Tasso and the Counter-Reformation

Tasso's (1544–1595) difficult predicament vis-à-vis the chivalric tradition and his personal difficulties in writing his masterpiece, including his obsessive need for the Inquisitors' approval, can be better understood if we take into account the widespread criticism against the genre

he had chosen. The arguments against court and chivalry continued to be voiced in the new climate of the Counter-Reformation with specific reference to the later chivalric literature. One of the most authoritative critiques within ecclesiastical milieus was the Bibliotheca selecta (1593) by the Mantuan Jesuit, polymath, and diplomat Antonio Possevino. In this ponderous, systematic assessment of the vast bibliographic material available to contemporary teachers of every academic subject, Possevino specifically proscribed all chivalric literature, including the Orlando Furioso, for its immoral, heretical influence on the nobility.^[83] In addition to the moralism of medieval memory, Possevino reiterated the classicistic recourse to the “Aristotelian” rules of imitation of nature, verisimilitude, and regularity of plot.

Besides their historic derivation from the ancient pastoral, Tasso's Aminta (1573) and Battista Guarini's Pastor Fido (definitive edition 1602), respectively historic models for the pastoral drama and the “tragicomic” genre, are ideally linked to the Provençal pastorela and French medieval pastourelle in the introduction of shepherdesses engaged in a possibly equal relationship with courtier/knights. This kind of pastoral could occasionally be set in a rarefied dream-like climate, the best examples of which are possibly Gavaudan's two pastorelas “Desamparatz, ses companho” and “L'autre dia, per un mati” as well as Walther von der Vogelweide's “Nemt, vrouwe, disen kranz.”^[84] Whereas the pastorela usually represented the shepherdess as a plaything to be taken advantage of as a member of the subhuman peasant class, the vilans, Marcabru turned it into a confrontation between the absurd arrogance of the knight and the subtle cleverness of the peasant girl, who sends him packing as out of place and out of turn. Gavaudan (fl. ca. 1195–1220) is remarkable for giving the genre a further twist: the knight finds consolation for the disappointments of the court in a relationship with a shepherdess who becomes his true love. Gavaudan considered himself unusual: “eu no sui pars als autres trobadors,” “I am not like other troubadours.” Indeed, he went both beyond the pastoral genre and beyond courtly love itself. Walther, in his turn, presented the motif of love for a shepherdess as the dream of a pleasant and wholesome sexual adventure—a dream because the reality of a class-conscious society made such a solution preposterous. Somewhat similarly, the dreamlike world of the Aminta, with its escapist thrust away from the strictures of the court, expresses the consciousness that the reality of a necessarily repressive society does not allow us such harmoniously natural behavior—and that we are the worse for it.

The nostalgic dream of a gentle chivalrous existence that still inspired Boiardo returns for a moment in Tasso, who, however, was deeply troubled by the remoteness of chivalrous virtues from the realities of court life. After dreaming about bygone ideals in his youthful Rinaldo, in the great work of his maturity, the Gerusalemme liberata (1581), he represented the knightly type in the romantic isolation of Tancredi, and the courtier type in Gernando. The planned contrast between the gentle Tancredi and the savage Argante is also a contrast between the true chivalrous knight and the barbarous warrior who recognizes no rule but his own strength (militia in its pure state). See how Tancredi addresses his opponent (6.36, 1–4):

Anima vile,
che ancor nelle vittorie infame sei,
qual titolo di laude alto e gentile
da modi attendi sì scortesi e rei?

And Argante dies as a Starcatherus would have wanted to die (19.26, 6–8):

Minacciava, morendo, e non languìa,
superbi, formidabili e feroci
gli ultimi moti fur, l'ultime voci.

The sentimental rejection of the court is best represented by powerful indirection in the episode of Erminia among the shepherds: just as she gives up (temporarily, as Tasso himself was only ever able to do) by withdrawing from the real world of the court, she listens to the disenchanted courtier who has found wisdom and peace in the wilderness, where he now leads the life of a shepherd (Gerusalemme liberata 7.12 f.). The Christian form Tasso newly imposes on the chivalric epic involves once again the fusion of Carolingian and Arthurian in the juxtaposition of centralized authority under loyalty to Godfrey, the leader selected by heaven, and the knights' centrifugal instinct to wander off on their own search for honor and individual happiness (signally, Rinaldo and Tancredi).^[85] The order implied in the submission to the collective Christian ideals and goals is threatened by the anarchic thrust of sensuality and passion, love and honor. This is the new aspect of the joining of the epic and the romantic, the new predicament of the “fusion” of genres, which in Ariosto had achieved a sort of happy harmony, but again showed its inherent, almost irreconcilable tension in Tasso, the poet of the manneristic culture of the Counter-Reformation.

Much as he dreamed of achieving a reconciliation of the culture of the knight and the culture of the prince, the feudal dream of independence and the orderly centralization under a benevolent and beneficent monarch, he ultimately failed in his professed purpose since what he did express was, above all, the inescapable disjunction between will and instincts, faith and desire, intellect and heart. The need for authoritarian order that was sanctioned by the Counter-Reformation went together with the developing need for a classicism based on the Aristotelian rules. The Jerusalem Delivered gave poetic voice to both.

Although he never managed to publish them as a whole, Tasso originally conceived his Dialoghi in 1578 as a comprehensive treatment of the vita activa in the form of the basic moral values affecting the life of the man of court—a crucial question for this life-long courtier, son of a diplomat courtier, and recipient of the best schooling a courtier's son could hope for.^[86] The first dialogue, Il Forno overo della nobiltà (1580, second version 1585),^[87] spoke of the high nobility as made of the illustrissimi (the princes, together with the molto illustri, i.e., their grand feudatories and the noblest knights of court) and the illustri (the higher city magistrates and the high office holders at court).

Tasso's lucubrations on courtly life come forth most significantly in another dialogue, Il Malpiglio overo de la corte (probably 1585), where he also discusses whether Castiglione's portrait of his subject is limited by the historical vicissitudes that affect and change all human affairs. He concludes that Castiglione had provided a Platonic, transcendentally philosophical, and universal image of ideal value for all times and places.^[88] When he summarizes his conclusions, Tasso lists the basic virtues with terms that are significantly close to Aristotle's list as Dante had translated it: fortezza, magnanimità, magnificenza, liberalità, cortesia, modestia, verità, affabilità, and piacevolezza.^[89] He defines courtliness as exercise of chivalry in order to win the favor of the prince while avoiding the envy of courtiers. These two goals are mutually exclusive, so real skills must be downplayed. Chivalry consists of physical aptitudes for riding and fencing as well as spiritual virtues, good mores and sociable manners. Knowledge of all disciplines and arts elicits esteem, hence favor. Fortitude and liberality must be exercized with extreme prudence and humility in obeying the prince, so as to avoid both envy and the prince's suspicion. Hence modestia is also necessary as a constant concealment of our true excellence: “Dunque appari il cortigiano più tosto d'occultare che di apparere,” “the courtier must sooner learn to conceal than to seem.”^[90] This twist in the argument reveals a disen-

chantment from the earlier faith in the potential inherent in the man of court or public figure. The prince was becoming more of a tyrant, and the courtier an opportunistic social ornament. Differently from Castiglione's more sanguine approach, this new portrait, where Dante's and Aristotle's “intellectual” virtue of prudence, a necessary guide to all the “moral” virtues, has become the paramount consideration (“la principal virtù delle corti”), is said to apply to Tasso's time, since dissimulation has become a major virtue: “in questi tempi, in cui l'infinger è una de le maggior virtù.”^[91] Not only is the new courtier reduced to the role of humble servant to the prince—serving even by writing court poetry—he has also been denied access to the political realm that was his predecessors' true vital space. In Tasso's pages that refer to the court, there is no suggestion of political involvement.^[92]

We are now approaching the end of the Italian segment of our complex subject, and it is time to take stock of some crucial threads in our story. By tracing the progress of literary forms and themes through the social ambience of the Italian courts and their centrifugal impact on the life of the public squares, I have singled out some typical elements that remained constant as part of an underlying ideology and that take us back to the early manifestations of courtly chivalry, even including some original ingredients of the magical setting of wandering knights and their relatives, the charismatic men of court. We have witnessed the continuity of the courtly heritage in such basic literary attitudes as irony and moral distancing. In a similar pattern of continuity, the early anticourt arguments have kept coming back in new settings and with a renewed sense of purpose.