University of Virginia Library

The 1532 edition of Ariosto's Orlando furioso was the last edition of this great work to be printed in the author's lifetime. It has always been regarded as of prime importance for the text of the poem, because it was printed under the author's eyes at Ferrara, where he lived, and, compared with earlier editions, contained numerous variants, as well as extensive new material. It thus comprised a new version of the work, intended to supersede that published for the first time in 1516, also at Ferrara, and reprinted there with minor changes in 1521, and then in a host of reprints, apparently unauthorized, which appeared in Milan, Venice and Florence between 1524 and 1531.[1] Only in the last half-century, under the influence of modern textual and linguistic criticism, and of structuralist and post-structuralist critical theory, which sees each version of a work as a discrete entity, of equal interest to, and indeed value as, any other version, have scholars begun to take an interest in the 1516 edition of the Furioso and its text. This modern scholarly interest apart, once the 1532 edition, with its numerous stylistic and linguistic changes and its six additional cantos, had appeared, it immediately became and has remained the basis of the reading text of the work.

During these four hundred and fifty years of critical interest, an awareness has grown among Italian scholars that copies of the 1532 edition of the Furioso differ from each other in ways significant enough to affect the work of a critical editor. However, it was not until the critical edition of the Furioso published by Santorre Debenedetti in 1928 that a satisfactory account was given of these variations, and their nature explained. Though trained in a scholarly tradition almost entirely preoccupied with problems of manuscript transmission, and working before the appearance of the first manual of textual bibliography in any language, Debenedetti accurately identified the two sources of internal variants in the 1532 Furioso—authorial press-corrections and a cancelled sheet—and, hampered though he was by the

centrifugal organization of the Italian library system and the inadequate cataloguing of sixteenth-century books in Italian libraries, and, of course, by working in the pre-microfilm era, he nonetheless succeeded in locating and collating all but two of the copies of the edition accessible to him in Italy at that time. Having re-traversed much of the ground covered by Debenedetti and become intimately acquainted with his editorial work, I have no hesitation in describing his edition as one of the masterpieces of modern Italian textual criticism. The editor's learning, intelligence, sensitivity and integrity shine from every page. Inevitably, however, his work has its shortcomings from the bibliographical point of view. In the first place, he did not understand the structure of the book, a quarto in eights; more fundamentally, though less surprisingly, he did not arrive at the bibliographical concept of state, but considered each press-variant in bibliographical isolation from all others, and without reference to its bibliographical context; finally, he left uncollated more than half the surviving copies of the 1532 Furioso.

With these considerations in mind, I began a couple of years ago to re-examine the 1532 Furioso. The results, though still incomplete, have been extensive and, in some ways, surprising. A complete statement of my findings will be published in Italy in due course in book form; meanwhile, the present paper discusses certain points which seem to me to be of general interest.[2]

My discussion begins with a general proposition concerning the Furioso, that the first edition of 1516 and the definitive edition of 1532 were both financed by the author. The evidence for this is circumstantial, as no contracts between Ariosto and the two printers in question, Giovanni Mazocco for the 1516 edition, and Francesco Rosso for the 1532 edition, have yet been found, but none the less its cumulative effect is convincing. It was first presented more than fifty years ago by Michele Catalano, author of a richly documented biography of the poet, whose arguments in this context, though occasionally unacceptable on points of detail, are generally valid.[3] We begin with a letter from Ariosto's master and the dedicatee of the Furioso, Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, brother of the Duke of Ferrara, addressed to the Marquis of Mantua, dated 17 September 1515, requesting permission for the transport across Mantuan territory free of tax from Salò, on the shores of lake Garda, of 1000 reams of paper, "as I am about to arrange for the printing of a book

by my servant M. Ludovico Ariosto".[4] There is no doubt that this is a reference to the forthcoming first edition of the Furioso. The letter, which is preserved in the Mantuan archives, is in Ariosto's handwriting, and I agree with Catalano and others that the Cardinal had probably provided Ariosto with no more than a signature to help him obtain exemption from customs dues for his paper. Even if he also furnished financial support, it is clear from other epistolary evidence that he left detailed arrangements for the production of the edition to his "servant". It was the author, for example, and not the Cardinal, nor the printer, who arranged for privileges to be obtained from the Pope, the Doge of Venice and others.[5] On 7 May, 1516, just over a fortnight after the completion of the printing of the first edition of the Furioso,[6] a Mantuan courtier, Ippolito Calandra, wrote to the son and heir of the Marquis of that city, who was in France, telling him that two days previously Ariosto had arrived from Ferrara with a case of books containing his new work, the Orlando furioso. He had presented copies to the young man's father, mother and uncle; the rest he was proposing to sell. Calandra added that when the poet put the copies up for sale, he would buy one, get it bound and send it to France for his young master.[7] Whether Ariosto sold the copies himself, or entrusted their sale to a local bookseller, it is clear that they belonged to him. This is confirmed by another letter, this time from Ariosto himself, written to Mario Equicola, secretary to the Marquis of Mantua and a fellow author, dated 8 November 1520. In this letter the poet acknowledged the receipt of a sum of money resulting from the sale of copies of the Furioso in Verona (with the comment, which authors of all periods will sympathise with, that it was less than he expected), and asked his friend to arrange for the Verona bookseller to return to him any unsold copies, because none seemed available anywhere else in Italy, and he could not satisfy the daily requests he received.[8]

In the light of this letter, we can understand why there was a new edition of the work in 1521, though so far no similar evidence has come to light of the author's direct involvement in its publication.[9] With the 1532 edition, however, we are back on familiar territory. We have letters to the Doge of Venice and to the Ferrarese ambassador at the Milanese court requesting privileges for the new version of the poem, and a letter to the Duke of Mantua (the young man for whom Calandra had bought a copy of the 1516 edition, who had succeeded his father in 1519, and been elevated to the rank of Duke by the emperor Charles V in 1530) asking for free transport across Mantuan territory of more paper from Salò. This time the letter is written by the poet in his own name, and the amount of paper specified is 400 reams, which, if it is the quantity actually bought and used, would give a print-run for the 1532 Furioso of about 3000 copies.[10] The colophon of the 1532 edition is dated 1 October. Within three months Ariosto was seriously ill. He never recovered his health, and died on 6 July 1533. It is not surprising, then, that this time we have no evidence of his having been personally involved in the sale of his work. But we have ample evidence that this edition, too, was his property: the most striking, and the best known, is a letter from his brother Galasso written a few days after the poet's death, in which he complains that because of the poet's illness and death three quarters of the edition still remains in the hands of his heirs, unsold.[11]

I have dwelt on the evidence for the personal involvement of Ariosto in the Ferrarese editions of his masterpiece because it undoubtedly helps to explain the interesting features of the 1532 edition, as they emerge from the interpretation of the evidence provided by the collation of the surviving copies. The three features which I wish to discuss in this paper are: the press-corrections; the cancelled sheet; and the existence of perfect copies of the edition, consisting only of sheets in the corrected state.