SOURCE: Looney, Dennis. “Tasso's Allegory of the Source in Gerusalemme Liberata.” In Compromising the Classics: Romance Epic Narrative in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 142-69. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Looney claims that Tasso uses an episode in Gerusalemme liberata concerning a source of water as an allegory of his own use of literary sources.]

Dice ancora Aristotele che … quella [la favola] de l'epopeia è simile a vino troppo inacquato.

Tasso, Discorsi del Poema Eroico¹

In the previous chapter, we observed Torquato Tasso's troubled reaction to the fusion of sources in Ariosto's Furioso. In chapter 1, by contrast, we saw how Torquanto's father, Bernardo, was able to accept the Furioso into his personal canon, despite its problematic confusion of romance and epic. Here I shall deal more directly with Torquato's ability and need to compromise sources in his own poem. In this reading of Gerusalemme Liberata, I argue that Torquato inscribed in the poem an allegory of imitative poetics, which provides the critic with a theoretical gloss on the poet's use of sources. Tasso develops an episode in the story line of canto 13 around a literal source of water—a spring in the desert outside of Jerusalem—to highlight a crisis in his use of literary sources for his intertextual narrative. The behavior of certain of his characters in response to a severe paucity of water stands allegorically for Tasso's treatment of his own sources. Torquato, we discover, is in many ways the ultimate compromiser.

SOURCES AND THE DROUGHT

In canto 13 of the Liberata, Tasso's poem on the First Crusade, a Greek soldier deserts the Christian army under cover of darkness. Misconstruing the deserter's actions as exemplary, some of his fellow crusaders decide to imitate him. The sequence of events threatens to dissolve the uneasy Christian alliance mustered against the Saracen enemy, which has secured defensive positions inside Jerusalem. The desertion also threatens to end the crusade, for without a cohesive army the Christian forces have no chance against the entrenched infidel. The desertion, therefore, also challenges the very narrative of the poem: if too many soldiers follow the Greek deserter, the war effort ends and the poem becomes at best a narrative of the adventures of individual knights wending their way back to western Europe. But the alliance does not dissolve and the poem does not turn into a collection of separate odysseys. The First Crusade ends with a Christian victory. Why then is the episode of desertion included in the poem?

Tasso drew the material for canto 13 from the historical record. A certain Taticius, who had been sent to the alliance by the Byzantine emperor, Alexios I Komnenos, did indeed encourage soldiers under his command to desert the army. For the details of this crisis, Tasso consulted a variety of historical sources in composing the episode. But his account of the desertion indicates that he had ulterior motives for introducing the scene into his highly selective retelling of the First Crusade. Historical accuracy aside, his additional reasons for appropriating the factual record were poetic and theoretical. The episode of Tatino (the Italianized form of the deserter's name in Latin, Tatinus) gave Tasso the opportunity to theorize and allegorize his dependence on literary sources. The episode allowed Tasso to address the following questions: How was he to work sources of conflicting ideological content and form into the Liberata? How, in particular, was he to combine elements of classical epic and vernacular romance in a Christian context?

I have found no critic who satisfactorily discusses the second half of canto 13, let alone one who discusses it in terms of the conflict among its sources.² Most critics ignore the episode altogether as they rush from the favored scenes of Tancredi and Clorinda in 12-13 to Rinaldo on Armida's isle in 14-16. Fredi Chiappelli addresses the issue of the episode's sources, but disparagingly: “la descrizione della siccità è uno dei passi compositi della Gerusalemme, e non dei più riusciti” (551). (the description of the drought is one of the patchwork passages of the Gerusalemme, and not one of the most successful.) Chiappelli is aware of the many parts that make up the poetic whole—to use his image, the patchwork or “composite” whole—but he is critical of the art that binds the parts together. He continues more specifically: “La concezione generale dell'episodio è biblica … In questa concezione biblica si manifesta di tanto in tanto un accento personale, … Ma in generale, la condotta della narrazione vuol essere monumentale, e secondo la monumentalità classica, il solito tempio cristiano eretto con colonne e frantumi pagani, Santa Maria ‘sopra’ Minerva” (551). (The general conceptual framework of the passage is biblical. … In this framework every so often one becomes aware of an individualized accent. … But, in general, the conduct of the narration strives for monumentality, and, in accordance with classical monumentality, it strives to establish the usual Christian temple erected with pagan columns and fragments, Santa Maria “over” Minerva.) In Chiappelli's image the combination of sources creates a structure that is like a Christian church built over the site of a classical temple. So far, so good. But the critic errs, I believe, in assuming that Tasso endowed one of the components, a prominent allusion to the book of Exodus, with a priority over the others: “… convinto com'era il poeta della sua architettura ispirata all'Esodo” (551). (… convinced as the poet was in his architecture, which had been inspired by the book of Exodus.) Is the poet really “convinced” that the allusion to Exodus perfects his narrative? Rather, is he not forced to incorporate allusions to the Bible into his poem by literary critics authorized by the Church hierarchy? I shall argue below that this second question more accurately corresponds to the situation. Tasso's incorporation of the allusion to Exodus, however, is more subtle than it appears at first glance, for the poet compromises it with nonbiblical allusions. Chiappelli's architectural metaphor does not properly encompass the notion of rendering sources impure by mixing them together. And yet Tasso consistently blends sources—biblical, classical, and vernacular—and, consequently, tensions and incongruities fill his poetry, or, as I put it above, such tensions create conflicts of subject matter and poetic form. What distinguishes canto 13 is that Tasso resorts to allegory in an attempt to dramatize and resolve the narrative's intertextual conflicts.

Canto 13 is the thematic middle of the narrative, the fulcrum on which the poem's action turns.³ Tasso reflects on this dramatic point in the narrative, both in the poem and in a letter in which he refers to the canto's centrality. In an oration near the end of canto 13, which I shall consider in more detail below, God declares to the faithful in heaven that the Christian army has suffered long enough. He commands a new order of events to unfold: “Or cominci novello ordin di cose” (13.73.5). (Now let a new order of things begin.) From this moment forward, the narrative moves inexorably toward a Christian victory. In a letter to one of his supporters, Scipione Gonzaga, Tasso gave a simple account for this change of circumstance: it derives from God's grace. In the letter he also discusses the centrality of canto 13, noting that Scipione has not yet come to the halfway point in the plot because he has read only through canto 10. Distinguishing the poem's “quanto” from its “favola” Tasso notes that 10 is halfway through the poem's twenty cantos but that 13 is actually halfway through its plot.⁴ In canto 13, the themes associated with the pagan successes of the first half of the poem come to an end and the thematic development of the plot turns to the Christians' advantage. As Tasso puts it, “Ma nel mezzo del terzodecimo le cose cominciano a rivoltarsi in meglio … e così di mano in mano tutte le cose succedono prospere.”⁵

If the first half of the poem comes to an end, the second half must begin anew. Indeed the plot of the Liberata can be said to start over with the jussive subjunctives of God's speech, which establishes a new order by commanding, among other things, that Rinaldo be brought back into the Christian army (13.73.7). This new beginning of the poem is inaugurated thematically in canto 14, in which Carlo and Ubaldo seek out the magus of Ascalon, who instructs them on how to recover Rinaldo. Carlo and Ubaldo encounter the magus walking on the waters of a river that flows into the sea on the coast of southern Palestine. The magus leads them to his dwelling beneath the bed of the river, where he shows them the fountainhead of the world's water. The vision of the primeval aqueduct is mysteriously dramatic and sets an appropriate tone at the beginning of the quest for Rinaldo. But it is more than merely an overture to adventure. As David Quint has shown in his study on the source topos in Renaissance literature, Tasso's portrayal of the ultimate source has implications for his poetics.⁶

Such a reading of the scene in canto 14 depends on a close analysis of its intertextual dynamism. Analyzing in particular the allusions to the Book of Job and to the lunar episode in Orlando Furioso 34-35, Quint interprets the fountainhead in the magus's cave as a symbol of the limitations of human knowledge. Carlo and Ubaldo learn that the true source of knowledge, the Truth itself, is far above this magical place deep within the earth: God is the ultimate source and verification of all earthly sources. Tasso uses the symbol of the source, in Quint's reading, to reinforce his concept of God's relationship to creation.⁷ Quint moves from a discussion of the literary sources of canto 14 to an analysis of the Counter-Reformation aesthetics that required Tasso to locate the authority for his poetic originality in the extratextual domain of the Christian God, far beyond the realm of the earthbound author. The discovery of God's ultimate power in canto 14 constitutes a turning in the poem that, for Quint, depends on Tasso's allusions to Ariosto and the Bible (102). But a complementary reading of cantos 13 and 14 might also consider how the Liberata itself moves intratextually toward the shift in canto 14. One might note, for example, how Tasso develops the narrative through his description of the dried-up sources in canto 13, which precedes the vision of the source of all earthly water in 14. We should now observe how the interplay of sources within the poem brings its first half to an end in canto 13, and how these literary sources contribute to the peripeteia of canto 14.

Canto 13 begins with a description of how Ismeno, the pagan wizard, infests the forest of Sharon with demons (1-16). It continues with a section on the magic forest (17-48) and the drought (49-69). The canto ends with God's response to Goffredo's prayer in the form of a saving rain that replenishes the dried-up sources on which the Christians depend for their water (70-80). There is a progression in the representation of marvelous elements in the canto, moving from the pagan bewitching of nature to God's successful overcoming of the pagans.

The black magic of the pagan wizard works against the Christian army. His demons terrify the army's heroes, Alcasto and Tancredi, who flee the forest. The forest, however, is the source of lumber, which the crusaders need to build their war machines in order to besiege Jerusalem. The campaign halts when Tancredi, admitting defeat, confirms Alcasto's report to Goffredo: “No, no, più non potrei (vinto mi chiamo) / né corteccia scorzar, né sveller ramo” (49.7-8). (No, no, I can do no more [I confess myself beaten], neither to split the bark nor pluck the bough.) Goffredo reacts predictably: he comes up with a plan to enter the forest on his own to fell the needed trees. It is not the first time that the captain has attempted to assume the role of foot soldier (cf. 11.54ff.). But Piero the Hermit intervenes to prevent the leader's rash act.

At stanza 51, Piero makes one of several prophecies about the end to come:

“Lascia il pensier audace: altri conviene
che de le piante sue la selva spoglie.
Già la fatal nave a l'erme arene
la prora accosta e l'auree vele accoglie;
già, rotte l'indegnissime catene,
l'aspettato guerrier dal lido scioglie:
non è lontana omai l'ora prescritta
che sia presa Siòn, l'oste sconfitta.”

“Abandon your hardy plan; it falls to another to spoil the forest of its trees. Already the destined ship is beaching her prow on the solitary sands, and furls her golden sails; already, his most disgraceful fetters broken, the expected warrior weighs anchor from the shore. Now not far off is the fated hour when Sion can be taken, her host discomfited.”

Piero foresees the defeat of the enemy at the poem's conclusion, so acquainted is he with the total vision of God. He foresees that the boat to rescue Rinaldo is already on its way (“già,” 3). He knows that the crisis will be resolved sometime after the hero returns to the Christian camp. It is for Rinaldo to confront the enchanted forest upon reconciling himself with Goffredo. Thus Piero, the man of God, draws the lines of the second half of the plot.

But the prophecy serves another function at this crux in the narrative, for it echoes the critical vocabulary of generic conflict and resolution. In deterring Goffredo from entering the wood, Piero is warning the would-be epic hero against the dangers of romance. If Goffredo deviates from his course and enters the wood, he risks entanglement in unhealthy narrative patterns of the sort Tasso argues against throughout the Discorsi when he claims that romance is an aberration of epic. Piero's choice of vocabulary explains why the leader's intervention is not necessary. At 51.5, the verb that describes Rinaldo coming down from the beach, “scioglie,” is the technical term used to denote narrative resolution. The same verb brings the entire narrative to its conclusion in canto 20 by marking Goffredo's fulfillment of his vow to retake Jerusalem (20.144.8).⁸ When Piero says that the “chains” are already broken (51.4), he uses an equally connotative term. Sixteenth-century critics used “catena” to describe the interlaced structure of the typical romance narrative, as we saw in our discussion of Giraldi Cinzio in chapter 3. Piero means that the chains of Armida's control over Rinaldo have been broken; we, however, can also understand him to mean that the interlaced network of romancelike stories has been interrupted by the linear inevitability of the Liberata's epic thrust. What Piero foretells is that the romance is over; we are at the beginning of something new in the design of the narrative. To be sure, this literary-critical prophecy is not without a touch of irony, for, although the romance has supposedly ended, we see its chains dismantled ever so slowly over the next seven cantos.

This sets the scene for the description of the drought, which, in spite of Piero's prediction of eventual victory, is suspenseful. Ismeno predicts the drought near the opening of canto 13 as he reports the progress of his magical endeavors to the king of Jerusalem, Aladino (13.13):

Soggiunse appresso: “Or cosa aggiungo a queste
fatte da me ch'a me non meno aggrada.
Sappi che tosto nel Leon celeste
Marte co 'l sol fia ch'ad unir si vada,
né tempreran le fiamme lor moleste
aure, o nembi di pioggia o di rugiada,
ché quanto in cielo appar, tutto predice
ardissima arsura ed infelice: …”

He added then: “To these things accomplished by me I add now a matter that to me is no less pleasing. Mars is soon going to be in conjunction with the sun, in the heavenly Lion, and no breezes or clouds of rain or dew will be tempering their noisome flames; for all the signs that appear in the heavens predict a most parched and hapless drought …”

There is a structural parallel between the pagan prophet and his patron at the beginning of the canto and Piero and Goffredo at midpoint. The parallel suggests the limitations of Ismeno's prediction, its shortsightedness when compared with the all-encompassing vision of Piero the Hermit. Nevertheless, Ismeno's prediction, based on his reading of the zodiac, is accurate: the “arsura” descends with a consummate destruction upon the Christians in the second half of stanza 52:

Ma nel Cancro celeste omai raccolto
apporta arsura inusitata il sole,
ch'a i suoi disegni, a i suoi guerrier nemica,
insopportabil rende ogni fatica.

But now the sun, being entered into Cancer, brings on unwonted heat, inimical to his plans and to his soldiery, that renders every task unbearable.

Tasso's outline of the events of the First Crusade is based, as I noted above, on the historical record. His main source is Belli sacri historia, an extensive chronicle written by the twelfth-century archbishop William of Tyre. The first printed edition of the Latin work was published in 1549, and it was quickly followed by numerous translations in the vernacular, including an Italian version published in 1562.⁹ The chronicle details the problems the crusaders faced when they entered the deserts of Palestine in the summer of 1097, overdressed and ill-prepared for the intense heat and scarcity of water. While William never refers to an actual drought, he repeatedly describes the destructive effect of the sun and the consequent lack of water. At 13.53-58, Tasso follows more or less the general description given in William's chronicle, where William recounts how the invading forces dissipated their energies in Palestine searching for drinking water. So also does Tasso depict his characters exhausting themselves in search of relief. He embellishes this recasting of the historical record with allusions to Vergil's Georgics and Lucretius's De rerum natura to compose a striking narration of the drought's effect on the terrain, on the crusaders' horses, and on the crusaders themselves.

William develops the narrative of his history with a clear sense of how an episode should begin and end. He prepares for the section on the summer of 1097 by commenting on the arid topography surrounding Jerusalem. He reproaches a postclassical historian, Solinus, for remarks in his Polyhistor about Jerusalem's geographical setting:

The city lies in arid surroundings, entirely lacking in water. Since there are no rills, springs, or rivers, the people depend upon rain water only. During the winter season it is their custom to collect this in cisterns, which are numerous throughout the city. Thus it is preserved for use during the year. Hence I am surprised at the statement of Solinus that Judea is famous for its waters. He says in the Polyhistor: “Judea is renowned for its waters, but the nature of these varies.” I cannot account for the discrepancy except by saying either that he did not tell the truth about the matter or that the face of the earth became changed later.¹⁰

William's revised estimation of the water supply in Jerusalem is conspicuous, and it might have caught Tasso's attention and quite possibly led him to create the center of his narrative around the drought. Tasso might also have appreciated William's skepticism toward his predecessor, a corrective attitude Tasso cultivates toward his sources, including even William. Tasso intentionally lodged the plot of the Liberata in a past event that was close enough to his own time to appear realistic and yet distant enough to allow the poet freedom to manipulate the historical sources.¹¹ At this point in his poetic version of the crusade, he follows William's account; later in the canto, however, he will make significant changes.

William describes how the Saracens used the drought and the heat of summer to their advantage. One of their strategies involved plugging all the springs in the vicinity of Jerusalem, thus blocking, as far as possible, the Christians from potable water (348).¹² In William's description, which he gives twice (at 8.4 and 8.7), the citizens of Jerusalem react immediately upon learning that the crusaders are near:

cives, praecognito nostrorum adventu, ora fontium et cisternarum quae in circuitu urbis erant, usque ad quinque vel sex milliaria, ut populus siti fatigatus ab urbis obsidione desisteret, obstruxerant

(8.4);¹³

The citizens, once our advance had been recognized, stopped up the mouths of the fountains and wells which were within a five- or six-mile radius of the city, so that thirst would exhaust our people and make them cease from laying siege to the town.

Canto 13 of the Liberata includes a narrative of a similar tactic (58.4-8):

ma pur la sete è il pessimo de' mali,
però che di Giudea l'iniquo donno
con veneni e con succhi aspri e mortali
più de l'inferna Stige e d'Acheronte
torbido fece e livido ogni fonte.

[B]ut yet the thirst is the worst evil of all, for Judaea's wicked lord made every spring filthy and unwholesome with poisons and secretions more bitter and deadly than hellish Styx and Acheron.

There is, one notices immediately, a variant on the historical event in Tasso's version: whereas in William's account the pagans merely block the springs and wells, in Tasso's, the king of Jerusalem, Aladino, poisons the springs.¹⁴ This strategy had already been announced at the beginning of the poem. In canto 1, Aladino ruins the countryside so that the Franks glean no sustenance as they invade: “turba le fonti e i rivi, e le pure onde / di veneni mortiferi confonde” (89.7-8).¹⁵ ([H]e roils the springs and the streams and mingles their pure waters with death-dealing poisons.) Only in the context of the drought in canto 13 does that act, heretofore disregarded in the narrative, assume dire consequences for the Christian forces.¹⁶

Describing Aladino's act twice provides the poet the opportunity to lend some variety to the second version. Indeed, the passage in canto 13 reads like a schoolboy exercise in variatio in relation to that of canto 1: “le fonti” becomes “ogni fonte”; “turba” becomes “fece torbido”; “veneni mortiferi” becomes “veneni mortali.” These superficial changes tend not to affect the content of the passage at all. There is, however, a notable addition to the description in 13 that invites further interpretation: “succhi aspri” (58.6). This phrase recalls the Lucretian allusion at the beginning of the poem in which poetry itself is likened to a mixture of bitter and sweet liquids (1.3):¹⁷

Sai che là corre il mondo ove più versi
di sue dolcezze il lusinghier Parnaso,
e che 'l vero, condito in molli versi,
i più schivi allettando ha persuaso.
Così a l'egro fanciul porgiamo aspersi
di soavi licor gli orli del vaso:
succhi amari ingannato intanto ei beve,
e da l'inganno suo vita riceve.

You know that the world flocks there where feigning Parnassus most pours out her sweetnesses, and that the truth in fluent verses hidden has by its charm persuaded the most forward. So we present to the feverish child the rim of the glass sprinkled over with sweet liquids: he drinks deceived the bitter medicine and from his deception receives life.

Aladino pollutes the springs of Jerusalem with “bitter juices,” as a doctor coats the rim of a cup with sweet liquids to trick a sick child into drinking the “bitter juices” of medicine within the cup.¹⁸ At first glance the analogy would seem to be turned on its head. Lucretius coats the bitter with the sweet, but Tasso coats—in fact, he almost contaminates totally—the sweet with the bitter. It has been argued—correctly, I believe—that Aladin's contamination of the wells reflects Tasso's ambiguity about literary pleasure and implies a potential threat to orthodox Christian ideology.¹⁹

The mixing of water and poison is analogous to Tasso's mixing of literary sources that conflict in their content and/or form. Stanza 58 does not raise the issue of generic conflict, which we have already encountered in the prophetic language of stanza 51, but it draws our attention to a mixture of sources. First, Tasso must confront the historical source: William of Tyre's chronicle. Second, there are the internal allusions Tasso makes to the beginning of his own poem. Third, in line 7 the poet calls on a classical commonplace to compare the poisoned springs around Jerusalem to the infernal waters of the Styx and the Acheron—an image brought into the Italian tradition by Dante's Inferno. And fourth, there is the biblical source for Aladino's actions: 2 Chronicles 32:2-4 recounts that a king of ancient Judah, Hezekiah, used a similar tactic when the Assyrians once besieged Jerusalem.

The four sources of stanza 58 can be classified into two kinds of allusions: intratextual and intertextual.²⁰ The intratextual is the one made within the poem to the poem itself, for example, the allusion in 13.58 to 1.3. The intertextual allusions of stanza 58 are to texts beyond the Liberata, which are historical, classical (perhaps filtered through a medieval vernacular source), and biblical. The intratextual allusion in 58 focuses the reader's attention, somewhat paradoxically, on the essentially intertextual nature of the stanza. By inviting the reader to consider the stanza in theoretical terms (as the allusion to the beginning of the poem does), Tasso focuses the reader's attention on his sources and on the way in which he, like his character Aladino, mixes them.

The most noticeable detail in Tasso's mixture is the inherent opposition between Aladino and Hezekiah. Any significant parallel to Hezekiah must reverse the biblical model: Aladino, an infidel, who keeps the Christians from taking back what is rightfully theirs, is compared implicitly to Hezekiah, a man of God, who defends Jerusalem against the invading Assyrians. The parallel highlights what the two kings do not share, namely, a faith in the Judeo-Christian deity. Hezekiah's faith in God allows him to overcome his enemy, while Aladino's infidelity leaves him vulnerable to the Christian deity's machinations. At the end of canto 13, God answers Goffredo's prayer for rain and thus foils Aladino's strategy to defeat the crusaders by desiccation. Tasso's allusive recall of the Bible in stanza 58 sets up this later moment in his narrative.²¹

POETIC ALLEGORIES

A discussion of Tasso's sources in stanza 58—a microcosm of his poetics in the canto—leads one invariably back to the narrative of the drought in canto 13. The poet gives the reader a tour of the parched countryside and the languishing Christian army²² before he shifts his focus to the drought's effect on the morale of the crusaders themselves (64):

Così languia la terra, e 'n tale stato
egri giaceansi i miseri mortali,
e 'l buon popol fedel, già disperato
di vittoria, temea gli ultimi mali;
e risonar s'udia per ogni lato
universal lamento in voci tali;
“Che più spera Goffredo o che più bada,
sì che tutto il suo campo a morte cada?”

So languished the countryside and in such state the wretched mortals lay in their afflication; and the faithful, having lost all hope of victory, began to fear extremity of evils; and on every side a universal complaint could be heard echoing in such words as these: “What more does Godfrey expect? or what is he waiting for—until his whole host drops dead?”

The speech, delivered by an unidentified narrative voice, continues in this troubled tone for three stanzas, dwelling on the inequity of the general situation. Its tone recalls the harangue of Thersites against Agamemnon in Iliad 2.212ff., and that of Drances against Turnus in Aeneid 11.336ff., although there are no points of direct linguistic imitation of these classical models.

Goffredo, however, is not suffering to the same degree as his men; indeed he hardly suffers at all (67):

“Or mira d'uom c'ha il titolo di pio
providenza pietosa, animo umano:
la salute de' suoi porre in oblio
per conservarsi onor dannoso e vano;
e veggendo a noi secchi i fonti e 'l rio,
per sé l'acque condur fa dal Giordano,
e fra pochi sedendo a mensa lieta,
mescolar l'onde fresche al vin di Creta.”

“Now look at the humane spirit, the compassionate care of a man who is called the Good; he forgets about the well-being of his men in order to preserve for himself a vain and destructive honor. And seeing the springs and the river dry for us, he has water fetched from Jordan for himself, and sitting at his cheerful feast with a few companions, he has cold water mixed with his Cretan wine.”

The captain, mocked for his piety, has designed his own private water supply, which enables him to continue cutting his wine at dinner with fresh water in spite of the desiccated springs, on which his soldiers can no longer depend. The observation is articulated in the rhetoric of revolt, the masses with their collective pronoun “noi” versus the captain who is doing things “per sé.” More exactly, Tasso's grammatical construction in line 6 indicates that Goffredo is not acting as a direct agent in all of this: “per sé l'acque condur fa dal Giordano.” He has his water supplied from no less than the Jordan River. The detail is historically accurate. The crusaders often traveled as far inland as the Jordan to procure drinking water when droughts hindered the progress of their various campaigns.²³ But there is more at stake in the passage than historical accuracy.

Goffredo's exclusive water supply enables a curious mixture of water and wine. His use of the Jordan speaks for itself. The verbal attack in lines 5-8 implies that Goffredo is selfishly abusing the sacred water of the most holy river in Christendom. The plural “acque” (waters) suggests the exaggerated extent of the abuse. The very presence of wine on his table is a further indication of how little Goffredo suffers from the drought. The chroniclers recount how wine, a part of daily rations, became more scarce and costly as the water supply dwindled.²⁴ And why does he mix these waters with a “vin di Creta” (Cretan wine)? Tasso reports in his poem that the islands of Chios and Crete provided wine for the crusaders: “e Scio pietrosa gli vendemmi e Creta” (1.78.8) (and rocky Scio her vintages, and Crete). And the same passage in canto 1 clearly borrows from William of Tyre's description of the crusaders' march from Tripoli toward Jerusalem, during which friendly supply ships hugged the coast as the army proceeded southward.²⁵ But William does not go so far as to specify which wines the crusaders drank.

Nonetheless, Tasso's reference to Cretan wine is a realistic historical detail. Unlike mainland Greece, the island of Crete has a large supply of fresh water that makes it an effective agricultural region, for which it has been famous since antiquity.²⁶ Pliny the Elder, among others, praised the wines of Crete, especially its sweet raisin wines.²⁷ From as early as the second millennium b.c., the island's position at the eastern end of the Mediterranean basin made it an important commercial link among the economic centers of Italy, Greece, Egypt, Asia Minor, and the Levant.²⁸ Thus its wines were exported early on and continued to be shipped to other countries throughout its early history.²⁹ This is true for the period of Byzantine control over the island (961-1204)—at the time of the First Crusade—as well as for the era of Venetian dominion (1204-1669). The Venetians, as one might expect, excelled in marketing Cretan wine all over northern Europe.³⁰ By the time Tasso was writing, Pliny's sweet wine had come to be one of the favorite drinks of the English and French, which they called, respectively, “malmsey” and “malvesie,” after one of the stops along the Venetian trade route from Crete to the north, Monemvasía. It seems likely that Tasso's participation in goliardic and courtly life during the 1560s and 1570s would have made him aware of the sociohistorical connotations of alluding to wine from Crete.

A literary rationale also coordinates the details in this passage, even to such a minute detail as the provenance of Goffredo's wine. When an Italian poet trained in the humanistic tradition, as Tasso was, refers to Crete, he conjures up the mythic legends associated with the island: Jupiter's birthplace, Minos, the Minotaur in Daedalus's labyrinth, and others. Moreover, these legends are refracted through well-known passages of Italian medieval literature in Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.³¹ Writers closer to his specific narrative tradition, Boiardo and Ariosto, also employ the myths of Crete.³² Ariosto even comments on the need to cut the heavy wine of the “treacherous Greeks” in a humorous passage of his Satire 2.46-57.

Of greater interest for Tasso's reference to Crete in stanza 67, however, is a reference in one of Ariosto's last writings to wine from Candia, the Italian name for Crete. In the Marganorre episode added to the 1532 edition of the Furioso, the evil misogynist, Marganorre, develops his hatred for women in response to a deadly Cretan wine, for a poisoned “vin dolce di Candia” (sweet wine from Candia) kills Tanacro, Marganorre's son (37.67-75). The Cretan wine in the Furioso, like Goffredo's wine in canto 13, is introduced in a sacramental context. Ariosto's character, Tanacro, dies after having drunk the poisoned wine during the Eucharist celebration at his wedding mass. In both texts wine from Crete symbolizes the perversion of community: in Ariosto's episode the perversion leads to a dramatic coupled death (Tanacro and his unwilling fiancée, Drusilla, who prepared the poison, both die); in Tasso's episode, the perversion threatens the military alliance of the Christian side. Again, as with the historical details outlined above, there is no positive proof that Tasso's passage alludes to the Furioso, although, certainly, the two passages become mutually enlightened if taken together. In any case, the mixing of Greek wine possessed a significant cultural resonance for Tasso and his contemporaries.

Let us continue with our reading of canto 13. The Franks under Goffredo's immediate command criticize his mixture of wine and water. Because the Christian coalition he commands is formed of diverse crusaders from various parts of Europe, the potential for schism is great. While his own troops criticize him in words alone, other members of the coalition openly defy him and the alliance begins to crack along ethnic lines. The lone Greek leader, Tatino, who commands those soldiers sent personally by the Byzantine emperor, is the first to desert. Diverse chroniclers record that this desertion did indeed take place—however, not when the crusaders were besieging Jerusalem, but rather Antioch. Why then does Tasso change the locale? The answer lies in his willingness to alter the historical record for the sake of his poem's unified epic narrative.³³ Unity requires a concentration of disparate actions in one theater; Tatino's desertion had to be moved to the desert near Jerusalem.

Tatino is introduced in the catalog of the Christian troops in 1.50-51:³⁴

Venian dietro ducento in Grecia nati,
che son quasi di ferro in tutto scarchi;
pendon spade ritorte a l'un de' lati,
suonano al tergo lor faretre ed archi;
asciutti hanno i cavalli, al corso usati,
a la fatica invitti, al cibo parchi;
ne l'assalir son pronti e nel ritrarsi,
e combatton fuggendo erranti e sparsi.
Tatin regge la schiera, e sol fu questi
che, greco, accompagnò l'arme latine.
Oh vergogna! oh misfatto! or non avesti
tu, Grecia, quelle guerre a te vicine?
E pur quasi a spettacolo sedesti,
lenta aspettando de' grand'atti il fine.
Or, se tu se' vil serva, è il tuo servaggio
(non ti lagnar) giustizia, e non oltraggio.

Behind them came two hundred born in Greece, who are almost entirely free of any steel; crescent swords hang down at their sides; quivers and bows rattle on their backs; wiry horses they have, inured to running, tireless in effort, sparing in diet: they are quick to attack and quick to sound retreat, and roving and scattered wage war by taking flight. / Tatin rules the band, and he was the only one who, being Greek, accompanied the Latin armies. Oh shame! oh crime! were not those wars near neighbor to you, Greece? and yet you sat, as at a spectacle, sluggishly awaiting the outcome of great actions. Now, if you are a common slave, your servitude (make no complaint) is a justice not an outrage.

The narrator uses the appearance of the Greek contingent to criticize the country for its weak-willed effort. Although the war takes place near Greece, the Greeks have dispatched only two hundred soldiers, merely a pack of scouts to lead the crusaders through Asia Minor.³⁵

Tasso's impassioned attack on Tatino has specific implications for Greece as a whole. Filling the role of spectators at a drama (1.51.5-6), the Greeks betray the cultural heritage they bequeathed to the West in their refusal to campaign aggressively against the Saracens. The wording of couplet 51.5-6 recalls Athenian tragedy, the cultural product of that brief period of relative peace from 480 to 430 b.c., when the democratic and cultural legacy of ancient Athens first took form. Subsequent references to the evil emperor (1.69-70) also suggest that the present ruler of the Byzantine empire has cynically disregarded the legacy of the Athenian golden age. Only the European peoples are able to protect and preserve what the Greeks no longer treasure.

Indeed, Tatino in canto 1 might at first appear an active exception to Greek passivity. But any hope that this activity might result in some heroic deed later in the narrative is in vain. Once again Tasso follows William's historical narrative from the beginning to the point that satisfies his own purposes. William foresees Tatino's desertion because of his unreliability as an agent of the emperor. The rubric for the chapter in which he first mentions Tatino is direct: “One Tatino, a servant of the emperor, a very crafty man of notorious wickedness, becomes associated with our leaders.”³⁶ He continues this description in a similar vein, reading into his physiognomy Tatino's moral shortcomings: “He was a wicked and treacherous man, whose slit nostrils were a sign of his evil mind” (150); the emperor is said to have “relied greatly upon his malice and unscrupulous duplicity” (150); and William declares from the outset that Tatino is responsible for “directing his nefarious schemes” (150). Clearly, for William the chronicler, Tatino is no shining star of probity.

The portrayal of Greeks as crafty masters of language is a topos of politicized rhetoric in the European Middle Ages. The literary archetype of clever Odysseus had long since become part of the common ground of Western culture. William's emphasis on the man as a liar is not out of order in this respect. During the Renaissance, leading up to Tasso's day, Italian culture continued to embrace the same stereotype of Greeks, probably for similar reasons. Ariosto provides a glimpse of this popular attitude in his play I suppositi (2.1.27-28), in which one character advises another: “Non ti fidare di lui, ch' egli è fallace e più bugiardo che se in Creta o in Affrica nato fusse.”³⁷ (Don't trust him, because he's false and more of a liar than if he'd been born in Crete or Africa.) The stereotypes held firm through Tasso's lifetime, with a new villain of similar malicious qualities being added in the second half of the sixteenth century: the Turk. Ironically, the historical Tatino was probably not Greek but Saracen or Turk. Another chronicler of the crusaders' march through Asia minor, Anna Komnena, the emperor's daughter, claimed that the Byzantine army had captured Tatino's father in a battle and that the son, a kind of human war prize, had been raised in the imperial court.³⁸ But to return to Tasso's narrative, it mattered little whether Tatino was Greek, African (i.e., Saracen), or Turk. It mattered much more that he was not European and that he was untrustworthy.

In stanzas 64 through 67, the Franks criticize Goffredo's abundance of water. Tatino, however, is more direct (68-69):

Così i Franchi dicean; ma 'l duce greco
che 'l lor vessillo è di seguir già stanco,
“Perché morir qui?” disse “e perché meco
far che la schiera mia ne vegna manco?
Se ne la sua follia Goffredo è cieco,
siasi in suo danno e del suo popol franco:
a noi che noce?” E senza tor licenza,
notturna fece e tacita partenza.
Mosse l'essempio assai, come al dì chiaro
fu noto; e d'imitarlo alcun risolve.
Quei che seguir Clotareo ed Ademaro
e gli altri duci ch'or son ossa e polve,
poi che la fede che a color giuraro
ha disciolto colei che tutto solve,
già trattano di fuga, e già qualcuno
parte furtivamente a l'aer bruno.

So spoke the Franks; but the Greekish captain, who is already tired of following their standard, said: “Why die here? and why let my division grow weaker, along with me? If Godfrey is blinded in his folly, let it be to his own hurt and that of the Frankish people: what harm in that for us?” And without obtaining permission he made his departure, in silence and by night. / The example caused a great stir when it became known by light of day, and some resolve to follow it. Those who were followers of Clothar and Adhemar and the other captains that now are dust and bones—since that which releases all has released the fealty that they swore to them—now consider flight; and already some have departed secretly in the darkened air.

In stanza 68 Tatino speaks, presumably to himself; then he takes leave, forsaking the camp by night. In an irrational sequence of tenses, the Christian army learns of his action the following day: the preterite verb forms “mosse” and “fu noto” shift unexpectedly to the dramatic present of “risolve.” The Greek leader has established an example in the past that heightens the crusaders' resolve to imitate it.

Like stanzas 51 and 58, the opening couplet of 69 is striking for its vocabulary drawn from the lexicon of sixteenth-century discourse on imitatio. Contemporary Renaissance descriptions of poetic imitation typically focus on one, usually modern, poet's imitation of a medieval or classical text. The words, “essempio,” “imitare,” and “seguir,” essential to the critical discourse of imitation, suggest that Tasso wants to do more with stanza 69 than merely further the plot through the description of Tatino's desertion. The terminology, found throughout Tasso's Discorsi dell'arte poetica, focuses our attention on the theoretical possibilities of the episode.³⁹ But first we need to examine the reaction of Goffredo to the exemplary Tatino, for our reading of Tatino's action is, of necessity, refracted through Goffredo's reading.

Goffredo, ever consonant with his epithet “pio,” prays for guidance when confronted with Tatino's desertion. Although he entertains possible violent responses to the soldier's bad example, his purposeful prayers allow him to avoid such temptation. From his misadventure in canto 11 (of which Piero reminds him in 13.51) he had learned the inappropriateness of intervening as a foot soldier. Rinaldo's murder of Gernando in canto 5 taught him that it would be dangerous for his troops to overreact at this point in the plot.⁴⁰ So at this turning point in the narrative, Goffredo shuns direct action and puts his faith in God (13.70):

Ben se l'ode Goffredo e ben se 'l vede,
e i più aspri rimedi avria ben pronti,
ma gli schiva ed aborre; e con la fede
che faria stare i fiumi e gir i monti,
devotamente al Re del mondo chiede
che gli apra omai de la sua grazia i fonti:
giunge le palme, e fiammaggianti in zelo
gli occhi rivolge e le parole al Cielo: …

Godfrey hears it clearly and sees it clearly and could have had ready at hand the most stringent remedies; but those he shuns and abhors, and with the faith that could make the mountains move and the rivers stand, devoutly he prays the King of the universe that He open now the wellsprings of His grace: he clasps his hands and directs his eyes and his words aflame with zeal to Heaven: …

Goffredo's faithfulness in lines 3-4 has biblical overtones. In a phrase that recalls Jesus's own definition of faith, the narrator describes faith as empowering Goffredo's prayer so that it might “make rivers stand and mountains move.”⁴¹ Jesus preaches several times to his disciples about the efficacy of prayer, which can, through faith, effect miracles. Once he speaks to them of the withering of the fig tree: “Amen dico vobis, si habueritis fidem, et non haesitaveritis, non solum de ficulnea facietis, sed et si monti huic dixeritis: Tolle, et iacta te in mare, fiet. Et omnia quaecumque petieritis in oratione credentes, accipietis” (Matthew 21:21-22). (Truly, I say to you, if you have faith and never doubt, you will not only do what has been done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, “Be taken up and cast into the sea,” it will be done. And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith.) In a similar way, Goffredo's faith leads him to embrace the expectations of God, which are expressed repeatedly by Piero the Hermit. Here is Goffredo's prayer (71):

“Padre e Signor, s'al popol tuo piovesti
già le dolci rugiade entro al deserto,
s'a mortal mano già virtù porgesti
romper le pietre e trar del monte aperto
un vivo fiume, or rinovella in questi
gli stessi essempi; e s'ineguale è il merto,
adempi di tua grazia i lor difetti,
e giovi lor che tuoi guerrier sian detti.”

Our father and our Lord, if once you rained down the grateful dew on your people in the wilderness; if once you placed the power in mortal hands to break open the rocks and draw a living stream from the riven mountain; now renew in these the same examples.⁴² And if their merit is unequal, supply their deficiencies with Thy grace, and let it be to their profit that they be called Thy soldiers.”

The narrator plays with the vocabulary and imagery of sources when he describes the prayer in 70.6 as a request for God to open “the wellsprings of His grace.”⁴³ Tellingly, the prayer, given in full in stanza 71, actually requests water. But the request comes by way of an example. Goffredo asks God to provide the crusaders with the same food he gave the Israelites as they wandered in the desert, thus putting himself in a position analogous to that of Moses. The mutinous crusaders, for their part, are comparable to the grumbling Israelites. In effect, Goffredo prays for a positive example to interpose between his army and Tatino's negative example. Just as God rained down sweet dew and drew forth from the rocks a living stream at Moses' request, so should he “now renew in these [warriors] the same examples.”

Goffredo is portrayed here as exhibiting a sincere parental concern for his charges. But underlying the leader's request on behalf of his men is the impinging vocabulary of literary imitation that shapes the scene. At stake is the proper sort of exemplarity: Tatino's or God's. The men of Clotareo and Ademaro (69.3), who can no longer follow their dead Frankish leaders, are given two options: should they follow a Greek or the God of the Old Testament? For the crusaders, there is a quick and easy answer to this question; for the poet, inasmuch as the question also applies to his imitative poiesis, the answer is much more complicated and leads to the heart of Tasso's allegory of the source.

Goffredo's prayer is immediately effective. God responds with a miraculous rainstorm and reaffirms Goffredo's authority, just as he intervened several times to reaffirm the authority of Moses. And as the threat of desertion ends, the second half of the poem begins. That beginning is marked by God's language of inauguration in stanza 73, which echoes Goffredo's remarks in 71. The divine proclamation on the new beginning (“Or cominci novello ordin di cose,” 73.5) corresponds to Goffredo's request that God renew the examples witnessed by the Israelites (“or rinovella in questi / gli stessi essempi,” 71.5-6). The implication of the comparison between Goffredo's request and God's reply is simple: to go forward one must first go back. The ancient past becomes an occasion to rewrite the present and shape the future. Imitatio is based on the same principle: one must go back (into literary history, into a literary source) in order to proceed.

Again, the issue of choice arises. In 71 the poet chooses to follow the Old Testament, strengthening the Christian underpinnings of the poem. The directness of Goffredo's reference to the Israelites has given rise to much enthusiastic criticism among Tasso's modern readers, as if the poet had triumphed by depending so obviously on a scriptural passage. De Maldè, for example, comments on how the passage in canto 13 and the story from Exodus are, with some minor exceptions, identical: “… tutto è identico nei due esemplari” (284). (… everything in the two texts is identical.) He then advances the forced claim that Moses and Goffredo are exact equivalents: “Mosè nel Vecchio Testamento fa perfetto riscontro a Goffredo nella Liberata” (284). (Moses in the Old Testament is a perfect counterpart to Goffredo in the Liberata.)

But can such a positive reaction, with its presupposition of an overt and unsophisticated imitation of a source, be accepted? Perhaps, but only by considering certain extra-poetic ideological demands. The technique of poets writing in the tradition of Tasso's vernacular humanism involves the cultivation of a deliberate elusiveness in the use of literary sources. A transparent allusion, moreover, is very probably obvious for a specific reason, that is, the decision to showcase a source can often be attributed to ideology. Writing under the tightening strictures of post-Tridentine aesthetics, Tasso became increasingly uncomfortable with the un-Christian qualities of the classical epic tradition that underlay much of the Liberata. The Roman censors, at least, were unhappy with the poem's un-Christian elements. Accordingly, the poet found himself in an awkward position. He reflects on his discomfort in many of the “lettere poetiche” written in 1575-76, the period when he was preparing the final draft of the Liberata. He openly had to demonstrate his commitment to Christian morals and aesthetics—whether or not that commitment might be central to his narrative. Perhaps, in his evocation of the famous passage from Exodus, Tasso intended to satisfy such an ideological requirement. To liken Goffredo to Moses was not really the point of the allusion; its purpose was to make Tasso resemble the kind of poet the Roman “revisori” demanded that he be.

No competent Christian reader would have failed to notice the source of Goffredo's prayer. If the ideologues were placated by its orthodoxy, all well and good. But if it is correct to interpret the allusion to Exodus as an ideological ploy on the part of Tasso, then the poet had his cake and ate it too. For no reader familiar with classical texts could avoid the additional fact that the context and the effect of the prayer are distinctly classical. When the prayer metamorphoses into a plural subject, “queste preghiere” (72.1), which fly up to God like winged birds, the learned reader recalls, among other classical motifs, the eagles of Zeus, who mediate between mortals and gods. Here as elsewhere in Tasso, such a plurality is antithetical to the ideal of Christian uniformity.⁴⁴ Once the prayers arrive at their destination, they evoke God's speech (73), which includes the very classical sounding verse already mentioned above: “Or cominci novello ordin di cose” (73.5). Indeed, God invokes the messianic rhetoric associated with many passages from the Bible, but at the same time he sounds remarkably similar to the narrator of Vergil's Eclogue 4.5: “magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo.” (the great line of the centuries begins anew.)⁴⁵ Medieval and Renaissance readers interpreted the Vergilian passage as an example of the classical author's visionary, prophetic proto-Christianity. Therefore, in a sense, the literary culture of Tasso's day had already worked out this elaborate compromise for him. God speaks with a classical accent, yet it is a voice sanctioned by the ecclesiastical tradition.

Tasso's allusion to the Vergilian new order straddles and combines the realms of the biblical and the classical, only to be punctuated by one of the poem's most noticeable neoclassical touches, the majestic nod of the deity.⁴⁶ God, looking very much like Jupiter, effects his will with a cataclysmic shake of the head: “Così dicendo, il capo mosse …” (74.1). (Thus speaking, He nodded His head. …)⁴⁷ The un-Christian reaction of the deity undermines any aura of Christianity surrounding Goffredo's prayer. If in stanza 71 Tasso has appeased those readers who are eager to censure him, by stanzas 72 and 74 he is composing once again as he wills.

What is the point of the allegory of the source in Liberata 13? Before considering this question, first let me review the sequence of events in the episode of the drought. There are six principal moments: (1) the sources around the city of Jerusalem dry up and are poisoned; (2) while his troops languish, Goffredo enjoys wine cut with water brought from the Jordan; (3) Tatino, the Greek soldier, deserts the Christian army; (4) certain crusaders follow Tatino's lead; (5) Goffredo prays that God end the drought; (6) God responds to Goffredo's prayer.

One way to read these events allegorically might be as follows. A crisis confronts the poet in regard to his literary sources. The exact nature of the crisis is never specified, but one deduces that it involves these issues: which specific sources should the poet use; what is the appropriate context in which to mix sources; and to what extent should the poet mix sources? One option the text suggests involves the rejection of a model from the vernacular tradition of medieval romance in favor of a Greek model from the classical tradition. Tatino's lead is followed by those soldiers who served under Clotareo and Ademaro, leaders killed by Clorinda earlier in the narrative (11.43-44). On the one hand, Ademaro, a historical figure, and Clotareo, Tasso's invention, stand in the allegory as emblems of romance; on the other, Tatino stands for classical Greek sources.⁴⁸ The crusaders who desert the army in imitation of Tatino can no longer follow the leads of their medievalizing captains of romance. They follow a Greek leader instead. Classical epic, one may conclude, assumes a greater importance when romance falls short.

Another option, the one which I believe is favored by the plot, is to isolate different and better examples for literary models, which can be identified with the Christian tradition. When Goffredo, in open imitation of Moses, prays for rain, he acts the part of a readily identifiable Christian example. Thus, in the allegory of the source the sequence of possible models shifts from romance to classical to Christian.

Tasso designed this allegory, as I have discussed above, for public consumption. It represents his response to the crisis that the Counter Reformation caused for humanistically trained poets like himself. He nominally accepts and respects the dominant ideology of the Counter Reformation. Since the “revisori” working for the Church are critical of the inclusion of too much of the wrong sort of classicism, he controls his references to the pagan classics. And since the “revisori” require a stronger biblical underpinning for the text, Tasso satisfies that requirement by including traditional and obvious allusions to the Bible.

The full allegoresis is, however, more complicated than the reading outlined above would suggest. For what Tasso does with his sources in actuality—his poetic solution to the problem in conjunction with his ideological solution—does not conform neatly to the interpretation I have proposed. In other words, there is an alternate allegorical interpretation also at play, a poetic (and less public) solution to the crisis of his sources.

Having satisfied the “revisori,” Tasso proceeds in the following way: as Aladino does with water and poison, and as Goffredo does with wine and water, so Tasso mixes his own different sources. One could say that he dilutes and cuts his sources even to the point of contamination, and, as I pointed out above, diluting and cutting might be considered “contamination” in the classical sense. In earlier chapters I have discussed how Boiardo and Ariosto engage in similar programs of imitative poiesis. Ariosto, in particular, thematizes the mixture of sources in his poem with the scene of Orlando muddying the spring in canto 23 of the Furioso, much as Tasso thematizes the mixture of his sources in canto 13. But neither Boiardo nor Ariosto had to confront the issue of Christian poetry and its appropriate sources as fully as Tasso did. The contaminated source does not have the same profound moral implications for poets writing before the Council of Trent.

Tasso's thematizing of his sources, therefore, must necessarily, at one level of reception or another, have moral overtones. Yet, to assert that Goffredo and Aladino are more realistic figures for the poet than Moses, who also creates his own sources anew, is a striking way of countering the Church's moral censorship. And although it may have smacked of blasphemy to some, the two soldiers do correspond more accurately as archetypes for Tasso than does Moses. It is not until the nineteenth century, with the rebellion against classicism, that readers' expectations require poets to be “new.” Not until then will a poet have to draw forth from the rock, as it were, a hidden stream, a novel vein of poetry. Not until the nineteenth century will a kind of Mosaic creativity be forced upon poets.

REVISING HUMANISTIC ALLEGORY IN THE CONQUISTATA

What to make of the allegory of the source in canto 13 becomes a moot point in the drastically revised version of the poem published in 1593 and retitled Gerusalemme Conquistata. The principal motivation behind the revision was to align the poem with the requirements of the ecclesiastical “revisori,” who had harassed the poet since the mid-1570s when the Liberata first came into circulation.⁴⁹ The Conquistata, then, represents the ideological capitulation of Tasso to those critics who were determined to have the poem conform to post-Tridentine literary doctrine.

In the revision of the Liberata, much of canto 13 is altered and cut. The second version of the poem increases the number of cantos from twenty to twenty-four, displacing the description of the drought in canto 13 of the Liberata to canto 19 of the Conquistata.⁵⁰ Noteworthy in this reshaping of the episode is the total excision of Tatino's desertion. By cutting stanzas 64-70 of Liberata 13, Tasso cuts the anonymous lament against Goffredo, which culminates with the description of the captain's mixing of the wine and water. Also cut are the stanzas that describe Tatino's reaction to Goffredo and the effect of the desertion on the crusaders. Gone, therefore, from the description of the drought in the Conquistata are all references to imitation and exemplarity. Even the Exodus-inspired request of Goffredo to “renew in these [warriors] the same examples [that were shown to the Israelites]” is recast significantly: “or rinnovella in questi / le grazie antiche” (19.134.6-7). (Now renew in these warriors the acts of ancient grace.) In the revised version of Goffredo's prayer, “examples” become “acts of ancient grace.” The phrase in the Conquistata carries the same basic sense as the phrase in the earlier version, but it does not contain any of the seeds of the Liberata's allegory of exemplarity. From the Liberata's examples to the Conquistata's grace, we move into a very different poem.⁵¹

Tasso cut the episode of Tatino for several reasons. In addition to reshaping the poem to suit the presiding morality of the Counter Reformation, Tasso's editing is an attempt to free himself from the agon between the genres of epic and romance, which gives the Liberata much of its energy. His editorial cutting heavily favors epic in the Conquistata: several scenes of epic inspiration are added to the final version, with extensive allusions made in particular to Homer's Iliad.⁵² At the same time, much of what Tasso removes from the final version of the poem falls within the generic boundaries of romance. No longer, for instance, do we find the stories of Sofronia and Olindo, Erminia among the shepherds, and Armida's conversion of the Christian knights into fish.⁵³

But the episode of Tatino was not excised because it is romancelike. It is absent, I believe, for two other reasons: (1) it contains an implicit critique of the Greek poetic tradition; and (2) it raises concerns about the moral efficacy of literary fictions. The story of Tatino impeded Tasso as he revised his poem into a composition that was to be a Christian-Homeric epic. I have argued that the allegory in Liberata 13 is in part a contest between Greek and biblical sources in which the Greek sources “lose.” But Homer's Iliad, as noted above, becomes central to Tasso's redefinition of his Christian epic; and Homer's poem, needless to say, is a Greek source. Were the episode of Tatino remaining in the Conquistata, it would run glaringly counter to the poet's intentions in composing his new epic. For this reason alone, Tatino's episode had become painfully out of line.

The story of Tatino's desertion raises the issue of the moral efficacy of literature and the problem of exemplarity in general. Throughout this study, imitatio has referred to literary imitation almost exclusively, but the word, especially in Tasso's post-Tridentine world, has moral implications as well. Just as there may be limitations to the mimetic possibilities of a literary example, so may there be limitations to the behavior of a specific character within a literary work of art. Put simply, Tatino sets a bad example for conduct.

The disappearance of the Tatino episode from the Conquistata, however, does not signal an end to Tasso's critical posturing. In an essay that accompanied the publication of the revised poem, Tasso openly reflects on his rewriting of the Liberata.⁵⁴ “Ma perchè in quella [poesia] de' Toscani erano famosi i duo fonti di Merlino, de' quali uno accendeva Amore, l'altro l'estingueva, volli piuttosto, a guisa di emulo, che d'imitatore irrigare di nuovi fonti i campi della Poesia, derivandoli non dalle favole Francesche o Inglesi ma dalle sacre Lettere. …”⁵⁵ (But because in that poetry of the Tuscans there were two famous fountains of Merlin, one of which kindled Love, the other of which extinguished it, I wanted to irrigate the fields of Poetry with new springs, more like an emulator than an imitator, deriving them not from French or English stories but from sacred Letters. …) The mere fact that Tasso makes this claim and the way in which he does so are as important as what he says. In the Conquistata he prefers to depend on sacred literature instead of French or English “favole,” filtered through poets writing in Tuscan like Pulci or, I believe, Ariosto. By this he means presumably that he is no longer dependent on the stories or plots that make up the two cycles of medieval romance, Carolingian or French, on the one hand, Arthurian or English, on the other. The choice of “favole” as noun in juxtaposition to “sacre lettere” points to the limitations of secular writing: it is as false as a fable. What Tasso means by “sacre lettere,” however, only becomes clear as the passage from the “Giudizio” continues: “… ma dalle sacre Lettere, perciocchè nell'Opuscolo sessagesimo primo di S. Tommaso, nel qual si tratta De dilectione Dei, & Proximi, si legge di cinque fonti misteriosi, che possono significare i cinque generi della sostanza sensibile …” (141). (… but from sacred Letters, since in the sixty-first pamphlet of St. Thomas, in which is treated De dilectione Dei, & Proximi, one reads of five mysterious fountains, which can signify the five kinds of perceptible substance. …) “Sacred” in this context does not refer to the Bible or to the canonical texts of the earliest church fathers; rather, in a very medievalizing vein, “sacred letters” refers to the writings of Thomas Aquinas. Thus, in cantos 8 and 21 of the Conquistata, Tasso's example of a sacred literary source is appropriately an elaborate description of a literal source of water that he borrows from Aquinas's De dilectione Dei: a five-tiered fountain, which for Aquinas represents an allegory of the five elements that make up the medieval cosmos (earth, water, air, fire, and quintessence). The fountain, first described in canto 8 when seen by Tancredi, is the source that bestows holy wisdom upon the wayward Riccardo/Rinaldo in canto 21. Tasso's allegory of the fountain is Dantesque in its use of Thomistic philosophy to explicate the object as the font of eternal wisdom. It is, also, clearly a different kind of allegory from the humanistic one of poetic sources in canto 13 of the Liberata. The allegory of the fountain in the Conquistata culminates in God, not in poetry.

In order to highlight his dependence on the sacred sources of the Christian tradition, Tasso establishes a controversy between medieval vernacular literature and “sacre lettere.” The controversy is similar to Tatino's allegorical episode, in which the Greek tradition is juxtaposed to the Judeo-Christian tradition to the detriment of the former. In the Conquistata, or at least in Tasso's description of the poem, a similar controversy is resolved once again in favor of religious tradition. One could say, perhaps, that the one contest replaces the other: the contest between Greek and sacred literature in the Tatino episode from the earlier version of Tasso's poem is replaced by a contest between medieval and sacred in the later one.

But there is much exaggeration in these implied agons. For all of Tasso's inclusions and omissions to suggest theoretical problems on the part of the poet, one must note the romance plots in the Conquistata that are not omitted.⁵⁶ Nor does he omit classical sources from the Liberata after the Tatino episode. As we have seen, he immediately resumes the narrative with a classical description of a nodding Jupiter who makes it rain on the crusaders. Both Tatino and the five-tiered fountain may easily appear to the reader as a superimposed poetics of intertextuality. And as such they become “declarations” that reveal as much about Tasso's strategies for composing as they do about his actual compositions. Tasso rationalized his contamination of sources, especially in his revision of the Liberata into the Conquistata, on the grounds of decorum, be it toward Christian poetic conventions or toward the requirements of classical epic. But his focus ultimately was limited to specific episodes of the poem and thus it allowed the poet to do what he wanted in other parts.

Throughout this chapter—indeed throughout this book—I have considered how a poet's choice of sources affects the organization of his poem's narrative. Tasso the poet, symbolized by the leader of the Christians, Goffredo, chooses and mixes his sources, sometimes from classical epic, sometimes from chivalric romance, sometimes from the Bible and its exegetical tradition. The result of this combination is a veritable Christianized “romance-epic.” In the introduction I invoked this term to label the long poems of the Renaissance, although I simultaneously indicated the problematic, critical compromise it suggests. Let me add here by way of conclusion further comments on “romance-epic” and the literary beast the term aims to describe.

The epigraph to this chapter taken from Tasso's prose would not seem to have a direct impact on a discussion involving romance: “Aristotle goes on to say that … [the plot] … of epic is like excessively watered wine.”⁵⁷ This observation from the final section of Tasso's Discorsi del Poema Eroico paraphrases Aristotle's Poetics 1462b. Tasso employs Aristotle's rivalry between tragedy and epic as a foil to conclude his own essay. The ending, however, is an ambiguous one. Tasso observes that Aristotle is for the most part critical of epic, especially its distended plot, which he contrasts with the more unified plot of tragedy. Tasso, for his part, appropriates Aristotle's argument against epic as a purely negative attack so that he might subvert or “revise” it. After all, epic narrative, with its compound plot, renders greater pleasure—a compounded delight, as it were—for the reader. He then concludes that the compounded narrative of epic, not the plot of tragedy, is the better: “… così aviene peraventura tra le favole che le più composte siano le migliori” (2: 382). (… thus it happens by chance among plots that the most compounded are the best.)⁵⁸

While Tasso does not refer directly to romance in this final section of the Discorsi, it would seem that he is proposing an analogy that pertains to the vernacular genre: Aristotle deals with tragedy versus epic, much as Tasso deals with epic versus romance. Tasso's assertions about classical epic narrative can be applied to romance, the distended, amplified plot of which also yields a multitude of pleasures. Romance is certainly “among the most compounded” of all narratives. In this criticism, as in that regarding the sources of his poem, Tasso follows the widely known bare bones of Aristotle's arguments on tragedy and epic to deflect attention from his real concern in this analysis, the narrative designs of romance and epic. One reason for the theoretical decoy might be that, as the theorist in him could not completely condemn the counterclassical aspects of the romance narrative, so the poet in him could not totally abandon those same features. What we have, then, is a description of classical epic narrative in terms taken from the vocabulary of romance. We have confusion, yes, but it is, I believe, a calculated and literal “mixing together” of the genres in Tasso's theory.

Aristotle's image of watered-down wine complements the image of mixing water and wine in the Liberata. Aristotle writes: “If the epic poet takes a single plot, either it is set forth so briefly as to seem curtailed, or if it conforms to the limit of length it seems thin and diluted” (1462b). But Tasso, unlike Aristotle, is not critical of the mixture of sources in his plot qua mixture; his problem is with what kinds of sources get mixed together in the first place. His difficulty is the combining of epic and romance elements in a Christian context. We could say that he is trying to baptize a hybrid made out of Aristotle's Homer and Ariosto: “Ariostotle,” if you will. I employed Tasso's image of the Furioso's narrative as a misshapen beast in discussing Ariosto's poem in chapter 4; Tasso's Liberata is certainly no less bizarre in its configuration, for the theoretical boundaries that circumscribe the Liberata's creation delimit a literary gerrymander of gargantuan complexities.

Tasso spent his career trying to resolve the demands of Aristotelian criticism without denying the romance heritage of his father, Ariosto, Boiardo, and Pulci, among others. It is appropriate that Torquato leave Aristotle behind while trying to recuperate the epic plot, which he interprets as a good plot to the degree that it contains intermingled and compounded parts characteristic of romance. His final metaphor for disregarding Aristotle's position on epic narrative is that of the traveler:

Concedamisi dunque ch'in questa ed in alcune altre poche opinioni lasci Aristotele … perciò che in questa diversità di parere io imiterò coloro i quali ne la divisione de le strade sogliono dividersi per breve spazio, e poi tornano a congiungersi ne l'amplissima strada, la qual conduce a qualche altissima meta o ad alcuna nobilissima città piena di magnifiche e di reali abitazioni ed ornata di templi e di palazzi e d'altre fabriche reali e maravigliose.

(2: 383)

Let me then be permitted to part company with Aristotle on this and some few other matters. … In this divergence of view I shall imitate those whom a branching of the road separates for a brief while; later they return and meet on the broad highway that leads to some lofty destination, some noble city, filled with magnificent regal dwellings, and adorned with temples and palaces and other majestic architectural marvels.

As Tasso takes his leave of Aristotelian authority, even as he proposes, promises, to join Aristotle further down the theoretical road, he reveals his undiminished and abiding attraction to the genre of romance. For where else is that traveler headed but into the world of romance, that literary realm of fantastic and wondrous fabrications? It is a civilized and urbane, even decorous, view of romance, to be sure, but romance no less. It is, one might say, a classically correct romance. Ever the compromiser, Tasso came to the end of his life still somewhere between the first and last phrases of the Discorsi del Poema Eroico, somewhere between the opposing poles of “i poemi eroici” and “altre fabriche reali e maravigliose.”

Notes

1. Scritti 2: 379. For the passage from Aristotle, see Poetics 1462b1-2.

2. There are several studies on Tasso's sources, all dating from the era of positivist criticism: Vincenzo Vivaldi, Sulle fonti della GL, Prolegomeni ad uno studio completo sulle fonti della GL, and La GL studiata nelle sue fonti; Salvatore Multineddu, Le fonti della GL; and Ettore de Maldè, Le fonti della GL.

3. This is not to contest Walter Stephens's argument that the poem's midpoint comes at the beginning of canto 11, with the scene of the Eucharist on the Mt. of Olives (11.1-15). The calculus of a poem that tries to be at once classical, romance, and biblical will allow for the reckoning of different midpoints.

4. In his introduction, Raimondi, in a similar vein, notes that canto 13 represents the symbolic center of the poem with its idealized geography in encapsulated form: forest and city with desert in between (pp. lxv-vi).

5. The full text in question reads: “Voglio però che sappia, che questa è più tosto metà del quanto, che de la favola; perch'il mezzo veramente de la favola è nel terzodecimo, perchè sin a quello le cose de' cristiani vanno peggiorando. … Ma nel mezzo del terzodecimo le cose cominciano a rivoltarsi in meglio: viene, per grazia di Dio, a' prieghi di Goffredo la pioggia; e così di mano in mano tutte le cose succedono prospere” (Le lettere di Torquato Tasso 1: 66). (But I want you [Scipione Gonzaga] to know that this is half of the poem's length, rather than its plot. The true middle of the plot is in the thirteenth canto, because up to that canto the situation for the Christians worsens. … But in the middle of the thirteenth canto the situation begins to change for the better: the rain, by the grace of God, comes in answer to Goffredo's prayers. And in this way, bit by bit, their situation works out favorably.)

6. Origin 92-117.

7. Tasso invokes a similar notion in a passage from the Discorsi to account for the relationship between the artist and his own aesthetic creation. See the concluding pages of Discorso 2 (Scritti 1: 41-42).

8. For an acute discussion of the poem's ending, see Ascoli, “Liberating the Tomb,” especially pp. 171ff., where he considers the meaning of “sciogliere.”

9. For a recent biography of William, see Peter W. Edbury and John Gordon Rowe, William of Tyre: Historian of the Latin East. The editio princeps of William's history was published in Basil (1549) by N. Brylingerum. Gioseppe Horologgi's translation in Italian was published in Venice by V. Valgrisi (1562).

10. William of Tyre, A History of Deeds Done beyond the Sea 1: 346-47. See also 347, n. 25: “Solinus Polyhistor xxxv. William's critical attitude here toward this postclassical writer is that of a modern scholar. In this chapter he tests his source, both by the observed facts of geography and by his knowledge of ancient history. The contrast between William's acceptance of so much legendary material in the previous book—probably written about 1171—and the more critical attitude displayed in this chapter—probably written in 1182—reflects his growth as an historian.”

11. See his remarks on the “vero alterato” in Discorso 2 (Scritti 1: 20). In Discorso 1 (Scritti 1: 11-12), he goes into some detail on the liberty a poet should take with the historical record when necessary.

12. Other accounts of the First Crusade similarly describe the problems caused by the lack of water. See Gesta Francorum 19, 88, 100; also Peter Tudebode, Historia de Hierosolymitano Itinere 114-15.

13. I follow the Latin text cited in the notes of Maier's ed. of the Liberata (39). The translation is my own.

14. William of Tyre does not refer to the poisoning of the water supply; pace Chiappelli (554, n. 58.3).

15. It is worth noting that the old shepherd, the former courtier who hosts Erminia, revels in the pure drinking water of his sylvan hideaway “che non tem'io che di venen s'asperga” (7.10.6) (and I have no fear lest it be mixed with poison).

16. I am assuming that at 13.58.5-8, Aladino does not repeat the action described in 1.89.7-8, namely, that he does not repoison the springs. I take the passage in 13 to be the same action merely described for a second time, although I am aware of its temporal ambiguity. Had Tasso wanted to be clear he could have used the pluperfect tense, “aveva fatto,” rather than the preterite form, “fece,” at 13.58.8.

17. Michael Murrin suggests that Tasso may have been inspired to use the Lucretian analogy by the argument of Maximus of Tyre, a Platonist of late antiquity whose lectures Tasso was studying as he revised the Liberata (Allegorical Epic 98-100).

18. The adjectives “aspro” (13.58.6) and “amaro” (1.3.7) are synonymous.

19. Sergio Zatti, in a comparative reading of these passages, adduces other lexical parallels to interpret the mixture of bitter and sweet in the poisoned springs of 13 as a gloss on the mixture of sweetened medicine in canto 1. He reads 13 as a passage about literature in which the mixture of water and poison is like the mixture of sweet liquids and medicine, of truth and lies, of fact and fiction in stanza 3 of canto 1 (L'uniforme cristiano 157-63).

20. For more on this distinction see the discussion above in the introduction and chapter 4.

21. The biblical books of 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles describe how Hezekiah prepared his kingdom for a massive invasion by the Assyrians. Concluding that the citizens of Jerusalem had sufficient water to withstand a long siege, Hezekiah contrived to stop up all the springs near Jerusalem. The reference to the “Siloè” in Tasso's text (59.1) alludes to the spring of Gihon that flows into the Pool of Siloam (or “Siloè”). It also calls to mind the career of Hezekiah, who had a tunnel drilled seventeen hundred feet through the rocky bluff on which Jerusalem rests to serve as a conduit from a spring outside the city to a reservoir inside the city walls called the Pool of Siloam. The tunnel, a kind of hidden aqueduct, was an incredible feat of engineering in its day. For a description of Hezekiah's Tunnel, as it came to be called, see The Westminster Historical Atlas to the Bible 486. Other passages on the tunnel are 2 Kings 20:20, Ecclesiasticus 48:17, and Isaiah 22:9-11. The tunnel also figures prominently in certain manuscript readings of the text of 2 Samuel 5:6-9, which recounts how David used the aqueduct to sneak into Jerusalem in order to capture it from the Jebusites. Hezekiah's various accomplishments are recorded in several books of the Bible in addition to the passage from 2 Chronicles cited above. Of note for Tasso's image of the poisoned source is Proverbs 25:26, a passage rabbinical tradition attributes to scholars in Hezekiah's court. The proverb in question takes the corrupted spring as its symbol for the honest man who falters when confronted with injustice: “Fons turbatus pede et vena corrupta, Iustus cadens coram impio.” (Like a muddied spring or a polluted fountain is a righteous man who gives way before the wicked.) The passage suggests further that Hezekiah is associated with the kind of imagery Tasso develops over the course of canto 13.

    Tasso's scene alludes to this passage from 2 Chronicles: “Quod cum vidisset Ezechias, venisse scilicet Sennacherib, et totum belli impetum verti contra Ierusalem, inito cum principibus consilio, virisque fortissimis ut obturarent capita fontium, qui erant extra urbem: et hoc omnium decernente sententia, congregavit plurimam multitudinem, et obturaverunt cunctos fontes, et rivum, qui fluebat in medio terrae, dicentes: Ne veniant reges Assyriorum, et inveniant aquarum abundantiam” (2 Chronicles 32:2-4). (And when Hezekiah saw that Sennacherib had come and intended to fight against Jerusalem, he planned with his officers and his mighty men to stop the water of the springs that were outside the city; and they helped him. A great many people were gathered, and they stopped all the springs and the brook that flowed through the land, saying, “Why should the kings of Assyria come and find much water?”)

22. In L'uniforme cristiano, Zatti notes that Tasso colors his description of the drought with the vocabulary of sexual languor. He correctly points out that “languir” (62.1, 63.1, 64.1), “vaneggiar” (56.4), and “bramare” (57.8) are part of the poem's lexicon of desire. He concludes that repressed sexual desire is rearing its head in the encamped army and in the landscape of the desert itself (159). But the desire, which no one denies, need not be understood only in Freudian terms. In the Liberata there is as much longing for textual integrity, for sources that can be brought together into one whole, as there is for sexual fulfillment.

23. Marshall W. Baldwin, The First Hundred Years 1: 335.

24. See, e.g., Gesta Francorum 62.

25. A History of Deeds Done beyond the Sea 1: 329-30.

26. See Linda Rose, “Crete.”

27. See Pliny, Naturalis Historia, XIV, 11, 81: “passum a Cretico Cilicium probatur et Africum.” (Next after the raisin-wine of Crete those of Cilicia and of Africa are held in esteem.) For text and trans. see Rackham's ed., 4: 240-41.

28. William Addison Laidlaw, “Crete” 242.

29. See the remarks of Eliyahu Ashtor, Levant Trade in the Later Middle Ages 364.

30. John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice 269-70.

31. Dante associates Crete with the Minotaur (Inf 12.25). Petrarch refers to the island as the place of superstitions: “Creta, vetus superstitionum domus, aliis vivit” (Fam 15.7.14). Boccaccio refers to Cretan legends throughout his work; see, e.g., his entry on Europa, “Cretensium regina,” in De mulieribus claris; see also Genealogia 2.62; Teseida 5.17.

32. Boiardo refers to myths associated with Crete in Innamorato 2.8.16; likewise Ariosto in Furioso 20.23; 25.36-37.

33. Tasso also rewrote the historical record because he wanted the role of deserter to be filled by a Greek. He could have chosen, e.g., Ugone of Vermandois, brother of Philip I, king of France, who also deserts the army at a crucial juncture in the campaign. But Tasso not only disregards this detail of the historical record; he accords Ugone a place of honor in the catalog of the troops in 1.37.

34. The same stanzas with slight changes also occur in the Gerusalemme Conquistata 1.71-72.

35. Tasso revises the Greek contribution to one thousand soldiers in the Conquistata, but he remains critical of Greek lethargy.

36. A History of Deeds Done beyond the Sea 1: 150.

37. For the stereotype of Greeks as liars, also see OF 29.18.8.

38. A History of Deeds Done beyond the Sea 1: 150, n. 35.

39. See, e.g., in Discorso 2, Tasso's remarks on Trissino and Ariosto: “… ove il Trissino, d'altra parte, che i poemi d'Omero religiosamente si propose d'imitare” (Scritti 1: 26) (… Trissino, on the other, who proposed to imitate the poems of Homer devoutly); “… giudico nondimeno che [Ariosto] non sia da esser seguìto nella moltitudine delle azioni” (Scritti 1: 27) (… I myself still think that Ariosto should not be imitated in the matter of multiple plots).

40. David Quint discusses the allegorical implications of the trouble within the Christian alliance in “Political Allegory in the GL,” now in Epic and Empire 213-47.

41. Although there are many passages in the Bible where faith is glossed as the ability to move mountains (e.g., Matthew 17:19, 1 Corinthians 13:2), I find no biblical passage in which faith is defined as the ability to stop the flow of rivers. Matthew 17:19 reads: “… si habueritis fidem, sicut granum sinapis, dicetis monti huic: Transi hinc illuc, et transibit, et nihil impossibile erit vobis.” (… if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, “Move hence to yonder place,” and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you.) Paul repeats the image at 1 Corinthians 13:2: “… et si habuero omnem fidem ita ut montes transferam, charitatem autem non habuero, nihil sum.” (… and if I have all faith, so as to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.)

42. I have adapted Nash's translation of this clause.

43. In poetic or archaic Italian the masculine “i fonti” denotes the figurative use of “source”; contrast Tasso's use of “le fonti” for actual springs of water (1.89.7). For a list of examples of the figurative use, see the entry in the Crusca dictionary, para. 6.

44. For a full study of the dynamics of the one and the many in the poem, see Zatti, L'uniforme cristiano 9-44.

45. Trans. Fairclough.

46. Salvatore Multineddu (Le fonti 147-48) compares Tasso's scene with the description of Zeus's nod in Iliad 1.488-533. I think it is more likely that Tasso is invoking the topos rather than the specific passage in Homer.

47. Tasso's description of the effect of the nod is also classical in its detail, as one of Tasso's earliest commentators, Guastavini, notes: “i Romani gli augurî da sinistra avevano per felici” (cited in Caretti 2: 440). (The Romans considered omens from the left auspicious.)

48. In this interpretation one might argue that Tatino stands for classical sources in general. Indeed, the textual tradition of the poem is ambiguous enough on the spelling of Tatino's name that some editors read “Latino.” This in turn has caused many commentators, e.g., Chiappelli (64, n.51.1), to warn against confusing Tatino with the character, Latino, of 9.27. Tasso's autograph manuscripts suggest that he himself was indecisive about the character's name. See Solerti's discussion of these textual problems (1: 53).

49. C. P. Brand discusses some of the other reasons for the revisions, such as Tasso's stylistic maturity, his greater focus on Homer as a structural model, and his long-standing desire to reduce the episodic part of the plot; see his Torquato Tasso 123-32.

50. The reordering is as follows (with some additions and much editing): GL 13.1-52 → GC 16.1-56; GL 13.53-63 and 71-80 → GC 19.120-30 and 134-43; stanzas 64-70 of canto 13 are cut from GC. See the schematic comparison of the two narratives by Angelo Solerti, “Ragguaglio della favola …” in Gerusalemme Conquistata, ed. Luigi Bonfigli 2: 385-409.

51. In Writing from History, Timothy Hampton discusses the transformation of Tasso's rhetoric of exemplarity in the Liberata into a rhetoric of martyrdom in the Conquistata.

52. The Homeric scenes, however, are not all successful. As Brand has noted, “Tasso's attempt to add epic grandeur by means of new episodes mostly imitating Homer also fails to add aristically to the poem: the battle of the ships, the death of Ruperto, the reactions of Riccardo, are unnecessary complications in an already over-laden military action” (Tasso 128).

53. These examples and several others are listed by Brand, Tasso 125.

54. The full title of the essay is “Del giudizio sopra la Gerusalemme di Torquato Tasso da lui medesimo riformata” in Opere 4: 129-76.

55. “Giudizio” 141.

56. E.g., he does not remove the sultry description of Armida's garden and its bathing nymphs in GL 16.

57. Discourses on the Heroic Poem 202-03.

58. Cavalchini and Samuel translate: “… so among fables the most composite are the best.” I prefer to render “favole” here as “plots” rather than “fables”.

Bibliography

Abbreviations of works cited frequently:

Poems

GL = Gerusalemme Liberata

Met = Ovid, Metamorphoses

OF = Orlando Furioso

OI = Orlando Innamorato

Secondary Materials

DBI = Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani

GSLI = Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana

JMRS = Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies

MLN = Modern Language Notes

PMLA = Publications of the Modern Language Association

TAPA = Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association

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Pliny. Natural History. Ed. H. Rackham et al. 10 vols. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1938-63.

Tasso, Torquato. Apologia del S. Torquato Tasso, In difesa della sua GL … Ferrara: Baldini, 1586.

———. “Del giudizio sopra la Gerusalemme di Torquato Tasso da lui medesimo riformata.” Opere 4: 129-76.

———. Discourses on the Heroic Poem. Trans. Mariella Cavalchini and Irene Samuel. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1973.

———. Gerusalemme Conquistata. Ed. Luigi Bonfigli. 2 vols. Bari: Laterza, 1934.

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———. GL. Ed. Angelo Solerti. 3 vols. Florence: Barbèra, 1986.

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———. “To Maurizio Cataneo.” Letter in Apologia in difesa dell GL. Ferrara: Cagnacini, 1585.

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