Travel by air is achieved in two ways. Astolfo is taken to the moon and back in a divinely-powered chariot. This is a supernatural means of transport, used for the special purpose of recovering Orlando’s wits.1 The hippogriff, or winged horse, on the other hand, is no magical or mythical creature, but a natural phenomenon, the offspring of a griffin and a mare:

… Such beasts, though rare,

In the Rhiphaean mountains, far beyond

The icy waters of the north, are found.2

This magnificent mount, whose genealogy may be traced to Pegasus, carries its riders with disdainful ease over the entire globe (on one occasion from the Far East to the Hebrides), thus serving to enlarge the geographical boundaries of the action, yet remaining within the romantic epic’s limits of credibility. If the chariot to the moon is fantasy, the hippogriff belongs to science fiction.

Within a firmly-constructed framework of verisimilitude (a technique he has learnt from Dante) Ariosto introduces the unbelievable. This is true especially of the military prowess of the warriors, Orlando, Rinaldo, Ruggiero, Rodomonte and Mandricardo, who perform prodigies of valour and strength on a scale which belongs to mythology rather than to reality. In this they are to be compared with their heroic counterparts in the Iliad and the Aeneid. Yet the constant, the norm to which everything is ultimately linked, remains the human heart. It is the aspirations, the love, the despair, the rage, the grief of the characters which matter. However fantastic their adventures, however far from reality the descriptions of their deeds, they retain an intimate relationship with the reader by virtue of emotions which he can share with them. When the ferocious pagan warrior Rodomonte has performed, single-handed, such devastation as would be beyond the strength of an entire army in real life, he leaves Paris, disgusted that he has been unable to destroy it utterly. Almost at once he hears the news that his lady, Doralice, has been captured by Mandricardo, and at once he suffers a piercing pang of jealousy which brings him, mythologically proportioned as he is, within the compass of our own experience:

Cold as a snake, Dame Jealousy the Moor’s

Fierce heart invaded and embraced straightway.1

The torments of Orlando which lead to the overthrow of his sanity are presented step by step with a veracity which belongs to classical drama or to the psychological novel, though the frenzy which then supervenes takes us far beyond normal dimensions. When he has read the fateful verses written on the wall of the cave in which Angelica and Medoro have made love, Orlando stands as though frozen, staring at the lines, searching them for some other meaning which will relieve the agony in his heart. This is an emotion at once measurable and measureless, shared by everyone who reads it, yet unique in its reverberations:

Three times, four times, six times, he read the script,

Attempting still, unhappy wretch! in vain

(For the true meaning he would not accept)

To change the sense of what was clear and plain.

Each time he read, an icy hand which gripped

His heart caused him intolerable pain.

Then motionless he stood, his eyes and mind

Fixed on the stone, like stone inert and blind.2

This is the letter which says that a love-affair is at an end; which asks the recipient not to communicate again, in any way; or the letter which provides evidence of infidelity. The gaze, as fixed as stone, the icy hand on the heart, the refusal to believe, are instantly and intimately recognized:

I speak here from experience, in brief.

Of all the sorrows which the pallid moon

Surveys, this sorrow offers no relief.1

Inflict such grief on a superhuman being and the result is madness on a superhuman scale.

On the subject of love, Ariosto asserts more than once that he speaks with authority:

Of all the many grievous pains of love

I have myself endured the greater part.

So vivid is the recollection of

My pangs, that on this theme I am expert.2

His personal life was conducted with discretion. The only woman he truly loved was Alessandra Benucci, whom he met in Florence in 1513. After the death of her husband, Tito Strozzi, she went to live in Ferrara in a house where Ariosto visited her in secret. Even their marriage, said to have occurred in about 1527, was clandestine, for Ariosto, like the Fellows of Oxford and Cambridge colleges up to the late nineteenth century, was in receipt of certain benefices available only to a celibate. Although the love-affair lasted for twenty years, there are intimations in his writings that Ludovico had suffered the torment of jealousy and cursed himself for a fool. He establishes a link between himself and Orlando in his surrender to the mastery of love:

Once Love has gained possession of a heart,

What can this cruel traitor then not do?

See how he tears Orlando’s soul apart:

So loyal once, now to his lord untrue,

So wise, so versed in every noble art,

And of the holy Church defender too,

A victim now of passion unreturned,

For God and king no longer he’s concerned.

But I excuse him and rejoice to have

In my defect companionship like his,

For to such passion likewise I’m a slave,

While my pursuit of goodness languid is.3

Nor did love relinquish its hold with the passing of the years, though he acknowledged its irrationality:

Who in Love’s snare has stepped, let him recoil

Ere round his wings the cunning meshes close.

For what is love but madness after all,

As every wise man in the wide world knows?

Though it is true not everyone may fall

Into Orlando’s state, his frenzy shows

What perils lurk; what sign is there more plain

Than self-destruction, of a mind insane?

The various effects which from love spring

By one same madness are brought into play.

It is a wood of error, menacing,

Where travellers perforce must lose their way;

One here, one there, it comes to the same thing.

To sum the matter up, then, I would say:

Who in old age the dupe of love remains

Deserving is of fetters and of chains.

You might well say: ‘My friend, you indicate

The faults of others; yours you do not see.’

But I reply: ‘I see the matter straight

In this brief moment of lucidity,

And I intend (if it is not too late)

To quit the dance and seek tranquillity.

And yet I fear my vow I cannot keep:

In me the malady has gone too deep.’1

Freely admitting his own shortcomings, Ariosto advises against excess in devotion. This is Orlando’s error; it is also Olimpia’s, who is held up as a warning to all women. Good and evil are evenly divided between the sexes. The perfidious Polinesso and the treacherous Bireno are balanced by the deceitful Orrigille and the murderous Gabrina (the latter, an embodiment of female wickedness, is moved about the poem like a stage-property, with superb disregard for probability). Passion and desire are shown in a sharply perceptive range of intensity, from gross lust to selfless devotion. It is difficult not to feel some sympathy for the predicament of the enchantress, Alcina, as Handel evidently did in his opera of that name. Evil though she is meant to be, her horror on realizing that she has lost Ruggiero is dramatically conveyed – her beauty crumpled to an ugly senility, her powers dwindled to a frenzied self-deception. Not all the wonders of Logistilla’s realm quite make up for the loss of Alcina’s magic garden,

Where everyone in dance or joyful game

The festive hours employed from early morn;

Where of sad thoughts no shadow ever came

To spoil this rosebed life without a thorn.

There no discomfort was, no cup was empty,

But endless bounty from the horn of plenty.1

The most idyllic treatment of love is reserved for the central episode which is the cause of Orlando’s derangement. Angelica, desired and pursued by the greatest heroes of Christian chivalry, by the greatest warriors and monarchs of the pagan world, indifferent to them all, thinking ‘no man deserving her was ever born’, rides unconcernedly through a forest one day, unaware of what is to befall her. Coming suddenly upon a wounded soldier bleeding to death on the ground, this cold, self-seeking princess, ever prepared to exploit the devotion of her admirers for her own ends, and giving nothing in return, is stirred unexpectedly by a feeling of compassion. She takes the trouble to search a near-by hillside for some stems of dittany, a plant with curative properties (known also to the mother of Aeneas) which she had learnt to use in the East. Meeting a shepherd on a horse, she persuades him to return with her to where the young man lies.