University of Virginia Library

II

It is time now to consider in more detail the "setting foorth" of the book as it is described in the advertisement to the reader and to try to form an assessment of Harington's authorial intentions in regard to the book's design (illustrations and typography). The first point to be noted is that the "setting foorth" is by no means merely derivative; it is adapted, not copied, from the Franceschi and Valgrisi editions, and has a number of interesting original features. Secondly, even its most conspicuously derivative features—that is to say, the illustrations—were borrowed for an artistic purpose and employed to calculated effect; or so it can be argued. They are examples of "honest Theft".

The first question to be asked concerns Harington's book in relation to his readers. What was Harington's purpose, his authorial intention, in bringing

out a book of this kind? On the one hand, it was a translation—and therefore presumably chiefly intended for readers ignorant of Italian; on the other, it was elaborately and expensively produced—and presumably beyond the pockets of many who most had need of it. No record seems to survive of the price at which Harington's Ariosto was sold to the Elizabethan public, but comparable books were sold in the 1590s for more than ten shillings, unbound; and binding would have cost another three or four shillings.[14] Harington recognized that "all that may reade this booke are not of equall capacities" and his translation and notes are accommodated to the needs and wishes of many different readers: the Queen, his "kindred and frends" (and among them especially, perhaps, his wife),[15] the book-trade authorities (no doubt), and others. In particular, many of the more elementary aids to comprehension with which he equipped the poem seem to have been addressed to the less learned readers of his book and here, I believe, he may have been thinking primarily of the needs of children, as well as of the less cultivated readers of the (wealthier) middle class. He appends his life of Ariosto: ". . . to satisfie such as are desirous to know who this Ariosto was, whom I haue so greatly extolled in my Apologie, as a benefactor of all studious mindes, and on whose worke I haue employed so much time, to put it into English verse, and to bestow so many notes as I haue done vpon the expounding of his Allegories, and whatsoeuer else I iudged fit for the readers of weaker capacities." We know that Harington's book was owned by families of the gentry and nobility and read by younger members of them, but just how widely the first edition of 1591 was distributed among the poorer literate classes is uncertain; not widely at all, one imagines.

Considering the readership, it is entirely understandable that the ancillary matter with which the poem is accompanied should tend, for all its elaboration, to be comparatively simple and straightforward (though it is graced with many details intended to give pleasure to the more discerning). In the preface, which is clearly intended to be a statement of some weight, Harington undertakes the initial task of introducing the translation to his English readers. He relates the work to the moral and literary concerns and controversies of contemporary English society, deprecating and ridiculing much that seems to him foolish, and dealing at length with the matters that seem to him to present serious threats to the success of his book. These are principally the fears of the pious but less cultivated reader that such "Italian toyes" as Ariosto's poem might be "hurtfull for his soule, or conscience", and the cant of the time that poetry was a "nurse of lies" and an "inticer to wantonnes". Harington defends his work in his own individual way, laying

particular stress on the poem's tendency to virtue, the true ground and basic credibility of Ariosto's narrative, and the pleasure as well as the profit to be taken from the poet's delightful fictions. Characteristically, he pokes fun at the hypocrisy of readers who blame and at the same time enjoy the poet's "lasciuious" stories, but for all that he takes the charge of "wantonnes" seriously and does his best to answer it. He has an equally individual point of view on the purely literary side of the question, arguing rather paradoxically that Ariosto, as a modern Christian poet, is at once superior to the ancient epic poets and free to depart from their example, yet good at imitating them and in following "verie strictly" Aristotle's "rules" of epic poetry. It is in accordance with both these lines of defence that in his marginal and end-of-canto annotations Harington interprets the poem and comments upon it. Then, at the end of the book, in the general allegory, he makes use of a not altogether like-minded treatise by Bononome[16] in order to present a serious, coherent summary of the good uses and profit to be had from reading the poem. Considering the readership, again, it is quite understandable that a great deal of Harington's apparatus should be intended to help the reader simply to follow and remember the story. The entire text of the advertisement to the reader is relevant here as a summary statement of Harington's authorial intentions, but it will be convenient to focus our attention, to begin with, on the remarks concerning the "Direction for continuing the diuers stories" and on the index: Then, later:

Ariosto's narrative method is too large a topic to be fully treated here. The particular points relevant to this discussion are the characteristic interruptions of the stories both within and at the end of the cantos (the two kinds of interruption are quite distinct from one another); the artistry in the succession of Ariosto's short narrative flights; the resumption of the preceding narratives at the beginning of each canto after the proemes; and the interposition in the narrative texture of a number of whole stories told consecutively from beginning to end. These last seem to be what Harington

is referring to in his remarks quoted above on the "seuerall tales . . . that may conueniently be read single", even though the list of the tales includes not only these but some others—for example, the stories told by newly introduced characters in order to explain their present predicaments and (hardly surprisingly) such major episodes as the "Tale of Rogeros comming to Alcina" and the "Tale of Orlandos madnes". By including these incomplete or interrupted narratives in the list of the tales, Harington clearly intended to make the list serviceable to those reading the book a second time, selectively; but his earlier remarks make it equally plain that he wished a first-time reader to begin at the beginning and to read the poem straight through, consecutively.

That key phrase—"the meane matter betweene the so deuided stories (vpon which commonly they depend)"—is strikingly reminiscent of the words of a modern critic, C. P. Brand, on Ariosto's "specific contribution to the romance tradition":

Whether Harington can be credited with a similar view of Ariosto's "invention" on the strength of one bare hint in the advertisement may be open to doubt; but at the very least he must have recognized that, when the threads of a story are picked up again, the reader is assumed to know about the developments in the plot that have taken place since it was broken off, and that without such knowledge the point would be missed of the many meetings, pursuits, vows, recognitions, exchanges and gifts and thefts of horses, armour, weapons, the magic ring, and so on, by which the plot is advanced. The memory of what is going on in all the various story-lines is an essential part of the poem's richness of texture. There are whole cantos in succession in which various major characters are never mentioned; they are off-stage, assembled in the wings or in the tiring-house, so to speak; or, more exactly, the reader knows, or should know, that Astolfo is still flying around the globe on the hippogriff (let us say), or that Fiordeliege is still seeking her beloved Brandimart. Harington's index permits the reader to refresh his memory on these points and, if need be, refer back to the text; so do those marginal directions that refer back; while those that refer forward not only are aids to selective reading but also, and perhaps more importantly, help the reader by telling him what to expect—how soon or how much later a story "abruptly broken off" will be resumed, how long there is to wait before knight recovers horse (say) or lover is reunited with lover. A similar concern to set the reader's expectations on the right course and to clarify the complexities of the plot, as well as to assist selective reading, is seen in the marginal notes on the stories' beginnings and endings, and in the practice of naming in the margin characters as they approach or appear, more often than not well before they are named in the text. It has to be admitted that all these aids to comprehension can sometimes be sharply at odds with Ariosto's narrative mystification (compare the text and marginal note at X: 47-48, for example).

From the point of view of book design, however, the breaks between the cantos are the main thing, and they have their own special character. Ariosto's congedi at the end of each canto, followed by the proemi at the start of the next, serve quite a different function from the dropping within a canto of one narrative thread in order to pick up another. The congedi and the proemi enforce a pause, and at the same time, despite Ariosto's more sophisticated treatment of them, they hark back to the practice of his predecessors in the romance tradition, suspending the action at a particularly exciting point.[18] The proemi themselves are neatly made to fit their positions, facing as they do Janus-like to past and future, and the resumed narrative after the proemio invariably—or, rather, with only one exception[19] —takes up the story again at just the point where it was broken off by the preceding congedo. The narrative technique is time-worn and familiar, reminiscent of cliff-hanging endings in silent-film serials. Or, in more modern terms, it is as if the poet imposes a "freeze" (as the TV technicians call it) on the moving images of his story, and begins the next canto's narrative with the melting of the same "freeze". Or again, in perhaps more decorous terms, it is as if Shakespeare, by mingling together and modifying the principles of the romantic and classical drama in a way he did not, had permitted himself the grossest disunities of time, place and action from scene to scene, and yet had rigorously observed an unknown—and, of course, theatrically quite pointless —liaison des actes.[20]

The elaborate treatment of the canto-breaks in the printed books—Valgrisi's, Franceschi's, Harington's—clearly reinforces the poet's own requirement of a pause. Hence the positioning of the plates immediately before each canto; hence the elaborately bordered verse-arguments (and, in the Italian editions, the prose allegorie) at the top of the page above the beginning of the text; hence the ornamental initial in each first stanza, inviting the reader to start the new canto with the proeme. To be sure, a similar treatment of the canto-breaks (or such divisions) can be seen in other contemporary books of poetry where the same narrative technique is not used and where there is no regular liaison across the divide; but Ariosto's use of liaison was well understood by the illustrators of the Valgrisi and Franceschi editions that Harington used, and also by the author of the verse-arguments that Harington translated.

The plates and the arguments of Harington's book are to be considered more fully later. Here it is appropriate to point out a rhythmical regularity that has not previously been commented upon. The borders surrounding the verse-arguments in Harington's book are of two kinds: one, a frame of type-ornaments; the other, a compartment made up of four head-pieces, i.e. ornamental woodblocks. The two borders alternate in a regular sequence, with a change of step at Book XXIV. This feature of the design was imitated, not from the Franceschi edition, where six different engraved borders are used in no particular order, but from the Valgrisi edition of 1556 or one of its reprints. In the 1556 edition, according to Mrs Falaschi, "Each canto is preceded by an argomento framed in an ornamental woodcut for which there are two alternating patterns consisting of putti, garlands and masks . . .".[21] Although there is no positive evidence on the matter, we may take it that Harington either suggested or at least approved of the imitation. Significantly, the alternating sequence—still with its change of step at Book XXIV, which seems not to have had Italian precedent—was to be preserved in the 1607 edition, printed by Field "for Iohn Norton and Simon VVaterson" and published in Harington's life-time. It was not preserved in the posthumous 1634 edition, printed "by G. Miller for J. Parker".