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Updated: June 11, 2025
His association of himself with the fraternity of authors was thought a little "strong" by Ariosto's contemporaries. The lesson read to the house of Este is obvious, and could hardly have been pleasant to men reputed to be such "criminals" themselves. Nor can Ariosto, in this passage, be reckoned a very flattering or conscientious pleader for his brother-poets.
Standing on the battlements, and looking across the broad, highly cultivated, but monotonous fields, whose horizon is not attractive, because the Veronese Alps are too far distant, and the Apennines, which are closer, are not clearly defined; and gazing down upon the black mass of the city itself, one wonders how Ariosto's exuberant creation could have been produced here.
These knights and ladies, for ever tearing about from Scotland to India, never, in point of fact, get any further than the Apennine slopes where Boiardo was born, where Ariosto governed the Garfagnana. Into the vast mediæval forests of Germany and France, Boiardo and Ariosto's fancy never penetrated.
Moreover, apart from argument, he clung as a point of honour to the Church as to the wife that he had accepted in his childhood; and often tried to recall the sketch that Philip Sidney had once given him of a tale that a friend of his designed to turn into a poem, like Ariosto's, in terza rima, of a Red Cross knight separated from his Una as the true faith, and tempted by a treacherous Duessa, who impersonated at once Falsehood and Rome.
Of each and all of them it must be said in Ariosto's words, "Nature made him, and then broke the mould." Yet, if we seek Michelangelo's affinities, we find them in Lucretius and Beethoven, not in Sophocles and Mozart. He belongs to the genus of deep, violent, colossal, passionately striving natures; not, like Raffaello, to the smooth, serene, broad, exquisitely finished, calmly perfect tribe.
You will there read that the lion, fatigued, harassed, out of breath, at length cried for quarter, and the justice must be rendered him to say that he gave as much as he required. Oh! those were glorious times, sire, strewed over with battles like one of Tasso's or Ariosto's epics. The wonders of those times, to which the people of ours would refuse belief, were every-day occurrences.
Placentia in England raves of her passion for Philidore exactly as Alovisa in Paris, Emanuella in Madrid, or Cleomelia in Bengal expose the raptures and agonies of their passions. The hero of "The Double Marriage" rescues a distressed damsel in the woods outside of Plymouth exactly as one of Ariosto's or Spenser's knights-errant might have done in the fairy country of old romance.
And with the exception perhaps, of this heroine and this hero, we cannot find any very great harm in Ariosto's ladies and gentlemen: we may, indeed, feel indignant when we think that they replace the chaste and noble impossibilities of earlier romance, the Rolands and Percivals, the Beatrices and Lauras of the past; when we consider that they represent for Ariosto, not the bespattered but the spotless, not the real but the ideal.
Our drama began with a translation of Ariosto's 'Suppositi' and ended with Davenant's 'Just Italian. In the very dawn of tragic composition Greene versified a portion of the 'Orlando Furioso, and Marlowe devoted one of his most brilliant studies to the villanies of a Maltese Jew.
"Ariosto; but I cannot say I love him better than the others, for he is my only love." "You know the others, though?" "I think I have read them all, but all their lights pale before Ariosto's. Fifteen years ago I read all you have written against him, and I said that you, would retract when you had read his works." "I am obliged to you for thinking that I had not read them.
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