Epic Features

In many ways, Gerusalemme Liberata is a perfect, rhetorically speaking, epic. Many of the dominant features found in Greek and Roman epics are found in Tasso. He uses the idea of a perfect hero, Godfrey and Rinaldo, who is the salvation of his group. There is the use of military ability, the intervention of the supernatural (God verus Satan), and the trip to the underworld with Rinaldo's supposed death and re-birth. Tasso was actively following the successful models of Virgil, Dante, and Ariosto as epic authors. In his Discourses on the Heroic Poem (1594), Tasso suggests that there are four major elements to epic poetry that must be followed by all epic poets: the story or fable, the morality of the characters, the purpose behind the story, and the language. All of these elements could be manipulated in the extreme, but they have to be present for an...