Lawrence, Jason. Tasso’s art and afterlives: The Gerusalemme liberata in England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).

It is well-known how, since its first publication in 1581, Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata was rapidly received as a major work both in Italy and beyond, not only within the field of literature, but also in the figurative arts and music. Along with France, England was the place where Tasso’s work was most enthusiastically received: Spenser’s Faerie Queene is the most familiar case of Tassian imitation before Milton. But further proof of the great attention the Liberata received in late sixteenth-century England is shown by, for example, Abraham Fraunce’s rhetoric manual, The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588). This text contains over eighty citations of passages from the Liberata and demonstrates how in this period Tasso’s poem rapidly became a reference model for English writers who were already oriented towards the artistic productions of Italy. Together with imitations of selected episodes from the poem, verse translations began to appear: the first in 1594, by Richard Carew, was limited to Cantos I to V, while the subsequent translation of the full poem, by Edward Fairfax, was printed in 1600.

Tasso’s presence in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England (which must include also the wide distribution, together with the Gerusalemme liberata, of the pastoral drama Aminta, whose fortune is intertwined with that of Battista Guarini’s Pastor fido, and of Tasso’s interventions in the field of poetical theory) has been the object of uninterrupted critical attention since the beginning of the twentieth century at the least, with work by scholars including Mario Praz, Robert Durling, Charles P. Brand and Lawrence Rhu. However, in recent years, interest in Tasso’s reception is perhaps not as lively as the topic deserves. Jason Lawrence’s volume makes an original contribution to this tradition. It explores the fortunes of Tasso’s poem in the widest interpretation of the term and takes into account, besides its profound influence on literature, its huge impact on the visual arts and on melodrama, from the late sixteenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth century. The last chapter and conclusion shift the field of scrutiny from the works to the author’s biography, examining the emergence in England of what became in the eighteenth and nineteenth century a Europe-wide romantic myth, mostly based on legendary aspects of Tasso’s life.

The Gerusalemme liberata as a poem comprises, through a lucid and conscious design of its author, both ‘unity’ -  an indispensable requirement within the dominant Aristotelian paradigms of late sixteenth-century Italian culture –  and ‘variety’, which was believed to be essential to the creation of ‘delectation’ in the reader. The poem is therefore crossed by two thematic lines arranged in perfect equilibrium: while the main fabula follows the war narrative of the final moments of the First Crusade, the connecting episodes develop Tasso’s reflection on eros through male and female figures such as Erminia, Tancredi, Clorinda, Rinaldo, Armida. It was indeed the romantic plots of the poem that ensured its extraordinary success, since it was received by poets, painters and musicians first and foremost as a great repository of ‘affetti’, that is to say, of passions, which were a central topic in arts and treatises of the Late Renaissance and the Baroque period. It is logical, as a result, to find that the parts of the Liberata most often imitated by poets and reinterpreted by painters and musicians were the crucial moments where, in modern fashion, Tasso gives ample attention to the psychological introspection of his characters: Lawrence’s decision to focus on the love romance of Rinaldo and Armida is therefore apposite.

This specific focus on the ethos of Tasso’s characters was widespread and appears to be the most pressing motivation for the attention paid by Elizabethan authors to the poem, as Lawrence makes clear in the first chapter. From this focus derives the fact that the citations from the Gerusalemme chosen by Fraunce in his Rhetorike are mostly the direct speech of the characters, and centre even more specifically on the figure of the sorceress Armida, captured at the moment of her arrival in the Christian camp (canto IV), that is, during her initial attempted seduction of her enemies. Significantly, the same Tassian episode is reprised by Samuel Daniel in his Complaint of Rosamond, published in 1592, which concerns the story of Rosamund Clifford, Henry II’s lover. Daniel however does not simply borrow from canto IV but reproduces elements from cantos XIV and XVI, all belonging to the semantic field of amorous temptation which characterise Armida, even though Rosamund was more of a victim of seduction rather than seductress. The reference to a natural ethics (‘the law of nature’) indeed points to, as well as the false siren of Gerusalemme liberata XIV 63, the celebrated first chorus of Aminta, which Daniel would later translate in 1601. Lawrence’s analysis, comparing passages from the Liberata to the corresponding verses of the Complaint, is convincing; but, though it is possible that Daniel first read the poem during his Italian journey of 1590-1591, it does not seem necessary to postulate his reading of canto IV in the rare partial printing made in Genoa by Zabata in 1579 (21-22).

Like Daniel, the Jesuit Robert Southwell echoes verses from the Liberata in his ‘Optima Deo’. It should be noted that Lawrence sees this poem as authentic, though Southwell’s editors, James H. McDonald and Nancy Pollard Brown, grouped it with poems of doubtful authorship (36).[1]  Southwell echoes the octaves set in Armida’s enchanted garden where a parrot pronounces an exhortation to pluck the rose of love before mankind’s brief youth loses its bloom; the English poem recontextualises the image of the rose transforming it into an exhortation to dedicate one’s youth to God. This transformation, while a spiritual parody of the original passage, is not entirely out of tune with the overall religious and moral significance of Tasso’s poem, where Armida’s magic represents for the Crusaders an obstacle to be overcome in the fulfilment of their mission. More debatable is Lawrence’s claim of a debt to the Liberata in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis: while it is certainly possible to hypothesise that Shakespeare was familiar with Tasso, the textual references brought in by Lawrence to support of this thesis are perhaps too generic and can be ascribed solely to classical sources.

The second chapter of Lawrence’s book is dedicated in its entirety to an analysis of an intertextual relationship already well known to scholars: that between Armida’s garden and the ‘Bowre of Blisse’ of Book II, canto XII of the Faerie Queene, where Guyon, the knight of temperance, defeats the enchantress Acrasia. Spenser in this circumstance also draws inspiration from other Italian poems, Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and Giangiorgio Trissino’s L’ Italia liberata dai Goti, but Tasso’s influence is vast and profound. The originality of Lawrence’s reading consists chiefly in his foregrounding in his account of Spenser’s version of visual and auditory elements, which were already central to Tasso’s text, but which were further amplified by the English poet. According to Lawrence, Spenser’s emphasis in this key passage exerted an influence on painters and musicians in the following decades and centuries, which is examined in chapters three and four. It is evident that Spenser’s tale, despite presenting a fundamentally similar meaning to that of Tasso, is constrained within a markedly allegorical perspective