13 August, 1594 - Tasso's Melancholy

Here's what the Admiral's Men performed at the Rose playhouse on this day, 424 years ago...

Henslowe writes: y^e 11 of aguste 1594 ... ne ... R at tassoes mellencoley ... iij^ll iiij^s 

In modern English: 13^th August, 1594 ... New ... Received at Tasso's Melancholy ... £3 and 4 shillings

Today, the Admiral's Men premiered a brand new play: Tasso's Melancholy. As is so often the case, this play is lost, but it must have depicted the mental torments of the Italian poet Torquato Tasso. There was quite a fashion in 1590s drama for protagonists who were mad (or at least pretending to be mad), so Tasso's Melancholy may have been an attempt at replicating the success of plays like The Spanish Tragedy, Orlando Furioso, the ur-Hamlet and Titus Andronicus. But what distinctive qualities might it have had?

Portrait of Tasso
by Jacopo Bassano (1566)

Tasso was still alive at this time; he would die in 1595. He was one of the most famous poets of his age, best known for his epic poem Jerusalem Delivered, about Godfrey of Bouillon's activities during the Crusades (this poem may have inspired elements of two Rose plays that we have already encountered, Jerusalem and Godfrey of Bouillon). The first English translation of Jerusalem Delivered appeared in this very year, so Tasso may have been of especial interest to playgoers in 1594.

And Tasso was indeed melancholic. The stories about him are a tangle of fact and fiction, but according to legend, he was driven mad for love of a noblewoman named Leonora, and his need to conceal his passions drove him to paranoia and violence. After attacking with a knife a servant he believed to have been spying on him, Tasso was kept in confinement by the Duke of Ferrara, but he escaped to his home town of Sorrento. Later, he returned to Ferrara, but his wild behaviour continued and he was locked in a cell in the Hospital of Santa Anna for years, where he continued to write poetry.

Tasso in the Madhouse by Eugene Delacroix (1839) 

In the succeeding centuries, Tasso's torments would be seen as a Romantic embodiment of the poetic spirit raging against restriction, and writers such as Lord Byron would make pilgrimages to his purported cell at Santa Anna. But back in 1594, many of the legends about Tasso's madness had not yet made it into print, so it's not clear what kind of story an English dramatist might have told about him.

The only clues are a couple of passages from contemporary poems. In an epigram that may date approximately to this period, the poet Sir John Harington describes Tasso making "one little fault" and being punished for it by a "most ungrateful Duke". Tasso is "shut up close prisoner in a loathsome vault" and the Duke orders his pen and ink taken away, but Tasso continues to write "excellent verse" using his own "piss and ordure".

In his catalogue of British Drama, Martin Wiggins draws attention to a passage in Daiphantus (1604), a poem by Anthony Scoloker, in which the love-crazed protagonist is compared with both Tasso and Hamlet; Wiggins wonders whether the passage might thus incorporate memories of seeing Tasso's Melancholy in performance. The madman is very wild indeed:

Now with his fingers, like a barber, snaps;

Plays with the fire-pan, as it were a lute;

Unties his shoe-strings, then his lips he laps;

Whistles awhile and thinks it is a flute;

At length, a glass presents it to his sight,

Where well he acts fond love in passions right.

A true mad poet, he even drinks his own ink:

Runs to his inkpot, drinks, then stops the hole,

And thus grows madder than he was at first.

Tasso, he finds, by that of Hamlet thinks:

Terms him a madman, then of his inkhorn drinks.

And he runs around in only his shirt:

Puts off his clothes, his shirt he only wears;

Much like mad Hamlet, thus a passion tears.

Perhaps in these fragments we can glimpse Edward Alleyn's performance as Tasso (along with Richard Burbage's as Hamlet).

Whatever the exact content of Tasso's Melancholy, we do know that today's premiere was a great success, performed to an almost full theatre.  

FURTHER READING

Tasso's Melancholy information

• Sir John Harington, The Letters and Epigrams of Sir John Harington, ed. Norman Egbert McClure (University of Philadelphia Press, 1930), 201-2.
• C.P. Brand, Torquato Tasso: A Study of the Poet and of his Contribution to English Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1965).
• Kathleen M. Lea and T.M. Gang, eds., Godfrey of Bulloigne: A Critical Edition of Edward Fairfax's Translation of Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata Together with Fairfax's Original Poems (Clarendon Press, 1981).
• Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 2013), entry 963.
• David Nicol, "Tasso's Melancholy", Lost Plays Database (2018). 

Henslowe links

• Transcript of this page of the Diary (from W.W. Greg's 1904 edition)
• Facsimile of this page of the Diary (from the Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project)

Comments?

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