"Between the xxiijth booke and the
xxiiijth I would have a
spare leafe . . .", wrote John Harington to his printer Richard Field in the
manuscript he was preparing to be used as the printer's copy for the first
(1591) edition of his translation of Orlando Furioso.[1] The remainder of the sentence is
lost
because the manuscript has been trimmed in binding. In the printed book,
instead of a blank leaf, there is a blank opening
(Q4v-R1r) between
the end of Book XXIII (Q4r) and the beginning of Book
XXIV
(R2r, faced on R1v
by Plate XXIV).
[2] The purpose of
the request, however, is clear. Harington wished to mark a break in the
text, to draw attention to what he saw as a fundamental division at the mid
point of the poem. The same purpose is served by arrangements made
elsewhere in the printed book. Thus, on the verso of the title-page, the
"note of the matters" or contents list also divides the poem—and
perhaps
the book as a whole—into two parts. A line-space appears between
the
"first xxiij Cantos, or bookes of Orlando Furioso, ending with Orlandos
falling mad" and the "other xxiij Cantos of Orlando Furioso, in which he
recouered his wits"—the line-space, like the type, being in Great
Primer.
Similarly, the wording of the line of smaller type at the end of Book XXIII
is significantly different from the wording of comparable lines at the end
of other cantos. Instead of something like "The end of the annotations of
the xxiij. booke", which would have been
unexceptional, we read, immediately above a tailpiece towards the foot of
the page: "Here end the first xxiij. bookes of Ariosto." In all three places,
Harington is making the same
literary point, and in order to
get
his point across he relies not only on words but on the suggestive power of
book-design, typography, blank paper. In doing so, moreover, he was going
well beyond the precedents offered him in the Italian editions.
[3] Anyone concerned to understand
and
appreciate Harington's work on Ariosto needs to give due weight, not only
to the text of the book (translation and prose apparatus), but also to the
literary significances embedded by Harington, or at any rate implicit or
inferable, in his book's design.
[4]
The approach I am advocating may be distinguished from that of
another scholar who has recently been working on aspects of the "setting
foorth" of Harington's Orlando Furioso. In a very interesting
and provocative paper, in which he presents some findings from his
collation of numerous copies of the 1591 and 1607 editions, Randall
McLeod discusses the related matter of the Dedication.[5] He demonstrates quite conclusively
that
in the 1591 edition there was a stop-press correction in the first sentence of
the Dedication, involving
the removal of three words and the consequential "driving out" and
rejustification of the next seven lines of type, and that the same three words
in some copies of the book are deleted in pen and ink. (They are erased,
not deleted, in the copy held in the Alexander Turnbull Library,
Wellington, which is one of the large-paper copies with pre-publication
pen-and-ink emendations and another candidate for collation.)
[6] Thus, in copies with the earlier
(uncorrected) state of the Dedication, the first sentence reads: ". . . I
presume to offer to your Highnes this first part of the ['part of the'
deleted, erased, or left standing] frute of the litle garden of
my
slender skill." However, in the printed version of his paper, McLeod does
not attempt to explain the point of this textual change or to consider what
it tells us about the publication history of the book or about Harington's
literary intentions. He uses it instead for polemical purposes in
an argument about the futility of editing and the comparative fidelity of
photographic reproduction.
Let me put forward an alternative (historical rather than polemical)
interpretation and application of the available evidence, including the new
evidence so painstakingly and helpfully gathered by McLeod. The
Dedication may have been written at a time when Harington was proposing
to publish Books I-XXIII of his translation separately—rather as
Spenser,
in 1590, had published the first three books of The Faerie
Queene. If this was so, then the phrase "this first part of the frute
of
the litle garden of my slender skill" referred to Books I-XXIII, and implied
that Harington hoped—perhaps not altogether confidently—to
publish
the second part, Books XXIV-XLVI, at some future date. This reading of
the passage is supported by a parenthetical remark in Harington's note on
the "Allegorie" at the end of Book XXIII: "Concerning
Orlandos madnesse there is a notable allegorie to be gathered therof,
of which (because I now haue taken upon me to go thorow with the whole
worke) I will defer to speake till I come to restoring of his wit
againe
. . .". And there are other places in Harington's writings where he alludes
to the time he spent or the difficulties he faced in translating such a long
poem as Orlando Furioso. What seems to have happened was
this. When he found himself able, after all, to publish the whole work in
one volume in 1591, Harington (a) requested a "spare leafe" between Books
XXIII and XXIV so that the two-part structure of the poem—as he
saw
it—would be manifest even in a single-volume publication, and (b)
neglected to alter the wording of the Dedication until he saw it in proof as
the book was going through the press.