Description
Book SynopsisThis 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 poem is remembered in Anglophone criticism today, if at all, as a principal model for the celebrated Bower 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 v
Table of Contents
Introduction: ‘I dote on Tasso’
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
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
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
Conclusion: the emergence of Tasso’s psychobiography
Bibliography
Index
