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.
Sources:
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