Sir John Harington's 'Life of Ariosto' and the Textual Economy of the Elizabethan Court

Abstract

In recent years historicist literary studies have increasingly attended to writers' careers as a means of locating texts within changing institutional situations and of charting the development of a profession of letters. Crucial to this scholarship is the part played by 'courtly amateurs', those who wrote in 'literary' modes only sporadically as a social accomplishment or a way of requesting more 'serious' public office. This conservative species, endangered both by the marketplace of print and by 'laureates' who took poetry seriously, was destined for extinction. My article offers a careful reading of a neglected text by a supposed 'courtly amateur', the 'Life of Ariosto', which John Harington appended to his 1591 translation of that poet's Orlando Furioso. I argue that, as he translated this biography from three Italian sources, Harington projected for himself a career which eludes currently available labels, which he then sought to realize as he circulated his book at the court of Elizabeth.