Oliver looked at Rinaldo, hardly able to hold his gaze for weeping, and said: “’Tis true that man cannot hide love and coughing. As thou seest, dear brother, love has caught me at last with his claws. I can no longer hide this desire. I know not what to do, what to decide. Cursed be the day on which I saw her. What am I to do? What dost thou advise?” Said Rinaldo, “Believe me, thou wilt leave this place. Leave the lady, marquis Oliver. Our intention was not to yearn, but to find Orlando” (IV. 88-90).
The naughty machinations of Malagigi are, indeed, comic interpolations; nothing comes of them; but the machinations of Gano have narrative function. There is hardly any separable description. Love laments are sketched, not dilated. Pulci is interested, and interests us, in his story as a story. To this end he takes a free hand with events. We have the usual paynim siege of Paris or of Montauban, but no attempt to include all the items of tradition. Pulci takes what he wishes and puts it where he wishes.
To call the poem a burlesque is misleading. The incidental farce, as in Boiardo and Ariosto, is rather appeal to Renaissance fondness for the grotesque as contrast. Though Pulci may have wished to pierce the inflation of the Carolingian street tirades, he was too clever to think of holding parody through 30,000 lines. Reducing the medieval aggregation to an intelligible story, he also, with an art more delicate than burlesque, reduced the style. Turning from both medieval gravity and Renaissance luster, he brought romance down to earth. Oliver falls in love promptly, utterly, and successively. The humor of this in real life Pulci frankly seeks. When two knights dare each other, he renders their speech not as oration, but as homely flyting. He is irreverent in the way of fashionable conversation. But his main object and achievement, as it is not parody, so it is not satire. It is pleasant, often humorous story of familiar antiquated persons in traditional events and setting, but in daylight.
6. BOIARDO
Boiardo, indignant at the degradation of the Carolingian heroes among the vulgar—how did he proceed toward elevation?
Who will give me the voice and the words, and utterance magnanimous and profound? (I. xxvii. 1).
Till now my song has not ventured far from shore. Now I must enter upon the great deep, to open immeasurable war. All Africa lies beyond that sea; and all the world flashes with men in arms (II. xvii. 2).
The poet seems to nerve himself, as Vergil at the opening of Aeneid VII, for loftier diction. The average Renaissance poet of the next century would invoke the Muses for that “high style” which had come down from classical through medieval rhetoric. But the words of Boiardo’s invocation are not heightened thus; nor is his diction generally. He not only omits the Muses here; he is very sparing with classical allusion throughout.
Book I mentions the Cyclops, Circe, Thyestes, Medusa, the Centaurs, Vulcan, Atalanta, the dragon’s teeth, and Hercules; Book II, a faun, the easy descent to Hades, the god of love, Pasithea, Narcissus, the Laestrigonians and Anthropophagi, the goddess Fame, Arion, and the Sibyl. Hector’s arms are brought in as a piece of medieval derivation from Troy. Classical similes are inserted here and there, as if conscientiously: the meeting of two winds, fire in grain, a boar or bear at bay, two bulls or two lions. Nor does Boiardo strive for other ornament. His heightening is rather the sheer extravagance of epic brag.