Spenser's Anxiety

From the Ariosto critic's point of view, Spenser criticism too often treats the Orlando Furioso (a great-albeit, in our time, unread classic of Western literature) as a footnote to The Faerie Queene and leaves Ariosto looking like a minor author. Even the most generous of the Spenserians, Paul J. Alpers, with his distinction between Ariosto, the master of visual and dramatic effects, and Spenser, the poet of complex psychological phenomena, gives the impression that Spenser is the poet and Ariosto something else.' Nor have the most painstaking philological studies to the contrary in Italian had much influence on English and American readers. Fredi Chiappelli, for instance, may sound like an Italian Alpers in the camp of the Ariostisti when he demonstrates that Ariosto's revisions of the Furioso shift emphasis in descriptive passages away from what is happening to Angelica or Olimpia to what is happening in Angelica and in Olimpia, that is, away from depiction of external events to externalization (magnification, Chiappelli calls it) of psychological states, but the reader of English is not likely to be aware of studies like Chiappelli's, even if this reader had the stamina to immerse himself in arguments about the Furioso's com

Anxiety · Art · Psychiatry · Psychoanalysis · Comparative Literary Analysis and Criticism · Cultural and Social Studies in Latin America · History · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Psychology

• Spenser's Use of Arisoto

  Open Access•Peter Desa Wiggins•Renaissance Quarterly•1991

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