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The Comedy of Errors, founded upon Plautus's Mænechmi. Much Ado About Nothing, a Comedy; for the plot see Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. Love's Labour Lost, a Comedy. Midsummer's Night's Dream, a Comedy. The Merchant of Venice, a Tragi-Comedy. As you Like it, a Comedy. The Taming of a Shrew, a Comedy. All's Well that Ends Well. The Twelfth-Night, or What you Will, a Comedy.
Family reasons have been alleged by Baruffaldi, one of Ariosto's many biographers, but they seem entirely inadequate and unsatisfactory, and the whole matter still remains shrouded in mystery. One side of the question which has not perhaps been presented before is this would there have been any change in the tone of Ariosto's lyric verse if Alessandra had been known to all the world as his wife?
I have asked several friends about the truth of what one has been always hearing of in England, that the Venetian gondoliers sing Tasso and Ariosto's verses in the streets at night; sometimes quarrelling with each other concerning the merit of their favourite poets; but what I have been told since I came here, of their attachment to their respective masters, and secrecy when trusted by them in love affairs, seems far more probable; as they are proud to excess when they serve a nobleman of high birth, and will tell you with an air of importance, that the house of Memmo, Monsenigo, or Gratterola, has been served by their ancestors for these eighty or perhaps a hundred years; transmitting family pride thus from generation to generation; even when that pride is but reflected only like the mock rainbow of a summer sky.
He was in a state of ecstasy with the beauty and grandeur he beheld around him obtained the favourable notice of the duke's two sisters and the duke himself went on with his Jerusalem Delivered, which, in spite of the presence of Ariosto's memory, he was resolved to load with praises of the house of Este; and in this tumult of pride and expectation, he beheld the duke, like one of the heroes of his poem, set out to assist the emperor against the Turks at the head of three hundred gentlemen, armed at all points, and mantled in various-coloured velvets embroidered with gold.
A recent Italian writer, speaking of Ariosto's adulation, says, "However much of it may be looked upon as court flattery, and as due to the poet's obligations to the house of Este, we know that the art of flattery had also its laws and bounds, and that one who ascribed such qualities to a prince who was known to be entirely lacking in them would be regarded as little acquainted with the world and with court manners, for he would cause the person to be publicly ridiculed.
There are men and women in books, who seem more really alive to us than men and women who have lived and died Richardson's Clarissa, Chenier's Camille, the Delia of Tibullus, Ariosto's Angelica, Dante's Francesca, Moliere's Alceste, Beaumarchais' Figaro, Scott's Rebecca the Jewess, the Don Quixote of Cervantes, do we not owe these deathless creations to immortal throes?"
Ariosto's Alcina belongs to a different family of magnificent witches. Cremona, at this epoch, had a school of painters, influenced almost equally by the Venetians, the Milanese, and the Roman mannerists. The Campi family covered those grave Lombard vaults with stucco, fresco, and gilding in a style only just removed from the barocco.
Tasso's enchantress Armida is a variation of the Angelica of the same poet, combined with Ariosto's Alcina; but her passionate voluptuousness makes her quite a new character in regard to the one; and she is as different from the painted hag of the Orlando as youth, beauty, and patriotic intention can make her.
Her parents and three brothers, Alfonso, Ferrante, and the boy Ippolito, afterwards well known as Ariosto's patron, Cardinal d'Este, with a large suite, accompanied her to the gates of Mantua, where a magnificent reception awaited her.
But in the growth of character the light on the road to Damascus is apt to be preceded by faint premonitory gleams; and even in his frivolous days at the Academy Alfieri carried a Virgil in his pocket and wept and trembled over Ariosto's verse. It was the instant response of Odo's imagination that drew the two together.
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