The Comedies of Ariosto by Ludovico Ariosto (review)

84 Comparative Drama vinced him that if it was unsatisfactory, success with the epic was no more likely in this new, unheroic, polite age, though we are sometimes led to think that all Dryden needed to do his epic was financial support. This is but one speculation that comes to the reader of Professor Pechter ’s stimulating study. It will be required reading for any investigator of Dryden’s literary ideas. G. L. ANDERSON University of Hawaii Ludovico Ariosto. The Comedies of Ariosto. Translated and edited by Edmond M. Beame and Leonard G. Sbrocchi. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1975. Pp. xlv + 322. $17.50. In 1566 The Supposes, George Gascoigne’s free version of I Suppositi, was performed in London; since then no other rendering of Ariosto’s comedies has been made available to English-speaking readers. Profes­ sors Beame and Sbrocchi are to be congratulated, then, as is the Univer­ sity of Chicago Press, for presenting for the first time in English the dramatic work of an author so important in the development of Euro­ pean comedy. A compulsive reviser, constantly experimenting to find the best form for a modern version of classical comedy, Ariosto wrote the Cassaria originally in prose for performances in 1502 and 1508, and re-cast it in sdrucciolo verse in 1528. In subsequent years he composed the Suppositi in prose (1509) and in verse (1528-31), two versions of II Negromante (1520 and 1529), both in verse, and two verse versions of La Lena (1528, 1529), the second with two added scenes and a new longer prologue. He left unfinished a fifth play, Gli Studenti, completed first by his brother Gabriele as La Scolastica, then by his son Virginio as L’Imperfetta. The manuscript of the second version was not discovered until 1915, and it showed that the original ended with Act IV, scene 4, line 14. The present volume contains both versions of La Cassaria (The Casket), the first ver­ sion of I Suppositi (The Pretenders) with variant readings from the second; the second version of II Negromante (The Necromancer) with variant readings from the first and with both prologues; the longer version of Lena and both its prologues; La Scolastica (The Students), and Vir­ ginio Ariosto’s prologue for LTmperfetta. All the translations are in prose. It is thus possible to have a comprehensive survey in English of the work of the first semi-professional dramatist, for all the comedies were composed for performance and held the stage throughout the Renais­ sance and after. An excellent introduction by Edmond Beame and valuable notes to each play complete the volume. The bibliography is contained in the notes, and is very thorough, though one important article seeems to be omitted, “Ariosto’s Delightful Prologue to La Cassaria” by Anthony Gisolfi (TA, XXII 1965/67, 41-47). The translations are based on the critical texts, and some sixteenth-century editions have also been consulted. Reviews 85 If Ariosto had taken as many liberties with Plautus and Terence as he did with Boiardo he would have moved farther away from his sources than he ever dared to do. But his reverence for the classics was great; he had acted in the Latin comedies, both in the original and in transla­ tions he himself had made, he was further hampered by the authority of Aristotle, and he had no earlier Italian tradition to encourage him. It is evident from allusions in his plays that he found the mould confining. In the brief prologue to the first version of the Casket he claims that the plays contain original witticisms. In that to the prose Pretenders he be­ gins by asserting that he wants to imitate the classical poets in content as well as in form, yet goes on to claim that his method is not plagiar­ ism but poetic imitation. Neither prologue to the Necromancer mentions the Latin dramatists. In the first prologue to Lena he jeers at “the ridicu­ lous things they call comedies,” and asseverates that originality is impos­ sible, Plautus and Terence themselves having done little more than translate from the Greek. The second prologue makes no mention of the classics, nor does...