Study guide

Jerusalem Delivered

by Torquato Tasso

Overview

Author: Torquato Tasso (1544–1595), court poet to the Este dukes of Ferrara
Original title: Gerusalemme liberata; Tasso himself called the poem Il Goffredo (Godfrey)
Written: Largely in the 1560s and 1570s; finished in 1575 and revised over the next years
First published: Partial unauthorized edition, Venice 1580; the first complete editions, Parma and Casalmaggiore, 1581
Genre: Christian heroic poem: a classical epic on a historical subject that absorbs the matter and manner of chivalric romance
Metre: Ottava rima: eight hendecasyllabic lines rhyming abababcc, the stanza of Italian narrative poetry
Length: Twenty cantos, 1,917 stanzas
Setting: Palestine in 1099, the sixth year of the First Crusade, ending with the capture of Jerusalem; excursions to the Dead Sea, Egypt and the Fortunate Isles of the Atlantic
Quotations from: Edward Fairfax, Godfrey of Bulloigne, or The Recoverie of Jerusalem (1600), cited as GL canto.stanza; the site also holds J. H. Wiffen's version in Spenserian stanzas (1824–25)
Revised as: Gerusalemme conquistata (Rome, 1593), in twenty-four books

Context

Torquato Tasso was born in Sorrento in 1544, the son of Bernardo Tasso, a courtier and the author of the chivalric poem Amadigi. He grew up in the shadow of his father's exile and service in several Italian courts, studied law and philosophy at Padua and Bologna, and published a youthful romance, Rinaldo, in 1562. In 1565 he entered the household of Cardinal Luigi d'Este at Ferrara, and from 1572 he served Duke Alfonso II. Ferrara was the most brilliant literary court in Italy and the home of Ariosto's Orlando furioso (1516–32), the romance against which Tasso measured everything he wrote. There he also wrote his pastoral drama Aminta (1573) (Brand 1965).

Tasso finished the Gerusalemme in 1575 and at once submitted it to a panel of readers in Rome, among them Scipione Gonzaga, Sperone Speroni and the strict churchman Silvio Antoniano. Their objections, literary and religious, drew him into years of anxious revision; he even presented himself to the Inquisition to have his orthodoxy examined. His behaviour at court grew erratic, and in March 1579, after an outburst during the duke's wedding festivities, he was confined in the hospital of Sant'Anna in Ferrara, where he remained until 1586. While he was a prisoner the poem escaped him: a partial edition appeared at Venice in 1580, and in 1581 Angelo Ingegneri printed complete texts at Parma and Casalmaggiore, giving the poem the title by which it is known. Tasso spent his last years rewriting it as the Gerusalemme conquistata (1593), a stricter and more devout poem that few readers have preferred. He died in Rome in 1595 (Brand 1965) (Zatti 2006).

The subject is the climax of the First Crusade: the siege and capture of Jerusalem in July 1099 under Godfrey of Bouillon, Duke of Lower Lorraine, followed in the poem by the immediate defeat of the Egyptian relief army (history places that battle, at Ascalon, a month later, in August 1099). Tasso took his history from the medieval chronicler William of Tyre and from humanist historians, and kept the main lines: Godfrey's leadership, the siege towers, the decisive assault. Around this frame he invented almost all of his most famous characters, Rinaldo, Armida, Clorinda and Erminia among them. The crusade also spoke to his own time. The Ottoman Empire was the great power of the eastern Mediterranean, Cyprus had fallen in 1571, and the victory of Lepanto that same year had revived dreams of a united Christian offensive (Quint 1993) (Murrin 1994).

Tasso was also the leading theorist of the heroic poem in his age. In the Discorsi dell'arte poetica (written in the 1560s, printed in 1587) and their expansion, the Discorsi del poema eroico (1594), he argued against the multiple plots of Ariosto for a single, complete action of due magnitude, drawn from history but not so recent as to bind the poet's invention. Such a poem should nevertheless contain great variety, like a little world in which battles, loves, councils and wonders are all ordered towards one end. He also argued that the marvellous (il meraviglioso), essential to epic delight, could be made credible by placing it in the Christian supernatural: what angels, devils and magicians perform will seem possible to a Christian reader, and so the probable and the marvellous are reconciled. His prose Allegory of the poem (1576), printed with it from 1581, reads the army as an image of the whole human being, with Godfrey as the understanding and Rinaldo as the irascible power that should serve it (Tasso 1973) (Rhu 1993) (Weinberg 1961).

For English poets the Gerusalemme was the modern epic. Spenser named Tasso beside Homer, Virgil and Ariosto in his Letter to Raleigh and rewrote Armida's garden as the Bower of Bliss. Richard Carew translated the first five cantos in 1594, and in 1600 Edward Fairfax published the complete Godfrey of Bulloigne in Tasso's own eight-line stanza, a version later praised by Dryden as a source of Waller's smooth couplets. Milton, weighing a subject for an epic of his own in The Reason of Church Government (1642), recalled that Tasso had offered his patron the choice of Godfrey’s expedition, Belisarius or Charlemagne, and Davenant's Preface to Gondibert (1650) took Tasso as the starting point of its argument about what a modern heroic poem should be. The Romantic age produced J. H. Wiffen's version in Spenserian stanzas (1824–25), also on this site; modern readers have the prose of Ralph Nash and the verse translations of Anthony Esolen and Max Wickert (Lea 1981) (Brand 1965) (Tasso 1987) (Tasso 2000) (Tasso 2009).

Plot overview

In the sixth year of the crusade God sends the archangel Gabriel to Godfrey of Bouillon, who is chosen supreme commander and leads the Christian army to Jerusalem. Inside the city the tyrant Aladino persecutes its Christians until the young Sofronia offers her life for theirs, and the warrior maiden Clorinda saves her and her lover Olindo from the stake. The siege begins with skirmishes and single combats, chiefly between the Christian prince Tancredi, who loves Clorinda, and the fierce Circassian Argante. Satan summons a council of hell and sets the enchantress Armida to divide the camp. She lures away many of the best knights, while the young hero Rinaldo, having killed a rival in a quarrel, leaves the army in disgrace.

Without Rinaldo the crusade falters. The Saracen princess Erminia, who loves Tancredi, flees the city in Clorinda's armour and finds refuge among shepherds; Tancredi, pursuing her in the belief that she is Clorinda, falls into Armida's power. The sultan Solimano attacks the camp by night, and the first assault on the walls fails when Godfrey is wounded. Clorinda burns the Christians' great siege tower, but is shut out of the city and killed in a night duel by Tancredi, who recognizes her only as she dies asking for baptism. The magician Ismeno then fills the forest from which the Christians must cut timber for new engines with demons and illusions, and no knight, not even the grieving Tancredi, can break the spell.

Heaven reveals that only Rinaldo can disenchant the wood. Two knights, Carlo and Ubaldo, are guided by a Christian wizard and a magic ship beyond the Pillars of Hercules to the Fortunate Isles, where they find Rinaldo idling in Armida's garden. Shown his own effeminate image in a polished shield, he returns, leaving Armida to destroy her palace and join the Egyptian army in search of revenge. Rinaldo, reconciled with Godfrey and absolved by Peter the Hermit, breaks the enchantment of the forest, and the rebuilt towers carry the crusaders over the walls. Jerusalem falls amid slaughter; Tancredi kills Argante, and Erminia finds him wounded and heals him.

In the final battle against the Egyptian host Rinaldo kills Solimano, Raimondo kills Aladino, and Godfrey kills the Egyptian commander. Armida, defeated, tries to kill herself; Rinaldo prevents her, offers to restore her to her throne, and she yields to him as the 'handmaid' of the Lord, accepting his faith. Godfrey goes, still in his bloodstained armour, to the church of the Holy Sepulchre, hangs up his arms and fulfils his vow.

Book by book

Book 1: The Choosing of Godfrey

Summary

After invoking a heavenly Muse crowned with stars, and dedicating the poem to Alfonso d'Este, the narrator describes the crusading army wintering at Tortosa in the sixth year of the war. God, looking down on the princes, sees that only Godfrey of Bouillon desires the recovery of Jerusalem for its own sake; the others are distracted by ambition, love or private quarrels. He sends Gabriel to Godfrey, who calls a council at which Peter the Hermit proposes that a single commander be chosen. The princes elect Godfrey.

Godfrey reviews his forces, and a catalogue presents the contingents and their leaders: the French, the Normans, the Flemings, the Italians under Tancredi, and the adventurers, the free band of knights whose finest member is the young Rinaldo. The army marches south and is soon in sight of Jerusalem's lands. Inside the city the old tyrant Aladino hears of its approach and, fearful, strengthens his defences and lays waste the country around.

Analysis

The opening stanzas state Tasso's programme. The subject is one man and one action, the 'godly knight' who freed the Sepulchre, and the hero's chief labour is not only to fight but to bring scattered and quarrelsome followers back under one command. Unity is therefore both the poem's formal principle and its plot. The Muse is no longer the Heliconian goddess but a heavenly one, and the poet asks pardon for mixing 'fictions light' with 'truth divine', the problem of the Christian marvellous in a single line. The famous comparison that follows, of the poet sweetening the rim of a cup of bitter medicine for a sick child, frames poetic pleasure as the servant of moral truth (Tasso 1973).

Gabriel's descent belongs to a long epic tradition of messengers sent from heaven, from Hermes in Homer to Mercury in Virgil; Tasso makes the convention Christian and carefully hierarchical (Greene 1963). The catalogue, too, is Homeric in origin, but its real function is to show the many being gathered into the one.

Inspire life in my wit, my thoughts upraise, My verse ennoble, and forgive the thing, If fictions light I mix with truth divine, And fill these lines with other praise than thine.

GL 1.2

The poet asks pardon for mixing invented episodes with sacred history. The tension between fiction and truth, delight and instruction, runs through the poem and through Tasso's criticism.

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Book 2: Olindo and Sofronia

Summary

The magician Ismeno, an apostate Christian, persuades Aladino to steal an image of the Virgin from the Christians' church and set it in the mosque as a protective charm. The image vanishes overnight, and the furious king threatens to massacre every Christian in the city. To save them the young Sofronia falsely confesses that she took it. Olindo, who has long loved her silently, claims the deed for himself to save her, and the king, in disgust, condemns both to be burned together.

As they stand bound at the stake, Clorinda, a pagan warrior maiden newly arrived in Jerusalem, hears their story, is moved, and obtains their pardon in return for her service in the war. The scene shifts to the Christian camp, where two ambassadors of the King of Egypt, the smooth-spoken Alete and the proud Argante, urge Godfrey to abandon the siege. Godfrey refuses, and Argante, shaking out a fold of his robe, declares war.

Analysis

Olindo and Sofronia is the poem's first and most self-contained episode, a small tragedy of love and martyrdom that ends happily. It was also the episode Tasso's Roman readers liked least: it has almost no causal link to the main action, and it puts a lovesick young man and a Christian woman's willing lie at the centre of a sacred poem. Tasso offered to cut it and did remove it from the Conquistata. Its place here is nonetheless telling. It introduces Clorinda through an act of mercy, and it states in miniature the poem's recurring pattern of love unrequited, sacrifice and unexpected grace (Zatti 2006) (Brand 1965).

Then back to back fast to a stake both ties, Two harmless turtles dight for sacrifice.

GL 2.32

The lovers are bound back to back at the stake. The image of the 'turtles' (turtle-doves) as sacrificial victims sums up the episode's pathos: innocence offered for others.

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Book 3: Before the Walls

Summary

The crusaders reach Jerusalem at dawn and weep at the sight of the holy city. Clorinda leads a sally against them. In the skirmish Tancredi meets her and strikes off her helmet; her golden hair falls loose, and he recognizes the woman he fell in love with when he once saw her drinking at a spring. He refuses to fight her and, in the middle of the battle, declares his love. On the walls the princess Erminia, standing beside Aladino, names the Christian champions to him, and secretly reveals her own love for Tancredi.

Argante kills Dudone, leader of the adventurers, and the day ends. Godfrey holds a solemn funeral for Dudone and then orders his men to cut timber in a nearby forest for siege engines. The trees fall with an echo of grief, a quiet foreshadowing of the enchantment the forest will later suffer.

Analysis

Erminia's naming of the enemy from the walls imitates the teichoskopia, the 'view from the wall', in the third book of the Iliad, where Helen names the Greek leaders for Priam. Tasso's change is characteristic: the speaker is a woman whose public duty and private desire point in opposite directions, so that every name she gives carries a concealed emotion. The unhelmeting of Clorinda shows the same blend of epic and romance. The battlefield turns into a scene of recognition and love at first sight, and the poem's main lovers are introduced in a way that makes them a danger to the war (Zatti 2006).

For every lace he broke and every thong, And in the dust threw down her plumed crest, About her shoulders shone her golden locks, Like sunny beams, on alabaster rocks.

GL 3.21

Clorinda's helmet falls in combat and her identity is revealed by her hair. Armour hides and reveals identity throughout the poem, and recognition often comes at the moment of greatest danger.

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Book 4: The Council of Hell and Armida

Summary

Satan, enraged by the crusaders' progress, summons the powers of hell to a council and, in a grand speech recalling their rebellion against God, sends them out to ruin the Christian enterprise. Idraote, king of Damascus and a magician, answers their prompting by sending his niece Armida, an enchantress of dazzling beauty, to the Christian camp to seduce its best knights away.

Armida tells Godfrey a false tale of a dispossessed princess persecuted by a usurping uncle and asks for ten champions to restore her. Godfrey, intent on the siege, hesitates, but his brother Eustazio and the other young knights, inflamed by her looks, press him until he agrees that ten should be chosen by lot. Armida works the camp with glances, smiles and tears.

Analysis

The infernal council is one of the most influential passages of the poem. Tasso brings the devils of Christian tradition into the classical epic council of gods, with monstrous forms and a ruler who speaks with wounded pride; Milton drew on it for the debate in Pandaemonium in Paradise Lost 2 (Kates 1983). The canto also shows how Tasso's Christian marvellous works. Armida's magic is real but limited, and its power lies in exploiting the knights' desires: she does not compel them, she persuades them. The narrator's remark that women 'enchant the valiant, and beguile the wise' sounds misogynist, but the canto as a whole makes the knights' self-deception as much the subject as Armida's art (Migiel 1993).

Her humble gestures made the residue plain, Dumb eloquence, persuading more than speech: Thus women know, and thus they use the guise, To enchant the valiant, and beguile the wise.

GL 4.85

Armida's 'dumb eloquence' is a rhetoric of gesture. The word 'enchant' links her beauty to her magic, the poem's central figure for the seductions that draw knights away from the war.

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Book 5: Rinaldo's Exile

Summary

The death of Dudone leaves the adventurers without a captain. The Norwegian prince Gernando, jealous that Rinaldo should be preferred, slanders him publicly, and Rinaldo kills him in a duel. Godfrey, bound to uphold military law, announces that the offender must be tried; Tancredi and Rinaldo's uncle Guelfo persuade Rinaldo to leave the camp rather than submit to arrest, and he rides away alone in search of glory.

Armida, meanwhile, departs with the ten champions chosen by lot and many more who slip away to follow her secretly. Godfrey, already weakened by Rinaldo's absence, hears unwelcome news from the coast concerning the fleet's supplies, but he hides his anxiety from the army.

Analysis

Rinaldo's quarrel echoes Akhilleus' withdrawal in the Iliad: the best warrior leaves the army after a dispute over honour, and the army suffers until he returns. But Tasso shifts the moral weight. Rinaldo is not wronged by his commander; he breaks the law in anger, and his departure begins a long wandering, the romance 'error' that the epic plot must correct. In the Allegory he represents the irascible power, noble but dangerous until it is governed by reason in the figure of Godfrey (Tasso 1973) (Quint 1993).

He rides, revolving in his noble spright Such haughty thoughts as fill the glorious mind; On hard adventures was his whole delight, And now to wondrous acts his will inclined;

GL 5.52

Rinaldo rides off dreaming of solitary deeds. His desire for individual glory, admirable in itself, is precisely what separates him from the common enterprise.

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Book 6: Argante's Challenge and Erminia's Flight

Summary

Argante challenges the Christians to single combat. Otone, rushing out before the chosen champion, is unhorsed and taken prisoner. Tancredi then meets Argante in a long and savage duel which night interrupts, and the two agree to finish it after six days. Both are wounded.

Erminia, daughter of the dead king of Antioch, had once been Tancredi's captive and was treated by him with honour; she has loved him ever since. Torn between love and modesty, she resolves to go to him and heal his wounds. She puts on Clorinda's armour to pass the gates and rides out by night, but Christian sentries see the famous armour and give chase, and she flees.

Analysis

The debate in Erminia's mind between Love and Honour is a set piece of the Italian lyric tradition, and Tasso's phrase for it, a 'doubtful combat' between love and honour, could stand as an epigraph for the seventeenth-century heroic drama that Davenant and Dryden built on the conflict (Davenant 1971). Disguise is again the engine of the plot: armour makes Erminia look like the warrior she is not, and the disguise that should protect her exposes her to danger. Her wish that her 'silken gown' were a breastplate measures the distance between Clorinda's martial freedom and the confinement of the princess (Migiel 1993).

“Alas, why did not Heaven these members frail With lively force and vigor strengthen so That I this silken gown and slender veil Might for a breastplate and an helm forego?

GL 6.83

Erminia wishes for a warrior's strength. The poem's women are defined by their relation to arms: Clorinda bears them, Erminia borrows them, Armida conquers without them.

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Book 7: Erminia among the Shepherds

Summary

Erminia's horse carries her far into the countryside, and she wakes beside the Jordan to birdsong and the sound of a shepherd's pipe. An old shepherd, making baskets among his sons, tells her that his poor and humble life is safe from the war, and that he once served at court before choosing the country. Erminia stays with the family, dresses as a shepherdess, and carves her lament for Tancredi into the bark of trees.

Tancredi, believing the fugitive to be Clorinda, follows her trail and is lured into Armida's enchanted castle by the Dead Sea, where he is taken prisoner. The aged Raimondo of Toulouse takes his place against Argante and, protected by a guardian angel, is winning when the Saracen archer Oradino, prompted by a devil, shoots at him. The truce is broken, a general fight follows, and the devils raise a storm that drives the crusaders back.

Analysis

Erminia's pastoral interlude is one of the most imitated passages in European poetry. Tasso had written the pastoral Aminta, and the old shepherd's praise of humble poverty sets against the epic the ideal of withdrawal from ambition and the court, an ideal that Spenser recalled in Calidore's visit to the shepherds in the sixth book of The Faerie Queene. Yet the idyll is not offered as a solution: Erminia cannot stay, and the shepherd's peace depends on obscurity. The pastoral is a pause within history, not an escape from it (Brand 1965) (Giamatti 1966).

“My son,” quoth he, “this poor estate of ours Is ever safe from storm of warlike broil; This wilderness doth us in safety keep, No thundering drum, no trumpet breaks our sleep.

GL 7.8

The old shepherd explains why war passes his family by. His speech praises the safety of obscurity and quietly criticizes the courts that Tasso himself served.

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Book 8: Sweno's Sword and the Mutiny

Summary

Carlo, a Danish knight, reaches the camp with news that his lord, Prince Sweno of Denmark, was ambushed and killed with all his men by Solimano, the exiled sultan of Nicaea. A heavenly vision had ordered Carlo to carry Sweno's sword to Rinaldo. Then a headless body in Rinaldo's armour is found, and his followers believe him dead.

The fury Alecto inflames the Italian knight Argillano, who accuses Godfrey of having Rinaldo murdered. Mutiny spreads through the Italian contingent. Godfrey prays, and then walks unarmed among the rebels, with a majesty that awes them into silence; Argillano is arrested and order is restored.

Analysis

The canto shows the power of rumour and false signs: the armour on the corpse is a deception arranged by Armida, and the passions it unleashes are fed by a fury from hell. Godfrey's answer is not force but presence. He goes out with bare hands and face, and his authority appears as something almost sacramental, a 'lamp of majesty'. This is the heroism the Allegory assigns to reason governing the passions. The episode also completes Tasso's version of the Iliad's broken army: the camp is now divided by the absent hero's wrath and the commander's justice (Quint 1993).

Above his hauberk strong a coat he ware, Embroidered fair with pearl and richest stone, His hands were naked, and his face was bare, Wherein a lamp of majesty bright shone;

GL 8.78

Godfrey confronts the mutineers without weapons. The image of light on his bare face makes his authority visible: he rules by grace and bearing as much as by arms.

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Book 9: The Night Attack

Summary

Alecto, disguised as an old man, urges Solimano to attack the Christian camp by night with his desert Arabs. The assault is ferocious, and Clorinda and Argante sally from the city to join it. Solimano kills many, including the old knight Latino and his five sons.

God sees the devils at work and sends the archangel Michael, who descends through the heavens and drives the demons back into hell. At that moment the knights who had followed Armida, now freed, arrive and fall upon the pagans. Solimano is the last to retire, fighting alone until the rout is complete.

Analysis

Michael's descent is the most elaborate of the poem's heavenly journeys. Tasso traces the angel's passage through the Ptolemaic universe, from the empyrean through the crystalline sphere and the planets to the region of weather, and then describes his light scattering the darkness. The cosmology gives the war a vertical axis: the struggle of crusaders and pagans is a local episode of the war between heaven and hell (Greene 1963). Solimano, meanwhile, gains the grandeur of a doomed pagan hero, admirable for his courage and dangerous because of it; his last stand recalls Turnus and the defeated heroes of Lucan (Quint 1993).

After a storm so spreadeth forth the sun His rays and binds the clouds in golden strings, Or in the stillness of a moonshine even A falling star so glideth down from Heaven.

GL 9.62

Two similes describe Michael's passage: sunlight after a storm, and a falling star. Tasso's angels move as light moves, an image Milton remembered for his angelic descents.

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Book 10: Solimano in Jerusalem

Summary

Ismeno finds the defeated Solimano asleep and carries him in a magic chariot, wrapped in a cloud, into Jerusalem. Unseen, he listens to Aladino's war council, then reveals himself and inspires the city's defenders to fight on.

In the Christian camp the knights who returned in canto 9 describe how Armida led them to her castle on the Dead Sea, changed them into fishes, and sent them in chains towards Egypt, until Rinaldo appeared and freed them. Rinaldo is therefore alive. Peter the Hermit, in a prophetic trance, announces his future glory and the deeds of his descendants, the house of Este.

Analysis

Peter's prophecy is dynastic poetry in the Virgilian manner: Rinaldo, like Aeneas, is the ancestor of a ruling house, and the Este dukes of Ferrara receive their genealogy and their political role as defenders of the papacy. Tasso inherited the device from Ariosto, whose Ruggiero is also an Este ancestor, but he binds it to the Church. The knights' narrative of Armida's castle also matters structurally. It reports in retrospect a romance adventure that the main action could not contain, a typical Tassonian compromise between variety and unity (Fichter 1982).

“His children’s children at his hardiness And great attempts shall take example fair, From emperors unjust in all distress They shall defend the state of Peter’s chair,

GL 10.76

Peter foretells that Rinaldo's descendants will defend 'Peter's chair'. The prophecy flatters the Este and fuses the dynastic epic with the Counter-Reformation papacy.

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Book 11: The First Assault

Summary

On the advice of Peter, Godfrey leads the army in a solemn procession to the Mount of Olives, with hymns and prayers to the saints, before the assault. The next day the crusaders attack the walls with ladders, rams and a great wooden tower. Clorinda's arrows wound many leaders, and finally Godfrey himself is struck in the leg.

The assault falters in his absence. As the surgeon fails to draw the arrow, Godfrey's guardian angel secretly brings a healing herb, the dittany; the wound closes and Godfrey returns to the field. But night falls before the attackers can recover the advantage, and the tower, damaged, is left before the walls.

Analysis

The procession puts liturgy into epic, an emphasis welcome to Counter-Reformation readers: victory must begin 'from Heaven above'. Godfrey's healing is borrowed from Aeneid 12, where Venus secretly brings dittany to heal Aeneas. Tasso's substitution of a guardian angel for the goddess is a clear example of his method of keeping the classical action while changing its supernatural cause (Greene 1963) (Kates 1983).

“Right well, my lord, these earthly strengths you move, But let us first begin from Heaven above:

GL 11.1

Peter reminds Godfrey that siege engines are not enough. The poem treats prayer as a precondition of victory, in keeping with its Counter-Reformation piety.

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Book 12: The Death of Clorinda

Summary

Clorinda resolves to burn the great siege tower by night. Before she goes, her old eunuch Arsete tells her who she is: the white daughter of a black Christian queen of Ethiopia, hidden at birth because her colour, caused by an image of a white maiden that the queen gazed on, would have raised suspicion. Arsete was to have her baptized but never did, and a dream of Saint George has warned him that she will soon die. Clorinda and Argante set the tower ablaze, but when they retreat she is shut outside the gate.

Tancredi, not knowing her in her dark armour, pursues her, and they fight a long, terrible duel in the night. He wounds her mortally. She forgives him and asks for baptism; he fetches water from a stream in his helmet, unlaces her helmet, and recognizes her. He baptizes her, and she dies in peace. Tancredi is overwhelmed by despair, until Peter rebukes him and Clorinda appears to him in a dream from heaven. Argante swears to avenge her.

Analysis

This is the emotional centre of the poem. The duel is described with a terrible intimacy: the combatants grapple in embraces that the narrator pointedly calls those of enemies, not of lovers. Tancredi's victory is his greatest loss, and the recognition comes only when it can no longer prevent the harm. At the same time the canto turns tragedy into grace. Clorinda's hidden Christian origin, revealed only in this canto, allows the killing of the beloved enemy to become her salvation, and her last words echo the language of the sacrament (Migiel 1993).

Critics have long asked whether the conversion consoles or troubles. The baptism lets the poem claim that violence serves providence, but Tancredi's grief, which no consolation entirely quiets, keeps the cost visible. The episode is one of the poem's most powerful questions about the relation between love, killing and faith (Quint 1993) (Zatti 2006).

And as her life decays her joys increase, She smiled and said, “Farewell, I die in peace.”

GL 12.68

Clorinda's dying smile and words. The baptism turns defeat into a Christian death, but Tancredi's grief makes the moment more tragic than triumphant.

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Book 13: The Enchanted Forest

Summary

To prevent the Christians from building new engines, Ismeno fills the forest that supplies their timber with demons, so that the woodcutters flee in terror. The champion Alcasto approaches and is driven back by a wall of fire. Tancredi passes the flames, which prove to be illusions, and comes to a tall cypress. When he strikes it, blood flows, and Clorinda's voice complains that he wounds her again. Unable to strike a second time, he leaves the forest.

A terrible drought then afflicts the army; men and animals die of thirst, and some soldiers desert. Godfrey prays for rain, God answers, and the downpour revives the camp. But the forest remains closed.

Analysis

The bleeding tree descends from Virgil's Polydorus in Aeneid 3 and Dante's wood of the suicides in Inferno 13, and Spenser used the motif for Fradubio. Tasso's version is psychologically precise. The voice may not be Clorinda at all, but it finds the knight's weak point, his guilt and longing, and his pity disables him. The forest is thus a place where the hero's own inner life becomes the enchantment. The canto also shows what Tasso meant by the Christian marvellous: the magic is diabolical but limited, and it is overcome not by greater magic but by prayer and grace (Giamatti 1966) (Zatti 2006).

He drew his sword at last, and gave the tree A mighty blow, that made a gaping wound, Out of the rift red streams he trickling see That all bebled the verdant plain around,

GL 13.41

Tancredi strikes the cypress and blood flows from the wound. The tree that bleeds like a body is one of the oldest images in epic and here becomes a figure of guilt.

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Book 14: The Wizard of Ascalon

Summary

In a dream Godfrey is carried to heaven, where the spirit of the crusader Hugh tells him that Rinaldo must be recalled. Guelfo asks pardon for his nephew, and Godfrey gladly grants it. Carlo and Ubaldo are chosen to find Rinaldo, and Peter sends them to a wise old man at Ascalon.

The wizard, a pagan converted to Christianity, leads them through the waters of a river to his palace in the hollow earth, where precious stones grow and the sources of rivers rise. He explains that Armida captured Rinaldo with a song sung by a siren who told him that virtue and glory are empty names and pleasure the only wisdom, then carried him to an island at the end of the world. The wizard gives them a golden wand and instructions for resisting her enchantments.

Analysis

The wizard is Tasso's answer to his own critics. If magic is diabolical, how can a Christian hero use it? The poem introduces a 'white' magic, knowledge of nature converted to the service of grace, which the wizard explicitly distinguishes from his former pagan arrogance. The siren's song, in contrast, states the philosophy of pleasure in its most seductive form. Its sentiments come from the pastoral tradition, from the golden-age chorus of Tasso's own Aminta, so that the poem places its own lyric voice under judgment (Giamatti 1966) (Zatti 2006).

“‘O fools who youth possess, yet scorn the same, A precious, but a short-abiding treasure, Virtue itself is but an idle name, Prized by the world ’bove reason all and measure,

GL 14.63

The siren tells Rinaldo that virtue is 'but an idle name'. Her song gives the case for pleasure that the epic must answer, and it is among the most beautiful verse in the poem.

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Book 15: The Voyage to the Fortunate Isles

Summary

On the coast the two knights find a small ship piloted by a mysterious lady, Fortune, who carries them with miraculous speed past the Egyptian fleet at Gaza, along the coast of Africa and through the Strait of Gibraltar into the open ocean. She foretells that a future navigator will one day sail across it to a new world.

On one of the Fortunate Isles they climb a mountain, overcome monsters with the golden wand, and resist a fountain whose waters make the drinker die laughing. Two naked maidens bathing in the lake invite them to enjoy the garden. The knights, warned in advance, pass by and approach Armida's palace.

Analysis

The voyage beyond the Pillars of Hercules rewrites the last voyage of Ulysses in Dante's Inferno 26, a journey of forbidden curiosity that ends in shipwreck. Tasso's knights go further under the guidance of providence, and the prophecy of Columbus makes the Atlantic part of a Christian history of expansion. The voyage thus links the crusade to the European discovery and conquest of the Americas (Quint 1993). The bathing maidens, in turn, are the direct model for the two damsels whom Spenser's Guyon sees in the Bower of Bliss (Giamatti 1966).

Withal she smiled and she blushed withal, Her blush, her smilings, smiles her blushing graced: Over her face her amber tresses fall, Whereunder Love himself in ambush placed:

GL 15.62

One of the bathing maidens blushes and smiles at the knights. Tasso's chiasmus (her blush graces her smile, her smile her blush) makes the temptation as much rhetorical as sensual.

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Book 16: Armida's Garden

Summary

Carlo and Ubaldo pass through Armida's maze-like palace into her garden, where art and nature compete and a bird with human voice sings that the rose of life must be gathered before it fades. They find Rinaldo lying with his head in Armida's lap; she gazes in a crystal mirror and he gazes at her. When Armida leaves, the knights show Rinaldo his reflection in Ubaldo's polished shield. Seeing his perfumed hair and flower-covered sword, he is struck with shame, and Ubaldo's speech recalls him to the war.

As Rinaldo departs, Armida pursues him and pleads with him, first as a lover, then as an abandoned woman, then in fury. He answers kindly but firmly and leaves. Armida faints, wakes to find herself alone, destroys her palace and garden with her own magic, and flies through the air towards the war, resolved on revenge.

Analysis

The garden is the poem's most famous image of the earthly paradise turned into a trap. Everything in it is beautiful and artificial, and its song of the rose turns a classical commonplace about the brevity of youth into an invitation to love. The episode depends on two reflecting surfaces. Armida's mirror shows each lover only an image of the other, while the soldier's shield gives Rinaldo a true and shameful view of himself; the instrument of war becomes an instrument of self-knowledge (Giamatti 1966) (Bellamy 1992).

Armida's lament recalls Dido's in Aeneid 4, and Tasso gives her a voice of real grief, so that the reader shares her sense of abandonment even as the poem demands Rinaldo's departure. Spenser imitated the garden closely in the Bower of Bliss in The Faerie Queene 2.12, translating the rose song almost stanza for stanza (Spenser 2001).

Her, to command; to serve, it pleased the knight; He proud of bondage; of her empire, she;

GL 16.21

Rinaldo and Armida's love is described as a reversal of chivalric order. He takes pride in bondage and she in empire, a pointed inversion of the knight's service to God.

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Book 17: The Egyptian Host and Rinaldo's Shield

Summary

The Caliph of Egypt reviews his huge army at Gaza, and a second catalogue presents its peoples and commanders, under Emireno, an Armenian who has abandoned the Christian faith. Armida arrives with her troops and offers herself in marriage to whoever kills Rinaldo; the Indian king Adrasto and the Egyptian Tisaferno compete for the prize.

Rinaldo, Carlo and Ubaldo reach Palestine, where the wizard of Ascalon gives Rinaldo new armour. On his shield are engraved the deeds of his ancestors, down to the Este dukes of Tasso's day. The wizard tells Rinaldo that anger is the soldier of reason, given by nature so that it can be turned against the enemies of Christ.

Analysis

The shield imitates the shield of Aeneas in Aeneid 8, on which Vulcan engraves the future of Rome. Tasso's version is a gallery of the house of Este, and the canto's dynastic flattery is part of the poem's patronage. The wizard's speech on anger is the moral key to Rinaldo's story: wrath is not to be destroyed but disciplined, as in the Allegory, where the irascible power serves the understanding (Fichter 1982) (Tasso 1973).

“Nature lifts up thy forehead to the skies, And fills thy heart with high and noble thought, That thou to heavenward aye shouldst lift thine eyes, And purchase fame by deeds well done and wrought;

GL 17.62

The wizard tells Rinaldo why nature has given him anger. The speech states the poem's psychology: passion is legitimate when it is directed towards a higher end.

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Book 18: The Forest Disenchanted and the Fall of Jerusalem

Summary

Rinaldo is reconciled with Godfrey, confesses to Peter, and at dawn prays on the Mount of Olives, where the dew whitens his armour. He enters the enchanted forest, where music plays and nymphs emerge from the trees. A great myrtle opens, and a figure in Armida's likeness begs him to embrace her. Rinaldo strikes the myrtle, the illusion becomes a giant, and the enchantment dissolves.

New towers are built. A dove carrying a message to Aladino is intercepted, revealing that the Egyptian army is near, and Godfrey sends the squire Vafrino as a spy. In the final assault Michael shows Godfrey the host of angels and of the crusader dead fighting beside the living. Rinaldo scales the wall, Godfrey's tower reaches the ramparts, and the cross is raised over Jerusalem.

Analysis

The disenchantment answers canto 13. Tancredi failed because the spell found his grief; Rinaldo succeeds because penance has freed him from the attraction of Armida. Tasso carefully sets the sacramental preparation (confession, prayer, the dew of grace) before the adventure, so that the romance quest becomes a ritual of purification. The vision of heavenly allies at the assault is another of the poem's revelations of the invisible order behind events (Zatti 2006) (Kates 1983).

Kiss me, embrace me, if you further venture, Love keeps the gate, the fort is eath to enter.”

GL 18.32

The false Armida in the myrtle invites Rinaldo to an embrace. Her military metaphor for love, a fort easy to enter, shows the illusion speaking the language of the siege.

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Book 19: Tancredi and Argante; Erminia's Healing

Summary

Tancredi and Argante leave the battle to fight their long-delayed duel in a valley outside the walls. Argante, gazing at the doomed city, fights with grim fury and refuses mercy; Tancredi kills him but is badly wounded. Inside the city the crusaders slaughter the inhabitants, while Aladino and Solimano take refuge in the Tower of David.

Vafrino, spying in the Egyptian camp, learns of a plot by Ormondo to kill Godfrey in disguise. Erminia, now in the camp, recognizes him, reveals the plot, and asks to be taken to the Christians. On the way they find Tancredi lying apparently dead; she laments over him, then revives him and binds his wounds with her hair. Godfrey learns of the plot and the sign the traitors will wear.

Analysis

Argante dies as he lived, defiant and without complaint, and Tasso grants his enemy a tragic dignity that recalls Virgil's Turnus. The victory of the city is shadowed by massacre, which the poem records without celebration. Erminia's healing completes her story with a romance reversal: the woman who could not reach Tancredi in canto 6 now saves him, using her hair, the sign of femininity, as a bandage. Her lament over his body is one of the poem's great lyric passages (Migiel 1993) (Quint 1993).

Argantes died, yet no complaint he made, But as he furious lived he careless dies; Bold, proud, disdainful, fierce and void of fear His motions last, last looks, last speeches were.

GL 19.26

Argante dies proud and fearless. The pagan hero's end is described with a respect that complicates the poem's crusading triumph.

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Book 20: The Last Battle

Summary

The Egyptian army arrives and the two hosts meet before the walls. Solimano and Aladino watch from the Tower of David, then sally out. Solimano kills the married warriors Gildippe and Odoardo, and many others, until Rinaldo kills him; Raimondo kills Aladino. Rinaldo also kills Adrasto and Tisaferno. Godfrey kills the Egyptian commander Emireno, and Altamoro surrenders.

Armida, seeing her champions dead, flees the battle and tries to kill herself. Rinaldo seizes her hand, weeps, and promises to restore her kingdom and to serve her if she will accept the Christian faith. Her anger melts and she calls herself his handmaid. The battle won, Godfrey goes in his bloodstained armour to the Holy Sepulchre, hangs up his arms, and fulfils his vow.

Analysis

The final canto resolves the poem's two plots. The epic action ends in the fulfilment of Godfrey's vow, the 'one action' announced in the first stanza. The romance plot ends in Armida's conversion, which reconciles love with faith and the East with the West. Her words echo Mary's at the Annunciation ('Behold the handmaid of the Lord'), and they translate erotic submission into Christian obedience. Critics have read the conversion both as a harmonious ending and as an uneasy one, in which the defeated Eastern queen is absorbed into the conqueror's faith (Quint 1993) (Migiel 1993).

The comparison of Armida to Cleopatra fleeing Actium links the poem's ending to Virgil's account of the triumph of West over East in Aeneid 8, a key element in the ideological reading of the poem (Quint 1993).

His bloody coat he put not off, but run To the high temple with his noble train, And there hung up his arms, and there he bows His knees, there prayed, and there performed his vows.

GL 20.144

Godfrey goes directly from the battle to the church and hangs up his arms. The poem ends not with conquest but with an act of devotion, the fulfilment of the vow of a pilgrim army.

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Characters

Crusaders

Godfrey of Bouillon (Goffredo): Duke of Lower Lorraine and the historical leader of the First Crusade, chosen supreme commander in canto 1. He is the poem's hero in the sense of its first stanza, the leader whose task is to unite a divided army under God. Prudent, pious and self-controlled, he rarely fights in single combat and wins most of his battles by authority, prayer and judgment. In Tasso's Allegory he stands for the understanding, the faculty that should govern the passions. Readers have often found him less vivid than Rinaldo or Tancredi, a deliberate effect of his role as the still centre of the poem.
Rinaldo: The youngest and greatest of the crusading knights, a fictional ancestor of the Este dukes. His killing of Gernando and his exile, his captivity in Armida's garden and his return form the poem's central romance line. He resembles Akhilleus in his wrath and Aeneas in his departure from a lover, and the poem treats his passions as noble energies that must be disciplined. Only he can break the enchantment of the forest, and he kills Solimano in the last battle.
Tancredi: A Norman prince from southern Italy, the most melancholy and inward of the crusaders. His love for Clorinda, an enemy, distracts him in battle, and he kills her without knowing her in canto 12. His grief makes him unable to strike the bleeding cypress in the enchanted forest. He kills Argante in canto 19 and is healed by Erminia, whose love he never fully returns. He is the poem's figure of tragic pity.
Raimondo (Raymond of Toulouse): The aged Count of Toulouse, a counsellor of experience and courage. He fights Argante in canto 7, protected by an angel, and kills Aladino in the last battle.
Peter the Hermit: The preacher of the crusade and the army's spiritual guide. He proposes the election of a single commander, orders the procession before the assault, rebukes Tancredi's despair, hears Rinaldo's confession and prophesies the glory of the Este. He represents the authority of the Church within the army.
Carlo and Ubaldo: The two knights sent to find Rinaldo. Carlo, a Dane, brings Sweno's sword to the camp in canto 8; Ubaldo is the older and wiser, who has travelled widely. Guided by the wizard of Ascalon and the ship of Fortune, they resist the temptations of the Fortunate Isles and confront Rinaldo with his reflection in the shield.

Saracens and defenders of Jerusalem

Aladino (Fairfax: Aladine): The old king of Jerusalem, a usurper and a tyrant who persecutes the Christians of the city. Fearful and cruel, he depends on others to defend him. He is killed by Raimondo in canto 20.
Argante (Fairfax: Argantes): A Circassian warrior who comes as an ambassador from Egypt and stays to defend Jerusalem. Proud, violent and contemptuous of the gods themselves, he is the poem's embodiment of pagan fury. He kills Dudone, fights Tancredi and Raimondo, and swears to avenge Clorinda. His death at Tancredi's hands in canto 19 has a tragic grandeur.
Solimano (Fairfax: Solyman): The exiled sultan of Nicaea, the most formidable pagan commander. He destroys Sweno's army, leads the night attack, enters Jerusalem in Ismeno's magic chariot and dies at Rinaldo's hand. Tasso gives him the noble melancholy of a defeated king, and his story is often read as the poem's portrait of the Turkish enemy.
Emireno: The commander of the Egyptian army, an Armenian who has renounced the Christian faith. He is killed by Godfrey in the last battle.

Enchanters

Armida: The niece of Idraote, king of Damascus, and the poem's great enchantress. Sent to seduce the crusaders, she falls in love with Rinaldo and keeps him in her garden on the Fortunate Isles. Abandoned, she destroys her palace, joins the Egyptian army and offers herself to Rinaldo's killer. In the end she tries to kill herself, is saved by Rinaldo and accepts his faith. She combines Circe, Dido and Cleopatra, and she is both the poem's principal danger and one of its most moving voices.
Ismeno (Fairfax: Ismen, Ismeno): A magician who has abandoned Christianity for Islam. He persuades Aladino to steal the image of the Virgin, carries Solimano into the city and enchants the forest. He is killed when a stone from a Christian engine strikes him on the walls.
Idraote (Fairfax: Hidraort): King of Damascus and a magician, Armida's uncle. Prompted by the devils, he sends her to the Christian camp.
The wizard of Ascalon: An old pagan sage converted to Christianity who lives in a palace beneath the earth. He guides Carlo and Ubaldo, explains Armida's enchantments, and gives Rinaldo his new arms. He represents a natural knowledge redeemed by faith.
Satan and Alecto: The powers of hell. Satan summons the infernal council in canto 4; the fury Alecto incites the mutiny of canto 8 and Solimano's night attack. Against them stand the archangels Gabriel and Michael and the guardian angels who protect Godfrey and Raimondo.

Women

Clorinda: A warrior maiden in the service of Aladino, renowned for her skill with the bow and the sword. She saves Olindo and Sofronia, fights Tancredi, wounds Godfrey and burns the siege tower. Her hidden origin as the daughter of a Christian queen of Ethiopia is revealed just before her death. Mortally wounded by Tancredi, she asks for baptism and dies forgiving him. Her literary ancestors include Virgil's Camilla and Ariosto's Bradamante.
Erminia: The daughter of the dead king of Antioch, who loves Tancredi since he treated her honourably as his captive. She names the Christian knights from the walls, flees in Clorinda's armour, lives among the shepherds and finally heals Tancredi. She is the poem's figure of hopeless love and its most lyrical voice.
Sofronia and Olindo (Fairfax: Sophronia): A young Christian woman of Jerusalem, who falsely confesses to stealing the image of the Virgin to save her people, and the shy young man who loves her and claims the deed to save her. Condemned to the stake together, they are freed by Clorinda and married.
Gildippe and Odoardo: A married couple who fight side by side among the crusaders, a rare picture of shared love and arms. They are killed together by Solimano in the last battle.

Themes

Unity and multiplicity

The poem's first stanza praises a leader who brought scattered and rebellious followers back under one command, and its plot is a long struggle to keep the army together. Every danger takes the form of division: quarrels, desertion, mutiny, the dispersal of knights in search of private adventure or love. Godfrey's task is to gather the many into the one, and the end of the poem, with Rinaldo restored and Armida converted, is a return to unity.

This theme is also Tasso's theory of poetry. He argued that a heroic poem should have one action but contain the variety of a whole world. The poem's structure therefore acts out its critical argument: romance episodes are allowed to wander, but they must finally return to the main action (Zatti 2006) (Tasso 1973).

Love and duty

Almost every major character is torn between love and the war. Tancredi loves Clorinda, Erminia loves Tancredi, Rinaldo is held by Armida, and Armida herself discovers that her love has undone her purpose. The poem neither simply condemns love nor allows it to prevail. Love is the source of its most moving scenes, but in the epic order it must be subordinated or converted. Erminia's inner combat of 'love and honor' gave the seventeenth century a formula for heroic drama (Migiel 1993).

Pity and violence

The crusade is a holy war, and the poem celebrates its victory, but it repeatedly asks the reader to feel for its victims. Tancredi kills the woman he loves; the forest speaks with the voice of the dead; the city falls amid massacre; Argante and Solimano die with tragic dignity. Pity can be a weakness, as when Tancredi cannot strike the cypress, but it is also the poem's most human response to war (Quint 1993).

Illusion and the marvellous

The poem is full of enchantments: the castle on the Dead Sea, the forest of demons, the garden of the Fortunate Isles. Most of them work by exploiting desire or fear rather than by force, and they dissolve when the hero sees through them. Tasso's marvellous is therefore also a psychology of illusion. Against the magic of the devils he sets the true marvels of heaven: angels, visions, prophetic dreams (Giamatti 1966) (Zatti 2006).

Conversion and grace

Several of the poem's resolutions are conversions. The wizard of Ascalon was a pagan, Clorinda dies a Christian, and Armida accepts the faith in the last canto. Rinaldo, too, undergoes a conversion through confession and penance. Grace in the poem works through human feeling rather than against it, but its final aim is always the subordination of individual desire to the divine plan (Kates 1983).

East and West

Tasso writes of a Christian war against Muslim powers in a century when the Ottoman Empire threatened Italy. The poem's pagans are often admirable, but the structure of the action, with its Christian victory and the conversion of the Eastern queen, belongs to a long tradition of representing the East as the seductive, dangerous other of the West (Said 1978) (Quint 1993).

Motifs

Armour and disguise

Identity in the poem is constantly hidden and revealed by armour. Clorinda is recognized when her helmet falls, Erminia escapes in Clorinda's armour, Tancredi kills Clorinda because her armour is unfamiliar, and Rinaldo's armour on a headless corpse causes the mutiny. The motif links the chivalric romance with the poem's concern with recognition and self-knowledge.

Gardens and the locus amoenus

Pleasant places recur: the spring where Tancredi first sees Clorinda, the shepherds' valley, the Fortunate Isles, Armida's garden. They offer rest and beauty but also temptation and delay, and the poem asks which forms of withdrawal are innocent and which are traps (Giamatti 1966).

Descents from heaven

Gabriel, Michael and the guardian angels descend to direct and protect the crusaders. These scenes replace the classical messenger gods and give the poem its vertical structure, the visible action framed by an invisible order (Greene 1963).

Recognition too late

Tancredi recognizes Clorinda only as she dies, and he does not know the voice in the tree. Erminia finds Tancredi when he seems dead. The motif of late recognition gives the poem much of its tragic pathos.

Catalogues and councils

Following Homer and Virgil, the poem includes catalogues of the armies (cantos 1 and 17) and councils of war, of heaven and of hell. They are part of Tasso's effort to make the romance material conform to epic form.

Symbols

Jerusalem and the Sepulchre

The goal of the crusade and the end of the poem. The city is both a historical place and a figure of spiritual fulfilment, and Godfrey's prayer at the Sepulchre in the last stanza gives the poem its devotional conclusion.

The mirror and the shield

In Armida's garden the lovers' crystal mirror reflects only images of desire. Ubaldo's polished shield shows Rinaldo the truth about himself. The two surfaces stand for two kinds of seeing, the narcissism of love and the self-knowledge that calls the hero back to duty (Bellamy 1992).

The rose

The rose in the song of Armida's garden is the classical symbol of brief youth and beauty, and its message is to love while there is time. Spenser translated the song in the Bower of Bliss, and the image became a commonplace of English lyric.

The enchanted forest

The wood the crusaders need for their engines becomes a place of illusion where the dead seem to speak. It symbolizes the inner obstacles, guilt, grief and desire, that must be overcome before the city can be taken.

Critical debates

Epic unity and the romance digressions

Tasso wrote in the middle of a long Italian controversy over Ariosto's Orlando furioso. Critics who followed Aristotle's Poetics, recovered and widely commented on in the sixteenth century, demanded a single action; Ariosto's defenders argued that the romance was a new genre with its own rules, and that its multiple stories and interruptions gave modern readers a pleasure that the ancients had not known. Tasso tried to combine the two, writing a poem with one action but containing romance episodes that would delight by their variety (Weinberg 1961) (Javitch 1991).

When Camillo Pellegrino praised the Gerusalemme above the Furioso in his dialogue Il Carrafa (1584), the Florentine Accademia della Crusca, led by Lionardo Salviati, replied in defence of Ariosto and with sharp criticism of Tasso's language and plot. Tasso responded with an Apologia (1585), and the quarrel continued for years. Modern critics, notably Sergio Zatti, have argued that the poem is internally divided between its epic and romance elements, and that its energy comes from that unresolved tension (Zatti 2006) (Rhu 1993).

The Counter-Reformation and Tasso's revisions

The Gerusalemme was composed in the years after the Council of Trent, and its author was anxious to satisfy the religious authorities. His Roman readers objected to the love episodes, to the magic and to the Olindo and Sofronia story; Tasso responded with revisions, the Allegory, and finally the Gerusalemme conquistata, in which many of the episodes readers loved are reduced or removed. Critics debate whether the Liberata itself is a Counter-Reformation poem in its piety and its theology of grace, or whether its richest effects come from what that piety could not suppress (Brand 1965) (Zatti 2006).

Tasso's theory of the Christian marvellous is central to this debate. By placing all wonders under the control of God or the devil, he sought to make the marvellous credible to a Christian audience, but the price was an anxious supervision of fiction that his critics, and he himself, never fully resolved (Tasso 1973).

Eros and the epic: Armida and Rinaldo

Armida's garden has been read as a moral allegory of the passions, as a version of the earthly paradise, and as a psychological study of narcissism. A. Bartlett Giamatti placed it in a long tradition of false paradises, in which beauty and art become dangerous because they are self-sufficient (Giamatti 1966). Elizabeth Bellamy and others have explored the poem's mirrors and its anxieties about identity (Bellamy 1992).

Feminist critics have examined the poem's treatment of Armida, Clorinda and Erminia, and the ways in which female desire and female power are both admired and contained (Migiel 1993). The question remains whether Armida's conversion is the poem's triumph or its most troubling act of control.

Clorinda and the ethics of violence

Clorinda's death is the poem's most famous scene and its most disturbing. The holy war is fought by a man against the woman he loves, and the victory is a catastrophe for him. The baptism makes the killing a means of salvation, but the poem's emphasis on Tancredi's grief has led critics to ask whether the poem questions the violence it celebrates (Migiel 1993) (Quint 1993).

Her origin as a white child of a black Christian queen, revealed only in this canto, has also attracted attention for what it shows about the poem's assumptions concerning race and religion, and about its desire to find hidden Christianity in its admired enemies (Quint 1993).

Tasso and Spenser's Bower of Bliss

The final canto of Book 2 of Spenser's Faerie Queene, the destruction of Acrasia's Bower of Bliss, closely imitates Armida's garden. Spenser borrows the two bathing damsels from GL 15 and translates the song of the rose from GL 16.14–15 almost word for word. But he alters the ending decisively. Armida destroys her own palace in grief; Guyon breaks the Bower down himself, without pity, and Acrasia is bound rather than converted (Spenser 2001) (Giamatti 1966).

In his Letter to Raleigh Spenser also adopted Tasso's division of virtue between Godfrey, the political virtue, and Rinaldo, the ethical, as a model for his own design. The relation between the two poems has been studied by C. P. Brand and by later critics of the epic romance (Brand 1965) (Burrow 1993).

Tasso and Milton

Milton knew Tasso's poetry and criticism well. In The Reason of Church-Government (1642) he recalled that Tasso offered a prince of Italy the choice of Godfrey's expedition or another subject, and in Of Education (1644) he named Tasso among the critics who taught 'that sublime art' of the epic. His Latin poem Mansus (1639) honours Giovanni Battista Manso, Tasso's patron and biographer (Prince 1954).

Paradise Lost draws on the Gerusalemme in its infernal council, in its angelic descents and in the garden of Eden, which recalls Armida's garden while correcting it. Judith Kates argues that both poets faced the same problem, how to write a Christian epic that keeps the classical form while rejecting its values, and that Milton's solution is both a debt and a critique (Kates 1983) (Greene 1963).

Fairfax and English heroic poetry

Edward Fairfax's Godfrey of Bulloigne (1600) kept Tasso's eight-line stanza and his canto structure, while adding elaborations of its own. Dryden, in the Preface to his Fables (1700), wrote that Milton was the poetical son of Spenser and Waller of Fairfax, and reported that Waller had confessed his debt to Fairfax for the harmony of his verse. Fairfax was thus central to the English story of the polished line that led to the heroic couplet (Lea 1981) (Brand 1965).

Tasso was also a starting point for English epic theory. In the Preface to Gondibert (1650), addressed to Thomas Hobbes, Davenant surveyed the heroic poets from Homer to Spenser, praised Tasso for recovering the epic, but found fault with his machinery of heaven, hell and enchantment as a strain on probability. Davenant's own experiment, a heroic poem without the Christian marvellous, can be read as a reply to Tasso (Davenant 1971) (Burrow 1993).

Orientalism and the crusade

Since Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), critics have examined how European literature has represented the East. The Gerusalemme imagines the Muslim world as both dangerous and seductive, through tyrants, magicians and the beautiful Armida. Yet its pagan heroes are some of its most impressive characters, and the poem's sympathy often seems to exceed its ideology (Said 1978).

David Quint reads the poem in the tradition of the Aeneid as an epic of empire, which represents the victory of West over East and associates the enemy with chaos and the feminine, while also giving voice to the defeated. Michael Murrin has placed the poem in the history of Renaissance warfare and its relation to the contemporary conflict with the Ottomans (Quint 1993) (Murrin 1994).

Key passages

The sacred armies, and the godly knight, That the great sepulchre of Christ did free, I sing; much wrought his valor and foresight, And in that glorious war much suffered he;

The narrator · GL 1.1

The opening announces the poem's subject: the crusade and its leader, the 'godly knight' who freed the Holy Sepulchre. The first stanza echoes the opening of the Aeneid ('Arms and the man I sing'), but the subject is a Christian army and a pious leader, and the emphasis on his suffering and his labour in uniting his followers sets the tone for the poem.

So we, if children young diseased we find, Anoint with sweets the vessel’s foremost parts To make them taste the potions sharp we give; They drink deceived, and so deceived, they live.

The narrator · GL 1.3

The comparison of poetry to the sweetened rim of a medicine cup comes from Lucretius. Tasso uses it to defend the pleasures of his poem: its fictions and love stories are the honey that makes the moral and religious truth palatable. The image summarizes the Renaissance doctrine that poetry should delight and instruct.

He durst not speak by suit to purchase ruth, She saw not, marked not, wist not what he sought, Thus loved, thus served he long, but not regarded, Unseen, unmarked, unpitied, unrewarded.

The narrator · GL 2.16

Olindo's silent love for Sofronia is described in a series of balanced phrases ending in a line of four negative words. The style is typical of Tasso's lyric manner, with its antitheses and patterned repetitions, which Fairfax reproduces closely.

The dreary trumpet blew a dreadful blast, And rumbled through the lands and kingdoms under, Through wasteness wide it roared, and hollows vast, And filled the deep with horror, fear and wonder,

The narrator · GL 4.3

Satan's trumpet summons the powers of hell to their council. The scene's sound and grandeur made it a model for later poets, including Milton in the council of Pandaemonium.

For in the secret of her troubled thought, A doubtful combat, love and honor fought.

The narrator, of Erminia · GL 6.70

Erminia's internal debate between love and honour. The formula 'love and honor' became the name of a whole dramatic genre in seventeenth-century England; Davenant, for instance, wrote a play called Love and Honour (1634).

“O poverty, chief of the heavenly brood, Dearer to me than wealth or kingly crown: No wish for honor, thirst of others’ good, Can move my heart, contented with mine own:

The old shepherd, to Erminia · GL 7.10

The shepherd's praise of poverty is the heart of the pastoral episode. He has chosen a life without ambition, and his words implicitly criticize the courts and the war. The episode reflects Tasso's own pastoral writing and his ambivalence about life at court.

“Friend, thou hast won, I pardon thee, nor save This body, that all torments can endure, But save my soul, baptism I dying crave, Come wash away my sins with waters pure:”

Clorinda, to Tancredi · GL 12.66

Clorinda's dying words. She calls her killer 'friend', forgives him, and asks for baptism. The speech transforms the duel: the enemy becomes a friend and the victim a Christian, and Tancredi's victory becomes the occasion for her salvation and his grief.

Cruel, is’t not enough thy foes to kill, But in their graves wilt thou torment them still?

The voice in the cypress · GL 13.42

The voice that seems to be Clorinda's accuses Tancredi of cruelty. Whether or not it is a demonic illusion, it reaches his conscience, and he cannot strike again. The passage turns the enchanted forest into a drama of guilt.

Oh gather then the rose while time thou hast Short is the day, done when it scant began, Gather the rose of love, while yet thou mayest, Loving, be loved; embracing, be embraced.”

The bird in Armida's garden · GL 16.15

The song of the rose urges the lovers to enjoy love while youth lasts. It is one of the most famous carpe diem passages in European poetry, translated by Spenser in the Bower of Bliss. In the poem it is the voice of temptation, but its beauty makes the temptation real.

So melts her wrath; but love remains entire. “Behold,” she says, “your handmaid and your thrall: My life, my crown, my wealth use at your pleasure;” Thus death her life became, loss proved her treasure.

Armida, to Rinaldo · GL 20.136

Armida's surrender echoes Mary's words at the Annunciation. Her wrath melts and her love remains, now directed to Christian obedience. The final line's paradoxes, death becoming life and loss becoming treasure, express the poem's logic of conversion.

Questions for study

What does Tasso mean by unity of action, and how does the Gerusalemme try to combine it with the variety of romance?
Consider the first stanza, the return of Rinaldo, and the way the episodes of Erminia, Armida and the enchanted forest are linked to the main action.
How does Godfrey differ from the heroes of classical epic, and why might readers find him less interesting than Rinaldo or Tancredi?
Think about his role as commander, his piety, and the Allegory's account of him as the understanding.
Is Armida a villain, a victim, or a heroine?
Follow her from canto 4 to canto 20. Consider her motives, her love for Rinaldo, her lament, her revenge and her conversion.
What is the significance of the mirror and the shield in canto 16?
Compare what each reflects and what each tells Rinaldo about himself.
Does Clorinda's baptism resolve the tragedy of her death?
Consider Tancredi's grief, his dream, and the voice in the cypress in canto 13.
How does Tasso make the supernatural credible?
Compare the angels with the magic of Ismeno and Armida, and consider the role of prayer and the wizard of Ascalon.
What role do women play in the poem?
Compare Sofronia, Clorinda, Erminia, Armida and Gildippe. Consider their relation to arms and to love.
How does Spenser change Tasso's garden in the Bower of Bliss, and what do the changes suggest?
Compare GL 16 with The Faerie Queene 2.12, especially the endings.
How sympathetic is the poem to its pagan characters?
Look at Argante's and Solimano's deaths, at the shepherds of canto 7, and at the conversions of Clorinda and Armida.
What does Fairfax's translation show about English heroic poetry around 1600?
Consider the stanza form, Fairfax's style, and the later comments of Dryden and Davenant on Tasso and his translator.