Robert Greene's 1591 English stage adaptation of Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1516, rev. 1532) converts a sprawling and digressive epic romance into a unified plot centered on interfaith sexual union. Following just one of Ariosto's many interwoven storylines, Greene's play focuses on the rivalry among international suitors for the beautiful pagan princess, Angelica. In adapting this story for the stage, Greene crucially reverses the concluding events as presented in his source. In Ariosto's version, Angelica willingly marries the Saracen warrior Medor, sending his Christian rival Orlando into a fit of temporary madness, which he overcomes through the therapeutic slaughter of Saracens on the battlefield. In Greene's version, however, Angelica's preference for Medor turns out to be a false rumor and she winds up marrying Orlando. Thus, the triumph that produces the play's happy ending depends less on Orlando's battlefield prowess in Christian crusade than on his heroic rescue of the pagan princess from the literally unthinkable charge that she loved his Muslim rival. In effect, Greene's adaptation elevates the stakes of this potential sexual union by making its consummation or prevention the determining factor between a tragic or comic resolution.

If I have attempted throughout this book to expose the gendered and proto-racial stakes of Christian conversion to Islam, the following analysis considers how the adaptation of Ariosto's episodic plot into a dramatic stage play lays bare the cultural stakes that are necessary to produce a comic ending. My reading is intentionally schematic in order to emphasize the rigid logic that determines how a story of interfaith seduction, resistance, and redemption can play out in the genres of the stage.