Guarini, Battista

Born Dec. 10, 1538, in Ferrara; died Oct. 7, 1612, in Venice. Italian poet and theoretician of literature and art.

Guarini was the author of elegant madrigals and the “tragicomic pastoral” The Faithful Shepherd (1580-83, staged in 1590), which portrayed conventionalized shepherds endowed with the manners and psychology of 16th-century Italian aristocrats. The appearance of Guarini’s pastoral marked a break with the humanist ideas of the Renaissance and the repudiation of Renaissance simplicity. The play was translated into nearly all European languages in his lifetime. Guarini championed entertaining poetry remote from social problems in his Textbook of Tragicomic Poetry (1601-02).