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Tasso's Rinaldo (1562) at Billingbear: Spenser's Named Model, Living Images, Disguise, and Private Virtue

Mixed Ready evidence packet

Topic: Tasso's Rinaldo (1562) at Billingbear

Source-Control Position

The 1780 Billingbear catalogue records:

Il Rinaldo di Torquato Tasso _____ Venet. 1562.

The combined Billingbear/Audley End spreadsheet identifies the surviving book as English Heritage object 81035054: Il Rinaldo di Torquato Tasso, Venice, 1562, quarto, leather/half calf, present both in the 1780 Billingbear list and the modern Audley End record. This is the first edition, not a later reprint or a copy of Tasso's better-known Gerusalemme liberata.

The public Google Books witness has the title:

IL RINALDO DI TORQVATO TASSO A ILLVSTRISSIMO ET REVERENDISSIMO SIGNOR D. LVIGI D'ESTE CARD.

CON PRIVILEGII. IN VENETIA APPRESSO FRANCESCO SENESE. MDLXII.

Its printer's device carries PACE, PER ME QVI SI RIPOSA, and E'N CIEL SI GODE. That public scan is a different copy and has a manuscript ownership inscription of its own. The inscription must not be attributed to Billingbear.

The catalogue evidence establishes a concrete book at Billingbear by 1780 and a surviving Audley End object. It does not by itself establish that Henry Neville bought, read, or annotated the book. The physical copy must be photographed before its ownership history can be narrowed.

1. A Young Author's Deliberate Experiment

Tasso's address to the readers makes the circumstances of composition unusually explicit. He says that he was living at Padua to study law, had not yet reached nineteen, felt a stronger natural inclination toward poetry, initially hid the project from his father Bernardo, and completed it in ten months. The poem was not an accidental juvenile miscellany. It was a conscious attempt to reconcile rival theories of epic and romance.

Tasso ends the preface by describing the compromise in one sentence:

Non vi spiaccia dunque di vedere il mio Rinaldo parte ad imitazion de gli antichi e parte a quella de' moderni composto.

Earlier in the preface he explains what this means. He accepts episodes, the presentation of other speakers rather than a continuously intrusive poet, and recognitions and reversals arising by necessity or probability. He seeks one fable and one action, but interprets unity broadly enough to accommodate romance variety. His memorable body analogy treats removable episodes like hair and beard: one can be cut without destroying the body, but removing too many makes it ugly. He refuses both inflexible Aristotelians and readers who make Ariosto an absolute rule.

This formal program also explains why he rejects regular moralizing proems at the head of every canto. Ariosto, shifting among many knights and actions, needed to reconnect narrative threads. Tasso says that he treats one knight and weaves his action with a continuous thread:

Ma io che tratto d'un sol cavaliero, ristringendo (per quanto i presenti tempi comportano) tutti i suoi fatti in un'azione, e con perpetuo e non interrotto filo tesso il mio poema, non so per qual cagione ciò mi dovessi fare.

The preface places the experiment inside an identifiable Padua-Venice intellectual environment. Tasso names Carlo Sigonio's exposition of Aristotle, Giovan Battista Pigna, Sperone Speroni, Domenico Venier, Girolamo Molino, Danese Cattaneo, and Cesare Pavesi. A Billingbear reader therefore encountered not merely a chivalric plot but a compact statement about Aristotle, Ariosto, unity, episodes, character, narration, recognition, reversal, and readerly pleasure.

2. The Publication Was Protected Before It Appeared

The Venetian State Archive preserves Tasso's petition for a printing privilege, dated 30 May 1562: Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Senato, Deliberazioni, Terra, fz. 36. Tasso asked for a fifteen-year exclusive right:

che per spatio di anni 15 niuno altro che io possa stampar, né far stampar o stampato vender il libro mio intitulato Il Rinaldo ... senza mia licenza ... non essendo honesto che alcuno defraudi alle altrui fatiche.

The Senate granted what he requested after receiving assurance that the work contained nothing contrary to the laws. The record fixes the poem at the intersection of literary experiment, commercial authorship, censorship review, and Venetian privilege law. It also shows Tasso claiming the labor of the book as his own before publication.

Tasso Online's work record adds an important textual point. The princeps contains an authorial errata list, including substantive corrections. The 1570 edition contains numerous changes, many now regarded as editorial rather than authorial; modern editors therefore give special authority to the 1562 first edition. This makes the surviving Billingbear object especially worth collating. It may preserve Tasso's own correction apparatus in the form first offered to readers.

3. Twelve Cantos of Formation in Arms and Love

The poem contains twelve cantos in ottava rima. Its opening defines a double education:

Canto i felici affanni e i primi ardori

che giovanetto ancor soffrì Rinaldo,

e come 'l trasse in perigliosi errori

desir di gloria ed amoroso caldo.

Source: Rinaldo 1.1.1-4, Tasso Online/Navone text.

The plot follows the young Rinaldo before his mature Carolingian fame. He must acquire the arms, horse, reputation, and ethical discipline appropriate to his name; love for Clarice both impels and misdirects him. Tasso's plot therefore makes private virtue dynamic. The knight is not introduced as a finished emblem. Desire, error, shame, recognition, renewed purpose, and honorable action form him.

At the end of the first canto, Clarice already loves Rinaldo but conceals it. Tasso makes the difference between inward affection and outward behavior explicit:

Ma sempre o non intenderle fingea,

o gli dav'ella aspre risposte altere

con le quai l'alma al giovin trafiggea,

e sciemava in gran parte il suo piacere;

ché, benché eguale ardore al cor sentisse,

non volea ch'in lei quello altri scoprisse.

Source: Rinaldo 1.89.3-8.

Rinaldo mistakes the performed face for the hidden will:

Pur il guerrier, che ciò ch'ascoso giace

sotto sdegnosa e rigida sembianza

scorger non puote, e crede al finto volto,

si trova in mille acerbe pene involto.

Source: Rinaldo 1.90.5-8.

The error becomes productive because Rinaldo hopes deeds will make him worthy:

Ma speme ha pur di farsi ancor famoso,

sì che da lei ne deggia esser pregiato.

Così ad un nobil core amor sovente

è qual lo sprone ad un destrier corrente.

Source: Rinaldo 1.92.5-8.

Love here is neither simply a reward nor simply an impediment. It is a spur to virtuous fame, while misreading and erotic diversion repeatedly test the knight's direction.

4. Clarice Multiplied Across Media

Sandra Carapezza's study shows that images are structural motors throughout Rinaldo, not ornamental pauses. Clarice exists in several modes: living woman, inward mental image, painted or sculpted copy, dream apparition, and an image that other characters mistake for life.

One character first sees her among portraits in the Temple of Beauty. Unable to remove the enchanted original, he orders copies in five media:

indi ritrar fe' la sua cara amica

in carta, in tela, in bronzo, in marmo e 'n legno;

gli artefici fur tai ch'oggi a fatica

altri si troveria di lor più degno,

ed opra fe' ciascun che viva sembra

a l'aria, a gli atti, al garbo de le membra.

Source: Rinaldo 3.41.3-8.

The copies provide dilettosa froda and dolci inganni, but eventually intensify rather than satisfy desire. He wants not il falso e l'ombra but il vivo e 'l vero (3.42). Representation generates action.

Later Clarice appears to Rinaldo in a dream, rebukes his infidelity, and recalls him to both love and honor. Once awake, he sees her portrait:

Di Clarice il ritratto ecco veduto

a caso viene al paladino in questa:

egli lo sguarda, e sta pensoso e muto,

e, come sia di pietra, immobil resta.

Source: Rinaldo 9.88.1-4.

The image reverses the expected relation between living viewer and stone object: the portrait appears animate enough to act upon him, while he becomes stone. The sequence joins dream, portrait, memory, shame, repentance, and renewed movement.

An engraved shield offers another almost-living image:

Era quivi intagliata una donzella

da così dotta e maestrevol mano,

che giamai non fu vista opra sì bella:

divin pareva e non sembiante umano;

viva rassembra, e 'l moto e la favella

mancava solo a l'artificio strano;

ma se non parla ancor, se non s'è mossa,

par che non voglia, e non che far no 'l possa.

Source: Rinaldo 10.76.

The next stanza says viewers wonder that she does not speak more than they would wonder if she did. Rinaldo takes the shield for defense, but its image later wounds his heart by provoking Clarice's jealousy. Art again changes the plot.

Carapezza identifies further image-bearing spaces and objects: the Temple of Beauty, the cave of Love, the House of Courtesy, statues of Lancelot and Tristan, heraldic shields, and a Niobe embroidered across a surcoat. Her larger point is important for research: Rinaldo should not be reduced to an immature rehearsal for Gerusalemme liberata. Its sustained inquiry into finto and vero, portraits, theatrical appearance, and persuasive description has its own integrity.

5. Florindo's Female Disguise and Embedded Tale

The fifth canto contains a first-person story told within the larger poem. Florindo, young enough that beard growth will not betray him, dresses as a woman to enter a gathering of women and steal a kiss from Olinda:

Deliberai, feminil vesta presa,

tra le donzelle anch'io meschiarmi quando

vengono insieme a placida contesa,

l'una soavi baci a l'altra dando,

per poter poscia (oh temeraria impresa,

cagion ch'or sia d'ogni mio bene in bando!)

congiunger con la mia la rosea bocca

onde Amor mille strali aventa e scocca.

Source: Rinaldo 5.48.

The disguise initially succeeds:

Onde tra lor sicuro io mi meschiai,

donna creduto da le donne anch'io;

molte abbracciai di lor, molte basciai

con poca gioia e con minor disio,

sin ch'ad Olinda alfin pur arrivai.

Source: Rinaldo 5.51.1-5.

Olinda recognizes him after the intensity of his kiss prompts scrutiny; she calls the act tradimento and banishes him. Florindo's later recognition as noble changes the social meaning of the episode. The sequence combines costume, gendered access, erotic opportunism, mistaken identity, discovery, banishment, embedded narration, and eventual recognition. It should be traced alongside Italian novella and theatrical disguise traditions rather than treated as a free-floating resemblance to any one play.

6. Spenser Explicitly Names Rinaldo as a Model

The clearest English reception found in this pass is not an inferred motif. In the letter to Raleigh printed with the 1590 Faerie Queene (STC 23081; TCP A12777), Spenser describes an epic genealogy from Homer and Virgil through Ariosto and Tasso. The page image reads:

after him Ariosto comprised them both in his Orlando: and lately Tasso disseuered them againe, and formed both parts in two persons, namely that part which they in Philosophy call Ethice, or vertues of a priuate man, coloured in his Rinaldo: The other named Politice in his Godfredo. By ensample of which excellente Poets, I labour to pourtraict in Arthure, before he was king, the image of a braue knight, perfected in the twelue priuate morall vertues, as Aristotle hath deuised.

This is a major contextual link for the Billingbear book:

  1. an important English poet knew Rinaldo as a distinct work, not merely Tasso's name;
  2. he read it as a poem of Ethice, the virtues of a private person;
  3. he paired Tasso's twelve-canto Rinaldo with the design of a pre-kingship Arthur perfected in twelve private moral virtues;
  4. he invoked Tasso immediately after describing his own synthesis of romance, classical epic, Aristotle, and exemplary action.

Spenser's statement closely matches the problem Tasso himself formulates in the preface: how to join ancient unity and philosophical structure to the variety and pleasure of modern chivalric romance. It shows that this aspect of Rinaldo was legible and productive in England by 1590.

The exact page has been saved locally from the verified 1590 image witness. The TCP transcription and page image are separate witnesses; both are retained.

7. Shakespeare Research Avenues, with Exact Folger Text

The following are documented avenues for comparison. They do not by themselves identify a source or an author. Each statement about a Shakespeare play is tied to exact Folger text rather than memory.

7.1 The living image that makes its viewer stone: The Winter's Tale

Tasso's engraved maiden lacks only speech and motion and seems not unable but merely unwilling to speak or move (10.76). Clarice's portrait makes Rinaldo stand come sia di pietra (9.88). In The Winter's Tale, Paulina unveils Hermione like a statue, and Leontes finds life, rebuke, magic, and petrification in the encounter:

LEONTES Her natural posture!--

Chide me, dear stone, that I may say indeed

Thou art Hermione; or rather, thou art she

In thy not chiding, for she was as tender

As infancy and grace.--But yet, Paulina,

Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing

So aged as this seems.

Later in the same speech:

I am ashamed. Does not the stone rebuke me

For being more stone than it?--O royal piece,

There's magic in thy majesty, which has

My evils conjured to remembrance and

From thy admiring daughter took the spirits,

Standing like stone with thee.

Source: Folger, The Winter's Tale 5.3, FTLN 3314-3320, 3330-3335; act 05 scene 03; Folger online.

Paulina then warns that gazing may make imagination supply motion:

PAULINA

No longer shall you gaze on 't, lest your fancy

May think anon it moves.

LEONTES Let be, let be.

Would I were dead but that methinks already--

What was he that did make it?--See, my lord,

Would you not deem it breathed? And that those

veins

Did verily bear blood?

POLIXENES Masterly done.

The very life seems warm upon her lip.

LEONTES

The fixture of her eye has motion in 't,

As we are mocked with art.

Source: Folger, The Winter's Tale 5.3, FTLN 3360-3371; same local and online witnesses.

The comparison deserves a dedicated source study because both sequences join a supposedly inanimate likeness, apparent breath/motion/speech, a morally compromised male viewer, shame or repentance, and the transfer of stoniness from object to spectator. Classical statue tales, ekphrasis, emblem books, and other Italian romances must be checked before any route is proposed.

7.2 Woman as portrait and living original: Twelfth Night

Tasso repeatedly distinguishes the living Clarice from multiplied copies and from il falso e l'ombra. In Twelfth Night, Olivia turns her own unveiled face into a self-conscious picture, while Viola distinguishes divine making from human artistry:

OLIVIA Have you any commission from your lord to

negotiate with my face? You are now out of your

text. But we will draw the curtain and show you the

picture. [She removes her veil.] Look you, sir, such a

one I was this present. Is 't not well done?

VIOLA Excellently done, if God did all.

OLIVIA 'Tis in grain, sir; 'twill endure wind and

weather.

Source: Folger, Twelfth Night 1.5.230-236, FTLN 0525-0532; act 01 scene 05; Folger online.

This scene is useful because picture is not a loose critical metaphor imposed afterward; Olivia herself speaks the word, stages an unveiling, and invites judgment on whether the work is well done. Research should ask whether the language of living portraits and the opposition between natural and artificial making entered English comedy through a broader Italian ekphrastic tradition in which Rinaldo participated.

7.3 Female clothing, concealed identity, and the form of intent: Twelfth Night

Florindo's disguise is male-to-female and undertaken for erotic access; Viola's is female-to-male/eunuch and undertaken for safety and service. They should not be collapsed into the same situation. The structural question concerns how costume creates access, secrecy, mistaken identity, and an action that could not otherwise occur. Viola tells the Captain:

VIOLA

There is a fair behavior in thee, captain,

And though that nature with a beauteous wall

Doth oft close in pollution, yet of thee

I will believe thou hast a mind that suits

With this thy fair and outward character.

I prithee--and I'll pay thee bounteously--

Conceal me what I am, and be my aid

For such disguise as haply shall become

The form of my intent. I'll serve this duke.

Thou shalt present me as an eunuch to him.

Source: Folger, Twelfth Night 1.2.50-59, FTLN 0093-0102; act 01 scene 02; Folger online.

Tasso's embedded tale supplies specific questions for comparative work: who assists the disguise, what physical signs threaten exposure, what social space the clothing opens, what desire the disguise redirects, and how recognition changes the moral and social reading of the act.

7.4 Performed disdain concealing affection: Much Ado About Nothing

Clarice feels eguale ardore but gives aspre risposte altere; Rinaldo crede al finto volto. Much Ado About Nothing opens with Beatrice and Benedick publicly professing hard-hearted disdain:

BENEDICK Then is courtesy a turncoat. But it is certain

I am loved of all ladies, only you excepted; and

I would I could find in my heart that I had not a

hard heart, for truly I love none.

BEATRICE A dear happiness to women. They would

else have been troubled with a pernicious suitor. I

thank God and my cold blood I am of your humor

for that. I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow

than a man swear he loves me.

Source: Folger, Much Ado About Nothing 1.1.122-130, FTLN 0122-0130; act 01 scene 01; Folger online.

The productive comparison is not that the characters map one-to-one. It is the dramatic use of an outward anti-erotic performance that obscures an inward disposition, followed by other characters' efforts to alter what the lovers believe about one another.

8. Why This Book Opens Several Research Programs

The Billingbear Rinaldo joins questions that are often separated:

This means the next step should not be a general motif list. It should be a controlled program connecting the physical object, Tasso's exact words, English reception, and the exact language of selected plays.

9. Research Program

  1. Photograph object 81035054 completely. Give priority to the preface, errata, canto divisions, 1.89-93, 3.38-43, 5.47-54, 9.83-90, 10.76-77, and final leaves.
  2. Record every mark using page/leaf, ink or pencil, hand, mark type, and adjacent text. Do not assume that marks belong to Henry Neville.
  3. Collate the Billingbear copy against the Google 1562 witness and the Navone/Tasso Online text, including the entire errata list.
  4. Build a canto-by-canto plot and poetics table: episode, ethical problem, disguise/recognition, image object, intertext, and outcome.
  5. Trace Spenser's Ethice reading through the 1590 Faerie Queene, especially places where Arthur before kingship is presented as an image of private virtue.
  6. Search English print before 1623 for named references to Tasso's Rinaldo, not merely the character Rinaldo. The present EarlyPrint search found Spenser as the only text placing Tasso within thirty words of Rinaldo.
  7. Trace the living-image complex through Ovid, Petrarch, Ariosto, Italian novella, emblem books, art theory, and English drama.
  8. Trace Florindo's disguised entry and attempted kiss through Italian tales and comedies, distinguishing direction of cross-dressing and purpose of disguise.
  9. Compare Tasso's preface with English defences of poetry and with printed discussions of unity, episodes, and tragicomic or romantic form.
  10. Investigate acquisition routes: Neville, Hoby, Cooke, Gresham, Sidney, Essex, or later collectors. The physical copy's inscriptions and binding history should lead this work.

Quoted Source Passages

The controlling quotations are embedded in their full research contexts above: the Billingbear catalogue entry and 1562 title page; Tasso's ancient/modern program and continuous-thread statement; the Venetian privilege; the poem's opening; Clarice's concealed love; the multiplied portraits; Florindo's disguise; the petrifying portrait; the nearly animate shield; Spenser's Ethice statement; and exact Folger passages from The Winter's Tale, Twelfth Night, and Much Ado About Nothing. Each Shakespeare quotation preserves the line breaks of the Folger witness and carries a scene and FTLN reference.

Notes on Access and Witnesses

Citations