Search

Characters from medieval and Renaissance chivalric texts have been given tangible form through the centuries not only in operatic, melo-dramatic, theatrical and, more recently, cinematic adaptations, but also in popular performance traditions such as Sicilian puppet theater (opera dei pupi) and the folk operas (maggi epici) of the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines. This essay traces the reimagining of a sampling of non-Christian characters and non-European places from Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato and Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso by a number of contemporary puppet theater and maggio companies. My contention is that an examination of select scenes available online, in conjunction with a close reading of the original episodes, may help students think more deeply about perennial issues addressed in the two poems—related to gender roles, the foreign and religious Other, violence, and political power—that continue to be relevant today.

Is the [Greek] conception of nature and of social relations possible when there are . . . railways, locomotives and electric telegraphs? What is a Vulcan compared with Roberts and Co., Jupiter compared with the lightning conductor, and Hermes compared with the Credit Mobilier? All mythology subdues, controls and fashions the forces of nature in the imagination and through imagination; it disappears therefore when real control of these forces is established. What becomes of Fama side by side with Printing House Square? ... Is Achilles possible when powder and shot have been invented? And is the Iliad possible at all when the printing press and even printing machines exist? Is it not inevitable that with the emergence of the press, the singing and the telling and the muse cease, that is the conditions necessary for epic poetry disappear?"'

La signification negative du fragment romantique chez C., dans le poeme epique K. K., comme fragment du romantisme laisse comme probleme a la critique: les lectures du romantisme restent les fragments, l'allegorie, de sa signification. L'impossibilite de la totalisation de la dialectique speculaire fragment-totalite et l'horizon d'une "lecture litteraire non absolue" (Lacoue-Labarthe et Nancy).