SOURCE: Shapiro, Marianne. “Ariosto's Multiple Vision.” In The Poetics of Ariosto, pp. 152-91. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988.

In the following essay, Shapiro details the role of repetition and doubling in achieving apparently contradictory goals in Orlando furioso.

My previous chapter referred to the “binary form of accurate understanding” as it concerned the maddened Orlando, who could not be saved by the anaesthetic of self-irony from obsession and its concomitant rigidity. We will test this assumption now, exploring and delineating the perfectly contrary movement of Ariosto's writing as it affects plot construction. I hope to reveal in this chapter the ubiquity of doubling and muliplication as the very replication of the poet's vision.

The conflict of love and honor that governs the adventures of Ruggiero and (in lesser measure) of Bradamante forms the spine of Ariosto's epic poem. Even the madness of Orlando, its second subject, can be...