[In the following excerpt, Quint argues that the “modern” technique of narrative interlace, in which multiple storylines are interwoven, is present in Ariosto's Orlando furioso.]

Cervantes owed much to Ariosto when he created the novel in Don Quijote. He derived from the Orlando furioso both the narrative technique of interlace, which places multiple story lines next to one another, and Ariosto's particular use of it to juxtapose and intermingle hitherto distinct narrative genres. In much the same way, Cervantes links the interpolated tales of the first part of Don Quijote in terms of theme and contrasts them in terms of generic and stylistic registers, both among themselves and to the story of the mad hero. The effect is similar in the two works: generic capaciousness and the blurring of boundaries among genres that Mikhail Bakhtin called “novelization.” Inside the emergent novel, he wrote, traditional genres become “permeated with laughter, irony, humor, elements of self-parody and finally—this is the most important thing—the novel inserts into these other genres an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with unfinished, still evolving contemporary reality.”¹ Two modern expositors of Bakhtin explain: “At times, [genres] may be forced to compete with rival genres as the best way to visualize a given aspect of life. No longer sensed as indisputably correct within its sphere, a genre may instead be perceived as one participant in an ongoing dialogue about its characteristic type.”² Thus genres are tested as they compete for space and present different versions of lived experience within a novelistic framework. Their contestation accounts in no small part for the “perspectivism”—the call to look at the same phenomena from different angles and according to different systems of value—that Leo Spitzer saw in Don Quijote.³ But the same treatment of genre is already present in the Orlando furioso, whose narrative technique lends thematic coherence to, and so makes artistically feasible, the poem's mixing of genres. Don Quijote needs to be read as we have learned to read the Furioso: episodes reveal their full meaning only when read as the mirrors of other episodes. Ariosto's use of interlace to meditate on genre contributed, moreover, to the creation, in the Quijote, of a new novelistic form and sensibility.⁴

GENRE AND INTERLACE IN THE ORLANDO FURIOSO

Interlace is itself a modern narrative technique. By “modern” I mean derived from medieval vernacular rather than from classical literary culture. It is the familiar form of the great chivalric romances of the Middle Ages, such as the prose Lancelot, in which the author follows the careers of some eight or ten questing knights, telling a segment of one knight's story before turning to a segment of another's, and thus keeps multiple plots going at once. The plots parallel one another, and the reader begins to realize that the romance coheres and generates meaning not so much from the endings of the knights' stories, which are hardly in sight, as from the relationship among the stories. In the Orlando furioso Ariosto modifies interlace in two ways.⁵ First, he famously interrupts the story of one knight in the middle, sometimes at a moment of great suspense, to jump to another and thus intensifies the reader's difficulties in keeping the plot straight. Second—and it is this dimension that I want to insist on here—he uses interlace not only to connect the thematic content of episodes but also to juxtapose different levels of storytelling and ultimately to break down distinctions among high and low genres.

A particularly good example of this use of interlace is found in cantos 14 through 18 of the Furioso. Ariosto presents a remarkable sequence of episodes organized around the ostensibly central event of siege and assault led by the African king Agramante and his ferocious chief warrior, Rodomonte, against the Paris of Charlemagne. With its high geopolitical stakes, the war between Christianity and Islam is the matter of epic, and Ariosto has recourse to classical epic models. He closely imitates Turnus's aristeia, or killing spree, in the Trojan camp in book 9 of the Aeneid when Rodomonte leaps over the battlements and rampages through the streets of Paris while his men are horribly burned to death in a moat to which the city's defenders have set fire. The night exploit of Cloridano and Medoro, which can be said to close this stretch of the Furioso, is modeled on the night raid of Nisus and Euryalus in the same book of Virgil's epic.⁶

Now, as critics have noted, the poem's account of the struggle for Paris is framed, through the device of the exordium, the narrator's address to his readers at the beginning of an individual canto, with references to actual battles fought in Italy in the wake of the French and Spanish invasions that had begun in 1494 and still continued as Ariosto wrote, warfare in which his patrons, the Este dukes of Ferrara, had taken part (Durling, 140-4; Beer, 125-9). Thus Agramante's costly, by implication Pyrrhic, victories over the French are compared at the opening of canto 14 to the recent victory of French troops at Ravenna in 1512, after which the city was sacked. Ariosto portrays the rapacious French of the sixteenth century,

che suore, e frati e bianchi e neri e bigi
violato hanno, e sposa e figlia e madre;
gittato in terra Cristo in sacramento,
per torgli un tabernaculo d'argento.

(14.8.5-8)

[who have violated nuns and friars in white, black, and gray, and wife, daughter, and mother; they have thrown the sacrament of Christ to the ground in order to steal its silver tabernacle.]⁷

Similarly, canto 15 opens with a recollection of the Ferrarese victory over the Venetians at Polesella in 1509 and praises Cardinal Ippolito d'Este for having preserved his own troops, unlike Rodomonte, while routing the enemy. The exordium to canto 17 continues the analogy between the fictional African troops laying waste to France and the modern-day invaders of Italy: both are scourges visited by God on sinful peoples. But the instruments of divine punishment themselves commit sins, such as the rape of nuns and friars, and the passage concludes with a fantasy of retribution, in which Italy will turn the tables on her present oppressors:

Or Dio consente che noi siàn puniti
da populi di noi forse peggiori,
per li multiplicati e infiniti
nostri nefandi, obbrobriosi errori.
Tempo verrà ch'a depredar lor liti
andremo noi, se mai saren migliori,
e che i peccati lor giungano al segno,
che l'eterna Bontà muovano a sdegno.

(17.5)

[Now God allows us to be punished by peoples that are perhaps worse than we are, for our manifold and infinite, unspeakable and opprobrious misdeeds. The time will come that we shall go to devastate their shores, if we ever become better and their sins reach the point that they move the Eternal Goodness to wrath.]

Such retribution does, in fact, take place within the poem's subsequent fiction. The Christians not only drive Agramante's troops from Paris but invade and destroy his North African kingdom.

The Furioso thus suggests the relationship of its epic fiction—the story of a make-believe war between Christian and Saracen, based loosely on the struggles that culminated in the battle of Poitiers, won by Charles Martel, the grandfather of Charlemagne, in 732—to actual warfare in early-sixteenth-century Italy. The reader is invited to think of the poem's depiction of war as a reflection, highly mediated through the conventions of epic, of current martial events; at the same time, however, the poem distances itself from them, retreating into a fantasy of chivalry. Indeed, the Furioso has been charged with creating an autonomous poetic world by evading the very history it mentions in the exordia. These charges have been recently reexamined in a powerful critical study by Albert Russell Ascoli, who has argued that the poem self-consciously stages and points to its own act of escapism in order to explore the problems of all literary acts of reference (see n. 5).

In particular, Ariosto appears to take a hard look at the peculiar status of epic, which claims a strong relationship to, as Hegel puts it, the world-historical event. Yet what immediately distances epic from the collective experience and massed troop movements of real warfare is its insistence on following the heroism of single combatants. Thus the passage about war and its atrocities as divine punishment modulates into a description of Rodomonte set loose in Paris:

Doveano allora aver gli eccessi loro
di Dio turbata la serena fronte
che scòrse ogni lor luogo il Turco e 'l Moro
con stupri, uccision, rapine et onte:
ma più di tutti gli altri danni, foro
gravati dal furor di Rodomonte.

(17.6.1-6)

[The excesses of Agramante's troops in those days should have clouded the serene face of God, for the Turks and Moors scoured the land with rapes, murders, looting, and outrages; but more than any other injuries, they were compounded by the furor of Rodomonte.]

In the single Saracen warrior we are to see the poem's emblem of the divine scourge. His rampage through the French capital should be understood to reflect the contemporary carnage inflicted on Ravenna by a whole foreign army.⁸ Like Virgil's Turnus, who holds off the assembled Trojans inside their camp, Rodomonte is seemingly endowed with the strength of an army. Charlemagne puts a halt to Rodomonte's massacre of the civilian population when he himself, accompanied by seven of his knights, opposes the Saracen; Rodomonte can only be expelled from the city when further reinforcements arrive. But in the superhuman hero, Ariosto suggests, the epic fiction measures its fictionality, its degree of separation from the actual warfare and history to which it claims affinity.

The Furioso takes a step further away from history by interlacing the battle of Paris and Rodomonte's exploits in the city with the adventures of the distinctly secondary character Grifone, a Christian knight-errant, in the Levant. In this eastern locale, the poem takes geographic distance from its epic center and announces its entrance into a different generic world or narrative register, that of romance. The distinction between epic and romance would be articulated only in the generation after Ariosto's death by theorists who based it on the peculiar generic status of the Furioso itself: some accused the poet of having written a failed epic, some of having invented a new literary form, the romanzo.⁹ But it is possible to see the Furioso already exploring within its capacious structure an implicit opposition between epic and romance that would shape the ensuing critical debate.

In romance, the individualism of the epic hero is given its own independent sphere in the wanderings of the single knight-errant. Detached from the collective efforts of war and history, the locale in which he or she quests becomes more unreal, more a projection of human desire, more markedly fictional, whether it is the ubiquitous Ariostesque woods or an Orient so exotic as to be make-believe. The Damascus to which Grifone arrives in canto 17—as pleasant in winter as in summer (17.18), with its infinite number of gardens (17.19), its beautiful women richly adorned with gems and sumptuous gowns (17.20), its joyful dances and balls (17.21)—suggests nothing less than the enchanted pleasure realm of the sorceress-fairy Alcina, the exemplary romance locus amoenus, described some ten cantos earlier. In Damascus the local king, Norandino, has declared a tournament that all but mirrors genuine warfare:

per giuoco in somma qui facean, secondo
fan gli nimici capitali, eccetto
che potea il re partirli a suo diletto.

(17.85.6-8)

[In sum, here they did in sport what capital enemies do, except that the king could part them at his pleasure.]

In the tournament, however, only individual reputations are at stake; it is precisely the site where the knight-errant of chivalric romance can prove himself or herself. Grifone enters the joust and defeats in sequence the king's eight champions, who had sworn to fight all comers (18.84).

The juxtaposition of the two episodes—the Muslim Rodomonte fighting a war in Christian Paris, the Christian Grifone fighting in a tournament in Muslim Damascus—is sharpened in canto 18, where, after a series of misunderstandings and miscarriages of justice, Grifone begins to massacre the citizens of Damascus and Norandino comes to their rescue at the head of a thousand soldiers. The scene abruptly shifts back to Paris, where Rodomonte is at bay against Charlemagne and his seven knights. They attack him en masse, but he withstands “otto scontri di lance, che da forza / di tali otto guerrier cacciati fòro” [eight runnings of the lance at a time, thrust at him by those eight worthy warriors] (18.9.1-2). The narrative thus juxtaposes not only two knights slaughtering civilians but also two knights fighting alone against eight similar knights. Placing the episodes side by side contrasts the greater reality of Rodomonte's epic warfare with the fantastic world of romance, whose emblem might be the tournament, in which the violence of warfare is conducted and contained “per giuoco,” as aestheticized entertainment. In other words, the Damascus episodes are set at a fictional remove from the war in Paris—the generic remove of romance from epic—just as the battle in Paris is itself set at a fictional remove from the sixteenth-century warfare to which it is compared in the narrator's exordia—and here the poem measures its own aesthetic or escapist distance from the violence it narrates, the distance that renders such violence into a game or pastime for the reader.

But the contrast, in typically Ariostesque fashion, breaks down, and not only because the events in Damascus escape the ceremonial containment of the tournament and result in another civilian massacre hardly distinguishable from the slaughter of Parisians or, for that matter, of the unlucky inhabitants of Ravenna. There is also a sense that Rodomonte's exploits, modeled on those of Virgil's Turnus, belong less to a real experience of war—where it is entirely normal, if unchivalric, for eight to attack one at the same time but decidedly not normal for the one to be able to resist the eight—than to the fabulous fictions of romance. Rodomonte in his epic setting actually outdoes Grifone in his romance one, for Grifone only has to fight his eight opponents in the tournament one at a time. Moreover, while Rodomonte decides to retreat from Paris while his body is still “sano” and in one piece (18.17.7), Grifone is wounded in the left shoulder and thigh before he realizes that he cannot hold off the Damascene troops indefinitely (18.63.7-8). In the representation of battle, epic seems more fabulous than romance, which here seems to acknowledge realistic detail.

But the romance world of Damascus contains a level of even more fabulous narrative. Norandino holds his tournament to commemorate his own escape and that of his betrothed, Lucina, from the clutches of the monstrous Orco; the inset story of this adventure, narrated to Grifone by a courteous gentleman of Damascus (17.25-68), picks up an episode in Boiardo's Orlando innamorato that is in turn modeled on the Polyphemus episode of the Odyssey. Norandino eludes the Orco by covering himself and his men with goats' hides, and so recalls Odysseus's stratagem of concealing himself and his men among the sheep of the cyclops's flock. The story reprises the make-believe, folk-loric motifs of the ur-romance of Western literature and introduces a further layer of fictionality into the poem, which has moved in sequence from a frame of reference to contemporary history, to epic, to chivalric romance, to romance fable. We can imagine concentric narrative layers successively farther away from historical experience.

History r Epic r Romance r Fairytale l History Ravenna r Paris r Damascus r Orco l New Crusade

But Ariosto's interlace again refuses to allow the narrative or generic levels to settle into a stable hierarchy. No sooner has the gentleman finished the story of Norandino than the Ariostesque narrator comments, apparently innocuously, on the armor that the Damascenes use in their tournaments:

Soriani in quel tempo aveano usanza
d'armarsi a questa guisa di Ponente.
Forse ve gli inducea la vicinanza
che de' Franceschi avean continuamente,
che quivi allor reggean la sacra stanza
dove in carne abitò Dio onnipotente;
ch'ora i superbi e miseri cristiani,
con biasmi lor, lasciano in man de' cani.

(17.73)

[The Syrians at that time had the custom of arming themselves in this way of the West. Perhaps they were led to do so by having continuous dealings with the neighboring Franks, who then governed the holy place where Almighty God lived in the flesh but which now the proud and wretched Christians, to their blame, leave in the hands of dogs.]

The proximity of Damascus to the Holy Land triggers a call for a new crusade, intended less to chastise the infidel than to direct the European powers away from Italy:

Dove abbassar dovrebbono la lancia
in augumento de la santa fede,
tra lor si dan nel petto e ne la pancia
a destruzion del poco che si crede.
Voi, gente ispana, e voi, gente di Francia,
volgete altrove, e voi, Svizzeri, il piede,
e voi, Tedeschi, a far più degno acquisto;
che quanto qui cercate è già di Cristo.

(17.74)

[Where they ought to lower their lances to spread the holy faith, they assault each other's breast and stomach, to the destruction of the few who believe. You, Spaniards, and you, Frenchmen, and you, Switzers, turn your steps elsewhere, and you, Germans, to make a more worthy conquest, for what you seek here (i.e., Italy) already belongs to Christ.]

At the moment when Ariosto's poem has carried us on the wings of escapist fiction to the farthest distance from history, history thrusts its foot in the door. Damascus, the world of Eastern romance tall tales, turns out to be the site simultaneously for the telling of even taller tales—Norandino and the Orco—and for another evocation of the Italian historical crisis that seemed to lie outside the poem's fiction or at its frame. Even at its most fictional, fiction cannot escape the pressures and reference of history. Equally important, in an instance of “novelization.” Ariosto points to the impurity of narrative genres. We watch the same story unfold in various registers, and we are made to reflect both on how each one changes our perception of the story, particularly our perception of its closeness to or distance from lived experience, and on how, for all that, it is the same story. Moreover, we are asked to see how epic and romance may resemble one another more than we suspect. One result, of course, is to deny epic its claim to be closer to the realia of history.

The Furioso stages the novelization of epic and romance in preparation, as it were, for the arrival of the novel itself. Ariosto includes, in the form of Boccaccian novellas, a series of recounted tales that concern and are carefully interlaced with the poem's central depiction of erotic jealousy and betrayal: the madness of Orlando when he discovers that his beloved princess, Angelica, has run off with and married the lower-class, but very handsome, foot soldier Medoro. The first, notorious novella of canto 28 is told to console Rodomonte, who, disgusted that the king has allowed his beloved Doralice to choose another warrior over him, has left Agramante's camp, and it is followed in the next canto by Orlando's encounter with Angelica: neither recognizes the other, but the lady escapes the grasp of the naked madman, who seizes her horse instead and rides it into the ground. Once again we may note that the mirroring figures of the betrayed Rodomonte and Orlando suggest epic and romance versions of the same story: while Orlando's love-madness comes from the tradition of chivalry—one thinks immediately of Chrétien de Troyes's Yvain running naked through the woods—Rodomonte's sulky abandonment of his king and commander makes him an Achilles, angered at Agamemnon for the loss of Briseis.¹⁰ Like Achilles, Rodomonte wants his king's military position to worsen so that his own worth can be recognized:

Ha disio di veder che sopra il regno
gli cada tanto mal, tanta procella,
ch'in Africa ogni cosa si funesti
né pietra salda sopra pietra resti;
e che spinto del regno, in duolo e in lutto
viva Agramante misero e mendico:
e ch'esso sia che poi gli renda il tutto,
e lo riponga nel suo seggio antico,
e de la fede sua produca il frutto;
e gli faccia veder ch'un vero amico
a dritto e a torto esser dovea preposto,
se tutto ‘l mondo se gli fosse opposto.

(27.125-6)

[He wishes to see so much evil, so great a storm fall on Agramante's kingdom that every house in Africa will go to ruin and not one solid stone will remain standing on another, and that, exiled from his realm, Agramante should live in woe and sorrow, miserable and begging, and that it should be he, Rodomonte, who will restore everything to him, and put him back on his ancient throne, and show the fruit of his loyalty, and make him see that a true friend should be favored whether he is right or wrong, even if all the world should be against him.]

The tone is that of a child having a tantrum: you'll be sorry someday, and then you'll wish you'd been nicer to me. Ariosto is smiling not only at Rodomonte but at the sulking Achilles, who can easily enough lose the dignity that epic decorum accords him. That there is not much to choose from between the epic hero and the romance madman is dramatized in canto 29, when Rodomonte and Orlando tumble off a bridge together, embraced in combat: Orlando, who is naked, finds it easier to swim than Rodomonte, encumbered by his epic armor.

Between the stories of the two betrayed heroes is the novella recounted in canto 28, which Ariosto advises his lady readers to skip because of its misogyny and salacious content. It is itself the story of two betrayed male lovers, King Astolfo and the nobleman Giocondo, the two handsomest men in Italy, who discover that they have been cuckolded by their wives, who have taken on lovers from the lower classes, just as Orlando's Angelica has taken on Medoro. But Angelica at least has the excuse of Medoro's good looks; Astolfo learns that his queen is consorting with no other than “il bruttissimo omiciuolo,” the court dwarf (28.43.8). Astolfo “ne fu per arrabbiar, per venir matto” [was on the verge of flying into a rage, on the verge of going mad] (28.44.3), that is, of taking up the alternatives of Rodomonte and Orlando, respectively. But instead he and Giocondo decide to go about the world, seducing all the women they find; when they grow tired of living as tag-team Don Juans, they take a beautiful but poor young woman to share in bed. When they discover, however, that Fiammetta had invited her Greek boyfriend, still another lower-class rival, to sleep with her while in the darkness of the bedroom Astolfo and Giocondo each thought that the other was enjoying her, the two men burst into laughter, conclude that women are hopelessly unfaithful and sexually insatiable, and decide to return to their wives.

Ariosto links this comically resolved tale of faithless women and male jealousy to the more serious stories of Orlando and Rodomonte through an equestrian metaphor: the dwarf spurs on the “giumenta” [mare] (28.43.7) who is Astolfo's wife and queen, and Astolfo and Giocondo talk about their imagined sharing of Fiametta in similar terms. “It's high time you rested, for you've been on horseback [stato a cavallo] the entire night,” says one, while the other rejoins, “It's you who have been riding to the hounds [cavalcato a caccia] all night” (28.66.4, 8). In the next canto Orlando rides Angelica's horse to death in what is clearly a symbolic substitution for rape: “Avrebbe così fatto, o poco manco, / alla sua donna” [He would have done the same or little less to his lady] (29.73.1-2), says the narrator. In between, the woman-hating Rodomonte journeys by boat to save wear and tear on his own horse: “He realized that he had pressed on harder these last two days than he should have on so fine a horse [sì buon destriero]” (28.86.6). The juxtaposition of the three episodes tells us a lot about men who treat women like horses, horses like women, horses better than women.¹¹

Several generic markers distinguish the novelistic nature of the interpolated tale and suggest how the medieval and Renaissance novella foreshadows the novel. Astolfo and Giocondo are married, and the marital household to which each returns at the end of the tale is the domestic space that the novel will explore in both its aristocratic and bourgeois forms. Their comic accommodation is also typically novelistic: one may still go mad, even die, for the ideal of love—but young Werther and Emma Bovary are exceptions in an unheroic world, where characters just as often negotiate a compromise with unyielding social reality. Happiness in this world depends on facing and making do with what one has and on sometimes overlooking unpleasant facts.¹²

Such a world increasingly becomes the world of the Furioso itself in its final cantos, which, after the decisive battles have been fought and Agramante has been defeated and killed, reprise the issues of betrayal and jealousy, centered on the figure of Rinaldo, who learns only now about Angelica's marriage to Medoro and is briefly tormented by and then rescued from Jealousy (42.29-66). In rapid succession Ariosto interpolates two novellas, told to Rinaldo first by his Mantuan host, then by the pilot who conveys him down the Po past Ferrara (43.9-46, 72-143), as an explicit commentary on Rinaldo's decision not to drink from the dribble glass offered by the Mantuan host to test the fidelity of Rinaldo's wife (43.6-9): if he spills the wine, she's guilty. It is the first mention of the fact that Rinaldo is married, and the domestication of the hero who moments earlier was in hot pursuit of Angelica, like the ensuing tales of jealous husbands and wayward wives, looks forward to the climactic marriage of the dynastic couple Ruggiero and Bradamante in the final canto. (One might say that Rinaldo's story in cantos 42 and 43 bridges the careers of the poem's two principal heroes, the love-mad Orlando and the betrothed Ruggiero.)

The reason that Rinaldo later gives for not wanting to know the truth about his wife is couched in the language of calculated risk—it would be, he reasons, like betting “mille contra uno” [a thousand to one], for one can lose a lot and gain little (43.66.7)—and both of the last novellas concern attempts to use wealth to corrupt the sexual virtue of wives and, it turns out in the second tale, of the husband as well. Anselmo, the husband in question, is a judge, and by now the Furioso has finally abandoned its aristocratic world and entered the bourgeois one of money and marriage, the realm of the novel. Here husband and wife learn to compromise and forgive each other after they have both sold their bodies—Anselmo's wife promises that “né ch'in parole io possa mai né in atto / ricordarti il tuo error, né a me tu il mio” [I will never in words or in deeds recall to you your error, nor will you recall mine to me] (43.143.3-4)—and they live happily ever after.¹³ Not coincidentally, the telling of these tales to Rinaldo as he passes from Mantua to Ferrara, and the setting of the tales in the two cities—in the first story a Mantuan is cuckolded by a Ferrarese, in the second the Ferrarese Anselmo by the Mantuan Adonio—implies a correspondence between the novelistic world and the one in which the Ferrarese poet Ariosto himself lived. By the end of the Furioso we seem to have come back to the present, as if the poem had cleared away a literary history of epic and romance for a new modern genre.

Notes

1. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press Slavic Series, 1 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 7. One passage in the essay “Discourse in the Novel” seems quite close to my concerns. Bakhtin notes that the inserted genres in Don Quijote “serve the basic purpose of introducing heteroglossia into the novel, of introducing an era's many and diverse languages” (411); then he declares that “this autocriticism of discourse is one of the primary distinguishing features of the novel as a genre. … Already in Don Quixote we have a literary, novelistic discourse being tested by life” (412). Bakhtin, in fact, gives relatively little attention to Don Quijote in his theory of the novel; see Walter Reed, “The Problem of Cervantes in Bakhtin's Poetics,” Cervantes 7 (1987): 29-37. See also Anthony J. Cascardi, “Genre Definition and Multiplicity in Don Quixote,” Cervantes 6 (1986): 39-49.

2. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 299.

3. Spitzer, “Linguistic Perspectivism in the Don Quijote,” in Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), 41-85.

4. For a related discussion of the debt that Cervantes owes to Ariosto's formal techniques see Thomas R. Hart, Cervantes and Ariosto: Renewing Fiction (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 16-38.

5. Eugène Vinaver provides a classic account of the technique of interlace in medieval romance in The Rise of Romance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971). Marco Praloran discusses the innovations of interlace, particularly the suspension of the outcomes of individual episodes, in the narrative practice of Ariosto's predecessor, Matteo Maria Boiardo, in “Il modello formale dell'entrelacement nell'Orlando innamorato,” in Tipografie e romanzi in Val Padana tra quattro e cinquecento, ed. Riccardo Bruscagli and Amedeo Quondam (Modena: Panini, 1992), 117-27. In an extension of his narratological analysis to the Furioso, Praloran focuses less on interlace itself than on the temporal loops in the poem (“Temporalità e tecniche narrative nel Furioso,” Studi italiani 11 [1994]: 5-54). Valuable analyses of Ariosto's interlace at work are offered by Elissa Weaver, “Lettura dell'intreccio dell' Orlando furioso: Il caso delle tre pazzie d'amore,” Strumenti critici 11 (1977): 384-406; Robert M. Durling, The Figure of the Poet in Renaissance Epic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), 140-76; and Albert Russell Ascoli, Ariosto's Bitter Harmony: Crisis and Evasion in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987). On the suspensions of the narrative of the Furioso see Daniel Javitch, “Cantus Interruptus in the Orlando furioso,” Modern Language Notes 95 (1980): 66-80.

6. For the Virgilian allusions in cantos 14-8 see Daniel Javitch, “The Orlando furioso and Ovid's Revision of the Aeneid,” Modern Language Notes 99 (1984): 1029-32. In an argument closely related to the one about genre that I advance here, Javitch suggests that the interruptions of the epic action in Paris by the romance adventures of Grifone in Damascus “deflate the higher status traditionally assigned to heroic narrative” (1031). For the parallel between Rodomonte and Grifone see also Leonizio Pampaloni, “La guerra nel Furioso,” Belphagor 26 (1971): 644-50; and Marina Beer, Romanzi di cavalleria: Il “Furioso” e il romanzo italiano del primo cinquecento (Rome: Bulzoni, 1987), 120-4.

7. The translations of the Furioso are my own; the citations are from the Italian text edited by Lanfranco Caretti (Milan: Ricciardi, 1954). I quote, with minor alterations, from the Walter Starkie translation of Don Quijote (New York: New American Library, 1964); the citations are from the Spanish text edited by Martin de Riquer, 2 vols. (Barcelona: Juventud, 1971).

8. On the “realism” of Ariosto's depiction of Rodomonte's rampage through Paris and its relationship to contemporary warfare see Michael Murrin, History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 80-92.

9. See Giovambattista Giraldi Cinzio, Giraldi Cinzio on Romances, trans. Henry L. Snuggs (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1968); and Daniel Javitch, Prodaiming a Classic: The Canonization of “Orlando furioso” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991).

10. See Weaver (n. 5 above) for other analogies between the jealousy stories of Orlando and Rodomonte.

11. On Orlando's mistreatment of women and horses and the waning role of the warrior on horseback see Beer, 124.

12. On social negotiation in the Boccaccian novella see Thomas M. Greene, “Forms of Accommodation in the Decameron,” Italica 45 (1968): 297-313. Franco Moretti argues that such compromise is the basis of at least one subset of the modern novel (The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, trans. Albert Sbragia [London: Verso, 1987]).

13. For the spirit of bourgeois compromise in the novellas of cantos 28 and 43 see Sergio Zatti, Il “Furioso” fra epos e romanzo (Lucca: Maria Pacini Fazzi, 1990), 55-6; and Alberto Casadei, Il percorso del “Furioso”: Ricerche intorno alle redazioni del 1516 e del 1521 (Bologna: Mulino, 1993), 81-2.