The letters from Sant'Anna
With their alternating humours and the sheer quantity of information on Tasso’s hopes and writing projects, the letters written during the confinement years provide valuable testimony. The first letters composed at the Sant’Anna Hospital, which was not far from the Duke’s Castle at Ferrara, sent to Scipione Gonzaga, Duke Alfonso II and others, are permeated with the poet’s despair, his sense of injustice at how he had been treated and the recognition that his behaviour in the previous months had been misguided. At the same time, while commencing work on his first dialogues, Tasso filled his pages with erudite references and rhetorical elegance, ingredients deployed to reassure the recipients of his lucid state of mind despite the diagnosis of melancholy turned to madness which had led to his confinement. He complained to G. G. Albani as follows:
This new and unprecedented misfortune of mine means that I must persuade Your Lordship that I am not mad, and therefore should not be confined as such by the Duke of Ferrara
Nuova ed inaudita sorte d’infelicità è la mia, ch’io debba persuadere a Vostra Signoria reverendissima di non esser forsennato, e di non dover come tal esser custodito dal signor duca di Ferrara (T. Tasso, Le lettere, edited by C. Guasti, 5 vols, Florence, Le Monnier, 1852-55, vol. II, 119).
After a couple of years his tone is calmer, and the pleas for his release less frequent and less desperate. In 1581, he also wrote letters indicating reverence and loyalty to the Duke, letters somewhat compromising regarding his religious faith, and discussions on the conventions of chivalry. The darker side of this period in his life is expressed in the letters describing “human and diabolical” disorders experienced during his prison years (T. Tasso, Le lettere, edited by C. Guasti, 5 vols, Florence, Le Monnier, 1852-55, vol. II, 161-162). Although the most famous passages of his letters are those traditionally used to demonstrate Tasso’s “madness”, they are better identified as expressing the darker moments of a disturbed mind that in later years regained its former lucidity, ably handling complex poetic constructions.
