I want you to close your eyes for a second. Transport
yourself back in time. Right. We're going to
Rome. The date is April 25th, 1595. And it is
a dark and stormy, well, day. Rain is just lashing
against the cobblestones, thunders rolling over
the seven hills. It's dramatic. Very dramatic.
But despite the weather. There's this electric
buzz in the city. The Vatican is in overdrive.
You've got cardinals fussing over banquet menus.
The pope himself, Clement VIII, is preparing
this massive ceremony on the Capitoline Hill.
It is supposed to be the event of the decade.
And we should probably set the stakes here because
this isn't a political coronation. I mean, they're
not crowning a king or an emperor. No. They're
preparing to crown a poet, the king of poets.
And you have to understand, this was a huge deal.
The laurel wreath they were going to use had
basically been collecting dust since Petrarch
wore it centuries earlier. Right. So this is
like the ultimate validation. It's the Nobel
Prize, the Lifetime Achievement Oscar, and a
knighthood all rolled into one beautiful leafy
package. Exactly. So the entire intellectual
world of Europe, they're all looking at Rome.
They're all waiting to celebrate this man, the
greatest living writer of the age, Torquato Tasso.
But here's the twist. And it's a really dark
one. It's so cinematic. While all the dignitaries
are down on the Capitoline Hill, you know, polishing
their speeches and getting their robes ready,
the guest of honor isn't there. He's not even
close. He's on a completely different hill, the
Janiculum, at this little convent called Sant
'Onofrio. And he is not trying on his laurel
wreath. He's lying in a monk's cell listening
to that same rain. And he is... dying it's just
a devastating image isn't it he'd arrived there
just a little while before in the middle of a
storm basically dragging his broken body up the
hill and when the monks opened the door to greet
this huge celebrity i mean this man who was supposed
to be the pride of all italy tasso just looked
at the prior and said i have come here to die
wow he knew he knew the coronation was a phantom
it was never going to happen for him he was out
of time and that moment right there the king
of poets dying alone in a monastery while the
world prepares this huge party he'll never attend
that is the perfect encapsulation of the man
we're talking about today. I really is. So welcome
to our deep dive into the life and work of Torquato
Tasso. And if you're listening to this thinking,
Tasso, I think I read a footnote about him in
college once, you are in for a ride because Tasso
is the original archetype. He really, really
is. You know how we have this cultural concept
of the tortured artist? This idea that genius
always comes with a side order of madness, suffering,
and persecution. Sure, Van Gogh cutting off his
ears, Sylvia Plath, Kurt Cobain. Exactly, we
think of them. But Tasso is the grandfather of
that entire lineage. He was the first one to
really, truly embody that tragic fusion of supreme,
world -changing talent and supreme, soul -crushing
instability. And the mission for this deep dive
is to figure out how that happened. We're talking
about a guy who wrote Liberata Jerusalem Delivered.
which is, and it's not really an exaggeration
to say this, it's arguably the greatest epic
poem of the entire Renaissance. It's right up
there. A masterpiece. He had the world at his
feet. He was handsome. He was brilliant. He was
a favorite at the most glamorous court in Italy.
And yet, he ended up... locked in a madhouse
for seven years. Which is the central question,
right? That's what we have to answer today. How
did he get there? Was he actually mad in a clinical
sense we'd understand today? Or was he a victim?
Was he gaslit by a rigid, paranoid society that
just had no idea what to do with a mind like
his? So we're going to be looking at his biography.
We'll dig into the actual plots of his masterpieces,
and we'll even read through the heartbreaking
letters he wrote from inside the asylum to try
and piece together the truth. It's a complicated
story. So let's untack this life. To understand
that tragic ending, we really have to start at
the beginning. And with Tasso, the beginning
is almost prophetic. He wasn't some self -made
man who just stumbled into poetry. He was born
into the family business. He was. Born in 1544
in Sorrento, which, if you've never been, is
this absolutely beautiful coastal town, his father
was a man named Bernardo Tasso. And Bernardo
wasn't just some hobbyist. He was a serious,
famous nobleman poet in his own right. He had
a reputation. Okay. But I think, more importantly,
Bernardo was a professional courtier. And we
need to clarify what that means, because courtier
sounds like a very fancy, cushy job. Yeah. Where
you just, I don't know, bow a lot and wear nice
tights. But in 16th century Italy, Being in Cordia
was more like being a high -level executive in
a company that is constantly being raided by
the FBI while also being in the middle of a hostile
takeover. It was dangerous. That is a perfect
analogy. It really is. You have to remember,
Italy wasn't a unified country. It was this patchwork
of the city -states and principalities, Ferrara,
Mantua, Urbino, the papal states. And they were
all fighting each other, all dealing with massive
foreign powers like Spain or France breathing
down their necks. A political minefield. A total
minefield. And Bernardo, Tasso's father, he worked
for the Prince of Salerno. Now, the prince got
into a massive political conflict with the Spanish
government, who controlled Naples at the time.
The prince was declared a rebel and outlawed.
And because Bernardo was his secretary, his right
-hand man, Bernardo, went down with the ship.
So Trocuato was just a little kid at this point,
watching his dad get declared an enemy of the
state. Exactly. The family is outlawed. Their
entire patrimony, all their property, is seized
by the government. Bernardo is proclaimed a rebel
and has to flee into exile. So from the very
beginning, Tossa learns this brutal, brutal lesson.
Art and politics are a toxic mix. You can be
a celebrated poet one day and a homeless refugee
the next. And the trauma doesn't just stop with
the politics. There's a personal family tragedy
here that feels like something straight out of
a true crime podcast. It really does. While Bernardo
is in exile, young Turquato is separated from
his mother, Portia de Rossi. This must have been
devastating for him. It was the heartbreak of
his childhood. He's sent away and she stays behind
in Naples to try and save her dowry to salvage
some money for the family. But then she dies.
Suddenly. Mysteriously, Tasso is still just a
young boy. And the circumstances around her death,
well, they were deeply suspicious. Suspicious
how? What happened? Bernardo, the father, was
absolutely convinced that Portia was poisoned.
Poisoned? By who? By her own brothers. Her own
brothers? Why would they do that? For the money.
For the dowry. If she died, the money would stay
with her family, with them, instead of ever going
to her exiled husband Bernardo and their son
Torquato. That's unbelievably cold. It's brutal.
And sure enough, Tasso never saw a single dime
of that inheritance his entire life. So just
try to picture the psyche of this child. He's
maybe 12 years old. His father is an outlaw living
in exile. His mother is dead. And he's been told
she was likely murdered by his own uncles. He's
essentially homeless. bouncing around from city
to city with his dad, the world must have felt
like an incredibly hostile, dangerous, and treacherous
place. It's the perfect recipe for anxiety, for
paranoia, and for a desperate lifelong need for
security and validation. Absolutely. But here's
the amazing part. Despite all this chaos, all
this trauma, the kid is a prodigy. I mean, he's
not just smart, he's scary smart. The phrase
biographers always use is precocity of intellect,
right? That's the one. Before the exile fully
hit, he was educated by the Jesuits in Naples.
And we should note, the Jesuits were the intellectual
shock troops of the Catholic Church. The best
of the best. They gave him an incredibly rigorous
classical education. We're talking Latin, Greek,
rhetoric, theology, philosophy. He soaked it
all up. He was apparently famous for his intellect
by the age of eight. By the time he's a teenager,
he's debating complex philosophy with grown men
and winning. So he eventually joins his father
in exile, and they move from Rome to the court
of Urbino. And Urbino is a key setting here,
isn't it? If you've ever read Castiglione's The
Book of the Courtier, that was set in Urbino.
It's the model of Renaissance refinement. It
is. It's a society of highly cultivated men,
refined luxury, incredible art. But it's also
a place of extreme judgment. It's what one historian
called a place of pedantic criticism. What does
that mean exactly? It means it's a place where
how you hold your gloves or how you turn a phrase
in a poem or whether you know the latest philosophical
argument can literally determine your entire
social standing. It's high stakes intellectualism.
And Casa is just soaking all this up. He's a
natural. He's handsome. He's athletic. A great
fencer and horseman. He's studying and playing
sports with the Duke's own son and heir. He's
learning how to be the perfect gentleman. But
there is a conflict brewing under the surface.
With his father. With his father. Bernardo, this
famous poet who has lived this life of poverty
and exile, looks at his brilliant son and says,
whatever you do for the love of God, do not become
a poet. Which is pretty rich coming from him.
But I guess he knew the cost firsthand. He knew
the poverty. He knew the dependency on patrons
who could turn on you in a second. He didn't
want his son begging princes for scraps his whole
life. So he does what so many parents do. He
forced Tasso to study law at the University of
Padua. I feel like my father forced me to study
law is the origin story of half the great artists
in history. It really is. And like pretty much
all of them, Tasso ignored it. He apparently
sat in the law lectures, but under the desk he
was secretly reading philosophy and writing a
verse. And then the rebellion happens. In 1562,
at the ripe old age of 18, he publishes an epic
poem, a full -blown epic called Rinaldo. 18 years
old. I was struggling to write a coherent five
-page term paper at 18. He publishes an epic
poem. And it wasn't just some throwaway poem.
Rinaldo was a serious literary contender. It
was Tasso's attempt to solve this huge puzzle
that all the intellectuals in Italy were arguing
about at the time. The big question was, how
do you combine the wild, imaginative excitement
of medieval romance, you know, knights, dragons,
damsels in distress, magic, with the strict...
classical rules of epic poetry laid down by virgil
and more importantly by aristotle ah the rules
we're going to be talking a lot about these rules
later because they basically become the bane
of his entire existence but for now ronaldo is
a hit it is a massive success it shows incredible
originality it's amazing command of language
and bernardo the father he finally has to admit
defeat he realizes his son isn't going to be
a lawyer he's a poet and maybe a better one than
bernardo ever was so he drops out of law school
He has a hit debut under his belt, and this success
sets him on a path to the most glittering and
maybe the most dangerous court in all of Italy,
Ferrara. Enter the House of Este. It's 1565.
Tasso is 21 years old. He enters the service
of Cardinal Luigi d 'Este, and then a few years
later, the service of the Duke himself, Alfonso
II. I want to pause on Ferrara for a second.
Because when we say court, people might picture
some quiet, stuffy room with tapestries on the
wall. But Ferrara in the 1560s, it was more like
a permanent festival mixed with a snake pit.
It was the Hollywood of the Renaissance. That's
a great description. The Esther Court was obsessed
with prestige, with art, with music, with fear.
It was loud. It was colorful. It was decadent.
And it was incredibly competitive. And Tasso,
he fits right in. He's the golden boy. He's young,
handsome. He has that fashionable, melancholy
air about him. He's a great horseman, a brilliant
conversationalist. He becomes the idol of the
court. And of course, being a court poet involves
romance, or at least the public performance of
romance. Right. It was part of the job description.
A courtier poet needs music. So he courted several
ladies -in -waiting, like Lucrezia Bandidio and
Laura Pavera, who were famous singers of the
time. He wrote these beautiful sonnets for them,
praising their voices, their beauty, their virtue.
Standard stuff. Standard stuff. But then he moves
up a weight class. He becomes very close to the
princesses themselves. The Duke's own sisters.
Lucrezia and Eleanor d 'Este. They were about
10 years older than Tasso, unmarried, very intelligent,
very refined, and they took him under their protection.
He was admitted to their private rooms to read
his poetry aloud to them. This was a huge honor,
a sign of incredible intimacy and favor. So for
a while, Tasso was just living the dream. He
has a good salary. He has prestige. He has the
ear of the ruling family. He's on top of the
world. It's his golden age. And during this period,
before the madness really sets in, he produces
two works that will define his career. The first
is a play called Aminta. Okay, now help us out
here. Aminta is a pastoral drama. For a modern
listener, what does that actually mean? Because
pastoral kind of sounds like a church sermon
or something about farming. It's pretty much
the opposite. You should think of Pastoral as
the 16th century version of, I don't know, Cottagecore.
It's a complete fantasy. The setting is always
a beautiful, idealized forest Arcadia. The characters
are shepherds and nymphs. But they're not real
shepherds who have to deal with, you know, sheep
dung and ticks. Not at all. They are highly refined,
eloquent, poetic shepherds who spend all day
talking about love and beauty and heartbreak.
It's a form of escapism for the stressed -out
city courtiers. It's a fantasy of a simpler,
more beautiful world. Got it. So what made Aminta
so special? It was staged in 1573, and it was
revolutionary because of its style. The plot
is very simple. Shepard Amenta loves nymph Sylvia.
Sylvia is sworn to chastity and doesn't love
him back. Complications ensue. But the language?
Oh my God, the language was just dripping with
this exquisite lyrical charm. And this is happening
right around the time that music is undergoing
a huge change in Italy, right? We're seeing the
birth of what will eventually become opera. Precisely.
That is the perfect context. Aminta is almost
like a libretto waiting for a composer to set
it. It's filled with these honeyed melodies and
this unique feeling of sensuous melancholy. It
was a massive, massive hit. It was read and performed
all across Europe for two centuries. It influenced
Shakespeare. It heavily influenced the development
of opera and the cantata. If Tasso had died right
after writing Aminta, he would still be in all
the textbooks. But he didn't stop there. He had
a much bigger target in his sights. He wanted
to write the great Italian epic. He wanted to
top Ariosto, who was the reigning champion. He
wanted to top Virgil. He set out to write Jerusalem
Liberata. Jerusalem delivered. He finished the
draft around 1574 when he was just 31 years old.
We need to dive deep into this book because this
is the masterpiece. This is the main event. On
the surface, it's about the First Crusade, specifically
the siege of Jerusalem in 1099. But that sounds
a little dry. A little bit like homework. What
is the actual experience of reading this thing?
Well, Tasso was brilliant. He knew that a poem
that was just about military strategy and pious
knights praying would be incredibly boring. So
he creates this nominal hero, Godfrey of Bouillon,
who is the leader of the Christian army. And
Godfrey is, well, he's pious, he's serious, he's
modeled on Virgil's Aeneas. And frankly, he's
dull as dishwater. He's the guy you're supposed
to root for, but you don't really care about
him. Exactly. He's the designated... Good guy.
But Tasso, very cleverly, surrounds Godfrey with
what I like to call the soap opera. The good
stuff. The really good stuff. The romance, the
magic, the conflicted villains, the psychological
drama. This is where the poem comes alive. The
real appeal is in all of the side characters
who are constantly getting distracted from the
Holy War by their very human feelings. Okay,
so walk us through some of these characters.
Who were the fan favorites that made this book
a bestseller? All right. First, you have to talk
about Clorinda. She is a fascinating, revolutionary
character. She's a warrior maiden fighting for
the enemy side, for the Saracens defending Jerusalem.
She wears full armor. She's their greatest champion.
She kicks butt. She's totally independent. And
one of the top Christian knights, a prince named
Tancredi, falls desperately, obsessively in love
with her after seeing her just once. And this
obsession leads to one of the most famous and
most tragic scenes in all of literature. It's
the duel. It's unforgettable. They meet on the
battlefield at night. Clorinda is wearing her
full armor. Her helmet is down, so she's anonymous.
Tancredi doesn't know it's her. He thinks he's
fighting another male enemy champion. And they
fight this brutal, intimate, desperate duel to
the death under the stars. It's described in
excruciating detail. And finally, Tancredi gets
the upper hand and drives his sword through her
chest. Oh, man. I can see where this is going.
And as she's dying, she whispers a final request.
She asks to be baptized, to become a Christian.
So Tancredi, fulfilling the duty of a knight,
runs to a nearby stream to get water in his helmet.
He comes back, takes off her helmet to baptize
his dying enemy, and he realizes... it's her
it's the woman he loves she dies in his arms
just as he baptizes her that is absolutely gut
-wrenching it is it wrecked readers people wept
over this scene for centuries it brings this
incredible humanity and pathos to the enemy it's
not just good versus evil anymore and then for
something completely different you have armida
the witch The sorceress. The beautiful sorceress,
yes. She is a demonic agent, basically. She's
sent by the forces of hell to distract and seduce
the Christian knights. She uses her magic to
lure their greatest warrior, Rinaldo, who is
a different character from the one in his earlier
poem, Away, to her enchanted island. And her
plan is to kill him, right? To neutralize the
Christian's best player. That's the plan. But
she looks at him while he's sleeping and she's
so struck by his beauty that she just... can't
do it. She falls in love with him instead. She
creates this incredible magical pleasure palace
for him, the famous Garden of Armida, where they
just lay around in bliss, surrounded by sensual
delights, completely forgetting about the war.
So Tasso is basically inventing the make love
not war trope right in the middle of a holy war
epic. In a way, yes. And this is Tasso's great
innovation. He introduced what literary critics
call the poetry of sentiment. Before him, epics
were mostly about action, about deeds. Tasso
made them about feeling he elevated the emotional
lives of women of enemies of lovers who are on
the wrong side he drenched the whole story in
this noble beautiful intoxicating melancholy
it was a brand new feeling in 16th century literature
it was absolutely magnetic so here we are The
year is about 1575. He's 31 years old. He has
in his desk drawer the manuscript for the greatest
poem of his age. He has the favor of the Duke
of Ferrara. He should be on top of the world.
But this is the moment where the music changes
to a minor key. This is where we begin the unraveling.
It really is a tragedy of, well, of one's own
making, but fueled by the environment around
him. Instead of just publishing the poem and
taking the win, Tasso hesitated. He had this...
paranoid character, as his biographers call it.
But we have to contextualize that paranoia. It
wasn't just in his head. Right. We can't just
fall back on, oh, he was crazy. What was the
political and religious climate that was making
him so anxious? This is the absolute height of
the Counter -Reformation. The Council of Trent
had just wrapped up a few years earlier. The
Catholic Church was terrified, absolutely terrified
of the Protestant Reformation spreading south
from Germany and Switzerland. So they clamped
down hard. This is when they created the Index
of prohibited books. The Index, yes. And the
Roman Inquisition was very, very active. If you
wrote something that was seen as heretical or
too pagan or too sensual, you could be in very
serious trouble. We're talking prison or worse.
So Tasso's anxiety wasn't coming from nowhere.
He's written a poem that is filled with sympathetic
Muslim characters, with powerful magic, with
witches, with incredibly sexy garden scenes,
all in a world where the church is burning people
at the stake for less. Exactly. He became obsessed
with the idea that his poem was sinful or theologically
improper. So in what has to be one of the worst
decisions in literary history, he sent the manuscript
to a committee of critics in Rome. He voluntarily
asked them to audit it for him. He voluntarily.
sent his poem to a committee. That sounds like
an absolute nightmare. It was a complete disaster.
You have to understand, these weren't his fans.
These were pedantic, by -the -book Aristotelian
scholars and churchmen, and they just tore the
poem to shreds. What specifically did they hate?
Because as you've described it, the romance and
the magic are the best parts of the book. That's
precisely what they hated. They complained that
the magic, you know, Armida spells and so on,
wasn't Christian enough. They said the intense
romance between Tancredi and Clorinda was unworthy
of an epic, but their biggest obsession was with
the unities. The famous Aristotelian rules. The
rules, yeah. The idea that a proper epic must
happen in one primary place over one continuous
stretch of time with one single plot line. And
they looked at Tasso's masterpiece and said,
too many subplots. It's too messy. Too many distractions.
You have to cut the garden scene. Cut the death
of Clorinda. Cut the love stories. They were
basically trying to turn his Technicolor masterpiece
into a black and white documentary. They wanted
to strip out everything that made it special.
And Tasso tried to argue with them. He wrote
these long, desperate letters defending his artistic
choices, but he was driven almost mad with worry.
He was caught in this impossible bind, trying
to reconcile his own artistic genius with the
rigid, suffocating demands of these critics and
the stress of it all, feeling like a heretic,
feeling like a failure. It cracked him. And this
is where we see the slide into what his contemporaries
called persecution mania yes this is the mid
-1570s tasso starts having active delusions it
starts small he thinks the servants at the court
are stealing his notes his books then he becomes
convinced they are spying on him and reporting
back to the inquisition then he thinks the duke
himself is plotting against him He almost stopped
eating because he expected to be poisoned at
every single meal. And it wasn't just paranoia
in his head. He started acting out in public.
Violently. In 1576, he got into a huge quarrel
and physically assaulted a courtier named Medallo
because he thought Medallo was spreading rumors
about his private life, specifically about a
same -sex love affair, which, again, in the climate
of the Counter -Reformation, was an accusation
that could get you killed. And then, a year later,
the infamous knife incident. 1577. This is the
scene that really marks the point of no return.
Tasso is in the private apartments of Lucrezia
d 'Este, the Duke's sister, who by now is the
Duchess of Urbino. It's a quiet evening. Suddenly,
Tasso thinks he sees a servant spying on them
from the shadows. And he just snaps. He draws
a knife and attacks the servant. In front of
the duchess. In the royal apartments. You just
cannot pull a knife on a servant in the presence
of a royal duchess. It's a massive, massive breach
of protocol. Aside from being, you know, aggravated
assault. But what does the duke do? Because the
romantic legend says the duke was a cruel tyrant
who hated Tasso. But the history suggests something
else, right? The Duke, Alfonso II, was actually
incredibly forbearing and patient at first. He
seems to have realized that Tasso was genuinely
unwell. He didn't throw him in a dungeon. He
put him under a kind of house arrest in the castle
and then sent him to a country villa and then
to a Franciscan convent to calm down. He even
arranged for doctors to see him. But Tasso can't
handle the confinement. He escapes. He does,
and this begins one of the most cinematic sequences
of his entire life. He breaks out of the convent
at night, he gets his hands on some peasant clothes,
disguises himself as a shepherd, and he walks
on foot all the way from Ferrara in the north
of Italy down to his sister's home in Sorrento
in the south. That is... Hundreds and hundreds
of miles. Through bandit country with no money.
Through incredibly dangerous territory. He finally
shows up at his sister Cornelia's house in Sorrento.
She hasn't seen him in years. He's in rags. He
looks like a beggar. And he actually plays this
cruel prank on her at first. He pretends to be
a messenger bringing the terrible news of Torquato
Tasso's death just to see if she really loves
him. That is, wow. That's both deeply cruel and
incredibly insecure. It's so revealing, isn't
it? When she faints from grease, he finally reveals
himself. It's me. And for a few months, he lives
quietly with her in beautiful Sorrento. It's
safe. He's away from the critics. He's away from
the pressures of the court. He could have just
stayed there. But he couldn't stay away. He couldn't.
This is the central tragedy of his personality.
He was addicted to the court. He was addicted
to the prestige, the danger, the validation.
He missed what he called the charmed circle.
So he started writing these desperate begging
letters to the Duke and Ferrara. I'm better now.
I'm cured. I promise I'll behave. Please let
me come back. And the Duke actually takes him
back after everything. Reluctantly. The Duke's
condition was, OK, you can come back, but you
have to agree to submit to medical treatment
for your melancholy. You have to take your medicine
and listen to the doctors. And Tasso agrees.
So he goes back to Ferrara. But the timing is
just catastrophic. It's 1579. And this is the
grand finale of his breakdown. Tasso arrives
back in Ferrara, and he's probably expecting
a hero's welcome. The great poet returns, but
he walks into a city that is in total chaos.
Duke Alfonso is about to get married for the
third time, this time to a princess from Mentua.
Why was the duce so stressed out about this?
A royal wedding should be a party. It was a desperation
wedding. Alfonso had no children, no heir from
his first two marriages. If he died without a
son, the Pope was legally entitled to seize the
entire Duchy of Ferrara. and annex it to the
Papal States. The very existence of the Eston
dynasty was on the line. The Duke was frantic.
He had absolutely zero time or patience for a
neurotic poet having a personal crisis. So Tasso
arrives, and nobody rolls out the red carpet
for him. He gets completely ignored. He's given
bad rooms in the castle. The other courtiers,
who were probably jealous of him anyway, openly
mock him. And Tasso, with his fragile ego and
his raging paranoia, takes all of this as a deliberate
personal attack, a conspiracy, and he just explodes.
What does he do? He breaks into what the Chronicles
call open abuse in the middle of the court. He
screams insults at the Duke. He screams at the
new princess from Mantua. He shouts blasphemies.
He behaves like a complete and utter lunatic
in front of all the most important diplomatic
guests from all over Italy. And that's it. That's
the last straw. The Duke's patience is finally
gone. It snapped completely. Alfonso orders the
guards to seize him, and he doesn't send him
to a nice country villa this time. He sends him
to the madhouse of St. Anna. And let's be very
clear. This isn't a modern mental health facility
with therapy and calming music. This is a 16th
century asylum. It was a prison for the Pazzi.
The mad. Tasso was thrown into a cell. He was
chained, at least initially. He was surrounded
by the sounds of people screaming, howling, suffering.
For a man of his incredible sensitivity, it must
have been a vision of hell on earth. And he stays
there for seven years. Seven years of his life.
Seven years, from 1579 to 1586. I want to dig
into his life inside St. Anna, because the story
is a bit more complicated than him just rotting
in a dungeon. Eventually, the conditions improved
for him, right? They did. Once the initial fury
of the Duke wore off, and as Tasso's fame continued
to grow outside the walls, the Duke probably
realized, okay, I can't just let the most famous
poet in Europe rot in a filthy cell. So Tasso
was eventually moved to much better quarters,
a suite of spacious apartments within the asylum
complex. He was allowed to have his books. He
was allowed to receive visitors. And he wrote.
He wrote constantly. He wrote thousands of letters.
And these letters are just heartbreaking to read.
They are our best window into his mind. They
show a man who is lucid one day, then manic the
next, then plunged into deep depression. He writes
about the horrible sounds of the mad that keep
him awake all night. He writes about hallucinations.
He described a filetto. of mischievous sprite
that would steal his food and mess up his papers.
But at the same time he could write incredibly
lucid philosophy. Incredibly lucid. Most modern
psychiatrists and scholars who have studied his
letters agree that his symptoms align almost
perfectly with what we would now call bipolar
disorder. The extreme oscillations between immense
creative energy and deep, paranoid, delusional
depression fits the profile perfectly. But back
then, they just called it melancholy or mania.
While he is locked up, suffering through this,
the cruelest twist of his entire career happens.
This is what you call the literary tragedy. This
part, it just makes my blood boil on his behalf.
While he is in St. Anna, completely powerless
to do anything, his manuscript of Jerusalem Liberata,
the one he was so afraid to publish, the one
he wanted to fix to please the critics. It gets
stolen. Stolen. How? Well, circulated is probably
the better word. Friends and patrons had copies
of the manuscript. And in 1581, a publisher in
Venice gets his hands on one of these unauthorized
copies and prints it. Without Tasso's permission,
he just puts it out there. Here it is. The Great
Loss Masterpiece by the mad poet Tasso. And the
public reaction. It goes viral. 16th century
style. It is an instant runaway sensation. There
were seven different editions printed in just
six months. It becomes the most talked about,
most... read, most recited book in Europe. Everyone
is talking about Tasso. And Tasso himself gets,
what does he get from all this success? Nothing.
Absolutely nothing. No royalties, no creative
control, no money. He's sitting in a madhouse,
hearing through visitors that the entire world
is in love with his poem. But it's the wrong
version in his mind. It's the unpolished draft
he hated. And the publishers are getting rich
while he's writing letters to the Duke begging
for new shirts. It's nightmarish. It's like hearing
your demo tape from high school has become the
number one album in the world. But you're in
jail and someone else is collecting all the checks.
And to make it even worse. Because he was legally
declared mad, he had no standing, he couldn't
sue the publishers, he had to watch as a rival
poet at the Ferrara Court, a man named Battista
Guarini, was hired to edit his lyrics for official
publication. It was the ultimate humiliation,
the ultimate powerlessness. Before we get him
out of St. Anna, we have to address the elephant
in the room, the big myth. The Leonora myth.
Ah, yes. The romantic conspiracy theory. If you
read a lot of the older biographies, especially
from the 19th century, they will tell you that
Tasso wasn't locked up for being crazy. They
say he was locked up because he was secretly
in love with the Duke's unmarried sister, the
Princess Leonora d 'Este. The story goes that
he kissed her in public or that they were caught
in a secret affair and the enraged Duke locked
Tasso up in the asylum to silence him and cover
up the scandal. Lord Byron wrote a famous poem
about it. Goethe wrote a play. It's so romantic.
The poet is the martyr of love. It's a great
story. The only problem is we have to be the
buzzkills here and say there is zero evidence
for it. None at all. None. The historical record
just doesn't support it. At the time of his confinement,
Leonora was 42 years old. Tasso was 35. She was
a chronic invalid. Very, very religious. Their
letters to each other are affectionate, but they're
very formal and proper. The Duke didn't lock
him up for love. He locked him up because Tasso
was a public menace who pulled knives on servants
and screened insults at his new bride during
their wedding celebrations. It was a mental health
crisis, not a romance novel. Good to clear that
up. Okay, so it's 1586. Tasso has been in St.
Anna for seven long years. How does he finally
get out? He has a super fan. A powerful one.
A young man named Vincenzo Gonzaga, who was the
prince of Mantua. Vincenzo was a young, hip,
art -loving prince, and he idolized Tasso. For
years, he pestered Duke Alfonso of Ferrara. Let
me take Tasso. I'll look after him. He can come
to my court in Mantua. Finally, Alfonso, who
is probably just sick of the bad PR of keeping
a world -famous genius locked in a cage, agrees.
Fine, take him. He's your problem now. So Tosso
is free. He goes to the court of Mantua. Is this
the happy ending we've been waiting for? You
so want it to be. And for a little while it is.
He's treated like a king in Mantua. He has nice
clothes, good food, intellectual company. But
the damage was done. The restlessness, the paranoia,
it was too deeply ingrained. He couldn't settle.
These are the Odyssey years. He becomes a wanderer.
After a while in Mantua, he gets bored, feels
neglected, and he leaves. He goes to Bologna,
then to Loreto, then Rome, then Naples, then
Florence. He's just bouncing around Italy like
a pinball. He's welcomed by princes and popes
everywhere he goes, but he can't rest anywhere.
He always finds a reason to be paranoid or unsatisfied.
There's that sad, famous quote from the people
in Florence who saw him during this period. Yes.
They saw this shambling, prematurely old man,
probably in his mid -40s but looking 70, and
a Florentine diarist wrote, Actum este eo, it
is all over with him. They looked at him and
saw a ghost, a finished man. And in this... fragile,
wandering state, he commits what I can only call
literary suicide. This is the part of the story
that just hurts to talk about. It really does,
because in 1592, he publishes a new book. It's
called Jerusalem Conquistada, Jerusalem Conquered.
This was his official rewrite, his director's
cut of his own masterpiece. It was his attempt,
after all these years, to finally please those
pedantic critics from Rome. He spent his final
wandering years butchering his own beautiful
poem. What exactly did he change? He took out
everything we loved, everything that made it
immortal. He cut the heartbreaking scene of Clorinda's
baptism and death. He completely removed the
beautiful, sensual garden of Armida. He took
out most of the magic. He made the language...
Stiff, formal, pedantic, and historically accurate.
He basically turned a vibrant, emotional soap
opera into a boring, rhetorical sermon. George
Lucas, his own special edition. But much, much
worse. Much worse. Because at least the original
Star Wars still exists. Tasso wanted this version
to replace the other one. He destroyed the soul
of his own poem to accuse his religious guilt
and the rules of the critics who had tormented
him 20 years earlier. It was a tragic act of
artistic self -mutilation. It's a good thing
history has basically ignored it. Yes. Thank
God. Nobody reads Jerusalem Conquistada. We still
read the Liberata. The unauthorized pirate version.
The one he thought was sinful and flawed is the
one that made him immortal. The irony is just
staggering. So we're nearing the end now. It's
1594. Tasso is completely worn out. He's ruined
his own book. His health is completely shattered.
But then one last lifeline appeared. One last
chance at glory. The Pope calls. Pope Clement
VIII personally invites him to Rome to finally
be crowned Poet Laureate on the Capitoline Hill.
Back to our intro. The coronation that never
was. It was the ultimate vindication. After all
the suffering, all the humiliation, the Pope
offered him a pension, a permanent apartment
in the Vatican, and the laurel crown. Tasso accepts.
He travels to Rome. But he's just too sick. The
winter of 1594 is harsh. The ceremony keeps getting
postponed because a cardinal is busy or the weather
is bad. Tasso just waits in Rome, getting weaker
and weaker every day. And then comes that stormy
day in April 1595. He knows he isn't going to
make it to the ceremony. He asks his patrons
to be moved to the convent of Centonofrio, up
on the Janiculum Hill, where he says the air
is better. He climbs that hill during the storm.
He makes his last confession to the monks. He
receives the last rites. And on April 25th, the
very day the coronation was finally officially
supposed to happen. He dies, age just 51. The
laurel wreath was literally waiting for him down
at the capital, but he never got to wear it.
It's such a profoundly tragic timeline. But if
we pull back and look at his legacy, he didn't
really die, did he? His influence was just beginning.
Not even a little bit. His influence was seismic,
especially outside of Italy. In England, a young
poet named Edmund Spencer read Tasso and was
so inspired he wrote The Fairy Queen. A few decades
later, John Milton read Tasso and wrote Paradise
Lost. The entire idea of a grand Christian epic
poem in the vernacular comes directly from Tasso.
And the romantics. A couple of centuries later,
they absolutely adored the mad genius angle of
his life story. Oh, they ate it up. Goethe wrote
a famous play called Torquato Tasso. Lord Byron
wrote his poem The Lament of Tasso. To the romantics,
he was the patron saint of suffering. He was
the ultimate proof that great art comes from
great pain and that society will always misunderstand
its greatest artists. And we can't forget the
music. His work was perfect for musical adaptation.
Incredibly so. The great Claudio Monteverdi took
that scene, the duel between Tancredi and Clorinda,
and set it to music. It's a piece called Il Combattimento
di Tancredi e Clorinda, and it is one of the
first and greatest masterpieces of the Baroque
musical style. Tasso's poetry, with its intense,
conflicting emotions, basically taught music
how to express deep psychological drama. So bringing
it all back to the present, when we look at Tasso's
life, the paranoia, the pedantic criticism, the
asylum, the rewritten poem, what do you think
is the big final takeaway for us today? I think
it's a timeless and powerful warning about the
conflict between individual genius and the pressure
to conform. Tasso had a wild, romantic, innovative
spirit. He wanted to write about magic and impossible
love and the humanity of the enemy. But he lived
in a world of rigid rules, the counter -reformation,
the Aristotelian critics. They all tried to put
his genius in a box. And the friction between
his spirit and that box is what ultimately drove
him mad. It did. And the ultimate tragedy is
that he spent the last years of his life internalizing
their criticism. He spent his life trying to
please the comment section of his day. He tried
to fix his work. make the critics happy. And
in doing so, he ended up completely ruining it.
And that, I think, is the provocative thought
I want to leave all of you with. Tasso's unauthorized,
flawed pirate draft is a timeless masterpiece.
His own fixed, authorized version is unreadable
garbage. It forces us to ask a really uncomfortable
question. How much great art has been lost or
ruined or just watered down into mediocrity because
the artist was too afraid of the critics of their
time? How many incredible movies or albums or
books have been edited into oblivion because
the creator was listening to the wrong voices?
It's a terrifying thought. Tasso is standing
there in history, shouting at us across the centuries,
don't read the reviews, trust your gut, just
publish the damn draft. For God's sakes, whatever
you do, don't let a committee edit your poem.
Amen to that. That is all the time we have for
this deep dive into the agony and the ecstasy
of Torquato Tasso. If you get a chance, go read
some Jerusalem Delivered, the unauthorized version,
of course. Thanks for listening.