MAJOR WORKS AND THEMES

Ariosto constructed his Furioso , a romance composed of forty-six cantos in the final 1532 version, as generically mixed narrative—a “varied tapestry,” as the narrator describes it at one point. This flair for change, typical of romances, is visible in the myriad stories intricately woven into the length of the narrative, as well as in the numerous stories that remain compact, self-contained units. The variety of the Furioso is also conspicuously evident in the poet’s multiple alterations of tone, style, and genre as he passes, for example, from an epic battlefield in which two friends reveal their love for one another in a moment of extreme danger, to a pastoral landscape in which two lovers carve their names on trees. The variety of the Furioso is further present in the plethora of literary sources, both classical and contemporary, that underpin the text, beginning with Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato , to which the Furioso is an obvious continuation and its formal completion, and extending to the works of Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Ovid, Catullus, Virgil, Statius, and Seneca—to name but a few of its Italic progenitors. Moreover, in borrowing from, and alluding to, these and a host of other works, Ariosto significantly sets up literary authorities and genres over and against one another in dialectical interplay, privileging the many over the one. There is, to be sure, no single underlying narrative authority to this poem, which begins with a title that evokes Seneca’s Hercules Furens , opens with verses that echo Dante’s Purgatorio , soon passes through episodes that repeatedly imitate and emulate Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Petrarch’s Canzoniere , and ends with a conspicuous allusion to the last verse of the most revered classical epic of the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, Virgil’s Aeneid .

Variety, an essential part of Boiardo’s poem, was also central to early cinquecento aesthetics and rhetoric, which privileged richness and copiousness in disposition, invention, and elocution. Perhaps Ariosto’s Furioso not only represents this variety but seeks to embrace it as a totality within a harmonious— though by no means always felicitous—vision. For unlike the Orlando innamorato , amid the multiple voices that make up the strands of this narrative, there are unifying forces at work in this highly structured and sophisticated romance. In particular, Ariosto unifies his romance by often enforcing connections between characters through the conspicuous juxtaposition of parallel episodes, as when he has both Ruggiero and Orlando free naked women— respectively, Angelica and Olimpia—from a sea monster or when both Ruggiero and Orlando discard weapons—respectively, a blinding shield and the harquebus—in order to rely on their valor alone. Ariosto further gives the impression that his rapid shifts in focus are not arbitrary but consistently the product of an extraordinary mastery of the typical romance structure of interlacement ( entrelacement ), a poetic strategy that creates suspense, complexity, and narrative depth as one story line is suddenly dropped or carefully woven into another in the formation of an intricate textual web. But above all the most pervasive unifying force in the Furioso is the poet’s celebrated irony, which allows him to hold together conflicting points of view in a sort of “discordant concord” or discordia concors and assert absolute control over all events and characters.

The highly self-conscious and discursive poet of the Furioso , however, does not exercise narrative control with complete emotional and cognitive detachment. One striking characteristic of the poet of the Furioso is his ability to use irony to separate himself from, yet identify with, the characters whom he controls in his poem. Like his characters, the poet of the Furioso is a subject with an object of desire, though throughout he remains the subject who always oversees the actions he describes, from Angelica fleeing the grasps of her alternately lusty and loving suitors, to a knight-errant chasing after his own horse, to Astolfo descending into the first circle of hell and then voyaging to the moon. Hence, at one moment the poet of the Furioso can be (or feign to be) a lover on the verge of insanity; at another instant he can seem to be a distant, almost indifferent god controlling the threads of his multiple and varied tapestry; and at yet another instant he emerges as the poet who self-consciously reflects on the linguistic errancy of his own text and, in general, the truth value of all literature since Homer. Repeatedly, he can ridicule his characters and then become a mocked character within his own field of vision as he goes about composing his poem, as he puts it, in a “lucid interval.” At the same time, he can gaze serenely at the slaughter of millions in his text but then reflect bitterly upon his own society and the erosion of its “ bel viver ” (beautiful way of life) (34.2) ever since foreigners invaded Italy in 1494.

Typical of romances, characters in the Furioso often wander in search of adventure in a world ruled by Fortune, traveling through cities and forests, over sea and land as they relentlessly crisscross the globe. In the process, they customarily quest after, as well as engage in staged or spontaneous contests over, an object of desire, whether it be a helmet, a fabulous horse, a sword, or an elusive loved one. Nevertheless, what distinguishes Ariosto’s romance from so many others of the Middle Ages and Renaissance is the extraordinary nature of the quest in the Furioso as an expression of a desire for an absolute, an impossible plenitude. This desire animates Orlando’s quest for Angelica, which ends in his madness at the center of the poem, as he recognizes—with an almost heroic capacity for self-delusion—that the woman he has persistently loved and held up as the image of perfection and completion has finally chosen and married another man. Orlando’s love, like his madness, is a “furor,” an overwhelming passion that consumes his entire existence from the moment he sets out on his quest to the moment when his wits are finally restored to him, at which point he immediately begins to operate once more as an agent of the community engaged in an epic war. Similarly, the desire for a totality instills in Ruggiero and Astolfo a longing to circle the entire globe upon the hippogriff, though neither wanderlust hero manages to complete his circumnavigation. In much the same way, the desire for an impossible plenitude imprisons heroes and heroines within Atlante’s labyrinthine castle as they wander about endlessly seeking what they have most longed for in their lives. Objects of desire in the Furioso are thus often abstractions, symbolic end points for desire itself.

Though the poem takes its title from an event placed in the near structural center of the poem—Orlando’s madness and “furor’—a significant narrative strand running throughout the Furioso tells the story of Ruggiero’s and Bradamante’s love for one another and their eventual marriage, once they have successfully overcome a number of obstacles. At one level, the Ruggiero– Bradamante narrative functions as a complement and counterpoint to Orlando’s single-minded desire for Angelica. A woman, Bradamante, steadfastly quests after a man, Ruggiero, who inversely proves throughout much of the romance to be an elusive object of desire, as well as a knight easily distracted from his goal of locating his beloved. Moreover, through the figure of Bradamante, a virtuous warrior who unsaddles a number of male heroes, Ariosto explores a number of central issues in the Renaissance regarding the normative conceptions of a woman’s role in society and the ways in which those roles were then being culturally debated and redefined. At yet another level, the story of Bradamante and Ruggiero’s love allows Ariosto to inscribe into his poem a developmental narrative—a sort of bildungsroman—in which a pagan hero eventually converts to Christianity and learns through his adventures to place his individual passion at the service of Charlemagne’s greater victorious community. Unlike the older, wiser Orlando who has lost his wits, Ruggiero, a young man from the outset driven by passion rather than reason, gradually matures over the course of the narrative and becomes the hero who rightfully wins Bradamante’s hand. As predicted in a number of places in the poem, the marriage of Ruggiero and Bradamante further marks, within the fiction of the Furioso , the origins of the Este dynasty. Hence, through Ruggiero’s maturation into a hero and Bradamante’s devotion to her future husband, along with her extraordinary perseverance and strength, Ariosto introduces into his poem a number of passages in praise of his patrons and their family line. This was by no means an insignificant aspect to Ariosto’s romance. The fashioning of Ruggiero’s identity allowed for the refashioning of the Este dynasty; it also permitted Ariosto to present himself, in typical humanist fashion, as the poet who would immortalize his patrons in the very moment that he would win everlasting fame for himself through his poem.