From the consuming sentiment that the slowly-arriving art form of Romanticism -- something Goethe initially helped to create -- was actually a symptom of a disease rather than an artistic advancement, came a two-year long meditation on what it means to create classical art, literature in particular, achieved through anonymous vacation in Italy. Goethe's trip was spent gazing at Roman art and architecture throughout the peninsula, and then at its Grecian counterpart in Sicily, that ancient colony of Greek civilization, where he discovered a much simpler, yet just as imposing style. Instead of allowing a tumultuous love affair back in Weimar -- the duchy where Goethe served as an adviser to its Duke, writing copious amounts of poetry, philosophy, and scientific work on the side -- to fester and crush his livelihood, he chose instead to flee into a quest of contemplation both of himself and the finest creations of European civilization.
The play is a synthesis of all these things: poetry, politics, tangled love, the papacy, and the endless labyrinth of psychological probing and expressed in a paced meter of sobriety and the classical unities of Greek theatre (missing its chorus, however). It concerns the final hours of Renaissance poet Torquato Tasso's sane life. Tasso's epic poem Jerusalem Delivered, commemorating the valor of Christian knights in the crusades some 400 years before him, caused appraisal from his patron Alfonso, the Duke of Ferrara, who wished to have it dedicated to himself and delivered to the Pope for use as literary exaltation of Christendom against the Saracens -- and, of course, as an eternal record of his own generosity. However, Tasso's crippling self-doubt made him reluctant towards Alfonso's requests, and his crippling paranoia made him want to leave Ferrara. Alfonso was extremely afraid of the Medici stealing Tasso's work and claiming it a result of their own patronage, so he refused to let Tasso go; combine the adoring and conflicting love of the Duke's two sisters towards the poet and the politician Atonio's antagonisms and we end up with Tasso's deterioration into madness. Beneath the plot in the heart of the play is a constant contention between Tasso's sick, other-worldy idealist romanticism and the Princess's lush, this-worldly classicism, leading to Tasso's flight from the world itself:
"In thought and poetry I will be free;
The world imposes curbs enough on action"
Something not felt by Goethe, a staunch advocate of classicism and this world. Goethe also reveals his true understanding of Italy, of Italy as a concept, the same concept as the agon of ancient Greece; the Duke says to Antonio:
"What's made the whole of Italy so great
Is that each neighbor squabbles with the other
To keep and supply superior men.
A prince who does not gather talents round him,
I think, is like a general without troops:
And barbarous, whatever else he may be.
The prince who's deaf to poetry and poets.
This one I have discovered, I have chosen,
And as my servant I am proud of him,
And having done so much for him already,
I'm loath to lose him for no urgent reason"
Goethe was in a much similar situation as Tasso, a poet in the cage of a Duke, embroiled in affairs with women - yet he possessed the health to affirm classical art and recreate himself in the face of strife rather than succumb to the menacing pressures of idealism. This play has an empathetic testament to Tasso, yet is more so a guide to overcome the failures of his life.