Torquato tasso biography of william

Among writers, Torquato Tasso ranks out of 7, Rowling , and Bram Stoker. Among people born in , Torquato Tasso ranks 3. Among people deceased in , Torquato Tasso ranks 2. In Urbino, Torquato studied alongside the duke's son, Francesco Maria, and Guidobaldo Del Monte, the future illustrious mathematician, receiving a rich education from the court tutors.

From this period is his first poetic composition, a sonnet in praise of Urbino, which testifies to the influence on the young man of the poets then present in the city. In , he moved to Venice , where his father had travelled to find new publishers for his works. It is believed that during this period Torquato started working on Rinaldo and the first book of Gerusalemme.

The following year, the young man unwillingly enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the University of Padua , where he was happier to attend lectures on philosophy and eloquence and where he assimilated an erudite Aristotelian culture from his tutor Carlo Sigonio and Sperone Speroni, discernible in the future Discourses on the Art of Poetry In the meantime, his father had moved to the court of Ferrara, and Tassino as Torquato was called to distinguish him from his father began to be noticed by the Este family for his poetic ambitions.

Indeed, his first publication of poems dates back to this period, followed in by the publication of Rinaldo , a poem of chivalry that came out in Venice with a dedication to Luigi d'Este. With the financial support of the Duke of Urbino, in Torquato moved to Bologna with a scholarship that enabled him to enrol at the local university. Upon his arrival, the ancient University had just been unified in the new Archiginnasio , a symbol of ecclesiastical power and control that would persist over academic programmes and moral regulations throughout the modern age.

The uninhibited student was severely punished for some texts in which he publicly ridiculed pupils and professors and for this reason, in , he was expelled from the Alma Mater and his scholarship was confiscated. His real breakthrough came in with the support of Cardinal Luigi d'Este , who called him to Ferrara and at whose court Tasso lived his golden age for ten years.

The prisoner of St. Anna had no control over his editors; and from the masterpiece which placed him on the level of Petrarch and Ariosto he never derived one penny of pecuniary profit. A rival poet at the court of Ferrara undertook to revise and edit his lyrics in This was Battista Guarini; and Tasso, in his cell, had to allow odes and sonnets, poems of personal feeling, occasional pieces of compliment, to be collected and emended, without lifting a voice in the matter.

A few years later, in , two Florentine pedants of the Crusca Academy declared war against the Gerusalemme. They loaded it with insults, which seem to those who read their pamphlets now mere parodies of criticism. Yet Tasso felt bound to reply; and he did so with a moderation and urbanity which prove him to have been not only in full possession of his reasoning faculties, but a gentleman of noble manners also.

The man, like Hamlet, was distraught through ill-accommodation to his circumstances and his age; brain-sick he was undoubtedly; and this is the Duke of Ferrara's justification for the treatment he endured. In the prison he bore himself pathetically, peevishly, but never ignobly. What remained over, untouched by the malady, unoppressed by his consciousness thereof, displayed a sweet and gravely-toned humanity.

The oddest thing about his life in prison is that he was always trying to place his two nephews, the sons of his sister Cornelia, in court service. Late years In Tasso left St. Anna at the solicitation of Vincenzo Gonzaga, Prince of Mantua. He followed his young deliverer to the city by the Mincio, basked awhile in liberty and courtly pleasures, enjoyed a splendid reception from his paternal town of Bergamo, and reworked his tragedy Galealto Re di Norvegia into a classical drama entitled Torrismondo.

But only a few months had passed when he grew discontented. Vincenzo Gonzaga, succeeding to his father's dukedom of Mantua, had scanty leisure to bestow upon the poet. Tasso felt neglected. In the autumn of he journeyed through Bologna and Loreto to Rome, and taking up his quarters there with an old friend, Scipione Gonzaga, now Patriarch of Jerusalem.

Next year he wandered off to Naples, where he wrote several religious poems, including Monte Oliveto. In he returned to Rome, and took up his quarters again with the patriarch of Jerusalem. The servants found him insufferable, and turned him out of doors. He fell ill, and went to a hospital. The patriarch in again received him. But Tasso's restless spirit drove him forth to Florence.

The Florentines said, "Actum est de eo. He endured a veritable Odyssey of malady, indigence and misfortune. To Tasso everything came amiss. He had the palaces of princes, cardinals, patriarchs, nay popes, always open to him. Yet he could rest in none. His health grew ever feebler and his genius dimmer. In , he published a revised version of the Gerusalemme, Gerusalemme Conquistata.

All that made the poem of his early manhood charming he rigidly erased. The versification became more pedantic; the romantic and magical episodes were excised; the heavier elements of the plot underwent a dull rhetorical development. During the same year a blank-verse retelling of Genesis, called Le Sette Giornate, saw the light.

When mental disorder, physical weakness, and decay of inspiration seemed dooming Tasso to oblivion, his last years were cheered with hope. He and his nephew, Cardinal Aldobrandini of San Giorgio, determined to befriend the poet. In , they invited him to Rome. There he was to receive the crown of laurels, as Petrarch had been crowned, on the Capitol.

Worn out with illness, Tasso reached Rome in November. The ceremony of his coronation was deferred because Cardinal Aldobrandini had fallen ill, but the pope assigned him a pension; and, under the pressure of pontifical remonstrance, Prince Avellino, who held Tasso's maternal estate, agreed to discharge a portion of his claims by payment of a yearly rent.

At no time since Tasso left St. Anna had the heavens apparently so smiled upon him. Capitolian honors and money were now at his disposal. Yet fortune came too late. Before he wore the crown of poet laureate, or received his pensions, he ascended to the convent of Sant'Onofrio, on a stormy 1 April Seeing a cardinal's coach toil up the steep Trasteverine Hill, the monks came to the door to greet it.

From the carriage stepped Tasso and told the prior he had come to die with him. Tasso died in Sant'Onofrio in April aged The last twenty years of his existence had been practically and artistically unsatisfying. Other works Rime Rhymes , nearly two thousand lyrics in nine books, were written between and , influenced by Petrarch's Canzoniere Songbook.

Galealto re di Norvegia —4 is an unfinished tragedy, which was later finished under a new title: Re Torrismondo It is influenced by the tragedies of Sophocles and Seneca, and tells the story of princess Alvida of Norway, who is forcibly married off to the Goth king Torrismondo, when she is devoted to her childhood friend, king Germondo of Sweden.

Dialoghi Dialogues , written between and These 28 texts deal with issues from morality love, virtue, nobility to the mundane masks, play, courtly style, beauty. Sometimes Tasso touches major themes of his time, such as religion vs. Islam at Lepanto. Discorsi del poema eroico, published in , is the main text for Tasso's poetics. It was probably written in the years while he was working on Gerusalemme Liberata.

Troubles immediately began to gather round him. Instead of having the courage to obey his own instinct, and to publish the Gerusalemme as he had conceived it, he yielded to the excessive scrupulosity which formed a feature of his paranoid character. The poem was sent in manuscript to a large committee of eminent literary men, Tasso expressing his willingness to hear their strictures and to adopt their suggestions unless he could convert them to his own views.

The result was that each of these candid friends, while expressing in general high admiration for the epic, took some exception to its plot, its title, its moral tone, its episodes or its diction, in detail. One wished it to be more regularly classical; another wanted more romance. One hinted that the Inquisition would not tolerate its supernatural machinery; another demanded the excision of its most charming passages, the loves of Armida , Clorinda and Erminia.

Tasso had to defend himself against all these ineptitudes and pedantries, and to accommodate his practice to the theories he had rashly expressed. Tasso's self-chosen critics were not men to admit what the public has since accepted as incontrovertible. They vaguely felt that a great and beautiful romantic poem was imbedded in a dull and not very correct epic.

In their uneasiness they suggested every course but the right one, which was to publish the Gerusalemme without further dispute. Tasso, already overworked by his precocious studies, by exciting court life and exhausting literary industry, now grew almost mad with worry. His health began to fail him. He complained of headache, malarious fevers, and wished to leave Ferrara.

The Gerusalemme was laid in manuscript upon a shelf. He opened negotiations with the court of Florence for an exchange of service. This irritated the duke of Ferrara. Alfonso hated nothing more than to see courtiers especially famous ones leave him for a rival duchy. Moreover, Alfonso was married to a French Calvinist princess and thus justly worried about antagonizing the more orthodox powers in Italy, concentrated in Florence and Rome.

Alfonso thought, moreover, that, if Tasso were allowed to go, the Medici would get the coveted dedication of that already famous epic. Therefore, he bore with the poet's humours, and so contrived that the latter should have no excuse for quitting Ferrara. Meanwhile, through the years , and , Tasso's health grew worse. Jealousy inspired the courtiers to malign and insult him.

His irritable and suspicious temper, vain and sensitive to slights, rendered him only too easy a prey to their malevolence. In the course of the s Tasso developed a persecution mania which led to legends about the restless, half-mad, and misunderstood author. He became consumed by thoughts that his servants betrayed his confidence, fancied he had been denounced to the Inquisition , and expected daily to be poisoned.

In the autumn of Tasso quarrelled with a Ferrarese gentleman, Maddalo, who had talked too freely about some same-sex love affair; the same year he wrote a letter to his homosexual friend Luca Scalabrino dealing with his own love for a year-old young man Orazio Ariosto; [ 6 ] [ a ] [ 7 ] in the summer of he drew his knife upon a servant in the presence of Lucrezia d'Este, duchess of Urbino.

For this excess he was arrested; but the duke released him, and took him for a change of air to his country seat of Villa Belriguardo. What happened there is not known. Some biographers have surmised that a compromising liaison with Leonora d'Este came to light, and that Tasso agreed to feign madness in order to cover her honour, but of this, there is no proof.

It is only certain that from Belriguardo he returned to a Franciscan convent at Ferrara, for the express purpose of attending to his health. There the dread of being murdered by the duke took a firm hold on his mind. He escaped at the end of July, disguised himself as a peasant, and went on foot to his sister at Sorrento. The conclusions were that Tasso, after the beginning of , developed a mental malady, which, without amounting to actual insanity, rendered him fantastical and insupportable, a cause of anxiety to his patrons.

There is no evidence whatsoever for the later romantic myth that this state of things was due to an overwhelming passion for Leonora. The duke, contrary to his image as a tyrant, showed considerable forbearance. Though a rigid and unsympathetic man, as egotistical as any princeling of his era, to Tasso he was never cruel; unintelligent perhaps, but far from being that monster of ferocity as which was later portrayed.

The subsequent history of his connection with the poet corroborates this view. While with his sister at Sorrento, Tasso yearned for Ferrara. The court-made man could not breathe freely outside its charmed circle. He wrote humbly requesting to be taken back. Alfonso consented, provided Tasso would agree to undergo a medical course of treatment for his melancholy.

When he returned, which he did with alacrity under those conditions, he was well received by the ducal family. All might have gone well if his old maladies had not revived. Scene followed scene of irritability, moodiness, suspicion, wounded vanity and violent outbursts. In the summer of he ran away again, traveling through Mantua , Padua, Venice, and Urbino Lombardy.

In September he reached the gates of Turin on foot and was courteously entertained by Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy. Wherever he went, wandering like the world's rejected guest, he met with the honour due his illustrious name. Great folk gladly opened their houses to him, partly in compassion, partly in admiration of his genius. But he soon wearied of their society and wore their kindness thin by his querulous peevishness.

It seemed, moreover, that life was intolerable to him outside Ferrara. Accordingly, he once more opened negotiations with the duke; and in February he again set foot in the castle. Alfonso was about to contract his third marriage, this time with a princess of the house of Mantua. He had no children, and unless he got an heir there was a probability that his state would fall to the Holy See , as in fact it eventually did.

The nuptial festivals, on the eve of which Tasso arrived, were therefore not an occasion of great rejoicing for the elderly bridegroom. As a forlorn hope Alfonso had to wed a third wife; but his heart was not in it and his expectations were far from sanguine.

Torquato tasso biography of william

Tasso, preoccupied as always with his own sorrows and his own sense of dignity, made no allowance for the troubles of his master. Rooms below his rank, he thought, had been assigned him; the Duke was engaged. Without exercising common patience, or giving his old friends the benefit of the doubt, Tasso broke into terms of open abuse, behaved like a lunatic, and was sent off without ceremony to the madhouse of St.

This happened in March , and there he remained until July