Rinaldo: Character and Intertext in Ariosto and Tasso.

There is more to this book than its title suggests. The author's focus on the permutations of the paladin Rinaldo from Boiardo (and the "cantari") through Ariosto to Tasso becomes an occasion to consider how a literary and cultural tradition (in this case, the Carolingian heritage of the Ferrarese Renaissance) accommodates change. In the hands of these poets from Ferrara, the Matter of France, as it is called, proves to be amazingly supple, especially when combined with the Arthurian Matter of Britain.

At the same time, this book draws attention to problems of characterization in a literary tradition that would eventually contribute to the development of the novel. The book's argument focusses repeatedly on the quotidian exemplariness of Rinaldo, as contrasted with, say, Orlando's outlandish exploits, leading Sherberg to argue that Rinaldo is a more credible hero: "Throughout the tradition poets showed him struggling with the same conflicts that readers may note in their own experience: problems of authority and self-affirmation, of rivalry and betrayal, of eros and economics, of the challenges of a dangerous world" (195). At the conclusion of this careful study, made whole by numerous and judicious references to the texts in question, Sherberg correctly observes that for Ariosto and Tasso, the portrayal of Rinaldo, archetypal homo viator, represents no less than "the struggle of the individual to discover a place in the world" (197).

Following a scheme proposed by Saussure, Sherberg studies how Ariosto and Tasso create their respective pictures of Rinaldo. Both allude to the semiotic identity of the Carolingian character, while at the same time noticeably altering that identity in focussing on Rinaldo's actions and on how his actions derive from basic character traits. Not surprisingly, each poet alters Rinaldo in a different way, and herein one sees the value of Sherberg's comparative approach to the treatment of the knight. On the one hand, Ariosto's Rinaldo accrues meaning over the course of the Furioso through his juxtaposition with Orlando and other knights; Sherberg cites the readings of Carne-Ross, Weaver, and Zatti, among others, with Greimas mentioned as a theoretical point of reference. On the other hand, the young Tasso's rejection of entrelacement as an organizing principle for the narrative of Rinaldo requires him to shed light on the poem's eponymous character in a way that doesn't depend on reverberations within the narrative as it unfolds. Tasso rewrites Rinaldo "in large part by giving him greater psychological depth" than the character has had heretofore in the tradition (6). In so doing, the poet experiments with a compositional technique he will later perfect in the Gerusalemme Liberata, a poem in which he "endows each character with a unique psychology and subjects each to unique experiences" (6).

Sherberg makes a convincing case for the importance of Rinaldo in an assessment of Tasso's poetics, not only his "poetics of character" (8), but also his intertextual poetics. Many of the observations on Tasso's early poem, such as the note on how he rewrites the poetic tradition into which his use of Rinaldo inserts himself (103-05), return in the discussion of the Liberata. In the book's final major section, "Parabola and Palimpsest" (163-93), the author analyzes Tasso's use of allusive poetry to align Rinaldo the crusader - his "invented" character - with Charlemagne's wayward knight. It is, like the entire book, presented with accurate documentation, critical insight, and verve: we need more writing like this.

Sherberg's book does not deal with literary history beyond Tasso's treatment of Rinaldo, although his story, as one might expect, continues. As late as the mid-nineteenth century, a Venetian minstrel could refer to Rinaldo as a "birba," a rascal, who lathered over fifty bastards. (For this more recent apparition of the knight, see the piece by G. Fusinato in Giornale di filologia romanza 9 [1883]: 170-83.) Some literary characters, after all is said and done, don't change that much.

DENNIS LOONEY University of Pittsburgh