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Torquato Tasso
play by Goethe
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discussed in biography
- In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Return to Weimar and the French Revolution (1788–94)
…an outlet in the play Torquato Tasso (1790; Eng. trans. Torquato Tasso), the first tragedy in European literature with a poet as its hero, which was written largely in 1788–89, though it had been begun in 1780. In richly plangent verse but at inordinately untheatrical length, Tasso descends into madness,…
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German literature
- In German literature: Weimar Classicism: Goethe and Schiller
Goethe completed his Renaissance drama Torquato Tasso (1790) on the eve of the French Revolution. It deals with the fate of the bourgeois poet in courtly society and arises from Goethe’s own dilemma at the court of Weimar. The poet Tasso finds himself isolated and misunderstood by the court. He…
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