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Tasso's Epic of Deliverance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Andrew Fichter
Andrew Fichter*
Affiliation:
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey
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Abstract

Tasso states his objections to Ariostan chivalric romance in terms of neo-Aristotelian epic theory in the Discorsi: romance, with its disunity, multiplicity, and irreality, violates the classical canons requiring epic to be unified, whole, and verisimilar. Analogous to and implicit in these objections are those stemming from Tasso’s Counter-Reformation Christianity, which holds romance confusion and disorder to be morally as well as esthetically repugnant. But it is Tasso’s aim in La Gerusalemme liberata to redeem romance by converting it to the service of both classical and Christian imperatives. The apparent conflict between romance and epic proves to be illusory when the dialectic of Tasso’s Christian humanism has run its course. The Liberata asks us to see romance diversity completed in epic unity, romance magic fulfilled in Christian mystery, and to see chivalric romance, therefore, as a vehicle for Christian epic.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 93 , Issue 2 , March 1978 , pp. 265 - 274
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1978

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References

Notes

1 See A. Bartlett Giamatti, “Spenser: From Magic to Miracle,” Four Essays on Romance, ed. Herschel Baker (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 15–31. Giamatti argues that romance has a visionary dimension, “an impulse to reveal divinity” (p. 17), and that this impulse is completed in Christian revelation.

2 The English translation of Tasso's Allegoria is found in Edward Fairfax's translation of La Gerusalemme liberata (London: 1600).

3 Torquato Tasso, Discourses on the Heroic Poem, trans. Mariella Cavalchini and Irene Samuel (London: Oxford, 1973), Bk. iii, p. 63. All subsequent quotations from this English translation are from Book iii, unless otherwise noted, and page references are given parenthetically in the text.

4 La Gerusalemme liberata (Milan: Rizzoli, 1950). All quotations from the poem are from this edition.

5 For a further discussion of typology and its application to the Liberata see Thomas P. Roche, Jr., “Tasso's Enchanted Woods,” Literary Uses of Typology, ed. Earl Miner (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 49–78.

6 Unless otherwise noted, the English versions of all quotations from the Liberata are my own paraphrases, intended neither as poetic renderings nor as literal line-for-line translations.