Torquato Tasso and Leonora d’Este. A drama by J. W. von Goethe.

Torquato Tasso and Leonora d’Este by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Torquato Tasso

Tasso
SLOWLY I come to bring my work to thee,
And yet I linger before presenting it.
Although apparently it seem complete.
Too well I know it is unfinished still.
But, if I cherished once an anxious fear.
Lest I should bring thee an imperfect word,
A new solicitude constrains me now;
I would not seem ungrateful, nor appear
Unduly anxious, and as to his friends,
A man can say but simply, “Here I am,”
That they, with kind forbearance, may rejoice.
So I can only say, “Receive my work!”

Of you alone I thought while I composed;
You to delight, was still my highest wish.
You to enrapture, was my final aim.
Who doth not in his friends behold the world
Deserves not that of him the world should hear.
Here is my fatherland and here the sphere
In which my spirit only comes to dwell.

Goethe’s ” Torquato Tasso. Artist: W. von Kaulbach. J. L. Raab, Engraver

Torquato Tasso is a drama in five acts by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The Italian poet Torquato Tasso (1544-1595) is the focus of the action. The play, which strictly adheres to the traditional rule of the three units of the local, the time and the action was created between 30 March 1780 to 31 July 1789th. The play takes place on a spring day (around the year 1577), the scene is Belriguardo, a summer residence of Alfonso II., The Duke of Ferrara. Theme of the drama is – in addition to the love of the young Tasso the Princess of Este, the sister of the Duke – the role of the poet in the court society. In his drama leads J. W. Goethe the audience before the restrictions, which the sensitive poet who aspires only after completion in the work, was suspended on the part of the disdainful world.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) is considered one of the most important representatives of German-language poetry.

German Enlightenment, Romanticism. Costumes Renaissance era.

Source: Character sketches of romance, fiction and the drama by Rev. Ebenezer Cobham Brewer, 1892. A revised American edition of the readers handbook. Edited by Marion Harland.

Full Text of Torquato Tasso and other works of J. W. Goethe at Zeno.org.

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