Author Description

This translation of Torquato Tasso's Il re Torrismondo, the first to be made directly from the Italian into English, is intended to help those students and scholars who do not command the language of the original text. This translation provides readers with a wider range of the Italian tragedy as a genre; it also allows readers to acquire a deeper awareness of the entire spectrum of the Italian Renaissance in its final brilliance. Tasso's King Torrismondo provides an example of Neo-Aristotelian dramatic theory of the second half of the fifteenth century. It incorporates into the dramatic genre elements of the epic lyric poem. Tasso's language can also be studied as an example of "imitation" of Virgil, Dante, Petrarch, and Tasso's own epic. Finally, Tasso's Torrismondo affords us an opportunity of comparative analysis of French, English, and Spanish literature in the development of tragedy as a European genre.