Orlando furioso: secondo la princeps del 1516 (review)

Students of Ariosto know that the poet labored long and hard over his masterpiece, Orlando furioso, from the first decade of the 1500s to the end of his life, having overseen the definitive third edition in 1532, nine months before he died. Ariosto died, if we are to believe his brother Galasso, unsatisfied with the final version and hoping to publish it in yet another edition, claiming that in the third his text had been "assassinato." He simply could not stop writing, revising, and reworking his brilliant poem. In addition to the four new episodes (approximately 5,600 lines) he added to the final edition, Ariosto was constantly revising the linguistic fabric of his text, working hard, if not consistently, to render its original "Padano illustre" more Tuscan, to bring it more in line with the strictures of the new vernacular classicism being promoted by Pietro Bembo and his followers. The first edition of 1516 bears the imprint of Bembo, that of 1521 more so, and the final edition even more. What Berni would do to Boiardo, Ariosto did to himself.

The 1532 Furioso bequeathed to posterity, then, was not the poem that Ariosto's contemporaries knew and read. That would have been the 1516 and 1521 editions, which demonstrate more vividly, among other things, Ariosto's Ferrarese chauvinism. A clearer picture of Ariosto's political engagement with the life of the Estense court emerges in these earlier editions. Critics who have argued for the value of restoring the 1516 edition for this reason among others include, of an earlier generation, Caretti, Dionisotti, and Segre, and, more recently, Ascoli, Casadei, Fahy, and Henderson. Now Marco Dorigatti has successfully completed the daunting task of restoring the original text of the 1516 edition (to which the 1521 is similar), following the methodology detailed in Conor Fahy's magisterial L'Orlando furioso del 1532 (1989). In a combination of analytical, descriptive, and historical bibliographical research, Dorigatti has produced what is without question the best text available of the first edition. One might expect such a massive and detailed example of textual bibliography to be a difficult read, but Dorigatti's prose is brimming with insight and wit.

Dorigatti makes a compelling case for his edition situating it in the context of the rich publication history of the Furioso. His close analysis of the twelve exemplars of the first edition that he has identified, as well as an awareness of the diplomatic Ermini edition of 1909–11 and the interesting set of problems it raises, and a clear understanding of the choices that shaped the Debenedetti-Segre variorum of 1960, underlie his volume. While the third edition is marked by no less than 287 passages where the author created a variant by changing the body of the text while the work was rolling off the press, the first edition has 111 internal variants that provide a fascinating glimpse inside the writer's workshop.

Future explorations of the text of Orlando furioso, whether of the 1516, 1521, or 1532 editions, may have to look more carefully at the scattered suggestions of Allan H. Gilbert, rather cavalierly dismissed by Cesare Segre in the "Nota al testo" to his 1964 Mondadori edition of the Furioso (1249, n. 4). In addition to comments in his substantive review of the Debenedetti-Segre edition of 1960, Gilbert peppers his personal copies of texts with emendations of various sorts as if he too had been planning an edition. Fahy, more judicious in his response to Gilbert, confirms that this was probably the case (30, n. 32). Many items from Gilbert's personal collection are in the Perkins Library at Duke University, including working papers, drafts, and notes on Ariosto in the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections section. There are, for instance, numerous annotations in Gilbert's copies of Debenedetti's edition of the Furioso. One needs to verify Segre...