‘There are as many Tassos as there are Hamlets’: representations of Tasso’s life in England

During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, attention in England focused increasingly on the troubled life of the poet, who came to be regarded as ‘a prototype of the Romantic poet, loving passionately but hopelessly and above his station, ...chained in a lunatic’s cell’. In the fifth chapter the second principal strand of this study traces and analyses the development of such views about Tasso himself, from the earliest English biographical account by Henry Layng in 1748 to the last at the start of the twentieth century. It also examines the many imaginative engagements with aspects of the poet’s legendary biography, such as his apparent madness and prolonged imprisonment in Ferrara as a result of his supposed love for Leonora d’Este, the Duke’s sister, which were to become a prominent feature of English and European responses to him in the nineteenth century. It focuses particularly on Lord Byron’s impassioned ventriloquisation of the Italian poet’s voice in The Lament of Tasso (1817).