Introduction: ‘I dote on Tasso’
Introduction: ‘I dote on Tasso’
The introduction demonstrates the continuing popularity of Tasso’s troubled life and epic poem in England up to the late nineteenth century via a fictional conversation in George Eliot’s final novel. It then gives an overview of knowledge of Tasso’s works and life in England by the end of the sixteenth century, using John Eliot’s translated comments in his Ortho-epia Gallica (1593) as a starting point. The final part of the introduction considers Milton’s knowledge of Tasso’s apparent madness in the mid-seventeenth century, probably acquired from his first-hand acquaintance with the great Italian poet’s last patron and earliest biographer, Giovanni Battista Manso.
Keywords: Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, biography, George Eliot, John Eliot, madness, Milton, Giovanni Battista Manso
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