SOURCE: Shapiro, Marianne. “Ariosto's Multiple Vision.” In The Poetics of Ariosto, pp. 152-91. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988.

[In the following essay, Shapiro details the role of repetition and doubling in achieving apparently contradictory goals in Orlando furioso.]

My previous chapter referred to the “binary form of accurate understanding” as it concerned the maddened Orlando, who could not be saved by the anaesthetic of self-irony from obsession and its concomitant rigidity. We will test this assumption now, exploring and delineating the perfectly contrary movement of Ariosto's writing as it affects plot construction. I hope to reveal in this chapter the ubiquity of doubling and muliplication as the very replication of the poet's vision.

The conflict of love and honor that governs the adventures of Ruggiero and (in lesser measure) of Bradamante forms the spine of Ariosto's epic poem. Even the madness of Orlando, its second subject, can be inserted into this overaching scheme. Orlando hyperbolizes a basic polarity: he has deserted the Christian army to devote himself to Angelica, his supposed beloved. The same clash of duty and pleasure is also answerable for those events that can be experienced as constants: the allurements of a lady persuade a knight away from the army; present charms outflank memory and principle; a new horse, even, causes the rider to abandon his trusted steed. Just as two kinds of knighthood confront one another through the juxtaposed Carolingian and Breton strains—Christian soldier against courtly wanderer, for one—and often within one and the same “character,” so do two codes, two goals, two endings: those of epic and of romance.

In another sense Orlando Furioso constitutes the second part of a diptych. To Boiardo's “prewar” poem it offers a wartime conclusion. It is of major significance that Ariosto takes up his pen after the devastating social disruption occasioned by concerted foreign invasions of Italy. He undertakes to complete Boiardo's unfinished work under the mature conditions of a knowledge Boiardo could only experience as prediction. Ariosto's work, like that of his admired Castiglione, constitutes a memorial to a world holding its own (in literary terms) against adverse fortune and death. Indeed the very force of repetition itself serves to hold at bay the forces of destruction, all the more so insofar as it functions as a dynamic narrative element. The formally unrestricted text, capable of being prolonged infinitely, implements a sense of repetition that is independent of the static reenunciations of epic in general. Whereas epic accustoms the reader to a given set of epithets and combinatory possibilities, presenting them as permanent, Ariosto's repetitions do not subserve any static tautology, nor do his psychological parallelisms boil down to ritualized messages. The systems of opposition on which the large-scale conflicts repose attest to a permanence of change, the recurrence of an event enabling its reinterpretation according to its immediate context.

Ruggiero and Astolfo both ride the Hippogryph, but Astolfo's ride represents no shirking of his duty or delinquency from his primary journey, whereas Ruggiero in his leisurely tour of the world notably forgets Bradamante and his army. Rodomonte shows the inconstancy of madness as he veers from extreme misogyny to the consuming love for Doralice, thus drawing closer to the insanity of Orlando. As Rodomonte goes on to pursue Isabella to the point of tragedy, the two reveal themselves to be at variance in important respects. Orlando's madness proceeds directly from his consistency, Rodomonte's from his inconsistency. Similar actions are each accompanied by singular causes or by their own time and space. It is as if Ariosto had substituted for spiritual progress, for the upward journey of any given character, a scheme in which the event itself usurps any one character's role, as an element mapped on a flat terrain that could be compared with a painting lacking in perspective.

Ariosto has his princely Ruggiero and Bradamante learn much of their destiny from artistic displays by means of tapestry or sculpture as well as conjured visions.¹ But there is only one stable mirror in Orlando Furioso, the mirror image of the world as perceived on the Moon.² Astolfo sees revealed there the detritus of vain earthly hopes and efforts, their emblems in the written signs of broken treaties, ignored love letters, and rejected poems. The Moon is the double of the world, and the repetitious altri that describes its geography easily misleads the reader into believing that he is experiencing something other than yet another instance of the duplicated resemblances forming the realms of Nature.³ This “mirror” approaches the type of the medieval speculum, parodying the didactic work composed for the benefit of the knight or prince or courtier during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance; the mirror that enabled the reader to confront his own image, compare it to his previous experience of self, and see in the comparison achievements yet to be attained, perfection to be striven for.⁴ Astolfo views among the vials of “sanity” the inversion of earthly images and their deceptions. But the effects of the mirror are ephemeral; Astolfo's failure of mind will also be repeated beyond the limits of this text.

For the rest Ariosto's repetitions of plot elements or functions do not seem to reflect each other. They fall at irregular intervals on what seems to be a flat picture-plane. But like forgotten perspective itself, the perception of single-plane chaos is only another perception, enduring only if the reader continues unwilling to supply perspective for himself. The repetitions of the poem's construction tend to occur at the (provisional) crossroads in a bifurcating path. In a painting such a path could be perceived as a foreshortened V. But as the eye enters, positing another picture plane, interpretation ensues. For example, the first encounters of Angelica with Rinaldo and Ferraù find them fighting over her, “clicking into place like the last term of a syllogism,”⁵ and as they disappear after her, the mathematics of the poem takes the following course:

Da quattro sproni il destrier punto arriva
ove una strada in due si dipartiva.

(I.22.7-8)

(Them, while four spurs infest his foaming sides,
Their courser brings to where the way divides.)

What is important is that opposition, dualism, and repetition are conveyed narratively in dynamic terms, the immense romance geography of the poem opening out into the seemingly fortuitous duplications of the labyrinth. The contradictions that grip characters in the vicissitudes of love and war are exclusively plot-functions.

The narrative ballet comprising the exchange of male and female roles for certain characters provides an overarching case in point. Whereas the search for completeness in the blending of male and female natures to be found in the Platonic and Renaissance conception of sexual love receives its most frequent expression in the static, discursive terms of treatises and (later) in the chiastic, fundamentally immobile conflicts of such epics as Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered), Ariosto allows it to be understood through the ambiguity or interchange of identities and other narrative adaptations of the strivings and quests of romance. The “maleness” that distinguishes Bradamante from all but one of the poem's other heroines completes the search and makes her, paradoxically, a fit companion for Ruggiero, the best response to a fundamental, “existential lack,”⁶ and a new exemplar of the desired union between the beauty of Venus and the bravery of Mars. Beyond this combinatory achievement, however, a host of nuances remain to be discovered. When Ruggiero, wounded by Mandricardo, is nursed by Marfisa, Bradamante's jealousy shows her, however fleetingly and iridescently, a female Orlando. Her anxiety threatens to drive her to suicide (XXXII.44). Her actions include those of a hyperbolized Petrarchistic lover, a docile daughter (XLI-XLII), and a heroic defender of (alternately) men's and women's rights.

Again purely in narrative terms, Bradamante is “doubled” by Marfisa, the only other heroine possessing notable masculine traits. She, too, falls in love with Ruggiero, and his fascination with her merely redoubles his original and fated attachment to Bradamante. Whereas Bradamante is a sufficient counterpart of Ruggiero to be considered nearly his sibling, Marfisa is indeed revealed to be his sister (XXXVI.59). And the confrontation of Ruggiero and Bradamante as warriors is both a continuation of the Bradamante-Marfisa opposition and a hyperbolizing of the fundamental love-war dichotomy played out to the hilt. Ariosto's Narrator announces and specifies it in the first line (“le donne, i cavallier, l'arme, gli amori”). To weave his varied tapestry Ariosto fully exploits the linearity of narrative, taking the reader through sequences of actions so disposed that successive canti recall, echo, parallel, or contrast with each other, shaping the reader's response by the relation of elements to each other over a vast expanse. Like plot elements, generic features often appear in complementary distribution. The conventions of a degenerated courtly code still serve as points of departure; these in their turn clash with the rigorous ethic of epic poetry. The embrace of the poem captures every manner, plebeian or noble, to which the Matter of France had been subjected in the course of centuries. It confronts them finally with the ungovernable recollections of a Carolingian “Turpino.”

The winding narrative subdivides the theme of love into a potential infinity of refractions. We begin with the pandemonic love of Orlando for Angelica, set against the comedy of the successful (though sorely tried) love of Ruggiero and Bradamante. The counterplay of humanitas and ferinitas (brutishness) occurs on two planes that incline, however, toward one another. Alternations of overwhelming rages with the measured progress of the future royal couple counterbalance the vicissitudes of the war taken as a whole. It is of course the enduring hostility between the two lovers' countries and faiths that impedes their marriage. Only as a direct result of his experience in battle, and in conjunction with the ending of the war, can Ruggiero win Bradamante's hand. Since the war provides the focusing point for the widespread conflicts among various pagans and Christians (who are repeatedly returned to the field of mass warfare), its completion is delayed far into the poem (XLII). The final pagan resistance, that of Rodomonte, is defeated only in the very last lines.

But this dualism is constantly undermined by competing dualisms or neutralized by a bifurcation of circumstances. When the poem shifts to the climactic battles of Biserta and Lipadusa, religious feeling on both sides is presented with no indication that the “Saracens” are deluded or that their gods do not heed them. Absent is the kind of traditional “Muslim” chaos that signifies dissolution in either chansons de geste or Tasso's Christian epic. One is tempted to compare Macone's indifference (“nulla sente” [XL. 13.4]) with that of Athena rejecting the offerings of the Trojan women in the Aeneid (I.482).⁷ Religion simply becomes a sign for doubling and opposition. For example, just before the battle of Lipadusa, Brandimarte, himself once a pagan, offers Agramante the possibility of conversion to Christianity, which the latter rejects. Meanwhile the shipwrecked Ruggiero undergoes a “true” conversion (XL.47) and is baptized as soon as he reaches land. Again, there exists a similar symmetry between Orlando's affection for the same Brandimarte and Bradamante's for Ruggiero, another converted pagan.

In accordance with the lack of religious constraints, supernatural realms lose their mysterious or dark aspects. As the Moon is the double of the world, the vertical geography of “Inferno” and “Terrestrial Paradise” (XXXIV-XXXV) is dependent on the recognition of a contrast of a literary and epistemological nature between Ariosto and Dante. When the world of romance is at issue, its multiple tributaries of river and wood seem governed by no law of combination or succession. The exception is that of the geographical tours provided for Astolfo and Ruggiero on the Hippogryph. They ride no longer in the labyrinth of romance but above a geographically charted terrain that the poet has perceived to be a small world. The horizons of transcendental experience merge with the quotidian and take on a recognizable shape. The reader is given to understand that the experience of triumph, or pleasure, or foolishness, or waste can no longer be invested permanently or definitively in any human agent or located at any focal point. Ariosto's momentary vision of a realm of supernatural activity superimposed on that real world does not outlive the contradiction—historical, ideological, or narrative—that it was invented to resolve.

This seemingly fortuitous result derives from a patterning made incongruous or invisible by the mediated narrator's skills. One aspect of this patterning resides in conceptual doubling: that of poetry and history, of love and war in their infinite subdivisions. They very linkage of the dynasty of Ferrara with the empire of Charlemagne and the Breton knights generates a stream full of crosscurrents, the most powerful of these bearing the narratives of Ruggiero, Bradamante, and Orlando. Ariosto also distinguishes various kinds of warfare and treats their oppositions. The relative conduct and import of battles and duels in Orlando Furioso appear as a point of debate whenever warlike conflict is prolonged. The advent of firearms as a modern means against the other, older magic of enchanted weapons; the diverse personal qualities called for in the duellist and soldier; and the entire gamut of juxtapositions of single combat and mass warfare are dealt with in their crucial connection with the chivalric code. When the outcome of a war is made dependent on a series of duels between individual knights—a single combat between Ruggiero and Rinaldo, then a triple contest between Orlando, Brandimarte, and Oliviero on one side, and Gradasso, Agramante, and Sobrino on the other—the conflict is revealed as a structural generator of subdividing oppositions. The fictions of poetry are juxtaposed with those of history.

Ariosto comments in tranquil but trenchant fashion on the calamities of his own age. His account of the war between Carlomagno and Agramante is accompanied by remarks on the contemporary Italian military scene. For example, he compares the situation of the Saracens in France, who had suffered heavy losses despite their successes, to the recent battle of Ravenna in which so many French captains were killed (XV.2). Some similar allusions are acts of deference to Alfonso d'Este and recent Ferrarese triumphs. In describing the defeat of Agramante's fleet by the forces of Astolfo and Orlando, Ariosto refers to the battle of Polesella (1509) in which a Venetian fleet in the Po was routed by a numerically inferior Ferrarese force. He himself was not present, the Narrator informs us, but anyone who was there will understand the situation of the Saracens (XL.5.5-8).

The conduct of legendary warfare contrasts, again, with the horrors of modern war. In turn, the nostalgia for a Golden Age of chivalry is overlaid by an awareness of the complexity of all human nature, on one side, and on the other by the advent of modern military techniques. At the same time the Narrator's protest against brutality is not a complete digression from his tone of romance. It is worked into the poem so that the arquebus, which comes to symbolize the new warfare, is used for treacherous purposes only. First the evil Cimosco destroys Olimpia's forces with it, then ambushes the gallant Orlando. Orlando captures it and throws it into the sea, moving the Narrator to lament its rediscovery in recent times, when it has destroyed the chivalrous conduct of warfare (XI.26). This meditation is easily revealed as a confrontation of the idealized past with the demystified present, and the fact that chivalrous ideals and practices loom large in the poem allows them to be opposed (as a refined but antiquated code) to prevailing ethical decay, their seeming permanence to present entropy. But again, even within the confines of the chivalrous world, the generous, courteous, high-souled knights have to live in a society penetrated by cunning, hypocritical, and treacherous rogues, and their rigid ideals are not suited to meet them.

The problem is no less acute in duels than in battle. From the wealth of incongruities resulting from the incompatibility of the chivalric code and the necessities of existence there emerges Ariosto's parody of courtly love involving Zerbino, Isabella, and the hideous Gabrina. Having lost a duel in which it was agreed that the loser would take Gabrina as his lady, Zerbino accompanies and defends her, although he would like to cut her throat (XXI.68). He remains tied to his chivalrous oath when he unhorses Ermonide, the brother of the man Gabrina had once betrayed. At last he is able to pass Gabrina on to his false friend, Odorico, who breaks his promise within a day and hangs her from an elm tree (XXIV.45). Whereas before the reunion with Isabella Zerbino is bound to defend the loathsome Gabrina, the parody of chivalric practice passes to Isabella after his death. She, in turn, has to be accompanied by an ineffectual and physically disgusting hermit as if by her knightly protector (XXIV.90-92).

Another dialectical plot motif derives from the dichotomy between inconsistency (abutting sometimes in madness) and perfect constancy. The Narrator punishes Rodomonte for his fickle infatuation with Isabella and for his inconsistency in falling in love just after delivering a tirade against women (XXXIX.3). Isabella, ever faithful to Zerbino, is rewarded with immortality when Rodomonte unwittingly kills her (XXXIX.26-27). But the Narrator's subsequent indictment of women like Angelica in the last strophe of the same canto acts out Rodomonte's previous condemnation of women's inconstancy (XXX.74.1-4). What finally emerges is the structural and dynamic opposition between the self-renewing terms of the dialectic.

As if to reflect the play of identity and otherness within the self and vis-à-vis the other that characterizes love stories, the language of warfare often doubles that of love. Ariosto's descriptions of single combat, such as the final duel between Rodomonte and Ruggiero, flow into a fierce embrace of the combatants. War and love potentially pit everyone against everyone and come mutually to signify each other. Virgil's narrator is a conquering warrior. Having announced in the third of his Georgics⁸ that he would prepare to compose an epic on Rome, in the exordium to the Aeneid he supersedes the muse of love, poetry, Erato, with “a more noble order of things.” But Ariosto's Narrator is himself a generally mad lover composing at lucid intervals.

The enduring connection between the two exordia also derives in part from Ariosto's imitation of Virgil's style noble, but from there on the difference takes precedence, definable, however, only in relation to that abiding bond. Where such obvious divergences of form, language, and intent exist, recourse to a stock of reliable topoi affirms that the older poem has been reread and revised. Since Plato's Republic (IX) at least, wrath and desire could be understood as interchangeable within the single passionate being. There scarcely exists a love in the poem without its coefficient in the realm of duelling. And when the combat between two knights fighting for a lady takes place before her very eyes, her presence subdivides the conflict so that war and love can be viewed at work simultaneously. In accordance with the effect of this topos, the separate medieval traditions of romance and epic that contend for pride of place in Orlando Furioso are conflated by the adoption of a style that somewhat elevates the tone of romance while somewhat reducing that of epic.

Ariosto's narratives tend to convey a balanced view of love and, consequently, of woman. Ariosto's Narrator is indeed ready to espouse either side of the querelle des femmes. He raises questions about the injustice of laws regulating feminine sexual conduct, and his presentation of women in love has even been claimed to approach an “androgynous” ideal in the freedom it concedes to women.⁹ But two points must be recalled in this connection. Ariosto's Narrator is a self-proclaimed mad lover, hence an inconsistent, unreliable speaker. His effect is a leveling not so much of roles or opinions as of linguistic and literary styles. Bradamante duels with Rodomonte (XXXV.40). Her female identity is clear to him, as well as the fact that she is fighting to avenge another woman, Isabella. Rodomonte accompanies his advances with a sexual boast that comically takes the place of the epic self-glorification of a warrior before combat:

lo son di tal valor, son di tal nerbo,
ch'aver non dei d'ander di sotto a sdegno.

(XXXV.47.1-2)

(To fall by me thou needest not disdain,
I with such strength, such nerve am fortified.)

Bradamante defeats Rodomonte on both counts and rides off, seeking a duel with Ruggiero. In the meantime she confronts Ferraù and vanquishes him by the beauty of her eyes before they come to blows (XXXV.78), just as Medoro had affected Zerbino. When he reports back to Ruggiero, Ferraù is not sure whether his opponent was actually Bradamante or one of her brothers (XXXVI.13). This situation is mirrored by Marfisa's rushing to accept Bradamante's challenge in her brother's place.

The stress on Bradamante's femininity in time of war, or on her warriorlike, masculine traits in moments of amorous reflection emphasizes chiefly the duality of her role as woman and warrior. Women's roles in Orlando Furioso emphasize the double nature of Ariosto's project and draw attention to the “romance” aspect of the poem. They furnish transitions away from epic modes. Even Bradamante appears so as to juxtapose (by her doubleness) the obdurate differences leading to the paradoxical confrontations of romance and epic. The misogynous tales that thread their way through much of the poem, such as that of the Rocca di Tristano, or of Marganorre, or of the homicidal women, subserve a counter-romance aggregate of elements set as obstacles to the integrated whole that the reader is invited to desire. The eventual marriage of the proto-Estensi is the nearest approximation to that whole, a graceful compliment inflated to hyperbolic power. Viewed at closer hand, Bradamante as the personified combination of these disparate elements that seek perfect union at rest allegorizes the impossibility of integrating them into one whole.

Analogous to the lack of balance between the two natures is that of the single triumphant hero. From the outset Orlando shares Ruggiero's distinction, one as the raison d'etre, the other as the title hero of the work. The two are buttressed by a number of other hyperbolized figures: Brandimarte, Rodomonte, even Astolfo, involved in multiplying episodes, possessing overlapping virtues and vices. It is this doubling and multiplication that permits these “characters” to slide into the status of character-functions. A basic shift occurs from the charismatic hero to the possibility of a simple transfer of leadership, and the emphasis comes to fall on the infinite possibilities of change.

Morton Bloomfield has shown¹⁰ that the technique of multiplying the hero, the better to diminish him, is already present in the late medieval romance. According to his analysis an “antiheroic force” came to the fore, manifesting itself in opposition to the concept of the single epic hero. The former focal point of an entire work—such as Roland in the chanson de geste—gave way to several possible forces: either a “self-destructive heroism”¹¹ epitomized by such passionate lovers as Lancelot, Troilus, and Tristan, or an overarching depiction of self-heroism of the author himself, or by destruction of the single charismatic figure, “creating various heroes in the same work so that no one would stand out by himself.”¹² Ariosto may be said to have deployed all three of these forces. In the twelfth century as in the High Renaissance, the shift was probably accompanied by a parallel shift from the singlemindedness of the miles christianus. Bloomfield finds the response of splintering the hero “characteristic of most of the literature of the later Middle Ages in Western Europe.”¹³ Not only the figure of the hero itself but episodes and epithets became transferable, and the same poem could celebrate diverse, sometimes opposed qualities. “The decline of the hero in the later Middle Ages … reveals a sense that human power is finally powerless and human goals finally disappointing,”¹⁴ writes Bloomfield, and the same might well have been written of Ariosto's era.

In his classical work on the double, Otto Rank terms repetition the temporal form of doubling.¹⁵ “It is those inevitable repetitions inherent in cyclical time,” he writes, “that seem to rob the individual of all potency”; even the recollection that an event has occurred before paralyzes the remembering will with “the awareness that the memory of what has occurred in the past is at the same time the foreknowledge of what will be repeated in the future, the debilitating sense that time is cyclical and that recollection is prophecy.”¹⁶ In accordance with this ontological negativity, the heroes of Orlando Furioso are protean (in the aggregate), and they travel light. Titanic proportions are not appreciated, as they are later in Tasso. An attribute such as a sword or horse may serve to link two users but also passes easily from hand to hand. Orlando's sword for the battle of Lipadusa is Balisarda, Ruggiero's weapon at the beginning of the poem. Eventually Orlando returns the sword to Ruggiero (XLIV.16), and it strikes for Ruggiero against the Saracens just as he is converted to Christianity.

Ariosto shows that loving couples tend to resemble each other. Brandimarte and Fiordiligi provide a continuation of the Zerbino-Isabella pair. Each couple is separated for a long time and scarcely comes together again when the male is killed in battle. As individuals, Brandimarte (of one pair) is linked with Isabella (of the other), for they are among the very few to whom Ariosto extends the promise of Paradise (XLI.100). Brandimarte has been killed by a pagan, Gradasso, but with a Christian sword, Orlando's Durindana. When he finds Brandimarte's body Orlando echoes the prayer that the Narrator has offered for Isabella (XXXIX.27;XLIII.162). Finally, the death of Brandimarte has left a shortage in the Christian ranks, so Ariosto spares Sobrino, a Saracen, recruiting him to the Christian side with a compensatory effect.

Two main variants of the reproduced situation predominate. Either two correlated stories with a similar situational base end differently, or two clearly opposed situations find the same resolution.¹⁷ Sometimes Ariosto connects the two episodes linearly. Two narratives begin with a knight's discovery of a beautiful maiden chained to a rock: the episode of Ruggiero and Angelica and that of Orlando and Olimpia. But they end in opposite ways: the “libidinosa furia” of Ruggiero toward Angelica and the paternal protection Orlando offers to Olimpia. Another example of this kind of doubling is furnished by the adventures of Doralice and those of Isabella. Both are Spanish ladies, Doralice from the ill-famed “Moorish” Andalusia and Isabella from the royal house of Aragon, a territory ennobled by the Catholic dynasty of Spain (indeed, the very family of Eleonora d'Este!). Doralice is engaged to Rodomonte, but on the road the Tartar Mandricardo ravishes her. At first she despairs, but Mandricardo manages to console her, and their subsequent encounters are more enjoyable to her (XIV.34). Isabella is the fiancée of Zerbino, and she is ravished by Odorico, but she does not surrender herself easily (XIII.28). Both ladies lose their intended husbands, but when Zerbino is fatally wounded Isabella decides to withdraw from the world to a convent, ready to die rather than betray the memory of her beloved. Doralice, when Ruggiero kills Mandricardo, resigns herself to love Ruggiero rather than have no lover at all (XXX.72). While Mandricardo lived he had been useful to Doralice; dead he is of no use at all (XXX.73). The narratives are linked, finally, by Ruggiero's killing of Mandricardo, who had succeeded Rodomonte.

In the second kind of doubling—that which produces the same ending for opposed situations—characters initially presented in their opposition to each other begin to behave similarly as the narrative progresses. We encounter the same sort of jealousy in the noble Bradamante (XXXII.10-25;XXXII.37-43) as in the notably discourteous prince Clodione, who has been overcome despite the courtly tenet that love teaches politeness and measured behavior (XXXII.92-93). Brandimarte, a gentle, pious knight, produces Rodomontades similar to the most hyperbolic behavior of that titanic paladin. For instance, in canto XIV (117.7-8) Rodomonte appears as an infernal being, accompanied by an allusion to Dante's Lapaneus, who cursed God in Inferno (XIV.63). Rodomonte is a descendant of the giant Nimrod, who directed the building of the Tower of Babel (XIV.119), and his mass slayings also portend the madness of Orlando. The Narrator informs us that Rodomonte has left unfinished the tower with which he had marked Isabella's tomb (XXIX.35), a strange analogue of Nimrod's tower.

Rodomonte's bestial fury is similar to Orlando's as he is maddened by Doralice's preference for Mandricardo (XXVII.122.66). This insanity has however the distinctive feature of inconsistency, and the heartbroken Saracen (by contrast with Orlando) mends quickly as he consoles himself with the pursuit of Isabella (XXIX.1-10). Whereas Orlando's wrath turns chiefly against himself, Rodomonte's extends toward Isabella, whom he intends to rape as soon as she has given him the promised magic potion (XXIX.18). Orlando turns instead on Angelica only when he does not recognize her (XXIX.60). Again, by contrast to Orlando's unilateral and univocal love for Angelica, the story of Rodomonte's passion for Isabella bifurcates into the capillaries of the various subterfuges initiated by both parties.

It is when Rodomonte explicitly confronts Orlando on the bridge, their matched strength and insanity locked into combative embrace, that the parallel reaches its fullest extent. They fall together, two “fools from a bridge,” as the proverb has it.¹⁸ To fight Rodomonte is to fight the inner beast, so like the mad Orlando Ruggiero eventually pairs off with Rodomonte in the close embrace of combat: “gli cinge il collo col braccio possente” (whom by the neck he with strong arm has caught; XLVI.124.6); “gli stringe con Ruggier sì, che l'abbraccia” (He grips Rogero so, fast locked they stand; XLVI.131.6). Nowhere does Ariosto put more strain on the capacity of amorous language to express extreme opposition in combat. The duel is purgative, for any threat of “enragement” on Ruggiero's part is finally removed when he eliminates Rodomonte in the last lines of the poem. To extend the parallel to the extremity of conflict, when Orlando appears at Biserta to turn the course of battle, he wears as his insignia the Tower of Babel (XLI.30.3-4) pulverized by lightning. It is a sign that he has overcome Rodomontian madness.

Orlando, meanwhile, has subsided to a secondary level of the narrative. Having “lost” both Angelica and his friend Brandimarte, he gives over the banner of insanity to Ruggiero and to Fiordiligi, Brandimarte's lover (XLIII.164). Like Rodomonte, Orlando does not find his love; the embraces of war elbow out the poem's long-postponed nuptial embrace. Even the last note is not one of union and repose, although the doublings of the last three canti appear to have prepared it.

These canti form part of Ariosto's interspersions made explicitly for the final version. They find Bradamante temporarily divested of her warrior aspect; the oppositions exist only between males. Bradamante takes over the “angelic” function of the unapproachable beloved, and the prize of battle. She is now a disputed bride, her parents favoring a match with Leone, the heir to the throne of Constantinople, while she and her brothers insist that she is sworn to Ruggiero. A new meekness binds her, and she seems unable to resist conflicting claims (XLIV.74.6). A scrambling of these ensues. Ruggiero has set out to fight his rival, Leone, but through a string of unforeseeable complications becomes deeply obligated to him and agrees to fight for the bride on his behalf. The conflict of love and duty is thus hyperbolized to its utmost but remains able to bifurcate yet again. For Ruggiero at this point, honor consists in that owed to Bradamante both as his intended and as the confounder of the Estense line, and that owed to his benefactor Leone for other chivalric reasons. In addition, Bradamante has extracted from Carlomagno a guarantee that she need not marry any man who can defeat her in combat. Therefore, Ruggiero must finally champion his friend Leone's cause by wielding his sword against his own lady. The oppositions of love and war come full circle, to the crash of the demolition of the chivalric code.

Ruggiero wishes to die by Bradamante's hand (XLIV.59), as earlier she had wished to die by his (XXXII.43). Honor compels him to strain toward victory in his friend and rival's name. He has paired himself with the most unfortunate partner possible: a Christian and another lover of Bradamante, but also a friend and benefactor. Even this comical position has already been prefigured in the poem: Ruggiero's duel with Bradamante's brother, Rinaldo (XXXVIII.68-XXXIX.8).

Bradamante does not know Ruggiero's identity at this moment. He is taken by all present for a Byzantine prince, and the onlookers find him a perfect match for Bradamante (XLIV.81). Like his beloved in so much of the poem, Ruggiero is, for this moment, not what he seems. Declared the winner, he despairs and retreats to the woods, leaving Bradamante to Leone. As will be seen in detail, his sister Marfisa takes up Ruggiero's cause and his fighting stance with more diligence than he himself shows (XLV.113). Only a stroke of Fortune evidenced by the sudden abdication of the Byzantine prince finally and belatedly gives sanction to the marriage of Ruggiero and Bradamante. But Fortune still permits the final intrusion of Rodomonte, who storms onto the scene seeking revenge for his duel with Bradamante. To the end, then, it is dissension, not union, that rules the plot; dualism, not unity, that provides its ending. The search for repose in final truth we know to be a major cause of madness in Orlando Furioso. Both curiosity for the absolute and absolute curiosity are severely punished.

That Ariosto chose to end his poem's definitive version with a doubling section, that he added this and three other major “echo” passages to what had gone before (the other new episodes are those of Olimpia, Marganorre, and the Rocca di Tristano) shows that he had amplification in mind, but specifically by repetition and comparison. The new episodes furnish the bulk of the new material, and their cumulative and collective effect is to topple the hierarchy of the chivalric world represented in other, lesser works as a unity. Ariosto's irony adds to the doubling, the later episode commenting and improving on the former. It is not the effect of a balanced vision but of two warring contentions expressed on the level of plot. Even the first of a pair of episodes contains abundant clues to its own destruction; its replication confirms them. But Ariosto's irony is functionally partial. Never does he claim to abjure meaning utterly, a stance that would handicap irremediably the project of his economiastic poem. In fact, the reference that anchors the poem to praise of the past—the heroic adventures of Ruggiero and Bradamante—simply points, courteously, to the conviction of the present by a better, fabled past. Whatever is a copy of that beginning must also surely be a diminution. The running on of time is a running downward; to come after is to be fated to repeat. Nowhere does Ariosto explicitly suggest that someone will repeat the lives of the Estense originals.

Within the poem, however, that postulate awakens questioning. The poem itself, a copy, must be a scaled-down imitation of the ever-elusive virgin truth, a double of Creation that cannot approximate its force. The divided characters and their subdivisions, the continually bifurcating conflicts and rapprochements of the plot lines reproduce the eternal inadequation endemic to the writer's profession itself. If there is an original to copy from, the search for it is an infinite regress, the issuing copies readable only in serial form.

Even the union of Ruggiero and Bradamante is bound by this consciousness of a permanence of change. For the predictions of the hermit who baptizes Ruggiero include those of his death, only seven years after his conversion to Christianity, at the hands of the traitorous Maganzesi (XLI.61). This is the same family of Gano who brought about the death of Roland, who is in no small measure an auctoritas for Ariosto's poem. And in fulfillment of the hermit's prophecy, Ruggiero and Bradamante will actually replicate the tragic pattern outlined by the pairs of Zerbino and Isabella and of Brandimarte and Fiordiligi: a lengthy separation and search for reunion followed—alas—by a brief reunion and the tragic death of the male.

Is this not, then, also a glorious inflation of the theory of translatio imperii, or the movement of imperial power? The bed canopy given to Ruggiero and Bradamante, worked with complicated tapestry designs depicting the future of the Estense line, had first been given by its maker, the prophetess Cassandra, to Hector. It traveled to Greece after the capture of Troy and later to Ptolemaic Egypt, Rome, Constantinople, and now west again, to Paris. This movement of power from one realm to the next in the course of history outlines what will happen to the stability of the Ferrarese regime, undercutting any claim to permanence. As a dynastic symbol it suggests clearly that power and security may at any time be transported elsewhere on the steed of chance and “madness,” anywhere, even if just beyond reach. Here in the sphere of encomium time is indeed cyclical and recollection prophecy. It is, however, in motion, not static. Accordingly, Ariosto's poetic recurrences tend to be paronomastic, not strictly repetitious. They include a plus or minus factor and occur in dialectical juxtaposition, not as refrains. The world reveals itself to be in flux, but not without superficial ordering.

The movement of the “Carolingian” plot is structured, therefore, in four parts that form two natural pairs. The first disperses the warriors from Paris; so does the third part. The second section concentrates them there for a great battle, and the fourth and last does the same, resolving the war in Paris. Again, the quadipartite structure of ottava rima remains the basis of Ariosto's prosodic method. This is, as Brand points out, the “standard pattern which conditions our ear to a certain cadence, any deviation from which we note consciously or subconsciously and which the poet can use for particular effects.”¹⁹ Brand also notes another means whereby the ottava can emphasize doubling: “the rhyming couplet at the end of the octave, by virtue of its rhyme and its position, has a special function in Ariosto's poem where it is used with much greater care and effect than in the poems of any of his predecessors. It frequently forms a genuine conclusion … it may sum up a lengthy description … or provide a sort of finishing touch, a witty comment or mythological adornment.”²⁰ The way is thus open for the final two lines to split off from the body of the octave to form an epigram or commentary.

Otherwise the octave may split in half, the first four lines offering a statement, with embellishment or comment contained in the second and possible redoubling in the final two lines. The following example was chosen entirely at random. In the course of a battle Rinaldo's horse, Baiardo, meets with a huge birdlike monster, which the Narrator greets with his customary blend of wonder and disbelief:

Forse era vero augel, ma non so dove
O quando un altro ne sia stato tale;
Non ho veduto mai, né letto altrove
Fuor ch'in Turpin, d'un sì fatto animale;
Questo rispetto a credere mi muove,
Che l'augel fosse un diavolo infernale;
Che Malagigi in quella forma trasse,
Acciò che la battaglia disturbasse.

(XXXIII.85)

(Perhaps it was a bird; but when or where
Another bird resembling this was seen
I know not, I, nor have I any where,
Except in Turpin, heard that such has been.
Hence that it was a fiend, to upper air
Evoked from depths of nether hell I ween;
Which Malagigi raised by magic sleight,
That so he might disturb the champions' fight.)

The first four lines describe the Narrator's puzzlement before so strange a creature, introducing the corollary that even his authority, Turpino, might not have attained such curious feats of storytelling. The final four lines move toward a distinctly separate thought, that perhaps the creature is a devil. But the second half of that group trivializes the notion of infernal origin by its reference to the mischievous and probably incapable Malagigi, as well as the use of the litotic “disturbasse” to put that personage's evil intent into action.

To undercut even further the deadness of final meaning Ariosto employs links of a chiefly or purely phonetic nature, which interconnect various characters (or character-functions) and episodes. One of these is the phonetic pairing of names: Agramante-Agricane (both Saracen kings, taken from Orlando Innamorato), Bradamante-Brandimarte, Hordiligi-Fiordispina, Orrilo-Orrigille, even the Orca and the Orco. These are sometimes “speaking names”²¹ that point to some common trait of their sharers—obviously the case for the two flowerlike ladies, also for Bradamante and Brandimarte, who are both as brave as their names suggest. The two orridi, also continued from Boiardo's poem, are traitors, one an unfaithful lover, the other a sneak attacker. Their two stories are intertwined in canto XV through Grifone, who fights Orrilo and subsequently falls in love with Orrigille. A sexual opposition divides the Orco, who consumes only male victims, from his female counterpart, who devours women (VIII; X and XI). Ariosto takes the sexual doubling further: the escape from the Orco by means of disguising oneself in sheepskin recalls the stratagem of Ulysses (Odyssey IX) employed to elude the Cyclops. But in Orlando Furioso it is a woman, Lucina, who attempts it but (again unlike Ulysses) is caught in the act.

The character-functions and episodes directly related to the fused Carolingian and Breton material by no means contain all of the doubled and multiplied elements. Even the interstices of created pauses in the stories of knights and ladies make use of doubling and twinning by filling with new stories. Two novelle, for instance, fitted between sets of heroic episodes amplify the latter from within.²² Both stories echo not only each other but the theme and purport of the main narrative at the places where they are inserted. They are based on the querelle des femmes, which was a staple of polite conversation in the High Renaissance. As in such representative instances as Castiglione's Libro del cortegiano, the attitudes toward women expressed in Orlando Furioso range from elaborate defense (usually by the Narrator) to confidential advice and veer sharply from encomium to absolute condemnation. These tales share a common subject: the sexual voracity of women and their ensuing lack of faithfulness to their husbands. They are linked by similar plots as well. In each one the chastity of a wife is subjected to trial until overcome. But the second story, in accordance with Ariosto's seeming preference for repetition with a difference, or paronomasia, is itself doubled. The pendant to it shows the reverse image, that of the sexual indiscrimination and complaisance of the husband!

By this turnabout ending the second story represents what has only been alleged by the teller of the first (as we shall see). This is narrated by an innkeeper to Rodomonte to justify and encourage his jealous anger at women, but it is followed by the remonstrances of a “giusto vecchio” who has heard all and speaks up for the women's side. Incontinent they may be, but incontinence is shared by both sexes, and men are never reproached for it. Women react to the pattern set by their men; it would be better to liberate all adulterers than to punish the female more severely, and so on.

The first story tells of an exceptionally handsome and desirable knight, Jocondo, who is summoned to court by King Astolfo (not at all related to the paladin) for his rare good looks, which exceed the unusual beauty of the king himself. Jocondo has to leave his devoted wife behind and does so with the parting gift of a little cross. A long way down the road (which he travels with his brother), he finds that he has left the gift behind. As he reenters his house to get it he finds his wife in the embrace of a manservant. Without betraying his presence he resumes his way and reaches Astolfo's court in distraught condition. Jocondo languishes there until one day he spies the beautiful queen (who doubles his own wife as an apparently faithful consort to an exceptionally handsome man) in the arms of a hunchbacked dwarf. This section of the story is most obviously self-doubling.

When Jocondo tells all to the king, they set out together, telling no one, to avenge themselves on all unchaste wives, and the second half of the story begins. At first, Jocondo and King Astolfo plan not to return to court until they have taken the “spoils” of a thousand wives, but they tire of the constant search for new women and decide to find one who can be shared by them both, in the same bed. In other words, the experiment with multiplication is channeled back into doubling, or halving.

In order that no jealousy may interfere with their friendship, the woman is to be faithful to them both equally. They turn up a young girl named Fiammetta (who bears no relation other than her name to any character in Boccaccio by that name). The arrangement works efficiently, but en route Fiammetta is reunited by chance with a former lover. She arranges that one night this man will lie with her, between her two regular lovers but unbeknown to them. As planned, Astolfo and Jocondo each hear some nocturnal going-on on that occasion, but each believes it to be the other making love to the girl. The next morning their altercation over property rights in Fiammetta yields the truth, and the two men laugh themselves to tears, leaving her with a handsome dowry to which each contributes equally.

Rodomonte hears the story out but silences the even-tempered old man who speaks in favor of women. Maddened by hatred of the female sex, Rodomonte storms out of the inn and shortly afterward discovers Isabella. A new episode of fury begins.

By contrast, Rinaldo receives the companion piece to this story, some fifteen canti later, with equanimity and readiness to derive useful meaning from it. Throughout the poem Rinaldo has not deviated from his advocacy of equal sexual freedom for men and women. He now ponders the possibility that his own wife may be unfaithful to him during his long absence from her. He is presented by his host, another innkeeper, with examples that justify his decision not to inquire into his wife's doings.

This innkeeper, once young and handsome, had married a wife parallel to himself in beauty and loyalty, but the sorceress Melissa fell in love with him. Failing in all other allurements to win him from his wife, Melissa offered him the chance to test his wife's fidelity. Let him drink once from a magic chalice, and if the wife has not remained chaste the wine will spill upon him; if she has, it will flow neatly down his throat. He drinks once and all goes well, but Melissa then suggests an interval of separation and a means of entrapment involving—again—a feigned departure by the innkeeper. Upon this leavetaking Melissa appears to the wife in the guise of a former suitor, promising her rich gifts in exchange for her love. The innkeeper witnesses his betrayal, and the sole comfort remaining to his declining years is the chalice and the opportunity to offer it to his guests, who may now test their wives' chastity with a drink.

Pleased by his own forbearance in refusing to accept this challenge, Rinaldo continues his journey of the moment. A boatman tells him a tale that furnishes a near-double and corollary to that of the chalice. This time a jealous husband, like his wife before him, falls prey to a new lover. Just as in the previous story, a sorceress proves indispensable to the outcome. Judge Anselmo of Mantua has a beautiful wife, Argia, who is bored with their sedate conjugal life. Soon she has an admirer, Adonio, whose name suggests his extreme beauty. He is a descendant of the founders of Mantua. Having spent all of his money in trying to win the lady, he sets out on the road, a ruined man. There he sees a peasant beating a serpent, and because of his fabled origin from a line beginning from a serpent's tooth, he intervenes for the snake and frees it. Meanwhile Anselmo has been named ambassador from Mantua to the Papal court. As he leaves he begs his wife to remain faithful to him, the more anxiously in that he has consulted an astrologer who warned him that his wife would betray him for money.

But Manto, the founding ancestor of Mantua, is on Adonio's side, for he has rescued a serpent, one of her own. This same serpent returns to him as Manto herself. She subsequently takes the form of a miraculous talking dog that produces unlimited wealth just by shaking itself. Together the lover and the dog persuade Argia to acquiesce in his design. Upon return and discovery of the intrigue, Judge Anselmo tries to murder his wife, but the magic dog saves her by rendering her invisible.

Without pausing to exploit the resonances between this tale and the larger narrative of Orlando Furioso Ariosto turns to the pendant that redoubles it. Anselmo, searching furiously for his wife, arrives at a rich and splendid palace and immediately covets it. The price is announced to him by its owner as “that which would cost him least.” But this powerful personage, although his desire for Anselmo parallels that of his wife for her handsome cavalier, is a hideous “Ethiopian.” Indeed, when the turnabout ending has the wife discover Anselmo, she makes it clear that his transgression exceeds hers. Summarizing, the boatman and Rinaldo praise Argia and blush for her husband in the new double context of the homosexuality and the repulsiveness of his lover.

The ebb and flow of certainties in these tales—the one heard by Rodomonte and the other, with its corollary and double, heard by Rinaldo—refer immediately to the question des femmes but far more generally to the rejection of absolute truth. The host with his chalice is punished for his aspiration to certain knowledge; Rinaldo renounces his chance for it. No topic could be better adapted to double truth than the matter of sexuality, and the inconsistency commonly acribed to woman alone is revealed in the stories as the single constant factor that groups survivors together. The Narrator's dialectical ruminations on the topic of woman are to be understood as governed by the context of a permanence of change. Canto XX, for instance, begins with the eulogy of deserving women, asserting that they have been deprived of their due by the envy and ignorance of writers. This is one of many passages in which the Narrator addresses the ladies themselves. Indeed, ladies in general are thought of as being an important part of the poem's audience, and the Narrator is concomitantly anxious to dispel the idea that he is not their true friend. Accordingly he will neutralize and discredit some of the misogynous views he himself may have expressed to this audience, offering to praise a hundred for every one blamed. In other words, having stated that the praiseworthy are rare, he offers obligingly to falsify this “truth.” So when canto XXVIII opens with a statement on women's infamy, the Narrator claims to include it only because “Turpino” does.

We could hardly be offered a clearer signal of the poet's obvious choice to produce the misogynous artillery, nor does he denigrate the more immediate “authority” of the innkeeper through whom a misogynous story is relayed. And when the first story at last finds correspondences in the very last—such as the parallel between the hideous dwarf beloved of King Astolfo's queen and the vile, homosexual “Ethiopian”—the symmetries simply stand as examples, mere deixis contrasted with pointed moralization, of the parallel sexual venality of male and female. The unreliable Narrator has availed himself of the binary system on all the levels of Memory, Invention, Disposition, and Elocution. The stratagem of the story within a story even facilitates our final understanding of the entire male-female controversy as represented in turn within the very idea that furnished the means of representation in the first place. This is to say that the signifying idea finds within itself the outcome of its role as representation pure and simple. The signifier has no function outside what it represents; it is entirely transparent to it. But this represented conclusion, the possibility that everything will find its justification on another scale, does not seem near or benign.

Perhaps the chief means whereby Ariosto illustrates the impossibility of complete identity is that of twinning. This forma mentis extends inward to the core of the poem, which celebrates the nuptials of two nearly like beings. Even Ruggiero and Bradamante, like many of the others, are capable of standing for each other. Their myth thereby participates in the universal myth of the Divine Twins²³ through which the origins of many a reign are explained. But they in turn have other, real siblings: Ruggiero's twin Marfisa and Bradamante's, Ricciardetto. Moreover, they depart from the canonical Divine Twins in respect of the cross-sexual aspect of all of the pairings. The lack of polarized sexual roles in Orlando Furioso ensues from a pattern of continual binary fission, both within the poem and anterior to it. Twinned characters are opposed along the lines of religion and, as importantly, of sex.

Even the smaller units of plot and diction participate in the crossings that are suggested by the alternations of its very first lines. No sooner are the events of the poem under way than a kind of transvestitism seems to take hold of the character roles. King Sacripante (I.53) greets his beloved, Angelica of Cathay, with the joy of a mother receiving a long-lost son. Pinabello (II.39.1-2) contemplates the abduction of his lady with the sorrow of a mother bird for her male offspring, or a mother fox losing her child to an eagle (II.44.3-4). This time he is actually addressing a woman whom he takes for a man, thereby effectuating a second-level exchange of identity. It is Bradamante, not Ruggiero, who follows the encomiastic thread of the pattern followed by Aeneas in Virgil. After a mock-descent into Hell imaged by her fall from a precipice (II.75-76), Bradamante receives a vision of the future Estensi (III.14-20) analogous to that vouchsafed Aeneas in the sixth book. Not until the final canto will Ruggiero have a similar vision (XLI.61).

Cross-sexual twinning in the first half of the poem, prior to Orlando's mad scenes, most frequently takes a form distinct from that in the second half: direct sex reversal expressed in outward appearance. A character, most frequently Bradamante, is placed in a situation traditionally associated with the opposite sex. The second half of Orlando Furioso intensifies the doubling of Christian by Saracen characters, a development that completes the progressive order of all the doublings inherent in the Ruggiero-Bradamante couple. Thus the ground rules prove subject to change as distinctions previously validated in some context become obsolete as they run counter to a different set of expectations.

When Atlante explains his motives for sequestering Ruggiero in his enchanted castle, these are revealed as the same motives that drove Thetis to hide Achilles from war (IV.31). But Bradamante undoes this enchantment by taking on the role of the knight-errant rescuing the ad hoc damsel from the sorcerer. Ruggiero continues as the object of desire (IV.47) when his impromptu flight on the Hippogryph leaves Bradamante with the fear that the same fate will befall her beloved as once befell Ganymede. That comparison is reinforced by frequent reference to his soft beauty. Whether ravished from his lady's embrace or struggling in combat, Ruggiero is a general object of aesthetic admiration (for example, XXXVI.31.4-6: “le spalle e'l petto, / le leggiadre fattezze, e'l movimento / pieno di grazia” are terms that would suit Bradamante equally, or less).

Astolfo, Ruggiero's kinsman, at times occupies a similar quasi-feminine status. When Alcina makes off with him it is by luring him onto the back of a whale, a masculine Europa (VI.41). The banquet Alcina serves him is compared to that at which Ganymede serves (VII.20.7-8), recalling the anterior image of Ruggiero. The implied feminization achieves more explicit motivation when Alcina's transforming realm is called “effeminato e molle” (VII.48); for the submission of both men to women categorizes them as adherents to a feminine way of life (VII.53-55) by contamination. Against the generally Virgilian patterns of this part of the poem, a reference to Hercules illuminates a comparison between Ruggiero's enslavement and that of Hercules by Omphale; like that hero Ruggiero too had been a “fanciullo avezzo a strangolar serpenti” (VII.57.4). Again Melissa taunts him for becoming Alcina's “Attis” (VII.57.8), implying that the force of his attraction to Alcina has castrated him. For a moment the “Herculean” characterization that attaches more generally to Orlando in the poem has gravitated to Ruggiero, by way of an exchange of masculine for feminine traits that Orlando is never forced to undergo.

But Ariosto's diction can play tricks with the externals of situations, causing a fleeting, seemingly misbegotten, incongruous association by means of word placement or connotation alone, as when Orlando seeking Angelica is compared to Ceres searching for Proserpina (XII.1). To describe the pain of a slighted lover, Grifone, Ariosto revives the image of the suffering Dido:

Vorria il miser fuggire; e come cervo
ferito, ovunque va, porta la freccia.

(XVI.3.5-6)²⁴

(The wretch would fly; but bears in him a dart,
Like wounded stag, whichever way he flees.)

Angelica's lover, Medoro, is also described in feminizing terms, with his delicate coloring and curling golden hair (XVIII.166.7-8). Even the motive for his entry into the plot is reminiscent of a famous heroine: like Antigone determined to bury her father's body Medoro feels compelled to bury his dead. And he defends the body of Dardinello like a she-bear defending her cubs (XIX.7). His tender beauty disarms even the valor of Zerbino, who spares him for love alone: “d'amor tutto e di pietade ardea” (he burned entirely with love and pity [my translation];XIX.12.8).

Sexual role reversal and neutralization overshadow even Orlando. Mandricardo picks up the sword Orlando has dropped and claims to have frightened Orlando into leaving it behind:

E dicea ch'imitato avea il castore,
il qual si strappa i genitali sui,
vedendosi alle spalle il cacciatore,
che sa che non ricerca altro da lui.

(XXVII.57.1-4)

(Saying the Count, in yielding to his foe
That sword, the Beavers' known device had tried;
Who, followed closely by the hunter, know
Their fell pursuer covets nought beside.)

The comparison to the self-castrated beaver explicitly equates the sword with the phallus and neutralizes Orlando's sheer heroism without the need for doubling or for the actions of the formidable young women like Bradamante and Marfisa who bestride the pages of the poem.

The island of the homicidal women (XIX.57-118) hyperbolizes the same theme. On this island all men are relentlessly exploited by the institutionalized lust and domination of women, but the latter are cast down by Marfisa, herself a warrior endowed with some awesome phallic attributes. Marfisa believes that the strength of her sword will compensate for the deficiencies of nature when she is called upon, in the place of a man, to satisfy ten women in one night (“ma dove non l'aitasse la natura / con la spada supplir stava sicura” [Secure, where nature had her aid denied, / The want should with the falchion be supplied.]; XIX.69.7-8). She fights an extended duel with the unwilling champion of the women's customs, and when neither can gain the advantage, persuades him to join her. This warrior proves to be Guidon Selvaggio (XX.6), the illegitimate half-brother of Rinaldo and Bradamante. Here the binary oppositions dramatized by combat are joined to cross-sexual doubling. Each of the two major figures, Ruggiero and Bradamante, has been represented by a sibling of the opposite sex, Marfisa being Ruggiero's twin. The confrontation of the two sides is itself neutralized, however, as Marfisa and Guidon Selvaggio decide together to destroy the misanthropic institutions of the island.

Whereas Bradamante continually demonstrates the practical equivalence in the field of the sexes, her brother, Rinaldo, and half-brother, Guidon, together champion this equality in word and deed. Rinaldo decries the harsh law of Scotland that decreed the punishment of Ginevra for unchastity although men go unaccused of the same (IV.66.5-8). Guidon represents an extreme position, for the female supremacy on the island displays an unnatural imbalance demanding correction by a corresponding extreme. But in the process of righting the balance the Narrator first informs his reader that the history of the man-hating regime began with an injustice against women: they were abandoned en masse by their lovers after leaving their home in Crete to follow them (XX.21 ff). Again Ariosto presents the male-female controversy in dialectical form, extending it past the confines of the narrative in both directions.

Like Bradamante and Rinaldo, Marfisa and Ruggiero also prove to have a third sibling. This is Ricciardetto, introduced in canto XXV, who is saved from execution by Ruggiero because of his perfect resemblance to Bradamante. This similarity, amounting nearly to twinship, occasions the play of appearance and reality in numerous passages. Noting the captive Ricciardetto, Ruggiero declares:

O questa è Bradamante
O chi'io non son Ruggier com'era inante.

(XXV.9.7-8)

(Or this is Bradamant, or I no more
Am the Rogero which I was before.)

Ricciardetto's imprisonment was caused by a similar confusion: Bradamante had once again been taken for a man by a princess, Fiordispina, who fell in love with the man she took her to be. When Fiordispina discovered the truth she continued, nevertheless, to love Bradamante hopelessly. Hearing of this, Ricciardetto decided to take this opportunity to win Fiordispina, whom he, in turn, has loved a long time, by impersonating his sister. He tells her that he is Bradamante transformed into a man and amid imagined fanfares takes possession of her (XXV.68). The language of war returns to the description of love:

Non rumor di tamburi, o suon di trombe
Furon principio all'amoroso assalto,
Ma baci ch'imitavan le colombe,
Davan segno or di gire, or di fare alto:
Usammo altr'arme che saette o frombe,
Io senza scale in su la rocca salto,
E lo stendardo piantovi di botto,
E la nimica mia mi cacciò sotto.

(XXV.68)

(Neither the rattling drum nor trumpet's ring
Initiate the amorous assault,
But kisses like the dove's to war we bring,
And these give signal to advance or halt.
Our arms are neither arrows nor the sling.
Without a ladder, then, the wall I vault,
And plant my banner quickly, with a blow,
And thrust my helpless enemy below.)

The episode, which had opened with the man, Ricciardetto, resembling a woman, flows directly into the opposite, as Bradamante herself is taken for a man. Her brother's tender appearance contrasts with the sexual prowess evoked by martial imagery. In other ways Ricciardetto has not figured much as a warrior, but Bradamante can in fact perform all the feats of warfare that are assigned only metaphorically to her brother. The incident understandably confuses Ruggiero, though it does allow him to repay a certain debt to Bradamante: early on she had rescued him from Atlante; now he has saved her brother.

The tension between the contending roles of sibling and lover comes to a head as Ruggiero and Marfisa are paired in combat against the treacherous Maganzesi. Their deeds in arms are exactly equal (XXVI.16), but they are opposed in the comparison of their constancy. Ruggiero is delaying the conversion he had promised to his Christian beloved (XXII.35), but Marfisa adheres steadfastly to the Saracen cause as she understands it, deferring an eagerly awaited duel with Rodomonte in favor of the larger war against Carlomagno (XXVI.87). Ruggiero makes an apparently equivalent decision to defer a duel over the ownership of the steed Frontino, in order to march against Paris. Viewed in the context of his slowness to keep faith with Bradamante, even his seeming adherence to duty emerges as culpable, and for one reason only: Ruggiero's duty has subdivided itself yet again. Marfisa faces no similar dilemma. She will convert swiftly to Christianity as soon as she realizes that she is Ruggiero's sister and that they are of Christian descent (XXXVI.78).

Prior to this epiphanic moment Ariosto allows the hyperbolic opposition of twinship and lovers to reach its breaking point. Marfisa is allowed to fall in love with Ruggiero and cure his wounds, generating the dramatization of the erotic pattern woven into their relationship. She is in fact doing for Ruggiero what Angelica had done for Medoro before the consummation of their love, and at last the two warrior women confront one another as rivals. At first, the Narrator stresses their equivalence by awarding a provisional victory to Bradamante, attributable only to her magic lance (XXXVI.23). And parallel to Marfisa's triumph over the homicidal women was Bradamante's overthrow of the misogynous customs of the Rocca di Tristano (XXXII). But Bradamante destroys that law both as warrior and as woman: first her valor unhorses the knights who come to duel with her, earning her admission to the castle; then as a beautiful maiden she surpasses the lady whose cause she had embraced. Now she joins in the duel with Marfisa bearing that extra advantage, but the conflict has reached its terminal point. Atlante's sepulchral voice (XXXVI.27) intervenes magically to reveal the twinship of Ruggiero and Marfisa, thereby skirting the impieties of fraternal combat (war) and incest (love).

Emerging from this maximally stressful opposition is a gentler Bradamante. In accordance with that development, the Narrator's stirring account of women's military courage that opens canto XXXVII quickly becomes a prolonged encomium of Vittoria Colonna (XXXVII.16-18), a notably peaceful heroine whose military connections reside only in the careful emphasis of warlike qualities in her husband (XXXVII.20). Bradamante will take up arms twice again: first, in the episode of Marganorre that patiently lengthens the theme of misogyny, and then against Ruggiero.

The Marganorre tale is to be closely compared with that of the homicidal women in canto XX. As a result of their indecent attacks on married women, the sons of King Marganorre had been put to death. In revenge Marganorre separated the women from their men as if they had been the Lemnian women; thus the victims of misogyny were misinterpreted as active man-haters. The story encloses an exemplum of constancy akin to that of Isabella. Drusilla, because one of King Marganorre's sons has murdered her husband and taken possession of her, must appear to accept him, but like Isabella against Rodomonte, she resorts to deceit. Again Ariosto singles out a lady for her constancy, and when her plan fails, the Narrator (as in Isabella's case) prays that she may rejoin her husband in Paradise (XXXVII.74). So does Ariosto remove from from the sphere of Nature the most convincing examples of consistency, leaving change and flux to rule on earth.

Just as Marfisa, Astolfo, and Guidon Selvaggio had overthrown the persecution of males by females on the “homicidal” island, the trio formed now by Marfisa, Ruggiero, and Bradamante overthrows the system of persecution instituted by Marganorre. But the new episode serves as a paronomastic commentary on the first. No balance is righted, although Marfisa participates in both successful raids. For the matriarchal system they set up to replace Marganorre's regime quite resembles the social patterns they had destroyed on the island! However they may have tended toward the construction of a balance, the human coefficients of that plan do not achieve it; they have been, it might be said, reassigned.

At the close of canto XXXVIII Rinaldo and Ruggiero, still a pagan, are made the symbols (as champions) of their respective armies and decide to settle the larger conflict by its microcosm, single combat. Ruggiero regrets having to fight the brother of his lady and tries to parry rather than thrust (XXXVIII.89.5). The unhappy situation emphasizes the wrongness of his fighting on the Saracen side regardless of his promise to convert to Christianity. Two kinds of delay are involved: that implicit in the desultory fighting and, of course, the “religious” motif, which here begins obviously to build toward the point at which the two lovers will actually fight each other. Rinaldo serves as the final substitute for Bradamante before she herself must raise her sword against Ruggiero, raising the conflict of love and duty to its utmost narrative paradox.

Their submissiveness to the process of binary subdivision characterizes all the heroes of Orlando Furioso who do not go mad: the fallible, sensual Ruggiero contending with his own courageous aspect and his manifest destiny; the warrior and maiden Bradamante; Astolfo, at once the explorer on the Hippograph and the foolish slave of Alcina. The narratives that enfold them show how characters and events can reform into their own polar opposites, how the effort by anyone to dominate chance merely flows into a subsequent phase. Thus the relation between two elements in the chain may be one of contradiction, but also of intimate kinship. The oppositions are never static but subject to all kinds of spatial and temporal movement. Repetition keeps the series open. Any plot element may have its answering one, and any seemingly unique event or personality may have its double. The conception of the hero and of heroism emerges as irremediably trivialized, reduced to absurdity vis-à-vis this radical version of the Renaissance practice of imitation.

The entire structure of Orlando Furioso, permeated with doubling, twinning, inversion, and bifurcation, dynamically transports Petrarchan man onto the narrative plane. More properly speaking, Ariosto attacks identity and wholeness by opposing to them the continuous process of binary fission. Just as in the inverted view of the earth proposed by the trip to the Moon, just as in the reversal of recorded history and poetry proposed to Astolfo by San Giovanni, the poem offers knowledge in the form of the play of opposition and affinity. The situations Ariosto spins out are double or multiple in their specific external structure, but even on the level of their interrelation to interpret them at all is to come up with double meaning. Astolfo on the Moon is able to interpret what he sees by turning it upside down so as to maximize difference and thus understand it more clearly. Reversal and transposition are the tools: the hierarchical inversion of the relations between terms.

It is illuminating to think of the situation in Orlando Furioso as a kind of ideogram having two different meanings for two interpreters, or subdividing into two divergent situations, or eliciting two contrasting reactions depending on the interpreter. They may be called punning situations—just as some juxtapose the distinct universe of discourse of love and war, others those of the practical world and the earth viewed as sublunary planet, and yet others force characters to double or splinter against themselves. Like a pun, such a situation jocosely replicates an ideogrammatic middle ground; it is the point of departure for the comparison and contrast of two things. And like a pun, its ground is fortuitous, arbitrary, fully dependent on the vagaries of a sign system whose origin and final sense remain tantalizingly within vision and beyond grasp.

A pun also serves to reactivate the cultural apparatus that produced it, since both of its meanings come from that reserve and are themselves affected by it. An obvious example is the eroticizing of one of the meanings by usage. In fact double meanings are obviously favored in environments that seek to eroticize previously nonerotic meanings and by users who derive pleasure from the simple recognition of an erotic sense. This kind of meaning is neatly distinct from that sought by the discarded epistemologies preceding Ariosto's High Renaissance. Among the latter are that of morally based allegory and its correlate, the hidden meaning. That kernel of ultimate sense that would reward either exegetical research or imitative striving is now rendered null and void. The metaphorized languages of chivalry in its decline provide superlative vehicles for the momentary encounter and recognition of halves by their other halves, and of self-love by its own aggrandized image.

A hero in Orlando Furioso may declare and even partially implement his choice to move from the physical to the spiritual, from word to idea, to turn upward or move inward, but the materialism that undermines him is little less inexorable than that aspect of words themselves. Similarly the pun does not define words but establishes their power relations while playing with a specious equivalence relation. The clash between separate series of associations when they are brought into contact by linguistic factors mocks the referential function of language itself. From such a situation, as from a pun, a virtual, intrusive meaning rises to the fore while previous meaning is relegated to virtual status. This juxtaposition and reversal make latent patterns manifest, but again only within a general context of imitation or self-love.

It is precisely within such a context that Orlando Furioso emerges as the most apt, the most nearly perfect expression of its historical moment. The poem has to stand as its creator's answer to the call for a myth of origins, and the founders of the Estense dynasty, Ruggiero and Bradamante, serve as its link between mythology and history. They straddle a gulf between literary tradition and contemporary politics; they turn a less fabled present into an idealized past; they sum up, as one perceptive reader of Orlando Furioso has remarked, the end of an idyll.²⁵ But the most graceful compliments of the court poet inveigle and persuade to their own questioning: what more than the sameness of sound connects Hercules and Hippolytus to Ercole and Ippolito d'Este?

The Ferrara of Ariosto's time, though a sheltered principality governed by an entrenched line of long-standing rule, found itself undergoing the reality of encroachment by powerful nation-states. Resting on the possession of an acquired and stagnant capital that had to be guarded by limited warfare, Ferrara turned nostalgically to the configurations of literary feudalism for its poetic representation.²⁶ Itself neither quite a feudal nor a national entity, Ferrara came to be artistically portrayed as a cross between a fairy tale walled city and a pastoral seat of good government, from Boiardo to Tasso's Aminta. Beyond doubt it lay closer to the pole of feudalism than to that of the nation-state, and perhaps something of the laxity of late feudal rule penetrates the organization of both of its Orlando epics. But it was partially in order to counter the extensive disruption of his society by invasion and war that Ariosto responded to the demand for the creation of literary selves for the Estensi with hyperbolic excess. The systematic doubling and multiplication are accompanied by a critique whose trenchancy renders Orlando Furioso an independently self-consuming text.

It is surprising to a reader perusing the poem as an encomiastic and mythologized history that there is no important father figure anywhere in it. Carlomagno, conventionally the father of his army, reappears in his latter-day disguise as a comic figure; Ruggiero's and Bradamante's parents are mentioned but never emphasized despite the poem's stress on dynastic expectations. It is as if there were no one prince to posit as the focus of praise. Like the absent, invalided Duke Guidobaldo di Montefeltro of Urbino in Castiglione's Libro del Cortegiano, the “father” of Ferrara provides no implicit point of comparison for heroism in Orlando Furioso. Whatever ambiguous material can be amassed to mask this lack, it subsists in Italian sixteenth-century literature and fairly protrudes from a work that purports to celebrate origins.

Apart from the “endorsement by dignification” of Ruggiero and Bradamante,²⁷ the multiplication and doubling undercut the possibility of domination by any hero or heroine. This relation could be analogized by a sibling relation beyond the literary boundary: that of a number of brothers and sisters of one family scrambling for pride of place. In their resemblance to one another Ruggiero and Bradamante represent a balanced moment of unified tranquility that justifies the creation of an epic based on their love. But this coupling of lovers depicted as near doubles of each other, or “sibling,” also represents a narcissistic act of self-begetting and self-possession. The political directives that could issue from such a union bid the interpreter to regard the political aspect of the union as divinely fated, cutting off any temptation to view the despotism of Ferrara as the domination of some negative or inadequate “father” over his progeny.

Among the conceptual implications of doubling in Orlando Furioso is the observation, by Otto Rank, that the brother is one of the most common forms assumed by the figure of the double in the products of human imagination. Rank identifies doubling with narcissism, self-regard, and aggression. According to his examination of pathological doubles, these represent elements of morbid self-love that actually impede the formation of a balanced personality. Rank's studies participate in and further motivate the transposition of the Freudian theory of narcissism to the analysis of societies as wholes. He locates the very origin of doubling in narcissism, and (with specific import for the study of the High Renaissance in Italy) as part of the guilt that the narcissistic ego feels at “the distance between the ego-ideal and the attained reality.”²⁸ According to this view, the ego's super-abundant self-love and consequent overestimation of its own worth cause it to construct another near-self or mirror image.

It is through the sibling relation that doubling most frequently takes place in literature. And the case of an individual “unable to free himself from a certain phase of his narcissistically loved ego development”²⁹ can be fruitfully compared, I believe, with that of a proud, despotically ruled, and externally menaced society such as that of Ariosto's Ferrara. The poet's ruling hand that creates in multiples may move to diminish each and every thing it touches, but his procedure is also an integrative one.

A variant of the Narcissus myth retold by Otto Rank has it that Narcissus became inconsolable after the death of his twin sister, who resembled him in everything, until he viewed his own reflection. Though he knew he was gazing only at his reflected image he still felt a certain assuagement of his grief. “Sometimes he thought he could see his beloved twin in the water, and thereby, however fleetingly, entrap death.”³⁰ The less cheerful and more widely diffused version tells that Narcissus, entranced by his reflection, took his own life and even in the nether world continued to see himself in the Styx.³¹ According to either version the narcissism of the culture of Ferrara found its most apt expression in a myth whose content consists in its own process of perpetual motion through a garden of forking paths with provisional repose in mirroring and twinship.

In accordance with the generally rhetorical emphasis of High Renaissance literature in Italy we may therefore search more profitably for the sense of the repetition and doubling that are characteristic of Orlando Furioso with its goals rather than its origins in mind. The poem assumes a double duty: that of giving pleasure in its particular social and political environment, or purveying the past to the future, so to speak, without abdicating its responsibility to the Narrator, a man of superior experience. It can do both so long as it adheres to a conception of literature that is transitive rather than static, a string of actions rather than a collection of objects. The doubling and multiplying within and without the confines of the text argue processually that writing consists mainly in the new disposition of elements of an existing, hence stable, body of expression. Orlando Furioso emerges as evidence of a moment in which the author was able to keep in tenuous balance the unaccountability of his poem to its screen-texts and its full accountability to historical circumstance.

Notes

1. I refer in particular (cf. Chapter 6) to the passages among the many ecphrases of the poem that specifically describe the Estense progeny and offer praise to their friends and beneficiaries: the Tomb of Merlin (III), and Hall of Merlin (XXXIII); the Fountain (XXVI) consisting of Merlin's marble sculptures; Atlante's tomb (XXXVI); the Fountain of sculptured Ladies (XLII) and the tapestry of Melissa (XLVI). Other important ecphrases describe Olimpia (XI), Alcina (VI), and Atlante's castle (X).

2. For a stimulating interpretation of this voyage, see David Quint, “Astolfo's Journey to the Moon,” Yale Italian Studies, 4 (1980), 398-408.

3. Elsewhere in this book I make the point that Ariosto has transferred onto the plane of narrative Petrarch's conception of fluctuating, unstable mankind. Stylistic evidence of this transfer may be derived from Petrarch's own use of “Altri” in his Canzoniere, often to signify unspecified otherness and emphasize the sameness of the lover's experience. See Marianne Shapiro, “Revelation and the Vials of Sanity in Orlando Furioso,” Romance Notes, 22 (1982), 329-31.

4. The tradition of the mirror is well surveyed by Sister Ritamary Bradley, C.H.M., “Backgrounds of the Title Speculum in Medieval Literature,” Speculum, 29 (1954), 100-115. See also Frederick Goldin, The Mirror of Narcissus (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967), for an incisive analysis of the mirror image in medieval love lyric. The latter topic is of course to be related to the self-conception of the lovers in Ariosto's poem.

5. Donald S. Carne-Ross, “The One and the Many: A Reading of Orlando Furioso, Cantos I and VIII,” Arion, 5 (1966), 195-234.

6. Marilyn Schneider, “Calvino's Erotic Metaphor and the Hermaphroditic Solution,” Stanford Italian Review, 1 (1981), 95 and 105, posits Bradamante as an essentially hermaphroditic figure in Orlando Furioso as well as in Calvino's reinterpretation.

7. Virgil, Aeneid I.482: “diva solo fixos oculos aversa tenebat” (the goddess kept her eyes fixedly averted).

8. Virgil, Georgics III.8-29, announces his intention to bring the Muses home to Mantua, as a “victor” parallel to Caesar in war.

9. Carolyn Heilbrun, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (New York: Knopf, 1973), pp. 242-43, deals briefly with twinning and the exchange of sexual identities in Orlando Furioso.

10. Morton Bloomfield, “The Problem of the Hero in the Later Medieval Period,” in Concepts of the Hero in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Norman T. Burns and Christopher T. Reagan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975), pp. 30-48.

11. Ibid., p. 33.

12. Ibid., p. 34.

13. Ibid., p. 32.

14. Ibid., p. 42.

15. Otto Rank, The Double, trans. and ed. Harry Tucker, Jr. (New York: New American Library, 1971), p. 69.

16. Ibid., p. 70.

17. For an effort at narrative analysis of Orlando Furioso in terms of bipartite and tripartite schemes, see Leonzio Pampalone, “Per un'analisi narrativa del Furioso,” Belfagor, 26 (1974), 133-50. This article constitutes the only earlier attempt to decipher the narrative patterns of the poem.

18. The first poetic use of this expression known to me occurs in the well-known Provençal lyric beginning “Can vei la lauzeta mover” by Bernart de Ventadorn (fl. c. 1170). Its proverbial meaning is explained in Karl Appel, Bernart von Ventadorn: Seine Lieder (Halle: Niemeyer, 1915), p. 256: “A wise man does not fall (from his horse) on the bridge because he is able to control the reins.” According to Appel the saying is one of the medieval Proverbes au vilain, 28: “Sages hon ne chiet ou pont.”

19. Charles Peter Brand, Ludovico Ariosto: A Preface to the Orlando Furioso (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1974), p. 147.

20. Ibid., p. 148.

21. The term and concept are taken from Ruggero M. Ruggieri, “I nomi parlanti nel Morgante, nell'Innamorato e nel Furioso,” in his Saggi di linguistica italiana e italo-romanza (Florence: Olschki, 1962), pp. 169-82.

22. These exemplary stories together constitute the precursor and source of Cervantes's “The Man Who Was Too Curious,” incorporated within Don Quixote, I.4.6. The chief character, as in one of Ariosto's stories, is called Anselmo.

23. Donald Ward, The Divine Twins: An Indo-European Myth in Germanic Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), is a comprehensive survey of the theme, including Greek and Latin mythology (for example in the myth of Castor and Pollux).

24. Virgil, Aeneid IV.69.72-73: “qualis coniecta cerva sagitta … / illa fuga silvas saltusque peregrat / Dictaeos; haeret lateri letalis harundo.” (even as a hind, smitten by an arrow … She in flight ranges the Dictaean woods and glades, but fast to her side clings the deadly shaft.)

25. The critic is Giorgio Barberi Squarotti, Fine dell'idillio: Da Dante a Marino (Genoa: Il Menangolo, 1978), pp. 110-19.

26. For a recent account of neofeudalism in the Ferrarese arts, see Werner Gundersheimer, Ferrara: The Style of a Renaissance Despotism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973); also the clearly negative interpretation of the same trend by Antonio Piromalli, La cultura a Ferrara al tempo di Ludovico Ariosto (Rome: Bulzoni, 1975).

27. Kenneth Burke, Terms for Order, ed. Stanley E. Hyman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), p. 84.

28. Rank, The Double, p. 82.

29. Ibid., p. 83.

30. Pausanias, Descriptions of Greece 9.31.6 (ed. W. H. S. Jones [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975], 4, 311), cited in Rank, The Double, p. 87.

31. Ovid, Metamorphoses III.504-5: “tum quoque se, postquam est inferna sede receptus, / in Stygia spectabat aqua.” (And even when he had been received into the infernal abodes, he kept on gazing at his image in the Stygian pool.)

Bibliography

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———. Orlando Furioso, ed. Leonzio Pampaloni. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1971.

———. Orlando Furioso, ed. Nicola Zingarelli. Milan: Hoepli, 1959.

———. Satire, ed. Cesare Segre. Turin: Einaudi, 1976.