"Quante promesse e giuramenti a l’aura / tu spargi, Amor" : tecniche intertestuali e personaggi femminili del "Re Torrismondo"

This article analyzes the intertextual relationships within the first two acts of Tasso’s Re Torrismondo. In fact these acts are the most significant to highlight the structural and compositional criteria of the female characters, main innovation of the work. We can thus distinguish many allusive strategies adopted (self-citations, contamination of sources and their subsequent modification). Particularly the citations address the need to confirm and reshape some ideas dear to the writer, taking a different light on the tragical mechanism; with the contamination of his sources, however, Tasso doesn’t only refer to some models, but builds – using disparate and heterogeneous inserts – an independent literary product. In effect the poet presents some references known to the public, but he overlaps one with another and regenerates them surprisingly. Through the modification of sources the writer changes deeply the works he is inspired by, shaping them in a totally new way as requested by the new context. Therefore these techniques, so formally eclectic, give us a literary mosaic that clearly exhibits the programmatic valences and the ideological value of the text.