Sir John Harington’s Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse (1591) is a significant example of material-textual Englishing: under the direction of Harington, his book’s emblematic title page, copperplate engravings, typography, mise-en-page, and commentary apparatus are all transmutations of the preeminent Italian editions of the sixteenth century, most notably Francesco de Franceschi’s lavish 1584 edition. This article traces how Harington cannily deploys his bibliographic code in metatextual and metavisual ways to call attention to how the material-textual manipulates the reader’s experience. In what could be called an act of early postmodern deconstruction, Harington playfully dismantles the edifying structures of pragmatic humanism in the same way that romance dissolves epic.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Reid, J., (2025), "Serious Play: Sir John Harington’s Material-Textual Errancy in Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse (1591)", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Reid, Joshua. "Serious Play: Sir John Harington’s Material-Textual Errancy in Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse (1591)." Renaissance and Reformation 43 (2): 2020. 147-182. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v43i2.34795. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.