(1474-1533) poet, playwright
Ludovico Ariosto was born at Reggio, Italy, and was the first of 10 children. When his father died in 1500, Ariosto became the head of the household. In 1503 he entered the service of Cardinal Hip-polytus, who employed him as a diplomat and ambassador as well as poet; however, when Ariosto declined to move to Hungary with the cardinal, he was dismissed. He then took service with Duke Alfonso d’Este and, except for a three-year term as governor of one of the outlying provinces, he was allowed to remain in Ferrara to compose, perform, and publish his work. In 1526 he married his lifelong love, Alessandra Benucci.
Though today he is remembered for his epic poem Orlando Furioso, Ariosto also wrote a variety of plays, lyric verse, and satires. His dramatic pieces show the influence of Plautus and Terence; his earliest play, The Chest of Gold (1508), was the first of its kind to use modern stage settings. For the Supposes (1509), set in Ferrara, Raphael painted the cityscape that served as the backdrop, and The Necromancer (1520) introduced a new stock character in the form of the villain Iache-lino, a magician and sage. Ariosto wrote Lena for a wedding in 1528, and later began The Students, which he never finished.
Ariosto’s Satires are written in three-line rhymed stanzas and contain a great deal of autobiographical material. Like Horace, he treated the satire as a mirror of daily life.
Ariosto’s lyric and occasional poems were not published as a collection until 1546. Many of them had been written while he was a student, or in the service of Hippolytus. A number of the sonnets, addressed to Alessandra and composed in the form perfected by petrarch, show his style maturing as the artist perfected the tools he would use to craft his masterwork, Orlando Furioso.
Ariosto lived during the peak of the Italian renaissance, and Orlando Furioso, which he spent half his life writing and revising, is completely a product of the Renaissance at its height. The character of Orlando evolved from the historical Roland, who served in the army of Charlemagne. In turn, Ariosto’s character evolved as the product of previous works about Roland, including The Song of Roland (11th century), pulci’s The Greater Mor-gante (1482), and Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato (Orlando in love, 1494), which he never finished.
In 1506 Ariosto took up where Boiardo left off. The first edition of Orlando Furioso (Orlando the mad) appeared in 1516, the second in 1521, and the third, expanded and revised edition in 1532. The work preserves the grand vision and sprawling scope of the legends in three main storylines that hold the work together. The first is an account of Charlemagne’s perpetual war with the Saracens; the second concerns Orlando’s passion for Angelica; and the final story involves the love affair of Ruggiero and Rinaldo’s sister Bradamante.
Ariosto composed Orlando in highly polished eight-line stanzas, or octaves, and he frequently intervenes to comment on the larger themes of love, war, and the fragility of the human mind and soul. He understood the nature of the quest, and all of his characters search for different things: love, glory, victory, paradise, and peace. In addition, he combines classical, medieval, and contemporary material to create a work that blends tragedy, comedy, and epic in an enormously varied and vital style.
The Five Cantos, which appeared after Ariosto’s death, were thought to be additions to the Furioso. John Harington first translated the Furioso into English in 1591. Edmund Spenser began The Faerie Queene with the intention of surpassing Ariosto’s achievement, and Walter Scott learned Italian simply so he could read Orlando in the original.
Though critics from the beginning have debated over the quality of Ariosto’s style, they can agree to what biographer Griffin calls “the stupendous impact of the Furioso on European literature.” A work as much about limits as it is about extremes, as much about human failure as it is about human achievement, the themes of Orlando Furioso continue to hold compelling relevance to the writing and study of literature.
English Versions of Works by Ludovico Ariosto
Orlando Furioso. Translated by Guido Waldman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Orlando Furioso: Part One. Translated by Barbara Reynolds. New York: Viking Press, 1975.
Works about Ludovico Ariosto Finucci, Valeria. Renaissance Transactions: Ariosto and Tasso. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999.
Griffin, Robert. Ludovico Ariosto. New York: Twayne, 1974.
