What the presses most readily carried on from the Middle Age was the separate romances that had not been merged in one of the cycles. The old fairy-mistress story told by Jean d’Arras as Mélusine (1387) was printed at Geneva in 1468. Pontus and the Fair Sidoine, translated into German in 1468, was printed in French at Lyon in 1484 and in German at Augsburg in 1548. Amadis of Gaul traveled from Brittany to Spain and Portugal and back to France. The French prose version printed in 1540 and again in 1548,[33] typically romantic in love, adventure, and chivalry, deserved its popularity also by narrative skill. With some lyric dilation of love and an occasional allusion to classical mythology, the style is generally restrained to the narrative purpose. Description, rarely dilated, is often cleverly inwoven. Dialogue adds not only liveliness, but some characterization. Though the simple transitions sound like Malory’s (“Now the author leaves this and returns to the treatment of the child”), this shifting is not frequent; often it does not really interrupt; and generally the composition has distinct narrative sequence. The knighting of Amadis is not merely a scene in a series; it is a situation, prepared and pointed as at once fulfillment and promise. So the complication of the rings (Chapter XI) is carried out before our eyes through suspense to solution.
In such separate romances the Middle Age had advanced the art of verse narrative. Not only in Chaucer’s masterpiece Troilus and Criseyde, but also in the contemporary Gawain and the Green Knight, the story is carried forward in consistent sequence to a distinct issue of character. The Renaissance, though generally it had other preoccupations, caught some of this vigor in the telling of single romances. One of these, loosely related to the Arthurian cycle without ever being embodied, is of Giron; and this was put into Italian stanzas by Luigi Alamanni (1495-1556). An industrious and capable man of letters,[34] who spent much of his life in France, he was a convinced classicist. His Gyrone il cortese (Paris, 1548; Venice, 1549), though it was written long after Ariosto had secured fame by quite other methods, shows that he felt the obligation of a single story, distinct from a cycle, to keep narrative sequence.
Alamanni’s Dedicatory Epistle, after relating the Arthur stories to history, and mentioning some dozen of the Arthurian heroes, expounds tournaments and the quests of errant knights, and offers his Gyrone, as Caxton offers his Malory, to educate toward true valor. Confessing that he has not always followed his source in detail, he promises later “another new work of poetry ... made in the ancient style and order and imitating Homer and Vergil.” [This was fulfilled in the last years of his life by his Avarchide.]
The first five books proceed as follows. After preliminary adventures, Gyrone goes to his bosom friend Danain at Malahalto. On news of a tournament they decide to go disguised in black arms (II). But Danain’s wife languishes for love of Gyrone and gains permission to go thither also under escort while the two friends lodge with a hermit. After combats on the way, they arrive at the tournament as Sagramor is victorious in the first jousts. The beauty of Danain’s wife arouses the jealousy of the other ladies and the passion of the Greek king Laco. His ardor and his threats to seize her are overheard by Gyrone, who courteously rebukes him in a lecture.
Further description of the combats at the tournament (III) leads to the final victory of Gyrone and Danain. While Laco still yearns (IV) toward Danain’s wife, a messenger arrives to conduct her to a neighboring castle. Laco parts from Meliadus, as Gyrone from Danain. Thus Laco and Gyrone are left sighing for the same lady in the same forest. They meet, express their admiration of each other, and sleep side by side in the wood.
In the morning Laco routs single-handed the lady’s whole escort (V). The lady appealing eloquently to his honor in vain, Gyrone arrives and fells him. While the lady debates with herself whether to reveal her love, and Gyrone is torn by the conflict of his own with his loyalty to Danain, they are irresistibly drawn together. In a flowery mead by a spring they prepare for love. But Gyrone’s lance falling knocks his sword into the spring. When he has retrieved it, he reads as never before its inscription summoning to honor, and turns it in shame on himself. A peasant supervening betrays their sad plight to Laco.
Thus the story is brought definitely to a situation of character. Obvious as the Renaissance manipulation is in the space given to love, the handling makes this not merely lyric interlude, but story motive. Though Alamanni is unwilling, or unable, to carry this through the 28,000 lines of his twenty-four books, though he often fails to give that salience to critical situations which is evident here, he nevertheless achieves what the Renaissance cyclical romances generally ignored, narrative sequence. All he needed to make his Gyrone shorter, tighter, more compelling, was firmer control of fourteenth-century narrative art.
For a classicist Alamanni is remarkably sparing of the fashionable Renaissance allusions. He does, indeed, use that paganizing phrase which was satirized by Erasmus. “In the consecrated temples, devoutly about the sacrifices in accordance with true example, they listened, adored, and besought the immortal Father”; when Malory would say, “They heard their Mass and brake their fast.” But in spite of many Vergilian similes and of occasional orations to troops, Alamanni’s classicism is not intrusive. Apparently he thought it had small place in romance.