Battista Guarini

Battista Guarini was born before and died after Tasso. He studied at Padua in the 1550s, taking part the following decade in the meetings of the Eterei, and later in the collection of their poems published in 1567, in which he and Tasso played the most important role. In the service of Duke Alfonso he shared the experience of the Este Court alongside Tasso, and, not without a certain envy and rivalry, Pigna, whose collection of lyrical poems, Ben divino, he edited. His best period coincided with Tasso’s worst, the confinement at Sant’Anna, during which Guarini was at the centre of Ferrara’s literary circles, engaged in writing lyric poetry (often closely connected to music) and the Pastor fido, his response, radically different compared to the Aminta. Long-term acquaintances rather than friends, Guarini and Tasso shared an implicit rivalry which came to the fore when Salviati, soon to become fierce critic of the Liberata, hailed Guarini as one of Italy’s most important literary figures, helping him to revise the language of the Pastor fido. He left Ferrara in 1583, going first to Padua then to Turin, re-entering the service of Alfonso in 1585 but leaving definitively in 1588, when he embarked on a long search for a new patron, responding also to the many criticisms raised against the tragic-comic nature of his pastoral. His position as Prince of Rome’s Accademia degli Umoristi (in which Marino came to fame) in the early years of the seventeenth century points to his ability to influence the literary era that followed.