Monday, April 2, 2018

Tara on Ariosto



Orlando Furioso (Tara Olivero)


Ludovico Ariosto, a poet born in 1474 in Ferrara, Italy, is most well-known for his epic poem Orlando Furioso. Composed of 40 cantos published in 1516, with an expanded version (46 total cantos) published in 1532, the poem is a continuation and expansion of an epic by Matteo Maria Boiardo called Orlando Innamorato, which was published around 1482 and was based on both Arthurian legend and the Song of Roland, the earliest known example of French literature. The protagonist of Boiardo’s story is Roland, Charlemagne’s nephew and a knight, who helps the army of Christian Franks fight against Muslim armies in Spain.

In Ariosto’s continuation, Orlando (based on Roland) falls in love with a pagan princess, Angelica, and is driven mad by her. The poem is written in ottava rima, an eight-line stanza, and is split into episodes focused around three subplots: Orlando’s love for Angelica, the battle near Paris between Charlemagne’s Christian army and the Muslim Saracens, and a love story between two characters named Ruggiero and Bradamante. It was first translated into English by Sir John Harington, a courtier who dedicated an illustrated volume to Queen Elizabeth I, his godmother.

An excerpt from the first canto of Orlando Furioso is below:

OF LOVES and LADIES, KNIGHTS and ARMS, I sing,
Of COURTESIES, and many a DARING FEAT;
And from those ancient days my story bring,
When Moors from Afric passed in hostile fleet,
And ravaged France, with Agramant their king,
Flushed with his youthful rage and furious heat,
Who on king Charles', the Roman emperor's head,
Had vowed due vengeance for Troyano dead.

In the same strain of Roland will I tell
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme,
On whom strange madness and rank fury fell,
A man esteemed so wise in former time;
If she, who to like cruel pass has well
Nigh brought my feeble wit which fain would climb
And hourly wastes my sense, concede me skill
And strength my daring promise to fulfil.

Orlando Furioso had a tremendous impact on Elizabethan literature, including on Spenser’s The Faerie Queen and Shakespeare’s Hero/Claudio plot in Much Ado About Nothing. Spenser’s inclusion of King Arthur in The Faerie Queen was most likely inspired by Ariosto’s work; he also makes a number of allusions to events and characters in Orlando Furioso, and by turning them inside out and ignoring their context in the older epic, Spenser seems to be asserting his own artistic superiority. A 2013 article published in the Journal of Arts and Humanities posits that because the English translation of Furioso was planned to be released barely a year after the publication of Spenser’s epic, this could have contributed to Spenser’s motivation to prove himself the better writer and the poet with greater “moral seriousness.”

The article cites one of the strong examples of parody of Ariosto in The Faerie Queen’s Book I, Canto viii, when Arthur battles the giant Orgoglio, where Spenser references a mirrored shield like one which played a major role in Orlando Furioso. However, Spenser not only alludes to this shield but instead manipulates readers’ expectations based on the role that the shield played in Ariosto’s work compared to his own. For example, in Ariosto, the shield is a prize carried by Atlante, a character representing the idea of time, with the round shield as a symbol of the round world. Time, and specifically worldly pleasures, conquer all humans (although in the end, Atlante is overcome by a magic ring, an eternally circular shape which signifies some divine power). According to the article, in The Faerie Queen, however, Arthur’s shield instead takes up the symbolic position of the ring in Orlando Furioso, acting as a representation of Arthur’s magnificence and merit; Spenser’s shield is not a negative symbol of humanity’s failure but is flipped to represent positive Christian virtues instead. In sum: “Spenser’s use of allusion in this way is deliberate, and in many ways it is a silent tribute to Ariosto’s poem, where Spenser asks the reader to remember the great work which is Orlando Furioso, but also to keep in mind that The Faerie Queene is the better poem within the construct of Elizabethan poetic standards.”

**Fun extra note: a project at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania began tracking Orlando’s journeys on an interactive website called The Orlando Furioso Atlas. You can check it out here.

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