Thrilled to be part of Women and the Canon conference at Christchurch, Oxford, in January. A fascinating array of presentations; in the meantime, busy writing my own – among other things. But keep watching this space for I will be posting about an enchanted forest soon!
Source: Conference
Formidable Armida (Part Two)
In spite of its historical pretensions and its status as one of the great heroic epics, or perhaps alongside with them, Gerusalemme Liberata is ultimately a romance. And a romance is never far away from the fairy-tale. It is populated by the same kind of characters: brave young men and beautiful princesses, proud kings and wicked witches. Rinaldo and Tancred, Clorinda and Erminia, Godfrey and his dark equivalent Aladdin, and of course the great Armida are the sort of people one would encounter in the land of Faerie. But we really know we have arrived there when our heroes walk into enchanted places, by chance or by design.
In Canto Seven, Tancred finds himself in a place which screams ‘Faerie’ a mile away. He was persecuting Erminia, whom he had taken for an enemy warrior but lost her, and wandering far away, he ends up in
a nearby forest thicket, whereupon / so dense the windswept trees grow roundabout, / so black and fathomless the shadows yawn, / that soon he grows unable to make out / more recent footprints, and, perplexed, rides on.
It is night time and Tancred is lost in this forest, where ‘the faintest night-breeze rustles through / the twigs of elm or beech with feeble force’. The awe inspired by a forest at night-time is legendary: it is the deep archetypall fear of the wild, of the desert where no civilized person would go willingly, a cultural shock memory deeply impressed on European sensibilities ever since the Romans tried (and failed) to conquer Germania with its impenetrable forests. As medievalist Jacques LeGoff put it:
‘the face of Christian Europe was a great cloak of forests and moorlands perforated by relatively fertile cultivated clearings … a collection … of manors, castles, and towns arising out of the midst of stretches of land which were uncultivated and deserted … It was rather like a photographic negative of the Muslim east which was a world of oases in the midst of deserts.’ (1)
Tasso transposes the world of European Faerie onto the Holy Land, placing a dark forest there (and not the only one, as we shall see later). Tancred wanders in the forest all night, but eventually reaches a clearing. It is noteworthy that, although the forest is scariest, it is the clearing in its heart that holds the real danger – witness Circe’s palace in The Odyssey. There, ‘a distant hum’ leads him to the banks of a river. He is completely lost and all alone, when at last someone approaches:
[He] soon hears hoof-beats ever nearer, and / at last out of a narrow pass there flung / a man – a courier, by his look. His hand / held a little whip, and from his shoulders hung / a great horn, in the fashion of our land.
So far, so good: Tancred is reassured by the recognizable cultural signs – the horse, the whip, the horn of the courier. What is more, the man tells him he is sent by Tancred’s own uncle, Bohemond. ‘Tancred goes with him’, we are told, ‘thinking him sent by his famous uncle, and his false tale sound.’ Oops! A warning sign! And very soon Tancred himself is on the alert too:
‘Ere long a foul, unwholesome lake they nigh, / with swamp-like moat girding a castle round, / at the hour when the sun appears to leap / down to vasty den of night and sleep.’
This is a place of magic; what is more, of evil magic: the lake and the moat around the castle are described in threatening terms (‘foul’, ‘unwholesome,’ swamp-like’ sound noxious for body and soul). But the worst is that, although we were told only a few lines back that Tancred ‘sees with serene forehead rise / Aurora in the white and crimson skies’, this is a world about to be steeped in night. The pace of the narrative does not allow for so much time to have elapsed that it is already the end of day. Some devilry is at work here.
Still, Tancred follows the false courier, taken in by his plausible lie that this castle used to belong to Saracens (which would explain the foulness), but now it is conquered by Count Cosenza – a fictitious name of a non-existent character. Tancred begins to have misgivings about the whole thing. What worries him most is the castle itself. ‘Somewhat he suspects that such a strong / castle might hide entrapment or betrayal.’ He too recognizes the castle, as any reader of the romance would (and this includes us modern readers), as a potential place of danger. Yet he is so fearless, Tasso tells us, that he walks in; and then of course the game is up, and Tancred realizes that this is indeed a trap. An ‘armoured knight’ ‘with fierce and scornful air’ appears and tells him what he has got himself into:
O you, who (led by Fortune or your will) / have set foot in Armida’s fatal lands, / think not of flight, but straight your weapons spill / and into shackled thrust your caitiff hands. / Seek not to cross her guarded threshold till / you bow to the law that binds her warrior-bands, / nor ever hope to see the sky once more, / though years roll past and all your locks turn hoar, / unless you swear to join her men and ride / against whoever fights in Jesus’ name.
So, Armida is behind all this! And this is what happened to those knights who followed her, beguiled by her fraudulent tale! This knight is In fact one of Tancred’s former brothers-in-arms, Rambault, now a renegade and Armida’s pawn. And as Tancred, furious with the deception and the additional insult of submitting to it, is getting ready to fight him, darkness falls and ‘nothing could be seen’. But what follows is a splendid image of potent visual magic, between illusion and reality:
at once a thousand torches, clear and bright,/ suffused the region with a golden sheen./ The castle glows as on a festive night / in a gilded theatre some lofty scene, / and, perched on high, Armida sits at ease, / hid where, though unseen, she both hears and sees.
Enchanted Castle. [Source: https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2045/2077039702_a0390bdf0b_z.jpg%5D
Tasso, living in an enlightened age, prefers to invoke the enchantment performed by theatrical illusion rather than the supernatural workings of actual magic. A spectacle is about to unfold and it is all the work of a hidden illusionist, Armida, who is also the only spectator.
A fierce combat between the two knights follows, in which Tancred seems to be winning: he chases his foe to the bridge of the castle and is ready to strike the final blow:
when lo! (help from on high to the wretch) all light / of torches ceased, and of all stars beside, / and to blind night, beneath a sky bereft / no ray, not even the pale moon’s, was left.
Tancred is left in the dark, because of Armida’s dirty trick, and now the battle is lost. He is trapped in an ‘uncanny prison’, and it was all his fault, for he ‘went / willingly in and found himself confined / in a den no man leaves by his own intent.’ He gropes about in the dark and pounds at the gate but to no avail. And to spell out his doom, a voice is heard in the dark:
Hear you – fear not to die yet! – shall drag out,
entombed in living death, your days and years.
This magical scene, possibly inspired by a scene in The Iliad where the goddess Aphrodite protects Paris from Menelaus by casting a dark cloud over him, inspired other poets in its turn; for example Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene (see Harold H. Blanchard, ‘Imitations from Tasso in the “Faerie Queene”‘, Studies in Philology, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Apr., 1925), pp. 198-221). It is a powerful scene, making use of the primeval fears of the dark and of entrapment, as well as the wonder and delight stirred in our souls when we see a multitude of lights blazing all at once. It is also about the potency of illusion and the bitterness of disillusionment.
It is also another of Tasso’s artful cliffhangers, urging us to read on. What will happen next? Is Tancred doomed? Surely not – but how is he going to break free from Armida’s dark castle?
(1) Jacques Le Goff, Medieval Civilization 400-1500, tr. Julia Barrow (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), p.131.
Armida petitions Godfrey to redress the injustice done to her – but in fact she plots the destruction of his army. Illustration of Gierusalemme Liberata (Venice 1745) by Giambatista Piazzetta. Sp Coll Hunterian Cd.2.1., Special Collections, University of Glasgow Library.
Do not be fooled by the meek expression and the posture of submission. This is a very dangerous woman!
Each darkest trick, each subtlest blandishment
a woman or a witch can ply she knows. (4.23)
Armida is powerful, combining beauty (the greatest in ‘all the Orient’), intelligence, and the art of witchcraft. Her uncle, Hydraoth, a sorcerer himself and lord of Damascus, recognizes her extraordinary talents when he says:
My darling girl, who know the art / to make blond hair and sweet looks hide a wit / sharp as a greybeard’s and a mannish heart. / In sorcery you’re my better. (4.24)
But the crusading soldiers cannot see the hidden intelligence. They only have eyes for her beauty and are struck by her sexual allure, which is expressed in no uncertain terms, verging on soft pornography (for the sixteenth century, at least):
Her beauteous breast displays its naked snows
that feed love’s flame that they themselves have brought.
Partly her budding unsucked bosom shows,
partly lies hid, in envious garments caught –
envious, yes, – but though all paths they close
to sight, they cannot quite bar amorous thought,
that, not content with outward beauties, traces
an inward path to hidden, secret places. (4.31)
The ‘lustful’ crowd surrounds Armida as she visits Godfrey to play the damsel in distress. She spins a woeful tale of hardship and injustice done to her by her ‘guardian,’ who supposedly stole her fortune and tried to force her to marry his son. But it is all part of an evil plan hatched between Armida and her uncle, Hydraoth, aiming to destroy the Christian army. And she, ultimate actress, ‘gives no sign how her heart laughs to abide / her certain triumph and its spoils’ (4.33), but plays her game to the end, and partly succeeds in her aim. Eustace, Godfrey’s younger brother, falls madly in love with her, and so do dozens of other Christians, who are ready to abandon the camp and go to her aid.
But Godfrey is suspicious and cannot wholly believe her story. He promises to help her get her fortune and throne back after the crusaders have taken Jerusalem. Armida bursts into tears and threatens to kill herself. The gallant Eustace and other men are angry with Godfrey and promise to help her.
Beauty in tears – when will it not succeed?
Or speech on an amorous tongue, meltingly sweet? (4.83)
The seeds of discord are sown in the Christian camp. So far, Armida’s plan is going well.
And now, since she sees smiling Fortune greet
this great commencement of her wiles, she starts,
before her plot can weaken, to complete
her criminal design upon their hearts,
to gain by her fair looks and gestures sweet
more than Medea or Circe by their arts. (4.86)
Like her powerful predecessors of Classical mythology, Medea and Circe, Armida has criminal designs, and in spite of Godfrey’s resistance, she means to carry out her plan to the end. But the names of those two witches also ring a bell of warning: both Medea and Circe fell in love with men they initially wanted to destroy, and both payed for it, more or less…
What will be Armida’s next move?
(to be continued)
Leaving aside the woes and bewitchments of Gerusalemme’s heroines for a little while, I would like to return to the war between Franks and Saracens and to the hostile stance of Torquato Tasso towards the Greeks, one of the great powers of the times, although they were called Romans back then – but this did not confuse Tasso and his contemporaries, as it did not confuse the chroniclers of the Crusades. In view of recent developments in the European world of politics and finance, and particularly in the Eurozone, it is interesting to see Tasso’s depiction of the Greeks in his epic.
Tasso used William of Tyre as his main historical source; William of Tyre, in his turn, born over a hundred years after the First Crusade, based his account on previous chronicles, among which Gesta Francorum et Aliorum Ierosolimitanorum: the great heroes in that narrative are Bohemond and his nephew – none other than our old acquaintance, Tancred. The Gesta were hostile towards the Greek emperor Alexius I Comnenus, who did not trust Bohemond and was not particularly keen to allow the rather unruly bands of crusaders to devastate his lands. For Tasso, Alexius is of course ‘the treacherous emperor of the Greeks … with his wonted cunning’ (I.69) (Albert of Aachen’s chronicle, on the other hand, paints a much more favourable picture of the emperor, who had the difficult role of balancing his moral obligation to the Christian armies with consideration of his own people…)
In Canto One, Tasso describes the various armies participating in the Crusade. This is how he presents the Greeks:
Two hundred ride behind them, Grecian – born,
each armed so lightly that it seems he lacks
all steel, with scimitars athwart their sashes worn,
and bows and quivers rattling on their backs.
Their wiry steeds, well fed on little corn,
are tireless in long treks and swift attacks.
Quick to maraud and quick to quit the fight,
roving and scattered, they wage war by flight. (I.50)
Tasso’s description seems to refer rather to Ottoman Turks (e.g. ‘scimitars athwart their sashes worn’) or Arabs (their wiry steeds, well fed on little corn’) rather than to offer historical representations of Byzantine Greeks. (And this conflation has its own significance, too). Tasso writes over a hundred years after the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, and barely ten years after the Battle of Lepanto, in 1571, in which the Ottoman Fleet was defeated by a Holy League of the Catholic states of the Mediterranean. (Bonus info: Miguel de Cervantes fought in that battle and was wounded, too!)
Tatinos rules that band, the only Greek
who joined the Latin armies. Oh, the shame!
the crime! These wars – were they too far to seek,
right at your doorstep, Greece? And yet you came
to lounge, a lazy spectator and weak,
who waits to see the outcome of the game?
If you are now a slave, your slavery
is (don’t complain!) justice, not infamy. (I.51)
In Greek mythology, the Nine Muses, daughters of Zeus and Mmenosyne (=Memory), protected the Arts and Sciences. In this 1745 illustration of Jerusalem Delivered by Giambattista Piazzetta, you can see the Muses on Mt Helicon, their residence, while two winged figures are carrying a cameo with Torquato Tasso’s portrait.
Sp Coll Hunterian Cd.2.1., Special Collections, University of Glasgow Library.
The scornful tone and the belief that the Greeks brought their slavery upon themselves due to their deceit, weakness, and indolence seem to have initiated a narrative tradition of hostile and deprecatory assessment which is strangely echoed in similar remarks in Western Europe today on the ‘lazy’ and ‘untrustworthy’ Greeks. What Tasso cannot mention – since it wouldn’t fit in the time-frame of Gerusalemme Liberata, having happened about a hundred years after the First Crusade – is that those brave and honest Frankish crusaders led the Fourth Crusade against Constantinople; that first Fall of the City in 1204 weakened the already faltering Byzantine Empire considerably, and eased off the work of the Ottomans in 1453. Yet, according to Tasso and the mainstream narrative in the centuries to follow, it was the Greeks who were treacherous:
The faith of Greeks – who knows not how it fares?
One treason shows all treason they can do –
no, thousands show it, since a thousand snares
that faithless, greedy folk has laid for you. (II.72)
On the one hand, the narrative fictional tradition of the ‘Fallatia Graecorum’; on the other, the historical fact of the Fourth Crusade which shows treachery to be firmly in the Frankish court. But fiction seems to be winning over fact, every time. A rather melancholy thought, this.
We shall now leave Rinaldo to his as yet unknown fate, and turn to another young (and purely fictional) character in the story. Erminia is a young and beautiful girl, a blonde and on the Muslim camp – all three major female characters are, an intriguing fact which will be discussed later – who is a guest of King Aladdin.
Erminia joins him, at his invitation, / Erminia fair, who to his court did fly, / by Christian armies ousted from her reign / of Antioch, the king her father slain. (3.12)
Erminia, by Sebastien Leclerc. © The Hunterian, University of Glasgow 2014.
From above the walls of Jerusalem, Aladdin is watching a battle raging between his own men, led by Clorinda, and the Christians led by a most gallant and fierce knight. In a scene reminiscent of Homer’s Iliad (Helen formerly of Sparta and now of Troy does the same, pointing out various Greek heroes to the Trojans), Aladdin asks Erminia who that man is; she knows the names of all the main Christian knights from the siege of her own city, This is her answer:
He is Prince Tancred. Would that he were mine / one day, my captive – and not dead, for I / want him alive that I may wreak a fine / vengeance on him and slake my rage thereby.
She is only telling half the truth, and her words are at best ambivalent, for she is really deeply in love with Tancred, who treated her with courtesy, and honoured her like a queen after Antioch fell to the Christian’s siege. In the end, he granted her her freedom plus all her personal jewellery and treasures. How could she not love him? But Tancred is in love with Clorinda. And Clorinda is a good friend of Erminia’s. And Erminia knows nothing of this love – and to be fair, neither does Clorinda, at first.
In Canto Six, Tancred is to fight in single combat with the major Muslim warrior, Argant. The two warriors are equally fierce and strong, and the event cannot be concluded in just one day. Argant is injured, but not seriously, and so is Tancred. Erminia wishes to go to Tancred and heal him with her arts; because, of course, she is a little bit of a witch, too:
And since she by her mother had been taught / the secret virtues in all growing things, / and all that might through magic spells be wrought / to close a wound and soothe the pangs it brings / (lore which the custom of that country thought / fit for the noble daughters of its kings) …. / She yearns to nurse her lover, and to choose / some condign(1) way to serve his enemy / perhaps with noisome herb or cursed juice / to sprinkle him and poison him thereby. (6.67-8)
Erminia is reluctant to use such dark arts, although she yearns to heal Tancred. She debates the question of whether she should go to him for a while, but finally vain hopes and foolish daydreams of becoming his wife lead her to make a big decision: she will abandon Jerusalem and try to sneak into the Christian camp and inside Tancred’s tent. But how will she leave the city, whose gates are so scrupulously locked and guarded?
Erminia is not brave: she is the opposite of Clorinda, in many ways. A girly girl, she has only got time for love and for spending time with her dear friend, to whom she confides all her secrets – they often share the same bed and keep chatting till the morning, as girl friends will do – except the one that concerns Tancred. Erminia has free access to Clorinda’s room and things, and decides to dress up in her martial friend’s suit of mail, and thus disguised leave the city. At that moment, Erminia realises that perhaps it is better to be a warrior maiden than a cosseted princess:
How I envy her lot – not for her glory’s glow / nor for her beauty (womanish vanity), / but that no long gown clogs her steps / and no envious bower cramps her heart, / for she girds on her arms when exploits are her aim, / and rides out unrestrained by fear or shame. (6.82)
Eventually she squeezes herself into Clorinda’s armour and, feeling extremely uncomfortable and slightly ridiculous, for she soon realises that ‘the habit does not the priest make,’ she leaves the security of the city walls for the hostile world outside.
Erminia in Clorinda’s clothes flees Jerusalem, by Giambatista Piazzetta. Sp Coll Hunterian Cd.2.1., Special Collections, University of Glasgow Library.
Her plan goes all awry: not only cannot she walk – much less swagger like a true warrior maiden – in the hot and heavy armour, but she is mistaken for Clorinda by a Christian knight whose whole family had been exterminated by her only that morning! Her maid and squire, who had been accompanying her all along, as befits a girl of noble family, flee, and her horse carries her to a nearby ancient forest, where she is lost and wanders all alone, crying and calling for help, but alas, to no avail…
In the end, after a night and a day wandering, scared and lonely and desperate, she comes across an idyllic scene: a family of poor but happy fishermen and shepherds, braiding baskets and playing the woodland whistles and singing. They take her in for a while, offering hospitality and friendship, and in a turn very common to romance, Erminia the princess is transformed for a while into a shepherdess.
The pastoral idyll, a very ancient tradition in romance (‘Dafnis and Chloe’ is the archetype for this genre, written in the 2nd century) was having a comeback in the late Renaissance, and Tasso himself wrote one of the most famous pastorals of all time, Aminta. Why did he choose to insert this sort of adventure in the midst of all the drama of war? Perhaps as a respite, or to gently remind the readers of his other work. The story of Erminia is not finished here though: more is in store for her as the affairs of Christians and ‘pagans’ take a more dramatic turn soon.
(1) condign: fitting and deserved, esp. as punishment or retribution.
One thing we must bear in mind when we talk about heroes of epic romance is that they are usually very young, by today’s standards. This applies mostly to women, as well as some men, particularly those who find themselves embroiled in love situations. In Gerusalemme Liberata, the greatest hero of them all is such a young man. He was not invented by Torquato Tasso; he first seems to appear in The Song of Roland, another ‘ancestor’ of Gerusalemme along with classical epic. But it was Tasso’s Rinaldo and his adventures that was destined to capture the imagination of audiences and inspire artists, most of all composers of opera, in the centuries to follow.
The arms of Rinaldo, torn and bloodied, are brought to Godfrey of Bouillon. Illustration by Giambatista Piazzetta. (Venice 1745). Sp Coll Hunterian Cd.2.1., Special Collections, University of Glasgow Library.
Rinaldo was only fifteen years old when he left his home in Italy to join the Frankish camp in the First Crusade. I’ve already mentioned the genealogy attached to Rinaldo, and what were Tasso’s reasons for it. Now, three years into the war, Rinaldo is only eighteen, an age in which most people today are considered little more than children. But he is already an accomplished warrior, and ready for love: his face is that of Cupid (Roman version of Eros, son of Venus, goddess of love). It’s easy to guess where Tasso will be going with this!
Rinaldo’s youth and pride in his martial prowess (Tasso likens him to Mars, the god of war, too) makes him too touchy and a tad too volatile. Basically he is the immature adolescent to be measured against Godfrey, the fully mature man. Incensed by a fellow soldier who doubts his honour, Rinaldo kills him, and when he is informed that Godfrey means to bring him to justice for this, he is outraged:
‘Let slaves defend their motives in a base
prison,’ he said, ‘or slavish creatures; I’ll
die – free-born, living freely – ere I’ll place
my hand or foot in gyves or shackles vile.
This hand well knows the sword’s use, and the use
of the victor’s palm. Fetters it shall refuse.
But if for my deserving Godfrey sends
such thanks, and wishes to imprison me
like a common criminal, if he intends
to drag me chained to a vulgar gaol, then see:
here stand I. Let him come or send his friends.
Our justicer the chance of war shall be.
A bloody tragedy he’ll thus ordain
the armies of the foe to entertain. (5.43-44)
Rinaldo’s aristocratic scorn for justice makes him less appealing to a modern audience; but he actually expresses the values of an older world order, in which war and combat were thought to be the only true means to judge highly-born men. Like Achilles in The Iliad, his anger has got the better of him, and his injured pride is more important than civil war and the slaughter of his comrades, which will make the Christian army the laughing stock of the foes. Like an extremely fractious teenager, Rinaldo doesn’t care.
Tancred, his champion and advisor, being older and wiser, advises Rinaldo to leave the camp, in order to avoid the bloody consequences of a refusal to obey Godfrey and to keep his honour intact at the same time. They’ll soon realise how important you are in this enterprise, he says, and will come begging. Rinaldo ‘consents at once to leave the camp behind,’ and refusing anybody’s company or assistance, he dons his beautiful armour, described in loving detail by Tasso, and he sets out on his own.
He leaves, and a great mind’s whip and spur, desire
for deathless, blessed fame within him grew.
His soul for generous enterprise on fire,
he is resolved unheard-of deeds to do. (5.52)
But will he succeed? Soon the Prince of Denmark will appear at the Christian camp, coming from afar, and bringing catastrophic news: he shows Godfrey a torn and bloodied armour, found at the site of a terrible battle, which everyone recognises with dismay: this is Rinaldo’s armour, and they last saw it on him when he left the camp …
(to be continued)
If you happen to be in Glasgow tomorrow at 1.00, I am giving a ten-minute Insight Talk at the Hunterian Art Gallery. I will talk about the Enchanted Forest, an episode from Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata which inspired a 1754 pantomime in the French Court and a print by John Collins in 1759. Below you can see the print, which belongs to the Hunterian Art Gallery collections.
Alcastus in the enchanted forest. There are tricks and devilries ahead …. Illustration by J. Collins, 1759. © The Hunterian, University of Glasgow 2014
For those who are away or can’t make it tomorrow, I will write in detail about this enchanting episode in a following post.
The Hunterian Associates Keynote Event on Wednesday night went really well. I did not expect that so many people would be interested in Torquato Tasso; wildly popular though he had been for many centuries, he is not exactly a household name nowadays.
As I was giving my talk about the various editions of Gerusalemme Liberata William Hunter owned, and the illustrations in the Hunterian Art Collections, and his copy of William of Tyre, I realised that things were not so different in the eighteenth century for fans of a particular book or writer: judging by the case of Hunter, they would collect and enjoy as many things about their favourite writer and his work as possible – exactly as we do today.
Another thought that struck me was how one form of art fed another and was fed by it in its turn, then as now. Tasso’s heroes and particularly Rinaldo and Armida and their intriguing love story inspired many operas and plays, and it is possible that those performances, in their turn, gave a publishing boost to his book (alas, too late for him to benefit, or care). It is a little like what happens today with famous books turned into films. Think, for example, of all those new editions of The Hobbit following the success of the films.
The event ended with a beautiful aria from Rinaldo, the opera (one of the many inspired by Tasso’s epic) by Handel. Rinaldo will be the subject of the next post. In the meantime, enjoy the song, evocatively rendered by Brianna Robertson – Kirkland:
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