Orlando: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

Orlando swings his sword at the severed head of a Moor hanging from the rafters in the attic of his father’s “gigantic,” and old, house. “He—for there can be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it,” the biographer writes, is eager to ride, like his father and grandfather, “in the barbarian fields of Africa.” There, they strike “many heads of many colors off many shoulders,” and then they bring the heads “back to hang from the rafters.” But Orlando is only 16, so he can only “lunge and plunge” at the “Pagan” head in the attic.

Orlando’s family has always been noble. They arrived from “the northern mists wearing coronets on their heads,” and their massive family estate is proof of this. Large stained-glass windows line the vast attic, and Orlando walks over to one and opens it. The attic is bathed in a myriad of red, blue, and yellow light, “like a butterfly’s wing,” and it illuminates “the shapely legs, the handsome body, and the well-set shoulders” of Orlando. His face is lit by the “heraldic light,” and the biographer who narrates the book celebrates their luck in having such a beautiful subject: “Happy the mother who bears, happier still the biographer who records the life of such a one!”

Orlando’s cheeks are red and “covered with peach down,” and his lips sit perfectly “over teeth of an exquisite and almond whiteness.” His nose is “short” and his hair “dark,” and his eyes are “like drenched violets.” the narrator, however, does “admit” to “a thousand disagreeables,” but “it is the aim of every good biographer to ignore” them. Orlando is “disturbed” by the sight of his mother in the garden below, but the sounds and sights of the garden appeals to his love of nature. His head begins to spin in a “riot and confusion” of “passion and emotions which every good biographer detests,” the narrator claims.

Orlando goes to a desk and opens a writing book with the title, “Æthelbert: A Tragedy in Five Acts,” and quickly writes out 10 pages of poetry in 10 minutes. Orlando is “fluent,” but “abstract,” and he never writes a line in the way he would speak. Such language is the mark of the 16th century, the narrator notes. Like all other poets, Orlando is “forever describing nature,” and this is where he is stalled now. “Green in nature is one thing,” the narrator suggests, “green in literature another.” There is a “natural antipathy” between nature and letters; “bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.” Frustrated, Orlando stands and walks out of the attic, striking his foot on a chest in the process—Orlando is a “trifle clumsy.”

Orlando avoids his family and the household staff as he moves through the house. “The biographer should here call attention to the fact that this clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude,” the narrator writes. Orlando loves “solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.” Outside the huge mansion, Orlando can see the English Channel in the distance, as well as “the spires of London.” His family’s estate takes up most of the countryside in immediate view, including his father’s house, as well as his uncle’s and aunt’s. After about an hour of aimless wandering outdoors, Orlando hears a “shrill sound” come from his father’s house and the servants spring into action, dashing back and forth in the dimly lit windows. The Queen has arrived.

Orlando runs back to the house and darts up the staircase. In his room, he “dips his head” and washes his hands. He trims his nails and changes his clothes, putting on “crimson breeches, lace collar, waistcoat of taffeta, and shoes with rosettes” using only two candles for light and “six inches of looking-glass.” He is ready in less than 10 minutes, but he is “terribly late.” Orlando runs downstairs, past the servants’ dinner table, where a “rather fat, rather shabby man” sits holding a pen. Orlando stops. “Is this a poet?” he wonders. “Is he writing poetry?” Orlando has “the wildest, most absurd, extravagant ideas about poets and poetry.” He hesitates. “Tell me,” he wants to say, “everything in the whole world.”

The shabby man quickly writes down several lines and then looks directly at Orlando. Struck by his “shyness,” Orlando runs away, toward the Queen’s receiving line, where he drops to his knees and bows his head. The Queen approaches immediately and accepts the bowl of rose water Orlando holds up as a gift. Orlando doesn’t look up, and he can only see her hand as she takes the bowl. It is a “commanding hand,” but also “nervous, crabbed, [and] sickly.” If Orlando were to raise his head, he would see the Queen’s “light yellow” eyes, as well as her furs and “brocades and gems.”

Likewise, the Queen is only able to see the top of Orlando’s head and the “long, curled hair” bent before her. Orlando’s head and hair “implies a pair of the finest legs that a young nobleman has ever stood upright upon; and violet eyes; and a heart of gold,” but he never once looks up. That night, as Orlando sleeps “in ignorance,” the Queen gifts the “great monastic house that had been the Archbishop’s and then the King’s to Orlando’s father.”

Two years later, Orlando receives an invitation from the Queen to join her court at Whitehall. “Here,” the Queen says as Orlando arrives, “comes my innocent!” To her, Orlando is “the very image of a noble gentleman,” and, on the inside (she can “read him like a page”), he is full of “strength, grace, romance, folly, poetry, [and] youth.” Pulling a ring from the “swollen” joint of her finger, the Queen presents it to Orlando and names him her “Treasurer and Steward.” She then bestows upon him the “jeweled order of the Garter,” and from that day forward, Orlando is never “denied” a thing.

The Queen, who knows “a man” when she sees one, deeply loves Orlando. She gives him land and houses and calls him “the son of her old age; the limb of her infirmity.” That winter, as the snow begins to fall, the Queen sees in the mirror (which she keeps “for fear of spies”), through the door (which is always open “for fear of murderers”) a boy kissing a girl. “Could it be Orlando?” the Queen wonders. “Who in the Devil’s name is the brazen hussy?” The Queen grabs her sword and “violently” strikes the mirror, shattering the glass. From that day on, she is “stricken” and prone to “groaning” of “man’s treachery.”

It is, perhaps, Orlando’s “fault,” the narrator writes, but “are we to blame him?” It is, after all, the Elizabethan age. Their morals are different, as well as their poets. Their weather, too, is different and has “another temper altogether.” The food is different, and the light is different—“Everything is different.” Elizabethan poets sing “beautifully” of “roses” and “violence,” and what the poets write “in rhyme, the young people translate into practice.” So, the biographer concludes, “if Orlando follows the leading of the climate, of the poets, of the age itself, […] we can scarcely bring ourselves to blame him.”

“As for the girl,” the narrator writes of the “brazen hussy” kissing Orlando, “we know no more than Queen Elizabeth herself.” The girl could have been anyone, for Orlando’s “taste” is “broad.” His grandmother “had worn a smock and carried milk pails,” and this mix of “brown earth and blue blood” gave him a certain “liking for low company, especially for that of lettered people whose wits so often keep them under.” Orlando is fond of going to pubs and bars, “wrapped in a grey cloak to hide the star at his neck and the garter as his knee,” where he listens to the stories of sailors. There, the women sit on his knee and put their arms around his neck, and they suspect “that something out of the common lay hid beneath his duffle cloak.”

But Orlando soon grows disillusioned with the “primitive manners of the people” and returns to court, where “many ladies” are “ready to show him their favours.” Orlando first meets Clorinda, a “sweet-mannered gentle lady,” and dates her for nearly six months, but she has “white eyelashes” and can’t stand the sight of blood or roasted meet. She is also “much under the influence of the Priests,” and when she tries to “reform Orlando of his sins, which sickens him,” he stops calling on her.

Clorinda tragically catches smallpox and dies, and Orlando meets Favilla, the daughter of a poor man from Somersetshire, who “had worked her way up at court” with her “assiduity” and eyes. One day, Orlando witnesses Favilla beat a dog that had ripped her silk stocking (of which she had few, the narrator points out). Forever a “passionate lover of animals,” Orlando suddenly notices that Favilla’s teeth are “crooked,” which “is a sure sign of a perverse and cruel disposition in woman,” so he breaks off the relationship.

Next, Orlando meets Euphrosyne, as he calls her in his sonnets, and she is “the most serious of his flames.” She is of noble birth like Orlando, and her family tree is “old and deeply rooted.” Euphrosyne is “fair, florid, and a trifle phlegmatic,” but she is “never without a whippet or spaniel at her knee.” She will make a perfect wife for Orlando, and by the time of the Great Frost, the lawyers are busy drawing up contracts.

All of England seems to freeze with the Great Frost. Birds freeze in flight, and cattle and sheep drop dead from the cold across the country. Entire herds of swine freeze in the middle of a country roads, and all the trade and the economy come to a halt. As the people “suffer,” London enjoys “a carnival of the utmost brilliancy.” The frozen city is decorated and lit up, and the people dance among the frozen ships and people near London Bridge. Orlando is “clumsy,” and as he brings “his feet together” in dance, at “about six in the evening of the seventh of January,” he notices a mysterious figure skating on the ice.

The figure emerges from the Muscovite Embassy, and, since their clothes—“[a] loose tunic and trousers of the Russian fashion”—obscure their gender, Orlando knows not if the figure is a man or woman. It must be a man, Orlando thinks, for “no woman” can “skate with such speed and vigor.” As the figure moves closer, however, he can make out the shape of breasts beneath the tunic—it is a woman. Orlando “stares” and “trembles,” he “turns hot” then “cold,” and longs to be with her. Suddenly, he remembers Lady Euphrosyne “upon his arm.”

The woman’s name is Princess Marousha Staniloska Dagmar Natasha Iliana Romanovich, but Orlando will come to call her Sasha, and she is the daughter, or perhaps the niece, of the Muscovite Ambassador. Her time at court has been trying, as no one speaks Russian, and she doesn’t speak English. Sasha speaks French as well, but very few at court can speak that language either. One night at dinner, after attempting to talk to two nobles, Sasha gives up all hope of communicating and asks Orlando to pass the salt. “With all the pleasure in the world, Madame,” Orlando says in French as he hands Sasha the salt.

After the incident with the saltshaker, the “intimacy” between Orlando and Sasha becomes “the scandal of the Court.” Orlando begins to pay Sasha “far more attention than mere civility demands,” and even though no one can understand the French language they speak, their “unintelligible speech” is accompanied by “blushes and laughter.” Orlando begins to “change.” He becomes “animated” and “full of grace and manly courtesy.” He is, of course, “betrothed to another,” but when Euphrosyne (whose real name is Lady Margaret) drops her handkerchief, Orlando never picks it up, and when she falls skating on the ice, he does not run to her.

Orlando doesn’t try to hide his feelings for Sasha, and he frequently finds reason to spend time with her. One day, Sasha says to Orlando, “Take me away. I detest your English mob.” Her homeland of Russia is sparsely populated, and she detests the hoards of people at court. They smell “bad,” she says, and it is much “like being in a cage.” Orlando and Sasha skate up a secluded bend in the frozen river, where, “hot with skating and with love,” Orlando “takes [Sasha] in his arms,” and he “knows, for the first time, […] the delights of love.”

Orlando tells Sasha of his other loves, who, “compared with her,” are nothing but “wood,” “sackcloth,” and “cinders.” Suddenly, Orlando falls “into one of his moods of melancholy.” Anything can precipitate such a mood, or nothing at all, and Orlando throws himself on the ice, thinking of nothing but death. “All ends in death,” Orlando says to Sasha. “All ends in death.” She “stares at him,” or perhaps “sneers at him,” as he showers her with compliments. She is like “snow, cream, marble, cherries, alabaster, golden wire,” he says. He decides these words are all inadequate—she is “like a fox.”

Sasha is quiet as Orlando talks. When he is done recounting his entire family history, he asks Sasha about her own. She answers politely but seems distant. There is a sudden “awkwardness” between them that Orlando can’t quite put his finger on. They decide to skate farther up the river, where the Russian ship sits waiting. Sasha has forgotten some things on the ship, she says, and they climb aboard to find them. They soon come upon a young Russian man, and after a short exchange with Sasha in Russian, he agrees to help her retrieve her belongings.

As Orlando waits for Sasha, he thinks about Euphrosyne. He is set to marry her soon, but it all seems “so palpably absurd” that he can’t bear to keep thinking of it. Her family will be angry, and his friends will “deride him,” but he has made up his mind. He will go to Russia with Sasha. After an hour, Orlando grows impatient and goes to look for Sasha. He finds her in the hold of the ship sitting on the Russian man’s knee, locked in an embrace.

Suddenly, the light is “blotted out in a red cloud by [Orlando’s] rage,” and a “deadly sickness” comes over him. He falls to the floor and must drink a bit of brandy to “revive” himself. The man was simply helping her with a heavy box, Sasha says as she turns “red” and stomps her feet. She calls “upon her Gods to destroy her, if she, a Romanovitch, had lain in the arms of a common seaman.” Orlando “yields; believes her; and asks her pardon,” and they climb down the ladder of the ship. On the way out, Sasha yells back to the man in Russian, but something about her tone reminds Orlando of the way Sasha speaks to him in French.

Back on the ice, Orlando and Sasha skate toward London. Sasha is “tenderer than usual and even more delightful. She talks of Russia and praises Orlando “for his love of beasts; for his gallantry; for his legs.” As night falls, “everything suffer[s] emaciation and transformation.” As they move closer to the carnival, Orlando can make out the people enjoying the festivities, and their privacy comes to an end. All of London is out, skating and telling fortunes, and many people stand facing a stage where a black man is “waving his arms and vociferating.”

On the stage, “a woman in white” lies upon a bed. The crowd yells and stomps their feet and throws scraps of food at the actors. To Orlando, however, the “sinuous melody of the words” are “like music.” The Moor’s “frenzy” on stage seems to be Orlando’s, and when the Moor suffocates the woman in the bed, killing her, it is Sasha whom he really kills. The play ends and all goes dark. Tears streak Orlando’s face as he looks to the sky. “Ruin and death,” he thinks, “cover all. The life of man ends in the grave. Worms devour us.”

“Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse / Of sun and moon, and that the affrighted globe / Should yawn—” Orlando says out loud. Suddenly, he remembers. “Jour de ma vie!” he cries to Sasha. Tonight, is the night. He will meet Sasha at an old inn where their horses are waiting, and they will flee together. But it is an hour before midnight when they are to meet, so they part and go to their tents.

Orlando arrives early and waits for Sasha in the dark. He paces the courtyard listening carefully for footsteps in the dark. He hears only merchants heading home and women “of the quarter” whose “errands” are not “so innocent.” Few lanterns light the street, and while Orlando listens for every footstep, he hears nothing of Sasha’s. She is to arrive by herself, clothed “in her cloak and trousers, booted like a man.”

Suddenly, Orlando is “struck in the face by a blow, soft, yet heavy, on the side of his cheek.” He is hit again and again, and it takes him a moment to realize it is raining. Softly and slowly at first, then a forceful and torrential downfall that quickly soaks Orlando. Steam rises from the ground, and the heavy pounding of the rain drowns out the sound of approaching footsteps. Then, he hears the clock tower in the distance strike midnight. Orlando’s “superstitious” side tells him Sasha will arrive by the sixth strike of the hour, but she doesn’t. By the twelfth and final strike, Orlando knows “the truth.” As the other clocks strike around London, the entire world seems “to ring with the news of her deceit and his derision.”

Orlando stands unmoving until he hears the clock strike two, then he climbs on his horse and begins to ride. He doesn’t know where he is going, but he is heading in the direction of the river and the sea. He soon finds himself near the Thames and discovers that the river has “gained its freedom in the night.” The water is moving again, and icebergs of every imaginable size float everywhere. People, caught out on the ice during the festival, are trapped on floating icebergs, sweeping out to sea. Orlando can faintly hear them “crying vainly for help,” and some even jump into the water and try to grab the golden goblets and various treasures that bob in the debris-filled water.

As Orlando stares at the river, “a cat suckling its young” floats by on an iceberg, followed by “a table laid sumptuously for a supper of twenty” and “a couple in bed.” Orlando rides up the river a bit more, to where he can see the Ambassadors’ ships anchored out at sea. They are all there—the French, Spanish, and Austrian—but not the Russian ship. Orlando begins to wonder if it has sunk, and then he looks to the horizon. He can vaguely see the outline of the Russian ship moving out to sea. Standing in the water, Orlando yells at Sasha “all the insults that have ever been the lot of her sex,” and the rushing waters of the Thames “took his words, and tossed at his feet a broken pot and a little straw.”