TASSO,. TORQUATO ( 1544-95). A famous Ital ian poet, son of the preceding, born at Sorrento, March 11, 1544. Accompanying his father on his various military and diplomatic missions, he received his early training in Naples, Rome, and Venice. Fired by the re ports of the inroads made by the Turks in Hun gary and by the accounts of their piratical land ings on the coast of Italy, the Christian popu lation began to think of a new crusade against the Moslem's, and the young Tasso now conceived the idea of writing a poem on the Crusades. He actually did compose on the subject some verses which he revised and incorporated in the first cantos of his Gerusalemme liberata. In 1560 he was sent to the University of Padua to study law, but he soon gave up law for philosophy and letters. lie was in the meantime at work upon a poem of chivalrous import, the Rinaldo (published at Venice in 1562). From Bologna, where lie had been engaged in study for two years, Torquato had to flee in 1564 in order to escape a prosecution for certain satires that he had aimed at professors and fellow students. Induced by the willingness of Cardinal Luigi d'Este to take him into his service, he went to Ferrara in 1565, and there devoting some atten tion to his Germs/den/me, already begun, he also played a distinguished part at the Court of the Duke, Alfonso IL Tasso was regularly attached to the suite of Alfonso II. in 1572, and left with full leisure for his literary pursuits, so that in 1573 he was able to compose in a short time his excellent pastoral drama, the Aminta, and to continue work upon the Ger/ma/eta me, which was finished by 1575. In this same year he was given the sine cure post of historiographer of the Court of Este. Troubles of various kinds now began to affect his mind, and his mental ailment, made worse by a blow on the head received during a quarrel, developed into a mania, which consisted in a belief on his part that he was inclining to heretical principles and was therefore watched and persecuted. In June, 1577, he drew a
knife upon a servant who seemed to be watching him as he was conversing with the Princess Lucrezia d'Este, and by order of the Duke he was confined in a room of the palace that he might there receive treatment. Having been later transferred to the Franciscan monastery in Fer rara, he escaped thence one night in July, 1579, and wandered for a while begging his way about Italy, and fleeing in turn from the various asy lums offered him. During the lucid intervals of this period he composed several of his best dialogues.
In 1579 he returned t'o Ferrara, at a time when the attention of the Court was wrapt in the nuptials of the Duke and Margherita Gonzaga. Having failed on this account to obtain the audience that he sought., he became frantic and, bursting into the Court one day, he behaved so violently that it was found necessary to imprison him in the insane asylum of Sant' Anna. He was treated kindly and was allowed to receive the vigits of princes, persons of the Court and other friends. At one moment a furious maniac. at the next he was in perfect possession of his faculties and could write his philosophical Dialoghi.
As soon as his confinement in Sant' Anna be came known, pirated editions of his works be gan to appear. In 1580 a certain Malaspina published in Venice a garbled edition of four teen cantos of the 6sYN5ulemine under the title Goffredo, and this induced a friend of Tasso, Angelo Ingegneri, to publish a more correct edi tion at Parma and Casalmaggiore (1581). Still better editions are the two that appeared at Ferrara, also in 1581. prepared by still another friend of the poet, BonnA, who had access to Tasso's own manuscript. But the Gerusulemme liberata, thus given to the public in its proper form, no longer pleased its author. who set to work to correct and remodel it, eventually pro ducing the luckless Gerusalemme conquistata, a work decidedly inferior to the earlier and in spired epic.