Renaissance literary theory and practice

by Charles Sears Baldwin

He even turns them to humor.

I am reminded that I ought to tell you (I promised to, and then I forgot) of a suspicion that the fair lady of the grieving Ruggiero had concerning the other lady less pleasing and more wicked and of sharper and more venomous tooth, so that through what she heard from Ricciardetto it devoured the heart in her breast.

I should have told you, and I began something else because Rinaldo intervened; and then Guidone gave me enough to do, so that he held me off a bit on the way. From one thing to another I became so involved that I hardly remembered Bradamante. I remember her now, and I am going to go on with her story before I tell of Rinaldo and Gradasso.

Before I speak of her, need is that I speak a bit of Agramante (xxxii. 1-3).

Such narrative art as Ariosto exhibits is in detail, not in the onwardness of the whole story. The close is both interrupted and delayed.

Canto XXXVI, which finally brings Ruggiero and Bradamante together, ends without their actual reunion. There is no meeting, no dialogue. Canto XXXVIII takes Ruggiero from her, to support his honor; “and that, ladies, is strange.” Canto XLIV still postpones, as lesser issues have been postponed, the issue, their marriage. Canto XLVI ends characteristically on description of the wedding and encomium of Ariosto’s patron Ippolito; but that the poem may conclude as the Aeneid with the defeat of Turnus, it gives Ruggiero one more victory. Boccaccio’s art of the long narrative poem, to say nothing of Chaucer’s, is ignored.

This is not careless; it is intentional. Some of the delay at the close was added in the final revision of 1532. Ariosto designed not sequence, but abundance and variety. His opening Arma virumque cano is: “I sing the ladies, the loves, the courtesies, the bold emprise of the time when the Moors crossed the sea from Africa and did such harm in France.... Of Orlando too will I tell, how for love he went mad.” These loves, traditional in still subscribing to amour courtois, are more various than Boiardo’s. But though much of the appeal is by amorous descant, the staple of this Carolingian romance is still single combat. As for Orlando’s love madness, announced in the title and in the opening lines, it is not reached till Canto XXIII; and once his fury is spent, he disappears once more for some six cantos. He is hardly even a leading character. The principal role, for encomium of the house of Este, belongs to Ruggiero. Stories of the other paladins are often brought into connection, sometimes skillfully, sometimes ingeniously, rarely to the extent of making a situation, never in such an onward scheme as Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. For that demands what Ariosto never sought, consistent motivation by progressive characterization from scene to scene. Such characterization as Ariosto offers remains separate. Zerbino has more space than is warranted by any distinct function. Oliver, coming in casually, is less a person than a great traditional name. Astolfo’s miraculous journey, with its interesting geographical list has so little visible function that it might as well have been made somewhere else, or by some one else. Leone, one of the most distinct characterizations, comes in only toward the end. Even Ruggiero meets Bradamante when he least expects or deserves her.

Ariosto is a typical example of the popular poet gauging and answering his public. His elegant ease is flattering. His decoration is distinct. His diffuseness relieves us of all coöperative thinking. A scene is dilated through every phase of its emotion, and then discharged as finished in and for itself. The next will be pleasantly different, or, if unpleasantly, may be skipped. The dilation, the variety, that Vergil turned his back upon, and after him Tasso, Ariosto frankly sought. He has no care for poetic sequence beyond neat transitions, no poetic austerity of sustained single purpose. Renaissance poets, for all the cult of classicism, often revived the ancient world in Alexandrian decadence, saw in Vergil only his high style, conceived poetic as rhetoric, and ran after the “Greek Romances.” Ariosto was one of these Alexandrians.

8. TASSO AND SPENSER

The contrast between Tasso and Spenser is heightened by the fact that they were closely contemporary. Spenser’s birth was eight years after Tasso’s; his death, but three years. Tasso began his Gerusalemme liberata in his twenties, published it at thirty-one, kept it on his mind throughout his working life, and finally rewrote it. Spenser published three books of his Faerie Queene at thirty-eight, three more at forty-three, and left it unfinished. Tasso’s is the shortest of the Renaissance verse romances; Spenser’s was to be the longest. Tasso turned away from Ariosto toward Vergil; Spenser moved even farther than Ariosto from epic sequence. Allegory, hardly more than a figure of speech with Tasso, is announced by Spenser as his plan. Religion having more place in these two romances than in any of the others, Tasso’s is conceived as uniting western Europe, Spenser’s as nationalistic. Tasso’s poem is one of the greater European books, and has been widely read in England; Spenser’s great reputation has been very slow to cross the Channel. The latter years of the sixteenth century, then, carried on verse romance in two distinct directions: the classical direction from Aristotelian theory and Vergilian practice toward narrative singleness and sequence; the allegorizing of the medieval cycles toward a series of counsels for individual and social conduct.