ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the earliest English assessment of Tasso’s literary achievements, in John Eliot’s Ortho-epia Gallica (1593), in order to demonstrate the Italian poet’s wide-ranging impact in England even before his death in 1595, especially through his pastoral drama Aminta (1580) and his epic poem Gerusalemme liberata (1581). Lawrence weighs up the voluminous, and differing, critical assessments of Spenser’s use of Tasso in his own epic poem. He also charts a significant recent move away from the focus on Spenser as the primary English channel for Tasso’s poem in the 1590s, in the context of broader critical considerations of Tasso’s influence on contemporary English poets such as Daniel, Southwell, and even Shakespeare. Finally he demonstrates how certain passages in Tasso’s poem, from the Rinaldo and Armida episode in particular, had both a wide-ranging and long-lasting impact for at least a century: stanzas imitated by Spenser and Daniel in the 1590s were still being alluded to by Dryden and John Dennis in dramatic operas composed in the 1690s.
