Guarini frequently repeated Tasso’s ideas, striving to enhance their
effect by careful elaboration. The poetry of one or both has passed
into Calderon’s _Magico Prodigioso_, and originated the scene of
the temptation of Justina, an ornament of English literature in the
incomparable version of Shelley.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] The novel by Cinthio himself on which this play is founded was
dramatised by Whetstone; but that Shakespeare had seen Cinthio’s
dramatic version also may be inferred from a minute circumstance.
Cinthio’s play, not his novel or Whetstone’s adaptation of it, has
a character named Angela, whose name disappears from _Measure for
Measure_, but who bequeaths Angelo as that of her brother, whom Cinthio
calls Juristi, and Whetstone Andrugio.
CHAPTER XVIII
TASSO
The year 1564 is memorable in the intellectual history of the world.
It marks the beginning of the long ascent of the North, and of the
slow depression of the South. In it Shakespeare was born; in it
Michael Angelo died; in it the decrees of the Council of Trent were
promulgated by one of the most liberal and enlightened of the Popes,
even as the Society of Jesus had been established twenty-four years
before by another entitled to the same commendation. Neither Paul nor
Pius was free to gratify his personal inclinations at the expense
of the institution over which he presided; and in fact the Society
and the Council were less important in themselves than as indicative
of the new spirit which was to prevail in Roman Catholic countries,
destructive, so far as its influence extended, of science, and deadly
to learning, literature, and art. The time was at hand when the policy
of great states was to be controlled by confessors; when the clergy,
under the influence of a training in special seminaries, were to
be converted from an order into a caste; when the entire influence
of State and Church was to be devoted to the repression of free
thought, with the inevitable result of intellectual degeneracy, and
mortifying inferiority to the nations which, with whatever limitations,
acknowledged the principle of freedom.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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