far more moral sense than the adventures of most romances. The Faerie Queene also differs from the Furioso in its flowing transitions from episode to episode. Ariosto is noted for using a formula that reads “Mes a tant laisse li contes a parler de…et retorne a…”(“Now I stop telling the story of…and return to…”)(Fowler 135). An example of fluidity in The Faerie Queene is in Book 3, Canto 6, when in the birth of Belphoebe and her ‘twinship’ with Amoret, “an inset Ovidian tale of Chrysogone provides the canto’s first mythological treatment of generation (Fowler 135): It were a goodly story to declare,/ By what straunge accident faire Chrysogone/ Conceived these infants, and how them she bare…” A distinct similarity between the Furioso and The Faerie Queene is the allegorical meaning behind the marriage or uniting of two characters. Orlando, whose name is Italian for Roland, is the Furioso’s hero. He is united with the enchantress Angelica, which symbolizes the two great commentaries of narrative in the Middle Ages: “the martial Matter of France, associated with Charlemagne’s wars, and the romantic Matter or Brittany, associated with Arthurian knighterranty and enchantment” (Marinelli 56). The marriage of Thames and Medway in Book 4 of The Faerie Queene is the only allegorical wedding in the entire epic. Their wedding ceremony is symbolic in two ways. It can be considered political as in the marriage of England to Elizabeth, or generally understood as “referring to the unity of life and the significance of generation in nature (Lerner 455).Not only are Spenser’s characters and storylines reflections of Ariosto’s but its very shape also derives from a few developments in fifteenth and sixteenth century Italian literature. In his personal pressure to “overgo” Ariosto, Spenser wove extended narra...
