University of Virginia Library

Harington's Orlando Furioso: A "Spare Leafe" and a Stop-Press Correction
by
Simon Cauchi

"Between the xxiijth booke and the xxiiijth I would have a spare leafe . . .", wrote John Harington to his printer Richard Field in the manuscript he was preparing to be used as the printer's copy for the first (1591) edition of his translation of Orlando Furioso.[1] The remainder of the sentence is lost because the manuscript has been trimmed in binding. In the printed book, instead of a blank leaf, there is a blank opening (Q4v-R1r) between the end of Book XXIII (Q4r) and the beginning of Book XXIV (R2r, faced on R1v

by Plate XXIV).[2] The purpose of the request, however, is clear. Harington wished to mark a break in the text, to draw attention to what he saw as a fundamental division at the mid point of the poem. The same purpose is served by arrangements made elsewhere in the printed book. Thus, on the verso of the title-page, the "note of the matters" or contents list also divides the poem—and perhaps the book as a whole—into two parts. A line-space appears between the "first xxiij Cantos, or bookes of Orlando Furioso, ending with Orlandos falling mad" and the "other xxiij Cantos of Orlando Furioso, in which he recouered his wits"—the line-space, like the type, being in Great Primer. Similarly, the wording of the line of smaller type at the end of Book XXIII is significantly different from the wording of comparable lines at the end of other cantos. Instead of something like "The end of the annotations of the xxiij. booke", which would have been unexceptional, we read, immediately above a tailpiece towards the foot of the page: "Here end the first xxiij. bookes of Ariosto." In all three places, Harington is making the same literary point, and in order to get his point across he relies not only on words but on the suggestive power of book-design, typography, blank paper. In doing so, moreover, he was going well beyond the precedents offered him in the Italian editions.[3] Anyone concerned to understand and appreciate Harington's work on Ariosto needs to give due weight, not only to the text of the book (translation and prose apparatus), but also to the literary significances embedded by Harington, or at any rate implicit or inferable, in his book's design.[4]

The approach I am advocating may be distinguished from that of another scholar who has recently been working on aspects of the "setting foorth" of Harington's Orlando Furioso. In a very interesting and provocative paper, in which he presents some findings from his collation of numerous copies of the 1591 and 1607 editions, Randall McLeod discusses the related matter of the Dedication.[5] He demonstrates quite conclusively that in the 1591 edition there was a stop-press correction in the first sentence of the Dedication, involving

the removal of three words and the consequential "driving out" and rejustification of the next seven lines of type, and that the same three words in some copies of the book are deleted in pen and ink. (They are erased, not deleted, in the copy held in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, which is one of the large-paper copies with pre-publication pen-and-ink emendations and another candidate for collation.)[6] Thus, in copies with the earlier (uncorrected) state of the Dedication, the first sentence reads: ". . . I presume to offer to your Highnes this first part of the ['part of the' deleted, erased, or left standing] frute of the litle garden of my slender skill." However, in the printed version of his paper, McLeod does not attempt to explain the point of this textual change or to consider what it tells us about the publication history of the book or about Harington's literary intentions. He uses it instead for polemical purposes in an argument about the futility of editing and the comparative fidelity of photographic reproduction.

Let me put forward an alternative (historical rather than polemical) interpretation and application of the available evidence, including the new evidence so painstakingly and helpfully gathered by McLeod. The Dedication may have been written at a time when Harington was proposing to publish Books I-XXIII of his translation separately—rather as Spenser, in 1590, had published the first three books of The Faerie Queene. If this was so, then the phrase "this first part of the frute of the litle garden of my slender skill" referred to Books I-XXIII, and implied that Harington hoped—perhaps not altogether confidently—to publish the second part, Books XXIV-XLVI, at some future date. This reading of the passage is supported by a parenthetical remark in Harington's note on the "Allegorie" at the end of Book XXIII: "Concerning Orlandos madnesse there is a notable allegorie to be gathered therof, of which (because I now haue taken upon me to go thorow with the whole worke) I will defer to speake till I come to restoring of his wit againe . . .". And there are other places in Harington's writings where he alludes to the time he spent or the difficulties he faced in translating such a long poem as Orlando Furioso. What seems to have happened was this. When he found himself able, after all, to publish the whole work in one volume in 1591, Harington (a) requested a "spare leafe" between Books XXIII and XXIV so that the two-part structure of the poem—as he saw it—would be manifest even in a single-volume publication, and (b) neglected to alter the wording of the Dedication until he saw it in proof as the book was going through the press.

Notes