Court

Living in the latter part of the sixteenth century and the renaissance period, Tasso was the last of the great court poets, the figure in which the longstanding dialectic between the man of letters and the top-down power dynamics of the court came to a head, as dramatically shown by Tasso’s confinement at Sant’Anna. “Everything in him converges in the court: manners, tastes, habits, even his language” (translated from T. Tasso, Tre scritti politici, edited by L. Firpo, Turin Utet, 1980, 28) claims Luigi Firpo, describing Tasso’s bond with the court, first encountered as a young boy at Urbino and later experienced as a protagonist at the Este Court at Ferrara. Separation from that world was therefore tantamount to the disintegration of an ideal, yet even in the years prior to his conflict at the court, Tasso had shown signs of disenchantment with the courtly world, which extended to an anti-court polemic both in the controversial Mopso episode in the Aminta, and in the episode of Erminia among the shepherds in Liberata VII. Perhaps Tasso’s position is best seen as a kind of nostalgia for an ideal court, marked by magnanimity and harmony, as described in Baldassar Castiglione’s Cortegiano, and as a lucid vision of the crisis dominating the final years of the century. Pointing to this are passages in his epistolary (“E bench’io de le corti ch’or fioriscono, e de’ principi ch’or vivono, io non sia intieramente soddisfatto”, in T. Tasso, Le lettere, edited by C. Guasti, 5 vols, Florence, Le Monnier, 1852-55, vol. II, 290) and in Malpiglio overo de la corte, a dialogue of 1585, in which Tasso refers to infingere, a blend of simulation and dissimulation, as a norm of court life, foreshadowing Torquato Accetto’s “honest dissimulation” of half a century later.