The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso: From Public Duty to Private Pleasure (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso: From Public Duty to Private Pleasure Dosia Reichardt Cavallo, Jo Ann , The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso: From Public Duty to Private Pleasure, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2004; hardback; pp. x, 294; RRP US$75.95; ISBN 0802089151. The northern Italian Renaissance romance epics of the chivalric poets Boiardo, Ariosto and Tasso tend to be given short shrift in university courses, but they fill an interesting space between Malory and Spenser, and their influence extends beyond the Renaissance to the poets and dramatists of the Stuart court in the seventeenth century. English writers were familiar with continental literature (often in the original), but this inter-textuality is lost when texts such as those examined by Jo Ann Cavallo are ignored by current commentators. Cavallo's aim is ambitious: she sets out to examine key episodes in the poems and to focus on how each poet creatively reworks the romances of his predecessor. These poets use genre, she argues, to construct ideology. The principal narrative mode of the day was the romance epic, within which political issues could be raised. By arguing for the poets' deliberate engagement with their societies, Cavallo avoids a narrowly determinist Marxist view of the relation [End Page 140] between class and ideological superstructure through which hegemonic values are passively transmitted. Boiardo (1441-1494), Ariosto (1474-1533), and Tasso (1544-1595) were the 'three crowns of Ferrara', all in the service of the Este family in the span of more than a century from 1471 to 1597. Boiardo's achievement is his Orlando Innamorato of 1482-3; Ariosto's the better known Orlando Furioso (1516), which modern readers sometimes prefer to Tasso's La Gerusalemme Liberata (1581). All of these have inspired countless operas and paintings – which makes their neglect all the more surprising. Cavallo divides her study into three parts to correspond with the works of these three writers although in the second and third sections she does include some lesser lights: Cieco da Ferrara, Trissino, and Bernardo Tasso. She begins by re-instating Boiardo as an innovator in the history of Italian chivalric literature and by looking at the political dimensions of his romance. Boiardo's epic contrasts the good and bad behaviour of rulers through a series of didactic episodes and a movement from romance, through history, to epic. In this she breaks new ground for although Boiardo was involved in politics in his minor works and in his life, scholars generally assume that his romance writing involves avoidance of political engagement. Cavallo provides some detailed analysis of the poetry of the three books of the unfinished Orlando Innamorato and a welcome summary of the action. In Book One, she points out, although there are many fabulous adventures involving giants and maidens and these take place in Eastern, non-Christian kingdoms, their rulers are plagued with the same problems of legitimacy and maintaining power that were occurring in the feudal systems of Christian countries. Boiardo also examines the expansionist ambitions of rulers through his re-telling of the history of Alexander the Great. In the course of this book there also develops a contrast between a hero neglecting duty for passion and a new type of hero who upholds the values of chivalry, while in Book Three this hero, Ruggiero, becomes a peace-maker. Ariosto's creative remaking of Boiardo's work is the focus of the middle section of Cavallo's book. It was a complex undertaking due to Ariosto's successive revisions of his poem between 1516 and 1532. Here the issue of public duty versus private pleasure becomes more obvious as the hero, Ruggiero, is repeatedly seduced to abandon duty, but then extricates himself into a morally improved state. Cavallo argues that the Orlando Furioso is a response to a loss of humanist belief in the individual's and the prince's duty to act for the good of society under the aegis of an increasingly repressive state. In his addition of four [End Page 141] new episodes for the 1532 version of the poem, Ariosto merges novellas of civic virtue with allegorical episodes of moral education. Courtesy...