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Updated: June 9, 2025
After Tasso's confinement to S. Anna in 1579, Guarini became court poet, and the luckless prisoner was condemned to see his own poems entrusted to the editorial care of his rival. Guarini, however, was not satisfied with the court of Ferrara.
With the exception of the omission of the prologue the version keeps pretty faithfully to its original, but it does no more than emphasize the tedious artificiality of the Italian, while whatever charm and perhaps over-elaborated grace of language Guarini infused into his verse has entirely evaporated in the process of translation.
The queen's confessor, Father Guarini, now rose from his knees, and, approaching the queen, he said, in a solemn, commanding voice: "My daughter, by virtue of my profession, as a servant of the holy mother church, to whom is due obedience and trust, I command you to deliver up to this man the key of this door." The queen's head fell upon her breast, and hollow, convulsive groans escaped her.
Tasso, Marino, Guarini, Metastasio, and a crowd of writers of inferior merit and celebrity, were spell-bound in the enchanted gardens of a gaudy and meretricious Alcina, who concealed debility and deformity beneath the deceitful semblance of loveliness and health.
As early as 1587 a certain Giasone de Nores or Denores, a Cypriot noble who held the chair of moral philosophy at the university of Padua, published a pamphlet on the relations existing between different forms of literature and the philosophy of government, in which, while refraining from any specific allusions, he denounced tragi-comedies and pastorals as 'monstrous and disproportionate compositions ... contrary to the principles of moral and civil philosophy. Guarini argued that, as his play was the only one deserving to be called a tragi-comedy and was at the same time a pastoral, the reference was palpable.
Thus Malacreta is not even content to let the author choose his own title, arguing that Mirtillo was faithful not in his quality of shepherd but of lover . He goes on to complain of the tangle of laws and oracles which Guarini invents in order to motive the action of his play; and here, though taken individually his objections may be hypercritical, he has laid his finger on a very real weakness of the author's ingenious plot.
Chrysostom, the original manuscripts of Tasso, Ariosto, and Guarini, or the inscription of Victor Alfieri in the Studio Publico.
The truth is that we have up to now been dealing merely with origins, with productions which are of interest only in the reflected light of later work; whatever there is of real beauty and of permanent value in the pastoral drama of Italy is due to the breath of life inspired into the phantasms of earlier writers by the genius of Tasso and Guarini.
The second, and for the English drama vastly the more important channel, was the pastoral-chivalric romance borrowed by Sidney from Montemayor, the great exponent of the Spanish school, which was, however, based upon the Italian work of Sannazzaro. The third was the Arcadian drama of the Ferrarese court, which was imitated, chiefly from Guarini, by Samuel Daniel.
Two other passages from Guarini have been quoted as germane to the discussion.
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