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Grace and Ingratitude: Lodovico Dolce and Ludovico Ariosto

Ita Mac Carthy

in The Grace of the Italian Renaissance

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 ... More

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.Less

Ronsard Furieux: Interest in Ariosto

William J. Kennedy

in Petrarchism at Work: Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare

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 ... More

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.Less

Providence, Irony, and Magic: Petrarch and Vida

Tobias Gregory

in From Many Gods to One: Divine Action in Renaissance Epic

This chapter deals with Orlando furioso by Ludovico Ariosto. Orlando furioso does not abandon divine action of the characteristically epic type, though it infuses epic divine action with both irony ... More

This chapter deals with Orlando furioso by Ludovico Ariosto. Orlando furioso does not abandon divine action of the characteristically epic type, though it infuses epic divine action with both irony and anxiety. There is also plenty of providentialism in the Furioso. The military plot of the Furioso is the Christian-Saracen conflict of Carolingian literary tradition. Ariosto also wrote the Cinque canti, first printed as an appendix to the Furioso in 1545. Cinque canti shifts the Furioso's balance of epic and romantic supernatural elements in the direction of epic. In the Furioso, Ariosto's view of divine providence is playful and optimistic when writing of the legendary past, anguished and uncertain when he turns toward the historical present. In the Cinque canti, he sets the story in a legendary past that bears closer resemblance to the historical present, and its supreme deity is not God but Demogorgon.Less

Renaissance Epics: Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser

Peter Mack

in Reading Old Books: Writing with Traditions

This chapter takes a look at Orlando Furioso (1516, 1532), Gerusalemme Liberata (1581), and The Faerie Queene (1596), which are the recognized epic masterpieces of their eras. They draw in succession ... More

This chapter takes a look at Orlando Furioso (1516, 1532), Gerusalemme Liberata (1581), and The Faerie Queene (1596), which are the recognized epic masterpieces of their eras. They draw in succession on each other and on a wide range of classical and romance texts, many of them known to the first audiences of these three poems. The chapter investigates the ways in which Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, and Edmund Spenser used their predecessors and the different effects they achieved from a shared heritage. It examines the ways in which a series of authors used both their immediate predecessors and their sense of a long tradition of epic writing to create something new. The chapter argues that Ariosto aimed to shock and surprise his audience. Tasso reacted to Ariosto by combining a more serious and unified epic on the lines of the Iliad. Spenser's idea of devoting each book to a hero and a virtue presents a structure which is easier to comprehend than Ariosto's, yet looser and more open to surprises than Tasso's.Less

Ariosto's “Fier Pastor”: Form and History in Orlando furioso

Albert Russell Ascoli

in A Local Habitation and a Name: Imagining Histories in the Italian Renaissance

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 ... More

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.Less

Solvite me: Epic, Romance, and the Poetics of Melancholy in the Orlando Furioso

in The Secret Wound: Love-Melancholy and Early Modern Romance

This chapter examines Ludovico Ariosto's poem Orlando Furioso and argues that his depiction of its structure is far more deeply engaged than has been recognized with the psychic structure of ... More

This chapter examines Ludovico Ariosto's poem Orlando Furioso and argues that his depiction of its structure is far more deeply engaged than has been recognized with the psychic structure of love-melancholy. Drawing on Petrarch's self-conscious poetic exploration of the atra voluptas of melancholy love in his Canzoniere, it analyzes Ariosto's etiology of Orlando's furor and descent into madness, as well as the phantasmic dolce error (sweet error). The chapter also considers the palace and how it generates the object of desire as a phantasm that lures the lover out of the real world in an increasingly frantic search for what can never be grasped. Orlando's refusal to accept the loss of Angelica results in an obsessive rage that seems to end symbolically only when, through the mediation of Virgil's elegiac sixth eclogue (solvite me), his quest turns toward the accommodation of death. The chapter also focuses on a shift toward epic closure that is signaled by Ariosto's use of the Virgilian topos of the mors immatura, or untimely death of young warriors.Less

Ericthonius's Secret: Body Politics in Ariosto's Orlando furioso

Albert Russell Ascoli

in A Local Habitation and a Name: Imagining Histories in the Italian Renaissance

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 ... More

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.Less

. Infidel Texts and Errant Sexuality: Translation, Reading, and Conversion in Harington’s Orlando Furioso

Dennis Austin Britton

in Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance

Chapter 3 considers John Harington’s distinctly Protestant translation of Ludovico Ariosto’s epic romance, Orlando Furioso. It suggests that Harington’s translation gained legitimacy by creating a ... More

Chapter 3 considers John Harington’s distinctly Protestant translation of Ludovico Ariosto’s epic romance, Orlando Furioso. It suggests that Harington’s translation gained legitimacy by creating a reading experience that was similar to that of reading the Bible. Like early modern English Bibles, Harington’s translation uses paratextual materials—prefaces, marginal glosses, “Moralls” and “Allegories”—in order to guide readers’ interpretations and foster moral and spiritual transformation. Just as reading the Bible (alongside preaching) was deemed necessary for spiritual transformation, Harington’s translation and subsequent allegorizing of Ariosto’s poem seek to transform and indeed convert readers. Moreover, Harington’s translation is itself a convert: The formerly infidel text, a repugnant Romish romance, is transformed into an English Protestant poem. Harington thus likens the translation and allegorizing of Orlando Furioso to religious conversion.Less

Introduction

Tobias Gregory

in From Many Gods to One: Divine Action in Renaissance Epic

This book focuses on the Renaissance reinvention of epic divine action. This reinvention involved the adapting of an originally polytheistic literary genre to a European culture that was officially ... More

This book focuses on the Renaissance reinvention of epic divine action. This reinvention involved the adapting of an originally polytheistic literary genre to a European culture that was officially monotheistic. This book also argues that the Mosaic distinction constitutes the single most important difference between classical and Renaissance epic. In the epic poetry of the Renaissance, the Mosaic distinction operates in conjunction with a range of political differences that combine in as many ways as there are poems. The syncretism of classical artistic models and Christian religious norms is addressed. The chapters in this book evaluate the classical polytheistic model and then five Renaissance epics, each of which illustrates a different approach to the problem of monotheistic divine action: Francesco Petrarch's Africa, Marco Girolamo Vida's Christiad, Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso, Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, and John Milton's Paradise Lost. Finally, an overview of each chapter is provided.Less

Transformative and Restorative Romance: Re-“turning” Othello and Locating Christian Identity

Dennis Austin Britton

in Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance

Chapter 4 argues that William Shakespeare’s Othello both reveals the work of genre and geography in the formation of religious identities and enacts a debate about the uses of romance’s two competing ... More

Chapter 4 argues that William Shakespeare’s Othello both reveals the work of genre and geography in the formation of religious identities and enacts a debate about the uses of romance’s two competing goals: to transform and to restore identity. Othello is patterned after Ruggiero in Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso; Ruggiero is a convert to Christianity who, like Othello, marries an Italian woman. Like Orlando Furioso, Othello employs the infidel-conversion motif, which aims to erase the significance of racial, geographical, and cultural difference. Iago, however, seeks to reverse the effects of the infidel-conversion motif in order to restore Othello to what presumably is his prior Muslim identity. Because romances usually figure marriage and baptism as sacraments that work complementarily to create Christian identity, Iago aims to disrupt the marriage bond between Othello and his wife; dissolving Othello and Desdemona’s marriage undoes Othello’s Christian identity.Less

Horace Walpole’s Enchanted Castles

Dale Townshend

in Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance, and the Architectural Imagination, 1760-1840

Extending the discussion of Walpole’s architectural imagination in Chapter 1, this chapter pays sustained attention to the assumption that the eponymous castle in his The Castle of Otranto (1764) is ... More

Extending the discussion of Walpole’s architectural imagination in Chapter 1, this chapter pays sustained attention to the assumption that the eponymous castle in his The Castle of Otranto (1764) is based on, or inspired by, the author’s architectural work at Strawberry Hill. Having outlined the history of the Otranto/Strawberry Hill relationship, the chapter subjects these presumed correspondences between text and house to careful scrutiny, eventually arguing that if the two are related at all, it is primarily through the language of romance that is common to both. Both the Castle at Otranto and Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, the argument shows, are versions of the ‘enchanted castles’ that Walpole discovered deep in the annals of ‘Gothic story’. The chapter ends with an account of the extent to which Walpole arrogated to himself the ability to call up so many ‘enchanted castles’ in a number of contemporary literary and architectural experiments.Less