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Notes
British Library Additional MS 18920, fo. 90v. Harington's instructions to the printer in this manuscript have often been examined since Sir Walter Greg first drew attention to them in 1923: see his Collected Papers, ed. J. C. Maxwell (1966), pp. 99-100.
That is the general rule. However, Mr Rowan Gibbs of Smith's Bookshop Limited, Wellington, has kindly allowed me to examine a copy of the second (1607) edition—item 248 in his Catalogue 93, 1990—in which Plate XXIV appears on Q4v and a blank leaf (R1) occurs between the plate and the beginning of Book XXIV: but other copies of the 1607 edition have the blank opening, and I know of no 1591 copy which has the blank leaf. Various indications suggest that Harington's involvement in the printing of his book was much less close in 1607 than it had been in 1591.
In the four Italian editions known to have been used by Harington, the division between cantos XXIII and XXIV is not differentiated in any way from the other cantodivisions. The principal design model for Harington's book, and the source of much of his information, was the Franceschi edition (Venice, 1584). This edition does have a blank leaf (u8), but it is cancelled or removed from some copies, and comes towards the end of the book, immediately after an index of first lines and before the separately signed and foliated "Osservationi . . . sopra il Furioso" of Alberto Lavezuola.
For a fuller discussion of these points, see my article, "The 'setting foorth' of Harington's Ariosto", Studies in Bibliography 36 (1983), 137-168, esp. pp. 164-166.
See "from Tranceformations in the Text of 'Orlando Furioso'", Library Chronicle 20, nos. 1/2 (1990), 61-85.
The emendations described and reproduced in Randall McLeod's earlier (unpublished) paper, "Or Words to that dEffect", given at the Bowers Eightieth-Birthday Conference, Charlottesville, Virginia, in April 1985, are very similar to the corresponding ones I have examined in the Wellington copy. Where McLeod reports variant ways of making an emendation, the Wellington copy has the commoner version of it.
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