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  • The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso: From Public Duty to Private Pleasure
  • Julia Kisacky
Jo Ann Cavallo . The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso: From Public Duty to Private Pleasure. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2004. xii + 294 pp. index. bibl. $70. ISBN: 0–8020–8915–1.

Jo Ann Cavallo examines the romance epics of her title (and more) "with a particular focus on questions of creative imitation, genre, allegory, ideology, and politics," studying how the poets rework textual elements "to construct the ideological program of their respective poems" (3). She argues for all three poets' "deliberate, albeit not always explicit, engagement with significant social and political questions of the period" (4).

The four chapters of part 1, "An Ethics of Action," deal with Boiardo's Orlando innamorato. Asserting Boiardo's involvement in contemporary politics and his didactic intentions, Cavallo proceeds to study his political messages as the poet draws exempla successively from the genres of romance, history, and epic. Particularly intriguing in the analysis of the Innamorato's numerous unsatisfactory rulers are the parallels Cavallo draws between public disorder in Circassia andthe state of affairs in Este territory. Cavallo's reading of the contrast between Agramante, an imitator of Alexander's negative example, with Rugiero, who instead imitates Alexander's three sons is convincing. A good example of Boiardo's humanist optimism in the face of adversity is that while death by treachery is a recurrent theme in Rugiero's family history, courageous widows and sons see to it that "[h]ope is reborn with each generation" (53–55).

Part 2, "Creative Imitation," vindicates the Innamorato's importance as a literary model, beginning with the hero-seductress encounter in Cieco da Ferrara's Il Mambriano. Cavallo next follows the themes of didactic allegory and civic engagement in Ariosto. Cavallo finds that the 1516 Orlando furioso's "negative rewriting . . . not only casts doubt on the Innamorato's essentially humanist belief in the ability of literature and history to promote justice . . . but also questions the power of good actions to make a difference" (120). Analysis of two episodes in the Cinque canti demonstrates Ariosto's increasing emphasis on the theme of treachery and despair about human powerlessness. However, the episodes added to the 1532 Furioso include: instances of friendship, which had been "consistently undercut" in [End Page 898] the first edition (144); an example "for the first time — in either poem . . . [of] the abolition of an unjust law" (145); and the completion of Ruggiero's moral education, linking back to Boiardo's example of ideal rule. Cavallo attributes this recuperation of some of the Innamorato's themes and its humanist vision to Ariosto's new subscription "to the idea of the poet's civic responsibility" (152).

Cavallo's observation that by the mid-sixteenth century the hero-temptress encounter shifts attention from the hero's moral progress to the individual's relationship with society is amply borne out in part 3, "The Triumph of Romance." She devotes a chapter each to such encounters in Trissino's L'Italia liberata da'Goti and Bernardo Tasso's L'Amadigi. In Torquato Tasso's Il Rinaldo, Cavallo reads Carandina as a positive character who ends up living in "a Golden Age outside Christian morality" (183), while Rinaldo's marriage to Clarice eliminates the passion the two had previously felt for each other. In her long chapter on the Gerusalemme liberata, Cavallo studies in detail Rinaldo's break with Goffredo and his idyll with Armida, and finds that, through references to Boiardo, Tasso condemns the Christians who manipulate Rinaldo into leaving Armida. Tasso finally reconciles marriage and passion, and is "the only epic poet to merge woman as deviation and woman as endpoint . . . into the very same person" (213). Cavallo notes a precedent for Rinaldo's strategy of "temporary collaboration" withGoffredo in order "to return undisturbed to his private existence" (223), a strategy which advocates the individual's rights apart from the state. Cavallo attributes the poem's ambiguities and contradictions not to the poet's confusion, but to his mastery of dissimulation in dangerous circumstances. In the Conclusion Cavallo gives an overview of the Innamorato, the Furioso...

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