This is the conventional description called by the Middle Age blason. It is used again for Olimpia bound to the rock, where the situation itself is conventional. A bit of very old folklore, and coming down also through classical mythology as Perseus and Andromeda, it was a commonplace for dilation.
But what Ariosto dilates oftenest is emotion. His characteristic pauses are lyric. Thus he interpolates the medieval compleint d’amour not only again and again, but for long exhalations. Bradamante alone utters a whole series of these laments. The second begins as follows:
Then shall it be true (said she) that I must seek him who flees me and hides? Then must I prize him who scorns me? Must I implore him who never answers me? Shall I endure to hold at heart him who hates me, who thinks his qualities so rare that an immortal goddess must descend from heaven to kindle his heart with love?
In his pride he knows that I love him, that I adore him; nor will he of me for lover nor for slave. In his cruelty he knows that I yearn and die for him; and he waits till after death to give me help. And lest I tell him of my martyrdom, fit to move even his stubborn will, he hides himself from me, as the asp who to keep her venom refuses to hear the charm.
Ah! Love, stay him who hastes so free beyond my slow running, or restore me to the state whence thou hast taken me, when I was subject neither to thee nor to any other. Alas! how deceitful and foolish is my hope that ever prayers should move thee to pity! For thou delightest to draw streams of tears from our eyes; nay, thereon thou feedest and livest (xxxii. 18-20).
Substantially the same is the famous madness of Orlando. Though Ariosto cleverly gives it narrative enough to relieve its prolongation through twenty-five stanzas, it is a dilated lyric interlude.
The art that dilates these lyrics is rhetoric. Thus they answer not only the learning, but the taste of the Renaissance. With Alcina’s charms and Olimpia’s, they were the favorite passages of the Pléiade. Ronsard, using them often, was especially fond of Orlando’s madness. Beyond the Pléiade, they open a long vista toward Italian opera. To look the other way, back to the Middle Age, is to meet the sharp contradiction of Dante. Paolo and Francesca, or Ugolino, is the poetic antithesis to Bradamante and Orlando.
Such dilated interludes would interrupt any progress of the whole story; and they are not the only interpolations. Traditionally the cyclical romances might pause to add incidental stories, usually told by errant damsels seeking help. Ariosto inserts these freely, and quite as freely others having even less relevance. The story of Ginevra, Ariodante, and Polinesso (Canto V), for instance, though it falls among Rinaldo’s adventures, has its own intrigue and motivation. Equally separable, the fabliau of Fiammetta is told for sex, and prolonged by appended dialogue and comment. “Ladies,” it begins, “and you who hold ladies in esteem, for heaven’s sake give no ear to this story.... Omit this canto; for my story needs it not and will be no less clear without it.” Evidently Ariosto has not planned his cantos as chapters.
A mere glance through the summaries prefixed to each canto will show that the many interruptions are not breaks in the sequence of the whole. There is no such sequence. The poem is a collection of parallel stories taken up in turn, and only thus combined, not integrated in a single scheme. Accepting Boiardo’s method, he uses the same frank transitions.
But to another time I will defer the story of what ensued from this. I must return to the good King Charles, against whom Rodomonte was coming in haste and whose folk he was killing (xviii. 8).