ducal pageants shrink From thee! if in another station born, Scarce fit to be the slave of him thou madest to mourn: Thou! form’d to eat, and be despised, and die, Even as the beasts that perish, save that thou Hadst a more splendid trough and wider sty: He! with a glory round his furrow’d brow, Which emanated then, and dazzles now. (stanza 37 and 38, 325–38)59

Clearly for Byron the conferral of poetic immortality could be a double-edged sword, ensuring fame or infamy in equal measure. What both examples in relation to the figure of Tasso illustrate most readily, however, is that historical fact played only a very minor role in ensuring

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the perpetuation of the legends surrounding the poet’s troubled life and loves. The nineteenth-century denigration of Duke Alfonso and celebration of Tasso’s love for Leonora should have been rebutted once and for all by the work of Angelo Solerti, whose extensive trawl through the Estense archives in Modena and Ferrara for his monumental biography, printed in 1895, revealed definitively that the poet had received treatment at St Anna at the duke’s request for his increasingly erratic and maniacal behaviour, seemingly a manifestation of a form of paranoid schizophrenia described by the biographer as a ‘monomania religiosa’.60 This more prosaic but infinitely sadder truth has, however, still never quite superseded the legend of Tasso’s suffering at the hands of the Estes. As Anna Jameson admits in her chapter on Leonora in The Loves of the Poets, written only a few years later and clearly influenced by Byron’s ‘Lament’ as a celebration of the (male) poet’s ‘power of immortalising the object of his love’, the example of Tasso does not depend on verifiable historical accuracy to account for its continued power to move: Leonora d’Este, a princess of the proudest house in Europe, might have wedded an emperor, and have been forgotten. The idea, true or false, that she it was who broke the heart and frenzied the brain of Tasso, has glorified her to future ages.61

The everlasting fame prophesied for Tasso at the end of Byron’s poem was also much in evidence in France in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The contrast drawn between crown and laurel wreath by Byron’s poet as he imagines Ferrara’s desolate future was to become a key element of the denouement in the earliest French dramatic representation of Tasso’s life, Alexandre-Vincent Pineux Duval’s Le Tasse, drame historique en cinq actes, first performed in Paris in December 1826. The eponymous role had been written for François-Joseph Talma, the greatest French actor of his generation, but the onset of his terminal illness meant that it passed instead to a younger actor, Monsieur Firmin, who in turn received some extraordinary deathbed advice on how best to play the role on a visit to his dying colleague in September 1826: Talma ne l’entretient que des réflexions nouvelles que lui avait inspirées sa passion pour le théatre, au milieu meme des plus cruelles souffrances. ‘Ah! mon ami,’ lui dit-il, ‘que nous sommes encore loin de la vérité!’ ‘Eh bien! Vous allez jouer le Tasse?’ (C’est un role que Talma devait remplir avant sa maladie.) ‘Il y a une belle scène au cinquième acte; celle où, dans l’espoir de rendre la raison au malheureux Torquato, on lui parle des honneurs qui

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l’attendent, de la couronne qui va ceindre son front. Au mot de couronne, il semble se ranimer. Une couronne à moi! ... Alphonse ne me refusera donc plus sa soeur! ... On la lui présente, et dit en la regardant avec douleur: Elle n’est pas d’or! Ce n’est que du laurier. Ah! le frère n’y consentira pas ...–Tenez’, poursuivit Talma, ‘voici comment j’aurais rendu son stupide abattement’:   Il se soulève alors avec peine et prend, sur son lit de douleur, une attitude si vraie, sa figure exprime si bien le dernier degré de la folie, qu’il semblait que le grande ombre du Tasse fut sortie de son tombeau. (In the midst of his cruel sufferings Talma spoke only of the new ideas that had inspired his passionate love for the theatre. ‘Ah, my friend,’ he said to him, ‘how far we still are from the truth! So you are going to play Le Tasse?’ (It was a part intended for Talma before his illness.) ‘There is a fine scene in the fifth act, the one where, in the hope of restoring poor Torquato’s reason, they tell him of the honours that await him, of the crown that will grace his brow.’ At the word ‘crown’ he seems to rally. ‘A crown for me! Alphonse will not then refuse me his sister!’ They present the crown to him, and looking at it with great sadness, he says, ‘It is not made of gold! It is only laurel. Oh, her brother will never give his consent’. ‘Look!’ continued Talma, ‘this is how I would have played his dull prostration.’   Then rising with difficulty from his bed of suffering, he struck an attitude so true. His face expressed so well the last stage of madness that it seemed as if the mighty shade of the Italian poet had stepped forth from his tomb.)62

The offer of the laurel wreath to the poet here alludes to the historical decision by Pope Clement VIII and his nephews to have Tasso crowned as laureate on the Campidoglio in Rome, like Petrarch before him, only for his untimely death in April 1595 to prevent the plan reaching fruition. What should have provided a source of hope to the poet, however, as it does in the short final act of Jacopo Ferretti’s libretto for Donizetti’s opera semiseria on Tasso’s life, first performed in Rome in 1833, in Pineux Duval’s play leads instead to disappointment and further anguish, as he can only dream in his madness of marrying Élèonore, before his unhistorical death in the final scene of the play. In spite of the pre-eminence that Byron’s Tasso granted to the laurel wreath that he was prepared to share with Leonora, evidently it would not always be deemed a superior substitute for a royal crown. Byron’s poem did, however, also have a more positive impact on French responses to Tasso in the same decade. The earlier of Eugène Delacroix’s two portraits of the imprisoned poet, Le Tasse à l’hôpital Sainte-Anne de Ferrara, completed in 1824, was inspired by a French translation of ‘The

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Lament of Tasso’, with the French artist clearly sharing viscerally the English poet’s indignant response to Tasso’s mistreatment, and regretting only that he had not been able to read the poem in its original language: 63 N’est-ce pas que cette vie du Tasse est bien intéressante? Que cet homme a été malheureux! Qu’on est rempli d’indignation contre ces indignes protecteurs qui l’opprimaient sous le prétexte de le garantir contre ses ennemis, et qui le privaient de ses chers manuscrits! Que de pleurs de rage et d’indignation il a dû verser en voyant que pour les lui enlever plus sûrement on l’accusait de folie et d’impuissance produire. Qu’il a dû des fois user sa tête à ses indignes barreaux, en pensant à la bassesse des hommes, et accuser l’insuffisante tendresse de celle qu’il a immortalisée en son amour! Que ses jours devaient couler avec lenteur, et quelle douleur encore de les voir se perdre infructueux dans le cachot d’un maniaque! On pleure pour lui: on s’agite sur sa chaise en lisant cette vie; les yeux deviennent menaçants, les dents se serrent de colère quand on y pense. Un de mes regrets est de n’avoir pu lire la belle élégie de lord Byron: je dis belle, parce qu’il a l’âme trop brûlante et que le sujet lui convient trop bien pour qu’il ne l’ait saisi dans le bon sens. (Isn’t Tasso’s life truly interesting? How unhappy that man was! How one is filled with indignation against those unworthy protectors who oppressed him under the pretext of protecting him from his enemies, and who deprived him of his cherished manuscripts! How many tears of rage and indignation he must have shed in seeing that, in order to take them from him more certainly, they accused him of madness and creative sterility. How he must have worn his head sometimes against those unworthy prison bars, thinking about the corruption of mankind, and accused the insufficient affection of the woman whom he immortalised with his love! How his days must have passed with slowness, and what pain to see them lost fruitless in the cell of a madman! You cry for him: you squirm on your chair just reading about that life; your eyes become threatening, you grit your teeth in anger just thinking about it. One of my regrets is not to have read the beautiful elegy by Lord Byron [in the original]: I say beautiful, because he has a soul too burning and the subject suits him too well for him not to have seized upon it in the right way.)64

Delacroix was evidently also familiar with aspects of Tasso’s biography that are not alluded to specifically by Byron, but the emphasis on the imprisoned poet’s immortal love for his scornful beloved in the painter’s account seems to derive directly from the English poem. Delacroix’s indebtedness to Byron in the portrait itself is manifest in the way in which his melancholy poet similarly tries to hold on to his reason by

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studiously ignoring and thus distancing himself from the other desperate inmates of St Anna, who in this case are seen gawping at Tasso from the confines of his cell. Some fifteen years later Delacroix painted another portrait, Tasso dans l’asile de fous (1839), in which the poet himself has now become dishevelled and barefoot, even as he tries to maintain his calm. This latter rendering of the imprisoned poet in turn inspired a sonnet by Charles Baudelaire, ‘Sur le Tasse en Prison d’Eugène Delacroix’, originally composed in 1844 but printed, in a revised form, as late as 1864, where the description of ‘ce génie enfermé dans un taudis malsain’, ‘this genius locked up in an unhealthy hovel’ (9), itself hearkens back to Byron’s unsettling description of the terrifying sounds that echo around Tasso’s cell: Les rires enivrants dont s’emplit la prison Vers l’étrange et l’absurde invitent sa raison; Le Doute l’environne, et la Peur ridicule, Hideuse et multiforme, autour de lui circule.

(5–8)

(The intoxicating laughs with which the prison fills towards the strange and the absurd invite his reason; Doubt surrounds him and ridiculous Fear, hideous and multiform, circles around him.)65

Later in the same decade as the original version of Baudelaire’s sonnet on Delacroix’s painting, Byron’s poem was also used as one of the twin sources for Franz Liszt’s symphonic poem on the life of the Italian poet. The Hungarian composer’s Tasso, lamento e trionfo was one of his earliest experiments in this new musical form, commissioned as a prelude to a performance of Goethe’s Torquato Tasso at the Weimar court in 1849 to celebrate the centenary of the German poet’s birth. Goethe’s play was the principal source for the minor-key lament in the opening movement of the piece, but Byron’s poem, and specifically its prophecy of Tasso’s literary immortality, was the inspiration for Liszt’s musical rendering of the imprisoned poet’s triumph in its final movement, which is signalled by a switch into the corresponding major key. The literary immortality that Byron’s Tasso had imagined for himself at the end of ‘The Lament’ was now, some 250 years after the historical poet’s death, manifesting itself throughout much of Europe across a far wider range of artistic forms.

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english accounts of tasso’s ‘family romances’ If Tasso’s madness, imprisonment, and putative love for Leonora were the principal areas of interest for artistic renderings of imagined scenes from the poet’s life, they were by no means the only popular ones. In England in the late 1820s and the 1830s poets and writers were drawn increasingly to another episode rich in pathos recounted in Manso’s biography, Tasso’s surreptitious return in the summer of 1577 to his birthplace, and his reunion with his older sister Cornelia, whom the poet had not seen for almost twenty-five years. His happy sojourn with the widowed Cornelia and her children for a few months in Sorrento, on the southern tip of the Bay of Naples, allowed poets to envisage two potential sources of comfort against the torments of Tasso’s life in Ferrara, from which he was seeking refuge on his return south. The first was the place itself, which became connected nostalgically with the poet’s boyhood innocence and happiness; Sorrento was visited regularly by English poets in the nineteenth century both for its natural beauty and for its specific associations with Tasso, whose place of birth had been restored at the instigation of Joseph Bonaparte during his brief reign as King of Naples at the start of the century. The second source of solace was the enduring love of Cornelia, his estranged sister and closest surviving relative. The earliest English account of Tasso’s connection to Sorrento, in the poem ‘Amalfi’ in the second edition of Samuel Rogers’s Italy, a Poem (1828), did not, however, even mention the poet’s brief return to his birthplace in later life, imagining instead an unnamed young boy on the beach beneath the sheer cliff, blissfully unaware of the troubles that his poetic calling would cause for him, where, once among The children gathering shells along the shore, One laughed and played, unconscious of his fate; His to drink deep of sorrow, and thro’ life, To be the scorn of them that knew him not, Trampling alike the giver and his gift, The gift a pearl precious, inestimable, A lay divine, a lay of love and war, To charm, ennoble, and, from age to age, Sweeten the labour, when the oar was plied Or on the ADRIAN or the TUSCAN sea.66

A decade or so later John Reade chose instead to focus exclusively on the poet’s reunion with his sister in the sixth canto of his Italy, a Poem

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(1838), written in the same nine-line Spenserian stanza as Byron’s Childe Harold. On visiting Tasso’s house in Sorrento he was moved to imagine Cornelia at home in her ‘dwelling on the sea-cliff ’s side’ (stanza LIV), keenly awaiting her brother’s return:

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A Lady by its casements sits and sighs, Watching a distant sail whose white wing homeward flies; That light skiff, bird-like, closely nearing now, Shows one therein whose eyes are fixed on her, Those eyes that sunk beneath his sickly brow, And wan as lights within their sepulchre, Now soften with the look familiar Of unforgotten ties! he springs to land, And they embrace as those whose spirits are United: whose affections more expand, As time and distance knit them with a stronger band. The sister’s love, the holy, and the pure, Recals again all Nature’s wonted force Even in TASSO! other loves endure To perish, lighted at an earthlier source, Dimmed by doubt, fear, or buried in remorse: Oh, if there be one pure receptacle, One feeling flowing purer in its course, One love an Angel might not blush to tell, ’Tis when a Sister’s heart to thine doth fondly swell! The exile came for quiet: to forget The blighted hope, the inexplicable wrong: To soften here in solitude regret Of a love stamped immortal in his song! (stanzas LV–LVIII)67

Reade’s descriptions of the exile’s woes in this final stanza and of his inexplicable return to Ferrara in the next (‘thou didst fly / From Nature’s ever fresh and joyous reign, / Back to the deserts of humanity’: stanza LIX) demonstrate an awareness of the most familiar aspects of the poet’s legendary biography, but his rather generalised and sentimental account of everlasting fraternal affection inspired by Tasso’s sudden embrace of Cornelia suggests that the English poet had either not read or curiously chose to ignore the most dramatic details in Manso’s account of the return to Sorrento, which had been translated in John Black’s biography of the

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poet, and also summarised in Wiffen’s ‘Life’ printed with his translation of Jerusalem Delivered in 1824.68 While, according to his earliest Italian biographer, Tasso did indeed complete his journey by boat, he did so in disguise, having, like Erminia in his epic poem, exchanged clothes with a shepherd, who had provided overnight shelter to the poet as he travelled south from Rome on foot. Tasso’s desire to avoid detection was doubly motivated, as he feared apprehension by agents of either the Duke of Ferrara, from whose service he had absconded, or the Viceroy of Naples, from whose territories he had been banished for life when still a child as a result of his father’s ill-judged political allegiances. Even when he reached his sister Tasso maintained his pretence, claiming to be a messenger bringing Cornelia news of her brother’s calamitous circumstances in order to test her loyalty after such a long absence. Her response, to fall immediately into a dangerous swoon, convinced Tasso of her continued affection for him, so that he was then moved to comfort her and only gradually reveal his true identity, in order not to startle Cornelia still further. Their emotional reunion followed Cornelia’s recovery on discovering the true identity of her visitor, leading to the invitation to stay with her in Sorrento and an assurance of utmost secrecy, with Cornelia pretending that the family guest was a cousin from Bergamo. The next English poem to focus on Tasso and Cornelia’s reunion, Mary Boddington’s ‘Written at Sorrento’ from the Poems of 1839,69 opens with a description of an unnamed ‘lone wayfaring man’ dressed ‘in a palmer’s weed’, an alteration to Manso’s account of the disguised poet suggested by the brief extract from Madame de Stael’s romantic novel Corinne (1807), which is printed as the epigraph to the poem: Devant vous est Sorrente, là demeuroit la soeur de Tasse, quand il vint en pèlerin demander à cette obscure amie un asile contre l’injustice des princes: ses longues douleurs avoient presque égaré sa raison; il ne lui restaient que la connaissance des choses divines, toutes les images de la terre étaient troublées. (In front of you is Sorrento, where the sister of Tasso lived when he came as a pilgrim to seek shelter with this estranged friend from the injustice of princes: his long sorrows had almost upset his reason; nothing remained but his knowledge of divine mysteries, all the reflections of the earth had become obscure to him.)

Like Reade before her, Boddington focuses on Tasso’s physical and mental deterioration as he returns to his place of birth, emphasising that ‘the deep mark / Of sorrow on his brow’ and ‘hollow eye’ are manifesta-

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tions of ‘a disorder’d mind / Driven from its lofty grapplings by the scorn / And tyranny of man’.70 The English poet vividly describes the physical beauty of Sorrento, where the evening light ‘touch’d with burnish’d hues / Each jutting cape and every classic swell / Of that enchanting coast’. Initially, however, the troubled traveller is unmoved by what lies before him, instead gazing wistfully on the stars, as in Madame de Stael’s image of the poet seemingly contemplating either his love for Leonora or his mistreatment at the hands of her brother. As Tasso approaches his childhood home, Boddington distinguishes in stark terms the current circumstances of the two siblings: Sorrow had touch’d his brain, – and on he went, Seeking the vine-clad home where she still dwelt Who was the gentle sister of his blood, But not of his high destiny, – or woe. Hers was an humble, but more peaceful lot, And still she sat within her trellised bower, As in the happy morning of their lives, Ere the wild workings of his lofty mind Had driv’n him on the world. Time had not changed The gentle beaming of her quiet eye, Or sorrow furrowed her still ruddy cheek; She had but mildly passed from infancy Into the seriousness of womanhood; But in that wasted form that met her eye, Showing hope quenched and ever-gnawing grief, Nothing remained of that which once had been: ’Stead of one full of home-awak’ning joy, He stood a daylight spectre in the porch Where they had often gamboll’d.71

The house itself, like his sister, remains largely unchanged, and this marked contrast between their stability and Tasso’s visible decline seems only to stress the remoteness of the consolation and shelter that the returning poet is so desperately seeking. A sudden flash of Cornelia’s fraternal affection and female intuition, however, leads to the final revelation of the mysterious visitor’s identity: All was still as he had left it; still the purple grape Fell in rich clusters o’er the leafy shed, Mingling its tender tendrils with the buds Of flagrant myrtle and the orange flower.

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– Only himself was changed: vainly man’s eye Had in his altered features sought the lines Of the once well-known face: but woman’s heart Never forgets that which it once has loved, And she was in his arms ere yet his voice Had told her it was Tasso!72

The sister’s immediate recognition and embrace of her much-changed brother in Boddington’s poem again ignores the details in Manso’s account of the reunion, and the added suggestion that no man could ever have recognised him ironically makes redundant Tasso’s disguise and caution in the earliest account of his return to Sorrento. The only English work to move beyond the initial recognition and reunion of brother and sister is Walter Savage Landor’s ‘Imaginary Conversation’ between Tasso and Cornelia, first printed in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine ( January 1843), a few years after this brief spate of English poems focusing on the troubled poet’s return to Sorrento. The imagined dialogue between the siblings, however, is full of historical inaccuracies. While the poet has again arrived seeking comfort from both his sister and his place of birth, in this instance Landor imagines that Tasso is seeking solace specifically for the death of his beloved Leonora, something that Cornelia evidently misunderstands at the start of their conversation. Historically the princess did not die until 1581, four years after the poet’s stay in Sorrento, by which time Tasso was confined in St Anna. Landor, however, seems to have set the episode, whether knowingly or otherwise, after this period of imprisonment and apparent madness; certainly Cornelia herself is aware of the exact nature of the sufferings that her brother has undergone, even if the poet is dismayed to learn that news of his ‘imprisonment, derision, [and] madness’ in Ferrara has reached the town of his birth. Cornelia naturally offers Tasso the ‘comfort of a sister’s love’, but her physical proximity instead only unnerves the poet: ‘Then do not rest thy face upon my arm; it so reminds me of her. And thy tears, too! they melt me into her grave.’73 Although ostensibly set in Sorrento, the first half of Landor’s dialogue echoes many of the themes familiar from the ventriloquised monologues usually attributed to the imprisoned poet. Thus Landor’s Tasso reveals to his sister the extent of his ‘insatiable love’ for Leonora, and how he has repeatedly had visions of her even ‘in the broad daylight, when my eyes were open’, while it is left to Cornelia herself to suggest, like Byron’s figure of the poet, that this love and his poetic fame will immortalise the

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princess: ‘Meanwhile, in the laurels of my Torquato, there will always be one leaf, above man’s reach, above time’s wrath and injury, inscribed with the name of Leonora.’74 These words do finally prove to be a source of some fraternal solace to Tasso; after the lamentations for and visions of his beloved, the poet falls into a dual reverie, inspired by the recollection of composing his great epic poem on the liberation of Jerusalem (‘I seem to live back in those days. I feel the helmet on my head; I wave the standard over it’) and the memory of their late father’s house in Bergamo, as well as a returning sense of familiarity with and shared comfort from their own place of birth: ‘Away to Sorrento – I knew the road – a few strides brought me back – here I am. Tomorrow, my Cornelia, we will walk together, as we used to do, into the cool and quiet caves on the shore; and we will catch the little breezes as they come in and go out again on the backs of the jocund waves.’75 Tasso’s new-found sense of calm and happiness at his sister’s house is confirmed by the sudden appearance of a young boy selling watermelons, singing verses from his pastoral drama Aminta, which in turn inspires the poet to recite aloud his most recent composition. In Landor’s dialogue the return home to the bosom of his surviving family finally allows Tasso to re-engage with his long-dormant poetic muse. This emphasis on the beneficial effects of Tasso’s reunion with his sister in the Sorrento poems and Landor’s imaginary dialogue was a manifestation of the developing English interest in the poet’s complex family relationships, which, over the course of the nineteenth century, came to displace the initial obsession with Tasso and Leonora, particularly in the still popular biographical accounts, as I will explore in the conclusion. notes  1 Henry Layng, ‘The Life of Torquato Tasso’ in Several Pieces in Verse and Prose (London, 1748), 45–82: p. 45.  2 Layng, ‘Life’, pp. 58–9. Dryden had argued in the long prose dedication to the Earl of Musgrave prefacing his translation of Virgil’s Aeneis (1697) that ‘there have been but one great Ilias and one AEnis in so many Ages. The next, but the next with a long interval betwixt, was the Jerusalem: I mean not so much in distance of time, as in Excellency’, granting only Tasso among modern European epic poets a status comparable to that of Homer and Virgil: The Works of John Dryden, 5, ed. William Frost and Vinton A. Dearing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 275.  3 Layng, ‘Life’, p. 68.

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 4 Giovanni Battista Manso, Vita di Torquato Tasso, ed. Bruno Basile (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1995), pp. 65–6.  5 Layng, ‘Life’, pp. 72–3.  6 Lord George Gordon Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, 2, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 136–7.  7 John Hoole, ‘The Life of Tasso’ in Jerusalem Delivered (London, 1763), p. xxxii.  8 Layng, ‘Life’, p. 74.  9 Layng, ‘Life’, pp. 73–5. 10 Hoole, ‘Life of Tasso’, pp. xxxix–xl. 11 Manso, Vita, ed. Basile, pp. 117–18. 12 Manso, Vita, ed. Basile, p. 119. 13 The Poems and Plays of Thomas Wade, ed. John L. McLean (Troy, NY: Whitston, 1997), pp. 27–8. 14 Poems and Plays of Thomas Wade, ed. McLean, pp. 29–30. 15 Giuseppe Compagnoni, Le Veglie di Tasso, ed. Dietmar Rieger (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1992), p. 75. 16 Compagnoni, Le Veglie di Tasso, ed. Rieger, p. 41. 17 Pierantonio Serassi, La Vita di Torquato Tasso (Bergamo, 1785). 18 Anonymous, The Night Thoughts of Torquato Tasso, translated from the Italian by Mrs. ***** (Paris, 1828), p. i. 19 See Umberto Bosco, ‘L’uomo-poeta dei Romantici’ in Aspetti del Romanticismo italiano (Rome: Edizioni Cremonese, 1942), pp. 5–132: p. 114. 20 Giacomo Leopardi, Operette morali, ed. and trans. Giovanni Cecchetti (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 166–7 and pp. 178–9. 21 Leopardi, Operette, pp. 174–7. 22 See, for example, Arnaldo di Benedetto, ‘“La sua vita stessa è una poesia”: sul mito romantico di Torquato Tasso’ in Dal tramonto dei lumi al Romanticismo (Modena: Murchi Editore, 2000), pp. 203–42: pp. 231–4. 23 Leopardi, Operette, pp. 180–1. 24 Henrietta Prescott, Tasso in Poems, written in Newfoundland (London, 1839), pp. 3–58: p. 13. 25 Prescott, Tasso, p. 25. 26 Prescott, Tasso, p. 30. 27 The poem’s epigraph is also taken from the first canto of the epic, from the stanza in which the poet figures himself as a ‘peregrino errante, infra gli scogli, / e fra l’onde agitato e quasi absorto’, ‘wandering pilgrim, perturbed and almost drowned amid the rocks and the waves’ (I, 4, 3–4): Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, ed. Lanfranco Caretti (Turin: Eindaudi, 1971), p. 14. 28 Tasso, Gerusalemme, ed. Caretti, p. 48; translation in Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, ed. and trans. Esolen, p. 39. 29 Prescott, Tasso, p. 37.

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30 See di Benedetto, ‘Mito romantico’, pp. 224–8, and Stefano Jossa, ‘Il luogo della poesia: la prigione del Tasso a Sant’ Anna’ in Siriana Sgavicchia (ed.), Spazi, geografie, testi (Rome: Bulzoni, 2003), pp. 45–57: pp. 45–9. 31 Joseph Cooper Walker, Historical Memoir on Italian Tragedy (London, 1799), p. 128. 32 Anna Brownell Jameson, The Loves of the Poets, by the author of ‘The Diary of an Ennuyée’, 1 (London, 1829), p. 326. 33 The Italian Journal of Samuel Rogers, ed. J. R. Hale (London: Faber and Faber, 1956). 34 Samuel Rogers, Italy, a Poem (London, 1822), p. 75. 35 Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, 4, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 116. 36 Byron, Poetical Works, 2, ed. McGann, p. 136. 37 John Cam Hobhouse, ‘Essay on the Imprisonment of Tasso’ in Historical Illustrations of the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold (London, 1818), pp. 13–29: p 13. The translation of the inscription is mine. 38 Jameson, Loves, p. 325. 39 The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2: Shelley in Italy, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), p. 485. 40 The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2, ed. Jones, p. 485. 41 Byron, Poetical Works, 4, ed. McGann, p. 121. 42 In a letter dated 30 October 1812, Byron asks Lady Melbourne, ‘do you doubt me in the “bowers of Armida”? – I certainly am very much enchanted, but your spells will always retain their full force – try them.’ A few weeks later, in a letter dated 26 November, Byron reveals to her that ‘the decorations of my last apartment were certainly very different – for a print of Rinaldo & Armida was one of the most prominent ornaments’: Byron’s Letters and Journals, 2, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (London: John Murray, 1973), p. 238 and p. 250. The origins of this print are uncertain, but it may have been based on one of the celebrated depictions of the Rinaldo and Armida episode by the Swiss-born and Italian-trained painter Angelica Kauffman, a founding member of the Royal Academy, who worked in London throughout the 1770s. She painted at least two versions of the episode, one of which was displayed at the Royal Academy in 1775; this was later turned into an engraving by William Ryland, as were other works of hers by Francesco Bartolozzi in the mid-1780s. Prints derived from these engravings remained popular until into the nineteenth century: see Wendy W. Roworth (ed.), Angelica Kauffman: a Continental Artist in Georgian London (London: Reaktion, 1992). 43 Byron, Poetical Works, 4, ed. McGann, p. 116. 44 Byron, Poetical Works, 4, ed. McGann, p. 118. 45 Byron, Poetical Works, 4, ed. McGann, pp. 122–3. 46 Byron, Poetical Works, 4, ed. McGann, p. 117.

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47 Nathan Drake, ‘On the Government of the Imagination: on the Frenzy of Tasso and Collins’ in Literary Hours, or Sketches Critical and Narrative (London, 1798), pp. 29–44: p. 29. 48 Drake, ‘On the Government’, p. 33. 49 Drake, ‘On the Government’, p. 36. 50 Byron, Poetical Works, 4, ed. McGann, p. 124. 51 Giovanni Rosini, Saggio sugli amori di T. Tasso e sulle cause della sua prigionia (Pisa, 1832). 52 Byron, Poetical Works, 4, ed. McGann, p. 118. 53 Byron, Poetical Works, 4, ed. McGann, p. 118. 54 Byron, Poetical Works, 4, ed. McGann, p. 120. 55 Byron, Poetical Works, 4, ed. McGann, p. 124. 56 See sonnets XXX, XXXIII, and XXXIV in the first edition of Delia (1592). 57 Kari Lokke, ‘Weimar classicism and Romantic madness: Tasso in Goethe, Byron, and Shelley’, European Romantic Review, 2 (1992), 195–214: p. 214. See also Frederick Burwick, Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination (University Park: Penn State Press, 1996), pp. 112–18. 58 Byron, Poetical Works, 4, ed. McGann, p. 124. 59 Byron, Poetical Works, 2, ed. McGann, pp. 136–7. 60 Angelo Solerti, Vita di Torquato Tasso, 1 (Turin and Rome, 1895), p. 837. 61 Jameson, Loves, p. 1 and p. 288. 62 J.-J. Regnault-Warin, Mémoires sur Talma (Paris, 1904), pp. 253–4; translation in Herbert F. Collins, Talma (London: Faber, 1964), p. 367. 63 Delacroix certainly knew the prose translations by Amédée Pichot of Byron’s complete works, published in ten volumes between 1819 and 1821. ‘The Lament of Tasso’ had appeared in a French translation as early as 1818. 64 Eugène Delacroix, Oeuvres littéraires (Paris: Nizet, 1923), p. 57. Translation in Rebecca M. Pauly, ‘Baudelaire and Delacroix on Tasso in prison: Romantic reflections on a Renaissance martyr’, College Literature, 30 (2003), 120–36: p.  122. 65 Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Yves-Gérard Le Dantec (Bruges: Librairie Gallimard, 1951), p. 226; translation in Pauly, ‘Romantic reflections’, p. 130. 66 Rogers, Italy, pp. 212–13. 67 John Reade, Italy, a Poem (London, 1838), pp. 316–19. 68 Manso, Vita, ed. Basile, pp. 71–4; John Black, Life of Torquato Tasso, 2 (Edinburgh, 1810), pp. 3–4. 69 Mary Boddington, ‘Written at Sorrento’ in Poems (London, 1839), pp. 328–31. In the same year Jules Canonge published a French poem in five cantos on Le Tasse à Sorrente, which he describes, in dedicating it to his own sister, as a family epic. 70 Boddington, ‘Sorrento’, p. 328. 71 Boddington, ‘Sorrento’, p. 330.

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72 Boddington, ‘Sorrento’, p. 331. 73 Walter Savage Landor, ‘Imaginary Conversation: Tasso and Cornelia’ Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine ( January 1843), 62–6: p. 63. 74 Landor, ‘Imaginary Conversation’, p. 64. 75 Landor, ‘Imaginary Conversation’, p. 64.

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Conclusion: the emergence of Tasso’s psychobiography

Many later nineteenth-century English accounts of Tasso’s life began to focus on less positive aspects of his family inheritance, and became increasingly critical in their approach to apparent defects in the poet’s character. J. A. Symonds, for example, begins his biographical chapter by highlighting the poet’s lack of ‘force of character’ and ‘mental vigour’, which generates a feeling of ‘pity tempered by a slight contempt’ in the contemporary reader, whereas before ‘from the study of his history we should then have risen invigorated by the contemplation of heroism’.1 These weaknesses were often associated specifically with certain character traits of either Tasso’s father or mother. Leigh Hunt concludes the ‘Critical Notice’ of Tasso’s life, based on Serassi’s and Black’s biographies, in his Stories from the Italian Poets (1846) with a damning assessment of the poet’s character in relation to what he had inherited from both his parents: His mother is thought to have died of chagrin and impatience at being separated so long from her husband, and not knowing what to do to save her dowry from her brothers; and I take her son to have combined his mother’s ultra-sensitive organisation with his father’s worldly imprudence and unequal spirits. The addition of the nervous temperament of one parent to the aspiring nature of the other gave rise to the poet’s trembling eagerness for distinction; and Torquato’s very love for them both hindered him from seeing what should have been corrected in the infirmities which he inherited. Falling from the highest hopes of prosperity into the most painful afflictions, he thus wanted solid principles of action to support him, and was forced to retreat upon an excess of self-esteem, which allowed his pride to become a beggar, and his naturally kind, loving, just, and heroical disposition to condescend to almost every species of inconsistency. The Duke of Ferrara, he complains, did not believe a word he said; and the fact

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is, that, partly from disease, and partly from a want of courage to look his defects in the face, he beheld the same things in so many different lights, and according as it suited him at the moment, that, without intending falsehood, his statements are really not to be relied on.2

Tasso’s early years with his mother in Sorrento and Naples, and especially his terminal separation from her in 1554, when he joined his father in Rome at only ten years old, became a source of great interest to English biographers, particularly as the poet himself had recalled this deeply traumatic event in one of his most personal and moving poems, composed almost a quarter of a century later and cited in almost every nineteenth-century account of his life. The unfinished ‘Canzone al Metauro’, addressed to the river that ran by the Duke of Urbino’s residence at Casteldurante, where Tasso stayed briefly during another of his flights from Ferrara in the summer of 1578, begins as a simple plea for shelter and potential aristocratic patronage. In it the poet figures himself as a ‘fugace peregrino’, ‘pilgrim in flight’ (4), not unlike the ‘peregrino errante’, ‘wandering pilgrim’ (I, iv, 3), in the dedicatory stanza to Duke Alfonso in the completed but as yet unprinted Gerusalemme liberata, seeking refuge from the goddess Fortune under the branches of a mighty oak tree, a punning allusion to the Duke of Urbino’s family name, della Rovere. The poet laments that he has been pursued by ‘quella cruda / e cieca dea’, ‘that cruel and blind Goddess’ (14–15) since birth, prompting his vivid and impassioned memory in verse of the separation from his mother, whom he was never to see again: Ma del sen della madre empia fortuna pargoletto divelse. Ah! di quei baci ch’ ella bagnò di lagrime dolenti, con sospir mi rimembra e de gli ardenti preghi che se ’n portár l’aure fugaci: ch’io non dovea giunger più volto a volto fra quelle braccia accolto con nodi così stretti e sì tenaci. Lasso! e seguii con mal sicure piante, qual Ascanio, o Camilla, il padre errante. Me from my mother’s breast, a child, Did cruel Fortune tear; The tears she shed, the kisses wild She pressed in her despair

(31–40)

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On my pale cheek, and oh, the zeal Of her most passionate appeal To Heaven for me, in air Alone recorded – with regret I yet remember, weep for yet. Never, ah! never more was I, To meet her face to face, And feel my full heart beat more high In her beloved embrace! I left her – oh, the pang severe! Like young Camilla, or, more drear, Ascanius-like, to trace O’er hill and dale, through bush and brier, The footsteps of the wandering sire.3

The double comparison to characters in the Aeneid, both of whom were compelled to endure separation from their mothers in order to follow their exiled fathers, hints at an ambivalent attitude towards the poet’s own ‘padre errante’. At the very least it suggests that Tasso was keenly aware of the similarities between his current situation and that brought on by his late father’s banishment from the kingdom of Naples, recognising the paternal inheritance in his own status as a literary ‘fugace peregrino’; as Symonds was to suggest towards the end of the nineteenth century, the unhappy events of Bernardo’s life as poet and courtier did indeed seem to ‘foreshadow and illustrate the miseries of his more famous son’: It is singular that the young man, witnessing the wretchedness of his father’s life, should not have shunned a like career of gilded misery and famous indigence. But Tasso was born to reproduce Bernardo’s qualities in their feebleness and respectability, to outshine him in genius, and to outstrip him in the celebrity of his misfortunes.4

This sense of a hereditary compulsion towards wretchedness is vividly conveyed amid the twisted syntax of the ensuing lines of the ‘Canzone al Metauro’: In aspro esiglio e’n dura povertà crebbi in quei sì mesti errori: intempestivo senso ebbi a gli affanni; ch’anzi stagion, matura l’acerbità de’ casi e de’ dolori in me rendé l’acerbità de gli anni. L’egra spogliata sua vecchiezza e i danni

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narrerò tutti. Or che non sono io tanto ricco de’ propri guai che basti solo per materia di duolo? Dunque altri ch’io da me dev’esser pianto?

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(41–51)

(In those sad wanderings I grew up in bitter exile and desperate poverty; I had an untimely awareness of such anxieties: I matured before my time, as my unripe years yielded to the bitterness of fate and sorrow. I will recount all the spoils of illness and misfortunes of his [Bernardo’s] old age. Am I not rich enough in troubles myself to provide the raw materials for grief ? Therefore must I always lament for others besides myself ?)5

These memories of his father’s misfortunes, which the poet feels dutybound if reluctant to recollect, draw Tasso uncomfortably close to filial resentment. The ‘Canzone’ breaks off immediately after an extraordinary address to the dead Bernardo in heaven, in which the poet tries to move back from this developing sense of resentment by stressing his filial love, recalling particularly the obsequies performed on his father’s death, before attempting finally to apologise for dwelling exclusively on their hereditary misery in the poem: Padre, o buon padre che dal ciel rimiri, egro e morto ti piansi, e ben tu il sai, e gemendo scaldai il tomba e il letto: or che ne gli altri giri tu godi, a te si deve onor, non lutto: a me versato il mio dolor sia tutto ...         Non finita

(55–60)

(Father, oh good father, who is gazing down from the sky, well you know how I cried for you when you were ill and dead, and how, moaning, I scalded your tomb and bed with tears: but now that you rejoice in the high circles of heaven, I owe you honour, not grief: rather let all my pain be poured out over me ... Not finished)6

Leigh Hunt also cites and translates these lines to support his argument that ‘Torquato was as loving a son as Mozart or Montaigne’, suggesting that ‘whenever he had a glimpse of felicity, he appears to have associated the idea of it with that of his father’.7 Hunt is referring specifically to the period immediately following Tasso’s release from St Anna in 1586, when the poet completed and published Bernardo’s poem Floridante (1587), but it is not clear exactly how the direct paternal address in

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the earlier ‘Canzone al Metauro’ might reinforce this point, suggesting instead surely the opposite association of unhappiness with his father. While Tasso ‘affectingly begs pardon of his blessed spirit for troubling him with his earthly griefs’ in the final lines of the poem, it is not a particularly effective apology: Tasso seems rather to be asserting the preeminence and independence of his own ‘earthly griefs’ at the expense of his father’s, which he has still felt obliged to record in the poem, while simultaneously, and perhaps subconsciously, blaming Bernardo for being the source of these very woes, even as the father now resides happily in heaven. As Margaret Ferguson was to conclude in her late twentiethcentury Freudian interpretation of the ‘Canzone’, ‘no wonder Tasso couldn’t finish this poem’, where ‘the effort to transform the raw material of memory and psychic ambivalence into art is reflected in the extraordinarily baroque conceits and the difficult syntax’ and failure to achieve ‘aesthetic closure’.8 Some key elements of Ferguson’s approach to what she has described as Tasso’s ‘psychic biography’ had, however, been anticipated almost a century earlier in Symonds’s account of the poet’s life, some thirty years before Freud himself referred to ‘the most moving poetic picture’ of Tancredi and the bleeding tree from canto XIII of Gerusalemme liberata in connection to ‘the compulsion to repeat’ in his essay ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’.9 Ferguson stresses the importance of ‘his father’s absence from Naples [sic]’ during the crucial first year of Torquato’s life, while Symonds had noted more generally the ‘absence of his father’ as the poet was raised, with his mother and sister, in Sorrento and then Naples.10 The prolonged absence of his mother, however, is considered to have had an even more marked impact on the poet’s future maladies in both accounts. The enforced separation from his mother in 1554 was followed only a couple of years later by her sudden and premature death, giving rise to Bernardo’s suspicions of foul play on the part of his late wife’s overbearing relatives. In support of her Freudian reading of the autobiographical ‘Canzone’, Ferguson cites Donald Sutherland’s theory in his essay on Tasso (‘The Neapolitan Stranger’) in On Romanticism (1971), where he speculated ‘that Tasso’s loss of his mother, and his suspicions that she was poisoned, provide a key to understanding the psychic malady which caused Tasso to be imprisoned in Sant’ Anna, and which was certainly worsened by the experience of imprisonment itself; his paranoid tendencies (including fear of poison) grew in prison and his alternations between manic and depressive states became more extreme’.11

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In spite of the absence of a yet to be defined language for psychoanalytical discourse, Symonds’s earlier speculations surrounding the same events seem somehow both more immediate and psychologically acute: That melancholy temperament which he inherited from Bernardo was nourished by the half-concealed mysteriously haunting troubles of his parents. And when Porzia died suddenly, in 1556, we can hardly doubt that the father broke out before his son into some such expressions of ungovernable grief as he openly expressed in the letter to Amerigo Sanseverino. Is it possible, then, thought Torquato, that the mother from whose tender kisses and streaming tears I was severed but one year ago had died of poison – poisoned by my uncles?12 Sinking into the consciousness of a child so sensitive by nature and so early toned to sadness, this terrible suspicion of a secret death by poison incorporated itself with the very essence of his melancholy humour, and lurked within him to flash forth in madness at a future period of life.13

Crucially the child’s later obsession with being poisoned is here triggered by hearing and lending credence to the father’s ungoverned suspicions about the cause of the mother’s death, where the devastating impact on the young Tasso’s psyche is further reinforced by the sudden momentary switch into an imagined first-person account as he contemplates her murder. Where Ferguson goes on to suggest that the poet ‘obliquely accuses his father of causing the separation’ from his mother in the ‘Canzone al Metauro’, in Symonds’s interpretation an overwhelming sense of paternal blame may be extended still further, not only to the traumatic effect of his mother’s death but even to the poet’s own subsequent history of mental illness. It is therefore no surprise that Ferguson’s Freudian reading of the poet’s Apologia in difesa della Gerusalemme liberata (1585) should focus so intently on the troubled ‘family romance’ between Torquato and Bernardo: If Tasso broods obsessively on the difficulties of defining father-son relationships it is because, for him, questions of literal and figurative filiation were necessarily and inextricably linked. I can think of no other major writer in the Western tradition whose identity as a son was more problematically over-determined than Tasso’s.14

Symonds’s chapter on Tasso’s life, however, also influences Ferguson’s work in another perhaps less conscious way. Where Tasso’s literal filiation in relation to Bernardo is approached specifically through the lens of Freud’s works, Tasso’s over-determined figurative filiations in Ferguson’s reading are conceived consistently in relation to complex father–son

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relationships in Shakespeare’s plays, with reference to Hamlet in particular.15 Symonds was again the earliest Anglophone critic to suggest an affinity between Tasso and Shakespeare’s prince: as he relates the story of how the poet impetuously drew a knife on a servant in the Duchess of Urbino’s apartment in 1577, he likens his behaviour to that of ‘Hamlet in his mother’s bedchamber’.16 Perhaps more tellingly, at the end of his biographical account, Symonds compares the multitudinous interpretations of the mysteries of Tasso’s life story throughout the nineteenth century to the innumerable and widely divergent critical interpretations of Shakespeare’s most ineffable dramatic creation; the celebrated formulation that was cited in the title of Chapter 5 is particularly apt, because it seems to acknowledge the strong element of fictionality that permeates so many of the ostensibly biographical accounts of an historical figure: There is a legendary Tasso, the victim of malevolent persecution by pedants, the mysterious lover condemned to misery in prison by a tyrannous duke. There is also a Tasso formed by men of learning upon ingeniously constructed systems; Rosini’s Tasso, condemned to feign madness in punishment for courting Leonora d’Este with lascivious verses; Capponi’s Tasso, punished for seeking to exchange the service of the House of Este for that of the House of Medici; a Tasso who was wholly mad; a Tasso who remained through life the victim of Jesuistical influences. In short, there are as many Tassos as there are Hamlets. Yet these Tassos of the legend and of erudition do not reproduce his self-revealed lineaments. Tasso’s letters furnish documents of sufficient extent to make the real man visible, though something yet remains perhaps not wholly explicable in his tragedy.17

This propensity for likening the ‘real man’ to a fictional creation is still clearly manifest in Ferguson’s work on Tasso in the latter part of the twentieth century. In her reading of the first part of the Apologia the troubled poet, who occasionally ‘claims, like Hamlet, that his madness is merely feigned’, is also likened to the Danish prince because ‘he finds it hard to perform his memorial filial duty, in part because he must contend with a Claudius figure: Ariosto’.18 This triangulation of the son’s relationship with his late father and a threatening uncle, who is both a literary rival and a substitute father figure, through the lens of Hamlet is, however, just the first step in what becomes a bewilderingly long and complex list of ‘literal and figurative filiations’ in terms of Tasso’s Freudian ‘psychic biography’. Tasso’s epic predecessor Ariosto is only the first of a series of potential father substitutes in Ferguson’s analysis, which encompasses

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both historical figures, such as the Duke of Ferrara, and the poet’s own fictional creations in the Gerusalemme liberata, such as Goffredo, the leader of the Christian forces, and Ismeno, the powerful pagan magician. If Tasso initially plays Hamlet to Ariosto’s ‘usurper, a Claudius figure’, then he must also assume the role of one of his own Christian epic heroes to make sense of these other literary figurations: Like Hamlet, brooding on ‘sullied flesh’ and ‘the thousand shocks that flesh is heir to’, Tasso seems to suffer from a nameless disease whose symptoms include an aggressivity that may be directed toward the self (suicide) as easily as toward others (murder). Tasso’s hero Tancredi, as we shall see, suffers from the same disease.19

In the case of Tancredi, ‘a hero who is at once Goffredo’s figurative son and his dark double’ as well as a figure for the poet himself, this dangerous melancholy is again seen to derive essentially from complex questions of figurative filiation and blame. Ferguson’s reading of the celebrated episode in the enchanted wood in canto XIII, where Tancredi encounters and flees from the ‘the phantasmic voice of Clorinda’, the pagan beloved whom he has unwittingly killed in single combat, issuing from a bleeding tree, centres on the conflict between Goffredo and Ismeno, the magician responsible for creating the ghostly voice: Tancredi is like a son caught between a spiritual and a natural father; to fulfil his duty to the former, he must withstand the power of the latter – a difficult task because he is himself tied to Ismeno’s romance ethos by bonds of love and guilt. Ismeno, I suggest, is an allegorical figure who threatens Tancredi in some of the ways Bernardo and Ariosto threaten Tasso.20

Perhaps inevitably in this complex web of historical and literary allegorical doubles, there is room for one more psychobiographical association, with Ferguson going on to suggest that ‘Tasso’s biography offers rich material for associating Clorinda with the beloved mother Tasso lost as a child, and whose loss he blamed, in part, on the “confusions” of his father’s political career.’21 Quite how this manifestation of Tancredi’s deeply felt guilt for unwittingly slaying his beloved comes to be associated specifically with the poet’s own complex feelings of blame towards his father for his role in his mother’s premature death in such an analysis is not made entirely clear. It is, however, an association picked up directly a decade or so later in an Italian ‘psicobiografia’, published in 1995 to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the poet’s death, where Giampiero Giampieri also suggests, again with reference to Freud’s ‘Beyond

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the Pleasure Principle’, that ‘Tancredi è la voce della privata nevrosi tassesca’, ‘Tancredi is the voice of Tasso’s private neurosis’, and that Clorinda represents Tasso’s dead mother.22 The Freudian transference (‘il transfert Freudiano’) in this instance associates the poet’s ambivalent feelings for his biological father directly with ‘qual sostituto del padre’, ‘that substitute father figure’, Duke Alfonso, who becomes the unwitting target of an Oedipal fantasy of parricide, ‘fantasma del parricidio’: La nevrosi è una lotta per la libertà ingaggiato contro un potere (quella del padre) da cui si pretende, al tempo stesso, amore, comprensione e perdono. ... Si però il nevrotico diviene un grande artista, allora la capacità di penetrazione del suo messaggio rischia di risultare formidabile. (Neurosis is a fight for liberty engaged against a power (that of the father), to which is avowed simultaneously love, understanding and pardon. ... If, however, the neurotic becomes a great artist, then the capacity of this message to penetrate risks becoming overpowering.)23

For all the complex psychoanalytical lexicon of identification, repression, and transference, these late twentieth-century Freudian readings of the historical Tasso as a beguiling combination of Hamlet and Tancredi, in relation to both of his natural, substitute, and figurative parents, are not a significant advance on those earlier nineteenth-century biographical readings, which had often blurred fact and fiction in insisting on a direct correlation between the poet’s concealed love for the Princess Leonora and the Sofronia and Olindo episode in canto II of Gerusalemme liberata. The tendency to approach and attempt to explain the historical Tasso as though he were a fictional creation is the most striking aspect of nineteenth-century approaches to the poet, whether in artistic representations of imagined scenes from the poet’s life or ostensibly biographical works. The enduring legacy of this approach continued to be felt until well into the final quarter of the twentieth century, primarily in critical accounts such as Ferguson’s and Enterline’s, as well as in psychobiographical accounts like Giampieri’s, but it occasionally resurfaced in an imaginative re-engagement with the poet’s unhappy plight, such as the ‘Monologo del Tasso a Sant’ Anna’, a poem by the literary critic and Tasso scholar Franco Fortini, printed in 1984. In this sonnet the familiar voice of the solitary poet, imprisoned by his (benevolent, in this instance) ducal patron and surrounded only by spirits, is again summoned up and ventriloquised. In the final quatrain of the poem, however, in stark contrast to the figure of the poet’s irresistible belief in his future literary

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immortality at the end of Byron’s ‘Lament of Tasso’, Fortini’s poet remains bathetically indifferent to the immediate European-wide impact of his esteemed epic poem, which had, of course, provided the historical foundation in England for both Tasso’s literary reputation and the longstanding interest in his troubled biography, from before his death in 1595 through to the early years of the twentieth century: Mi dicono che il mio poema ha successo e che nei paesi stranieri è letto e cantanto.

(11–12)

(They tell me that my poem has been successful, and that it is even read and sung in foreign countries.)24

notes  1 John Addington Symonds, Renaissance in Italy: the Catholic Reaction, 1 (London, 1886), p. 337.  2 Leigh Hunt, Stories from the Italian Poets, 1 (London, 1846), pp. 446–7.  3 Torquato Tasso, Poesie, ed. Francesco Flora (Milan and Naples: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1952), p. 814. The verse translation is from J. H. Wiffen’s ‘Life of Torquato Tasso’, printed with his translation of Jerusalem Delivered (London, 1824), p. xii.  4 Symonds, Catholic Reaction, pp. 341–2.  5 Tasso, Poesie, ed. Flora, p. 815.  6 Tasso, Poesie, ed. Flora, p. 815.  7 Hunt, Stories, p. 437.  8 Margaret W. Ferguson, ‘Torquato Tasso: the trial of conscience’ in Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 54–136: p. 77.  9 Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920) in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 18 (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), p. 22. ‘Tasso, I think, anticipates Freud’s theory that the human consciousness never fully liberates itself from primal memories and that its journey forwards in time is also a return to the past’: Ferguson, ‘Torquato Tasso’, p. 59. 10 Ferguson, ‘Torquato Tasso’, p. 71; Symonds, Catholic Reaction, p. 342. 11 Ferguson, ‘Torquato Tasso’, p. 74. 12 The associated footnote refers the reader to ‘Tasso’s description of the farewell to his mother, which he remembered deeply even in later life’ in the ‘Canzone al Metauro’. 13 Symonds, Catholic Reaction, pp. 344–5. 14 Ferguson, ‘Torquato Tasso’, p. 55.

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15 Ferguson also alludes to the fraught relationship between Henry IV and Prince Hal in 2 Henry IV. 16 Symonds, Catholic Reaction, p. 373. 17 Symonds, Catholic Reaction, pp. 393–4. 18 Ferguson, ‘Torquato Tasso’, p. 56 and p. 59. Giampieri, in a chapter entitled ‘Le Tasse en prison’, has also recently compared Tasso and Hamlet in terms of their apparently simulated madness: ‘se il personaggio di Shakespeare si finge pazzo per proteggersi dal sovrano suo nemico, il Tasso fa la stessa cosa per scavalcare i nemici e conquistare l’amore del duca’, ‘if Shakespeare’s character feigns madness to protect himself from his enemy the sovereign, Tasso does the same thing to unsettle his enemies and regain the love of the duke’: Giampiero Giampieri, Tasso: una psicobiografia (Florence: Casa Editrice Le Lettore, 1995), pp. 91–106: p. 95. Another critical work published in the same year, 1995, also uses the ‘Canzone al Metauro’ as a starting point for an elaborate Freudian interpretation of Tasso’s epic poem, refined through the more recent psychoanalytical work of Lacan and Kristeva, which suggests that the figure of the enchantress Armida provides a further ‘disturbing double’ for the poet himself: Lynn Enterline, ‘Armida’s lap, Erminia’s tears: in the wake of paternity and figuration in the Gerusalemme liberata’ in Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 84–145: p. 104. 19 Ferguson, ‘Torquato Tasso’, p. 68 and p. 122. 20 Ferguson, ‘Torquato Tasso’, p. 126. 21 Ferguson, ‘Torquato Tasso’, p. 62. 22 Giampieri, Tasso, p. 65 and p. 8. 23 Giampieri, Tasso, p. 39, p. 96, and p. 94. 24 Franco Fortini, Paesaggio con serpente: poesie 1973–1983 (Turin: Einaudi, 1984), p. 74.

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Index

Note: Literary works are listed under authors’ names; ‘n.’ refers to a note number Addison, Joseph 152 Alfonso II d’Este 2, 7, 131n.14, 136, 174–5, 178–80, 187, 193, 195–7, 211, 217–18 Alpers, Paul 72 Aminta 4–5, 19, 32, 161, 164–5, 172n.90, 205 Ariosto, Lodovico 5, 10, 42, 47, 56, 169n.43, 171n.83, 186, 216–17 Orlando Furioso 10, 42, 169n.43, 171n.83 Armida 8–10, 18–19, 20–36, 43–5, 46–8, 88–91, 97–9, 111–19, 132n.31, 136–7, 167n.5, 169n.43, 220n.18 Armida and Rinaldo 5, 9, 11, 18, 22, 38, 43–5, 46–8, 55, 81–3, 88, 98, 107–19, 135, 138–60, 173, 189, 207n.42 Armida’s garden 10, 18, 34–5, 50n.29, 55–97, 135, 165 Baroni, Leonora 13–14 Baudelaire, Charles 15, 199 Bellori, Giovan Pietro 126–7, 133n.57, 134n.60 Le Vite de’ pittori 126–7, 133n.57 Belsey, Catherine 72

Bender, John 59–60, 61, 67, 71–2, 89, 101n.36 Bill, John 110–11, 171n.84 Blake, Robin 108–9, 114, 119 Boddington, Mary 202–4 ‘Written at Sorrento’ 202–4 Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas 149–50, 152, 169n.43, 170n.52, 174–5 Bononcini, Giovanni 12, 160–7 L’Erminia 12, 160–7 Borris, Kenneth 103n.73 Brand, C. P. 15, 19, 51n.49, 61, 77, 146, 170n.67 Brown, Christopher 109 Burrow, Colin 43, 53n.76 Byron, Lord George Gordon 7, 15, 175, 180, 182, 186, 188, 189–99, 201, 204, 207n.42, 219 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 175, 186–7, 195, 201 ‘The Lament of Tasso’ 7, 180, 186–7, 188, 189–95, 198, 199, 219 canto della rosa 10, 20, 32–3, 36–46, 55, 81, 84–6, 135, 165 ‘Canzone al Metauro’ 211–15 Careri, Giovanni 107, 115–16

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Carracci, Annibale 67, 102n.42, 107 Castelli, Alberto 16n.17, 83 Castello, Bernardo 101n.41, 107 Castelvetro, Iacopo 4, 17 Charles I 11, 108–9, 110–11, 118–19, 171n.84 Cheney, Donald 86, 91, 104n.87 Churchyard, Thomas 22 Compagnoni, Giuseppe 178–80, 182 Le Veglie di Tasso 178–80 Cory, Herbert Ellsworth 55–6 Daniel, Samuel 5, 9–10, 21–36, 40–1, 43, 46, 47–8, 194 ‘The Complaint of Rosamond’ 5, 10, 21–36, 41, 48 A Defence of Ryme 5 Delia 5, 21, 33, 38, 40–1, 43, 194 Davis, Nick 100n.18, 102n.53 Davison, Francis 24–5, 36, 48 Dean, Winton 153, 160, 168n.10, 171n.76 Delacroix, Eugène 15, 197–9, 208n.63 Dennis, John 12, 138–52, 154, 160, 169n.31 Essay on the Opera’s 148–51 Rinaldo and Armida: A Tragedy 12, 138–52, 169n.31 Devlin, Christopher 36–7, 39, 53n.71 di Benedetto, Arnaldo 12, 206n.22, 207n.30 Domenichino 102n.42, 102n.53 Drake, Nathan 191–2 dramatic opera 12, 138–51 Drayton, Michael 131n.15 Dryden, John 127, 144, 170n.64, 174, 205n.2 The Art of Painting 127 King Arthur 144, 170n.64 Durling, Robert 49n.3, 63, 66, 73, 100n.8 Eccles, John 12, 138, 142–3, 146, 151–2 ekphrasis 27, 58–62, 107, 120–30

Eliot, George 1–3, 182 Daniel Deronda 1–2, 182 Eliot, John 4–5 Ortho-epia Gallica 4 Elizabeth I 2, 17–18, 131n.14 Enterline, Lynn 218, 220n.18 Esolen, Anthony 83, 98, 104n.86 Fairfax, Edward 36, 38, 48, 50n.20, 51n.47, 77, 110, 162, 171n.84 Ferguson, Margaret 214–18 Florio, John 6, 42–3 Fortini, Franco 218–19 ‘Monologo del Tasso’ 218–19 Fowler, Alistair 96, 101n.26 Fox, Alistair 77, 99n.3 Fraunce, Abraham 5, 9, 19–21, 36 The Arcadian Rhetorike 5, 9, 19–21, 36 Freud, Sigmund 3, 214, 217–18, 219n.9 Frye, Northrop 79–80 Gentili, Scipio 17, 62 Annotationi di Scipio Gentili 62 Giamatti, Bartlett 83, 97 Giampieri, Giampiero 217–18, 220n.18 Gibson-Wood, Carol 120, 130 Goethe, Johann 3, 14, 174, 178, 185, 189, 191, 199 Gonzaga, Ferdinando 109 Gonzaga, Vincenzo II 114, 168n.8 Goulart, Simon 4–5 Greenblatt, Stephen 10, 102n.49, 104n.86, 104n.102 Grogan, Jane 101n.24, 105n.106 Guarini, Battista 4, 30, 51n.38, 109, 166, 186 Il pastor fido 30–1, 51n.38, 109, 166, 186 Hamilton, A. C. 64, 69, 77, 80, 86, 90 Handel, George 12, 135, 137, 151–60 Rinaldo 135, 137, 151–60

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index Harington, Sir John 6–7, 42, 47 Epigrams 6–7 Heffernan, James 59, 61 Heywood, Thomas 8–9 The Four Prentises of London 8–9 Hill, Aaron 135, 151–60 Hobhouse, John Cam 186–8 ‘Essay on the Imprisonment’ 187–8 Hollander, John 79 Hoole, John 175–7 ‘Life of Tasso’ 175–7 Hunt, Leigh 210–11, 213 Hyman, Wendy 86 James I 110–11 Lepanto 111 Jameson, Anna 186, 188, 190, 196 Jason and Medea 58–61 Jonson, Ben 25 Everyman Out of his Humour 25 Joulet, Pierre 18, 46–7 Les Amours d’Armide 18, 46–7 Kates, Judith 57, 96, 98, 102n.45, 104n.91 King, John 105n.119 Knapp, John Merrill 153, 160, 168n.10, 171n.76 Krieger, Murray 132n.42 Landor, Walter Savage 182, 204–5 ‘Imaginary Conversation’ 204–5 Lanier, Nicholas 109, 114 Layng, Henry 49n.13, 173–6 ‘The Life of Torquato Tasso’ 173–6 Lee, Sir Sidney 7–8, 15, 100n.4 Lee, Vernon 55 Lees-Jeffries, Hester 10, 69, 91, 101n.23, 101n.25 Leonora d’Este 3, 13, 174–5, 178–81, 183–5, 189, 192–7, 204–5, 216, 218 Leopardi, Giacomo 15, 180–2, 190, 192

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Dialogo di Torquato Tasso 180–2 Leslie, Michael 63 Lewis, C. S. 10, 37, 56, 71–2 The Allegory of Love 56 Liszt, Franz 15, 199 locus amoenus 44, 62 Lowerre, Kathryn 143–4, 146, 168n.10, 168n.14 Lully, Jean-Baptiste 138–9, 143–5, 150, 154, 169n.31, 169n.43 Armide 138–9, 143–5, 150 madrigal settings 11, 80–1, 135–6 Manso, Giovanni Battista 3, 13–14, 173–7, 180, 189, 190, 200, 204 Vita di Torquato Tasso 3, 13, 174, 176–7, 189 Marenzio, Luca 81, 135–6 Milton, John 13–14, 22, 95–9, 171n.80 Areopagitica 95 Mansus 13–14 Paradise Lost 22, 95–9, 171n.80 Garden of Eden 95–7 Montaigne, Michel de 5–6, 185 ‘Apologie de Raymond Sebond’ 6 Monteverdi, Claudio 49n.6, 114, 137–8, 168n.8 opera seria 137–8, 148, 151–67, 197 Ovid 27–30, 34, 42–3, 57–8, 118 Pollock, Zailig 78, 101n.22 Porter, Sir Endymion 108, 109 Poussin, Nicolas 11, 108, 115, 118, 120–30, 131n.21, 132n.31, 133n.57, 172n.89 Prescott, Henrietta 182–5, 192 Tasso 183–5 Pugh, Syrithe 105n.108, 105n.116 Quinault, Philippe 138–9, 143–5, 150, 169n.43

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Reade, John 200–2 Italy, a Poem 200–2 Richardson, Jonathan 11, 120–30, 132n.38 An Essay on the Whole Art 120–30 Rime degli academici eterei 33 Rogers, Malcolm 109–10, 119 Rogers, Samuel 186, 200 Italy, a Poem 186, 200 Rolli, Paolo 12, 160–7, 171n.80 Remarks upon M. Voltaire’s Essay 161–2 Rooks, John 79 Rossi, Giacomo 12, 153–60 St Anna hospital 2, 175, 178, 185, 187–9, 191, 197–9, 204, 213, 214, 218 St Onofrio monastery 182, 184–6 Scarsi, Selene 38, 42, 51n.48, 54n.91, 106n.126 Shakespeare, William 8, 15, 42–6, 171n.83, 216 Hamlet 8, 216–18, 220n.18 Venus and Adonis 10, 39, 42–6 Shell, Alison 53n.71 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 186, 188–9, 192 Soames, Sir William 169n.43 Sofronia and Olindo 19–20, 161, 183–4, 218 Solerti, Angelo 48n.1, 174, 196 Sorrento 3, 183, 185–6, 200–5, 211, 214 Southwell, Robert 10, 36–41, 46, 52n.55 ‘Optima Deo’ 36–41 Saint Peters Complaynt 38, 41 Spenser, Edmund 5, 10–11, 18, 20, 35, 37–40, 43–4, 46, 47–8, 50n.29, 55–95, 98–9, 144, 158, 167n.4, 168n.27, 170n.61 The Faerie Queene 5, 10, 18, 20, 38–40, 48, 55–95, 167n.4, 170n.61



Bowre of Blisse 10, 18–19, 35, 37–8, 43–4, 50n.29, 55–95, 144, 168n.27 Cave of Mammon 95 Garden of Adonis 96 Symonds, J. A. 99n.1, 210, 212, 214–16 Talma, Francois-Joseph 196–7 Tancredi and Clorinda 20, 135, 137, 160, 162, 173, 217 Tancredi and Erminia 11, 12, 120–30, 160–6, 184 Tasso, Bernardo 3, 183, 202, 205, 210, 212–18 Tasso, Cornelia 182, 200–5 Tasso, Porzia 210–12, 214–15, 217 Tasso’s madness 2–7, 14, 173–95, 198–9, 215–16 Tasso’s Melancholy 7–8 Thornhill, Sir James 11, 120, 127, 129 Titian 108–10 Tofte, Robert 18, 46–8 ‘Romance of Armide’ 46–8 Unglaub, Jonathan 62, 107–8, 115, 125, 128, 133n.50, 134n.63 Van Dyck, Anthony 11, 107–19, 121, 132n.31 Verdi, Richard 124, 127–8 Wade, Thomas 177–8, 180 Walker, Joseph Cooper 185 Watkins, John 94 Watson, Thomas 81, 136, 167n.4 Wert, Giaches de 81, 135–7, 167n.2 Wiffen, J. H. 202, 219n.3 Wilson-Okamura, David Scott 101n.30 Wolfe, John 4, 17, 62 Wriothesley, Henry 42–3 Zabata, Cristoforo 21–2