SOURCE: Looney, Dennis. “Tasso's Allegory of the Source in Gerusalemme Liberata.” In Compromising the Classics: Romance Epic Narrative in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 142-69. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Looney claims that Tasso uses an episode in Gerusalemme liberata concerning a source of water as an allegory of his own use of literary sources.

Dice ancora Aristotele che … quella [la favola] de l'epopeia è simile a vino troppo inacquato.

Tasso, Discorsi del Poema Eroico¹

In the previous chapter, we observed Torquato Tasso's troubled reaction to the fusion of sources in Ariosto's Furioso. In chapter 1, by contrast, we saw how Torquanto's father, Bernardo, was able to accept the Furioso into his personal canon, despite its problematic confusion of romance and epic. Here I shall deal more directly with Torquato's ability and need to compromise sources in his own poem. In this reading of Gerusalemme Liberata, I...