Orlando Innamorato
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Orlando Innamorato is an epic poem written by the Italian Renaissance author Matteo Maria Boiardo. The poem is written in the ottava rima stanza rhythm consisting of sixty-eight cantos and a half.
Boiardo begun the poem about his thirty-eighth year, but interrupted it for a time because of the Venetian war. He is believed to have continued till 1486, but then left the poem unfinished.
Boiardo's Orlando was first published in 1495. The poem, after sixteen editions, was not to be republished for nearly three centuries. Francesco Berni's rifacimento, or recasting of L'Orlando appeared in 1542, and from that date till 1830, when Panizzi revived it, Boiardo's name was well-nigh forgotten.
Orlando Innamorato is a romance concerning the travels of the heroic knight Orlando. To material largely quarried from the Carlovingian and Arthurian cycles Boiardo added a superstructure of his own making. As the plot is not woven around a single pivotal action, the inextricable maze of most cunningly contrived episodes are seen to be linked, first, with the quest of beautiful Angelica by love-smitten Orlando and the other enamoured knights, then with the defence of Albracca by Angelica's father, the King of Cathay, against the beleaguering Tartars, and, finally, with the Moors' siege of Paris and their struggle with Charlemagne's army.
In spite of not being finished, and showing some deficiencies in rhytm, Boiardo's Orlando is considered as a magnificent work of art, echoing throughout the poet's ardent devotion to Love and Loyalty, shedding warmth and sunshine wherever the lapse of ages had rendered the legends colourless and cold.
Orlando's exploits were continued in the Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto in 1516. Also another Renaissance poet, Torquato Tasso, created further extentions to the Orlando theme.
Orlando: A Biography was written in 1928 by Virginia Woolf, and could at first sight be seen as adding yet some more episodes to the adventures of the (by now imaginary) Orlando character, but Woolf's story takes a completely different turn, and is set in a time different from that of the Renaissance Orlando's.