But he believed that his originality as a tragic
author suffered from his reading, and he determined to read no more
tragedies till he had made his own. For this reason he had already
given up Shakespeare. "The more that author accorded with my humor
(though I very well perceived all his defects), the more I was
resolved to abstain," he tells us.
This was during a literary sojourn in Tuscany, whither he had gone to
accustom himself "to speak, hear, think, and dream in Tuscan, and not
otherwise evermore." Here he versified his first two tragedies, and
sketched others; and here, he says, "I deluged my brain with the
verses of Petrarch, of Dante, of Tasso, and of Ariosto, convinced that
the day would infallibly come in which all these forms, phrases, and
words of others would return from its cells, blended and identified
with my own ideas and emotions."
He had now indeed entered with all the fury of his nature into the
business of making tragedies, which he did very much as if he had
been making love. He abandoned everything else for it--country, home,
money, friends; for having decided to live henceforth only in Tuscany,
and hating to ask that royal permission to remain abroad, without
which, annually renewed, the Piedmontese noble of that day could not
reside out of his own country, he gave up his estates at Asti to his
sister, keeping for himself a pension that came only to about half his
former income.
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