Perhaps the Ariostan narrator's wonderful, terrifying phrase, “lucido intervallo,” is the best way to describe the position of comic poets who make fun of those caught in desire's net: they do not claim to be above or outside that complex, troublesome part of the human experience, but through their adherence to a comic vision they are able to shed a little salutary light on it. Perhaps, also, this is the true significance of the outrageous passage in canto 4 of the Orlando Furioso asserting the reality of the hippogryph. There is truth, Ariosto may be suggesting, in the outrageous flights of fancy of comic writers—the distorted but revealing truth of the comic mirror, which Ovid holds up to Augustan Rome in the personae of hopeless lover and bogus professor of desire while confessing, in his lucid interval in Amores 1.4, that he's fully aware that his elaborate strategies for fooling a husband won't work or, at the conclusion of Ars amatoria book 1, that a thousand women require a thousand different ways of wooing. We find such comic truth also in Chaucer, who maps the relationship between social status and experience of desire in The Parlement of Foules but has his narrator admit in the lucid interval of the prologue to book 2 of Troilus and Criseyde (before that poem turns tragic) that everyone's experience of love is seemingly, if not actually, unique, creating an immense challenge to the love poet—especially one whose understanding of love is literary rather than experiential. To make people laugh about matters as serious and as potentially heart-breaking as crises of desire and authority is no mean feat. The three poets for whom I've attempted in these pages to offer an adequate appreciation deserve our thanks (and applause) for the comic mirrors and monuments to serious play that they have left us.