Sources of the Paladins of France Cycle

Giusto Lodico's Storia dei paladini (1858–1860) weaves together in chronological fashion episodes from both canonical and lesser-known fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury poems to arrive at almost 3,000 pages of prose. This monumental compilation quickly became the undisputed source of Sicilian puppet theater and was commonly referred to as the puppeteers’ Bible or simply “the book.” Following the publication of Giuseppe Leggio's expanded edition in 1895–1896, puppeteers increasingly adopted this more extensive and readily available version even while invariably citing Lodico as the sole author. Leggio's version, printed frequently in the following decades, also became the basis of all successive editions. A perusal of Agrippino's scripts confirms that he likewise drew from Leggio's expanded version rather than Lodico's original narrative. Indeed, a copy of the 1909 edition published by Bideri in Naples is still in the family's possession today (Appendix 3).

Anyone interested in reading the prose source of the stories staged in Agrippino's Paladins of France cycle can find Leggio's expanded version of the Storia dei paladini most recently published in 13 volumes between 1993 and 2000. For those who do not read Italian, there are excellent English translations of the most famous Renaissance poems refashioned by Lodico, namely Torquato Tasso's Rinaldo (1562), Matteo Maria Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato (ca. 1483, 1495), Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1516, 1532) and Cinque canti (published posthumously in 1545), and Luigi Pulci's Morgante (ca. 1478, 1483). These five poems take the reader from Rinaldo's initiation into knighthood (Tasso) to his departure from the Frankish court following his heroic exploits at Roncevaux (Pulci), and include the central episodes of Orlando's enamorment of the princess Angelica (Boiardo), descent into madness, and miraculous recovery (Ariosto).

Using the Storia dei paladini as his direct source, Agrippino painstakingly transformed the third-person prose adaptation into intricate scripts. Each play consists of three acts, with each act generally divided into various scenes with detailed stage instructions. Substantial dialogues (and monologues) are written out in full while the less notable exchanges would have been improvised during the performance. In the absence of an audio or video recording of the Paladins of France cycle, these scripts provide the only indication we have of the speech and action that occurred in each evening's play.