In 1573 Torquato Tasso composed Aminta, a pastoral drama created for the Este court at Ferrara. Its first performance (31 July 1573) helped confirm his reputation at court and set the cultural scene in which he would pursue his larger epic project.
By 1575, Tasso finished Gerusalemme liberata (later known in English as Jerusalem Delivered), an epic poem about the First Crusade. He then entered a long period of revisions and anxiety about criticism and religious acceptability, which shaped both the poem’s later publication history and his own instability.
In June 1577, Tasso’s situation at Ferrara worsened sharply. After stabbing a servant (believing he was being watched), he was arrested and briefly confined, then placed under close supervision. These events show how his mental health crisis began to disrupt his work and position at court.
After being moved to the convent of San Francesco in Ferrara, Tasso planned an escape. By late July 1577 he fled the city, beginning a period of wandering and insecurity. His flight also weakened his ties to Este patronage, making his future support more uncertain.
After months of travel, Tasso returned to Ferrara in early 1578 and tried to repair his standing with Duke Alfonso II d’Este. His letters and actions from this period show a man seeking stability while still troubled by suspicion and fear about judgment of his writing and beliefs.
In 1579, Tasso was incarcerated in the hospital of Santa Anna (Sant’Anna) in Ferrara by order of Duke Alfonso II. This confinement—lasting until 1586—became central to the story of Jerusalem Delivered, because major parts of the poem circulated while the author had limited control over his text and reputation.
While Tasso was confined, an unauthorized (pirated) edition of part of his epic appeared under the title Il Goffredo. This episode mattered because it pushed the poem into public debate before Tasso could finalize revisions, and it increased the gap between the author’s intentions and what readers first encountered.
In 1581, the full Gerusalemme liberata was published, with complete editions appearing in Italy while Tasso remained confined. The publication made the epic widely available and influential, but it also intensified disputes about style, morality, and whether Tasso had achieved the “right” kind of Christian epic for Counter-Reformation tastes.
During his years at Sant’Anna, Tasso produced philosophical and moral dialogues and many letters. These prose works are important because they show how he tried to think through ethics, court life, and personal suffering while isolated, and they became admired examples of 16th-century Italian prose.
By the mid-1580s, Italian critics were openly debating the merits of Tasso’s epic compared with Ariosto’s Orlando furioso. Tasso joined the debate with an Apologia (a formal defense), showing that even while confined he remained engaged with literary standards and public judgment about his poem.
In July 1586, Vincenzo Gonzaga (prince of Mantua) obtained Tasso’s release from Sant’Anna and brought him to Mantua. This marked a turning point: Tasso regained physical freedom, but his life remained unsettled, and he continued to revise his epic as he sought patrons and peace of mind.
After leaving Sant’Anna, Tasso returned to his epic and rewrote it to better match strict moral and literary expectations of the Counter-Reformation era. The result was not just a minor revision: it was a major reworking intended to remove or reduce elements (especially romance episodes) that some readers viewed as improper.
In 1593, Tasso published Gerusalemme conquistata, his revised version of Gerusalemme liberata. The publication shows how strongly he felt pressured—by critics and by religious-cultural climate—to reshape his masterpiece into a more rigidly “correct” epic, even at the cost of much-loved episodes.
In 1595, Tasso was in Rome amid preparations for a public honor: a laurel crowning on the Capitoline, symbolizing poetic fame. He fell ill and died on 25 April 1595 at the monastery of Sant’Onofrio, closing a career shaped by both extraordinary literary achievement and long periods of confinement and dependence on patrons.
Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered and Imprisonment (1573–1595)