SOURCE: Finnuci, Valeria. “The Masquerade of Masculinity: Astolfo and Jocondo in Orlando furioso, Canto 28.” In Renaissance Transactions: Ariosto and Tasso, edited by Valeria Finucci, pp. 215-45. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, Finucci offers a psychoanalytic reading of gender and disguise in Canto 28 of Ariosto's Orlando furioso, and finds that gender identities were not clearly defined and that the boundaries between normal, normative, and deviant behavior in the Furioso appear as fluid and permeable as in the early twenty-first century.]

“Mirror, mirror on the wall,
Who's the fairest of them all?”

—J. Grimm, “Snow White”

“Madamina, il catalogo è questo
Delle belle che amò il padron mio,
Un catalogo egli è che ho fatt'io,
Osservate, leggete con me.”

—L. Ponte, Don Giovanni

Stories are written to be read. So what do we make of an author who urges his readers to skip the very tale he is proposing for their attention? “Donne, e voi che le donne avete in pregio,” Ludovico Ariosto pleads in Orlando furioso (1532),

per Dio, non date a questa istoria orecchia,
a questa che l'ostier dire in dispregio
e in vostra infamia e biasmo s'apparecchia; …
… Lasciate questo canto, che senza esso
può star l'istoria e non sarà men chiara.

(1-2)

(“Ladies—and ladies' devotees—by all means disregard this tale which the innkeeper is preparing to relate to the disparagement, to the ignominy and censure of your sex. … Skip this canto: it is not essential—my story is no less clear without it.”)¹

To be sure, such modesty is often employed as a device: in Metamorphoses 10, Ovid uses the same tactics before he embarks on the story of Mirrha:

Terrible my tale will be!
Away, daughters! Away, parents! Away!
Or, if my singing charms you, hold this tale
In disbelief; suppose the deed not done;
Or, with belief, believe the punishment.

Ovid had some ethical reasons for his warning, since Mirrha's tale is one of incest and unlawful daughterly desire. But what Ariosto is planning to retell, almost two-thirds of the way through his chivalric romance, is a bawdy story of male sexual prowess, one that his readers would hardly find culturally demanding or difficult to condone. In fact, he did not even invent his subject matter, for this novella had been widely circulated in print, under the title “Historia del re di Pavia.”² That Ariosto included this authorial disclaimer for reasons of morality appears unlikely.

Could this repudiation then constitute a rhetorical ruse, one that Ariosto—often accused of being logorrheic—might have invented to tantalize his readers? First published in 1516 in forty cantos (slightly revised in 1521), the Furioso had six additional cantos and hundreds of new stanzas added at the time of the now standard 1532 edition. The convoluted plot of love and war, which constitutes the main thrust of the work, is spiced here and there with set pieces from the novella tradition. Some of these pieces are ribald, others are not; but salaciousness is not usually a trigger for authorial restraint in the Furioso. It may well be that Ariosto knew that the best way to catch his readers' attention was to advise them to pass over what he was writing. One has simply to recall how successful, narratively speaking, this and other frustrating interruptions of action in the text are to realize that he knows how to create suspense in preparation for a climactic ending.³

To take Ariosto at his word—and his argument makes him an advocate of women's rights ante literam—the tale of King Astolfo and of the nobleman Jocondo is not worth reading because women do not fare well in it. Ariosto then rushes to offer the one reason he is constrained to include such a story in his Furioso: it is there for its historicity, because the piece comes to him from his master, Turpino, whose (questionable) authority guarantees the “truthfulness” of his other sources, at least in matters of war. Finding the novella politically incorrect for his mixed audience, Ariosto distances himself from its ostensible narrator, an innkeeper. This narrator, however—himself a new historicist ante literam—knows how to avoid being dismissed: his story is true, he claims, and his source is the nobleman Gian Francesco Valerio, a historical figure of Ariosto's time.⁴ Whether the novella recounts actual events or not is beside the point, for even at his most cogent moments Ariosto is unreliable; as for the innkeeper, he may be giving his story about women's inconstancy and sexual hunger a mysogynistic spin because he needs to entertain an irascible knight, the Saracen Rodomonte. Rodomonte has hated women ever since he was scorned by his fiancée, Doralice; he had seized the occasion for a lengthy, vituperative curse on the female sex just a few octaves earlier (27.117-21).

Before offering my own hypothesis on Ariosto's motives for his disclaimer, let me summarize the novella. In two key details Ariosto revises the tale of the Lombard king who travels from country to country following his discovery of the queen's infidelity: he adds the theme of King Astolfo's handsomeness and accompanying narcissism, which seems out of place in an account of men cuckolded by women, and he shrinks the entourage of traveling companions to one, Jocondo. The story begins with the presentation of Astolfo as the most handsome man in the world: “fu ne la giovinezza sua sì bello, / che mai poch'altri giunsero a quel segno” (“[he] was so handsome in his youth that seldom had anyone matched him for beauty,” 4). When, in this masculine version of the “Snow White” fairy tale, the king is told that there is a better looking man than himself residing in Rome, he summons the rival, Jocondo, to his court to see if the claim is true. He is warned, however, that his invitation may be refused, for this knight is too much in love with his wife ever to leave her. Eventually Jocondo undertakes the journey to Lombardy, but he has immediate reasons to regret this decision: turning back to retrieve a neck chain given him by his wife as a good-bye present and pledge of faithfulness, he finds her in bed with a stable boy. Needless to say, by the time he arrives in Lombardy his vaunted beauty is lost. It takes some time for Jocondo to discover a way out of his melancholic moroseness and become once more true to his name. The occasion that affords him this recovery is the chance witnessing through a hole in the wall of King Astolfo's wife, dallying with a dwarf. Feeling equal or even superior to the king now, for at least his own wife had the decency to choose a better-looking man with whom to commit adultery, he divulges the matter to Astolfo. Since the king had promised not to harm the queen, no matter what was revealed about her, the two men decide to take their anger elsewhere.⁵ They leave Lombardy on a winding journey across Europe with the avowed purpose of inflicting on one thousand men what has been inflicted on themselves. This task turns out to be easy, since no woman resists their sexual advances, whether because of their handsomeness or because of the money they generously bestow.

Pleasure soon disappears from this arrangement, however, because the repetitive nature of their enterprise and the need to continuously exercise their prowess make a chore of what started out as a sexual adventure: when every desire is satisfied, what is the point of desiring more? To curtail this useless libidinal expenditure, the two friends resort to a new arrangement. They buy a young Spanish woman, Fiammetta, from her father and pledge to share her sexually on an equal basis on the understanding that a woman may remain faithful if two men, rather than one, take turns in satisfying her sexually.⁶ But even this movement from polygyny to polyandry proves inadequate, failing as it does to take into account female agency: one night Fiammetta, exercising for the first time her desire to desire, to give the story a female-friendly reading—or, to give it a mysogynistic one, letting her own sexual hunger dictate her actions, as do all the women in our story—allows a former acquaintance, a Greek, to make love to her while she lies in bed between her two owners. Astolfo and Jocondo will take no more: acknowledging that women have minds and sexual needs of their own, they choose monogamy and return to their wives. “Così fan tutte!”

No wonder that this novella, with its abundance of erotic offerings, touched a nerve in people's imagination. Among the many set pieces of the Furioso, the story of Astolfo and Jocondo was the most successful from the very beginning: influential imitations were written not only in Italy but also in France (by La Fontaine) and Spain (by Cervantes and the picaresque writers); even today it is considered perhaps the best novella of the sixteenth century.⁷ True, better than the main storyline, the novellas could nonchalantly offer some sexual frisson or give a polemical reading of gender frictions, thanks in part to their “disposable” nature: for, since the protagonists were not the main ones, Ariosto could eliminate—with no apparent damage to the structure of his work—whatever proved too controversial during readings at court. But I would prefer to link the success of this story to the obsession with erotica that swept Italy during the first half of the sixteenth century and reached its apex in the middle 1520s. The publication of Pletro Aretino's I sedici modi (The Sixteen Ways), which coupled Giulio Romano's illustrations of human sexual acrobatics and the “divino” Aretino's verbal nimbleness, took place in 1524; and painfully hilarious treatises on the goodness of prostitution, such as Aretino's Ragionamenti (1534), come out of the same obsession.⁸ Titian's Venus of Urbino, the great masterpiece of erotic painting (1538), was still to be executed of course, yet its commission, made years earlier, was fostered by the contemporary interest in the representation of the nude and eroticized body. Voyeuristic and virtuosistic sex, in short—narrated, versified, played, or illustrated—sold.

The moral of the Astolfo and Jocondo story is that it is pointless for men to try to keep up with the desires of sex-crazed females.⁹ By renouncing all women in the end, our two men seem to suggest that the reason for cuckoldry is not that men are insufficiently potent, but that they somehow have been caught up in a definition of manhood that is linked, wrongly (as can be expected), to women's needs. No matter how often virility is staged, it must be endlessly restaged, they discover, when maleness is tied to a genital sexuality that requires women's faithfulness for confirmation of its adequacy. In this sense, the “wise” knight Rinaldo, with Orlando, the most powerful Christian paladin, is right, unlike our two men, in refusing to learn whether his wife has been faithful:

                              Ben sarebbe folle
chi quel che non vorria trovar, cercasse.
Mia donna è donna, ed ogni donna è molle:
lascian star mia credenza come stasse.

(43.6)

(He would be an utter fool who sought for what he had no wish to find. My wife is a woman, and every woman is pliant. Let my faith remain undisturbed.)

Whatever Rinaldo's preference, the story of Astolfo and Jocondo was understood and rewritten by a host of writers throughout Europe as the two men's Don Juanesque revenge for their wives' infidelity; the fact that the king and his companion break faith with the one thousand other women in the process never became a point of interest. Ariosto, as I mentioned, urges his readers to skip over this story because it disparages women. But I would like to propose a different reason for his disclaimer. What I read in canto 28 is not so much a sustained reflection on the perils for men of female sexuality but rather the perplexing working through of the notion that masculinity may be other than what it is made to stand for in culture, and that virility—notwithstanding the satyriasis displayed—does not per se guarantee male power. That this insight is embedded in the most unlikely setting for the questioning of masculinity, given the collection of “manly” acts recorded in the story, may be less strange than it appears, for this chivalric epic probes, after all, the tattered illusions and phantasmic progresses of romances of old. And what a success the Furioso was at it: the text was an incredibly popular one, read, sung, recited, memorized, even staged throughout most of the sixteenth century, and with sales handily surpassing those of the Bible.¹⁰

As I read it, Ariosto portrays man in the Astolfo and Jocondo story as just as feminized and narcissistically centered on physical attributes as woman can be in traditional culture. In short, masculinity is a construct, a masquerade, a display, a performance, just like femininity.¹¹ It has often been said that the sixteenth century was obsessed with the notion of female promiscuity and the consequences that the lack of chastity among females had for men.¹² By juxtaposing a plot centered on men's revenge for this penchant in women, a revenge that requires the display of some forms of macho masculine sexuality, with a characterization of maleness that is constructed as shifting, Ariosto underscores the neurosis behind the cultural construction of masculinity as the defining trait of what a man is. I do not intend to link effeminacy directly with a discourse on homoeroticism, because for me effeminacy is central to any discourse on sexuality, be it heterosexual or homosexual. This is especially true when we focus on a period in which new, ideologically inflected definitions of male subjectivity were being explored and when what constituted socially legible homosexual behavior is different from our contemporary view.¹³ At the same time, I do not read effeminacy as a sure sign of disorder and demise of the Law of the Father. A feminized, or potentially unstable, masculinity should perhaps not be pathologized in an era in which male homosocial ties clearly had their place within a heterosocial/sexual symbolic. My tools in examining this story come mostly from psychoanalysis, because Freudian, and, to a lesser extent, Lacanian analyses allow me more fully, I hope, to probe the inner life of characters offered as ambiguous and to concentrate on their confused articulations of identity.

Don Juan-style sexual gratification has dependably come across in culture as manly. But does the possession of hundreds of women make men heterosexual in their choice of object? More to the point, are our two fetishists of the penis, Astolfo and Jocondo, more masculine because they dispense their sexual favors widely? Lacan suggests that this is hardly so: “virile display in the human being itself appears as feminine” (“The Meaning of the Phallus,” 85). In the early modern period, too, excessive sexual expenditure was linked to emasculation, because overconcentration on sexual, bodily matters showed lack of manly restraint and practicality, and thus made man resemble woman. A case in point is that of Antony, whose love for Cleopatra rendered him womanish in Shakespeare's play. Medical treatises of the time stressed the same principle: moderation made a man manly; too much or too little sex was unhealthy, turned the individual morose, was detrimental to the brain, and could lead to an early death.¹⁴ Erotic manuals tended to emphasize the quality, variety, originality, and theatricality of the heterosexual encounter, not repetition.¹⁵

Ariosto has Astolfo and Jocondo start their debauching errantry not because they are sexually unfulfilled or wanton themselves but because they want to cuckold other men for the sake of reestablishing some sexual “worth” for themselves after their respective conjugal betrayals. Thus their motive for hypersexuality is political. The mistake of conflating penis and phallus, however, makes these two friends forget where power lies; their journey toward the consolations of romance turns out to be full of pitfalls, founded as it is on the vagaries of sex: not sex as suicide, as in the case of Callimaco in Niccolò Machiavelli's comic play La Mandragola, but sex as social competition. Astolfo and Jocondo's search is also misplaced because their aim is to recoup a loss brought upon them by their wives. But this loss exists only in their unconscious—their sexual misadventure at home undermined their feelings of wholeness and narcissistic omnipotence—because they never truly possessed what they now mourn as lost.

This journey into sexual one-upmanship reveals more homoerotic frisson than heterosexual curiosity, a fact that is evident not only when Astolfo and Jocondo competitively share more or less the same women in sequence, but also when they perversely require one female to lie in bed between them, in a triangulation of desire à la Girard, so that each is present when the other is sexually engaged.¹⁶ Their agenda is homosocial rather than sexual; it is directed at men and addresses male fears about sexual inadequacy. But it has nothing to do with women, whose only task is to provide the body. In this sense I would like to revise the formulation posited originally by Eve Sedgwick in which homosociality is presented to prevent homosexuality. In my view, this homosocial state of being does not necessarily exclude homoeroticism. Thus the apparently heterosexual triangle with Fiammetta somehow enacts the Freudian insight that in triangular situations a man can sublimate his feelings for another man by claiming that he does not love him, for she is the one who ostensibly does.

Central to this male/male sharing is the circulation and exchange of women, who are bought, used, and then released for further sexual consumption. No actual female face or name is supplied to the reader in this story, apart from Fiammetta's, since the point for Astolfo and Jocondo is not to think of any woman as a subject, but to act out an exhibitionistic need to be seen by other men as manly through the possession of their anonymous wives. Hypermasculinity is a masquerade theatrically staged for the sake of other men; what drives our two companions is after all collectomania, not erotomania. As Irigaray argues, “reigning everywhere, although prohibited in practice, hom(m)osexuality is played out through the bodies of women, matter, or sign, and heterosexuality has been up to now just an alibi for the smooth workings of man's relation with himself, of relations among men” (172). Even the two men's final settling on the prostitute Fiammetta confirms that the prostitute has worth precisely because she has been used, that is, she has been thoroughly objectified and rendered passively available.¹⁷ As the narrator explains, Fiammetta is chosen because it is easy to have her, for she provides the “furnace” in which to satisfy unproblematic sexual needs:

Pigliano la fanciulla, e piacer n'hanno
or l'un or l'altro in caritade e in pace,
come a vicenda i mantici che danno,
or l'uno or l'altro fiato alla fornace.

(54)

([they] took their pleasure with her in turns, in peace and charity, like two bellows each blowing alternately upon the furnace.)¹⁸

The ambiguous masculinity of Astolfo and Jocondo is not all that undermines the prevalent reading of this story as one of male hyperbolic sexual prowess, for Ariosto adds a trait to his characterization of the two men that does not usually sit well with hypermanhood: male beauty. If beauty is what turns women into objects of desire, why would an author strip men of their customary position of power as subjects and emphasize a physical attribute that turns them into objects? And why write so fulsomely of male beauty in a story in which women seem to be taken the least by the handsomeness of their counterparts? But here is how Astolfo is introduced by the innkeeper:

Bello era, ed a ciascun così parea:
ma di molto egli ancor più si tenea.
                    Non stimava egli tanto per l'altezza
del grado suo, d'avere ognun minore;
né tanto, che di genti e di ricchezza,
di tutti i re vicini era il maggiore;
quanto che di presenza e di bellezza
avea per tutto ‘l mondo il primo onore.

(5)

(Yes, he was handsome, and everyone recognized it, but he was far and away his own greatest admirer for this. He valued less the eminence of his station, which set him over everybody else; or the magnitude of his wealth and nation, which made him greater than all the neighbouring kings; what he valued most of all was the pre-eminence he enjoyed throughout the world for his beautiful physique.)

Now, although the issue of male handsomeness has not been tackled with the frequency with which female beauty has been on a variety of fronts, Vitruvian parameters of ideal proportions did indeed center on the male body. Unlike female beauty which was associated with ornaments, following a more or less standard Petrarchan catalogue of parts, male beauty was linked to measurements. Moreover, given that beauty is the good of all exertions on the part, say, of the visual artist, and culturally and biologically the male body was considered more functionally perfect than the female, the artist, it was thought, could realize the perfect idea of beauty precisely by representing the male body.¹⁹ Even treatises dedicated solely to women, such as Agnolo Firenzuola's On the Beauty of Women (1541), made clear that female and male beauty are complementary: every woman should have something of the male in her and vice versa.

For Neoplatonics, male handsomeness was of course a visualization of inner virtues: good external features were thought to reflect an internal moral goodness, or, as Bembo states in Castiglione's Il libro del cortegiano, the handsome are good (“e li belli boni,” 4.58).²⁰ In this sense, Astolfo would, by virtue of being handsome, be a better king than most, and Jocondo, a good nobleman. But such is hardly the case: Astolfo gives little thought to political matters and even leaves his kingdom unattended for reasons that are hardly pressing; and Jocondo proves incapable of or uninterested in improving his father's fortune: “la roba di che ‘l padre il lasciò erede, / nè mai cresciuta avea nè minuita” (“the inheritance bequeathed him by his father had neither grown nor shrunk in value,” 9). Both men, in fact, although born into a position of wealth, power, and authority, are described as emasculated on these fronts; their masculinity in this respect is given as problematic, as if to parallel some hypothesized disarray of the paternal function. Politically speaking, the two men would then reflect the historical failure of contemporary Italian princes and dukes to further a nation-building process, a goal that eluded Italy for centuries to come. This inability, Machiavelli teaches, had its roots in the opportunism, disinterest, and narcissism of those in charge: real-life, mindless, self-centered Astolfo figures.

Let me note that the politics of spectatorship are not necessarily the same when handsome men, rather than women, are displayed. Astolfo might have been a worthy subject for a painting by Apelles and Zeuxis, the narrator emphasizes. But the women that Zeuxis painted had their individualities canceled out in the representation, because Zeuxis seized whatever parts of five female bodies he saw as perfect and painted them to reflect his idea of a single beautiful woman as his mind constructed her.²¹ Here, by contrast, Astolfo is presented as in control of his representation. He lavishly praises the parts of his own body that are well formed: “essendosi lodato / or del bel viso or de la bella mano” ([he] “often flattered himself, one moment on his beautiful face, the next, on his exquisite hand,” 6). And he presents himself to his courtier Fausto as sure of his superior body: “avendolo un giorno domandato / se mai veduto avea, presso e lontano, altro uom di forma così ben composto” (“he asked Fausto whether he had ever, anywhere, set eyes on a man as well built as himself,” 4-5). Jocondo too, for his part, knows what he needs to improve his physical goods and acts on this knowledge, as when he orders rich clothes for himself before leaving Rome to meet Astolfo: “vesti fe' far per comparire adorno, / che talor cresce una beltà un bel manto” ([he] “ordered new clothing, to make his appearance suitably dressed—for a handsome cloak will enhance a man's looks,” 12).²² Emphasis on handsomeness then is empowering and not objectifying when one is in charge of the representation.²³ In no instance, however, no matter how much masculinity is deessentialized, is the handsome male body directly appreciated by another man, for heterosexual boundaries must remain in place at all costs. Any unrepressed form of erotic contemplation would inevitably be understood as homosexually voyeuristic. Fausto, for one, although he listens politely, is unimpressed by Astolfo's body.

Of course, if beauty does not make men powerless, it makes them womanish. Interestingly, the feminization of men does not entail here, as is often the case, the masculinization of women, because the narrative's motor is erotics and not power. Femininity is cast as disruptive and at odds with social relations no matter who embodies it, woman or man. When men are represented as feminized, the apprehension that this gender-related anxiety generates is displaced onto the other sex, and the result is the representation of women as out of control, devouring. Such a movement is clearly mapped in our tale. Women do not simply make love: their erotic pursuits make them betray their well-endowed husbands, choose lewd men, and forget all laws of decency and status-connected self-restraint. Jocondo's wife is unwilling to wait more than an hour after her husband's departure to betray him; the queen gives herself to a dwarf even after he rebuffs her. The two women's lovemaking is shown to have animal connotations: the first lover chosen is dirty; the second, grotesquely shortened. By contrast, Fiammetta is cast as less of a threat to the two men than their wives because she is unmarried and functions as a servant. Once it is settled that she will be equally shared, the level of erotic competition between the two men diminishes, since she will—by contract—betray, but only with the other person in the triangle.

Another instance of problematic characterization of masculinity in this novella can be seen in the rendering of the two men's narcissism, again a feature at odds in a story that apparently means to poke fun at women.²⁴ In “On Narcissism,” Freud hypothesizes that the route toward outgrowing narcissism is through outgrowing one's self-centeredness and loving another. Men give up their narcissism with time but women, he argues, often retain it. The men in our story have clearly not followed the path outlined above, despite their age. Astolfo and Jocondo have a specular relationship, in that each identifies with the other by desiring the same object. A characteristic of the narcissist is, notoriously, an exhibitionistic desire to be admired. Such is the case of Astolfo. He constitutes his own love object and, although married, not only loves himself alone, but even solicits admiration from his subjects—until he is told that there is another man as handsome as he. Rather than try to eliminate his rival, like the queen in “Snow White,” he decides to check out the competition. His desire to see his purported double is partly a desire to dominate the other by the superiority of his physical attributes and partly a desire to recognize himself in the other. When he gets reassured that Jocondo is not superior to him in beauty, he begins to “love” him because the other, handsome and of the same sex, constitutes his mirrored image.²⁵

Although seemingly less narcissistically self-centered than Astolfo, Jocondo displays many of the same traits. I have already remarked on his desire for sartorial style. His love for his wife is narcissistic in that he finds gratification in seeing himself exclusively loved, in reflecting himself in the eye of another from whom he dreads to be separated. He is so fused with her that he neglects his chivalric obligation to obey the king's command without question or delay. Like Astolfo, he sees the other not as his alter ego but as his alterity. His wife functions more as a mother for him than the queen does for Astolfo, in that separation from her, because she is necessary for his selfhood and socialization, can only bring self-fragmentation and loss. This is why his narcissistic wound at discovering himself cuckolded is not only deeper than Astolfo's, but gets inscribed in his face, which loses its appeal:

e la faccia, che dianzi era sì bella,
si cangia sì, che più non sembra quella.
                    Par che gli occhi se ascondin ne la testa;
cresciuto il naso par nel viso scarno;
de la beltà sì poca gli ne resta,
che ne potrà far paragone indarno.

(26-27)

(his face, once so handsome, changed beyond recognition. His eyes seemed to have sunk into his head, his nose seemed bigger on his gaunt face; so little remained of his good looks that there was no further point in matching him with others.)

The loss of facial beauty is a mask of hysteria, for disfigurement, Freud argues, can be the physical equivalent of “a slap in the face” (“Medusa's Head”).

Refusing to take vengeance first, Jocondo runs away from home, falls into melancholia, and withdraws from company, until he discovers the queen's betrayal of her husband. In making Astolfo catch his wife in flagrante delicto, Jocondo finds himself vindicated, since the king is his superior and the queen shows herself to be anything but queenly in her sexual life. Having abjected the ‘mother’ (the queen is a mother figure par excellence), he can now fully identify with an ideal phallic image, a substitutive paternal ego in the person of the king; Astolfo helps him regain a sense of fullness of the self.²⁶ Interestingly Jocondo recovers his beauty then and there:

Allegro torna e grasso e rubicondo,
che sembra un cherubin del paradiso;
che ‘l re, il fratello, e tutta la famiglia
di tal mutazion si maraviglia.

(39)

(He became happy again, filled out, took on colour, looked once more like a cherub from paradise—a transformation which astonished his brother and the king and the entire household.)

Such a turn of events, however, brings no end to the hysteria, which, in mimetic sympathy, now infects Astolfo. Hysteria appears in the figural rendering of the two men as constantly phallicized figures, their journey reduced to a series of erections as they give spur, through fantasies of omnipotence, to their narcissistic rage for having been “diminished”:

Travestiti cercaro Italia, Francia,
le terre de' Fiamminghi e de l'Inglesi;
e quante ne vedean di bella guancia,
trovavan tutte ai prieghi lor cortesi.
Davano, e dato loro era la mancia;
e spesso rimetteano i denari spesi.
Da loro pregate foro molte, e foro
anch'altretante che pregaron loro.

(48)

(“In disguise they scoured Italy, France, Flanders, and England, and as many fair-cheeked ladies as they saw, they found responsive to their prayers. They would give money, and they would receive payments—indeed often they recovered their disbursements. Many ladies received their addresses, and as many more made advances to them.)

Hysteria is evident in their choice of Fiammetta as a psychotic defence against their fear of being sexually upstaged by the other, so that she is made to exist as a welcoming vagina in a ménage à trois, on duty at all hours:

sempre in mezzo a duo la notte giaccio
e meco or l'uno or l'altro si trastulla,
e sempre a l'un di lor mi trovo in braccio.

(61)

(I always sleep between the two of them. There is always one or the other making love to me—I'm always in the arms of one of them.)

That Ariosto makes Fiammetta throw the arrangement over in the end, allowing her to cast off a masochistic acceptance of the erotics of power in favor of a parodic sexual presa di coscienza, testifies not so much to the fact that where there is a will there is a way but that the stakes of Astolfo and Jocondo's picaresque search have become paranoiac.

It is not by chance that all this lovemaking is sterile. Neither the two wives nor any of the one thousand women Astolfo and Jocondo make love to ever gets pregnant. One could conclude that in tandem with their characterization as effeminate, the two men are constructed as unable to father. But this is the case only in the final, 1532, version of the Furioso, and the revision is significant. In the first and second editions, the narrator gave Astolfo a son; in fact, the story starts by naming Astolfo the father of the man who is king of Lombardy at the time when the story is being told: “Astolfo Re di Longobardi: quello / che costui che regna hor tenne per padre” (“Astolfo, king of the Lombards, the one who was the father of the present king,” 26.4; my translation). This reference is eliminated in the third version, where the king is introduced not as a father but as a brother—of a monk—also without issue, from whom he inherited the kingdom: “Astolfo, re de' Longobardi, quello / a cui lasciò il fratel monaco il regno” (“Astolfo, the King of the Lombards who was left his kingdom by his monastic brother,” 4). The choice is telling, for in removing the anxiety over reproduction that fueled many of these early modern stories of cuckoldry, Ariosto is able not only to explore at length and with intriguing results the vagaries of a phallic desire separated from a patriarchal injunction to secure name and property through generation; he is also able to present the work of emulation/competition between men as disruptive when it leaves no space for sublimation.

Making a series of women bear the weight of the two men's loss of self does not lead to a solution; repetition, if necessary to control feelings of bereavement or to restage lack as a way of mastering it, hardly solves their original problem or brings them closure. No matter how much the mother seems to be adjected, she returns to haunt the two men; trying to figure out what she desires—and why she does not desire them—Astolfo and Jocondo can only scatter their environment with female bodies. Still, it is only through compulsive repetition that they can rehearse the momentous scenes that eventually drew both away from their homes. And that these scenes are traumatic is onomastically suggested by the only woman named in the story, Fiammetta. Such a name could be easily read as Ariosto's literary nod to the master of the Italian novella, Boccaccio, who made of “Fiammetta” a household name. But I would like to suggest another, less obvious meaning for it: Fiammetta as “little flame.” Jean Laplanche has argued that fire is a figure that paradigmatically allows the subject to perceive a traumatic event (Problématiques, 3.194-96). In the Furioso, more than standing as a flame of passion, Fiammetta stands, diminutively, as the emblem of a trauma that will not be healed.

Let us take the case of Jocondo first. This knight seems at the beginning of the story to have a well-adjusted, heterosexual libido. But his object libido is redirected toward the ego (ego libido) following two traumatic scenes of seduction: of his wife and of the queen. Both scenes play all three of the original fantasies described by Laplanche and Pontalis: the primal scene, the seduction, and castration (“Fantasy”). These scenes are fantasies in that they are framed (the first by a veil, the second by a tiny hole in the wall) and oedipal in their figuration. Jocondo is the “child” in both the first scene, through identification with the stable boy (“‘l ragazzo,” 36) making love to an older woman, and in the second, through identification with a dwarf (a shorter man, and thus in fantasy a younger man), making love to the queen.²⁷ The difference in the second scene is that in the movement from mother to Mother, female sexual desire has been made grotesque: the queen not only makes love to an inferior being but is insatiable and irreverent: “non si fa festa giorno” (“they had no rest-day,” 37). Moreover, if in the first scene Jocondo is the unwilling and startled onlooker, in the second he is in control and thus reenacts, and tries to master in the repetition, the original trauma of castration.

Both scenes have something unheimlich about them. In the first scene Jocondo is returning home in a hurry to retrieve the necklace given him by his wife, which he had left under the pillow. Seeing his wife asleep on the conjugal bed with a servant in postcoital somnolentia, he experiences a sort of Medusan castration and cannot react:

La cortina levò senza far motto,
e vide quel che men veder credea:
che la sua casta e fedel moglie, sotto
la coltre, in braccio a un giovene giacea. …
                    S'attonito restasse e malcontento,
meglio è pensarlo e farne fede altrui,
ch'esserne mai per far l'esperimento
che con suo gran dolor ne fe' costui.
Da lo sdegno assalito, ebbe talento
di trar la spada e uccidergli ambedui:
ma da l'amor che porta, al suo dispetto,
all'ingrata moglier, gli fu interdetto.
… Quanto potè più tacito uscì fuore,
scese le scale, e rimontò a cavallo.

(21-23)

(“He lifted the curtains without a word—and was no little surprised by what he saw: his chaste and loyal wife under the covers in a young man's arms! … Was he dumbstruck and dismayed? You had better take another's word for this than undergo the experience at first hand, as did Jocondo to his great chagrin. In a fit of fury he made to draw his sword and slay the pair of them; what stopped him was the love which despite himself he bore his thankless wife. … So he crept out of the room as silently as he could, descended the stairs, [and] mounted his horse.)

The reaction that is not staged, the scream that does not come out, shows that Jocondo is unable to separate himself as yet from his too close other and embrace the law.²⁸ No wonder that he plunges into melancholia. The innkeeper implicates his male listeners in his retelling, just as much as the author implicates his male readers, by deflecting paranoia on them as well: better to be told about such a fact than to experience it, better to hear than to see.

In the second scene, of the queen and her dwarf, Jocondo cannot believe the strange spectacle (“sì strano spettacolo,” 39) that is taking place, and has to look at it again and again, for at first he thinks he is dreaming. This salacious, voyeuristic look provokes in him a feeling of disgust.²⁹ The dwarf, in his grotesquely shortened form and hunchback shape, moreover, is a figure of both castration and the uncanny (“uno sgrignuto mostro e contrafatto,” 35; “vil sergente,” 42; “il bruttissimo omiciuolo,” 43). This time Jocondo's reaction is voiced and vindictive, for misery loves company; by calling Astolfo to witness his own debasement and thus somehow symbolically castrating him, he finds a way out of his self-imposed quarantine, recovers a sense of selfhood, and becomes a man of the world.

Astolfo at first has the identical reaction that Jocondo had in seeing his wife's adultery: he is unable to take in all this ocular proof at once. In his case, too, the scream cannot be voiced:

Se parve al re vituperoso l'atto,
lo crederete ben, senza ch'io ‘l giuri.
Ne fu per arrabbiar, per venir matto;
ne fu per dar del capo in tutti i muri;
fu per gridar, fu per non stare al patto:
ma forza è che la bocca al fin si turi.

(44)

(That this struck the king as outrageous you will accept without my having to swear to it. He was ready to explode, to run amuck; he was ready to ram his head against every wall, to scream; he was ready to break his oath. But in the end he had perforce to plug his mouth.)

But then, unlike Jocondo, who gets stuck in melancholia as a response to narcissistic injury, Astolfo proceeds straight to mania, and the picaresque journey begins.

What follows, in its outer search for revenge on other men and its inner search for a woman—a mother—who will not betray, is predicated on fantasy. In fantasy, individuals can identify across gender and even with inanimate elements in the scene of fantasy. Astolfo can thus identify with Jocondo, and vice versa, and possess through him and with him any woman, also available to the other, but whose enjoyment can be magnified by seeing another person desiring her. Each can identify with all women in their being able, at least as they are imagined, to be utterly possessed and passive. Given the desire to be observed while copulating, as in the arrangement with Fiammetta, each can identify also with the men who took their place in their wives' beds. Each can identify with Fiammetta as well and fantasize being loved/possessed by an object of homoerotic desire without actually acting out this fantasy. Finally, each can identify with the whole scene and repeat ad infinitum his own primal scene with the other as the silent onlooker. But although Astolfo or Jocondo can assume at will both a feminine and a masculine position, as subject each can only look on, excluded. Knowledge brings powerlessness.

This hysterical doubling/mutual emulation is in any case difficult to hold down. If doubling, in its link to castration anxiety, is beneficial because it allows the individual to cancel the female threat by getting reassurance through the image of the other as the same (“E perchè [dicea il re] vo' che mi spiaccia / aver più te ch'un altro in compagnia? [“Why—exclaimed the king—should I object to sharing a woman with you more than with another?”], 50),³⁰ it can on the other hand give rise to hostility, because the quasi-similar other is too similar.³¹ Such a feeling does not necessarily arise out of a competition for the same object, nor is the result of wanting to act out the same desire. Freud notes, for example, that normal jealousy can be many times “experienced bisexually,” that is, the jealous subject wishes to be in the place not only of the rival but also of the beloved.³² Thus identification across gender can be sustained by jealousy just as it is by fantasy.

The way out of narcissistic rage, mimetic repetition, and duplicate selfhood presents itself when Astolfo and Jocondo recognize that they do not know what the other desires and that no woman can be wholly owned. Had they been willing to learn from Fiammetta's choice, or had they asked themselves “What does woman want?” rather than putting their conceits on center stage, they would have understood that what matters for women in sex is neither repetition nor at least two men per night, but perhaps the chance to decide for themselves. Outwitting her two lovers, Fiammetta got herself not so much a man who did not “dismount once all night long” (“scender non ne vuol per tutta notte.” 64) as Ariosto puts it, but the one she wanted. True, the grammatical referent for “non ne vuol” is the Greek lover rather than Fiammetta, and thus his desire rather than hers may once more be represented. Yet Fiammetta had reassured him earlier of the extent of her desire (“Credi (dicea) che men di te nol bramo” [“I want this no less than you do”], 60), and also had to be, at the very least, inventive and precise in her directions to him for the location in bed where she was lying was crucial to their sexual satisfaction:

Il Greco, sì come ella gli disegna,
.....va brancolando infin che ‘l letto trova:
e di là dove gli altri avean le piante,
tacito si cacciò col capo inante.
                    Fra l'una e l'altra gamba di Fiammetta
che supina giacea, diritto venne;
e quando le fu a par, l'abbracciò stretta,
e sopra lei sin presso al dì si tenne.

(62-64)

(the boy, following her instructions, … groped his way till he found the bed—into which, at the point where the sleepers had their feet, he quietly intruded head first. He slipped between the legs of Fiametta, who was lying on her back, and slid her up until they were face to face, when he hugged her tightly. He straddled her till day break.)

It is at this point, filled with a veritable sexual nausea, that Astolfo and Jocondo remove themselves from active heterosexual desire altogether and start to live where they have always wanted: in fantasy. The sudden end of their erotic quest and their return home, the resolution of the “errore”/“errare” paradigm, does not constitute for me a smart, bourgeois choice, as has been argued; I read it as a way to cancel out the other by remaining involved in the narcissistic story of selves as ideal selves.³³ In doing so Ariosto's characters can disavow difference. Still, their choice does mark a change. True, nothing has changed in the domestic situation that made the two men leave their wives in the first place; moreover, desire has not been erased, nor has concupiscence been conquered. But what has changed is that women have been removed from the equation. They are eliminated, not to erase the trauma, but because they in a sense were in the equation under false pretences, for they never existed per se. The one thousand and three women were always and only, to take it once more from Lacan, “symptoms” of men's subjectivity.³⁴

To be sure, the two friends could have found a degree of pleasure in shifting to some form of feminine masochism after they were appraised of Fiammetta's adventure with her Greek lover. Or they might have responded with melancholic withdrawal, as Jocondo did following his wife's betrayal. But by now their errantry has become shabby, and the women they share are of lower and lower social status. So they opt to show their phallic power by marking the successful exorcism of their fears with a Gargantuan, hysteric, orgasmic laughter:

Poi scoppiaro ugualmente in tanto riso,
che con la bocca aperta e gli occhi chiusi,
potendo a pena il fiato aver del petto,
a dietro si lasciar cader sul letto.
                    … ebbon tanto riso, che dolere
se ne sentiano il petto, e pianger gli occhi.

(71-72)

(Then they burst into fits of laughter, their mouths open and their eyes shut till, practically breathless, they fell backwards onto the bed. … [T]hey had laughed so much that their ribs ached and their eyes streamed.)

This also puts an end to their adventures in the never-never land of unbound sexual gratifications; before leaving, they allow Fiammetta to wed her lover and thus sanction the institutionalization of desire through marriage, the end of romance through an astute reading of the economics of loving.

At home, Astolfo and Jocondo will be, as before, and as they like it, once more alone and on center stage. Surprisingly, at the very moment in which they decline to judge, and let themselves be judged, as manly men, they are rendered as fully masculinized, for their masculinity is tied now not to sex—the flesh after all cannot signify, Lacan teaches—but to the power of the phallus. In the final version of this tale Ariosto omits an octave, present in the two earlier editions, that refers to a son born from the union between the queen and the dwarf and aptly named Strange Desire (“Stranodesiderio”). This name was later shortened into “Desire” to avoid improper allusions to the queen's sexual tastes.³⁵ Had he kept this bastard son in the text, Ariosto would have left Astolfo still living through the story of his sexual and oedipal demise, still trapped in the tensions and pleasures of the family romance. By deleting the illegitimate son, Ariosto brings the novella full circle, for we are told that neither Jocondo nor Astolfo will let themselves now be contaminated anew by their wives' aberrancies: “di ch'affanno mai più non si pigliaro,” (74) (“who never occasioned them another moment's distress”). Erotic politics are pushed aside to make room for gender politics. There is no doubt that, once back in power, the king and the knight will restart their love affair with the mirror.

So what does this story tell us about the representation of masculinity in Orlando furioso and the chivalric romance, and about gender relations in the sixteenth century in general? Should the reader skip the canto because women are portrayed dismissively, as Ariosto suggests, or because men are represented as masquerading masculinity, even when they aggressively test its most praised attribute, virility? Is there a real difference, all things considered, between the kind of manhood impersonated by Count Orlando, whose desire thrives on postponement until he realizes that he has arrived too late at his dreamed sexual banquet and goes mad, and the kind of manhood impersonated by Astolfo and Jocondo, whose desires are gratified to the point of disenchantment? In both cases what constitutes masculinity is very much at stake; if, as the Saracen knight Mandricardo hints, the end of Orlando's search for love leads him to a metaphoric self-castration (“E dicea ch'imitato avea il castore, / il qual si strappa i genitali sui” [“The count had imitated the beaver, he explained, who rips off his genitals”], 27, 57), then Astolfo and Jocondo's return to reality neither brings them closer to understanding the secret of women nor makes them better equipped to put an end to their self-mystification. In any case, whether in Orlando's world of romance or in the cynical, commodified realm of Astolfo and Jocondo, the confrontation with otherness leaves women out of the equation. But while for Orlando the endless search for armor or for Angelica is a postoedipal longing for a lost or perhaps never fully developed selfhood, for Astolfo and Jocondo, I would argue, the search for a mother who will not betray them is a search for a preoedipal, primal, Edenic world, uncontaminated by the confrontations and the urgencies of the symbolic. Thus, for Orlando the end of his story in the Furioso means his return to, and total embrace of, the paternal order, while for Astolfo and Jocondo the end of their search is a reimmersion in the narcissism with which their story started out, the return to sameness.

The trials of masculinity in Ariosto show how incomplete the articulations of identity—masculine as well as feminine—were in the period in which he wrote, and how deeply the emergent definitions of what was private and what was public influenced the social construction of gender. The boundaries between normal, normative, and deviant behavior were in many ways just as permeable in the secularized world of Ariosto testing the illusions of a bygone era of romance adventures, as they are in our postmodern times. In the end, if gender is, in the Lacanian sense, a masquerade, a form of fetishistic transvestism, then the labyrinthine, ironic narrative of the Furioso clearly lends itself to an examination of undecidability. For here identity is mimicry, and fantasy—or its extreme, madness—is endlessly employed to protect impassioned and neurotic characters from a death drive that demands attention but allows delays now and then, petites mortes indeed.

Even the authorial feint at the beginning, Ariosto's plea to his readers not to pay attention to him because the social conventions he is representing are not his credo but belong to a spurious father, Master Turpino—who has throughout been unable to signify any truth—can be understood as a request to take the story lightly, to read its surface and not its depth, to laugh at women, no matter how reproachable the business may be, because it is too dangerous—or too bewildering—to laugh at men.

Notes

1. Numbers refer to octave. Unless otherwise noted, all citations are from canto 28 (English translation by Waldman).

2. See Beer, 239 and 255, n. 86. Ariosto's novella constitutes the core of Giovanni Sercambi's “De ingenio mulieris adultera,” and displays an array of Boccaccian elements that the audience of the time might have easily recalled. For connections with Boccaccio, see Rajna, 436-55; and Barbirato, 331. Barbirato retraces points in common with the Decameron's stories of King Agilulf, 3.2; Madonna Filippa, 6.7; and Pinuccio, 9.6. This story also bears an intriguing resemblance to the frame story of One Thousand and One Nights, where Shahryar and his brother decide to have the women they enjoyed during the night killed at dawn. To avoid such an outcome Scheherazade spins her one thousand and one tales. See Scaglione.

3. For a reading of this rhetorical tactic, see Javitch, “Cantus interruptus.”

4. In the 1516 and 1521 versions of Orlando furioso there is an octave in which the innkeeper asserts that his story is true. See the Ermini edition of the text, 2.26, 75.

5. On a similar story of wife's betrayal, that of Anselmo being told of his wife's unfaithfulness in cantos 42-43, the reaction is more primitive: Anselmo decides to kill her, although eventually he changes his mind.

6. Unfortunately, even though Astolfo and Jocondo's sexual record is nothing short of outstanding (including the Spanish girl Fiammetta and their wives, they seduce one thousand and three women), they are still unable to match the record set by Don Giovanni, who reached the same number in Spain alone (“e in Spagna son già mille e tre”).

7. See, for example, Guglielminetti 14. On Ariosto's novellas, with references to Boccaccio and Boiardo, see Franceschetti.

8. Another contemporary case of illustrated erotic scenes is Jacopo Caraglio's The Loves of the God, which, like Aretino's Modi, used an apparatus of verses. On “Venus” and eroticism in art, see Pardo and Ginzburg.

9. Barbirato argues that while men leave women for love in the Furioso, women leave men because they are moody (Doralice), oversexed (Gabrina), or greedy (Argia) (345-47). In short, women are incapable of true love and keep their own interests in mind at all times.

10. For an account of the spectacular success of the Furioso, see Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic, ch. 1; and Beer. Although Matteo Maria Boiardo's Orlando innamorato, of which the Furioso is a “continuation,” was technically the first book published in Italian to reach beyond the rich and educated, only the Furioso sold by the thousands. For a reading of gender in the Furioso, see Finucci, The Lady Vanishes; see also Shemek, Benson, and McLucas.

11. For feminity as a masquerade, see Lacan, “The Meaning of the Phallus,” 85, and Rivière. For a companion piece to this essay, see my study of the masquerade of femininity (“The Female Masquerade”) as I see it played out in Ariosto's Dalinda and Gabrina episodes. In that essay I read the masquerade of femininity following Freud, Lacan, Rivière, and Irigaray, as well as Mary Ann Doane and Sue-Ellen Case.

12. Though this concern is reflected in many stories of the Furioso, the compulsive examination of sexual indiscretions and paranoid fears of cuckoldry better fits, I think, another genre—theater—and is associated with such names as Machiavelli, Bibbiena, and Aretino, as well as Ariosto.

13. Valerie Traub has argued for such delinking in the context of Shakespearean drama (136). See also the essays in Goldberg. In the popular view, Lombards were the people who most practiced and exported the crime of sodomy, as the Englishman, Sir Edward Coke, complained: “Bugeria is an Italian word, … and it was complained of in parliament, that the Lumbards brought into the realm the shameful sin of sodomy, that it is not to be named, as there it is said.” See The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws in England (London, 1797) and Cohen 188. In the Decameron, Boccaccio makes the protagonist of his only transparently homosexual story (5.1), Pietro, a man from Lombardy. But also keep in mind that, for Germans, sodomizers were specifically Florentines, not Lombards. See Roche. Many in Europe, on the other hand, considered Venice the “depraved” city par excellence of the period, given its close ties to the East and its reception of unorthodox customs. See Ruggiero.

14. Most medieval or early modern doctors, from Isidore to Guainerius and from Della Porta to Parè, had something to say on sexuality and the way to express it, help it, and regulate it. The field of critical studies on the subject is wide. See, for example, Jacquart and Thomasset, and Laqueur.

15. See, for example, Aretino.

16. Of Girard, see Deceit.

17. “The more it [the body] has served,” Irigaray writes, “the more it is worth. Not because its natural assets have been put to use their way, but, on the contrary, because its nature has been ‘used up’, and has become once again no more than a vehicle for relations among men” (186).

18. On the choice of Fiammetta because of the “comodità” she offers, see Barberi-Squarotti, 41.

19. See, for example, how Benedetto Varchi works through this concept in Michelangelo's art, both visual and poetic, in Il libro della beltà e della grazia (published in the 1540s but written earlier).

20. On this connection, see Haywood, 131.

21. For a reading of the Zeuxis story in these terms, see Castiglione's Cortegiano (1528), book 1, section 52. See also Finucci, The Lady Vanishes, ch. 2. According to Pliny, Zeuxis's women were chosen following an intriguing scheme: first the most handsome men of Croton were identified, then their sisters were chosen. Thus male beauty prefigured and confirmed female beauty. I would like to thank Mary Pardo for reminding me of this connection.

22. More than today, clothing stood for status and class in the sixteenth century. Sumptuous display was not necessarily linked to effeminacy, if done with taste and no garish excess. In the Cortegiano, for example, Castiglione spends considerable time examining the appropriate color, shape, and material of clothes befitting sophisticated courtiers on the rise.

23. Note, in this context, Laura Mulvey's insights on pleasure in looking, where the visual representation of men stands for castration: “according to the principles of ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification” (20).

24. Elizabeth Bellamy has called narcissism “the dominant neurosis of the Furioso” (87). For a study of female narcissism in the Furioso, see Finucci, The Lady Vanishes, ch. 4.

25. On the mirroring of the subject onto the object, see Borch-Jacobsen 86.

26. See Kristeva for this movement from the abjected mother to the imaginary father (41-42).

27. For a Freudian examination of the primal scene, see “Infantile Neurosis.”

28. As Žižek puts it, “the silent scream attests to the subject's clinging to enjoyment, to his/her unreadiness to exchange enjoyment” (i.e., the object which gives body to it) for the Other, for the Law, for the paternal metaphor” (118). Jocondo will stage his reaction later in the form of copulation with the one thousand other women.

29. The ability to override disgust is precisely what for Freud promotes scopophilia in the pervert: “this pleasure in looking (scopophilia) becomes a perversion (a) if it is restricted exclusively to the genitals or (b) if it is connected with the overriding of disgust (as in the case of voyeurs)” (“Three Essays,” 157).

30. According to Freud, the “double was originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego. … This invention of doubling as a preservation against extinction has its counterpart in the language of dreams, which is fond of representing castration by a doubling or multiplication of the genital symbol” (“The Uncanny,” 240).

31. In Fineman's words, emulation is “that paradoxical labor of envy that seeks to find difference in imitation” (74).

32. See Freud, “Certain Neurotic Mechanisms.” On jealousy, see also Maus.

33. Zatti reads in the story not bourgeois morals, but a wisdom-bound madness (“un giocondo errore,” 50). For Gareffi, the conclusion of the novella shows that while men tell stories, women make them (“Rimangono gli uomini a raccontarsi le storie, le donne le fanno,”91).

34. Interesting in this context, is the observation made by Franceschetti that there is one element of the traditional novella completely absent in Ariosto, that of the “beffa,” in which women show—through their wit, cunning, or savoir faire—the stupidity and gullibility of their mates (1835-36).

35. “Il Re il primo figliuol che poi gli nacque / nomo a battesmo Stranodesiderio / ma poi crescendo Strano se gli tacque / che pel nano alla madre era improperio” (2.26.75). We do not know whether the child was a dwarf like his father.

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