Abstract
This essay argues that the earliest English work to offer a sustained poetic engagement with the figure of Armida, the celebrated pagan enchantress from Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581), is Daniel’s The Complaint of Rosamond (1592). Unlike Spenser in The Faerie Queene (1590), who pays little attention to the enchantress herself even as he imitates Tasso directly in his construction of the Bower of Bliss, Daniel’s portrayal of his long-dead royal mistress is repeatedly, if unexpectedly, associated with Armida’s beauty. The essay considers how Daniel might have first encountered Tasso’s character in Italy, and goes on to demonstrate how frequently he translated from Tasso in describing the analogous impact of Rosamond’s beauty at the court of Henry II. A few of Daniel’s direct imitations from the Italian were detected by his contemporary Francis Davison, but many others were missed, and they have all been entirely ignored in modern criticism. This essay then seeks to demonstrate their centrality to Daniel’s conception of his spectral narrator, concluding that his translation and creative adaptation of material related to Armida from Tasso’s poem adds a significant level of interpretative ambiguity to the figure of Rosamond.
Highlights
There is strong evidence in The Complaint of Rosamond to suggest that Daniel’s poetic response to Tasso’s Armida was prompted by this initial exposure to her in the canto printed in isolation in Zabata’s collection, it becomes clear from his first volume as a whole that the English poet had soon familiarized himself with Armida’s wider role in the Italian poem, her amorous interlude with Rinaldo
The characteristically Petrarchan conjunction of fire and water in relation to the incendiary effect of Amymone’s crystal and pearl tears on Neptune is another condensed translation from Tasso’s Canto IV, as Francis Davison detected in his marginal annotations alongside stanzas lxxiv and lxxvi,29 where the Italian poet describes in identical terms the miraculous impact on the Christian army of Armida’s crocodile tears after Goffredo’s initial rejection of her plea for help: Il pianto si spargea senza ritegno, com’ira suol produrlo a’ dolor mista, e le nascenti lagrime a vederle erano a i rai del sol cristallo e perle. [. . .]
In this instance it is the king who is responsible for the construction of the palace rather than Tasso’s demons, Daniel’s close translation from the Italian makes it difficult to disassociate completely Rosamond’s role in the amorous bower from that of the more active Armida in her garden, which by extension seems to align King Henry with the passive figure of Rinaldo, the great military hero whose seduction by the pagan enchantress has left him inert and enfeebled
Summary
There is strong evidence in The Complaint of Rosamond to suggest that Daniel’s poetic response to Tasso’s Armida was prompted by this initial exposure to her in the canto printed in isolation in Zabata’s collection, it becomes clear from his first volume as a whole that the English poet had soon familiarized himself with Armida’s wider role in the Italian poem, her amorous interlude with Rinaldo.
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