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The cancelled sheet
The regularity with which press-variants occur throughout the edition and, in particular, the nature of some of those which are clearly attributable to the author, involving words, phrases, and even whole lines, and, in one case, two consecutive lines, lead one to reflect on the reason for their presence. Given the quality of the Orlando furioso, its importance to the author, and the circumstances of its printing, I believe that they represent, not the main, but the final act of correction carried out by the printer and the author on the text of this edition. They are, as it were, the tip of the iceberg of correction; the bulk of the correction is invisible, hidden to modern eyes, because it was carried out on proof-sheets which have not survived; indeed, I would suggest that the surviving press-corrections are due, not only to eleventh-hour changes of mind, but also to the fact that the corrections carried out on the proofs were sometimes so extensive as to make it difficult for all of them to be correctly transferred to the type under the sort of pressure normal in early printing.[16]
It would be nice to be able to produce, in support of this contention, one of the proof-sheets of the 1532 Furioso, discovered in those treasurehouses of rare finds, the libraries of Italy. I cannot do that, but I hope to persuade readers that I can do nearly as well, by demonstrating that the cancellandum of inner A is to be understood as representing, more or less, the text of that sheet as it appeared in the proofs.
It was once again Debenedetti who first realised that the numerous variants to be found between copies in ff. A3-6—he lists approximately one hundred—were attributable to two different settings of type.[17] He argued
Debenedetti's explanation of this accident—for such it certainly is—was that some pages of the 1521 text used as printers' copy had been marked with provisional corrections, which, due to the author's absentmindedness ("era distrattissimo!", Debenedetti adds), he had never revised. As with Debenedetti's consideration of individual variants, this explanation engages the textual situation without paying any attention to its bibliographical context, but whereas for the press-variants Debenedetti's great sensitivity triumphantly carries the day (only one of his thirty-seven textual choices turns out to be contradicted by the bibliographical evidence), in the case of the cancelled sheet his lack of bibliographical awareness leads him into an untenable position. The 1521 and 1532 editions, though identical in structure—they are both quartos in eights—do not have the same disposition of text on the page: in the earlier edition each page has two columns of four stanzas, while in the definitive edition the text is arranged in two columns of five stanzas. Thus, none of the sheets of one edition contains exactly the same text as the corresponding sheet of the other edition, even in the first gathering, where there is no new material. In the 1521 edition the portion of text contained in inner A of the 1532 edition (Canto I, st.18-Canto II, st.14)
Obviously, Type I of inner A in the 1532 edition prints its not yet linguistically or stylistically mature text because that is what the compositor found in his exemplar, which, as has already been said, was a marked-up copy of the 1521 edition.[19] The crucial question is, what was the relation of the text in the relevant portion of the exemplar to the text it carried elsewhere? Debenedetti's explanation requires that, while for the rest of the work the exemplar should bear a text which, except for the press variants, (which, apart from one instance—the outer forme of outer C—comprise only a handful for each forme), had already reached the stage of linguistic and stylistic maturity witnessed by the definitive edition, for the seventy-eight stanzas in question, which comprise neither a discrete bibliographical nor a discrete textual unit in the exemplar, it should have a text which failed to reach this standard by such a long way that an average of nearly fifty corrections per forme had to be introduced in a new setting of type to bring it up to the same level as the rest of the work. In human affairs, nothing is impossible; for the historian, however, in his task of reconstructing the past out of the inadequate documentation which remains, it is the probable which counts. In the circumstances, what Debenedetti suggested is improbable. More probable is that the text represented by Type I of sheet inner A reveals the linguistic and stylistic condition of the exemplar not only in that passage but in the surrounding text as well; the reasonable assumption is, in other words, that all the text of the exemplar, at least in the early part of the work, presented this same provisional linguistic and stylistic quality. The reason why this provisional quality does not now show elsewhere in the 1532 edition, except in the press-variants, can only be that it was removed by extensive corrections carried out on proofs before printing began. Type I of sheet inner A thus represents the text of the exemplar before the author corrected the proofs, Type II indicates the nature and the order of the corrections he introduced into the proof-sheets.
The fact that three of the four surviving vellum copies of the edition, which were presumably sent to Ariosto's patrons and influential friends as soon as printing was over, contain Type I of inner A suggests that Type II was printed after all the rest of the edition, after, indeed, an unknown number of copies had already left the printing-house.[20] What little can be gleaned
One can only speculate how Type I came to be printed. Perhaps the author was prevented by other commitments from correcting proofs for this sheet. More likely, I think, is the hypothesis that he made corrections, but that they failed to find their way into the forme. We are presumably at the very beginning of the printing of this edition; the printing house may not have yet settled into a proper rhythm for this job.[22] It is significant that, in addition to the cancel, the one sheet with numerous press variants—outer C—also belongs to the early gatherings of the volume. The high number of variants in its outer forme, twenty-three in all, suggests that here, too, the author's corrections had not been incorporated into the forme before printing began; in this case, however, the omission was noticed early in the press run (four of the copies examined have the uncorrected state, nineteen, including the vellum copies, the corrected state) and so did not require a cancel.[23]
In postulating an Ur-text of the definitive edition of the Furioso entrusted to the printers' copy and requiring heavy correction to bring it to its final form, I am not suggesting anything which clashes with what we know of Ariosto's artistic practices or of his preparatory work on this edition. Like most writers, he was always dissatisfied with what he had written; the letter from his brother Galasso, already quoted, shows that even after the publication of the definitive edition he was thinking of further amendments. As for the preparation of the text of the definitive edition, he had certainly begun work by early 1528, the date of his request for a privilege from the Venetian authorities. In the swiftly changing climate of opinion on linguistic matters in sixteenth-century Italy, four years was a long time: solutions adopted early
One has to admit, however, that if Type II of sheet inner A was a cancel, intended to correct an oversight which had left some early pages of the text linguistically and stylistically disfigured, it was a very unsuccessful one. Of the twenty-four surviving copies listed in Appendix A only three contain the cancellans. I have no satisfactory explanation of why this should be so. I assume that it is connected with the fact that the author, who owned the edition and probably took responsibility for its distribution, as he seems to have done with the first edition, was afflicted with a fatal illness within three months of the completion of the printing.[25]
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