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This chapter explores further the significance of forensic rhetoric in Latin intrigue comedies, which reflexively identify their own ‘probability’ (their power to convince us as stories) with legal scams. It shows how English humanists imitating Plautus and Terence tended to emphasize the forensic or legal elements of the plays, explicitly associating the achievement of ‘probable’ comic recognitions with the power of judges to decide on guilt or innocence using merely probable evidence. The chapter then considers the 1560s and 1570s as the decades which saw the beginnings of an increase of ‘governance’, requiring skills of evidence evaluation. It examines George Gascoigne's sceptical, mocking games with probability and evidence evaluation in his Supposes and shows how Gascoigne later adapted the mimetic power of probable argument in less satirical and more civically minded ways by inventing an ingenious and influential form of ‘magistrate-detective drama’.

Although Ariosto is often thought of as a literary fantasist, this chapter argues for his oblique political engagement in his romance-epic, Orlando furioso, primarily through the strategic juxtaposition of passages referring to contemporary and historical events with narratives that provide indirect and allusive commentary on them. In particular, the episode of the cannibalistic Orco (canto 17)—a carry over from Boiardo's Innamoramento di Orlando and a descendant of the Homeric Cyclops—presents the monster as a “fier pastor” (fierce shepherd) at once echoing Dante's damned Ugolino and creating a link to Leo X as pastoral pontiff. Like Machiavelli Ariosto uses literary allusion to engage in a critique of Pope Leo and other Italian rulers, but also to stage his own problematic relationship to such figures. In larger terms, this chapter both illustrates the way in which Renaissance literature engages indirectly with menacing historical context and argues for the crucial role that formal analysis has in uncovering the “historicity” of literary texts.

This chapter explores the relation of mock epic to earlier genres. It discusses Italian romance epic, especially Ariosto's Orlando furioso, showing how it represents sexual relations with more freedom than serious epic; the mock‐heroic tradition, going back to the Batrachomyomachia (once attributed to Homer) and ending with Pope's Rape of the Lock; and the travesty of epic, illustrated by Scarron's and Cotton's travesties of the Aeneid, and Marivaux's travesty of the Iliad. It ends by showing how literary theories that stressed the autonomy of the literary work rejected the intertextuality which is essential to mock epic.

This chapter examines Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso (1532) as an outstanding example of literary grace. It follows the judgement of sixteenth-century literary commentator and polygraph Lodovico Dolce. The chapter first mines Dolce's many commentaries, paratextual notes, appreciations, and treatises on poetics and aesthetics for a sense of just what he meant when he declared Ariosto the Renaissance poet of grace. Next, the chapter looks to Ariosto himself and focuses both on the poet's writing and on the emblems and images he used to embellish successive editions of his poem. In this encounter between grace in word and image, it offers an understanding of how Ariosto anticipated Dolce's reading while varying the terms of that reception.

This chapter looks into Ronsard’s inspiration from the career of Ludovico Ariosto, an Italian poet, in tracing the evolution of Ronsard’s early style from the forced antiquarianism of his odes to the self-conscious stylization of Les Amours. Ronsard’s obsessive habits of revision attest to his commitment as a writer, revealing second thoughts about his earlier inspired verse, the aspirations of subsequent verse in relation to his evolving aesthetic, his efforts to please new patrons and a changing readership, and his canny attempts to cash in on a growing reputation. Ariosto’s career impressed Ronsard for several reasons, but two stand out. Ariosto’s lyric and epic poetry challenged Ronsard by accommodating normative Petrarchan elegance to sturdier qualities of classical form, but it also alerted him to possibilities of style embedded in both, and especially to a demanding exercise of craftsmanship and skill that would compromise the Neoplatonic doctrine of furor.

This chapter focuses on the themes of love and war in epic poetry. It argues that these principal themes of the romance epic of the early Renaissance are virtually preset. The question facing poets is not what themes to choose, but how to characterize them, how to balance them and link them together, in what style and register to express them, since the solutions to these questions will dictate the extent to which the poem can be seen as reflecting classical epic traditions. The most obvious course for the vernacular poet to follow would have been to privilege warfare at the expense of love, reducing the theme of love to a secondary role and emphasizing the coherence of the theme of war, by creating a major campaign as the backbone of the narrative structure. This is the pattern adopted by Tasso, but it is not the one adopted by any of the poets surveyed in the chapter, nor indeed by Ariosto.

This chapter focuses on a major work of the later sixteenth century, Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, whose narrative arc is shaped by the felt need for the poem to free its characters and its author from the burden of history itself, staged through the quest to “liberate” the empty tomb of Christ—symbol of the transcendence of death and the abandonment of the world of history for a haven above and beyond time. That the poem is only able to reach the literal tomb, but not to pass beyond, is a sign of the author's anxious fear that such transcendence is as impossible as it is desirable. Such an interpretation is further confirmed by the poem's deliberate evocation of its place in a literary history that, in addition to its systematic transformation of the Virgil's pagan epic of imperial conquest, includes, on one hand, the overtly transcendent vision of Dante's Commedia and, on the other, Ariosto's fierce parody thereof in Orlando.

This final chapter ranges more widely across The Prelude in order to consider how forms of selving and humoring speak to one another, and how they speak to the vision (or version) of Wordsworth presented by this book. When he was looking around for epic-mock-epic models for the romancing of the self, certain writings, cherished from his childhood, would have come readily to mind, ones that should be kept in mind when reading him: eighteenth-century novels (particularly those of Sterne, Fielding, and Smollett); behind them, Cervantes; and behind him, Ariosto. The chapter closes with a sustained consideration of Wordsworth's debt to Don Quixote in The Prelude, arguing that this quixotic sense is a vital part of his ambitions for both himself and his poetry.

This chapter analyzes Ariosto's elaborate exploration of the politics of gender and the gendering of politics in the curious tale of the defeat of the phallocratic giant, Marganorre, by the warrior women, Marfisa and Bradamante. Like Chapter 4, this chapter suggests an unveiling of the gendered, sexualized categories that subtend not only the social relations of men and women but also the overarching legal and political order of which they are a part. Ariosto stages the ambivalence of his narrative avatar, who both exposes and reproduces the mechanisms by which male poets and patriarchal potentates keep women “beneath them.” Key elements are the poet's use of a little-known male mythological counterpart to the Medusa, Ericthonius, to dramatize the monstrous appropriation of female power by men; his play upon a symbolic proper name, Vittoria Colonna, whose declared role as emblem of female talent is cunningly absorbed into a symbolic political order at whose center stands a triumphal phallus, a “colonna.” The chapter points as well to the problem of deploying contemporary categories (Freudian, Lacanian, Derridean, or Butlerian) upon earlier periods where discourses of gender were quite different than our own. It makes the case, however, that the textual evidence lends itself readily to such an epoch-bridging encounter.

This chapter examines Machiavelli's lesser known, yet still estimable, comedy Clizia. While dramatizing, as in Chapters 4 and 7, the gendering of power and the power struggles between the genders, the play “performs” a studied confluence of literary and historical intertexts, blurring the boundaries between the two types of discourse, and in the process posing a number of key historiographical questions. Notably, among the intertextual relationships explored are those of Clizia to Machiavelli's own political-historical works, to Boccaccio's Decameron, Day 7, story 9 (the focus of Chapter 4), and to Ariosto's pioneering dramatic works.

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.

How did Milton read Ariosto? The standard account holds that he admired Orlando Furioso in his youth and dismissed it in his maturity, rejecting chivalric romance in Paradise Lost as ‘the skill of artifice or office mean’. This essay revisits the question. It finds a stronger and more positive connection between the Furioso and Paradise Lost in the two poems’ expansive sense of space, and in several prominent Ariostan allusions in Milton’s epic.