Freedom

Is a central concept in Ariosto’s world both in terms of the freedom that dominates the narrative structure of the  Furioso, organised in threads that are left suspended and then picked up once more, with characters that are free and mobile, eternally in flight, that follow a centripetal motion in the course of the book, and also if we consider his autobiographical and personal freedom, as made evident in the first three Satires. As concerns Ariosto’s narrative freedom, this resides in a series of novelties the author introduces as compared to Boiardo’s code for chivalrous romance; as, for example, with the adoption of the technique of interlacement or the singular presence, at the beginning and end of the cantos, of auditors that Ariosto had not mentioned at the start of the work, in the moment in which he makes his pact with the reader, when the narrative fiction is presented.  A further sign of narrative freedom is also the variety of contents and the approach with which the Furioso reactivates the thread of the tale interrupted in Boiardo’s romance.  The first canto of Ariosto’s romance, as compared to the conclusion of the Innamorato, is marked by an apparent total freedom of reinvention of the tale, with a continual play on allusion made of coincidences, deviations, and filiations that are not to be found in Boiardo’s narrative. As concerns personal freedom, a subject to be found in the early satires, for Ariosto it was an appeal to personal survival and personal safeguard, on the part of a courtier of letters weighed down with all manner of tasks and encumbrances. This is the concept of primum vivere (‘Prima la vita, a cui poche o nessuna / cosa ho da preferir, che far più breve / non voglio che ‘l ciel o la Fortuna’ (Satire I, 25-27), defended by the poet when he explains the reasons that brought him not to follow Cardinal Ippolito to Hungary in 1517. For Ariosto. the assertion of one’s own personal ‘freedom’ is linked to the exercise of poetry, to be safeguarded in the face of the risk of being totally absorbed by life as a courtier. Also the decision not to take up an ecclesiastical career, of which Ariosto speaks in Satire II, is explained in terms of freedom, with the rejection of that ‘Roma fumosa’ (stuffy Rome) where ‘il signore è più servo che ‘l ragazzo’ (where a gentleman is more a servant than a manservant) (II, 164-165).