Hero and Heroine

Orlando is the Italian for Roland, the name of the hero of many tales of chivalry and derring-do in the battles with the Saracens in Spain and in Jerusalem half a millennium before the hero/ine of Virginia Woolf’s novel enters the world. S/he is carefully named to convey the romance and panache of the earlier epics starring an Orlando—from the anonymous eleventh-century Old French La chanson de Roland (The Song of Roland) to Ludovico Ariosto’s 1516 poem Orlando furioso.

Surprisingly, these stories live on today, poetically and raucously, in the puppet plays of Sicily: paladins and (1581), who wields a magic lance, and Clorinda, who inspired Claudio Monteverdi’s beautiful 1624 operatic composition (The Combat of Tancredi and Clorinda). Also, the Sicilian puppet paladins themselves are swaggeringly heroic and at the same time highly ambiguous—their armor wasp-waisted; their lips crimson and cheeks rouged; and their tall plumes, bouncing on their helmets and identifying them by color (Orlando’s is scarlet), gloriously exaggerated. Display, dandyism, high spirits: Woolf was tuning in to a form of spectacle with a long history over time, one filled with performative dash, parodic glee, tongue-in-cheek humor, and defiant hope. (Sally Potter’s film catches this mood wonderfully, as does Tilda Swinton, looking straight out at us, archly, seductively.)