Rinaldo

Starting on the Rinaldo shortly after setting the Gierusalemme aside, Tasso spent from 1560 to 1562 on this new work, based mainly in Padua where he was a rather unenthusiastic law student. Here is the poem’s opening stanza, which is quite different in tone compared to the opening of the Gierusalemme, indicating Tasso’s keen awareness of the difference between the Ariostan model and epic:

Canto i felici affanni e i primi ardori

che giovanetto ancor soffrì Rinaldo,

e come ’l trasse in perigliosi errori

desir di gloria ed amoroso caldo,

allor che, vinti dal gran Carlo, i Mori, 

mostraro il cor più che le forze saldo;

e Troiano, Agolante, e il fiero Almonte

restar pugnando uccisi in Aspramonte (edited by L. Bonfigli, Bari, Laterza, 1936).

The desire for glory and passionate love (v. 4) are what drive the young Rinaldo, princely and only hero in Tasso’s plot, in stark contrast to the narrative multiplicity of Ariosto’s Furioso, within a topic from the Carolingian tradition but enriched with elements from other traditions, such as the Arthurian legends and Bernardo Tasso’s retelling of the Amadis of Gaul. The hero’s adventures and heroic deeds are thus the area in which Tasso tried to mediate. Applying his own classical mould, he used Virgil’s Aenead and Dido for the love story, with elements of the romance and enchantments, whose use in the later Gerusalemme liberate is fairly limited. The comments of the work’s first readers, including Venier, were so favourable that they earned Tasso not only the publication of his work (in Venice, 1562), but also enabled him to switch from law studies to literature, in autumn 1562.