[In the following essay, Javitch examines the critical reception of Orlando furioso in the sixteenth century to illustrate the growing significance of Neoclassical ideas.]

The many actions, characters, and various adventures of chivalric romance required multiple plot lines which had to be interrupted constantly in order for each of them to progress more or less simultaneously. So when Ariosto chose to make his Orlando Furioso a sequel to Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato, he opted for a discontinuous narrative. Moreover, the technique of entrelacement or interweaving which allowed the narrator to advance his various plots by shifting back and forth among them invited—in fact, had built into it—authorial intrusion. Whenever Ariosto has to abandon one of his plot lines he intervenes as narrator to announce it's time to leave a protagonist or a situation in order to take up or return to another. Examples can be found in almost every canto:

Ma perché varie file a varie tele
uopo mi son, che tutte ordire intendo,
lascio Rinaldo e l'agitata prua,
e torno a dir di Bradamanta sua.

(II.30)¹

The author is often playful when he announces the need to make a shift:

Di questo altrove io vo' rendervi conto;
ch'ad un gran duca è forza ch'io riguardi,
il qual mi grida, e di lontano accenna,
e priega ch'io nol lasci ne la penna.

(XV.9)

Occasionally he justifies these transitions by claiming that he makes them for the sake of varietà, and for the pleasure such variety produces.

Ma perché non convien che sempre io dica,
né ch'io vi occupi sempre in una cosa,
io lascerò Ruggiero in questo caldo,
e girò in Scozia a ritrovar Rinaldo.

(VIII.21; see also VIII.29; XIII.80-81)

It becomes evident, too, that since Ariosto likes to unite separate story lines, if only temporarily, he cannot do so until events in one have caught up with the events in another. For example, after Orlando goes mad in the middle of the poem, we follow his wanderings until he reaches the bridge built by Rodomonte (XXIV.14). But this bridge has yet to be built—something that will only take place after Isabella has died, an event that itself will result after the infatuated Rodomonte tries to possess her in Canto XXIX. Obviously, Ariosto has to suspend his account of Orlando at Rodomonte's bridge until all these events have occurred. In an earlier example, in Canto VIII, the narrator suspends his account of Angelica, who is on the island of Ebuda about to be sacrificed to the Orca (VIII.68), on the grounds that he cannot bear to describe this pathetic event. The real reason for his interruption is that none of the protagonists who might rescue the damsel from the monster is yet in a position to do so. The outcome of her dire predicament has to remain suspended until the end of Canto X when Ruggiero's aerial travel eventually brings him to remote Ebuda in time to save Angelica from her plight.

When Ariosto interrupts a plot line yet briefly anticipates its sequel, he reminds us that unlike his characters or his first-time readers he knows the future outcome of his poem. It is possible that he offers readers a glimpse of the future to arouse their curiosity; but he has other motives for letting a plot line get ahead of itself. Consider, as another example, the interruption that occurs at XII.65 when, once again, he takes leave of Angelica who, fleeing pursuers as is her wont, comes upon the body of a young man lying wounded in the forest. Ariosto leaves her in this frozen stance beholding the young soldier who remains unidentified for seven whole cantos. The poet knows, of course, what will only be revealed to the reader at Canto XIX—namely that the young man is Medoro who, after being wounded and nearly killed in a night expedition during the siege of Paris, is left lying in the way of the fleeing Angelica who will restore him back to health and, in the process, fall in love with him. While it may be true that the suspension at Canto XII leaves us curious to find out the identity of the mysterious young man Angelica has stumbled upon, the curiosity quickly dissipates as we are distracted by new adventures. More significantly, by this glancing forward before interrupting, the poet effectively reveals the omniscient purview he commands of his plot's future outcome and thereby affirms the control he exerts over his complex narrative. The poet wants the narrative to appear erratic and wayward and he exploits the discontinuous character of the romance plot to achieve this effect. But it becomes progressively clear that he breaks his plot lines very deliberately and precisely when he wants to.

The kind of interruptions discussed so far tend to leave the reader curious, but not too frustrated by the suspension of the narrative. Very frequently, however, Ariosto's interruptions are sudden, premature, and quite disconcerting. Repeatedly he interrupts a story earlier than he has to, and often when an action is at or is about to reach its most dramatic point. Such interruptions can always be found at the end of cantos since a recurring tactic of the poet is to defy the expectation of closure at the end of a canto by terminating it at the start or at the height of a dramatic episode. Frustrating as the reader may find it to be left hanging at the end of a canto, if he continues reading, he is not deprived of continuity for too long because, after an authorial intervention at the start of the next canto, the episode that was cut off is resumed again. Though the reader comes to expect that the story broken off at the end of one canto will be resumed very soon in the following one, it should not be overlooked that the authorial judgments and comments that begin every canto are themselves interruptive. Whether long or short, these proemi, as they were called, obviously contribute to the poem's discontinuity by disengaging the reader from the narrative whose sequel he or she usually yearns to discover after the suspenseful break of the previous canto. As I shall point out later, the proemi were criticized increasingly by sixteenth century-readers who found the authorial intrusions in the Furioso as disruptive as its narrative shifts.

More disconcerting than the unexpected interruptions at canto ends are those that occur within cantos. When Ariosto shifts from one plot to another, he tends to interrupt the story suddenly and prematurely, and always when he is sure the reader is totally captivated by the action taking place. Among the many examples that could be cited, a typical one occurs in Canto XI. Near the beginning of this canto, Ruggiero, left unrequited by Angelica who has just managed to escape his sexual assault after he rescues her from the Orca, is eventually distracted by the noise of a duel between a giant and a knight. As he watches the giant overcome the knight and unlace his helmet for the kill, Ruggiero recognizes that the victim is none other than Bradamante. Whereupon he rushes to assist her. The Giant seizes the stunned Bradamante, slings her on his shoulder and runs away, furiously pursued by Ruggiero. Just as the chase reaches a crescendo, the narrator interrupts it abruptly and shifts to Orlando's adventures that had been left in abeyance for over a canto:

Così correndo l'uno, e seguitando
l'altro, per un sentiero ombroso e fosco,
che sempre si venia più dilatando,
in un gran prato uscir fuor di quel bosco.
Non più di questo; ch'io ritorno a Orlando,
che 'l fulgur che portò già il re Cimosco,
avea gittato in mar nel maggior fondo,
acciò mai più non si trovasse al mondo.

(XI.20-21)

The acceleration of the tempo, the heightening of tension before the unexpected shift, and the defiance of formal expectation by making the break in mid-octave: these tactics regularly characterize Ariosto's sudden transitions. And, as in this example, the poet almost always chooses to interrupt the action at a tense and dramatic moment when the reader's engagement has been fully secured but obviously before the action reaches any satisfying conclusion. Although the multiple plot structure of his romanzo called for interruptions, they did not have to be as sudden and as premature as he liked to make them. So why did he suspend his narrative so abruptly in this way?

The usual but inadequate explanation is that these interruptions serve to arouse the reader's suspense and therefore prompt him or her to read on in order to discover the outcome of the action left unresolved. Already in the very first defenses of the modern romanzo that appeared in the middle of the sixteenth century the interruptions were justified on these grounds. Here, for example, is what G. B. Giraldi had to say on this matter in his Discorso on the composition of Romances, published in 1554.

Perché avendosi gli scrittori de' romanzi prese le azioni di molti da principio, non hanno potuto continuare di canto in canto una materia, essendo elle tutte insieme congiunte. Ma è stato lor mestieri, per condur l'opera al fine, poiché hanno detto d'un lor personaggio, frapporvi l'altro e rompere la prima materia ed entrare nei fatti d'un altro, e con questo ordine continuare le materie insino al fine dell'opera: la qual cosa hanno fatto con maraviglioso artificio. Perocché in questo lor troncar le cose, conducono il lettore a tal termine, prima che le tronchino, che gli lasciano nell'animo un ardente desiderio di tornare a ritrovarla: il che è cagione che tutto il poema loro sia letto, rimanendo sempre le principali materie imperfette insino al compimento dell' opera.²

While Giraldi's views were challenged, as I'll soon show, by critics in his own time, most modern commentators have shared his opinion that the function of Ariosto's interruptions was to arouse suspense and thereby keep readers engaged and curious to read on.

Ariosto's sudden interruptions definitely produce suspense, but readers usually find that so much else occurs to engross them in the narrative between the interruption and the resumption of a story that they tend to forget or to cease being interested in the earlier broken-off situation when it is eventually resumed. For example, Ruggiero's heated chase of the Giant bearing off Bradamante, interrupted as I noted at XI.21 is not resumed until a canto later at XII.16. Yet not even twenty stanzas after this interruption when Orlando is in the midst of battling the Orca, or at the start of the next canto when Orlando is himself furiously pursuing a knight who seems to have kidnapped Angelica, one reads on not to find out how Ruggiero's chase of the Giant turned out but because one is fully engrossed by the separate intervening narrative. In fact, by the time the narrator brings us back to Ruggiero's chase and its outcome we hardly care. We may recall the aggravation of being deprived of knowing the outcome a canto earlier, but none of the suspense and curiosity aroused at that point remains to be gratified when the interrupted action is resumed. As the reader moves from one such rupture to another it becomes apparent to him that, unlike the interruptions at canto ends which leave him briefly deprived, the interruptions within cantos leave him unrequited but without the prospect of gratification.

I could cite numerous instances of such frustrating breaks, especially in the segment that runs from Cantos XV to XIX where the narrative constantly shifts from the epic conflict within and around Paris under siege, to the romantic and fantastic adventures of Astolfo and Grifone in the Middle East. Let one characteristic example suffice. In Canto XVIII, after Rodomonte's forced exit from Paris where he has decimated the population, Ariosto devotes twenty octaves to the massive battle raging around Paris and then gradually focuses on the outstanding feats of the young Saracen prince Dardinello (XVIII.47ff). Dardinello's display of valor is modelled on that of the young Pallas in the tenth book of the Aeneid (X. 362-438) just before Pallas fights the much stronger Turnus and is killed by him (X. 439-509). To the extent that Ariosto's imitation is recognized, it contributes to the sense of Dardinello's impending doom that builds up even as he overcomes one Christian knight after another. But at the point when, after all his successes, Dardinello encounters the more formidable Rinaldo, just before the moment of tragic pathos when, like the young Pallas, Dardinello will meet his death, Ariosto suddenly interrupts the action:

ecco Rinaldo vien: Fortuna il guida
per dargli onor che Dardinello uccida.
Ma sia per questa volta detto assai
dei gloriosi fatti di Ponente.
Tempo è ch'io torni ove Grifon lasciai,
che tutto d'ira e di disdegno ardente
facea, con più timor ch'avesse mai,
tumultuar la sbigottita gente.

(XVIII.58-59)

Left hanging and deprived of the sequel to Dardinello's fatal encounter with Rinaldo, the reader does not care at this point how the situation in Damascus turns out, intensely preoccupied though he had been about Grifone's revenge when it was suddenly broken off at a most suspenseful moment fifty stanzas earlier (XVIII.7-8). The continuity one yearned for is now finally provided, but too late: it does not make up for the frustration produced by the interruption at XVIII.59. The narrator then goes on to describe the reconciliation between Grifone and the Damascan ruler Norandino, after which he recounts Aquilante's capture of the treacherous Orrigille and Martano, and the latter's shameful punishment at the hands of Norandino and the Damascans. Marfisa, the second greatest lady warrior in the poem is then introduced, and after she links up with Astolfo and Sansonetto they all proceed to Damascus where they also create havoc before making peace with Norandino. Eventually Marfisa, Sansonetto, Grifone, Aquilante, and Astolfo depart for France by sea. But at the height of a raging Mediterranean storm the narrator suddenly abandons them (XVIII.146) to resume the duel between Dardinello and Rinaldo that he had interrupted nearly one hundred octaves earlier. Once again, though that interruption left the reader yearning to know the sequel to Dardinello's fatal encounter, by the time the duel is resumed he is no longer interested, and all the less so since the sequel is provided at the cost of another premature interruption.

In an earlier article entitled “Cantus interruptus in the Orlando Furioso,” I tried to account for the motives underlying Ariosto's frustrating interruptions. I proposed—and I still uphold this view—that Ariosto sought to deprive his readers of continuity and fulfillment, even at the risk of jeopardizing his make-believe, in order to duplicate the frustration of desire and of expectation constantly experienced by the characters in his poem.³ That the poet seeks and achieves this duplication becomes particularly obvious when both character and reader are made to suffer their frustration more or less simultaneously. Consider, for example, the memorable end of Canto X. Having just rescued the naked Angelica from being devoured by the Orca, Ruggiero carries her off on the Hippogriff. Suddenly, overwhelmed by sexual desire, he alights in a meadow. While he frantically and clumsily tries to remove his armor in order to ravish the girl, the canto is abruptly brought to a halt which is as frustrating as Ruggiero's effort to shed his gear. Considered in the context of what then follows in Canto XI—the naked Angelica will manage to disappear before Ruggiero can get undressed—this interruption duplicates the sexual frustration Ruggiero is about to suffer. As readers, we are subjected repeatedly to such unpleasant deprivations and, even though these frustrations do not regularly occur at the same moment that they afflict his characters, it becomes clear that Ariosto wants us to share this inevitable existential condition. In other words, he not only wanted the various adventures of his protagonists to illustrate the wayward discontinuity of human existence, he also managed to exploit the formal necessity of interrupting his many plots to make his readers experience that discontinuity directly. In addition to duplicating for the reader the frustration of desire besetting his characters, Ariosto also meant to condition that reader for the time when such frustration would not be merely literary. Not that he believed his salutary interruptions would be sufficient or effective enough to make us immune to the world's unpredictable flux, but they could at least make us more habituated to flux and more aware that our persistent desire for continuity and completion was bound to remain unfulfilled.

To support my claims about the frustrating effect of Ariosto's interruptions, I invoked some of the negative reactions they provoked among sixteenth-century readers. However, since writing that article, I have discovered that the criticism of the discontinuities in the Furioso was more extensive than I had indicated and that it affected significantly the development of narrative poetry in the later sixteenth century. In what follows I want to consider these various critical reactions, especially the hostile ones, and to indicate, at the end, what they reveal about the neoclassical sensibility that was rapidly gaining ascendance in Italy and other parts of Europe at the end of the Renaissance.⁴

The interruptions in Ariosto's poem that I have begun to describe met with increasing hostility in the latter half of the cinquecento. By the last decades of the century the poem's discontinuity was considered one of its major flaws. For instance, at the beginning of Giuseppe Malatesta's Della Nuova Poesia (1589), a spirited defense of the Furioso's modernity, a speaker in the dialogue who is critical of the poem rapidly lists its chief defects. By mentioning at the start Ariosto's untimely shifts from one narrative strand to another, he suggests that the poem's interruptions were as commonly criticized by the end of the century as its lack of unity, its misleading title, and the indecorous conduct of its chief protagonists.⁵ Actually, the objections to Ariosto's interruptions begin to be voiced several decades earlier. Already in the 1550s one can infer that Ariosto's sudden shifts provoked unfavorable reactions. The first telling signs are to be found in the margins of different Venetian editions of the Furioso, starting with the Valgrisi edition of 1556. At those places within cantos where the narrative is suspended, marginal notes indicate where, later in the poem, the reader can find the suspended plot line continued. Presumably this was meant to allow readers to skip the intervening narrative and go straight to the sequel instead of being left frustrated by the break.⁶

Even more telling evidence that the sudden transitions irritated readers, is that G. B. Giraldi and Giovan Battista Pigna, the first defenders of the romanzo as a modern genre, made a point of justifying them. These critics not only showed that the multiple actions of the romanzo required that the narrator suspend one plot so that he could resume another, they sought to justify these suspensions on the grounds that such premature breaks aroused the desire to read on. G. B. Pigna, in his treatise on I Romanzi of 1554 actually distinguishes between timely interruptions and premature ones, and it is clear from the instances he cites of the latter kind that it is Ariosto's interruptions he has in mind. When the romanzatore suspends his narrative, Pigna explains,

Tralascia ò quando il tempo dà che s'interponga, ò quando nol dà. Quando il dà, l'animo di chi legge, quieto rimane. dal che ha contentezza, & perciò piacere: restando egli con una cosa compiuta. come se un naufragio è finito, ò una singolar battaglia, ò un fatto d'arme, ò una peregrinatione, ò cose simiglianti. Quando nol dà, l'animo resta sospeso. & ne nasce perciò un desiderio che fa diletto: essendo che un certo ardore è causato, che è di dover la fine della cosa sentire, come in sul bello d'una tempesta ritirarsi, ò nel tempo che due sono per menar le mani, ò che una guerra si prepari, ò da un luogo levar uno & a mezza strada & anche prima abbandonarlo, & far altre cose così fatte. Et ciò più s'usa che il primo modo: conciosia che il compositore di farne sempre più innanzi andare s'ingegna.⁷

In romances premature breaks are more usual, Pigna explains, because they fulfill the romanzatore's design to leave us in suspense and thereby make us read on. I mentioned earlier that Giraldi, whose Discorso on composing romances appeared the same year as Pigna's treatise, also maintained that the romanzo's necessary interruptions were artfully exploited to arouse a desire to continue reading. But, unlike Pigna, Giraldi expresses misgivings about the dislocating effects of such interruptions. Immediately after rationalizing them on grounds that they make the reader go on, Giraldi maintains that it would be preferable, because less disruptive, to organize the romance plot around the many actions of a single hero rather than the many actions of many heroes. “Egli è vero,” he writes, “che s'altri si desse a comporre le azioni di un uomo solo, si potrebbe continuare un canto con l'altro senza rompere le materie e' tralasciarle per ripigliarle poi e seguirle di novo.”⁸ Such a plot structure would avoid the discontinuities of the traditional romanzo without forfeiting its pleasurable variety. Anyone familiar with Giraldi's own effort at writing a romanzo—his unfinished Ercole (1557), based as the title suggests on the many exploits of Hercules—will realize that these prescriptions for a superior romance plot were meant, in fact, to justify his own departures from Ariosto and Boiardo. His choice of a plot that dealt with the many actions of one rather than of many protagonists aimed, as his theory suggests, to achieve greater continuity than had prior romanzatori. Giraldi did not make this choice out of some neoclassical impulse (Aristotle, it will be recalled, disapproved of plots organized around the many actions of one hero) but rather, it would seem, to preempt the growing criticism being levelled at the discontinuities of the romanzo, and Ariosto's in particular.

That such criticism began to affect the composition of narrative poetry around the middle of the century is attested by one of Giraldi's contemporaries, Bernardo Tasso, the father of Torquato. In 1556 and 1557 Bernardo actually exchanged a number of important letters with Giraldi on their different notions of the romanzo as these are embodied in the Ercole and the Amadigi respectively. However, it is especially in his letters to Vincenzo Laureo, Sperone Speroni, and Girolamo Molino that one can see how the objections (voiced by the first two of these correspondents among others) to the discontinuities of the romanzo affected Bernardo's composition of his Amadigi.⁹ The modern predilection for varietà and the other pleasures of chivalric romance led Bernardo to write a romanzo of many actions rather than a poem with a single plot (which is what he initially composed), but it becomes clear from his letters that he was pressured by literary colleagues to make his Amadigi more similar to classical epic than previous romanzi. From his comments in these letters it also becomes evident that what provoked particular criticism from Sperone Speroni and Vincenzo Laureo were characteristic factors of discontinuity in his romanzo: the narratorial comments and interventions at the beginning and end of cantos, and also within cantos when plotlines have to be shifted. It is not hard to infer that these judges must have objected even more to such features in Orlando Furioso since Ariosto's interventions were more pronounced and frequent than Bernardo's in the Amadigi.

Actually, one isn't just left to infer such objections. Among the few surviving records of Sperone Speroni's attacks against the Furioso is the criticism of Ariosto's interruptive addresses to the reader that he voices in a fragment entitled “De' Romanzi,” probably written soon after Tasso's Amadigi appeared in 1560 (in the fragment itself Speroni mentions his unsuccessful attempt to get Tasso to reduce his many actions to just one). Here, for instance, are Speroni's complaints about the authorial proemi that characterize the start of cantos in all romanzi, but that are particularly notable in the Furioso:

Far poi in ogni canto proemio, o ricercar, come dice il Giraldo [sic], è grandissima inezia, perchè non erat is locus. … Però dico, siano belli quanto si vuole i principii de' canti dell' Ariosto, son sempre inetti, e molte volte non catenati e congiunti alla cosa del poema.¹⁰

In anticipation of such objections, Bernardo Tasso had originally substituted the various kinds of addresses to the readers and moralità one finds in Ariosto's proemi with varied descriptions of dawn at the beginnings of his cantos. Each canto finished, moreover, with a description of night falling before the narrator announced briefly that it was time to bring the canto to a close. These recurring sunrises and sunsets framing each canto suggest what care Tasso took to make his pauses and shifts as timely as possible. In order to avoid being accused of making premature or gratuitous breaks in his narrative all'Ariosto, he tried to make as many of the narrative shifts as possible coincide with the start of cantos. Nonetheless his neoclassical colleagues still objected.

In a letter to Girolamo Molino of 1558 he writes that these colleagues, “giudiciosi uomini,”

m'hanno persuaso a discostarmi dalla maniera de' Romanzi, quanto sia possibile; e alzandomi in ogni sua parte, quanto si può, alla Eroica dignità, a ridurlo in Libri, levandone tutti i principii, e fini de' Canti, i quali erano tutti con una descrizion di notte, e di giorno.

Tasso was reluctant to give in to these pressures since he did not feel that the romanzo's particular features ought to be subjected to the different laws of epic. He did eventually eliminate in the first fifty cantos of his poem most of the descriptions of nightfall at canto ends, and a good number of the sunrises, but, still, though his canto openings rarely consisted of moralizing proemi, he continued to address his audience at the start and end of cantos. The same judges, he tells Molino, also wanted him to remove the authorial interventions that in Ariosto's and other romanzi occur when shifts have to be made from one plot line to another:

Volevano eziandío che nel tralasciar che fa 'l poeta una materia, per saltar ad un'altra, io lasciassi quella forma di dire, usata dall'Ariosto, e dagli altri, come per esempio sarebbe:

Lasciai, Signor, se vi ricorda, Orlando ec.

nella qual cosa ho voluto non in tutto, ma solo in parte al loro giudicio soddisfare.¹¹

Bernardo realized that his Amadigi could not accommodate such neoclassical strictures without confusing his readers and thereby depriving them of pleasure, the chief goal of his poetic effort. Given the narrative conventions of the romanzo, he had to shift from one plot to another and to inform his audience when he did so. Again, he had to warn his auditors when he brought a canto to an end, and to address them before resuming the narrative in the next one. Nonetheless, what one notices about Bernardo's practice, in comparison to Ariosto's, is how much briefer and less obtrusive his interventions are in the Amadigi, and how much less frustrating his suspensions: his effort to make his narrative seem less fragmented than Ariosto's is apparent at every shift and pause in his poem. He may have resisted the radical suggestions of his neoclassical correspondents, but it is clear that their dislike of the romanzo's endemic discontinuity made him attenuate it as much as he could in his contribution to the genre.

One must recall that it was also in the 1550s—when Giraldi's and Pigna's defenses of the romanzo appeared, and Bernardo Tasso wrote his Amadigi—that Aristotle's Poetics was getting assimilated in Italy, after being rediscovered and made available in the previous decade. As it gained currency and influence, Aristotle's theory lent its authority to the growing number of neoclassical critics who were keen to discredit the artistic shortcomings of chivalric romance in contrast to the ancient epic norms they were championing. Despite its great popularity the Orlando Furioso was included in this attack against the romanzo. As the objections of Speroni, cited above, begin to indicate, these critics were quick to condemn Ariosto's disregard for narrative continuity, and in opposition to Giraldi's and Pigna's justifications, they denied that his interruptive technique had any positive function whatsoever.

Representative of the new Aristotelianism that began to dominate Italian literary criticism is Antonio Minturno's Arte Poetica (1563) which, in the section devoted to heroic poetry, includes a sustained critique of the modern romanzo and of Ariosto's decision to write one. Minturno, contrary to the apologists of the new genre, did not consider the romance a legitimate form of poetry but rather a transgression of various unchanging principles—e.g. unity of action—which define heroic poetry. The way in which the romanzatore dismembers his actions particularly offends Minturno. He therefore singles out the shifts and interruptions characteristic of the romanzo as principal defects. His condemnation includes a distinction, like Pigna's, between timely and untimely interruptions. Timely interruptions are associated with proper epic practice whereas untimely ones, as the following statement indicates, are characteristic of the romanzatori (the general examples given bring Ariosto's practice immediately to mind).

Ma non concede [il tempo] che impresa una battaglia, ò cominciata una tempesta, ò qualunque altra cosa, nel meglio s'interrompa, e quando più se n'attende il fine, si tralasci per trattar d'alcuna altra faccenda, la quale ad altre persone, in altra parte, nel medesimo processo di tempo avvenuta sia; com' hanno propriamente in costume i romanzatori senza riguardo di ciò, che 'l tempo ricusa, e del desiderio, che lascian ne gli animi degli ascoltanti anzi molesto, che dilettevole.

After echoing Pigna's distinctions to make it clear that he is responding to this prior defense of the romanzo, Minturno refutes Pigna's claim that untimely interruptions can produce pleasure by stimulating a desire to read on. “Percioché,” he goes on,

à niuno ragionevolmente dee piacere, che alcuna cosa interrotta gli sia, quanto più gli diletta. Nè truovo esser vero, che l'attenzione più se n'accenda: ma più tosto se ne spenga. Conciosia, ch'ella se n'infiammi col desio d'intenderne il fine, non quando si tralascia la cominciata narrazione per un'altra: ma quando per molti accidenti à quella istessa materia appertenenti s'indugia la finale essecutione.¹²

Minturno condones episodic digressions from a central action, and even a suspension of it, as long as the intervening narrative remains linked to that central action. But the romanzatori have no regard for such coherence; they drop a plot line at will, to shift or to return to another in a completely disorderly fashion. Refusing to acknowledge that any narrative can be satisfying that fails to conform to ancient norms of unity and continuity, Minturno is unable to see the Furioso's interruptions as anything but proof of the romanzo's structural defectiveness in comparison to classical epic. Nonetheless, he is correct to maintain that the premature interruptions of the sort Ariosto inflicts on his readers tend to frustrate or annoy rather than please them.

Such perceptive but unsympathetic criticism can also be found in what is perhaps the most interesting attack of the period against the Furioso: Filippo Sassetti's “Discorso contro l'Ariosto,” composed about 1575-76, but never published by the author. Sassetti's objections to the discontinuity of the Furioso arise when he points out that the poet is compelled to suspend his various plots precisely because he is burdened with more than one of them, and has to keep all of them progressing forward. Sassetti refuses to grant the romanzo a legitimate and separate generic identity—for him the romanzo is merely an epic badly put together. As a result, he does not acknowledge, as had the apologists of the new genre, that the necessary interruptions of the several plot lines is a structural norm of the romance. As Minturno before him, he considers Ariosto's interruptions structural flaws inherent in an episodic narrative that refuses to observe classical norms of unity and continuity. When he attacks Ariosto's narrative technique, he does not even distinguish between timely and untimely breaks in the narrative, but suggests that all the shifts flout temporal consideration. Ariosto is constrained, he writes,

a tralasciare le incominciate materie; et hora indietro rivolgersi, hora passare avanti senza avere alcun riguardo alla continuatione del tempo et appunto quando egli comincia a muovere come se a sommo studio 'e volesse privare chi legge o ascolta di quel diletto: egli lascia la narratione incominciata saltando in un'altra materia quanto si voglia diversa da quella che egli aveva prima alle mani.

The effect of these transitions, Sassetti maintains, is a “raffreddamento dell'affetto già a muoversi incominciato.” He goes on to describe the frustration that the interruptions provoke in the reader with this vivid analogy:

in questi tralasciamenti che sono nel Furioso pare che si senta il medesimo diletto che gusterebbe colui che con fretta andandosene colà dove egli desiderasse di ritrovarsi fusse da alcuno a viva forza ritenuto, per lasciarlo poi andare quando l'occasione fusse di già passata.

Sassetti's account of the reader's response is quite accurate. As I observed earlier, the sensation often caused by Ariosto's interruption and resumption is not the pleasure of deferred gratification, but the aggravation of being stopped short, or being drawn into narratives only to be pulled out of them and to be left deprived. Though Sassetti comes close to recognizing that these annoying effects may have been intentional, he cannot finally accept the possibility that such alienating effects are anything but the product of artistic errore, and of a flawed poetic structure. Still, his observations are valuable because they attest how aggravating the interruptions in the Furioso were to some cinquecento readers. After describing the unpleasantness Ariosto's reader experiences when deprived of continuity, he remarks on the current editorial attempts to alleviate these frustrations. I stated earlier that, beginning in the 1550s, different Venetian publishers of the Furioso provided marginal indications to alert readers where interrupted episodes were resumed subsequently in the poem. Sassetti's remarks on these “paratextual” aids make it clear that they were designed to remedy what he calls the “inconvenience” of Ariosto's discontinuous narrative:

I rivenditori delle stampe hanno bene essi cognosciuto quanto ciò [the premature interruptions] conturbi l'animo di chi legge o di chi ascolta, e per rimediare a questo inconveniente hanno, laddove le materie si troncano, segnato il numero delle carte e delle stanze dove si ripiglia la tralasciata narratione.¹³

The Furioso's lack of continuity prompts Sassetti to criticize another of Ariosto's narrative procedures: his authorial comments and intrusions, including, of course, the exordia or proemi at the start of each canto. When one recalls that the end of cantos in the Furioso always consist of suspenseful breaks in the action, not resumed until the next canto and then continued only after the narrator has intervened with a preliminary comment, judgment, or address to the reader, one can well understand why these proemi were also singled out by Ariosto's critics as factors of discontinuity. Sassetti was hardly the first to object to these proemi or the other authorial interventions in the poem. I noted earlier how criticism of such interventions by Speroni and others affected Bernardo Tasso's handling of canto beginnings and ends in his Amadigi. Sassetti, however, makes more explicit the Aristotelian grounds of his objections. He begins his criticism of Ariosto's interventions by referring to Aristotle's praise of Homer's self-effacement as a speaker in his epics. The passage he has in mind can be found in Chapter 24 of the Poetics (1460a5-10) and, in a recent English rendering, it reads as follows:

In addition to the many other reasons why Homer deserves admiration, there is this in particular, that he alone among the epic poets has not failed to understand the part the poet himself should take in his poem. The poet should, in fact, speak as little as possible in his own person, since in what he himself says he is not an imitator. Now the other poets are themselves on the scene throughout their poems, and their moments of imitation are few and far between, but Homer, after a few introductory words, at once brings on a man or a woman or some other personage, and not one of them characterless, but each with a character of his own.¹⁴

After alluding to this passage, Sassetti remarks that Aristotle would have little to praise in the Furioso given the many “discorsi” that the poem contains. By “discorsi” the critic means presumably the various comments and moral judgments on the action that Ariosto makes in his own voice, and that regularly occur at the start of cantos. For example, in the proem of Canto X, the narrator, looking back at the account of Olimpia's exceptional devotion to Bireno, proposes that Olimpia deserves first prize among the faithful lovers of history. The narrator's judgment of his characters is just as often negative. Gabrina's perversity, for instance, makes him so indignant that in the proem of Canto XXII he has to explain to his lady readers that her exceptional evil does not blind him to the virtues of the fair sex. And to reassure these same readers of his sympathy for them, at the start of Canto XXIX, the narrator voices his anger at Rodomonte's generic condemnation of women and promises that he is going to make his character pay dearly for his misogyny. Sassetti actually cites this last proemio as an example of Ariosto's objectionable intrusions and then maintains, with Aristotle and contemporary Aristotelians to support him, that such observations and opinions are not part of the imitated action in the work, but belong to the audience that judge the action from outside. These authorial interventions, he goes on to say, jeopardize the poem's credibility, presumably because, by drawing the reader out of its imaginative world, they disrupt his or her involvement in it.

This criticism of Ariosto's authorial interventions immediately following, as it does, the attack against his premature interruptions suggests that sixteenth-century critics associated both these narrative features as sources of discontinuity. Although Sassetti's attack against Ariosto was never published, it is representative of the hostile criticism levelled at the Furioso in the 1570s and 1580s. As I mentioned above, his was hardly the sole or the first voice objecting to Ariosto's authorial intrusions. Nor, it turns out, was Sassetti the only critic to derive these objections from Aristotle's praise of Homer's self-effacement. Before him, both Torquato Tasso and Castelvetro had already associated their critique of Ariosto's exordia and other interventions with the same passage in Chapter 24 of the Poetics.

Tasso had criticized the proemi in the Furioso as early as 1562 in the Preface to the Rinaldo, his youthful effort to write a romanzo that heeded what was taken to be Aristotle's demand to minimize the presence of the narrator. In this preface to the readers Tasso proclaims that he does not want his work to be judged either by militant Aristotelians nor by the enthusiastic fans of Ariosto since he can anticipate their respective objections. “I troppo affezionati de l'Ariosto,” he writes,

mi riprenderanno che non usi ne' principi de' canti quelle moralità, e que' proemi ch'usa sempre l'Ariosto e tanto piú che mio padre … anch'ei talvolta da questa usanza s'è lasciato trasportare [though Bernardo, as we saw, was also persuaded to remove such proemi]. Benché, d'altra parte, né il principe dei poeti Virgilio, né Omero, né gli altri antichi gli abbiano usati, ed Aristotile chiaramente dica nella sua Poetica … che tanto il poeta è migliore, quanto imita piú, e tanto imita piú quanto men egli come poeta parla e piú introduce altri a parlare: il qual precetto ha benissimo servato il Danese, in un suo poema composto ad imitazione de gli antichi, e secondo la strada ch'insegna Aristotile. … Ma non l'han giá servato coloro che tutte le moralitá e le sentenze dicono in persona del poeta;né solo in persona del poeta, ma sempre nel principio de' canti: ch'oltre che ciò facendo non imitino, pare che siano talmente privi d'invenzione, che non sappiano tai cose in altra parte locare che nel principio del canto.¹⁵

Tasso acknowledges here the influence that Aristotle's preference for unmediated mimesis had, and would continue to have, on his narrative poetry. In the Gerusalemme Liberata he even sought to imitate the Homeric practice praised by Aristotle by limiting the appearance of the narrator to a preliminary invocation and a few very brief addresses to characters in the action. But more than for the Aristotelianism it displays, I find the passage above interesting because it links Ariosto's intrusive proemi and Aristotle's comments in Chapter 24 of the Poetics. Like Sassetti after him, when Tasso thought of Ariosto's authorial intrusions, he thought of the way they transgressed Aristotle's call for a minimal use of the poet's own voice.

The same association is to be found in Castelvetro's commentary on Aristotle's Poetics, first published in 1570, some five years before Sassetti's Discorso. Castelvetro makes several critical remarks about Ariosto in his commentary, and one of the occasions when he cannot resist disparaging the Furioso occurs during his discussion of Aristotle's praise of Homer's self-effacement (at 1460a). According to Aristotle, Castelvetro maintains, a poet should avoid speaking in his own person if he wishes to fulfill his proper duty as an imitator (Castelvetro's term is “rassomigliatore”). Yet as undesirable as it is for the poet to narrate events or to describe them too often in his own voice, it is much worse for the poet to comment personally on various actions narrated.

Se il poeta, in quella parte dell'epopea nella quale narra solamente e racconta l'azzione e non introduce persona a favellare, non è rassomigliatore, secondo Aristotele, e per conseguente non è poeta, che diremo noi del poeta, in quella parte dell'epopea nella quale egli né narra azzione né introduce persona a favellare, ma giudica le cose narrate, o riprendendole, o lodandole, or tirandole a utilità commune e ad insegnamenti civili e del ben vivere? Certo non altro se non che egli non è rassomigliatore. … Ora se egli non è rassomigliatore né per cagione del modo né per cagione della materia, seguita che ancora non sia in questa parte poeta. Il che non è errore da stimare poco, prima per quella parte, poi per l'altre parti ancora nelle quali è rassomigliatore e poeta, conciosia cosa che giudicandole e parlandone come che sia, si mostri persona passionata e la quale v'abbia interesse, e perciò si toglia a se stesso la fede e si renda sospetto a' lettori d'esser poco veritiere narratore. Senza che non si fa poco odioso altrui, scoprendo certa superbia e confidanza di bontà, quando, posposto l'ufficio di narratore che era suo proprio, imprenda l'ufficio di predicatore e di corregitore de' costumi fuori di tempo; nel quale errore non cade mai Omero, ma sì Virgilio alcuna volta, … [several examples of authorial interjections in the Aeneid are provided]. E più spesso di lui vi caggiono quelli poeti che sono meno buoni di lui, e massimamente Lucano … ; e più spesso di tutti Lodovico Ariosto nel suo Orlando Furioso.¹⁶

It is useful to learn from this passage, that, among modern poets, Ariosto was considered the greatest offender against Aristotle's demand for minimal authorial presence in epic narrative. Usually, late cinquecento commentators on the Poetics do not refer to the practice of vernacular poets, and even rarely of Roman poets. For example, in Alessandro Piccolomini's Annotationi nella Poetica d'Aristotele (1575), the next Italian commentary after Castelvetro's, the same passage from Chapter 24 is discussed at some length, but one is left to surmise which individual authors Piccolomini has in mind when he castigates poets who intervene personally in their poems. Modifying Castelvetro's and prior interpretations of the passage, Piccolomini claims that Aristotle would allow the poet to speak in his poem as long as he assumes the disinterested voice of an objective narrator. What has to be avoided, he argues, is the kind of personal intervention or judgment

quando il poeta spogliandosi l'habito di poeta, non come narratore, ma come giudicatore & stimator delle cose narrate, & come (insomma) interessato parla. com'à dir (per essempio) invocando, proponendo, esclamando, consigliando, proferendo qualche sententia sopra le cose dette, inserendo qualche corolario; l'humana miseria deplorando, la fortuna detestando, qualche virtù secondo l'occasion lodando, o altra … cosa facendo, non come poeta, ma come egli stesso, dell'habito della poesia spogliato; non come imitatore, ma come giudicatore, il giuditio, & il concetto suo interponendo.

Piccolomini does not identify the poets who resort to such malpractice, but one can infer he would share Castelvetro's view that Ariosto was a chief offender since the various admonitions he castigates in the passage above could well serve as an inventory of the kinds of judgments made in the proemi of the Furioso.

Piccolomini goes on to explain that the poetic representation does not appear “ben fatto,” when, as a result of such personal interventions, the poet

si scuopra, come interessato, & adherente più ad un fatto che ad un altro, & più ad una persona, che ad un'altra, in quel, che narra; & per conseguente deroghi, & nuochi in questa guisa alla credibilità, & alla fede di quel che ei dice.

Besides jeopardizing the credibility of his poem, by making judgments on the action or the characters represented, the author misappropriates a function that belongs to the audience. The poet should forego

il giudicare, il lodare, il biasmare, o altra cosa fare che appartenga a coloro, che leggono: dovendo il poeta apparir, come neutrale, & lasciar libero il giuditio a gli altri sopra le cose, che egli imitando narra.¹⁷

After one reads Piccolomini's general objections, it becomes apparent that Sassetti's subsequent critique of Ariosto's interventions is little more than a specific application of these objections to the Furioso. Just as Piccolomini, Sassetti maintains that Ariosto's exordia belong outside the realm of the poem along with the audience's other subjective responses. And he also points out that Ariosto's kind of interventions can only diminish the poem's credibility by breaking whatever continuity and illusion the imitation had achieved.

Sassetti's critique of Ariosto's intrusions was far from being an isolated reaction. By 1575 the new Aristotelians had virtually made a tradition of attacking his interruptions and his various narratorial interventions. Even Englishmen were aware of their criticism. In the Preface of his translation of Orlando Furioso (1591), Sir John Harington acknowledges that two “reproofs” were made about the author by Aristotle's followers: “One, that he breaks off narratives verie abruptly. … Another fault is that he speaketh so much in his own person by digression which they say also is against the rules of Poetrie because neither Homer nor Vergill did it.”¹⁸ Harington's comments attest that the neo-Aristotelian opposition to the Furioso was well established and widely known by the end of the sixteenth century. Castelvetro, Piccolomini and Sassetti shared a dislike of Ariosto's obtrusive presence as a narrator because it was unclassical. They also criticized this procedure because it broke the continuity of his fiction and, as a result, dissolved the illusion achieved by it. The Neo-Aristotelians were concerned that the make-believe the poet sought to achieve by his mimesis could only be jeopardized by Ariosto's sort of narrative interventions and breaks. But even more objectionable to their taste was that Ariosto's intrusions made the author's presence and his artificial manipulations too obvious. The sudden transitions had a similar effect: they exposed further the artifice of his fictive construct. Underlying the animus against Ariosto's technique was a neoclassical bias against conspicuous artifice and the attending belief that the more perfect the art the more unrevealed it was, ars est celare artem. It was, in part, this belief that had prompted all the critics from Speroni to Sassetti to characterize Ariosto's authorial intrusions as inept and inartistic. In general, the neo-Aristotelians valued unity, continuity, and verisimilitude because these features allowed the poet to achieve a closer correspondence between art and nature. Conversely they sought to exclude from poetic representation all the elements that might make its fictive and artificial character too visible. Among these undesirable elements were multiplicity of plot and the fragmentation of narrative it necessitated, authorial commentary and, in general, any form of obtrusive mediation between the poetic representation and the audience. No wonder that the Orlando Furioso became a recurring target of their criticism.

Why are these hostile reactions to Ariosto's poem historically significant? Because they provide some of the earliest evidence of the decisive shift in critical taste and in poetry that takes place with the advent of neoclassicism. In my opinion, the Orlando Furioso is not attacked by the neo-Aristotelians as a singular poem but rather as a representative of the kind of poetic discourse that has to be discarded and replaced. The change that is called for, and that is expressed in the criticism I have surveyed, is a change from a poetic discourse that is erratic, discontinuous, that playfully exhibits its fictionality, aware of its limits as fiction, to a poetic discourse that is coherent, unified, verisimilar, that represses all the elements that might betray its artificial and illusory character, and that believes in the efficacy of its superior realism. It is being recognized increasingly that, with the ascendance of neoclassical and neo-Aristotelian values a shift of this sort occurred in poetry, drama, and fiction at the end of the Renaissance.¹⁹ What is less known—and what this article has sought to document—is the significant role the Orlando Furioso played in the course of this shift by becoming an adversarial text against which neoclassical orthodoxies were enabled to define themselves.

The disapproval of narrative discontinuity and authorial intrusion is not simply a critical bias of neoclassicism but rather a characteristic or, at least, a recurring prejudice of post-Renaissance poetics. One need only think of the preference for “showing” versus “telling” held by later nineteenth century and modern writers and critics of fiction to realize how persistent the animus against intrusive narrators has remained. “Since Flaubert,” Wayne Booth observes at the beginning of his Rhetoric of Fiction, “many authors and critics have been convinced that ‘objective’ or impersonal or ‘dramatic’ modes of narration are naturally superior to any mode that allows for direct appearances by the author or his reliable spokesman.”²⁰ In fact, the aim of Booth's study, which appeared originally in 1961, was to challenge the reductive but persisting belief, derived from Henry James and Flaubert, that “showing,” or vivid dramatic rendering was artistic whereas “telling” was inartistic. One can easily appreciate how this bias could be linked, as cinquecento critics of Ariosto had linked it, to Aristotle's praise of Homer's self-effacement in the Poetics. Indeed, Aristotle's authority has continued to be invoked to support the impartiality, disinterestedness, in short, the objectivity, that modern advocates of “showing” have valued. It is very unlikely that Aristotle was already championing “showing” versus “telling,” yet the modern distrust of authorial commentary that Booth sought to dispel does seem to me to have ties with the prejudice against authorial intrusion and flaunting of artifice that is voiced at the end of the sixteenth century and that can be traced up to Hegel's Esthetics, and beyond. The grounds for this prejudice may not be as continuous as I am suggesting—in fact the different poetic and cultural circumstances that revive this bias need to be described—but already the neo-Aristotelians at the end of the Renaissance express the belief, upheld quite steadily thereafter, that the more unmediated a poem's representation or content can appear to be the more willing its readers will be to accept its imagined reality. The negative corollary to this belief is that the more conscious readers are made of the narrator's presence, the more conspicuous the fictional construct of a story becomes, the less likely they are to accept or believe its representation of the world. Now we may know after reading Ariosto, Cervantes, Sterne, and even Nabokov, that this assumption is fallacious, but the critical antagonism it has provoked against all forms of authorial intervention has persisted nonetheless. It is precisely because of the long life this bias has enjoyed in our critical tradition that it merits being more carefully historicized. Its pre-nineteenth century history still remains to be written. The reactions to the discontinuities of the Furioso that I have surveyed not only play a significant role in that history, they may well mark the beginning of a central debate in what we now call narratology.

Notes

1. Here and henceforth I cite from Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, a cura di Emilio Bigi (2 vols.; Milan, 1982).

2. G. B. Giraldi Cinzio, Scritti Critici, a cura di C. Guerrieri Crocetti (Milano, 1973), p. 68.

3. “Cantus Interruptus in the Orlando Furioso,” MLN 95 (1980), 66-80.

4. I am indebted to Riccardo Bruscagli for indicating to me in the course of our exchanges additional cinquecento criticism of Ariosto's interruptions. It was thanks to Professor Bruscagli that I became aware of Castelvetro's criticism, which, in turn, prompted me to investigate what other commentators of Aristotle's Poetics may have to had to say about the narrative techniques used in the modern romanzo.

5. Gioseppe Malatesta, Della Nuova Poesia Overo Delle Difese Del Furioso, Dialogo. … Verona: Sebastiano dalle Donne, 1589, p. 17. The speaker, Scipione Gonzaga, refers to the Furioso's discontinuity as “il segnar le materie, che narra intempestivamente, & quando il lettore aspetta ogn'altra cosa, che di vedersele toglier dinanti.” This defect is second only to the poem's confusing multiplicity of actions.

6. Sir John Harington, the Elizabethan translator of the Furioso, not only had such marginal indices provided in his English version (1591), he actually modified a number of Ariosto's more sudden transitions to attenuate their dislocating and frustrating effects. Compare, for example, Ariosto's interruption of the fatal duel about to take place between Dardinello and Rinaldo (XVIII.58-59, which I cited earlier in my discussion) and Harington's modification of this sudden shift:

   	No doubt the heav'ns had Dardanell ordained
   	To perish by a more victorious hand;
   	Renaldos blade must with his blood be stained
   	And was, as after you shall understand.
   It follows in this booke 68 st.	By him this praise and glorie must be gained
   	The fame whereof must fill both sea and land;
   	But let these westerne warres a while remaine,
   	And of Griffino talke we now againe.
   	(XVIII.24)

   In addition to the marginal indication of the sequel, which already alerts the reader that an interruption is about to occur, the translator warns the reader in the text (“as after you shall understand”) that the duel is being deferred. Unlike the original where the shift suddenly occurs between octaves, Harington makes the shift in the final couplet of the octave after the preceding lines have prepared the reader for it. Not only is the break less unexpected than in the original, Harington also reduces much of the tension by previewing more explicitly than Ariosto Rinaldo's subsequent killing of Dardinello.

   There are numerous other such examples which I intend to examine in a future article on Harington's efforts to make the Orlando Furioso more normal than it originally was.

7. I Romanzi di M. Giovan Battista Pigna. … Vinegia: V. Valgrisi, 1554, p. 44.

8. Discorso dei Romanzi, ed. cit., p. 68.

9. See Delle Lettere di M. Bernardo Tasso (Padova: Comino, 1733), II. pp. 323-327 and pp. 370-372 for Bernardo's letters to Sperone Speroni; pp. 343-346 for his letter to Vincenzo Laureo; pp. 362-365 for his letter to Girolamo Molino. All these letters were written between 1557 and 1558.

10. Opere di M. Sperone Speroni degli Alvarotti … (Venezia: D. Occhi, 1740), V. 521. After criticizing Ariosto's proemi, Speroni goes on to challenge the rationalization such authorial addresses were given by the defenders of the romanzo. Both Giraldi and Pigna had sought to justify the proemi as conventions that originated when the romances were oral poems and their singers turned to their listeners, especially during pauses between cantos. In the Discorso dei Romanzi (see ed. cit. p. 48) Giraldi proposed that these oral conventions went back to the heroic songs performed by the rhapsodes of ancient Greece. Canto divisions, he pointed out, were originally determined by the constraints of oral performance, namely the length of recitation that an audience found tolerable before a pause was needed. Speroni flatly counters these claims in his critique of the modern romanzo. According to him, the addresses to the audience at the beginning of cantos do not predate Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato. “Ma questi canti de' libri nostri Italiani in verso,” he writes, “parlando agli ascoltatori, furono invenzion del Bojardo, imitato e seguitato dall'Ariosto, che senza lui non sarebbe ito in cento anni. Sono divisi in canti, come è anche la commedia di Dante, benché non si cantassero; e come i trionfi del Petrarca: perché la divisione dà gran lume alla narrazione: e se le parte son brievi, onde finita l'una si pausi, il riposo è grato, e la cosa meglio s'intende. Ma che la divisione in canti sia fatta, perché si cantassero, o si debbano cantare, è una pazzia” (p. 521). The dozens upon dozens of editions of the Furioso that had already been printed by 1560 made Speroni all too aware of the fiction of Ariosto's pretense of addressing his canti to a group of courtly auditors. It is not surprising therefore that he thought it “a pazzia” to justify the romanzo's narrative technique on the grounds that it was still performed orally.

    Speroni's polemic suggests that the hostility of the neoclassical literati toward the modern romanzo stemmed, in part, from the fact that, although it was printed, this kind of poetry retained too many conventions and traces of the earlier oral tradition of cantastorie from which it descended. Besides their other objectionable qualities, the proemi and other authorial addresses to the audience may have already been considered formal anachronisms inappropriate in poetry intended for readers in the new age of print.

11. Delle lettere di M. Bernardo Tasso, II. 363-364.

12. L'arte poetica del Sig. Antonio Minturno. … Venezia: G. A. Valvassori, 1563, p. 35.

13. Filippo Sassetti, “Discorso contro l'Ariosto,” MS BNF Magl. IX, 125, fols. 189-204 was first printed by Giuseppe Castaldi in Rendiconti della Reale Accademia dei Lincei, Serie Quinta, XXII (1913), 473-524. I cite from this published version, pp. 502-503. The critique of Ariosto's interventions follows immediately after.

14. Aristotle's Poetics, tr. James Hutton (New York, 1982), p. 73.

15. Torquato Tasso, “A I Lettori,” Rinaldo, a cura di G. Bonfigli (Bari: Laterza, 1936), p. 5.

16. Ludovico Castelvetro, Poetica d'Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta, a cura di W. Romani (Bari: Laterza, 1979), II, pp. 164-165.

17. Annotationi Di M. Alessandro Piccolomini, Nel Libro della Poetica d'Aristotele. … Vinegia: Gio. Guarisco, 1575, pp. 385-86.

18. Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Translated into English Heroical Verse by Sir John Harington (1591), ed. Robert McNulty (Oxford, 1972), p. 13. See also note 6.

    Alberto Lavezuola provides further evidence of late cinquecento criticism of the proemi when he defends them in his Osservationi … sopra il Furioso appended to the 1584 edition of Ariosto's poem published by Francesco dei Franceschi. When commenting on Canto II Lavezuola begins by observing that “Hanno biasimato alcuni l'Ariosto nell'usare nel principio de' canti alcune moralità, stimando che ciò non habbia a far nulla con la testura della favola, et che l'interrompere l'ordine dell'opera con simili digressioni sia cosa disdicevole & vitiosa.” He then justifies the proemi on the grounds that they have ancient precedent, and that they give the reader a needed respite after every canto. He denies that these pauses obstruct the flow of the narrative, since readers who find them a hindrance can simply disregard them and go on with the story. This notion that readers can merely skip the proemi and read on was obviously shared by the various editors of the poem who provided marginal indices telling readers where suspended narratives were resumed so that they could go to the sequels directly without having to be bothered by Ariosto's interruptions.

19. See, for example, Terence Cave, “The Mimesis of Reading,” in Mimesis, From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes. Ed. John D. Lyons and Stephen G. Nichols (Hanover, N.H. and London, 1982); pp. 149-165. I draw upon Cave's intelligent contrast between the skeptical attitudes of Renaissance writers to their illusory representations and the efforts of neoclassical writers to conceal the mendacity and illusoriness of such representations.

20. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (second ed.: Chicago, 1983), p. 8.