"when Despotism Kept Genius in Chains": Imagining Tasso's Madness and Imprisonment, 1748-1849‪.‬

THE FIRST ENGLISH ACCOUNT OF TORQUATO TASSO'S LIFE, BY HENRY Layng, appeared a century and a half after his death in a miscellaneous collection with a strong focus on the Italian poet. Along with "The Life of Tasso" his Several Pieces in Verse and Prose (1748) also contains translations into couplets of cantos xv and XVI of Gerusalemme liberata, the celebrated episode in which one of the principal Christian heroes Rinaldo is rescued from his amorous languor in the beautiful garden of the pagan enchantress Armida, and a verse epistle from "Tancred to Clorinda," in which Layng imagines another prominent Christian hero addressing the pagan object of his unrequited love. Layng's brief account of Tasso's life is based on what "we are told from the best hands," both the poet's first Italian biographer, Giovan Battista Manso, and the French poet Jean-Baptiste de Mirabaud in the Abrege de la Vie du Tasse printed with his translation of Gerusalemme liberata in 1724, rather than on original research, but the emphasis that he places on key events and personalities in the poet's story had a lasting impact on how later English writers, such as Byron in particular, engaged with Tasso's biography: In Layng's biography Tasso emerges above all as a victim of forces beyond his own control. Even the immediate and wide-ranging fame of his great epic poem and "the warmth of the glory that blazed around him" served only to awaken the envy and malice of "whole swarms of Dunciad writers," such as various members of the Florentine Accademia della Crusca, who repeatedly criticized the poem in minute detail in the late sixteenth century. This critical hostility towards the poem continued even after Tasso's death in I595, before "the attack was again furiously renewed by the Partizans for the ancients, under Mons. Boileau in France" in the latter part of the seventeenth century. Layng, however, cites Dryden in suggesting by way of response that Tasso "has long since been quietly in Possession of the third Place in the College of Poets" behind only Homer and Virgil. (2) For him, Tasso's literary immortality is in no doubt, even as interest in the poet starts to switch from his work towards the unhappy events of his life.