HELEN Cooper's observation that the Charlemagne romances in England ‘barely made the transition’ from the Middle Ages into post-medieval culture is, as far as can be judged from the extant evidence, an accurate diagnosis for the Middle English verse texts. Unlike Guy of Warwick or Sir Isumbras, both also notable warriors on behalf of Christendom, Roland and Oliver did not have their heroic victories over Saracen opponents perpetuated in print, either as romance narratives or in chapbook retellings. Even the protagonists of Caxton's prose romance The Four Sons of Aymon, which was well known in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and frequently reprinted, did not thereafter join King Arthur's knights and Robin Hood's men in the repertoire of popular heroes in English culture, although the lost play The Four Sons of Aymon (c. 1581) was apparently still being performed in 1624.

Stories of Charlemagne and Roland were re-presented to insular audiences in the form of Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, translated by Sir John Harington (1591). The first stanza sets the familiar scene, ‘when the Moores transported all their might | On Affrick seas the force of France to breake’, seeking revenge against ‘the Romane Emperour Charlemaine’ (I, 3–4, 8). Harington's annotations on ‘The Historie’ of each book explain and comment on the connections to the ‘historical’ Charlemagne he discerns in Ariosto's highly complex romance, but the favourite insular stories of Roland and Otuel and of Oliver and Ferumbras do not feature (though there is a recollection of Roland's fight with Vernagu in the story of Orlando's protracted single combat against the almost-invincible Spanish knight Ferraw). Orlando Furioso, dramatized by Robert Greene (c. 1590), was possibly also one of the influences on Charlemagne, or The Distracted Emperor, an anonymous drama (c. 1604) preserved only in a seventeenth-century manuscript collection of plays (BL MS Egerton 1994), but which was apparently performed more than once. The play's prominent theme of corruption and treachery is staged through the actions of Ganelon, paralleling his heightened role in the Middle English retellings of the story of Roncevaux, while his ambition to supplant Charlemagne as king of France reflects the similar desire of Ganelon in the insular Fierabras tradition, though it is impossible to know how far, if at all, these insular developments influenced the play's adaptation of the Charlemagne legend.