Episode Length
Image credit: Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso (Venice: Valgrisi, 1562), p. 659. Courtesy of the George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives, Bowdoin College Library.
The Moon as Narrative Episode
One question was the extent to which the episode on the Moon marked an unusually (dis)continuous narrative block. Could computation capture the sense that after so much chaos, readers were treated to what felt like one story, with one protagonist, mostly in one place? Our data from Reynolds’ index and the online version of Kline’s translation provided two complementary perspectives on this question.
Reynolds’ index contains multiple references to any given sequence of octaves, since narrative episodes are often listed under entries for each character involved. To see if Astolfo’s time on the Moon resulted in fewer or longer mentions, we counted unique Canto-Octave occurrences with event descriptions. Given the way that the data is represented, what we are really modeling is Reynolds’ indexing practice. Since the index listed the full span of an episode, the data was transformed such that each octave involved is treated as a Canto-Octave pair (rather than a Canto-Range). We see 5 canti for which every octave has an event (those with a ratio of 1.0 in the figure below). Canti with less intensive indexing are closer to the bottom of the graph (still with a ratio higher than 70% of octaves attached to an event).
Scatterplot of indexed events per canto of the Orlando furioso in Barbara Reynolds’ translation. Darker colors indicate longer canti to assess the extent to which canto length was related to indexing.
Canti 34 and 35 are neither unusual nor obvious turning points in this model. The figure should draw our attention to the other similar canti that might be aligned with Astolfo’s voyage to the Moon.
Kline’s index focused on the narrative rather than characters, so emphasizes plot events, and might offer a better way to assess the question of how unusual the Moon narrative is in the context of the poem. The figure below represents the number of entries per canto as listed on https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Italian/AriostoCantoI.php
Here Canto 35 has one of the lowest ratios.
Scatterplot of the ratio of events listed in Kline’s index to the Orlando furioso as a factor of number of octaves in the canto.
In order to better assess the length of episodes, we plotted the inverse ratio: numbers of octaves divided by the number of episodes listed in the index:
At left: Average number of octaves per episode in Kline’s index of events in the canti of the Orlando furioso.
Here Canto 35 has a higher average than most other canti in the poem: slightly more than 6 octaves for each episode. The maximum average was in Canto 3 (over 8.5) likely due to the amount of time spent on the prophetic description of the Este family’s successes.