University of Virginia Library

V

The critical purposes served by the work of annotation are not our present concern, but rather the use of space. From the point of view of book design, Harington's method of annotation can be seen as an ingenious solution to a practical difficulty. He sought to imitate his Italian sources by publishing an annotated edition, but Ruscelli's canto-by-canto "Annotationi" could supply him with very little material towards his own notes: they are mostly comments on the fine points of Ariosto's use of the Italian language. Harington's solution was to borrow what he wanted from his other sources—the commentaries and the Valvassori prose allegorie [27] —and to transfer all this borrowed material into his end-of-canto notes and also (sometimes) into his marginal notes. All, that is, except the material borrowed for the general allegory and the life of Ariosto, which as we have seen were probably later additions to the book's contents. The omission of prose allegorie at the head of Harington's cantos makes sense as a consequence of this method. He needed the material for the end-of-canto notes, and to transfer it there had the additional advantage of bringing forward the first seven stanzas of a canto on to the first page, instead of four as in the Franceschi and Valgrisi editions, so that—whether consequently or, possibly, of set purpose—there was a better chance that the principal scene of an illustration would face the very stanza or stanzas it illustrated.[28]

Ideally both sets of annotations, Italian and English, should have regularly come to an end at the foot of a recto page, so that the following plate

would appear on the next verso. However, this ideal could not always be achieved, for quite often the annotations end neatly at the foot of a verso, facing the next plate, and sometimes they end too soon, well above the foot of the page. In Harington's book, if the notes ended rather high on the page, a tailpiece was regularly used to help fill up the remaining blank space. Where the verse of a canto happened to come to an end on the page —recto or verso, high up or low down or in the middle—made a good deal of difference to the ease or difficulty of achieving or approximating the desired effect. Where the verse ended high on a verso, the notes would need to be greatly extended to reach to the foot of the next recto; where the verse ended low on a recto, they would need to be either greatly compressed in order to fit, or else greatly extended to fill up the next two pages as well. Where the ideal was unattainable, it was usually possible to achieve at least one of the ideal conditions—a neat finish at the foot of the page, or alternatively the plate correctly imposed on a verso so that it faced the canto-beginning.

The method used by Ruscelli and Valgrisi to adjust the length of the "Annotationi" and to work out their relationships with the following plates is not known. Whatever it was, it worked. Franceschi simply adopted the same layout, but improved on it by adding new copy (presumably also written by Ruscelli) to the notes to cantos XXVII and XXXVIII, so that they too end at the foot of the page in his edition, as they do not in Valgrisi's.[29] In difficult cases, at least one or other of the two conditions for ideal layout is satisfied. There is only one exception to this, at the break following canto XXXVII, and even there the annotations fill up a good two-thirds of the page. In all other cases where much space is left blank, the "Annotationi" finish on a recto, followed by a plate properly facing its canto-beginning. The treatment of the "Annotationi" to canto XXXVI is of particular interest. There the very brief notes could quite easily have fitted below the verse, and were probably originally intended to go there; but they were imposed on the following recto, leaving much blank space at the bottom of both pages (pp. 410-411), presumably so that the following plate would appear on a verso.

In Harington's book, there are three canto-breaks where neither of the conditions for ideal layout are met. In the first two of these, the breaks following Books XVIII and XXV, the notes do fill up most of the remainder of the verso page even though some space is left blank. The third, following Book XXX, is a striking exception to the general rule and conspicuously fails to meet either condition. One suspects a blunder somewhere, and a blunder can be found. It will be discussed in some detail shortly.

There is no doubt at all that Harington concerned himself personally with these questions of layout. We have the evidence of remarks made in

the text of the annotations themselves—mostly grumbles about the lack of space available to him, e.g. at II: Allegory, IV: History, XIV: History, XV: History, and elsewhere—and also of several of his instructions to the printer. Moreover Harington's recorded words can be set in a wider context by examining the results achieved in the book itself and also, where possible, the means used to achieve these results. From all this we can be sure that Harington, as a rule, liked his annotations to finish neatly at the foot of a page, even if it meant making cross-references from one part of his apparatus to another in order to avoid running over the space available for any particular set of notes. How much he cared about the location of the plates (recto or verso) is harder to determine. His recorded words are silent on the topic, so that one is driven to relying on inferences from the book itself and from the printer's copy.

Consider, for example, Harington's instruction to the printer given at the end of the notes to Book XXIX. These notes include two verse-quotations, one Latin, one English, which in the manuscript are both written out in long lines, two lines of verse to one of script. The four lines of Latin verse are each numbered, but not the lines of English verse—it is probable that Harington thought of these latter as three lines of verse with internal rhyme as well as end rhyme, for they are also set out as three lines in Ruth Hughey's edition of The Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry (1960; no. 177). The instruction to Field reads: "Yf thear bee roome enowgh in the page print the verses at length yf not then print them as they are heer written. and yf need bee leave out the latten verse quyte." Harington did not wish the notes to run over on to the next printed page. At it turned out, there was "roome" for the Latin verses to be printed "at length", but the six (or three) lines of English verse remained set out as three. Plate XXX appears properly on the next verso, but there is no means of knowing if this is what Harington was aiming for, or if he merely wished to have a neat finish at the foot of the page.

In the manuscript, the tail end of the notes to Book XXXV is squeezed in above the heading to Book XXXVI. The notes end with a reference to Hudson's Du Bartas, but there is room for only one line of the poem to be quoted. In the printed book the quotation has been lengthened, presumably in proof, by a further five lines. The effect is to strengthen Harington's point and at the same time to bring the end of the notes nearer to the foot of the page. Plate XXXVI, alas, appears opposite, but at least one of the conditions for ideal layout has been met. Similarly, the notes of allusion to Book XXVIII (the tale of Jocundo) are made to fit: "Historie nor Allegorie, nor scant any thing that is good, can be picked out of this bad booke: but for Allusions, they come in my mynd so plentifully, as I can scant tell how to make an end, when I am once enterd into them: Only I will touch one or two, (to fill up this page withall). . . . Plate XXIX, alas, once again appears on a recto.

Where Harington had much space to fill, verse-quotation was a convenient

means of filling it—for example, of whole sonnets by Constable (Book XXXIV) and by Sidney (Books XI and XVI). In such places, also (e.g. Book XVII) Harington will expatiate in lengthy passages of free composition on the favourite topics of his social criticism. However, neither of these techniques seems to have been regularly used for the sake of ensuring that the following plates would appear on versos.

So far, in fact, there is little to suggest that Harington really cared whether the plates appeared on versos or rectos; but the blunder at the cantobreak following Book XXX, I believe, tips the balance in favour of the suggestion that he did. Here moreover we have a closer glimpse into Harington's working methods. The blunder seems to have been caused by reliance on faulty stanza-numbering in the manuscript. Stanza numbers 35-39 in Book XXX had been repeated, so that the last stanza of the canto was originally misnumbered "84" instead of "89"—though, like the others, it was later corrected. When he wrote the end-of-canto notes to Book XXX, Harington must have thought he had more space than in fact was available to him. The notes take up twenty lines of type and would have fitted comfortably under seven final stanzas of verse (78-84); but in fact there were five more stanzas, and here Harington had not left instructions to the printer that the notes were to be cut "yf need bee". The printers duly cast off and followed their copy, and the text necessarily runs over to the top of the next page, ending high on sig. Y1v after only twelve lines of type. It is followed by a tailpiece—the only tailpiece in all the annotations to appear on a verso. Here, at least, Harington seems to have calculated the length of his notes without reference to the not-yet-printed sheets, relying on the stanza-numbering and on his knowledge that the verse was to be set out in regular equal lengths of seven stanzas at a time. If his calculations had been sound, all would have been well and both conditions for ideal layout would have been satisfied.

The miscalculation in Book XXX, as is the way with these things, led to another one in Book XXXI. There, under the twelve final stanzas, Harington tucked in a very brief note on the moral. It is the shortest end-of-canto note in the whole book, a mere four lines of type, and ends: ". . . The rest of the booke hath no new matter, but such as hath bin noted before: and therefore I will end this little space with this short note." Plate XXXII appears opposite, but if the notes to Book XXX had been calculated aright, the whole sequence from Plate XXXI onwards would have been imposed one page earlier, and Harington's "short note" would have appeared properly at the foot of the preceding recto. That, I suggest, was the real reason why he kept the note so untypically short. These two examples, in which it is possible to trace failures to achieve ideal layout back to an observable miscalculation, lead me to think that, in fact, Harington did prefer the plates to appear facing the canto-beginnings. He must have been disappointed that in the finished book so many of his plates appear on rectos, by comparison with those of Franceschi's book.

Just how much further one can trace the consequences of this miscalculation

is unclear. Many of the following plates appear on rectos (Plates XXXIII, XXXV, XXXVI, XXXVII, XXXIX, etc.) but the notes to Book XXXIII are very long and one doubts whether Harington would have attempted to plan ahead beyond them.[30] Several of these canto-breaks are difficult cases where the verse itself ends at the foot of the page, and Harington has contented himself with supplying one full page of annotations. If only they could somehow have been imposed one page earlier or later, the results would have been very much better. However, in Book XXXVI, at least, Harington must have been aware that the following plate was to appear on a recto, for the notes to that book were written after the verse had been cast off. Harington must have seen the notation indicating the position of the plate on sig. 2C6: for he deleted the top line of it and wrote the last few words of his notes around it. Perhaps—who knows?—the following pages had already been printed, and Harington was late in supplying the copy for these notes. Possibly also the notes to Book XXXII were supplied late, for they stop abruptly at the foot of the verso printed page, and a tentative continuation of them in the manuscript is heavily deleted. One suspects that all these imperfections of layout may be related to Harington's absence or irregular attendance at the printing-house during this time. All these cantos are among those for which end-of-canto notes survive with the printer's copy.[31] Such an explanation would account for the much higher success-rate in achieving ideal layout of the plates in the first half of the book.

Book XLVI, of course, is a special case. There the Italian "Annotationi" end neatly at the foot of a verso page, facing the title-page of the "Cinque Canti", not translated by Harington. Harington's notes, unconstrained by plate or title-page, continue to the top of the next recto, where they take up six lines of type. They are followed by the line: "Here end the notes of the 46, and last Canto of Orlando Furioso"—a phrase that recalls the running-titles of that canto in the Italian editions, "CANTO QVARANTESIMOSESTO, ET VLTIMO". In the manuscript there is the most famous of all Harington's instructions to the printer:

(The remainder, concerning choice of type for preface, general allegory, and "all the prose that ys to come", was quoted earlier.) What exactly Harington had in mind when he asked for "some prety knotte" is impossible to determine. It sounds as if he were perhaps thinking of another tailpiece. At all events, Field's workmen used their common-sense and, very appropriately, chose a large headpiece to mark this major division in the text—the same headpiece as would be used for the dedication to the Queen.

The canto-break following Book XXIII is also a special case, and rather a remarkable one. It deserves to be discussed at some length. This cantobreak marks the mid-point of the poem, for Book XXIII ends with the story of the onset of Orlando's madness, the centre-piece of Ariosto's poem and the heart of what Harington called "the chiefe Allegorie of all the booke, and where-vpon the booke taketh his name Orlando Furioso" (XXXIX: Allegory). Harington made a number of special adjustments in his apparatus to make sure that his readers understood the importance of the episode. This was necessary because the madness of Orlando was not by any means the principal topic of Italian critical debate about the poem. Fornari in his Spositione, the critic from whom Harington borrowed most extensively, devoted the second of his two volumes to an explanation of the allegory, but far from interpreting the whole poem he concentrated his attention on the story of Ruggiero and Alcina and its ramifications. The same emphasis on Ruggiero and Alcina is seen in Bononome's "Allegoria", and also in Harington's general allegory, despite the adjustments made to the text in an attempt to give prominence to Orlando. The end-of-canto notes to Book XXIII are rather compressed by lack of space, and allegorical interpretation of the episode is deferred "till I come to restoring of his wit againe: which I count more proper for this subiect", but Harington did find space in the notes of allusion for an interesting comment on the artistic, literary, indeed Aristotelian qualities of the episode, on its psychological truth and its power to move. As we saw earlier, this note was taken—adapted, that is to say, not merely borrowed—partly from Fornari and partly from Lavezuola, and the argument to Book XXIII was also adjusted in exactly the same spirit. In all these various small ways, then, Harington can be seen to be altering his critical material in an attempt to redress the balance, and to express his own reading or vision of the poem; but commentary alone, however teased and twisted, was not enough.

In the Italian editions, the design-treatment of the canto-break following canto XXIII is not distinguished in any way from the others. However, Field was given the highly significant authorial instruction: "Between the xxiijth booke and the xxiiijth I would have a spare leafe . . ."—maddeningly, the sentence is unfinished because the rest has been trimmed away in binding.

Yet, instead of a "spare leafe", the printed book has a blank page-opening. Harington had forgotten that the plate for Book XXIV should appear on a verso, facing the start of the next canto, and that therefore his "spare leafe" would necessarily have been accompanied by further blank pages to either side; unless, that is, he chose to find some means of filling them—say, by extending the notes to Book XXIII on to the following verso and by concocting some sort of a title-page for the recto preceding the second half of the poem. Harington chose otherwise, and accepted the blank page-opening.[33]

That there were some uncertainties in the printing-house about what was going on is clear from the irregular four-leaf gathering at the end of Book XXIII and from the confused page-numbers throughout Book XXIV and at the start of Book XXV (i.e. all the next regular gathering). In the manuscript, the entire sequence of printers' notations between P.12/178 at XXIII: 8 and S.11./209 at XXVI:36 is in one way or another deficient or incorrect. The confusion in the printed book, however, is much greater here than in other places, where there are also lengthy sequences of missing or erroneous printers' notations in the manuscript. The picture that emerges is a pretty illustration of the relations between one printer and his author at the end of the sixteenth century. Harington knew what he wanted; Field knew what was practicable; together they reached a compromise solution, and in doing so caused a good deal of trouble to the workmen.

In other places, somewhat similar means are used to draw attention to a fundamental division at the mid-point of the poem and to the importance of Orlando's heroical—or perhaps we should call it heroi-comical—loss and recovery of his wits. Below the notes of allusion in Book XXIII the customary line appears, but the wording is different. Instead of something like "The end of the annotations vpon the xxiij. booke", which would have been typical, we read "Here end the first xxiij. bookes of Ariosto", and there is adequate but not excessive room below for a tailpiece. The contents-list similarly divides the poem into two halves, leaving a large gap, a thick white line, between the two entries, thus:

One hesitates to place much emphasis on such small points as these, but they are clearly done with a purpose—the same purpose as prompted Harington to ask for his "spare leafe".

It might show less than perfect balance on my own part to descant at any great length on the significance of these two blank pages at the heart of

Harington's book. Yet they are rich in significance—multiple rather than single. On consideration, the blank page-opening can be seen to be an improvement upon the "spare leafe" Harington originally asked for, rather than a mere compromise solution. Here the reader does indeed bend his eye on vacancy. The vacancy within Orlando's skull is matched by the vacancies in the ranks of Charlemagne's paladins, and just as Orlando loses his wits at the end of Book XXIII, so Bradamant at the start of the canto loses her way and is unable to return to Rogero. The blank double-spread accentuates the canto-break so that the "first xxiij Cantos" are distinguished from the "other xxiij Cantos" that are to follow; and the break in the narrative texture affects all three of the poem's main story-lines. The pause has become an interval, a deep breath at the mid-point of the poem.

The interesting thing about all this is that Harington had no Italian precedents for these features of the typographical design, or rather that he imitated Italian precedents and then took them one stage further. He followed Ruscelli, Valgrisi and Franceschi in making the annotations fit the space available for them on the page, so that the great majority of the pages in his book are printed from top to bottom of the printing surface. Only if this norm was clearly discernible would the two blank pages at the centre—for which there was no Italian precedent—have significance. Similarly he followed the 1556 Valgrisi edition (or one of its reprints) in maintaining an alternating sequence in the ornament of the canto-beginnings, and only in the context of that regularity does the change of step at Book XXIV also acquire significance. In the arrangement of the front and end matter and in the choice of type for the preface, general allegory, and life of Ariosto, he contrived a consistent design and sense of orderly sequence in the English book that are quite lacking in the Italian editions, yet wholly in keeping with the rhythmical presentation of the poem itself and its accompanying material; and the printing of the poem itself in roman, not italics, was just one of the many ways in which Ariosto's stanzas were tactfully "tempered to the obstinate humours of the island".[34] There could hardly be a better example than Harington's Ariosto of "triumphal form" in which the "centre" is "finessed", i.e. treated negatively; but the means used to achieve the effect were not the line-counting methods of numerology—which (it seems) interested neither Ariosto nor Harington—but rather the silent poetry of book design.[35] Harington expressly admired the shaping of Ariosto's poem, praising among much else its first and last lines and remarking in his life of Ariosto how "absolute a peece of worke" the poem is and how "euery matter" is "brought . . . to a good and well pleasing conclusion". He equally admired Ariosto's skills as a story-teller, recognizing his ability to "draw a

man with a continuall thirst to reade out the whole worke" (Preface). He expressly declared the story of Orlando's loss and recovery of his wits to be the "chiefe Allegorie of all the booke", and he retained Ariosto's title as part of his own. We may fairly conclude that in the shaping of his book he wished to do justice to the shaping of Ariosto's poem as he understood it.

No doubt, it is also a fair assumption that Harington wished to dress his book in the best contemporary Italian manner—to be sophisticated and up-to-date. Here, however, he was less successful. Considering together the nineteen plates that appear on rectos, the layout of the verse in seven stanzas to a full column instead of six, the omission of the prose allegorie at the head of each canto, the use of printer's ornaments in lieu of engraved designs in the borders for the arguments, the substitution of the sometimes troublesome "broken . . . discourse" (XVII:Moral) of annotation for commentary, and even the very choice of a folio rather than quarto format, one must acknowledge that Harington's book is a more thrifty production than Franceschi's—however lavish it must appear compared with other contemporary English books of poetry. Certain design problems were less successfully resolved in his book, and indeed, in one respect, the design of Harington's book was already out-of-date when it appeared in 1591, for in the previous year the Italian publisher Bartoli had brought out an edition of Tasso, also modelled on Franceschi's Ariosto, but with the design modified so that all the plates were made to face the canto-beginnings (Mortimer, no. 494). Of contemporary and early seventeenth-century English books, only Speght's Chaucer of 1598 and 1602 and Sandys' Ovid of 1632 may possibly owe certain features of their design to Harington's example.

To what extent—finally—should a modern edition follow the 1591 design? I hope I have shown that McNulty's edition, admirable though it is in giving us an entire version of the text (poem and apparatus) and in reproducing all the plates, nevertheless obscures Harington's meaning in certain small but crucial ways by failing to respect his design-intentions. The arrangement, typography, layout, and ornament, are all freely altered. His edition has been much discussed recently, but the question of book-design has not been seen to be part of the editorial problem, and it is worth considering what design-treatment of a modern edition would best fulfil Harington's intentions. Not, I suggest, a facsimile reproduction: Harington wished his book to be read and enjoyed. A re-set edition is called for, and let us assume (for argument's sake) that it will be in two volumes in paperback. There is room for considering a variety of design-treatments, but this is what I would recommend. The sequence of the contents from start to finish should be respected. The typography should follow the 1591 edition in its use of roman and (a calligraphic) italic, and in making appropriate discriminations in type-size, but the verse might well be in the same size of type as the arguments and the notes smaller. The page-layouts would necessarily be different from those Harington refers to in his text. The ornament of a paperback edition would need to be modest, but present; in particular, it should follow the system in Harington's book of an alternating

pattern in the ornament of the canto-beginnings, with a change of step at Book XXIV. The small page-size of a paperback edition would probably make it impossible to reproduce the English engravings; the most appropriate substitute would be the small Giolito woodcuts, which Harington is known to have borrowed for the Bodleian Library manuscript. Some, no doubt, might argue that the proposed treatment would result in a mere pastiche, a guess-work adaptation from an imaginary Elizabethan quarto; but I believe it would be closer to the spirit of Harington's enterprise than a plain text. Moreover, it would be fun to read, and books ought to promise the reader fun.

In all this, we need to remember what Greg well knew, and what any poet or playwright knows, that the substance of literary invention lies in the "Idea or fore-conceite of the work, and not in the work it selfe".[36] An editor's duty is to communicate that "Idea or fore-conceite" as fully and as faithfully as he can. His procedures will be determined by the particular circumstances of each case, and may according to those circumstances require close adherence to a single model or radical reconstruction from diverse sources. Among the sources that need to be considered is the design of the printed editions (or, for that matter, of a carefully-prepared presentation manuscript—but that is another story); and editorial treatment of what we may call the "accidentals" of book design needs to be informed by the same good sense, rational method and historical understanding as we expect in the procedures of textual criticism.