Orlando Furioso in Milton: Heroic Flights and True Heroines

Abstract

DITORS OF Milton's biblical epics have long noted most of his allusions to Ariosto's romance, Orlando Furioso. How such allusions work within Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained to indicate Milton's positive responses to major characters and events in Orlando Furioso has not, however, been seriously considered. The most thoroughly annotated modern editions of Milton's epicsthose by Merritt Hughes and Alastair Fowler-repeat Ariostan echoes noted by earlier editors, some without comment, others interpreted as ironically intended.1 Editors have generally assessed allusions to Ariosto in Milton's epics as obligatory nods by the English poet in the direction of a popular predecessor in Renaissance epic. Yet the strategic placement of some oft-cited ironic allusions to Orlando Furioso in Milton's epics suggests that Milton was not simply interested in reminding readers of Ariosto's romance epic in order to denigrate it in favor of his own religious poem.2 Some of Milton's allusions to Ariosto have gone undetected, others have been noticed but left relatively unexplored, and still others have been dismissed as the stuff of an epic writer's traditional boast to have outdone all who wrote before him.3 In the lat-