A Reader’s Research Guide to Ariosto in Shakespeare’s England

List of Contributors

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Ariosto in Early Modern England

Michele Marrapodi

I. The book’s perspective

II. Structuring the Furioso

III. Orlando Furens

IV. Cultural Criticism and Intertextuality

V. This volume

PART I Elizabethan culture

1. “I think you have not red it in Ariosto”: Ariostean Variations and Literary Experimentation in George Gascoigne’s A Hundreth Sundrie Flowers (1573)

Silvia Silvestri

2. Supposing in Translation: George Gascoigne’s The Supposes and the Elizabethan Naturalization of Ludovico Ariosto’s commedia erudita

Michele De Benedictis

3. Chastity and Misogyny in Ariosto and Spenser

Patricia Wareh

4. John Harington’s Translation of Orlando Furioso: Penance or Vengeance?

Eric Haywood

5. ‘Of Dames, of Knights, of Mercenaries, of Loues delight’: Robert Greene’s The History of Orlando Furioso

Beatrice Righetti

6. Variations on a Theme by Ariosto: How Ariodante and Ginevra Travelled to England

Selene Scarsi

PART II Shakespeare

7. Ariosto, Shakespeare, and the Comic Attitude

Kent Cartwright

8. Ariosto in Shakespearean Tragedy

Andrew Hiscock

9. Love and War in Ariosto and Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Dialogue with Canto 1 of Orlando Furioso

Marco Andreacchio

10. Shakespeare’s Impersonations: Ariosto and the Game of sorti in Much Ado About Nothing

Ambra Moroncini and Brian Cummings

11. Shakespeare, Ariosto, and the Erotics of Comic Probability

Lorna Hutson

PART III Stuart Drama and Pre-Restoration Culture

12. Sex Workers as Educators, from Ferrara to London: Ariosto’s La Lena and English City Comedy

Eric Nicholson

13. “Here’s a Bradamanta”: Ariosto’s Women in the Fletcher and Massinger Canon

Cristina Paravano

14. Earthly and Heavenly Love: The Influence of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso on Milton’s Paradise Lost

James O’Neill

15. The Wanderings of Angelica: From Ariosto to its French and British Translators

Alessandra Petrina

16. “Inglese italianato”: The Italian Origins of English Epic Poetics

Sarah Van der Laan

Part IV Ariosto’s Legacy: Then and Now 

17. “Against the rules of Poetrie”: Ariosto in Elizabethan Criticism

Chris Stamatakis

18. From Canon to Curiosity: The Ariosto–Tasso Debate and Its Reception in Seventeenth-Century English Literary Culture

Silvia Pireddu

19. Ariosto Readers: An Idea of the Italian Renaissance?

Stefano Jossa

20. Coupling Ariosto and Shakespeare: Genealogies of a Critical Constellation

from the Renaissance to the Present

Christian Rivoletti

21. Dreaming Orlando: Borges, Ariosto, Shakespeare, Woolf

William N. West

Coda

22. Translating Ariosto Today

Albert R. Ascoli

Index

Biography

Michele Marrapodi is a Full Professor of English Literature and History of English Drama at the University of Palermo, Italy.

Stefano Jossa is Honorary Reseach Fellow at Royal Holloway University of London, England, Fulbright Distinguished Chair at Northwestern University, USA, and Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Palermo, Italy

Scholars and readers of English Renaissance literature still tend to be hesitant about, or even ignorant of, the work of Ludovico Ariosto and the extent of his influence. Across the language barrier, the Orlando Furioso can seem distant and impenetrable; and Ariosto’s stage comedies, which effectively launched modern European theatre, are often underrated by anglophone historians of theatre. This volume edited by Marrapodi and Jossa will be enormously effective in clarifying aspects of what Ariosto achieved, and most of all in offering views of how English writers reacted to that achievement. The coverage of the book is impressive, ranging from Gascoigne, Spenser, and Robert Greene, through some penetrating treatments of influences on Shakespeare, into seventeenth-century writers, even including Milton. There are also reminders of how an awareness of Ariosto’s work lasted into the Romantic period, and reflections on the task of translating the Italian poet into English. There has been a long scholarly campaign to highlight direct Italian influence on English writers: it was started by Louise George Clubb and has been vigorously continued by Michele Marrapodi. This present volume continues those efforts, but it also innovates—both by broadening the range of English writers covered and by introducing new conceptual approaches.

Richard Andrews, Emeritus Professor of Italian, University of Leeds

 

The twenty-two essays in A Reader’s Research Guide to Ariosto in Shakespeare’s England offer an engaging examination of Ariosto’s impact on Elizabethan and Stuart culture – with a few forays into later moments and a closing reflection on translating Ariosto today. As they address issues of gender, genre, translation studies, and a host of other topics, an impressive cohort of scholars remedy the rather surprising neglect of Ariosto’s presence in English literature and criticism – despite the oft-noted popularity of the Orlando Furioso’s 1591 translation by John Harington, called “the English Ariosto.” Particularly welcome is the focus on Ariosto’s comedies, especially his Suppositi, which prompted one of the first English Renaissance dramas written in prose. Equally welcome is the extensive consideration of the impact of Ariosto’s plays and poem alike on Shakespeare’s varied corpus, from Taming of the Shrew and Midsummer Night’s Dream to Othello. The persuasive demonstrations of Ariosto’s importance for Spenser, Shakespeare, Fletcher, Massinger, Milton, and many others will challenge readers to rethink the early modern English canon by way of exciting connections to Renaissance Italy’s most beloved writer. Kudos to Michele Marrapodi for the wide-ranging introduction and the two editors’ creative approach to Anglo-Italian studies.

Jane Tylus, Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Italian and Professor of Comparative Literature, Department of Italian Studies, Yale University

 

In the more than three decades since Louise George Clubb’s pathfinding Italian Drama in Shakespeare’s Time (1989), the labor of bringing to light the debts of Elizabethan and later English literature to the most important (and popular) writer of the Italian Renaissance, Ludovico Ariosto, and especially to his romance epic Orlando Furioso, has progressed with gathering momentum. Scholars such as Jane Everson and Michele Marrapodi have documented and explained such debts with articles and collections of studies, creating in effect a new subspecialty of Early Modern literary studies. A Reader’s Research Guide to Ariosto in Shakespeare’s England, edited by Marrapodi and Stefano Jossa, includes an international list of contributors and is more extensive, interdisciplinary, and comprehensive than existing resources, covering not only principal authors such as Gascoigne, Spenser, Greene, and Milton, and embracing epochs from the first Elizabethans to the mid-Sixteenth century, but also offering a variety of methodological approaches. A third of the contributions is dedicated to Ariosto’s presence within Shakespeare’s dramatic works. Publication of the collection may also happily coincide with a forthcoming new translation of the Orlando Furioso by Albert R. Ascoli that will bring Ariosto’s work to a new generation of readers, many of whom will gratefully turn for further enlightenment to this new anthology of studies.

Ronald L. Martinez, Professor of Italian Studies, Brown University