A History of Fairfax Criticism

Abstract

Edward Fairfax, Elizabethan poet and translator, is most famous for his version of Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata. Opinions of this book have varied so greatly that Fairfax critics alone afford an interesting cross-section of English taste. We may see the author admired by his contemporaries for his Italianate richness of description, praised by the seventeenth century for his smoothness and heroics, neglected by the eighteenth for his lack of elegance and rime (i.e., of couplets), revived by the romantics for his touching passages of emotion, and left on the shelf today because, perhaps, we have other things to think about.