Torquato Tasso

“ But when we come to consider what an infinite number of suggestions must have been lost upon the world, and that originality, in it's most creative sense, is nothing but combination, we shall not dispute the entireness of this pretension. Agostino Beccari, a Ferrarese, is the first person on record who produced a complete pastoral drama. ”

“ The persons in the Aminta, though placed in a country famous for being misrepresented and frigidized in poetry,—Arcadia,—are all copies after humanity; the action is simple; the incidents necessary, and happily interwoven; the images, as Dryden has observed in contradistinction to those of Guarini, all rural and proper; the event at once new, unexpected, and natural. Lovers, and those who know lovers, will know how to account for what may seem exaggerations of feeling ”

“ Even the undoubted and ancient common-places, which are to be found here and there,—such as at the end, for instance, of the First Scene, Act the Third,—appeared nothing more than chalky pieces of baldness, over which you pass quickly upon the grass again, And it is to be said for those common-places, that they were not the school-boy things they are now. ”

“ Tasso's, far surpassing all three, was the next, and has stood without a rival of Italian growth ever since, though it has had crowds of followers. In 1614, a collection had been made of them amounting to eighty; and in 1700, more than two hundred were to be seen in a person's possession at Rome. We speak rather from our own feelings, than from universal consent, when we say that the Aminta had no rival; for it soon met with one in the Pastor Fido of Battista Guarini, Tasso's contemporary and fellow-courtier. ”

“ Nobody was more likely than Tasso to fancy himself in love with a person so situated, whether he actually was or not; but the same disposition which renders the fancy probable, renders fifty other causes of his adversity as much so.
But to return to the Aminta.—The Italians, among their other inventions, justly claim the merit of having originated this species of Drama. Eclogues, or detached pastoral scenes, are, it is true, as old as the Greeks ”

“ It is from Theocritus that our poet took the Flight of Love and the rewards offered by Venus in the Prologue, the comparison of Love with a bee at the beginning of the Second Act, and the complaints of the Satyr in that soliloquy. Minor touches of imitation are also scattered about from Theocritus, Moschus, and Anacreon. The Satyr's curse upon mercenary love is from Tibullus. Thyrsis going to the capital, and describing his patron as a god, is Virgil's Tityrus going to Rome and deifying Augustus. ”

“ So does the pretty moral fiction of the viper's putting away her poison when she goes to her lover. The origin of the enamoured Satyr is Pan and his followers; but the rejected Polyphemic Satyr, unhappy in his love on account of the difference of his form, was first compounded by the inventor of the Sylvan Drama, Beccari ”

“ If the Aminta, however, so far surpasses it's Italian followers, we are bound to assert, on the other hand, and we can safely say we do it out of no national self-love, that in point of poetry it is as far surpassed by Comus and the Faithful Shepherdess. ”

“ There is a strong aboriginal taste of nature in it; as if it had been written when gods, nymphs, and sylvans, had all the world to themselves. The idea of the cave in hell, where women are punished for cruelty to their lovers, (Act I. Scene I.) is from Ariosto. In Ariosto also, though I cannot refer to the passage, I remember finding the original of the pleasant fiction of the scene following, respecting the gossiping chairs and walls at court. It is not in Tasso's style ”