3.     Infidel Texts and Errant Sexuality

Translation, Reading, and Conversion in Harington’s Orlando Furioso

Spenser’s self-conscious uses and rejections of allegory in The Faerie Queene most likely reflect Protestant ambivalence about allegorical interpretation, which was usually associated with Catholic hermeneutics. Tyndale, for one, tells readers, “Beware of allegoryes for there is not a more handsome or apte a thing to begile withal than allegory,” and, conversely, “there is not a better vehementer or myghtyer thing to make a man understand than allegory.”1 Contradictory as these two statements may seem, Tyndale is less concerned with allegory as an author-intended mode of figuration than he is with the Catholic hermeneutic penchant for imputing allegorical meanings to texts that should, in his opinion, be read literally. Tyndale is chiefly concerned with the misuses of allegory, evincing a common Protestant belief that Scripture should be read literally. One effect of Tyndale’s insistence on the literal meaning of the Bible is, as Stephen Greenblatt has asserted, “an emphasis on the rhetorical nature of Scripture … The Bible is not a vast network of occult signs but a divine work of persuasion, designed to strengthen the reader’s faith and to deter him from evil.”2

Tyndale held that reading Scripture should bolster faith and that faith, in turn, is a prerequisite for correct interpretation of Scripture. In The exposition of the fyrste, seconde, and thyrde canonical epistles of S. Jhon (1538), Tyndale asserts that the reader risks misinterpretations if he or she does not “haue the profession of his baptysme in his harte, he can not understonde the scripture.”3 Tyndale’s baptismal theology leads him to see a connection between the ability to interpret Scripture correctly and the baptism of the heart rather than of the body. Being truly baptized, with or without receiving the outward sacramental sign, not only assures salvation but also conduces to a correct reading of Scripture.4

The anxieties surrounding reading and interpretation expressed by Tyndale and so many others partially originate in the Reformation’s commitment to vernacular religion—making services and Bibles available to the laity in native tongues. In article twenty-four of “The Thirty-Nine Articles,” the English Church vehemently denies that Latin should be used in church services: “It is a thing plainly repugnant to the word of God, and the customs of the primitive church, to have public prayer in the church, or to mister sacraments in a tongue not understanded of the people.”5 In England, English is the language of spiritual edification; conversely, Romish Latin is repugnant to God and his word. But as Scripture itself was originally written in a language not understood by the laity, it needed to be translated and converted into the new language of the church. The English language played an integral part in the national conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism.

The sanctification of English had a literary corollary. English emerged not only as a spiritually edifying language but also, as Richard Helgerson argues, the language through which early modern English poets self-consciously created a nation and a national literature.6 Helgerson demonstrates that the political and religious climate needed an English national epic like Spenser’s Faerie Queene; this climate also ripened a desire for an English (and Protestant) version of Ludovico Ariosto’s international bestseller, Orlando Furioso.7 In this chapter I argue that Sir John Harington’s translation of Orlando Furioso gained legitimacy by creating a reading experience that was similar to reading the Bible. Like early modern English Bibles, especially the Geneva Bible, it uses paratextual materials—in Harington, prefatory material, marginal glosses, “Moralls” and “Allegories”—in order to guide readers’ interpretations and foster moral and spiritual transformation. Harington’s translation demonstrates a Protestant commitment to translation, correct interpretation, and the spiritual transformation of the reader.

Translation preceded the Reformation in England, but it acquired an exalted purpose from Protestant discourse about Bible translation and a theology that asserted the necessity for the laity to read Scripture, notwithstanding the limited literacy in the period. Just as reading the Bible (alongside preaching, of course) was deemed necessary for spiritual transformation, Harington’s translation and subsequent allegorizing of Ariosto’s poem sought to transform and indeed convert readers. Moreover, Harington’s translation is itself a convert: The formerly infidel text, a repugnant Romish romance, is transformed into an English Protestant poem. Harington thus likens the translation and allegorizing of Orlando Furioso to religious conversion.8

Even so, as we saw in Spenser, Harington’s translation exhibits uneasiness with domesticating the foreign into the familiar, especially as regards the use of romance and religious conversion to transform infidels into Christians. This uneasiness is most clearly evident in the infidel-conversion motif, as exemplified in Harington’s curious treatment of Ariosto’s Ruggiero, the Saracen knight who converts to Christianity and marries the female Christian knight Bradamante at the end of the poem. In Harington’s version, however, Rogero (Harington’s translation of Ariosto’s Saracen knight) is proleptically converted by the allegory into a figure of the Christian reader who must reject desires that are non-European and foreign to the Christian self.

There are thus important differences between Harington’s Rogero and Ariosto’s Ruggiero. Rogero becomes a figure of European Christian experience, but only through paratextual materials that continually deemphasize his racial and religious identity. Within the allegory, and thus in tension with the plot, Harington’s Rogero appears to be Christian before his conversion. Because the translation repeatedly erases Rogero’s preconversion identity and thus distances Rogero from his Italianate literary progenitor, Harington’s Orlando Furioso repurposes the infidel-conversion motif: It becomes a parable of the Christian’s attempt to defeat the concupiscence that persists after baptism. This repurposing also uncovers anxieties about Christian affection for things infidel: Ariosto’s original poem, or its Saracen knight, Ruggiero.

Bible Translation, Interpretation, and Transformative Reading

In his monumental Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England, Ian Green asserts, “If there was one book that the English reformers, like their Continental counterparts, thought should be universally available, it was the Bible—in the vernacular.”9 Perhaps this conviction arose from the Reformation’s roots in an act of reading: Martin Luther’s encounter with the book of Romans. Luther’s narrative of conversion through reading, like the one St. Augustine’s described in his Confessions, indeed provided the justification for translating the Bible; the hope was that everyone—or, more precisely, every literate person—could read Scripture for him- or herself and undergo a similar act of spiritual conversion. Translating the Bible was thus essential to the Protestant mission. As Su Fang Ng suggests, “Translation for the early Protestants becomes a mode of piety and a means of evangelizing.”10 There could be no conversion from the old religion to the new without translation.

But as reading the Bible became necessary for the conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism, questions about what readers would do with the Bible—that is, how they would interpret it—necessarily came to the fore. Green goes on to note, “For while it was generally agreed among Protestants that the complete Bible should be made available to everyone, it was also recognized that while some passages were so clear and safe that even the youngest and most innocent reader could read them, others were so deep and dangerous that even great intellects could drown in them.”11 Consequently, those who commissioned English Bibles and their translators understood that providing vernacular Bibles was not enough. For the sake of evangelism and the propagation of Protestant religion, they also had to assure that readers would interpret the Bible correctly.

Paratextual materials (prefaces, annotations, and glosses) became important tools for assuring correct interpretation. In the preface to the new Protestant state’s authorized Bible, the Great Bible (1539), Archbishop Cranmer records the types of concerns that many, Protestants included, had about the impact of vernacular Bible, among them the spread of heresy.12 Cranmer begins his apology for the Great Bible by arguing that Bible translation is not the invention of the Reformation; he claims that the tradition of not reading the Bible in the vernacular is only about a hundred years old. He asserts that the Bible “was translated and read in the Saxon tongue, which at that time was our mother’s tongue: whereof there remained yet divers copies found lately in old abbeys” (39).13 Cranmer’s pointing toward an older tradition of vernacular Bibles, as evidenced in the discovered Saxon Bibles, seeks to establish the vernacular Bible as part of a native Christian tradition. He counters the arguments of those who saw English Bibles as tools of Protestant propaganda.

Asserting that vernacular Bibles are part of a native Christian tradition is just the first argument in the preface. Cranmer goes on to use a bodily analogy that justifies English Bibles. He questions why “any man should be so mad as to refuse in darkness, light; in hunger, food; in cold, fire” (38–9). The body becomes a primary metaphor in the preface; he later calls reading scripture “the most healthful medicine” (44). The frail and sick body becomes a metaphor for the soul needing sanctification, a metaphor that Cranmer borrows from Chrysostom, whom Cranmer employs to support his argument: “I intend here to say nothing but that was spoken and written by the noble doctor and most moral divine, St. John Chrysostom, in his sermon De Lazaro” (40). Just as he does through drawing attention to the existence of Saxon Bibles, Cranmer argues that reading vernacular Bibles has long been a practice in the universal church.

Cranmer quotes Chrysostom at length; a major reason the “noble doctor” gives for reading the Bible is that it fortifies the spirit against inordinate lust:

Where canst thou have armour or fortress against thine assaults? Where canst thou have salve for thy sores, but of holy scripture. Thy flesh must needs be prone and subject to fleshly lusts, which daily walkest and art conversant amongst women, seest their beauties set forth to the eye, hearest their nice and wanton words, smellest their balm, civet, and musk, with many other like provocations and stirrings, expect thou hast in a readiness wherein to suppress and avoid them, which cannot elsewhere be had, but only out of the Holy Scripture. Let us read and seek all the remedies that we can, and all shall be little enough. (41)

Harington, too, regards reading as a way to fight the concupiscence inspired by literary romance (more about that later). Chrysostom argues that Scripture is the body’s chief defense against the effects of a dangerously sensual world. Cranmer, by way of Chrysostom, emphasizes the Pauline opposition between the pleasures of the body and the health of the spirit, but what is remarkable here is the sensuality of the description itself. The hypothetical male walker sees, hears, smells, and then is stirred sexually by his senses. The belief that reading can curb sexual desire thus mandates that the Bible be read by all who can read—though Chrysostom notes that even reading the Bible “shall be little enough” defense against human sexuality.

Human sexuality prompts the need for Bible translation, perhaps because reading was viewed as a brake on the concupiscence that remains after baptism. (As I mentioned in the previous chapter, the “Thirty-Nine Articles” of the Church of England asserted that baptism does not remove concupiscence, which humans inherit from their fallen forebearers Adam and Eve.) Cranmer’s belief in the power of reading the Bible to transform individuals likely draws from early modern understandings of reading as a practice that affects the passions and the humoral body; Katharine A. Craik and Elizabeth Spiller, in tracing the development of this view, observe that concerns about the body’s health figure prominently in both arguments for reading spiritually edifying texts and against reading poetry.14 Spiller notes that early moderns understood the effects of reading as analogous to the effects of diet: “Humanist projects controlling reading in this period should be understood as fundamentally related to more familiar projects that sought to exert control over the humanist body through diet; both were aimed at subduing passion and achieving reason within the humoral body.”15 What one reads, just as what one eats, either positively or negatively affects the health of the body and the spirit. Early moderns surely would have seen the Bible—the divinely inspired word of God—as the healthiest of all texts: We should recall that Cranmer refers to the Bible as food and “the most healthful medicine.”

The connection between Bible reading, spiritual transformation, and sexual restraint takes an unforeseen racialized turn when Cranmer quotes Chrysostom’s description of the Ethiopian eunuch’s conversion in Acts 8. Cranmer quotes Chyrsostom as writing, “Remember the eunuch of Candace, Queen of Ethiopia, which, albeit he was a man of a wild and barbarous country, and one occupied with worldly cares and businesses, yet riding in his chariot, yet he was reading Scripture, what thinkest though of like was he wont to do sitting at home?” (43). On the one hand, the reference to the Ethiopian eunuch reminds its reader of the universal mission of Christianity: to make disciples of every nation. On the other hand, it fosters racial shame. Why is an Ethiopian from a “wild and barbarous country” seemingly more devoted to Bible reading than the typical Englishman? Perhaps it is because this Ethiopian is a eunuch and thus less susceptible to—or, at least, less able to act upon—sexual desire that he is able to channel his energy into reading Scripture. Although less explicitly here than earlier in Cranmer’s preface, reading the Bible is again counterposed to sexuality. Moreover, this eunuch is an African, who would have been associated with excessive sexuality were it not for his physical deficit. Mary Floyd-Wilson has shown in her study of race and geohumoralism that “sexuality became a central focus of the racializing process” and that northerners like the English were believed to be more sexually temperate than southern Europeans and Africans.16 As such, the allusion to the Ethiopian eunuch may have shamed the Bible-ignoring Englishman by questioning his distinctly English virtues of sexual restraint and religious piety.

Alongside the various arguments he uses to justify the need for English Bibles, Cranmer also addresses the dangers of misreading. Cranmer asserts, however, that misreading is the fault of the reader, not the English Bible. Like Tyndale, he argues that misreading comes from the defective faith of the reader. To illustrate his point, he likens misreading the Bible to pagan idolatry. Pagans worship the sun, moon and stars, but God’s creations are not responsible for that idolatry. Cranmer concludes this argument by writing, “to them that be evil of themselves everything setteth forward and increaseth their evil” (45). The Bible is no exception: “Therefore to conclude this latter part, every man that cometh to the reading of this holy book ought to bring with him first the fear of Almighty God, and then next a firm and stable purpose of reforming his own self according thereunto” (49).

Cranmer believes that correct interpretation of Scripture lies within the individual; it comes from the individual’s fear of God and a desire to be reformed by what is read. Cranmer’s position is a common one among Protestants, but this does not mean that English translators did not seek to reform the reader from the outside. The Geneva Bible (completed in 1560) was the most heavily glossed of the early modern English Bibles; it attempts to intervene where the fear of the Almighty might prove insufficient for producing correct interpretation. Unlike the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible acknowledges that understanding the Bible can be a difficult task. Its preface states,

And considering how hard a thing it is to understand the holy Scriptures, and what errors, sects and heresies growe dailie for lack of the true knollage thereof, and how many are discouraged (as thei pretend) because thei can not ataine the true and simple meaning of the same, we haue also indeuored bothe by the diligent reading of commentaries, and also by the conference with godly and learned breathern, to gather brief annotations vpon the hard places, aswel for the vnderstanding of such wordes as are obscure, and for the declaration of the text, as for the application for the same as may moste apperteine to Gods glorie and the edification of his Churche. (sig.a1v)

Unlike Cranmer and the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible seeks to thwart heresy through its substantial annotations, which are, perhaps, its most distinctive feature.17 Green notes that unlike other early modern English Bible translators and compilers, “the translators of the Geneva Bible had few inhibitions about moving from elucidation to interpretation and application.”18 The glosses guide the reader toward the compliers’ Calvinist strain of Protestantism.

Although it is hardly surprising that translation and annotation affect how the Bible is read (and thus mark the confessional differences among Protestants, Catholics, and Protestant sects), Protestant translators were careful to distinguish their Old Testament from the Hebrew Bible. Ilona N. Rashkow’s examination of differences between early modern English Bibles and the Hebrew Bible reveals that these differences reflected anxieties about “judaization,” the reading of Scripture with singular attention to carnal and earthly concerns. Here we should remember Daniel Boyarin’s correlation between hermeneutics and anthropology. Paratextual materials provided a way to protect the translator from accusations of judaizing: “Since the English Renaissance biblical translators were determined to avoid the stigma of judaization, the Hebrew Bible as narrative was to be read only as part of a larger unit including Christian marginalia, appendices, woodcuts, and even the New Testament.”19 According to Rashkow, English Bibles render the Hebrew Bible itself as no more than the prelude to the New Testament. To further distance themselves from being labeled judaizers, Rashkow observes, English translators, including the translators of the Geneva Bible, often resorted to more straightforward racialized anti-Semitism.20 Rashkow’s examination reveals how translation reflects not only religious difference but also the culture’s emerging racial ideologies. Translations record the translators’ desires to solidify racialized forms of religious difference.

Converting the Infidel Text and Erasing Race

In her reading of Harington’s translation, Tiffany Jo Werth compares the textual apparatuses of the English Orlando Furioso and the Geneva Bible.21 I would add to Werth’s insight that we can see in the paratexts that accompany Harington’s translation a concern for the effects of reading on human sexuality and for the ways in which interpretation engenders distinctions between races and religions. English Bibles are not the sole examples of how paratexts attempt to influence interpretations of texts (we might consider E. K.’s glosses to Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar, for example), but William W. E. Slights upholds biblical paratexts as “a pronounced instance of the marginal maneuvering that characterizes the texts of the day.”22 Harington’s paratextual materials attempt to govern readers’ interpretations and to help them mark differences between Protestants and Catholics and between Christians and Muslims. The work is thus caught between producing a distinctly Protestant poem and narrating a story that calls its readers to identify with Catholic France and universal Christendom’s shared fears about an expanding Islamic empire. The poem faces the conundrum: Who is more different, the Catholic or the Muslim? Harington’s translation thus engages the polemical Protestant/Catholic/Muslim triad that I discussed in chapter 1. Harington’s paratextual materials—his preface, marginalia, “Allegories” and “Morralls”—helped English readers to negotiate the racial and religious differences in this conundrum.

To begin this consideration of Harington’s Furioso, I start not with the translation’s beginning but with its end: “A Briefe And Summarie Allegorie Of Orlando Furioso, Not Unpleasant Nor Unprofitable For Those Who Have Read The Former Poem,” which immediately follows the final canto of the poem. I start here because Harington makes explicit both the aims of his translation and his anxieties about it. “A Briefe,” therefore, provides a framework for understanding how individual moments in the poem support his goals of producing a moral Protestant poem and alleviating fears about a potentially dangerous infidel text. And most important, “A Briefe” demonstrates Harington’s awareness of the Protestant linkage of translation, reading, and conversion.

“A Brief” begins with Harington describing a chance moment of reading:

When I had finished this translation of Orlando Furioso and began almost proud in my own conceit that I had in these my younge years employed my idle hours to the good liking of many and those of the better sort, I happened to reade in a grave and godly book these words: So devines do hold (for examples sake) that the glory of St. Paul is increased dayly in heaven and shall be to the worlds end by reason of them that dayly do profite by his writing and rare exampler life upon earth, as also on the contrarie part that the torments of Arrius Sabellius and other wicked heretikes are continually augmented by the numbers of them who from time to time are corrupted by their sedicous and pestilent writings. If it had stayed there, it would never have troubled me, but immediately followes: The like they hold of dissolute Poets and other loose writers which have left behind them lascivious, wanton, and carnal devices, as also of negligent parents, masters, teachters, &c. This saying (gentle Reader) was such a cooling card to me and did so cut the combe of that pleasing conceit of mine that I could not tell whether I should repent me or not of my former taken paine. (558)23

The godly text he happens to read—Robert Parsons’s The First Book of the Christian Excercize Apperytayning to Resolutions (1582)—causes a spiritual crisis. Harington announces that he is concerned with the spiritual import of his translation of Ariosto’s Italian, Catholic romance, and his own spiritual state after its completion. His “almost” sinful pride is curbed, however, by a chance act of reading—about Paul, no less—that results in a transformation of character. Indirectly, Harington audaciously compares his works to Paul’s; perhaps he wonders whether he will achieve the same eternal glory as the apostle for writing spiritually edifying texts.

Even so, it is difficult to read this comparison as anything but facetious, a critique of puritanical attacks on poetry’s and romance’s supposed wantonness, and of translations of foreign texts into English. As Werth has shown, romance bred anxieties “under the banner of ‘sola scriptura,’ ” under which “texts became especially fraught catalysts for—or against—faith.”24 More than ever, secular and foreign books aroused concerns about their effects on readers. In the Schoolmaster (1570), for example, Roger Ascham rebukes the “English man Italianated” and condemns books “of late translated out of Italian into English, sold in euery shop in London, commended by honest titles the soner to corrupt honest manners.”25 Just a bit later, Ascham criticizes “bookes of Cheualrie” like Morte d’Arthur, but he then qualifies this critique: “And yet ten Morte Arthures do not the tenth part so much harm, as one of these books, made in Italie, and translated in England.”26 Ascham does not mention Orlando Furioso, but as an Italian book of chivalry, he likely would have seen its popularity in England as a great evil. He argues that Italian texts carry within them Popish ideas that might transform readers into monstrous Anglo-Italian hybrids. The telos of this hybrid identity is hybridized religion, which he regards as satanic: “he shall haue free libertie to embrace all Religiouns, and becum, if he lust at once, without any let or punishment, Iewish, Turkish, Papish, and Deuillish.”27

Harington surely fits Ascham’s description of the “English man Italianated”: Harington not only expresses great admiration for Orlando Furioso, but at one time he also referred to himself as a “Protesting Catholic Puritan.”28 Harington refused to align himself with a specific confessional community, and his translation upholds Christian beliefs and values that cross confessional divides. As Jane E. Everson suggests, in his translation “Harington must also consider the ambivalent nature of the religious settlement in England, the shifting political alliances of his own day and country.”29 At the same time, despite his admiration for Ariosto’s poem, Harington is aware of what materials might offend a Protestant reader. Everson also points out that Harington often deletes moments exhibiting Catholic forms of piety, such as Bradamante’s prayer to the Virgin Mary at the beginning of canto 4.30 When it comes to moments of plot that cannot be easily excised from the poem, however, Harington uses paratextual materials, like “A Brief,” to strip those moments of nefarious Catholic content. Thus, as tongue-in-cheek as his comparison of his work and Paul’s might be, and even as he makes fun of puritanical arguments, Harington reexplains the spiritual lessons that an allegorical reading of Orlando Furioso can offer. Rather than repent for the translation, as he suggests he should do, he rearticulates the allegorical and moral readings that he has offered throughout his version of the poem.

Nevertheless, we might also read Harington’s insistence on an allegorical and moral reading of Ariosto’s romance as itself a type of conversion and turning away from romance as a genre that was often viewed, in the early modern period, mainly as a vehicle for pleasure and entertainment; allegory will absolve the poem of implications of heresy and sexual wantonness and endow it with chastity and orthodoxy. That Harington would here mention Paul of all people points to the importance of conversion as a trope for understanding the type of moral Protestant poem he created. Paul (formerly Saul), of course, was created by a radical act of conversion that occurred on the road to Damascus. Orlando Furioso recalls this conversion when Rogero has his chance encounter with a hermit in canto 41. The hermit’s first words to Rogero are those that Saul heard from the heavenly voice: “ô Saule, ô Saule, / Why persecutest though my people so?”(41.53). Ariosto asks his readers to consider the relation between Ruggiero’s conversion and Paul’s, but in “A Brief” Harington asks his English readers to make a connection between his allegorical project, itself a response to his encounter with Paul, and the moment of Rogero’s conversion. Like Spenser, however, Harington appears uneasy with transforming a Saracen into a Christian. Although we see the infidel-conversion motif in Harington’s translation—a plot element that cannot be removed from the poem—the allegorical Rogero (that is, what Rogero is to signify within his allegory) is a Christian and a European long before the literal Rogero converts to Christianity. In Harington’s translation we thus see a reappropriation of the infidel-conversion motif; it now signifies the sanctification of the Protestant reader.

Harington’s “A Brief” also resonates with an influential narrative of Christian conversion through reading, found in book 8 of Augustine’s Confessions. In the well-known story, Augustine hears the voice of a child chanting “Pick up and read, pick up and read.”31 By chance or divine intervention Augustine opens the Bible to Romans 13:13–14: “So that we walke honestly, as in the day: not in glotonie, and dronkennes, nether in chambering and wantonnes, nor in strife and euying: But put ye on the Lord IESVS CHRIST, and take no thought for the flesh, to fulfil the lustes of it.” The passage speaks to what Augustine characterizes throughout the Confessions as his own struggles with sexual lust: earlier in book 8 he recounts cheekily praying, “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.”32 As we saw in Cranmer’s preface, sexual desire impedes faith; reading, however, has the power to tame the sexual appetite. Although I do not believe that there is a direct connection between Cranmer preface, Augustine’s Confessions, and Harington’s “A Brief,” together they show that Christianity had long seen the reading of religious texts as a cure for lust. Harington seems well aware of this tradition, one that was revivified in the early modern period by the Reformation’s newfound emphasis on the transformative power of reading.

Another connection between reading, conversion, and sexuality surfaces in the apocryphal explanation of Harington’s motivation for translating the poem in its (almost) entirety.33 The story goes that Queen Elizabeth found Harington circulating a translation of the bawdy and misogynist canto 28. As punishment the queen sentenced Harington to translate the entire poem. The story of the translation’s origins cannot be verified, but it nevertheless demonstrates that Ariosto’s Italian eroticism was a source of English anxiety.34 If true, however, the story might also explain Harington’s desire to allegorize and moralize the poem, as well as his desire to make sure that he is not one of those “dissolute Poets and other loose writers which have left behind them lascivious, wanton, and carnal devices.” This desire may also explain why the translation, according to Colin Burrow, “does lack much of the amorous magic which keeps Ariosto’s poem flowing delightfully from action to action.”35 The story also allows us to see a likeness between Augustine and Harington in their randy youth. Whereas Augustine’s act of reading leads to his conversion, Harington’s act of translation leads to a conversion of the text and its reception. Harington’s translation attempts to sanctify the poem and its readers by purging it of errant eroticism, to restrain rather than excite the dangerous passions that romances were believed to inspire36

Harington’s treatment of Rogero illustrates the translation’s attempt to direct readers away from wayward desire. This intent is unmistakable in the translation’s preface, in which Harington compares Rogero’s rendezvous with the enchantress Alcina to Aeneas’s with Dido. The preface, a defense of poetry in general and of Orlando Furioso in particular, seeks to justify the poem’s mixture of Christian morality and sexual errancy (a characteristic of many romances), with the latter most apparent, according to Harington, in Ariosto’s description of Ruggiero’s relationship with Alcina: “But now it may be and is by some objection that although [Ariosto] writes Christianly in some places, yet in other some he is too lascivious, as in that of the baudy Frier, in Alcinas and Rogeros copulation … and some few places besides.… But as I say, if tis a fault, then Vergill committed the same fault in Dido and Aeneas intertainment” (11–12).

Although Harington seeks to elevate the status of Orlando Furioso by pointing out similarities between Ariosto’s poem and Virgil’s epic, he also elevates the status of Rogero; the comparison of Rogero and Aeneas is a significant one because Rogero, not the mad Orlando, becomes the father of a dynasty.37 In being compared with pius Aeneas, Rogero is initially associated with a specific kind of romance errancy, that which thwarts both dynastic lineage and religious piety. In this formulation Alcina, like Virgil’s Dido and Spenser’s Acrasia, is the sexually enticing foreign woman who can corrupt proper uses of sexuality—namely, the sexuality that propagates a desirable race and its attendant modes of European piety.

Harington fully capitalizes on the comparisons of Rogero and Aeneas, creating a Rogero whose particular faults (not to mention his non-Christian identify) are forgiven because, as the reader knows, he will become the father of a noble Christian race: Merlin’s prophecy to Bradamante in canto 3 makes this clear. But the comparison also disassociates Rogero from Africa, his ancestral homeland, and associates him instead with Europe. This disassociation is crucial to Harington’s allegorical project of erasing Rogero’s African Saracen identity in order to facilitate moral instruction. The most explicit allegorical erasure of Rogero’s African identity occurs in “Allegorie” in canto 6, in which Rogero is carried away by the hippogriff to Alcina’s island:

First thereof is Rogero … we may understand the Griffeth horse that carried him to signifie the passion of the mind contrarie to reason that caries men in aire, that is, in the height of the imaginations, out of Europ, that is out of the compasse of the rules of Christian religion and feare of God, unto the Ile of Alcyna, which signifieth pleasure and vanities of this world. (79)

I am struck by Rogero’s European origin; he is carried “out of Europ,” whence he seems to originate within the “Allegorie.” Rogero’s migration, moreover, has religious significance; Christianity is securely grounded in Europe, while non-Christianity is located much more ethereally elsewhere. On the “Allegorie’s” geo-religious map Rogero is already a Christian; the allegory converts an African Muslim into a European Christian before the actual moment of conversion in the poem.

Because it locates Christian experience in Europe, whither Rogero travels and to which he already seemingly belongs, the “Allegorie” also expresses concerns about “the passions of the mind” that have the potential to carry Europeans away from the geographically situated “rules of Christian religion.” Harington’s allegory of the Rogero and Alcina episode overlaps with religious arguments about the dangers of reading romance; Spiller and Werth have shown that a major charge against romance was that it could dangerously alter readers’ passions.38 The allegory thus encourages a recognition of a correspondence between Rogero’s story and the Europeans who read the poem wrongly. Romance, as a mode concerned with romantic relationships and errant sexuality, is able to carry Christian readers outside of the realm of Christianity and incite them to imagine exotic, infidel mores and passions.

The romance passions are thus figured as the illegitimate offspring of illicit sexual contact and miscegenation. Perhaps this is why Rogero’s affair with Alcina is one of the most heavily glossed episodes in the translation; Judith Lee suggests that this heavy glossing demonstrates that “Harington placed new emphasis on the ethical value of the Rogero-Alcina episode.”39 At the same time, the heavy glossing and the “Allegorie” unwittingly reveal anxieties about translating a scene that is likely to arouse the very passions of the mind that godly texts are supposed to suppress. But if a reader has, by chance, been caught up in his or her own passionate reading of and desire for the sexually enticing Alcina, the allegory seeks to bring that reader back down to Christian earth.

Rogero’s rejection of Alcina is also allegorized as a conversion from romance to epic; like Aeneas, Rogero must reject romance sexuality in order to become the progenitor of a dynasty. In fact, the rejection of romance desire is Rogero’s first conversion. In “A Brief” Harington describes Rogero’s sexual relationship with Alcina as being “drowned and utterly overwhelmed in this gulfe of pleasure which mine author hath set downe so lively as it were the verie picture of the prodigal sonne spoken of in the Scripture” (560). The Prodigal Son story is one of repentance, after all, and of turning back to God. The comparison between Rogero and the Prodigal Son foreshadows the conversion that is to come, which, in “A Brief,” is fulfilled not in Rogero’s eventual baptism by the hermit but in his seeing Alcina for who she really is: “This is to be understood,” Harington writes, “that a man besotted in the fond pleasures of the world, entering into godly consideration with himselfe of his owne estate, heareth Melyssa, which is to be understood the devine inspiration of the grace of God calling him from the damned course of life to an honest and virtuous course” (560). For Harington, Rogero’s rejection of Alcina is the evidence of an inward response to “the grace of God calling” and conversion. Just a bit later in “A brief” Harington writes that one of the lessons Rogero’s journey teaches is that “our concupiscence … with a perpetuall thirst still maketh us covet things hurtful to our selves” (561). The allegory in “A Brief,” therefore, connects Rogero and the Christian “our” who are still susceptible to sexual desires that could impel them, through a misreading of the poem or intercourse with an infidel woman, to transgressions of acceptable Christian behavior.

Harington’s opposition between Europe/Christian and non-Europe/non-Christian also recalls the “catholic” Charlemagne romances, born of a pre-Reformation united Christendom that had been a hallmark of the romance.40 Harington finds the symbolic geography of Christendom useful for his allegory, but he does not allow readers of his translation to accept Christendom’s theology, especially in matters of conversion. Surprisingly, Harington seems to find little allegorical significance in Rogero’s literal conversion: He does not mention it in “A Brief.” Moreover, in canto 41, which details Rogero’s literal conversion to Christianity, Harington does not include an “Allegorie.” There are other cantos in the poem that do not include an “Allegorie”: In canto 5, for example, under the “Allegorie” heading, Harington writes, “Allegorie there is none in this booke at all,” and in canto 3, as in canto 41, the heading does not appear at all. Perhaps the scene of Roger’s conversion is so clear that it requires no further explication. Or the lack of allegorizing suggests some intention to undermine the significance of the literal conversion and actual turning point in Ariosto’s plot. Highlighting the conversion would actually work against his allegorical Rogero, who is already a Christian.

Harington does not allegorize the contents of canto 41, but in the “Morrall” at the end of the book, he moralizes Rogero’s prayer and vow to convert if he should survive the shipwreck:

In that Rogero in his extremity of daunger feeleth a remorse of conscience and straight hath recourse to God by prayer and vow, it is a good president for others to do the like, though indeede most men are apt to do so but all the matter is performed the effect of their vow and promise to God after; for that few care, according to that saying made a proverb in Italian

Scampato il pericolo giabbato il santo.

When daunger is scaped, the said is—mocked.

But the example of Rogero may move us to more true devotion, and this speech of the good Old Hermit let everie one apply to him self that hath need of it, and it may do him as good as a sermon, for in deed it is most sweet and comfortable and very true doctrine. (479)

Rogero provides a model for the Christian reader to follow. The prayer and vow are described as a “recourse to God”; “recourse” can be read as denoting that he changes his course, but it can also suggest, according to one of Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions of the word, that this moment is a actually a “return” to God.41 If this is the case, Rogero is similar to Spenser’s Redcrosse, whose identity as Christian knight persists despite his moral failings. In the “Morrall,” Rogero’s prayer and vow are linked less to conversion than they are to a Christian reforming his bad behavior.

The “Morall” then suggests that this episode should “move us to more true devotion” through the hermit’s “sermon.” The “Morall” places the hermit’s words within a Protestant framework in which words—spoken in the form of a sermon and then read in Harington’s book—rather than sacraments inspire spiritual transformation. Nothing in the hermit’s sermon would be offensive to the Protestant reader: The hermit tells Roger, “how to Christ he must impute / The pardon of his sinnes, yet near the later / He told him he must be baptized in water” (41.58.6–8). Although baptism remains a “must,” the mandate to be baptized follows, as it would in the Church of England’s baptismal service, explanation of Christ’s (not baptism’s) saving power. The sacrament is deemphasized to underscore the transformative power of the spoken and written word. Rogero provides a model for “us” to follow: Like him, the reader is to be spiritually moved and transformed by the power of the words rendered here by Harington, the translator.

Yet Rogero’s transformation and new identity need to be firmly established, and, in conformity with the romance formula, marriage seals the deal. Harington, in “A Brief,” attempts to present Rogero as a unified figure of “the verie Idea and perfect example of a true knight that will by no means break his faith and his honour” (567); hence Rogero must be purged of imputations of racial alterity. We can see this in Harington’s discussion of Rogero’s encounter with the Saracen Rodomont, who shows up uninvited to Rogero’s and Bradamante’s wedding and calls the new Christian a traitor and an apostate. This insult, of course, incites the two knights to a battle, and the now-Christian Rogero defeats and slays the Muslim Rodomont. The “Allegorie” states that the scene provides an example of killing youthful passions:

In that mine author brings in for the conclusion of his whole work that Rogero immediately upon his marriage to Bradamante killeth Rodomont, this is the Allegorical sence thereof: that Rodomont, which is to be understood as the unbridled heat and courage of youth (for in all of Rodomonts actions you shall find him described ever most furious, hastie, and impatient), Rodomont, I say, is killed and quite vanquished and killed by marriage, and how soever the unrulinesse of youth is excusable in divers kind, yet after that holy state of matrimonie is entered into, all youthful wildness of all kinds must be cast away. (557)

In killing Rodomont, Rogero also vanquishes any residual non-Christian identity remaining in him; through marriage Rogero defeats his inner infidel. Like Spenser’s Pyrochles and Cymochles, Rodomont embodies emotions like rage, fury and haste; like The Faerie Queene, Harington’s Orlando Furioso locates intemperate modes of being in the body of the Saracen. Harington’s link between marriage and the death of Rodomont also draws most likely from the English Church’s marriage ceremony, which portrays marriage as “a remedy against sin,” and a way “to avoid fornication.”42 One might also read the killing of Rodomont as a killing of the “youthful wildness” that so offended the queen that she commanded Harington to translate and allegorize Orlando Furioso. Rogero’s marriage, then, is linked not with religious conversion but with maturation. The poem ends with a married and chaste Rogero, purged of foreign, infidel, and Italianate passions—a reformation of character that finds its analogue in Harington the penitent translator.

Disrupting Interracial Affection

Perhaps Rogero’s redemptive trajectory accounts for Harington’s effort, in the paratextual materials, to distance the hero from his ambiguous racial and religious identity. His identity is complicated by the interreligious and interracial relationship of his parents. In the second canto we are reminded of a fact first mentioned in Matao Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato (1495), that Ruggiero’s father is the Christian Ruggiero of Reggio and his mother is Galaciella, daughter to Agramante, King of the Saracens. Ariosto’s poem, however, makes very little of Ruggiero’s Christian ancestry, although it does become important inasmuch as the poem suggests that his conversion, like Clorinda’s in Gerusalemme liberata, is a recovery of a Christian identity that is lost to him; after the death of his parents, the orphaned Ruggiero is raised by the Saracen wizard Atlante. Ruggiero’s Christian and noble origins are important because they make him a fit spouse for Bradamante and a fit progenitor for the Este family—he is also a descendent of Trojan Hector. That said, it is impossible to ignore the Saracen blood in his veins—the poem does not forget it—and his Saracen identity throughout the majority of the poem.

I now wish to consider the significance of Harington’s locating Rogero’s figurative conversion at the beginning of the poem. The difference between the literal and figurative conversion suggests that the translation attempts to disavow the affective bonds Ariosto’s poem portrays between persons of different races and religions. Writing of such bonds in romance, Barbara Fuchs argues as follows:

Individual chivalric encounters while the heroes are away from the front do not observe the same rules as collective battles, so that the Christian knights occasionally experience love or friendship for the “infidels” whom they are collectively fighting. Thus romance challenges the political mythmaking of epic, and its tight networks of obligation and belonging.43

From the beginning, Ariosto proves willing to ignore the epic significance of the religious conflict in order to explore the ways in which erotic desire can erase difference. In canto 1, when Rinaldo realizes that Angelica is fleeing while he and Ferrau fight to win her, he suggests to his competitor that they suspend their combat lest they both lose the object of their desire; the Christian knight proposes an alliance with the Saracen knight. Ferrau consents, and the two ride off on a single horse. The narrator praises them for this action:

O auncient knights of true and noble hart:

They rivals were, one faith they liv’d not under;

Beside they felt their bodies shrewdly smart

Of blowes late given, and yet (behold a wonder)

Through thicke and thin, suspition set apart,

Like frends they ride and parted not a sunder

Untill the horse with double spurring drived

Unto a way parted in two arrived. (1.22)

The narrator commends the two knights for putting religious and cultural differences aside in order to achieve a common purpose. Erotic desire, disguised as chivalry, becomes a great unifier: it is able to create allies across cultures and religions. This scene, at the same time, points to the extraordinariness of this event, distancing itself temporarily from the present in the characterization of these knights as “auncient,” or in the Italian, “cavallieri antiqui.” Ariosto’s temporal distancing asks the poem’s Italian reader to consider whether such a rapprochement is possible in the sixteenth century and beyond. As they digress from the seemingly more important religious conflict, Rinaldo and Ferrau ignore their differences and instead focus on their similarities as knights and men in order to pursue their object of desire, Angelica.

Harington also calls his English readers’ attention to this action, inviting them to “behold a wonder”—this command to the reader is not in the Italian.44 Harington’s addition suggests that for him and his English readers, Rinaldo’s and Ferrau’s action is indeed a “wonder,” the stuff of romance, and a digression that imagines alliances that transcend racial and religious conflict—all the more notable because Harington usually disallows the marvelous to be read as such: Lee writes, “Harington’s translator describes the marvelous episodes from the point of view of a ‘plain speaking’ Englishman who never expresses surprise or wonder at the magical enchantments or at unexpected turns of events.… Harington used the marvelous as a way to reiterate the real historical and moral framework of the fiction.”45 The wonder inspired by the alliance between Rinaldo and Ferrau highlights its radical divergence from the poem’s context of religious conflict.

Harington’s version of Orlando Furioso attempts to impede such alliances, conciliations, and affections, especially with respect to readers’ views of Rogero. Although Ariosto’s readers know beginning with canto 3 that Ruggiero will eventually become a Christian, the preconversion Ruggiero is nevertheless appealing to both readers and Bradamante—long before he converts in canto 41. As Patricia Parker has observed, the lateness of the conversion may demonstrate that romance narratives are propelled by deferral and the impediment of narrative closure, but it is also true that the deferral of Ruggiero’s conversion allows more time for a reader to be moved by the hapless adventures of a Saracen.46

Harington’s “A Brief,” “Allegories” and “Moralls,” as well as interventions in the plot, keep English readers from making the same mistake Rinaldo does; together they seek to reform the reader’s desires in order to frustrate bonds between Christian readers and infidels. I am not arguing that Harington’s English Orlando Furioso is entirely successful in this task, especially since this reforming work primarily takes place in the paratexts rather than in the translation. Yet given the persuasive authority accorded to paratexts in early modern England, these notations are clearly a major component in Harington’s main goal of shielding the reader from forms of desire deemed alien to Protestant identity. Unlike his source text, which according to Albert Russell Ascoli revels in errancy and often diverges from European cultural values, Harington’s Orlando Furioso denies its readers the opportunity to be captivated by a Saracen by portraying Rogero as a Christian before his actual conversion.47 Harington’s English version seeks to prevent readers from being carried away—as Rogero is to Alcina’s island—by their affection for a non-Christian character.