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A History of Italian Literature/Chapter XV - Wikisource
History of Italian Literature (1901) by Richard Garnett
Chapter XV. Humorous Poetry—The Mock Heroic
It was a great step in Greek comedy when the mythological parodies which had constituted the substance of the middle comedy were replaced by the picture of contemporary manners which formed the staple of the new. So great an advance could not be made by Alessandro Tassoni (1565–1638), the chief representative of serio-comic poetry in the seventeenth century, for his age would not have tolerated it; but he effected much in the same direction by converting the mere parody of the chivalric romance which had satisfied his predecessors into the mock-heroic epic, a form of literature which, if he did not invent, he may claim to have perfected. Instead of contriving burlesque variations upon Ariosto, he took a real incident of a serio-comic nature—the war which in the thirteenth century had actually broken out between the republics of Modena and Bologna respecting a bucket carried off by the former. The treatment is admirable; the characters, some of whom are historical, and others sketched after Tassoni's contemporaries, have an air of reality altogether wanting to the personages of Folengo's parodies; there is enough of idyllic charm and tender pathos here and there to approve the writer a true poet, while humour dominates, and many of the sarcasms are really profound. A more biting irony on the wretched dissensions which had been the ruin of Italy cannot be conceived; and, notwithstanding a subordinate purpose of deriding Tasso's languid imitators, and the personal quarrel which prompted composition in the first instance, such was probably the main purpose of the writer, in his political sentiments and aspirations a statesman of the type of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, who burned with hatred of the Spanish oppressor, but, except for the two Philippics he composed in demonstration of the real hollowness of the Spanish power, could find no other vent for his patriotism than his poetry, and wasted his life in the service of petty princes. La Secchia Rapita (The Rape of the Bucket) was published under a pseudonym at Paris in 1622, having long circulated in manuscript. Tassoni also showed himself a bold if bilious critic of Petrarch, against whose predominance a reaction was declaring itself, and participated in the general anti-Aristotelian movement of his times by a volume of miscellaneous reflections.
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