Abstract

This brief treatment of Ugolino's sin against God and against his own children assumes that the reader neither cares for nor requires presentation of the ample catalogue of opinions that variously put forward the nobility, humanity, and pathos conveyed by the anguished monologue of the traitorous count. Since the classic statement by Francesco De Sanctis, readers of the episode have been mainly convinced that its central emotional experience involves what De Sanctis calls “the drama of paternity.” My task here is not to debate the degree of sympathy that Dante expected his reader to feel for Ugolino, despite his palpable sins, but to demonstrate that the text demands from us a pivotal awareness of the literary resonance of the words which he speaks. Once we become aware of the source of his plangent narrative, which contains more words for sadness and weeping than any other in the Commedia, we may begin to understand that the “drama” of Ugolino's paternity should enlist our sympathy less than our dispassionate analysis of his response to the pleas of his children, no matter how intensely moved we may be by their and their father's torment