SOURCE: Ascoli, Albert Russell. “Critical Readings of the Orlando Furioso.” In Ariosto's Bitter Harmony: Crisis and Evasion in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 43-120. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987.

[In the following excerpt, Ascoli documents the interplay of influence between Renaissance texts, noting the treatment of Hercules in Orlando furioso.]

The first impulse of this reader and this reading of Orlando Furioso is formalist: a rarely repressed tendency to the pleasures of close textual analysis. Nonetheless, recent critical events have made it very difficult to move directly to a thematic and/or structural interpretation of the poem's treatment of human selfhood. The last twenty years have seen the development of strong concepts of intertextuality, along with, more recently still, the emergence of a modified, “new,” historicism. A literary text, we feel compelled to recognize, is composed of readings—it is the composite transcription and revision of the classical, medieval, and Renaissance texts and other cultural discourses available to it. The text is thus not “individual” in the sense of remaining intrinsically separable from its precursors, contemporaries, or sequels—what identity it has is positional, contextual, social—just as human “individuals” exist only as a confusing nexus of social, semiotic, and psychological experiences. The question is particularly pressing when dealing with the Renaissance, which has most commonly been defined precisely as a crisis in older models of human identity opening onto the felicitous discovery by European culture of the human self as creative self-consciousness, no longer the Other or shadow of divine totality. In such a view, the proof of a new “individuality” comes exactly in a perception of textual and artistic innovation: the self's failures and successes at being and becoming uniquely itself are acted out in the words of Pico's Oratio and the images on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

All of these considerations militate against moving directly to a protracted study of the metaphors and narrative sequences of the Furioso which deal most directly with emergent or defeated selfhood. Instead, I will try to prepare a symptomatic context for the poem in the psychological/textual “identity crisis” of Ariosto's age. To begin with, this means pointing to key texts which both describe and act out the problem of human identity. It means recognizing that there has, in fact, been an ongoing crisis both in Renaissance scholarly-critical attempts to isolate the specific character of “the discovery of the self” and in efforts to define Ariosto's exact relationship—positive or negative, active or passive—to any such discovery. I will suggest, for instance, that there are at least two major versions of the educational acquisition of identity at work in the period: one, rhetorical and ethical, emphasizing the corporeal and civic life of man in this world; the other, philosophical and spiritual, emphasizing the inner intellectual life which aims to lift man beyond this world into a realm of incorporeal divinity. In addition, one cannot afford to ignore the intense awareness in the age and in the poem of that which most threatens the emergence of coherent self-consciousness under either regime: blind madness. In then preparing to apply these themes to a reading of the Furioso, one should not forget that the poem not only reflects or represents varieties of education and madness, but may also be said, on the evidence of Renaissance poetics, to embody or effect them. That is to say, in the first place, that for the Renaissance, education is a process of learning to read the world, one's mind, and the words which pass between them interpretively and of then expressing such acquired knowledge in speech and writing. In the second place, it is to remember that books, especially literary works, were the mediators used by teachers to effect such education. And, finally, it is to draw the obvious conclusion that Ariosto's poem almost certainly sees itself either as a successful instrument of readerly education or as its failed double, an agent of the madness which results when the educational process breaks down. In other words, not only am I going to be reading the Furioso through Renaissance themes, but in doing so I am going to be recognizing that interpretive reading itself is a, if not the, theme of the Renaissance and of the Furioso. And in this respect, one might suppose, the Furioso has as much to say about us as readers as we about it as reading.

The recognition that the poem might be quite aware of its rhetorical situation, its inevitable production of and subjection to the responses of a variety of readers, suggests a second way in which a text may be said to be composed of readings. In other words, even as the Furioso gathers together the many strands of precursor texts and codes, it is also dispersed, unraveled, into the “world, the texts, and the critics” which lie beyond itself. In particular, the poem is by now inseparable from the critical traditions which have expanded and appropriated it across the centuries. However, as with the texts which gave rise to it, so with the texts it in turn gives rise to: the Furioso is not merely passive; it furnishes us, as I believe, with images of a number of hypothetical readerly responses to itself—hypotheses which in the event have proven uncannily accurate. And it is for this reason that this chapter in particular, and in fact the book as a whole, dwells insistently upon the criticism of the poem—not so much as a way of defining the history of the production of my own study (its debts, its pet peeves), but rather as a means of giving evidence about the relationship between the text and its readers. I will show, on the one hand, how readerly blindness has often “deformed,” however brilliantly, the themes and structures of the Furioso and how, on the other, the Furioso both deliberately provokes a range of readerly responses and then quietly comments upon the situations and the motives of critics who choose this or that partial response which the text, with such apparent generosity, makes available to them.

The bivalent genitive of my chapter heading points to the Furioso as a piece of writing which both reads and is read. We can use Renaissance texts as a means of reading the poem, but the poem is also a critical reading of those same texts. By the same token, critics have made readings of the Furioso, but the Furioso has its own theories about its future readers. I am attempting, in this chapter, to arrive at an understanding of the poem as “inter-text” in the widest possible sense—a text dwelling between texts, past and future. The texts are around it, as con-texts which determine and bound its significance; but, surprisingly, they are also within it, absorbed as co-texts: cited and staged, faithfully or parodically re-presented, approvingly or polemically interpreted. The four sections of this chapter dedicated to Renaissance pre-text and to critical post-text will, yes, prepare us to explore the theme of education-as-reading developed in the Furioso. But it will also, perhaps even more importantly, allow us to see the Furioso as an act of reading-as-writing, writing-as-reading which names and judges crises, even as it is being critically judged.

I. ARIOSTO AND THE RENAISSANCE HERCULES

In discussing the problem of selfhood in the Renaissance it always makes sense to begin with Jacob Burckhardt, who is more responsible than any other post-Renaissance author for our understanding of that epoch and even for our belief (however embattled and qualified) that such a period or event actually took place at all. It is he who most forcefully contends that Italy from the fourteenth century on was the scene of the birth, or rebirth, of the individual as autonomous, self-aware shaper of his own destiny. Curiously, and brilliantly, he associates that birth with an outburst of illegitimacy, both genealogical and political. Bastard artists (e.g., Alberti, Leonardo, and so on) and usurping princes seem to him to occupy places outside the impersonal medieval structures of family, state, and church, throwing them back on the resources of individual consciousness and personal force.¹ That these resources seemed to include the frequent use of tyrannical violence and to imply the abandonment of conventional ethics and Christian faith appeared a regrettable and yet unavoidable side-effect to Burckhardt. And if Ariosto is at all a sponsor of Burckhardtian humanism, it is only with a firm understanding of these complications and qualifications.

For a less intrinsically problematic image of the crisis in and displacement of Western selfhood in the Renaissance, one might cite, symptomatically, Georges Poulet's phenomenological thesis from The Metamorphoses of the Circle. He argues that the medieval, Dantean model of a theocentric and “deiform” universe in which God is a “sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere” is gradually exchanged for one in which anthropos is the hub and pivot of his own existence, the point of reference for all other modes of being.² An even more comforting revision of Burckhardt allows for the emergence of human personality without the loss of Christian faith in deity. Charles Trinkaus has cogently fastened on the metaphor of man formed “in the image and likeness” of God to temper and perhaps to overthrow the claim of a radical shift in perspective from the God who becomes man to the Renaissance man who becomes, or rather makes himself, a god.³ One might add that the very concept of Renaissance is itself in part an appropriation and transfiguration of a (not exclusively) Christian motif of resurrection.⁴ In any case, for Trinkaus this image of creation allows the humanistic exaltation of man insofar as he is a distant figure of true divinity, which continues to be the one true source of identity.

In spite of the impressive mass of evidence assembled by Trinkaus for his claim, it is nonetheless true that there is an easy parodic inversion which might be made (and some Renaissance authors, Pico for example, might seem to have made it), so that God suddenly appears as the image and likeness of man, the cosmic projection of human form and human aspirations to totality. Ariosto criticism has, in any event, tended to associate its auctor with the theory of a radical break, as in these words of Caretti: “for medieval theocentric cosmography, Ariosto definitively substituted an anthropomorphic cosmography in which the center is, at any moment, freely variable.”⁵ Begging for the time being the question (to which I will return in Chapter 4) of whether Ariosto in some way recuperates a stable origin for the self outside of the circlings of Time and Fortuna, one must now ask whether his apparent reflections of and on the crisis in medieval models of effaced selfhood are actually accompanied by the positive emergence of a (semi)autonomous Renaissance self.

The obvious place to begin discussing the representation of human identity in the Furioso is with the question of characterization. If one does so, however, a problem arises almost immediately, and it comes from an unexpected source: Burckhardt himself. Burckhardt draws evidence for his thesis from numerous areas of human endeavor (not only political and artistic, but economic, ethical, and so on), but literature seems to present him with special difficulties. Petrarch and Dante provide relatively strong, though still contestable, pre-Renaissance proofs in a chapter entitled “The Discovery of Man: Spiritual Description in Poetry.”⁶ But the assertiveness of this claim is undermined precisely when he arrives at the “High Renaissance,” the time when “individualism” should have been at its apogee, and Burckhardt is forced to confess that “the chief reproach made against the heroic poetry of Italy is precisely on the score of the insignificance and imperfect representation of its characters.”⁷ It further turns out that Ariosto, as the greatest poet of the period, is also the most notable example of this apparent failure (p. 322), which might instead be interpreted as a failure in, or at least an invitation to the modification of, Burckhardt's thesis. Surely more evidence is required before accepting the great historian's summary judgment of the Furioso. It is worth noting, however, that if he is accurate, or at least relevant, it means that when we speak of a “crisis of identity” in the poem, it is no longer just the self's identity, but also, in some sense, the identity of an historical epoch, both as it was then perceived and as it is now.

In a number of ways the critics of Ariosto have reaffirmed, though usually in more euphemistic terms, the judgment of Burckhardt on the failures of or indifference to characterization in the poem.⁸ It is one of the commonplaces of the criticism that Orlando's role is noticeably diminished with respect to Boiardo's treatment of him (he makes his first real appearance of the poem in the eighth canto), while his place as hinge of the plot is at least partly appropriated by Ruggiero. Ruggiero, however, is something of a cypher, a frequently mechanical hero whose subjectivity is generally closed to the reader and whose heroic deeds never really lift him beyond the mass of lesser heroes in the poem, who are distinguished one from the other primarily by name.⁹ Angelica, so vividly present in the Innamorato, has here become “that obscure object of desire,” having, even when stark naked, no special identity beyond the projected images of her many lovers' blind longings. Even Rodomonte, the arch-pagan, is subject to radical shifts in mood and behavior, apparently according to the poet's whim and the logic of the narration. Locally, each of these judgments can be contested, and there are numerous characters and episodes which could be cited as counter-examples, although fairly subtle critical reasoning is required.¹⁰ Nonetheless, the very multiplicity of characters, and the general predominance of narrative exigencies over autonomy of characterization, militate against the emergence in the Furioso of a “fully represented self.”

More to the point, the Orlando Furioso takes a spectacular failure of identity as the occasion for its title. The argument that this title is inappropriate for the work as a whole, first raised by the Cinquecento commentators of Ariosto,¹¹ rather than vitiating this observation, merely signals another notably schizophrenic feature of the text, jeopardizing the poem's “identity” along with that of its characters. In any case, there is one central episode of the poem, Orlando's lapse into folly, which certainly does confound both of the classical signs of human distinctiveness and dignity: oratio and ratio, speech and reason.¹² This madness is, in both narrative and numerical terms, recounted at the very center of the poem (cantos xxiii-xxiv of forty-six).¹³ Thus, the poem not only confirms Burckhardt's judgment about its failure to represent individuality, it does so explicitly and deliberately, implying that this apparent failure is actually a successfully realized artistic choice.

Ironically, this very deliberateness, this evident choosing, seems to allow for a swing back in the opposite direction, in support of Burckhardt's broader hypothesis. We have already seen in the previous chapter that, for Croce, Ariosto's characters are not properly characters at all, but fragmented and partial “figures.” He then asserts that “the characters of Ariosto take liberties with themselves, according to the situations they run into.”¹⁴ Curiously, Croce's use of the word “libertà” may suggest that fragmentation and the possibility of self-contradiction are actually conditions of one sort of freedom: the freedom of self-difference which is in fact a prerequisite for the “freedom of choice” by which the coherently integrated self is constituted. And this is precisely the tack that Croce implicitly takes in asserting that the many “figures” within the poem are metaphors for aspects of the single integral self which produced the Furioso. To put it in slightly different terms, the very act of choosing to reflect upon madness suggests the existence of a free will and a lucid understanding, an autonomous authorial self. In this way, madness would be excluded in the process of elegantly and rationally naming it. Perhaps by subjecting the claims of other Renaissance authors about human rationality and dignity to the degradation of bestial furor, Ariosto both subverts and obliquely confirms them.

I will come back later and often to the many post-Crocean attempts to submit the multiplicities of the text and its characters to the oneness of the author, as well as to the few critics who, like Donato, have questioned the phenomenological leap from plural text to unified consciousness. For now, however, it is enough to notice, on the one hand, that the text repeatedly dramatizes madness as the dissociation of the self from itself (“non son, non sono io quel che paio in viso” xxiii.128.1) and from its language, suggesting possible ruptures between the author and his linguistic products. On the other hand, one also has to admit that the text itself is subject to a further split: even as it represents Orlando's madness as a possible version of Ariosto's, it also charts the education, the apparent self-becoming, of Ruggiero.¹⁵ In fact, madness and education, the loss and acquisition of human identity, contribute to defining each other throughout the poem and the Renaissance. Inhuman, bestial madness is what one escapes in a successful humanistic education. The self acquired or remembered through education is what one forgets in order to go mad. And of course some authors, St. Paul for example, and Ariosto's contemporary, Erasmus, are perfectly capable of conflating the two, both in the mad wisdom of the philosophers and in the wise folly of the Christians, as we shall see more clearly in Chapter 4. They suggest provisionally what the following pages hope to show: namely, that the two activities never quite fight clear of one another, each remaining as an immanent possibility within, and as a condition of possibility for, the other, in a perpetual dialectic of reason and irrationality, speech and silence, humanity and monstrosity.

One can give preliminary definition to the symbolic relation between Orlando and Ruggiero by showing that, for all their obvious differences, they are bound together in a single emblematic silhouette: the towering figure of Hercules, through which are acted out the dialectic of education and madness, the convergence of the poem and its epoch, and, finally, the union of the two main characters, all at once. The emblematic force of Hercules for the Renaissance has been amply charted and celebrated. Perhaps more than any single figure, Hercules displays the qualities which scholars repeatedly seize on as exemplary of the “novelty” of a supposed cultural rebirth, which is also a birth of consciousness. Panofsky's classic iconographical study, Hercules am Scheidewege, has been followed up on by the books and articles of several important historians and literary critics who have continued to bring out the multiple aspects under which the strongest of human heroes is represented throughout the period.¹⁶ What makes Hercules such a potent figure? First of all, he is the divinized man, a man who reaches heaven and immortality by force of his own virtus; that is according to the etymology of the day, by his own male humanity.¹⁷ His apotheosis leaves room for the interpretations either of secular humanism or of neo-Platonism. As the successful completer of twelve (actually many more) onerous labors, Hercules stands out as the active worker par excellence, whose labor for the earthly community brings him humanistic “gloria.”¹⁸ In the Momus of Alberti, Hercules is borne to heaven by Fama, his eternity apparently consisting in a nominal survival of his glorious name.¹⁹ Landino, instead, represents him as the allegorical achiever of true spiritual nobility through philosophical askesis. Part of his power is as a figure who combines active engagement in civic affairs with a reflective philosophical intelligence, capable of resolving the controversy over the relative values of active and contemplative lives, as well as those of virtue and knowledge.²⁰ Above all, however, he dramatizes over and over again, for both camps, the force of the human will in shaping its own destiny, particularly through the well-known allegory of a youthful moral choice at a crossroads between Virtue and Vice, a choice which seems to exceed, even to contradict outright, the Christian notion that human will originally fell out of edenic perfection exactly because of misguided choice and excessive human aspiration. Perhaps it was precisely this emphasis on will, however, which attracted the “father” of Christian humanism, Coluccio Salutati, to dedicate to Hercules his magnum opus (incomplete), the De Laboribus Herculis.²¹ The multitude and relative incoherence of Hercules' deeds apparently make him a far less tractable object of allegorizing than most Ovidian characters, or than the epic heroes, Ulysses and Aeneas, for that matter. Mythographers from Cicero to Boccaccio speculated that there was really more than one “Hercules” responsible for all the various legends.²² On the other hand, this very multiplicity in the figure, ranging from philosophical wisdom to brute force, from apotheosis to bestial madness, also makes it a strong symbol of human comprehensiveness, of man's ability to extract unity from a variety of outer experiences and inner contradictions.

The importance of Hercules for the Furioso was apparently first noticed by one of Ariosto's earliest critics, G. B. Pigna, in I Romanzi. Pigna, as various modern scholars have reminded us, identified a clear echo of Seneca's Hercules Furens (alongside that of Boiardo's poem) in the title.²³ Orlando, in effect, is under the sign of Hercules from the very beginning of the work. Moreover, as Saccone has recently made apparent, Hercules is a focal point of the poem-long dialectical relationship, of analogy and opposition, between Orlando and Ruggiero.²⁴ As we shall see later on, both heroes are allusively identified with a number of mythological and literary figures (notably Perseus), while their dialectic is structured not only through mythic echoes, but also through parallel experiences, settings, imagery, and so on. Nonetheless, the Herculean chiasmus of the title has the privilege of inaugurating and forecasting much that is to follow.

The assimilation of Ruggiero to Hercules, though it commences later than Orlando's, is no less clear. It has been known since the Cinquecento that Ruggiero's choice between the easy, if “sinister,” road to Alcinian vice and the rightward, right-thinking mountain path to Logistillan virtue recalls the Pythagorean “Y” and Hercules at the Crossroads (vi.55), and also that his effeminate collapse in the hands of Alcina is akin to Hercules' subjection to Omphale, queen of Lydia.²⁵ Saccone accurately, though sketchily, places these iconographical moments within a larger pattern of the pursuit of identity via a kind of education, arguing that Ruggiero's story as a whole is a kind of Bildungsroman avant la lettre. As I will show in Chapter 3, Ruggiero rehearses didactic patterns more peculiar to the Renaissance and its literature in the course of a full-blown “allegory of education,” and in doing so adds a significant number of twists and turns to the basic Herculean scheme. That model, however, is clearly the proper point of departure for dealings with Ruggiero as well as for those with Orlando.

A number of details, with one major, pervasive, connection, bring home this point in the Alcina-Logistilla sequence and throughout the Furioso. For instance, Ruggiero reaches Alcina's island precisely by exceeding “il segno che prescritto / avea già a' naviganti Ercole invitto” (“the sign that invincible Hercules once set up for sailors” vi.17.7-8). Most important, however, is the fact that the young knight's mentor and protector is Atlante (i.e., Atlas), who in both Boiardo and Ariosto is not a giant but an elderly magician.²⁶ Numerous allegorizations of the Herculean labor involving Atlas and the garden of the Hesperides take the sought-after golden apples as a form of wisdom (usually astrological) to be detached from a tree of knowledge in bono. They read the bearing of the heavens on one's shoulders as the possession of such wisdom. This interpretation is often extended, by Landino in the Disputationes, for example, into an allegory of Atlas as the tutor of young Hercules.²⁷ Within the Alcina episode, Melissa, disguised as Atlante, makes this connection explicitly, referring to tutoring the infant Ruggiero: “t'ho … / fanciullo avezzo a strangolar serpenti” (“I accustomed you, in your youth, to strangle serpents” vii.57.3-4), a clearly Herculean activity.

What then is the force of the rapprochement of the two heroes through the figure of Hercules? What it most obviously does is draw upon two usually distinct sets of associations among the multiple Renaissance myths of Hercules in such a way as to compromise his standing as a symbol of autonomous humanitas and, at the same time, to jeopardize the clear opposition between education and madness which is necessary for the emergence of human identity.²⁸ In short, by conflating two moments in the mythographical career of Hercules, his youthful choice in bivio and his mature lapse into folly, Ariosto collapses the conventional temporal continuum in the emergence of personality, reverses the usual division of the human life into adolescent folly and mature prudence, and generally works to abolish any clear hierarchy, or even differentiation, between education and madness.²⁹ The fact that Ruggiero's education by Logistilla is followed by his furious attempt to rape Angelica, and that Orlando's madness is apparently followed by a restoration to full command of his wits (and then by a little-noticed relapse), emphasizes the cyclical play of identity and self-difference. This mingling is further heightened by a curious tendency to assimilate key conflicts—in which now Orlando, now Ruggiero, participate—to Hercules' struggle with Anteus (always glossed as Virtue's victory over earthbound Vice), but then to compare the heroes to both of the mythical combatants, mixing the virtus of “Alcide” with the furor of Anteus.³⁰ Such conflations, such reductions of hierarchy, make attempts to find a positive and dominant value of didacticism, for instance in a differential superiority of Ruggiero's acquisition of control to Orlando's “sfrenatezza,” questionable indeed. The power of these suggestions is further amplified if we remind ourselves that the privileged audience of the poem, the Este family, had frequently availed itself of the name of Hercules and its mythological baggage, as the poem reminds us with great regularity. The most famous instance is the initial designation of Ippolito d'Este, Ariosto's sometime patron, as “generosa Erculea prole” (“generous offspring of Hercules” i.3.1), for his father, Ercole I, duke of Ferrara, and alleged descendant of this same (Herculean) Ruggiero.³¹

I will show in Chapters 3 and 4 how consistently Ariosto hints at the darker side of these genealogical myths—not only that of Hercules, but that of Hippolytus as well. The figure of Hercules is an obvious vehicle for carrying out a tacit polemic not only with the political purposes to which the Este were putting it, but also with the humanistic conceptions of man's dignity and power on which they were trading when they adopted it. Nonetheless, a number of additional questions should be raised which will show how firmly Ariosto's versions of Hercules are tied into a classical and Renaissance understanding of education and the acquisition of identity, into the formulation of a poetics of education, and into the designation of the Renaissance itself as a singular period or event.

One should begin by considering the details of the relationship between the Furioso and the Senecan drama from which it partly takes its title. To date, little has been done beyond noting the simple fact that there is such an echo. Of course, this lacuna in the criticism may stem from the obvious generic differences between late classical tragedy and the odd blend of epic and romance elements that compose the Furioso. With some justification, readers have almost always felt that Ariosto's poem was fundamentally alien to tragedy, even the rhetorical and “baroque” tragedy of Seneca. On the other side, I will eventually argue that the obvious suppression of tragic elements, their relegation to oblique echoes such as that in the title, does not at all mean that they are irrelevant to an understanding of the poem; that, in fact, the opposite claim is much closer to the truth. More specifically, however, there is also a seemingly radical difference in kind between the madness of Seneca's Hercules and that of Orlando which stands squarely in the way of critical studies comparing them. The latter folly has as its primary cause an erotic contretemps, the discovery of Angelica's “infidelity,” and, in the second place, is a divine punishment for Orlando's neglect of duty to God and country (xxiii.102; xxxiv.62-66). The former also has a double attribution, but is apparently divorced from eros. It springs instead from Juno's jealousy of Hercules' achievements and/or from Hercules' sudden desire to storm heaven by force in order to make himself the equal of the gods (ll. 1-124, 953-75). It has apparently not been noticed that this ambiguous double attribution—madness coming from within vs. madness imposed by a divinity from without—is a common feature of the two works. Nor has it been observed that Orlando's failure to recognize his once-beloved Angelica and his subsequent attempt to destroy her are analogous to Hercules' more successful assault against his unrecognized loved ones. The key terms of Orlando's madness and its cure repeatedly echo the Senecan drama, as do the lines (1.56.7-8) which give paradigmatic expression to the human dilemma of illusory vision and blind desire that is at the center of the Furioso.³²

In any event, a single echo, when located in the title, would alone justify a more careful thematic comparison, and a serious consideration of what relation Ariosto's “sunny” (or “loony”) poem has to the drama of tragic crisis. This is especially true considering how well immersed Ariosto must have been both in classical drama and in the culture of neo-Stoicism. The Hercules Furens was certainly available in the pioneering Este library.³³ The Este court's innovative role in the renewal of classical drama (comedy in particular), and Ariosto's part therein, are well known.³⁴ The Stoic tendency in humanist thought is prominent, ranging from the “Stoical” Augustine in Petrarch's Secretum to Poggio Bracciolini's “Stoic” polemics against Valla's supposed Epicureanism, even to Castiglione's courtly version of the ethical imperative of Stoic self-sameness. Finally, the Stoic fondness for Hercules; because of his mastery of the passions and the dignity and force of his human will, is obvious not only in the Senecan drama, but in Seneca the moral philosopher as well, and continues into the Renaissance.³⁵

Hercules Furens begins with an account of Hercules' descent into and return from hell, and in this sense is a humanistic celebration of triumphant virtus (cf. ll. 645-829). But the focus of the story is instead a degradation into inhuman, bestial madness: How can the apparent contradiction be reconciled? The first and most extensive Renaissance treatment of Hercules, Salutati's De Laboribus Herculis, in fact has its origin in response to a friend's perplexity over this very point: How could the greatest of heroes, emblem both of virtue and of wisdom, model of an educational itinerary, possibly lapse into madness? In the letter to Giovanni da Siena from which the longer treatise was developed, this doubt is the clear point of departure.³⁶ When the De Laboribus Herculis itself was composed, it had been set aside, or repressed, as it seems to me, in favor of a more general defense of (pagan) poetry as the allegorical bearer of instructive truths (and thus the opponent of the very idolatry and madness which it superficially seemed to represent). Even more important, the two principal episodes of Hercules' folly, the subjects of the two Senecan plays (Hercules Oetaeus as well as the Furens), remain outside the unfinished treatise, constituting precisely that which was never written.³⁷ Thus the greatest work by one of the “founders” of humanism originates in and yet finally defers the intuition that the figure par excellence of “divine” humanitas may be marked from within by madness.

By thus returning to a play which both stands as the product of the most famous Stoic, and yet seems to raise serious questions about the Stoic ideology of human integrity, and by refusing to recur to available allegorizations of Herculean furor as the Platonic furor divinus,³⁸ Ariosto discovers within Stoic humanism its own critique, its own lapse into the unnatural and the inhuman. At other points in the poem, for example in the proem to canto xxi, the neo-Stoic ethic of self-sameness is advanced only to be quickly undermined by the context.³⁹ It is not stretching a point, however, to argue that the Hercules Furens, by the contradictions it dramatizes, already predicts and criticizes the excesses of a certain humanism. Though Hercules is destined for divinity, though he has helped to resist the mad assault of the giants against heaven, now he himself, spurred somehow by Juno, sets aside piety and a sense of human limit and madly aspires to make himself a god by force. The consequence can only be a fall below the human and a severing of connections with the human family and its values (he literally destroys his family). As Juno says, the divine man, defeater of the monstrous and the inhuman, is defeated by his own internal contradictions, realizing his own capacity for monstrosity, incidentally leveling the Stoic project of rational self-restraint and the humanist project of auto-divinization. Virtus, humanity, disappears in a monstrous furor. In this perspective it is not surprising that Erasmus, the other great “fictor” of madness in the early Cinquecento, and a possible source for the Furioso, also takes the folly of the Stoics as a principal target in the Encomium Moriae. Erasmus goes on to recuperate a kind of madness as quintessentially human and as a key value in his Christian humanism. It remains to be seen in Chapter 4 whether or not madness assumes such a value for Ariosto.⁴⁰ More commonly, as we shall shortly see, Ariosto critics have identified the amorous furor of Orlando as a parody and critique of stilnovist and neo-Platonic versions of a redemptive erotic madness, a love through which the old self is lost only in order that a higher state of spiritual perfection may be attained (usually without remarking that the beginnings of such a critique are already visible in the open Petrarchan dialectic between spiritualizing and degrading love). Orlando, far from such an exaltation to “angelic” status, slides into bestiality. My reading, however, suggests that the secular humanism to which such critics usually turn as the alternative ideology promoted by the poem (an ideology which the text does approach at several points) may be equally a target for ironic subversion, equally a form of degrading madness.

A close look at Salutati's treatise may bring the importance of Hercules into even sharper focus.⁴¹ For Salutati, Hercules is an example both of practical, active virtue and of philosophical wisdom: “Hercules is the pinnacle of genius and of every virtue” (iii.xxiii, p. 298).⁴² Fighting Anteus, he is virtue personified (iii.xxvii); defeating the Hydra, Platonic symbol of sophistry, he is a “philosophus” (iii.ix, pp. 192-93). But he is more, a virtual synecdoche for all of classical culture, insofar as he is chosen as the exemplary vehicle for a defense of pagan “litterae.” By emphasizing now virtue, now wisdom, Salutati straddles the issue (later developed by Landino) as to whether Hercules' deeds sponsor the vita activa or vita contemplativa.⁴³ In effect, the multiplicity of deeds does allow the emergence of a many-faceted hero who might embrace all that is human, thereby displacing the human, but only metaphorically, by “similitude,” toward the divine (iii.v, pp. 176-77).

In the course of an allegorical education which is dramatized, variously, by the choice in bivio, by the single labor of Atlas and the Hesperides, or by the composite series of labors taken as a whole,⁴⁴ Hercules is said to acquire both wisdom and virtue. His identity, however, does not then consist only in a wise and virtuous mode of being. He also gains a name, which is both virtue's telos and an etymological dramatization of the relation between virtuous being and glorious name. Following a longstanding tradition, Salutati repeatedly etymologizes Hercules' (Alcides') two names as follows: “the name of Hercules is more perfect than that of Alcides. The latter is from ‘alce,’ which means ‘virtue;’ the former is from ‘eris’ and ‘cleos,’ that is ‘glory from struggle’ … which is indeed the prize and reward of virtue” (iii.xi, p. 214). Elsewhere he repeats: “‘Heris’ means ‘struggle,’ ‘cleos’ means ‘glory,’ as if to say ‘glorious on account of struggle’” (ii.xvi, p. 141).⁴⁵ Hercules wins a glorious name by virtue; and that name is precisely “virtue” and “glory,” a veritable allegory of winning a name through deeds. Besides, as the first citation suggests, there is a hierarchization of the two attributes, with glory ranking higher. Salutati again hedges his bets by sometimes leaving the gloria in question suspended between nominal fame and the ontological glory of Christian redemption (ii.xvi, p. 141), but in general both Salutati and other readers of Hercules' life tend toward the former. Even Bernardus Silvestris, whose neo-Platonic, spiritualizing tendencies are well known, takes gloria in this way, as the enduring product of earthly fama (pp. 73, 75, 105).

Hercules' name, thus expounded, is also exemplary of the Renaissance concept of the symbiotic relationship of virtue and glory, being and name, and of the educational poetics which derives from it. Petrarch, for example, in his well-known epistle to “Laelius,” recounting his visit with the Emperor Charles, envisions a double function of poetry which, by recording famous deeds, stimulates princes to imitate virtue and, simultaneously, is the end to which virtue is the means, honoring it with fame.⁴⁶ Literature, thus understood, is both the arche and the telos of virtue, rewarding it with the same kind of fame that stimulates it. Thus the aesthetic realm influences the ethical, while the ethical strives to transform itself into the aesthetic—at least within Petrarch's self-aggrandizing literary logic. Salutati argues something quite similar in the following passage: “Clio is first among the Muses. … Clio comes from ‘cleos’ which means glory. Just as glory is the end which scholars seek for their labors, even so it is uppermost in the mind of the student who submits himself to his labor. Thus, as Cicero said, ‘honor nourishes the arts, and all men are enflamed for studies by glory’” (i.ix, pp. 42-43).⁴⁷ When compared with the various etymologies of Hercules' name, these words reveal that, for Salutati, Hercules is not only a hero represented by poetry, but is in fact “synonymous” with one of the Muses, and is himself a figure for and of writing (historical, but also poetic) as well as being a philosophus (for Salutati, in any case, a poet is a philosopher is a theologian).⁴⁸

Hercules bears within his name, as understood in the Renaissance, the seeds of a poetics by which the realms of literature and of life are bound together in a complex circular relationship both of reference and of mutual influence: language as statement and as action. Of course, the first book of Salutati's treatise, and part of the second, is in fact a poetics (What is poetry? How should it be written?) and a hermeneutics (How do we read poetry?) which justifies his interpretations of the labors of Hercules and of which those interpretations are an exemplary illustration. As is well known, Salutati, like most humanists, assimilated poetry to oratory and assigned to it the educative function of persuading to virtue and dissuading from vice by exemplary representations of both.⁴⁹ The question he examines most extensively, however, is one of reference rather than of persuasion. How can pagan poetry, and poetic figures such as Hercules, be said to carry out this function when they explicitly seem to represent a plurality of gods, mad idolatry, and a belief in man's capacity literally to make a god of himself, all of which tenets are unacceptable in Christian terms. As Charles Trinkaus points out, Salutati first considers idolatry itself as a possible origin of poetry, perhaps constituted by the attempted conflation of image and essence (he even cites the famous passage from the Asclepius in which Hermes Trismegistus speaks of attracting gods into statuary images), but comes to the conclusion that poetry's true origin is exactly the opposite, having been founded by Enoch in recognition of the fact that no single name can ever designate God properly and that therefore it would only be “appropriate” to designate Him metaphorically by a multiplicity of improper, figurative names.⁵⁰ The plurality of gods can then be reinterpreted as metaphorical aspects of a single deity, and Hercules' divinity can be seen as figurative rather than as proper or essential: plurality and idolatry become unity and piety. On these grounds Trinkaus claims that Salutati sponsors what I would call a “nominalist poetics,” which postulates a gap between words and essences (signifiers and signifieds) which is only bridged improperly and metaphorically (by the alienated references of an always allegorical and “self-consuming” writing).⁵¹

Such a “nominalist poetics” might create, implicitly at least, some problems within the poetics of cleos previously described. How properly can glory, the name exalted in poetic writing, reflect virtuous being? What is the relation between the Hercules of poetry and some possible historical creature? The result of such an approach is an allegorical poetics of hermeneutic freedom: since the literal level is always improper, plural, and tendentially idolatrous, the reader can (must, in fact) always invent or rediscover a proper, single, pious meaning, even if the text clearly originated elsewhere. But if the text cannot teach the reader without his already having recognized that it does not mean what it says, but something else altogether different, how effective an educational tool can it be? Just as Hercules' potential madness is repressed within the text, so an idolatrous or demonic origin of textuality is envisioned and then repressed. Perhaps indicative of this repression is the extraordinary effort, even among allegorizers, in iii.xlii (esp. pp. 416-17) to interpret the evidently maddening and demonic Medusa, Dantean symbol of reification, idolatry, and/or heresy, as salutary eloquence.⁵² In this way the Pegasus, which arises from her blood and which originates the wellspring of poetry, may have an origin itself in bono. There is a clear anxiety to explain the birth of poetry's emblematic creature (evidently evoked by Ariosto's hippogryph) out of demonic, petrifying folly, which parallels the drive to turn reifying idolatry into vitalizing piety.

To what extent then are the themes of identity through a glorious name, the poetics of Herculean education that this implies,⁵³ and the hermeneutics of allegorical didacticism relevant to Ariosto's specific use of the figure of Hercules and to the Furioso in general? To what extent is the figure of Hercules both an emblematic version of heroic education and, simultaneously, the representative of a certain hermeneutics and poetics? To what extent, finally, are both the heroic individual and the poetics of heroic education subjected to crisis, to the threats of madness and of aesthetic self-enclosure which are already detectable (albeit negatively) in Salutati? It should be mentioned right away that, as far as I know, the etymology of “Hercules” given above is never directly mentioned by Ariosto, though he frequently depends on the etymological resonances of names, as we shall see. The concept of a “nominalist poetics” is, however, thematically crucial to such a key episode as the lunar allegory of fame won by earthly deeds, which also makes reference repeatedly to at least one key defense of poetry, Boccaccio's. What Salutati's “Hercules” tells us about poetry and education is something that the Renaissance said in many ways. And there can be no doubt that Ariosto listened very carefully to more than one version of it.

To the extent that Ariosto does eventually appear to be reflecting on a certain concept of ideal selfhood and a related poetics of education, he must also be engaging the Renaissance's concept of itself (or rather, of several related concepts and metaphors which the writers of the time quite deliberately applied to it and to themselves as part of it). By complicating the figure of Hercules as deployed by other Renaissance authors, I also aim to complicate the understanding of numerous critics for whom that hero has been an especially potent emblem of the existence and character of a “Renaissance.” Panofsky is the most obvious such scholar, arguing that the mythic choice of Hercules, along with the frequent use of that motif throughout the period, demonstrate a new concept of human freedom radically divergent from the medieval picture of man almost totally dependent on God's determining grace. Panofsky's view, as mentioned earlier, has been repeated and modified frequently, by Mazzeo and Trinkaus, for example. Jean Seznec saw the reappearance of a “realistic” Hercules in his original classical trappings (loincloth and club) as illustrative of the period's new historical sense and its classicism.⁵⁴ Garin sums it up in claiming that “Salutati proposed Hercules as the ideal of free humanity, the hero who defeated the monsters and tamed nature,” recalling as well Hercules' special role as symbol of Florence, itself in turn a symbol of humanism and rebirth.⁵⁵ It is thus singularly appropriate that the image of a restoration of life to dead culture, re-naissance, is frequently expressed in terms alluding to Hercules' successful foray into the Land of the Dead, his restoration of life to Theseus and Pirithoos (after which the events of the Hercules Furens are said to take a place).⁵⁶ Hence, my interest in Ariosto's use of this figure does have a double edge. Not only does a reading of the Furioso gain from probing the mythic and mythographical background on which the poet is drawing, but, in fact, we also learn that Ariosto's appropriation of Hercules may become in turn a commentary on, a reading of, his epoch's investment in the political, cultural, philosophical, and ethical significations of the myth. Through Hercules he implicitly engages even the very concept of historical rebirth: the Renaissance's identity as a period of productive crisis in human identity.⁵⁷ He also engages (obliquely, as it must be) his own specific historical situation as dependant of a family which turned the myth of Hercules into its very own.

To qualify what has just been said: I would prefer not to identify myself fully either with an attempt to make Hercules a perfect synecdoche for the Renaissance or with that of making Ariosto's title a perfect synecdoche for the work as a whole—particularly since the question at hand is precisely that of wholeness and identity, and of the possibility that they may slip into the domain of the partial and the fragmentary. Since the preceding discussion suggests that the relationship between the thing itself and the celebrated name by which it is identified may be crucial and problematic, the Cinquecento debate over the impropriety of the poem's title may be especially significant. The title then seemed, and even now may seem, to identify inadequately the work it is placed over and before: Orlando's story is only one of many, and madness is by no means the only prominent theme; there is no hint at the central narrative of genealogical foundation (so that the title conceals the poem's claim to “historicity”). Chapters 3 and 4 will pose and explore this question in greater detail. Meanwhile, it will be worth the trouble to give a broader context to the problems and motifs of a Renaissance “crisis of identity” into which the Furioso might fit either passively or polemically. Needless to say, very small parts will still have to be taken as representatives and representations of an irreducibly vast scene.

Notes

1. Burckhardt, Civilization, vol. 1, pp. 27-29; vol. 2, p. 426 ff.; passim. Such figures were typically obsessed with achieving legitimacy and integration. Witness Alberti's Libri della Famiglia, with all the historical pathos and irony of Alberti's ill-treatment by his relatives, as well as the genealogical myths fostered by great ruling families, including the Este, and propagated by poets and scholars, for instance Ariosto.

2. Poulet, The Metamorphoses of the Circle (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), p. xvii ff. For the human body as metaphorical point of reference for describing the cosmos in the Renaissance, see Leonard Barkan, Nature's Work of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975). By a curious historical irony, soon after man is supposed to have displaced God from the center of the universe, a (related) cosmological revolution resulted in the replacement of the earth by the sun (traditional figure of deity) at the center of the physical cosmos. Cf. Chapter 3, n. 109, below.

3. Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), esp. vol. 1, pp. xiii-xxiv. By tracing the tradition of dignitas hominis back to Saint Augustine, Trinkaus demystifies its alleged origins in classicist secularism.

4. See, as one good example out of many, Leonardo Bruni Aretino, Dialoghi, in Garin, ed., Prosatori Latini, esp. p. 46. Bruni, following a medieval topos common to Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Dante, sets his work in the Easter season, the time of Christ's Resurrection, but in such a way as to make the metaphor reflect on the rebirth of books and of classical learning. See also nn. 56 and 85 below.

5. I translate from Caretti, “Ariosto,” p. 35. On the question of Ariosto's religiosity or lack thereof, see Chapter 4, sec. i (esp. nn. 31, 45), below. In the next chapter I will show that the Furioso itself deploys the image of the circle ironically (cf. Chapter 3, nn. 105-109 and 155-156, below).

6. Vol. 1, pp. 303-23.

7. Vol. 2, pp. 303, 318. For a survey of the chronological development of the concept of a Renaissance, in historical writings from Petrarch to the present, see Wallace Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1948).

8. See, for instance, Greene, The Descent from Heaven (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), esp. pp. 129, 141; Carne-Ross, “One and Many,” p. 225; Caretti, “Ariosto,” p. 31.

9. As early as Foscolo, “Poemi Narrativi,” pp. 130, 146, we find a lament for the woodenness of Ruggiero, Bradamante, and the whole genealogical plot.

10. Peter DeSa Wiggins makes a spirited assault on the standard judgment of Ariostan characterization in “Galileo on Characterization in the Orlando Furioso,” Italica 57 (1980).

11. E.g., Simone Fornari, “Apologia,” in Spositione sopra l'“Orlando Furioso” (Firenze: 1549), p. 43.

12. See Chapter 4, secs. ii-iii, below, for a closer examination of this question. In general for the motif of oratio/ratio (or eloquence/wisdom, or word/idea) in the Renaissance, see Jerrold Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968). On p. xi, Seigel shows that at various times Cicero, key figure for the humanists, defined man by both of these terms (cf. De Oratore 1.viii, De Officiis 1.50) and usually insisted on the need to unite rhetorical eloquence with wisdom (Seigel, pp. xv, 7-8; cf. Curtius, European Literature, p. 70). In the Phaedrus, Socrates advocates roughly the same thing, but in the context of an anti-Sophist, anti-rhetoric polemic. These are the terms in which the early humanist antiphilosophy, pro-rhetoric polemics (especially that of Lorenzo Valla) should be seen, as well as the later Quattrocento efforts to unite poetic-rhetorical surface and hidden philosophical content in a “theologia poetica” (cf. Landino, “Proemio,” p. 118, on “sapienza” and “eloquenza” together as the proper of man). Even the neo-Platonists, however, had, in a sense, to admit that speech alone was unique to man (the angels, creatures of pure ratio, having no need for language). The parodic flip-side of these attempts to define the “human” is the Aristotelian characterization of man as the animal who laughs (Parts of Animals, trans. A.L. Peck [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961], bk. iii.10) which has its most famous Renaissance reprise in Rabelais, “Aux Lecteurs” preceding Gargantua (see Oeuvres Complètes, ed. P. Jourda [Paris: Garnier, 1962], vol. 1, p. 3).

13. The episode is alone at the center only in the third and final edition of the Furioso. In the forty-canto 1516 and 1521 editions, the madness of Orlando commences in canto xxi, rather than xxiii. The original canto xx (which in 1532 becomes xxii) focused on Ruggiero and Bradamante, climaxing with the latter's mad vengeance on Pinabello. Thus, the first center of the poem was designed to balance the two main plot lines (which the last edition does by other means), even as it was already zeroed in on the representation of folly.

14. I translate from Croce, “Ariosto,” pp. 49-50.

15. Giamatti, “Headlong Horses, Headless Horsemen,” is one of the two critics most successful in establishing the connection between the two heroes (who, after all, are the foci of the two main narrative lines of the poem). Saccone, “Il Soggetto,” is the other. In Chapter 4 I will add to their accounts and factor in Astolfo as a third term.

16. Erwin Panofsky, Hercules am Scheidewege (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1930). See also, Franco Gaeta, “L'Avventura d'Ercole,” Rinascimento 5 (1954); G.K. Galinsky, The Herakles Theme (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1972), esp. pp. 185-230; Marc-René Jung, Hercule dans la Littérature Française du XVI^eSiècle (Genève: Droz, 1966); T.E. Mommsen, “Petrarch and the Story of the Choice of Hercules,” in Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1959). Also of interest are E. Tietze-Conrat, “Notes on Hercules at the Crossroads,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 14 (1951); and Eugene Waith, The Herculean Hero (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962).

17. Mommsen, “Choice of Hercules,” p. 194, cites Petrarch's appropriation for the new humanism of Cicero's etymological derivation of virtus from vir, so that virtue equals (male) “humannness” (see Familiares xiii.2 in Rerum Familiarum Libri, eds. V. Rossi and U. Bosco, vols. 10-13 in Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Francesco Petrarca [Firenze: Sansoni, 1933-1942]; cf. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations ii.xviii.43). See also Saccone, “Il Soggetto,” p. 219; Galinsky, Herakles, p. 190, on Hercules as “exemplar virtutis,” with a long list of mythographical sources for that epithet. The shift from the Hercules of the Middle Ages to that of the Renaissance is usually seen as one from an allegorical emblem of Christ, the God become man, to a figure of man's potential for realizing the divine in himself. See Jung, Hercule, p. 7 (citing Pierre Bersuire, Ovidius Moralizatus) for the medieval position, as well as Garin, L'Educazione in Europa, pp. 91-92. For Hercules' qualified status as man-god, in pious deference to the one true God and even the angels, see Coluccio Salutati, De Laboribus Herculis, ed. B.L. Ullman (Zurich: Thesaurus Mundi, 1951), bk. iii.v (vol. 1, pp. 176-77). See also n. 21, below.

18. Felice Battaglia, “Introduzione,” in Il Pensiero Pedagogico del Rinascimento (Firenze: Sansoni e Giuntine, 1960), pp. 23-24. Cf. Gaeta, “Ercole,” p. 227 ff.

19. Leon Battista Alberti, Momus, ed. and trans. G. Martini (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1942), pp. 43-45. For the parodic force of this episode see Chapter 3, sec. iv, below.

20. Cristoforo Landino, De Vera Nobilitate, ed. M. Lentzen (Genève: Droz, 1970), esp. pp. 107-110, where he employs Hercules as an emblem of contemplative askesis. Cf. Disputationes, Lohe edition, p. 32, where he has “Lorenzo” use Hercules as a figure of the active life in his debate with “Alberti.” Cf. Salutati, De Laboribus Herculis iii.xi (vol. 1, pp. 211-12), where he allegorizes the killing of Chiron as the ascent from active to contemplative lives.

21. The importance of Hercules in bivio and the related image of the Pythagorean “Y” was established by Panofsky. See also Mommsen and Tietz-Conrat. The standard source is Cicero, De Officiis i.xxxii.18 (cf. iii.v.25), who cites Xenophon, Memorabilia ii.i.21-24, who in turn cites the pre-Socratic Prodicus. The most commonly cited literary use of the image is Aeneas' choice between Orcus to the left and the Elysian Fields to the right (Aeneid vi.540-43; cf. Landino's reading of the Aeneid in Disputationes, bks. iii-iv, esp. p. 247 in Lohe edition). According to Mommsen, Petrarch was the first to conflate the two images (“Choice of Hercules,” p. 181). For versions of the motif, see Petrarch, Secretum, in Prose, ed. G. Martellotti (Milano and Napoli: Ricciardi, 1955), bk. iii, p. 130; in the same volume, De Vita Solitaria i.ii.2 (p. 332) and ii.xiii.4 (p. 550). See also Salutati, De Laboribus Herculis iii.vii, xi, xv (vol. 1, pp. 182, 214, 249). Regarding possible anti-Christian implications of the figure, see Panofsky, Hercules, p. 164; Mommsen, “Choice of Hercules,” p. 194; Mazzeo, Renaissance and Revolution, p. 55. Trinkaus, Image and Likeness (vol. 1, p. 194, and vol. 2, p. 660), objects that the Renaissance emphasis on will was neo-Augustinian and hardly precluded Christianity, as Salutati's attempts to reconcile the two demonstrate. For overviews of Salutati's philosophy of the will and its importance for the period, see Garin, L'Umanesimo, pp. 35-42; and Trinkaus, Image and Likeness, vol. 1, p. 51 ff.

22. Cicero, De Natura Deorum iii.xvi; Salutati, De Laboribus Herculis iii.i (vol. 1, pp. 164-66); Boccaccio, Genealogie Deorum Gentilium Libri, ed. V. Romano (Bari: Laterza, 1951), bk. ii.ix (vol. 1, pp. 80-81) and bk. xiii.i (vol. 2, p. 638).

23. Rajna, Le Fonti, p. 67, points out that a number of Cinquecento commentators, beginning with Pigna, identified the Senecan echo.

24. Saccone also cites Pigna, arguing that “L'Ercole del titolo genera i due eroi, le cui traiettorie sono insieme analoghe ed opposte” (“Il Soggetto,” pp. 217, 222).

25. For echoes of Hercules in bivio in the Furioso, see also vi.60, vii.42, xv.92-94, xxvi.66-68. Among the Cinquecento commentators (conveniently compiled in Ariosto, Opere, S. Orlandini, ed. [Venezia: 1730]), Toscanella and Porcacchi note the use of the Pythagorean “Y” in their allegories of canto vi, while G. Bonomone's Allegoria which prefaces the same edition calls Ruggiero “questo nuovo Ercole.”

26. Saccone again provides useful references (Il Soggetto, p. 159): a long-standing tradition dating from Augustine, De Civitate Dei xviii.8 (which in turn cites Pliny, Historia Naturalis vii.lvi.283), interpreted the giant Atlas of mythology as an astrologer, even a philosopher, linked with the ancient Egyptian wisdom of Moses, Hermes Trismegistus, Prometheus, and Hercules himself. The information is passed on in a more positive light by Ficino in the preface to his translation of the hermetic Pimander. As Saccone explains, the tradition was known to the young Ariosto, who makes explicit reference to it in the (fragmentary) verse oration De Laudibus Sophiae, with which he introduced the scholastic year at the Studio in Ferrara, and in which he links Atlas, as astrologer, to Moses and Hermes as possessors of mystical knowledge (ll. 31-33). See also Salutati, De Laboribus Herculis iii.xxiii-xxiv, xlii (vol. 1, pp. 297-99, 307, 309, 311, 313-14; vol. 2, p. 418), and Boccaccio, Genealogia iv.xxxi (vol. 1, pp. 189-90). I regret that Marianne Shapiro's meticulous article, “From Atlas to Atlante,” Comparative Literature 35 (1983), which is destined to be a primary resource for students of Ariosto's Atlante, came into my hands too late to influence my argument.

27. Lohe edition, p. 32 (cf. n. 20, above). Salutati, calling Atlas a philosopher because of his knowledge of the heavens (which, as a giant, he literally bore on his shoulders) sees him as the teacher who made Hercules into a philosopher in his own right (De Laboribus Herculis, vol. 2, pp. 633-34); cf. Boccaccio, Genealogia xiii.i (vol. 2, p. 641). Jung (Hercule, pp. 9-10, 21-23) cites a number of Renaissance examples, notably Enrique de Villena, Los Doze Trabajos de Hercules (1417) and Raoul LeFèvre, Receuil des Hystoires de Troie (1464), otherwise known as the Roman de Fort Hercules.

28. This discussion is indebted to Saccone, who makes the following contrast between the two heroes, though without extensive textual grounding: “se Ruggiero è da un lato un Ercole giovane in cerca della sua via (la quale non sarà trovata una volta per tutte, come mostra già ciò che accade dopo il rinsavimento e la fuga da Alcina a Logistilla), Orlando dall'altro, il ‘senator romano,’ il savio e maturo eroe, ribadisce, senza possibilità d'equivoco che la virtù come s'acquista, così si perde” (“Il Soggetto,” pp. 222-23). Inserting this dialectic into a larger pattern of unresolved oppositions which he sees in the poem, he then argues that “la sanità confina con la pazzia, è dietro, o è l'ombra della pazzia” (p. 243). My discussion will test Saccone's point in a more detailed reading of the heroes' adventures in the poem to suggest that Ariosto uses them for deliberately polemical purposes—against humanistic didacticism, as well as against specific historical-political targets (see n. 31 below).

29. We have already seen that Hercules tends to be a “double man,” associated both with youth and age, labor and contemplation, strength and virtue, education and madness, deity and humanity. The following passage from Plotinus, Enneads, 4th ed., trans. S. MacKenna, revised by B. S. Page (London: Faber & Faber, 1969), exemplifies this doubling which seems both synthetic and schizophrenic: “the poet too, in the story of Hercules, seems to give this image of separate existence; he puts the shade of Hercules in the lower world and Hercules himself among the gods: treating the hero as existing in two realms at once, he gives a twofold Hercules” (i.i.12). Plotinus identifies the split with the active and contemplative sides of the figure. For the youth/age allegory see, for instance, Dante, Convivio iv.xxviii.13-19. Cf. Mazzotta, Dante, pp. 39-41, for a useful discussion of Dante's more complex treatment of young and old in the Commedia. See also Curtius, European Literature, pp. 98-101.

30. See Furioso ix.56.1-2, 77.5-8 (cf. 78-79); xxiii.85.6-8, 87-88; xlvi.124-25, 133. I will return to some of these scenes later on. For the standard allegorization of Anteus vs. Hercules, see Salutati, De Laboribus Herculis iii.xxviii (vol. 1, p. 322) and Prima Editio (vol. 2, p. 633); Landino, De Vera Nobilitate, p. 108. See also Saccone, “Il Soggetto,” p. 219.

31. Here is an incomplete list of references to Ercole I and II d'Este in the poem: iii.46, 49, 50, 58, 62; xxxvii.12-13; xl.1; xli.67; xliii.59; xlvi.87. The symbolic value of the name of Ercole I had earlier inspired an Este courtier, Pietro Andrea de' Bassi, to compose Le Fatiche d'Ercole in honor of his birth. The work was not published until 1473, some fifty years after its composition. Jung, Hercule, pp. 8-9, and Galinsky, Herakles, pp. 194-95, discuss it briefly. Other works on the Hercules theme were written by Este courtiers later on: Lilio Gregorio Giraldi, Vita Herculis (published in Ferrara, 1539; composed ca. 1514); G. B. Giraldi-Cinzio, Dell'Ercole Canti 26 (Ferrara, 1557; incomplete).

32. All references are to Seneca, Tragedies, vol. 1, ed. and trans. F. J. Miller (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1917). Saccone sees vii.55 as echoing both Hercules Furens (468-70) and Ovid, Heroides ix.57-60 (“Il Soggetto,” p. 222). More convincingly, Parker, Inescapable Romance, p. 248 (n. 27), observes that the reference to the Silenus at the curing of Orlando's madness (xxxix.60) echoes not only Virgil, Eclogues vi.24, but also Hercules Furens 1063: “solvite tantis animum monstris. …” The Virgilian echo is more direct, but the Senecan echo refers specifically to the cure of a madness and so cannot be discounted. I believe that Orlando's folly also begins with an echo from Hercules Furens 1043-48, which prefigures the head slumping on the breast in Furioso xxiii.112.5, as well as the crucial tree imagery of that passage. It is clear that i.56.7-8 comes from Hercules Furens 313-14: “quod nimis miseri volunt / hoc facile credunt.”

33. See Giulio Bertoni, La Biblioteca Estense e la Coltura Ferrarese (Torino: Loescher, 1903), esp. pp. 107, 216-17, 251. See also Marvin Herrick, Italian Tragedy in the Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965), p. 3, on the Este's possession of two manuscripts of Seneca's tragedies.

34. See Herrick, Italian Tragedy, as well as Catalano, Vita, vol. 1, pp. 116-26.

35. Cf. Waith, Herculean Hero, pp. 30-31. For Castiglione, see Cortegiano i.xvii.

36. This letter is published as the Prima Editio of the treatise at the end of vol. 2, Ullman edition.

37. Salutati, De Laboribus Herculis, vol. 2, p. 585.

38. Cf. Landino, De Vera Nobilitate, p. 109; Cortegiano iv.lxix. This reading is already explicit in Seneca's Hercules Oetaeus.

39. The proem to canto xxi (stanzas 1-2) insists upon an absolute, uncorrupted ethics of faithfully keeping one's promised word which derives, ultimately, from the Stoics. Saccone, “Clorindano e Medoro, con Alcuni Argomenti per una Lettura del Primo Furioso,” in Il Soggetto, asserts that this is the definitive value for Ariosto, though in “Il Soggetto” he implicitly reverses himself by arguing that any critic attempting to isolate a privileged “subject” of the poem reifies and dismembers it like Orrilo (cf. Chapter 1, n. 60, above). In the case of canto xxi, the story-within-a-story which follows the proem seems first to exemplify its precept; but, in fact, the “faithful” blindness and inflexibility of Filandro is exactly that which the faithless Gabrina manipulates to get him to violate his pledged word by killing her husband and marrying her. Zerbino hears the story from Filandro's noble brother, Ermonide, whom he has just mortally wounded in the process of keeping his promised word to this same Gabrina (who then “repays” him by attempting to have him executed in canto xxii). For more on the theme of faith see Chapter 4, nn. 44-45, below.

40. On Ariosto and Erasmus, see n. 115, below and Chapter 4, nn. 43, 131-33.

41. Since the De Laboribus Herculis apparently did not circulate widely in the Renaissance (cf. Jung, Hercule, pp. 7-8), I make no claims for its direct influence on Ariosto. Nonetheless, the treatise has great value as a compendium of topoi and motifs largely diffused both before and after it. Ariosto's sometimes close associations with the Medici and their circle make it conceivable that he knew the work from their great collection. On the other hand, in Chapter 4 I will argue that Ariosto clearly knew Boccaccio's Genealogia (bks. xiv and xv) and alluded to it specifically and polemically in writing canto xxxv.1-31.

42. De Laboribus Herculis, vol. 1, p. 298: “Hercules et ingenii et omnis virtutis sublimitas est.”

43. See Galinsky, Herakles, pp. 196-97, citing Salutati, iii.xv-xvi, xxvi-xxviii, xxxiii, xxxvi.

44. This last is the case in Landino's De Vera Nobilitate.

45. De Laboribus Herculis, vol. 1, p. 214: “Plus enim perfectionis sonat Herculis nomen quam Alcyde. Hoc enim ab ‘alce,’ quod est ‘virtus,’ dictum est; illud ab ‘eris,’ ‘cleos,’ id est litis gloria … que quidem est premium remuneratioque virtutum.” Cf. vol. 1, p. 141: “‘Heris’ enim ‘lis’ est, ‘cleos,’ ‘gloria,’ quasi ‘ex lite gloriosus,’” as well as iii.ix (vol. 1, p. 203). The etymology is a standard of mythographical treatises. Bernardus Silvestris, Commentary on the First Six Books of the “Aeneid,” eds. J. W. Jones and E. F. Jones (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977), glosses Hercules as “her lis, cleos gloria” (p. 56) and Alcides as “quasi fortis et formosus. Fortis notat virtutem, formosus gloriam” (p. 87). Boccaccio, Genealogia, offers the same etymology along with several others in xiii.i (vol. 2, p. 638).

46. Rerum Familiarum Libri xix.3. See also Mommsen, “Choice of Hercules,” pp. 194-96. Cf. Silvestris, Commentary, p. 75: “Boreas [gloria] Zeti et Calais pater est quia gloria poematis et egregii operis est causa. Virtutis enim fructum multi ponunt in gloria.”

47. De Laboribus Herculis, vol. 1, pp. 43-44: “Prima quidem Musarum est Clyo. … Unde Clyo a ‘cleos,’ quod est ‘gloria,’ dicta est. Sicut enim gloria finis est quem studiosi assequuntur in ultimis post laborem, ita primum est in intentione studentis propter quam subicit se labori. Nam ut dixit Cicero (Tusc. Disp. 1.4): ‘Honos alit artes, et incenduntur omnes ad studia gloria.’”

48. Clio, of course, is the Muse of History, rather than one of the poetic genres, but from the humanistic perspective the poetic and the historical do approach identity under the rubric of exemplary litterae and in their glory-conferring functions, for which see n. 75, below. For the Furioso's dramatization of poetry's (and its own) claims to historiographical verity, see Chapter 4, sec. i (esp. n. 29), below.

49. Salutati, De Laboribus Herculis i.ii (vol. 1, pp. 10, 14-15) and i.xii (pp. 63, 67). According to Jung, Hercule, p. 9, de' Bassi also dedicates the first part of his work on Hercules to poetry. There is a longstanding tradition of Hercules' binding of Cerebrus as a figure of eloquence (and thus of poetry, given the Renaissance tendency to ally literature and rhetoric). Typically the hero is represented with a golden chain emerging from his mouth, an image which derives from Lucian, “Heracles,” in Works, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), pp. 256-59. See also Silvestris, Commentary, pp. 87-88.

50. Salutati, De Laboribus Herculis ii.i (vol. 1, pp. 76-87); Trinkaus, Image and Likeness, vol. 2, pp. 697-98.

51. Trinkaus, Image and Likeness, vol. 1, pp. 63-66.

52. For the Medusa in the mythographical and hermeneutical traditions and in Dante, see John Freccero, “Medusa: The Letter and the Spirit,” Yearbook of Italian Studies 2 (1972). See also Mazzotta, Dante, pp. 163-64, 277-86; Durling, “Introduction,” in Petrarch's Lyric Poems (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 29-33, as well as his bibliography for additional references. In the following chapter I will discuss some ways that the Medusa myth makes itself felt in the Furioso, especially via related figures such as the Pegasus and Perseus, not to mention Atlas.

53. Cf. Landino, De Vera Nobilitate, p. 107: “est … Hercules imitandus.”

54. For Panofsky, Mazzeo, and Trinkaus, cf. nn. 16 and 21 above. Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), pp. 184-85.

55. Garin, L'Educazione in Europa, p. 81. See also his “Le Favole Antiche,” Rassegna della Letteratura Italiana 57 (1953), esp. p. 412. For Hercules as symbol of Florence, see also Landino, “Proemio,” p. 128.

56. E.g., Landino, “Proemio,” p. 119: “Merita adunque la nostra repubblica buona grazia da tutta l'Italia, poiché in quella nacquero e' primi che l'una e l'altra eloquenzia, non solo morta ma per tanti seculi sepulta, in vita ridussono e dalle tartaree tenebre in chiara luce rivocarono.” The two main models for successful rescues from hell are Christ's harrowing thereof and Hercules' rescue mission.

57. On the question of what the Renaissance was and/or whether it was at all, begin with Ferguson, The Renaissance, and Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, 2nd ed. (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 1965). My own approach is to insist on the metaphorical, “literary,” nature of the period; i.e., on the choice of the metaphor of rebirth by writers of the time and since to describe, but also in a way to create fictively, an identity for an enormous stretch of time and for an apparently infinite body of often recalcitrant facts.

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Note on Translations

In presenting quotations from Italian and Latin I have adopted, with minor exceptions, the following scheme. Primary texts in Italian are quoted in the original with following parenthetical translation. Secondary texts in Italian and all Latin texts are translated into English, with the original reproduced in a footnote. Translations are my own, with these exceptions:

Dante Alighieri: The Divine Comedy, 3 vols., trans. C. Singleton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970).

Ludovico Ariosto: The Satires of Ludovico Ariosto: A Renaissance Autobiography, ed. and trans. P. Wiggins (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976).

Giovanni Boccaccio: Boccaccio on Poetry; Being the Preface and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Books of Boccaccio's Genealogia Deorum Gentilium, ed. and trans. C. Osgood (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956; first published 1930).

Desiderius Erasmus: The Praise of Folly, trans. H.H. Hudson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941; repr. 1969).

Lorenzo Valla: Dialogue on Free Will, trans. C. Trinkaus, in E. Cassirer et al., eds., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948).

When, in rare cases, I disagree with one of the translators or feel a different emphasis is required, emendations are inserted between brackets.