VII: be a man

Canto VII

An introductory message from Ariosto: Are you an unimaginative homebody who thinks crazy adventures in far-away places are implausible? Then this story is not for you. It's for people like my man Ippolito, who can really understand it.

So, Ruggiero has arrived, ready for a fight, at the bridge occupied by Erifilla. Except for being a “monstrous giantess,” she's not described physically, but all of her accessories are impressive: she's got multicolored jeweled armor, a shield with the image of a poisonous toad, and a “sandy-coloured surcoat, like the frocks / Which prelates wear at court”; and she rides on a wolf the size of an ox. None of it helps much: Ruggiero immediately hits her so hard that she flies off the wolf and lands six yards away. He's ready to kill her, but the unicorn-riding damsels from the golden city show up and tell him to let her be. It doesn't occur to Ruggiero that this was a suspiciously easy quest.

They ride together through the woods until they get to the most beautiful palace in the world, and here's Alcina, the most beautiful woman in the world. Just as the palace is described as being not only fancy but full of very classy people, Alcina isn't some sleazy seductress, she's an ideal beauty with subtle charms:

Beneath two finely pencilled eyebrows, dark
As are the brilliant eyes they frame, her glance,
Compassionate, will lingeringly mark
The target where Love's arrows, not by chance,
Will accurately strike, until the spark
Becomes a flame …

Still, Ariosto doesn't beat around the bush here: she is also hotness incarnate.

Two ivory breasts, firm as young fruit, below
Her bodice move, as when soft breezes pull
The waters at the margin to and fro.
Her other parts would be invisible
Even to Argos with his hundred eyes,
But from the rest their beauty we surmise.

Ruggerio likes what he sees and doesn't put up a struggle at all. He remembers Astolfo telling him about her evil ways, but he decides that that story was obviously bogus and that if she did turn Astolfo into a tree, it was probably for some good reason. Lest we think Ruggiero was too easy, Ariosto tells us that we shouldn't blame him, because it's magic and there's really no way to fight it. That's what they all say.

The next 14 verses describe the very nice place where Ruggiero now lives— the golden city from the last canto, apparently not the same place as this, was just a warmup— and what a good time he has there. Whereas the other magic leisure castle he was trapped in before (Canto IV) sounded like a pleasant but limited and repetitive place in a sort of Hotel California way, this one sounds a lot more like somewhere you'd want to spend a lot of time on purpose. It's teeming with cool people enjoying food, drink, music, poetry, stories, party games, gardens, hunting, fishing, and sex— especially sex between Ruggiero and Alcina. Although these scenes are less physically explicit than the earlier descriptions of Alcina's eyes/breasts/etc., they are still very, very steamy, thanks to the lengthy buildup in which Ariosto describes how Ruggiero waits up every night listening as she walks toward his room in a transparent silk slip, which she then removes, and... we must imagine the rest, but we do know that “No lack of pleasure causes them distress” and that they're changing their clothes two or three times a day.

Of course, this is not what he's supposed to be doing. For one thing, the war is going on without him— although Ariosto's brief reference to this is slightly confusing, since Ruggiero is fighting on the “wrong” side and would only cause more problems for our other heroes if he were back in France. But we don't have to think about that at the moment, we can just root for Bradamante to get him back.

Bradamante has been looking everywhere, including in the Saracen camps, where she sneaks in with her invisibility ring and then convinces the soldiers that she's one of them; but no luck. Finally it occurs to her to go back to Merlin's cave and ask the sorceress Melissa, who seems to know everything. Sure enough, Melissa is fully aware of Ruggiero's enjoyable detour— which is now described a little more judgmentally:

So now he wastes the flower of his youth,
And in unending idleness this knight
Would have consumed his soul and body, both;
And that which lingers when the rest is quite
Defunct ….
Would have dispersed upon the wind like fume.

Melissa decides to rescue him, although she knows he won't like it— she compares her role to a doctor who uses “poison, knives and cautery” for the patient's own good. By contrast, we're reminded that the other magician, Atlante, also thought he was doing what was best for Ruggiero, but was “blind with love” and didn't want to allow him to suffer at all. In fact, we now learn, Atlante is actually responsible (presumably by controlling the hippogriff) for Ruggiero ending up on Alcina's island.

Unlike Canto III in which she sent Bradamante off with instructions, Melissa will take care of this mission herself; not only is she able to leave the cave, she can also conjure up a nifty high-speed horse (all black except for one red foot). She borrows the magic ring from Bradamante and leaves her to wait in Provence while she zooms off to the island. There, she changes from her usual form (a plainly dressed woman with bare feet and messy hair) into an illusion of Atlante, with some great visual touches:

Over a palm in stature first she grew ….
Guessing Atlante's size, she chose the norm
Of all the necromancers whom she knew.
That done, she draped a beard about her chin,
Furrowed her brow and wrinkled all her skin.

Why Atlante? Apparently, although the old magician did kidnap Ruggiero earlier, he'd known him since childhood and the knight still respects him— at least that's how this passage reads to me, as Melissa-as-Atlante berates Ruggiero for having abandoned his past badassery:

Was it for this on marrow-bones I fed you
Of lions and of bears? And, as a child,
Was it for this along ravines I led you,
Hunting for snakes to strangle in the wild?

Ruggiero certainly isn't eating any lions now; he's wearing gilded silk, scented hair oil, and jewelry. Although this is described as being the result of Alcina's magic spells, it seems more like a parody of a manly man's worst nightmare: getting so far gone over a girl that you let her dress you! This fits with the locker-room tone that pseudo-Atlante adopts when describing Alcina: “she leads you by the nose …. She whom you make a queen, what has she got / More than a thousand whores, that you're enraptured?” However, Melissa also throws in a reference to the prophecy about Ruggiero's noble descendants (although this is the first he's heard of it): he's got to get back together with Bradamante so that, among others, the awesome Ippolito and his brother can be born (“For in their valour they will be sublime”).

This rant is persuasive enough that Ruggiero is willing to try on the protective ring that Melissa/Atlante offers him, which breaks the spell. Melissa resumes her real form, and so does Alcina— it turns out that all those descriptions of her eyes etc. were false, and she's really an old hag. How grossed out and embarrassed is Ruggiero now? This much:

… as a boy who hides a fruit away
And then goes off, forgetting all about it,
On finding it long afterwards one day
Within a drawer or cupboard where he'd put it,
Astonished at the sight of such decay,
Is more than willing now to do without it ….

In preparing to escape, Ruggiero shows a little more subtlety and patience than he has previously: he doesn't let on that he's seen through the spell, he just finds excuses to get his armor out of storage and to obtain a horse— he leaves the hippogriff behind for now— and sneaks off to a side gate, where he finally releases all the violence he's been saving up as he annihilates a bunch of guards within three lines. He gallops off toward freedom and responsibility, probably still wearing his scented hair oil.

V: do right woman

(Edited a little because I misread the fight scene the first time.)
 
Canto V

Less complicated than previous installments, this canto tells a more or less self-contained story about the wronged princess Ginevra. It also has a moral lesson: some guys are just no good. Ariosto opens with a rant against the worst villains of all, men who hurt women:

No creatures on the earth ….
Are hostile to the females of their kind. …
The she-wolf and the wolf at peace appear;
The heifer from the bull has nought to fear. ….
What dreadful plague, what fury of despair
In our tormented bosoms now holds sway,
That wives and husbands constantly we hear
Wounding each other with the things they say? …
An outrage against Nature he commits
Who with his gentle helpmeet stoops to fight,
Or in her face a lovely woman hits ...

This is directed, a little oddly, at the two thugs from whom Rinaldo has rescued Dalinda— oddly since they're not domestic abusers, they're hired assassins, and even wolves are known to kill other wolves they're not married to.

Still, Dalinda certainly did have a terrible boyfriend. Hopelessly in love with Duke Polinesso, she's been using Ginevra's room for trysts with him. She describes the affair as a classic teenage disaster, misguided but so very hot:

For many months and days, joys not a few
We shared; in our delight, no amorous game
Was left untried, and, as our pleasure grew,
I seemed on fire with a consuming flame.
Blinded by love for him, I little knew
How much he feigned …

Polinesso tells her he's going to woo and marry the princess, but it's strictly business; they'll still have their secret love. Dalinda thinks that's just fine. But it's not in the cards anyway, as Ginevra already loves another. Polinesso, who had assumed he was irresistible, decides that if he can't have her then no one can, so he frames her for fornication— by convincing poor Dalinda to dress up as the princess at their next tryst. If this plot sounds familiar, it's because it was reused in Much Ado About Nothing.

Dalinda doesn't know the real point of the scheme; he tells her he's developed the hots for Ginevra and wants to role-play his fantasy just this once, so she does it to make him happy. The translator in her notes finds this willingness “not convincing,” but of course it is. Dalinda is a kid in love, they're making up their own rules. Maybe she thinks his fake-princess fetish is a lovable weakness that he was brave enough to admit to her, or maybe she thinks it's kind of fun; it's imaginable either way or both, and Polinesso's choice of such a non-innocent cover story shows him to be a very manipulative guy who understands what'll work with her.

Anyway, the charade works: Ginevra's beau Ariodante goes crazy with jealousy, runs away, and is later seen flinging himself into the sea. His brother Lurcanio accuses Ginevra, and volunteers to prove her guilt in a duel. (Trial by combat was still legal in some places in Ariosto's time, but just barely.) Rinaldo steps up to fight for her innocence, after hearing Dalinda's story— which Polinesso had tried to have her killed to cover up, in case there was any doubt that he is the worst boyfriend in the world.

Rinaldo shows up for the duel, but there's already someone else there to take Ginevra's side: a mystery knight, in generic armor with his face covered. The fight gets under way, but Rinaldo feels bad for Lurcanio (who's after all just a hothead acting on bad information), calls it to a halt, reveals the real story to everyone, and challenges Polinesso. Pretty much everyone in town hates Polinesso and is hoping that he's guilty, but they can't be sure without a duel. It's over soon: impaled on a lance, Polinesso briefly confesses and dies.

That's pretty much it, although there's a passing mention of Ginevra's father the King of Scotland, and her brother Zerbino (somewhere far away), which makes me think they may be important later on. By the way, the king was no help: despite being totally devoted to his daughter, he either couldn't or wouldn't change the anti-nookie law on her behalf— a law that even the monks thought was too prudish. The law isn't mentioned again, so I assume it's still on the books in Scotland to this day. Be careful there.

II: fight and flight

Canto II

Ariosto reflects briefly on the unfairness of love, then returns to the fight where we left off. Rinaldo is on foot and Sacripante is on horseback, but the horse he's on used to be Rinaldo's and feels belatedly loyal to him; in a nice comedy bit, Sacripante

tries to urge it on: the horse stops dead.
He tugs the rein: it breaks into a trot;

Then suddenly it checks and ducks its head,
Arches its back and with its hoofs kicks out.

He finally realizes the horse is not an advantage and dismounts. In an intense high-speed swordfight, Rinaldo breaks Sacripante's sword and also his arm. Angelica, watching, realizes Rinaldo is winning and will go after her next, so she flees again.

She's not alone for long: here's a kindly old hermit, who happens to also be a magician. Angelica asks for help in getting out of France, preferably by sea. The hermit's well-intentioned but not directly helpful response is to conjure up a genie, which flies back to where the knights are still fighting vigorously (Sacripante is presumably fighting with his feet) and tells them they'd best run off the other way: Angelica is with Orlando, heading for Paris. (This is a lie, but we haven't really seen Orlando yet and have no idea where he is.) Rinaldo swears and gallops away— on his own horse, finally.

Speaking of the horse, Ariosto finally clarifies that Baiardo isn't as fickle as he seemed: he's actually been leading Rinaldo all over the place in an attempt to reunite him with Angelica. A smart horse, in fact so smart that he understands the genie's story; but a trusting horse, so he's fooled by it too.

Rinaldo gets to Paris, but before he can find out that Angelica was never there, Charlemagne reminds him that he's still supposed to be in the army and sends him on a mission to England. Next thing he knows, he's on a ship from Calais and it's caught in a terrible storm. And Ariosto once again points out his cliffhangery narrative methods:

But many threads are needed for my tale

And so, to weave my canvas as I please,
I'll leave Rinaldo and the plunging prow,
And turn to talk of Bradamante now.

We learn that the warrior maid is Rinaldo's sister (another character borrowed from Orlando Innamorato). No military glass ceiling here; Bradamante is famous and universally respected. And the love of her life— although they've only met once, and they're on opposite sides of the war— is our other top-billed hero, Ruggiero.

After humiliating Sacripante in Canto I (he “kissed our ancient mother,” i.e. the dirt), she's on her way to nowhere in particular, when she meets a weeping knight by a creek: Pinabello. Unlike the previous sad knight, this one seems to be a decent guy. He tells her his story, and it's a good one.

Pinabello's girlfriend has been abruptly abducted by someone on a flying horse. He follows them to a rocky valley, surrounding an unclimbable spire, upon which is a huge castle all made of steel:

From far away it seemed to glow like flame.
No glaze, no marble, has such radiance.
When nearer to the shining work I came

And saw the marvel of its walls, at once

I knew that demon masons of ill fame

With incense, exhalations and weird chants

Had clad the castle walls with finest steel,
Forged in the fires and cooled in streams of Hell.

And he's not the only adventurer on the scene: Ruggiero and another knight, Gradasso, guided by an anonymous dwarf, are also on the trail of the aerial bandit,

the castle's owner, who,
Clad in full armour, travels through the sky
Aboard a bird-like quadruped, a new,
Unheard-of means of transport.

These two promise to rescue the lady, and Pinabello watches from a safe distance (hmm, maybe not such a nice guy after all) as they ride toward the castle and engage its owner. The villain has an effective fighting technique based on diving from a great height and smashing them into the ground again and again, but eventually he gets bored with this and unveils his secret weapon: a magic shield that knocks everyone unconscious with a beam of light. When Pinabello recovers, he's alone.

(Ariosto pauses during the fight scene for another authorial aside: “This is the truth: I added not one jot …. Here fiction is less marvelous than fact.” I imagine Ippolito's jaw dropping as he realizes: It's all true?! So the part about me being descended from Ruggiero and being the coolest guy ever is also true! He hands Ariosto another well-earned sack of gold.)

Back to the present: Bradamante is moved by the story and vows to help, hoping to rescue Ruggiero at the same time. But, as we're now informed, Pinabello is well known by everyone except her (and presumably his girlfriend) to be a treacherous schmuck. When he learns that she's been assigned to the army defending Marseilles, and is therefore an ally of a noble house that he has a grudge against, he decides to betray her somehow as soon as possible.

Distracted by scheming, Pinabello forgets where they're going and gets them lost in the woods. But he spots a cave leading to a deep dark hole, and evil inspiration strikes: telling Bradamante that he thinks he sees a helpless princess trapped in the cave, he gets her to climb part way in, then drops her into the pit. End-of-canto cliffhangers (or cave-floor-hangers) are definitely a regular feature, but this one feels less arbitrary than some: hero loses consciousness, fade to black.

I: horse trading

Canto I

Of ladies, cavaliers, of love and war,
Of courtesies and of brave deeds I sing ….

The wit to reach the end is all I ask.

Ariosto introduces the story's setting, the war between Emperor Charlemagne and the Saracens 700 years earlier. He dedicates the poem to his patron, Ippolito, claiming that the hero Ruggiero is one of Ippolito's superhuman ancestors. Ruggiero who? Never mind for now. First we hear a bit about the other hero, the one the book is named after, although he's not doing anything yet.

Orlando has just joined Charlemagne's army, bringing with him the object of his affection, Angelica. She's also caught the eye of Orlando's cousin Rinaldo, so to forestall trouble and get the boys' minds back on the war, the Emperor has taken Angelica off their hands and offered her in marriage to one of his allies. But Angelica has no use for any of these three guys, and the first thing we see her do is run away on a horse, with no particular plan.

This has all flashed by in a few verses, and one might wonder who the hell Orlando and Angelica and Ruggiero are. I turn to the introduction and learn that Orlando (a.k.a. Roland) was a familiar character from French and Italian romances from way back, a somewhat generic hero whose main personality traits were recklessness and romantic obsession, based loosely on a real guy who fought for the Franks. He'd most recently figured in Orlando Innamorato, by Boiardo, which also introduced Angelica— the daughter of the Great Khan of Cathay (China, or more generally, “somewhere east of here”)— and Ruggiero, a knight in the Muslim armies. Ariosto has borrowed his three main protagonists from Boiardo's earlier epic. Interestingly, two of them are from the “wrong” side, i.e. the Saracens or their various allies, whom Ariosto describes indiscriminately as “pagans.”

Anyway, immediately after escaping, Angelica meets a knight who has misplaced his horse. Bad luck: it's Rinaldo. She flees into the woods and meets a second, unfamiliar knight, Ferráu. This one is currently occupied with trying to retrieve his helmet which he's dropped in a creek, but he's interrupted by Rinaldo. Since Ferráu is a “pagan,” they fight briefly, until Rinaldo points out that the pretty girl is getting away; they team up (both on Ferráu's horse) to go after her:

O noble chivalry of knights of yore!

Here were two rivals, of opposed belief ….

Yet to each other no resentment bore.

Never mind that “knights” and “chivalry” were unknown concepts in eighth-century Europe, and that a Frank and a Saracen would probably not have made nice like this; Ariosto is trying to convey an ideal, and for him chivalry means the non-ideological coolness of the good old days, when even the enemy could be a good guy.

They start scouting the woods, but Ferráu can't resist trying one more time to get that damn helmet out of the water. Here's one of the many instances where Ariosto switches suddenly from fast-paced adventure to carefully observed realistic action, usually for comic effect, as the knight tries using a branch—

Which delicately in the stream he dipped,

Poking with care in every nook and hole,

Although with patience he was ill-equipped.

Boredom at last began to try his soul …

But he's interrupted again, this time by the ghost of the knight whose helmet it used to be, or at least his upper half, rising out of the stream. The ghost curses Ferráu out for a while, and then tells him there's a much cooler and more appropriate helmet out there somewhere— and Orlando has it. Ferráu is so impressed that he vows to give up wearing helmets until he can find Orlando and get his. Pretty girls are all well and good, but helmet quests are serious business, so he rides off. Shortest team-up ever.

Rinaldo is now horseless again; the horse appears briefly in the distance, ignoring him. He is not a happy man.

Angelica wanders through the woods, which are beautifully described:

Where flowering thorn with the vermilion red

Of roses is made gay, glassed in the brook,

With shady oak-trees arching overhead.

In its recess, as she draws near to look,

She finds a sheltered space, untenanted,

Branches and leaves together so entwine,

No sunlight can within directly shine.

But here's another knight! A sad one— “the cavalier of grief,” lamenting to himself about his hopeless love. This is Sacripante, king of Circassia, another of Charlemagne's opponents. Angelica recognizes him from back home, and the girl he's been pining over is her. She's got stalkers everywhere.

Although Angelica has no intention of getting together with Stalkerpants, she rather coldly decides to play on his feelings, since she could use some help in whatever it is she's trying to do. But her vamping is too successful: the king thinks he's going to get lucky right there in the woods. Fortunately he hears a noise and runs off to investigate (he wasn't well prepared to commit sexual assault anyway, since “he always wears full armor”).

The noise is from an unknown knight in white. Without a word, the two start fighting on horseback, and then playing chicken— which goes badly for Sacripante when their horses collide head to head, and his instantly dies and falls on him. The white knight does a victory lap and departs.

Sacripante crawls out from under his ex-horse, horribly embarrassed. Angelica tries to soothe his pride by pointing out that the white knight left the field first and therefore, in a way, lost. He's ready to accept this, until a messenger appears, sent to inform him that he was in fact defeated by a woman. The white knight was the warrior maid Bradamante; more about her later.

This shame-o-gram has the intended effect: the mortified king “knows neither what to say nor what to do.” So he rides off aimlessly with Angelica (both on her horse), trying to forget all about it.

They meet a solo horse: the one Rinaldo was chasing, named Baiardo, no relation to Boiardo. (Horses are prominent characters here; there's a list of their names in the introduction.) Notable for his leaping skills and his cool gold harness, this fickle beast seems to have ditched his owner without a second thought, but he recognizes Angelica and likes her, as everyone always does. So now she and the cavalier of horny grief both have horses. And just in time, since here comes Rinaldo, jogging miserably over hill and dale in his clanking armor, in the tireless hope of one day having both a horse and a girlfriend.

Ariosto chooses this point to provide more background for these two, and it turns out that this particular one-sided love story is less random than the rest. Some time ago, Rinaldo and Angelica accidentally drank from two magic springs; unfortunately, his was a love potion and hers was a hate potion.

Back to the present: as Rinaldo very gradually approaches, Angelica feels that this would be a good time to move on, but Sacripante feels a need to fight someone and not lose. As he prepares to attack this (to him) totally random person, he reminds Angelica of the many great victories he had prior to getting thrashed by Bradamante, including

the night when I, alone and nude,

King Agrican and all the field withstood

—but alas, that's all we hear about that intriguing scene.

Ariosto ends the canto on this cliffhanger, telling the boss that he'll have to wait till the next installment to find out what happens. Despite having described his patron as the smartest and most awesome guy in the world, whenever he addresses Ippolito directly I get the feeling that he regards him as an excitable six-year-old kid. Actually, there's also something about the storytelling so far that reminds me of such a kid— a feeling of breathless improvisation: there's a girl and she sees a knight and he lost his horse and then he meets another knight and they have a fight and there's a ghost with a helmet and then the girl meets the… and so on. If Ariosto knew about dinosaurs, surely one would pop up at any moment, and two pages later it would be gone.