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Tasso, Poet of Doubt

2019; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 134; Issue: S Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mln.2019.0071

1080-6598

Walter Stephens,

Renaissance Literature and Culture

Tasso, Poet of Doubt Walter Stephens1 (bio) Torquato Tasso was the poet of doubt, at every level.2 After 1575, he revised his works endlessly; not until much of the Gerusalemme liberata had been repeatedly printed without his consent did he acquiesce to its publication and, even then, he did so only to stem the flow of partial, pirated editions. In 1581, he allowed Febo Bonnà to publish the complete poem, thanks to the urging of his friends, and demand was such that a second printing was necessary after a month. Friends only overcame Tasso's reluctance because for the previous twenty-seven months he had been imprisoned in the hospital of Sant'Anna. Duke Alfonso d'Este had ordered him confined on 11 March 1579, so as to end Tasso's public displays of erratic behavior over the previous several years. As the dedicatee of the Liberata, Alfonso was anxious not only to maintain control over the poet—and over a poem he considered his personal property—but also to curb Tasso's insistent self-denunciations to the Inquisition, which threatened to compromise the ducal court.3 Tasso claimed to have never shared the public's enthusiasm for his poem and did not even choose its definitive 1581 title. His own preferred title had been Il Goffredo, in homage to Godfrey of Bouillon. His mental breakdown had in considerable measure resulted from his indecisiveness over the poem. During the final phases of composition, hoping to guarantee it both critical acceptance and safe [End Page S-252] passage through Roman censorship, he had chosen several friends and acquaintances to serve as surrogate, pre-emptive censors. Unable to agree with their conclusions, he broke off revisions in 1576 and commenced the restless peregrinations that ended when, returning suddenly to Ferrara, he felt himself excluded from the Duke's wedding festivities and ended in prison for his abusive behavior. Tasso was a master of indirection and dissimulation, in both life and art, so we would do well to interrogate at least one coincidence in the story just outlined. The date of his imprisonment, 11 March, was the anniversary of Tasso's birth, a fact we know from his own letters, and on that date in 1579 he turned thirty-five. According to traditional readings of Dante's Divina Commedia, the age of thirty-five was the midpoint of life, il mezzo del cammin di nostra vita. By reaching the nadir of his life at the Dantean age of thirty-five, he consciously or unconsciously inscribed himself in a literary typology and thus re-enacted Dante's psychic shipwreck (Inf. 1.22–27) and its antitype in Dante's Ulysses, the tireless seeker of virtù e canoscenza whom God destroyed for his sacrilegious pursuit of forbidden knowledge. Both Tasso's epic and his lyric poetry reflect his fascination with Homer's Odysseus as well as Dante's Ulysses. He confirmed his Ulyssean/Odyssean self-image when dedicating his epic to Alfonso, posing as "peregrino errante, e fra gli scogli / e fra l'onde agitato e quasi absorto" (GL 1.4). During previous years, Tasso had enacted other imitations, most notably in 1577 when, overcome with nostalgia for the home he had not visited since childhood, he appeared on his sister's doorstep in Sorrento, masquerading as a shepherd predicting the death of Torquato.4 Like the disguised Odysseus, he had been absent for decades and appears to have tested his sister's and his elder nephew's loyalty somewhat as Odysseus tested Penelope and Telemachus. In his profound identification with the ancient wanderer and the Dantean seeker of profane knowledge, Tasso seems to have cast Odysseus/Ulysses as the prototypical philosopher.5 The poet's sense of himself as errant philosopher animates one of the first letters he sent after his incarceration. Writing to his friend Scipione Gonzaga on 15 April 1579, forty-five days after his imprisonment, Tasso identified his fundamental existential problem as a crisis of faith. He cast Gonzaga as a father confessor and, through him, confessed to God that his Catholic faith was undermined by inveterate philosophical propensities: [End Page S-253] non mi scuso io, Signore, ma...