Orlando furioso (; The Frenzy of Orlando) is an Italian epic poem by Ludovico Ariosto which has exerted a wide influence on later culture. The earliest version appeared in 1516, although the poem was not published in its complete form until 1532. Orlando furioso is a continuation of Matteo Maria Boiardo's unfinished romance Orlando innamorato (Orlando in Love, published posthumously in 1495). In its historical setting and characters, it shares some features with the Old French La Chanson de Roland of the eleventh century, which tells of the death of Roland. The story is also a chivalric romance which stemmed from a tradition beginning in the Late Middle Ages and continuing in popularity in the 16th century and well into the 17th.
Orlando is the Christian knight known in French and English as Roland. The story takes place against the background of the war between Charlemagne's Christian paladins and the Saracen army that has invaded Europe and is attempting to overthrow the Christian empire. The poem is about knights and ladies, war and love, and the romantic ideal of chivalry. It mixes realism and fantasy, humor and tragedy.Orlando Furioso, Penguin Classics, Barbara Reynolds, translator, 1977 The stage is the entire world, plus a trip to the Moon. The large cast of characters features Christians and Saracens, soldiers and sorcerers, and fantastic creatures including a gigantic sea monster called the Orc and a flying horse called the hippogriff. Many themes are interwoven in its complicated episodic structure, but the most important are the paladin Orlando's unrequited love for the pagan princess Angelica, which drives him mad; the love between the female Christian warrior Bradamante and the Saracen Ruggiero, who are supposed to be the ancestors of Ariosto's patrons, the House of Este of Ferrara; and the war between Christian and Infidel.Waley's introduction, passim
The poem is divided into forty-six cantos which contain a varying number of eight-line stanzas in ottava rima (a rhyme scheme of abababcc). Ottava rima had been used in previous Italian romantic epics, including Luigi Pulci's Morgante and Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato. Ariosto's work is 38,736 lines long in total, making it one of the longest poems in European literature.Reynolds p. 12
Composition and publication
Ariosto began working on the poem around 1506, when he was 32. The first edition of the poem, in 40 cantos, was published in Ferrara in April 1516 and dedicated to the poet's patron Ippolito d'Este. A second edition appeared in 1521 with minor revisions.
Ariosto continued to write more material for the poem and in the 1520s he produced five more cantos, marking a further development of his poetry, which he decided not to include in the final edition. They were published after his death by his illegitimate son Virginio under the title Cinque canti and are highly regarded by some modern critics.Ludovico Ariosto,"Cinque Canti/Five Cantos" Translated by Alexander Sheers and David Quint, 1996, California Press (). The page also contains excerpts from various reviews. The third and final version of Orlando Furioso, containing 46 cantos, appeared in 1532.
Ariosto had sought stylistic advice from the humanist Pietro Bembo to give his verse the last degree of polish and this is the version known to posterity.Reynolds, vol.1, pp. 72–73; Waley's introduction
The first English translation by John Harington was published in 1591 at the behest of Queen Elizabeth I, who reportedly banned Harington from court until the translation was complete.
Ariosto and Boiardo Ariosto's poem is a sequel to Matteo Maria Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato (Orlando in Love). One of Boiardo's main achievements was his fusion of the Matter of France (the tradition of stories about Charlemagne and paladins such as Roland) with the Matter of Britain (the legends about King Arthur and his knights). The latter contained the magical elements and love interest that were generally lacking in the more austere and warlike poems about Carolingian heroes.
Ariosto continued to mix these elements in his poem as well as adding material derived from Classical sources.Reynolds pp. 53–67 However, Ariosto has an ironic tone rarely present in Boiardo, who treated the ideals of chivalry much more seriously.The Reader's Encyclopedia (ed. Benet, 1967) In Orlando Furioso, instead of the chivalric ideals which were no longer current in the 16th century, a humanistic conception of man and life is vividly celebrated under the appearance of a fantastical world, notwithstanding his early modern approaches to feminism.
Plot The action of Orlando Furioso takes place against the background of the war between the Christian emperor Charlemagne and the Saracen king of Africa, , who has invaded Europe to avenge the death of his father Troiano. Agramante and his allies – who include Marsilio, the King of Spain, and the boastful warrior Rodomonte – besiege Charlemagne in Paris.
Meanwhile, Orlando, Charlemagne's most famous paladin, has been tempted to forget his duty to protect the emperor because of his love for the pagan princess Angelica. At the beginning of the poem, Angelica escapes from the castle of the Bavarian Duke Namo, and Orlando sets off in pursuit. The two meet with various adventures until Angelica comes across a wounded Saracen infantryman on the verge of death, Medoro. She nurses him back to health, falls in love, and elopes with him to Cathay.
When Orlando learns the truth, by finding the pair's secret garden of love, or Locus Amoenus, he goes mad with despair and rampages through Europe and Africa destroying everything in his path, and thus demonstrates the frenzy that the title suggests. The English knight Astolfo journeys to Ethiopia on the hippogriff to find a cure for Orlando's madness.
He flies up in Elijah's flaming chariot to the Moon, where everything lost on Earth is to be found, including Orlando's wits. He brings them back in a bottle and makes Orlando sniff them, thus restoring him to sanity. (At the same time Orlando falls out of love with Angelica, as the author explains that love is itself a form of insanity.)
Orlando joins with Brandimarte and Oliver to fight Agramante, Sobrino and Gradasso on the island of Lampedusa that belongs to the archipelago of the Pelagie Islands, in Sicily. There Orlando kills King Agramante.
Another important plotline involves the love between the female Christian warrior Bradamante and the Saracen Ruggiero. They too have to endure many vicissitudes.
Ruggiero is taken captive by the sorceress Alcina and has to be freed from her magic island. He then rescues Angelica from the orc. He also has to avoid the enchantments of his foster father, the wizard Atlante, who does not want him to fight or see the world outside of his iron castle, because looking into the stars it is revealed that if Ruggiero converts himself to Christianity, he will die. He does not know this, so when he finally gets the chance to marry Bradamante, as they had been looking for each other through the entire poem although something always separated them, he converts to Christianity and marries Bradamante.
Rodomonte appears at the wedding feast, nine days after the wedding, and accuses him of being a traitor to the Saracen cause, and the poem ends with a duel between Rodomonte and Ruggiero. Ruggiero kills Rodomonte (Canto XLVI, stanza 140) and the final lines of the poem describe Rodomonte's spirit leaving the world. Ruggiero and Bradamante are the ancestors of the House of Este, Ariosto's patrons, whose genealogy he gives at length in canto 3 of the poem.
The epic contains many other characters, including Orlando's cousin, the paladin Rinaldo, who is also in love with Angelica; the thief Brunello; the Saracen Ferraù; Sacripante, King of Circassia and a leading Saracen knight; and the tragic heroine Isabella.
Influence
Later literature Orlando Furioso is "one of the most influential works in the whole of European literature"Reynolds, back cover and it remains an inspiration for writers to this day.
A few years before Ariosto's death, the poet Teofilo Folengo published his Orlandino, a caricaturization of the stories found in both Orlando Furioso and its precursor, Orlando Innamorato.
In 1554, Laura Terracina wrote the Discorso sopra il Principio di tutti i canti d'Orlando furioso which was linked to Orlando Furioso and in which several of the characters appeared.
Orlando Furioso was a major influence on Edmund Spenser's epic The Faerie Queene. William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing takes one of its plots (Hero/Claudio/Don John) from Orlando Furioso (probably via Spenser or Bandello). In 1592, Robert Greene published a play called The Historie of Orlando Furioso. According to Barbara Reynolds, the English poet closest in spirit to Ariosto is Lord Byron."The Orlando Furioso and English Literature" in Reynolds, Vol. 1, pp. 74–88
In Spain, Lope de Vega wrote a continuation of the epic (La hermosura de Angélica, 1602) as did Luis Barahona de Soto (Las lágrimas de Angélica, 1586). Góngora wrote a famous poem describing the idyllic honeymoon of Angelica and Medoro (En un pastoral albergue).Text: Angélica y Medoro. In the notes to Góngora: Antología poética (Castalia, 1986), Antonio Carreira comments: "Amongst the numerous works inspired by Ariosto in Spain (a subject to which M. Chevalier has dedicated two volumes) none has been so successful as this poem by Góngora, a lifelong admirer of Orlando Furioso". Orlando Furioso is mentioned among the romances in Don Quixote. Among the interpolated stories within Don Quixote is a retelling of a tale from canto 43 regarding a man who tests the fidelity of his wife.Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, translated and annotated by Edith Grossman, p. 272 Additionally, various literary critics have noted the poem's likely influence on Garcilaso de la Vega's second eclogue.
In France, Jean de la Fontaine used the plots of some of the bawdier episodes for three of his Contes et Nouvelles en vers (1665–66).
In chapter 11 of Sir Walter Scott's novel Rob Roy published in 1817, but set circa 1715, Mr. Francis Osbaldistone talks of completing "my unfinished version of Orlando Furioso, a poem which I longed to render into English verse...".
Virginia Woolf's eponymous historical romance Orlando (1928) is intricately structured by permutations of many elements of Ariosto's poem.
The modern Russian poet Osip Mandelstam paid tribute to Orlando Furioso in his poem Ariosto (1933).
The Italian novelist Italo Calvino drew on Ariosto for several of his works of fiction including Il cavaliere inesistente ("The Nonexistent Knight", 1959) and Il castello dei destini incrociati ("The Castle of Crossed Destinies", 1973). In 1970 Calvino brought out his own selection of extracts from the poem.Turchi, p. xl
The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges was an admirer of Orlando and included a poem, Ariosto y los árabes (Ariosto and the Arabs), exploring the relationship between the epic and the Arabian Nights, in his 1960 collection El hacedor. Borges also chose Attilio Momigliano's critical study of the work as one of the hundred volumes that were to make up his Personal Library.Biblioteca personal (1988), pp. 72–74
The English novelist Anthony Powell's Hearing Secret Harmonies includes images from Orlando Furioso to open chapter two.Anthony Powell, Hearing Secret Harmonies Heinemann: London, 1975, pp.30-34. Hearing Secret Harmonies is the final book in Powell's twelve-volume series, A Dance to the Music of Time.
British writer Salman Rushdie's 2008 novel The Enchantress of Florence was partly inspired by Orlando Furioso.
Popular fiction Bradamante is one of the main characters in several novels, including Linda C. McCabe's Quest of the Warrior Maiden, Ron Miller's Bradamant: The Iron Tempest and Ruth Berman's Bradamant's Quest.