Show how Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso parodies the epic and satirizes the ideas of chivalry

Question

Please provide the best answer for the statement.

Answer 1

1. Orlando Furioso (“The Madness of Orlando”) by Ludovico Ariosto takes a satiric approach to chivalry and courtly love. Published in Venice in 1515, Orlando Furioso would become the most popular book of the day, constantly revised and expanded to reflect events in contemporary Italian history artfully disguised in the conventions of medieval romance. The heroism and intellectual superiority of its many female characters served to inspire Lucretia Marinella. It also inspired artists to depict scenes from its narrative.
2. The plot of Ariosto’s epic is a conscious nod in the direction of the medieval French chanson de geste (“song of heroic deeds”) known as The Song of Roland. It takes place in the context of the largely mythologized history of Charlemagne’s wars against the encroaching forces of Islam, heading north from Africa through Spain. The poem’s hero, Orlando (the Roland of the French poem), goes mad halfway through the epic poem, when he cannot come to terms with his unrequited love for the beautiful Angelica. In a fantastic set of adventures. Angelica, the beloved of Orlando, is being pursued by a knight traveling on foot, in other words a horseless horseman, and this irregularity sets up the sense of parody and irony that dominates the poem.
3. The poem leaps from scene to scene, dropping one plot line and picking up another every time the action seems to heat up. Each “new affright” of its structure seemingly imitates the “strange and crooked paths” followed by Angelica. In its mockery of them, the poem demonstrates that traditional chivalric virtues had little or no relevance to the modern Italian court. Love is never ennobling in the poem—and rarely chivalric—but leads only to insult, rejection, madness, and death. The only way to save oneself is not to love at all.