Lessons in Madness

Orlando Furioso had a life in the European imagination well beyond the poem itself, and ranging from the visual arts to the operatic stage. Over a hundred operas based on it were composed between 1619 and 1924, and they tell us a great deal not only about the reception of Orlando Furioso across time and space, but also as regards the contribution of a particularly ‘mad’ genre to issues that variously dominated particular political, social, and cultural contexts. The settings of Orlando, Ariodante, and Alcina by George Frideric Handel, composed for London in the early 1730s, provide good examples: they reveal the fashion in England for matters Turkish (seen also in the architecture of Vauxhall Gardens), as well as emerging notions of the nature of madness and of the ways in which it might be treated.

Fiordispina’s English Afterlives

This essay examines the fortunes in English literature of one of Ariosto’s minor characters, the Spanish princess Fiordispina. It focuses, in particular, on the very different ways in which English authors Sir John Harington and John Gay cope (or fail to cope) with the abundant gender confusion and free-floating sexual desire of the Fiordispina episode in the former’s Orlando Furioso Translated into Heroical Verse (1591) and the latter’s ‘The Story of Fiordispina’ (c. 1720) and Achilles: A play (1732). Framed by Ali Smith’s reflections in Girl Meets Boy (2007) on rewriting old stories for new circumstances, it draws on relevance theory and offers new readings of how Harington and Gay amplify, abridge or alternatively alter the original in accordance with their need to be relevant to the readers for whom they write.

The Visualization of the Orlando Furioso

Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto, published in 1516 (and later in 1521 and 1532), very quickly became a bestseller, the first great classic of modernity. An important part of this success was due to the fact that illustrations began to be produced for the poem almost immediately. We will see how the early illustrated editions of the Orlando Furioso clearly attempted to influence its reception and the memory of the reader, while at the same time addressing the themes and narrative structure of the text. This essay will analyse the enduring popularity of the visual imagery of the poem, beginning with the emblems that frame the text in the editions prepared for publication by the author himself and concluding with an example of video art that reinterprets the illustrations from the Valgrisi edition published in 1556.

The Orlando Furioso, Writing and the Construction of Meaning

Nicola Gardini explores the notion of semantic truth in Orlando Furioso. It demonstrates that writing works as the ideal space for the expression of truth. Yet, as is characteristic of Ariosto, writing does not come across as a one-sided notion, that is, the ultimate guarantee of truth. Indeed, Ariosto tells us it can lie just like everyday speech or other kinds of verbal practice, including slander and magic. Resting on linguists’ opposition between referential and relational semantics (which Richard Waswo also investigated in one of his books) and exploring the two kinds of semantics respectively in Zerbino’s and others’ scripts and Saint John’s attack on the truthfulness of ancient poets, Gardini argues that literary writing is thematized in Orlando Furioso as ultimately resisting direct referentiality, while not denying the ideal of truth altogether. Ariosto shows that poetry creates meaning relationally, that is, through hermeneutic challenges and ironic strategies.

‘englishing th’Italian Ariost’: The Orlando Furioso among the Elizabethans

This discussion focuses upon the production of editions and translations of Ariosto’s epic poem, the circulation of these texts and the allusions to Ariosto in the early modern, most particularly, the Elizabethan, period. During the course of this essay, attention is paid to early modern European appreciations of the Orlando Furioso in Italy, Spain and France as well as looking forward to the influence of Ariosto’s writing in English culture in subsequent centuries. In this review of the Ariostan presence in English writing and culture, a number of writers are discussed, including Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare, Harington and those writing for the early modern playhouses in London during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.

Landscape and Seascape

Since the earliest reception of the Orlando Furioso, the episodes Ariosto set in and around the British Isles have fascinated readers and inspired iconic artistic depictions. This chapter explores these episodes, focusing on Ariosto’s manipulation of the traditional chivalric seascape, descriptions of the sea and shipwrecks, on places and toponyms as producers of meaning in the British Isles landscapes, and on the 1532 addition of the episode centred on Olimpia, which can be considered a laboratory of narrative techniques, stylistic choices, and geospatial innovation.

Introduction

The introduction presents the Orlando Furioso, tracing briefly its gestation and identifying its major themes and concerns – love, war, moral, social and ethical issues. It assesses the importance of the first edition, published in 1516, and discusses its continuing presence in the subsequent versions of the poem, and hence its influence on later adaptations and reactions to Ariosto’s poem. The chapter introduces the four principal sections of the volume – the Furioso in the visual arts; from the Elizabethan period to the Enlightenment; from Gothic to Romantic; and text and translation in the modern era. In presenting each of these, the introduction surveys the wider cultural contexts for the reception and influence of the Furioso in art, literature and music, the varying critical responses displayed over the centuries to Ariosto’s poem, and the myriad ways in which creative writers, artists and musicians in the English-speaking world have mined the Furioso as a never-ending source of inspiration.

Walter Scott and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso

Walter Scott proclaimed Ariosto his favourite Romance poet and Orlando Furioso his preferred epic. Byron subsequently called him the Ariosto of the North, and Ariosto the southern Scott. For Scott, the power of words to ‘make a ladye seem a knight’ or transform a sheeling into a palace associates Scottish folk culture with necromantic tales from medieval Italy and France. His life’s work shows the influence of the Italian Renaissance epic tradition to which the Furioso belongs. Scott’s collected ballads, narrative poetry, and novels demonstrate a complex response to Ariosto’s signature techniques of imitatio and entrelacement. His interest in oral literary history also connects him to improvisatori traditions. Scott’s interest in Ariosto extended beyond his writing career. Reading Orlando became a self-prescribed palliative for ‘mental and bodily fever’. The prospect of an ‘Orlando cure’ for frenzy is intriguing. This chapter explores the connections between Scott and Ariosto’s Furioso.

Ariosto in England in the Eighteenth Century

This essay explores the changing fortunes of Ariosto’s poem in England in mid- to late eighteenth-century criticism through an examination of select passages of the Letters on Chivalry and Romance, by Bishop Richard Hurd (1762), and a close reading of the introduction, notes and commentaries appended to the two translations published in this period: that of William Huggins (1755) with facing-page text and translation into ottava rima; and that of John Hoole (1783) into English heroic couplets. While Huggins is full of enthusiasm for virtually every aspect of the Furioso, both Hurd and Hoole display a certain ambivalence towards Ariosto and his poem, reflecting the negative views of earlier, especially French, critics, the neo-classical preference for Tasso, and the influence of Dryden on the theory and practice of translation of poetry.

Reading the Poem ‘in the Very Picture’

The international success of the Orlando Furioso would be hard to describe without the accompanying images. Virtually no early modern edition of Ariosto’s poem was published without a visual paratext. The English reception of the Orlando Furioso was no different, as illustrations were a vital component in the first edition of Harington’s translation (1591), whose 46 full-page plates imitated those published in Venice in 1584, with few and yet very significant changes. This essay discusses some new findings about the visual sources of the scenes added to the plate for Book 28, which shed new light on Harington’s approach to the Orlando Furioso and to Italian literature and culture. On the one hand, the picture shows that he knew an edition of the anonymous excerpt of canto 28 which circulated in Italy under the title of Historia del Re di Pavia, thus confirming the prominence and possibly also the priority of that canto in Harington’s work on the poem. On the other hand, some obscene additions aimed at enhancing the visibility of Ariosto’s most lascivious novella in defiance of the Puritan attacks against the Italianate vogue, appear so clearly related to the underground circulation of Aretino’s Sonetti lussuriosi in Elizabethan England as to urge a reconsideration of the balance between moralism and hedonism in Harington’s theory and practice of poetry.