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Allusive and Elusive Meanings: Reading Ariosto's Vergilian Ending*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Joseph C. Sitterson Jr.
Joseph C. Sitterson Jr.*
Affiliation:
Georgetown University
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Extract

Whatever the poem's ambiguities, the Orlando Furioso's ending has always seemed allusively unproblematic: in the words of Ariosto's sixteenth-century English translator, Sir John Harington, “in the death of Rodomont, to shew himself a perfect imitator of Virgill, [Ariosto] endeth just as Virgil ends his Aeneads with the death of Turnus.”

He sank his blade in fury in Turnus’ chest.

Then all the body slackened in death's chill,

And with a groan for that indignity

His spirit fled into the gloom below.

(Aeneid 12. 950-52)

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , Spring 1992 , pp. 1 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1992

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Footnotes

*

I thank my colleagues Joseph O'Connor, Jason Rosenblatt, and Penn Szittya for their helpful readings of an earlier draft of this essay, and Leona Fisher for translations from Salviati and Sassetti (in Brown and Castaldi). I began this essay in a Folger Institute Seminar directed by Daniel Javitch, who also read an earlier version of this essay, and to whom I am especially grateful.

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