From Lunacy to Faith

Abstract

In Robert Greene’s Orlando Furioso (1591), India takes the place of the moon (the Latin lunacy of the Italian furioso) in Ariosto’s original epic poem (1516–1532), which served as the playwright’s source. Orlando, the furious/mad hero, is exiled to India in his mind, as it were, rather than having his wits banished to the moon, the fate of Ariosto’s hero. For Greene the geographically vague “Indian clime” (996) is the locus of the foreign and of what is termed “base” (1246, 1384).¹ In Indian garments, Orlando is disguised from others and from his better self. His return to reason and to unvexed love for Angelica occurs at the end of the drama when he is able to cast off his Indian clothes, just after the scapegoat culture has been securely transferred from India to the Saracen world of Sacripant, the villain whose feigning and fraudulent artifices caused Orlando to assume a series of lunatic personae in the first place. In killing Sacripant, Orlando finds the perfect Other for his madness, embracing the target of long standing for his Christian culture. Orlando’s journey involves a passage to India, and an allegorical and physical passage from there back to faith and to Charlemagne’s court, epitomized in both amorous and religious terms in the figure of Angelica.