ABSTRACT
Dante’s cantos in the Divine Comedy are each approximately 130 lines. He seems attentive to the word’s root meaning (from cantare ‘to sing’) and to have decided that between 40 and 50 tercets are as much as can or should be ‘sung’ at one time. His episodes are short, so there are often as many as two or three in a single canto; and only rarely does the end of a canto coincide with the end of an episode. Ariosto’s cantos in Orlando furioso vary widely in length but average almost 1000 lines. Their most distinctive feature is their use as a means of creating or sustaining suspense, rather like the end of a chapter in a novel or fadeout in a soap opera which halts and suspends one strand of a multiple, intertwined story at a moment of high piquancy, excitement, or danger.
