Giovanni Battista Guarini

Giovanni Battista Guarini
Portrait of Giovanni Battista Guarini by Demautort
Born	(1538-12-10)December 10, 1538 Ferrara, Duchy of Ferrara
Died	October 7, 1612(1612-10-07) (aged 73) Venice, Republic of Venice
Occupation	Playwright, writer, poet, diplomat
Language	Italian
Nationality	Italian
Period	Renaissance
Genre	Tragicomedy
Subject	Pastoral
Literary movement	Renaissance literature
Notable works	Il pastor fido
Parents	Francesco Guarini and Orsina Guarini (née Macchiavelli)

Pastor fido, 1680

Giovanni Battista Guarini (10 December 1538 – 7 October 1612) was an Italian poet, dramatist, and diplomat. Courtier at Ferrara, diplomat and secretary to several ruling families, he served also at Florence and Urbino. He is best known as the author of the pastoral tragicomedy Il pastor fido. Written in emulation of Tasso's Aminta, it was extremely successful and remained the most popular work of secular literature in Western Europe for almost two hundred years.

Life

Guarini was born at Ferrara in 1538 of a family of Veronese origin. On the termination of his studies at the universities of Pisa, Padua and Ferrara, he was appointed professor of literature at Ferrara. Soon after his appointment, he published a collection of sonnets which obtained for him great popularity as a poet. In 1567, he entered the service of Alfonso II d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, who sent him on important missions of diplomacy. Unlike his younger rival Torquato Tasso, he seems to have had few difficulties in withstanding the pressures of courtly life. Although his masterpiece, Il pastor fido (published in 1590), was completed during a prolonged absence from the Este court, it is generally supportive of existing social structures.

After about 20 years of service, differences with the Duke led him to resign. After residing successively in Savoy, Mantua, Florence and Urbino, he returned to his native Ferrara. There he discharged one final public mission, that of congratulating Pope Paul V on his election (1605). In the late 1580s he was involved in a bitter polemic with Giason Denores, who objected in particular to Guarini's mixing of tragic and comic genres in his Pastor fido. He died in Venice, where he had been summoned to attend a lawsuit, aged 73.

He was the father of the scholar Alessandro Guarini and of Anna Guarini, one of the famous virtuose singers of the Ferrara court, the three women of the concerto di donne. She was murdered by her husband in 1598, with the assistance of her brother Girolamo.

Work and influence

His most notable work, Il pastor fido, had its first dramatic representation in honor of the nuptials of the Duke of Savoy and Catalina Michaela of Austria in 1585 (published in 1590 in Venice; 20th rev. ed., 1602, Venice; Eng. trans. The Faithful Shepherd, 1647). This play, a pastoral tragicomedy about the loves and fates of shepherds and hunters, polished in style, was translated into many languages and became popular during the 17th century. It set the pattern for a code of refinement and gallantry that lasted until the late 18th century.

Guarini's treatises, Il Verato (1588) and Il Verato secondo (1593), written in defence of his pastoral drama and subsequently reworked in the Compendio della poesia tragicomica (1601), are interesting efforts to justify the legitimacy of the hybrid genre, tragicomedy, which he argued was more in keeping with the aspirations and tastes of the contemporary world than either comedy or tragedy alone.

No poet played a larger role in the flowering of the madrigal in the late Renaissance and early Baroque eras than Guarini. His poems were set more often by madrigal composers than the work of any other poet, even Tasso, who came in a close second; the prolific madrigal composer Philippe de Monte even named one of his collections Il pastor fido after Guarini's most famous work. His popularity was due to his providing texts to composers which were rich with possibilities for word-painting and other easy translations of emotion into music. One of his poems, the erotic Tirsi morir volea, recounting the amorous encounter of a shepherd and a nymph, was set to music as a madrigal by more composers than any other pastoral poem of the era, including, among others, Andrea Gabrieli, Gioseppe Caimo, Carlo Gesualdo, Luca Marenzio, Benedetto Pallavicino, and Giaches de Wert. Another of Guarini's poems which was set by numerous madrigalists was Cor mio, deh non languire ("Dear heart, I prithee do not waste away").

In addition to his decisive influence on madrigal composers, he was the single largest influence on opera librettists up until the time of Metastasio in the 18th century. He therefore plays an important role in the history of music.

While Guarini's work may be seen as lacking the deep feeling and sentiment of another poet at the Este court, Torquato Tasso, it was precisely this quality which commended it to musical setting at a time when excessive emotionalism had become unfashionable. An example of a setting of his work would be "O come è gran martire" from Libro Terzo dei Madrigali (1592) by Monteverdi.

Other works are:

• Compendio della poesia tragicomica (1601; published again in the 1602 edition of Pastor fido)
• Il segretario, a dialog on the duties of a secretary, and on matters of logic, rhetoric, etc. (1594)
• La idropica, a prose comedy (written about 1584; published 1613)
• Lettere (1593)
• Trattato della politica libertà (Venice, 1818)

Works

• Delle opere del cavalier Battista Guarini (in Italian). Vol. 1. Verona: per Giovanni Alberto Timermani. 1737.
• Delle opere del cavalier Battista Guarini (in Italian). Vol. 2. Verona: per Giovanni Alberto Timermani. 1737.
• Delle opere del cavalier Battista Guarini (in Italian). Vol. 3. Verona: per Giovanni Alberto Timermani. 1738.
• Delle opere del cavalier Battista Guarini (in Italian). Vol. 4. Verona: per Giovanni Alberto Timermani. 1738.

References

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Symonds, John Addington (1911). "Guarini, Giovanni Battista". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
• Einstein, Alfred (1949). The Italian Madrigal. Three volumes. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-09112-9.
• Perella, Nicolas J. (1999). "Guarini, Battista". In Peter Bondanella; Julia Conway Bondanella (eds.). Cassell Dictionary Italian Literature. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. pp. 281–4. ISBN 978-1441150752.
• Griffiths, Clive (2002). "Guarini, Battista". The Oxford Companion to Italian Literature. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 12 February 2025.

External links

• Works by Giovanni Battista Guarini at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Giovanni Battista Guarini at the Internet Archive
•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "Battista Guarini". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
• Selmi, Elisabetta (2003). "GUARINI, Battista". Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Volume 60: Grosso–Guglielmo da Forli (in Italian). Rome: Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. ISBN 978-8-81200032-6.
• Free scores of works by Giovanni Battista Guarini in the Choral Public Domain Library (ChoralWiki)