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Notes
Ludovico Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso" Translated into English Heroical Verse by Sir John Harington (1591), ed. Robert McNulty (1972), is "Example I" in Gaskell's From Writer to Reader: Studies in Editorial Method (1978), pp. 11-28 (quotation from p. 11).
Cf. Harington's epigram, "Of honest Theft. To my good friend Master Samuel Daniel".—Book 2, no. 30, in Epigrams 1618 (STC 12776), and no. 126 in Letters and Epigrams of Sir John Harington Together with "The Prayse of Private Life", ed. N. E. McClure (1930).
"Typography and Meaning: The Case of William Congreve", in Buch und Buchhandel im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Giles Barber and Bernhard Fabian (1981), pp. 81-126 (Wolfenbütteler Schriften zur Geschichte des Buchwesens, Bd. 4). The research on which this article is based was supervised by Professor McKenzie.
McNulty, p. xliv; see also Gaskell, pp. 11-12, and Kathleen M. Lea, "Harington's Folly", in Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies Presented to Frank Percy Wilson (1959), pp. 42-58.
See Gaskell, pp. 11-12; Sir Walter Greg, "An Elizabethan Printer and his Copy", Library, 4th ser., 4 (1923), 102-118, also printed in his Collected Papers, ed. J. C. Maxwell (1966), pp. 95-109; and Percy Simpson, Proofreading in the Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1935), pp. 71-75.
The Valgrisi quarto, first published in 1556 and frequently reprinted, was the basis of Franceschi's; that is to say, Franceschi replaced the Valgrisi woodcuts by Porro's superior engravings, and he prefixed or appended much new scholarly apparatus, by various hands, to a page-for-page reprint of most of Valgrisi's text (comprising poem, verse-arguments, annotations, commentaries, indexes, etc., also by various hands). See especially McNulty, pp. xlii-xliv; also Harvard College Library, Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Catalogue of Books and Manuscripts, comp. Ruth Mortimer, Part II: Italian 16th Century Books (1974), nos. 28-30; Townsend Rich, Harington & Ariosto: A Study in Elizabethan Verse Translation (1940), chapter 4; and note 24 below.
See especially John A. Spevak, "Sir John Harington's Theoretical and Practical Criticism: The Sources and Originality of his Apparatus to the Orlando Furioso", Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago (1978).
Thus, at IX:10, for example, the reader is directed in the margin to "Looke in the end of this book in the Allegorie", where, however, in a mere sixteen lines of notes at the foot of the page, he will find only another and vaguer reference: "Allegory I finde none but of the Ile of Ebuda where women be giuen to monsters to be deuoured, of which I will speak in an other of the Cantoes that followes of that matter." The allegory is finally got in at Book XI.
The advertisement describes the preface as having been written "generally in defence of poemes, and specially of this present worke". However, I believe the preface was always in three parts, not two, and that additions and consequential deletions were made in the third part after the unbound sheets or gatherings were circulated among Harington's friends. See a marginal reference at XIV:16, which leads nowhere, for evidence of the deletion, and the third part of the preface itself for evidence of the addition. The references in the index are to page numbers, not canto and stanza numbers; in the advertisement, the list of tales is said to show the reader "where to begin and end" but the printed list gives only the beginnings.
Cited from Gaskell, p. 24, where there is also a photograph of the manuscript passage. A study of Harington's expressed and implied views about "heroical" verse leads me to think that Puttenham was in Harington's estimation an ally like Sidney, not an opponent, however unsatisfactory he may have found parts of both men's treatises. See T. G. A. Nelson, "Sir John Harington as a Critic of Sir Philip Sidney", Studies in Philology, 67 (1970), 41-56.
Harington's copy of the 1584 Franceschi edition must have lacked the proper plate for Book XXXIV; for an explanation of this defect (found also in other copies), see Roberto Ridolfi, "L' "Orlando Furioso" del 1584 e una sua singolarità tipografica", La Bibliofilia, 54 (1952), 92-96. Harington supplied the defect by having Plate XXXIV copied for his own book from the Valgrisi edition.
H. S. Bennett, English Books and Readers 1558 to 1603 (1965), p. 300, and the reference there cited.
I suspect, without much in the way of evidence, that the first reader, or hearer, of Harington's work in progress was usually his wife Mall, and that the translation was in many small ways adjusted to her tastes. See (for example) XIII: History, where the praise of the "education of children" attributed to "my Author" is in fact a quotation from a passage of Harington's own composition, interpolated in the text.
Much of the general allegory is a close and unacknowledged translation of Bononome's "Allegoria" printed in the Franceschi edition, but modified to suit its position at the back of the book and to bring the interpretations more into line with those of Harington's end-of-canto notes (Spevak, chapter 6).
Ludovico Ariosto: A Preface to the "Orlando Furioso" (1974), pp. 54-55; see also, for example, R. M. Durling, The Figure of the Poet in Renaissance Epic (1965), especially chapter 5; Orlando Furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando) . . . tr. Barbara Reynolds (1975-77), II, 7-18; and William Nelson, "From 'Listen, Lordings' to 'Dear Reader'", University of Toronto Quarterly, 46 (1976/77), 110-124.
Brand (p. 136) writes pertinently that "The mere suspension of the excitement would, however, have little significance for the reader, who has only to turn the page, were it not for a deliberate pause the poet enforces on him in the opening stanzas of the next canto. The proemio, like the congedo, was a natural device of the oral poet for welcoming his audience and setting the context of his narration".
Book XXXII, where the proeme is on the chopping and changing of narrative threads. That Harington was well aware of this departure from the norm may be inferred from his translation of the congedo of Book XXXI:
The next booke sauing one, the sequell showes.
Cf. McKenzie's discussion (pp. 112-116) of Congreve's use of neo-classical scene-division in his 1710 Works.
Enid T. Falaschi, "Valvassori's 1553 illustrations of Orlando furioso: the development of multi-narrative technique in Venice and its links with cartography", La Bibliofilia, 77 (1975), 227-251 (quotation from p. 236).
McNulty (p. xliii) understates the case when he writes that "rarely does more than a suggestion seem evident", and so does Mrs Falaschi when, in order to correct earlier critics' errors, she writes that Porro probably "took little note of the content of the woodcuts" (p. 248).
"Illustrated editions of 'Orlando Furioso' . . .", in Fragonard: Drawings for Ariosto; with Essays by Elizabeth Mongan, Philip Hofer and Jean Seznec (1945), pp. 27-40.
Enid T. Falaschi, "Notes on some illustrations for Ariosto's Orlando Furioso", La Bibliofilia, 75 (1973), 175-188, gives a thorough comparison of the English plates with their sources.
Porro's two glaring errors are in Plate VIII, where Melissa and Astolfo fly away from Alcina's island on a horse, not on the hippogriff, and in Plate XII, where Orlando should be shown with sword drawn (not lance in rest) and should be pursuing the phantasm of a knight riding a great horse (not a "Gigante")—Porro must have failed to refer back across the canto-divide to the last few stanzas of canto XI.
E.g. Book V:1 mn, "Looke more at large in the end of the booke of this morall", where we read, "The verie beginning being as it were a morall of it self, were sufficient for the point it treats of without any more speech to that purpose: but because the matter is such as cannot be too much spoken of, namely to perswade men to concord in matrimonie, I must needs adde a word or two thereof". His "word or two" takes up twenty-one lines.
Harington's use of the prose allegorie in the Valvassori edition, primarily for his notes on the moral, has been established by Spevak, pp. 122-130.
See, for example, Books VII, IX, XII, XVIII, XXIII, XXVII, XXVIII, XXX, XLVI; and others where the illustrated stanzas are in the first seven stanzas of a canto but where the plate is overleaf.
Judging (that is) by the editions I have seen: two Valgrisi editions of 1568 and 1587 held by Auckland Public Library, and microfilm of the 1584 Franceschi edition (a British Library copy, shelf-mark 79 K 12).
These notes are also, by the way, the most striking example of literary pressure affecting the design of the book. The lengthy historical notes take up most of nearly four pages and (unusually) they are keyed by marginal references to the stanzas discussed in them paragraph by paragraph. An instruction to the printer reads: "Yow must quote the numbers by the sydes, as I have donne in the story".
These are also cantos where one observes a catchword in lieu of a signature appearing on a recto (Z3; Book XXXII); headpieces incorrectly arranged for the argument borders (Y6v, 2A6, 2C2v, 2D6, 2F2v; Books XXXII, XXXIV, XXXVI, XXXVIII, XL); and a factotum used in lieu of initial 'F' of the proper foliated series (2D6; Book XXXVIII); judging, that is, by the copy in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington.
Sir Walter Greg plausibly suggested that the word "yow" may have been trimmed in binding after the word "have".
That is one explanation. Another might be that Harington somehow miscalculated the length of the notes to Book XXIII and would have tolerated Plate XXIV on the recto following his "spare leafe"; but I doubt it.
Review of McNulty's edition, Times Literary Supplement (6 October 1972), 1195-96; the reviewer is anonymous, but see also D. S. Carne-Ross, "The One and the Many: A Reading of Orlando Furioso Cantos 1 and 8", Arion, 5 (1966), 195-234, where Ariosto's poem and Harington's translation are discussed in very similar terms.
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