SOURCE: Ascoli, Albert Russell. “Critical Readings of the Orlando Furioso.” In Ariosto's Bitter Harmony: Crisis and Evasion in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 43-120. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987.

In the following excerpt, Ascoli documents the interplay of influence between Renaissance texts, noting the treatment of Hercules in Orlando furioso.

The first impulse of this reader and this reading of Orlando Furioso is formalist: a rarely repressed tendency to the pleasures of close textual analysis. Nonetheless, recent critical events have made it very difficult to move directly to a thematic and/or structural interpretation of the poem's treatment of human selfhood. The last twenty years have seen the development of strong concepts of intertextuality, along with, more recently still, the emergence of a modified, “new,” historicism. A literary text, we feel compelled to recognize, is composed of readings—it is the composite transcription and revision of the classical...