Tales From the Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio

by Giovanni Boccaccio

  As for the actual design of the Decameron, there are many other significant pointers in the earlier works. One instance is the passage in the Fiammetta in which the narrator/protagonist reminisces nostalgically about excursions undertaken with her young Neapolitan fellow-patricians to Baiae, a location with strong classical associations where the remains of the ancient Roman Baths of Venus, the Terme di Venere, are still in evidence. There the hotter part of the day would be devoted, by the ladies themselves or in the company of young men (o le donne per sé, o mescolate co’ giovani), to amorous discussions (amorosi ragionamenti), with music and dancing and singing as their other diversions. And similar scenes are portrayed, both in the Amorosa visione and in one of the author’s best-known sonnets, beginning

  Intorn’ad una fonte, in un pratello

  di verdi erbette pieno e di bei fiori,

  sedeano tre angliolette, i loro amori

  forse narrando.7

  The choice of verb here (narrando) would seem to be significant, but more importantly the passage is a good example of a recurrent leitmotif in Boccaccio’s work: the locus amœnus inhabited by nymph-like maidens who talk of love. And it was perhaps inevitable that just such a setting should eventually form the backdrop to the hundred tales. All that was lacking was a suitable pretext to lend an air of realism to the circumstances in which the stories were claimed to have been told and, from this point of view, the public calamity of 1348 was for Boccaccio an event that had a positive aspect. For it enabled him not only to make it seem entirely natural that the stories were told in the way he pretends, but to apply his considerable descriptive and rhetorical skills to the structurally vital account of the plague and the ruinous social upheaval it produced, both in Florence and elsewhere in Europe.

  Following the practice he had adopted earlier in the Filocolo, the Filostrato and the Teseida, Boccaccio gave his collection of tales a Greek title, meaning ‘Ten Days’ and referring to the ten separate days widiin a period of two weeks during which the stories were supposed to have been told. The tradition of hellenizing titles, which originated with Virgil, is associated with the epic, and the Decameron is often characterized as the epic of the Florentine merchant class, which, by the middle of the fourteenth century, had asserted itself as the dominant social force of medieval Italy. But more specifically, the title of Boccaccio’s vernacular masterpiece is modelled upon a work of a very different kind, written a thousand years earlier by St Ambrose: the series of commentaries on Old Testament narratives known as the Hexaemeron. The contrast in subject matter between the two works could hardly be more pronounced, and it lends to the title of Boccaccio’s book a subtle irony, almost certainly intentional in origin.

  As for the storytelling, it is represented as having begun on a Wednesday in the early summer of 1348 and ended on a Tuesday two weeks later, no tales having been told on Fridays or Saturdays for reasons both religious and practical, which are carefully spelt out by the newly appointed queen, Neifile, at the end of the Second Day. Those two days, she says, are rather tedious, because they are days given over to prayer and fasting, Friday to commemorate the Passion of Our Lord, and Saturday out of reverence to His Mother, and also because the ladies are wont to wash their hair on Saturdays, so as to remove the dust and grime of the week’s endeavours. One other reason Neifile gives for desisting from storytelling on Saturday afternoons is that the approach of Sunday should be honoured by resting from one’s labours.

  So much for the title of the work and its significance. When one comes to consider its precise form, numerous antecedents for collections of tales may be found, as well as for the literary device whereby such compilations are inserted within a frame-narrative, known to generations of Italians as the cornice (‘frame’), a term which critics of the present day, after seemingly endless debate, tend to regard as misleading because it suggests that its purpose is merely decorative. Before the Decameron, the most important collection of tales in Italian was the anonymous Novellino, composed probably towards the end of the thirteenth century and consisting of a hundred anecdotes, for the most part very brief and narrated in a manner that is simple to the point, sometimes, of crudity. Some of the stories of the Decameron, for instance the tale of the three rings (I, 3), draw the substance of their narrative from the Novellino, but Boccaccio made more extensive use of other material. One of his most fertile sources was the collection of narratives in French verse known as fabliaux, notable for their brevity, humour and impropriety, to which he would have had ready access in the French-speaking milieu where his literary apprenticeship was served. Equally fruitful as a source of narrative material were the moralizing collections of exempta, generally written in Latin, whose primary purpose was to furnish edifying anecdotes for embellishment in church sermons. One of the most popular and influential of these collections was the Disciplina clericalis compiled by Peter Alphonsi, born in 1062, an erudite scholar and physician to King Alphonso I of Aragon. Boccaccio’s sources also included medieval chronicles, both in Latin and Italian, and occasionally his stories have their origin in classical Latin literature, in particular the works of his favourite Latin authors, Ovid and Apuleius. It was from the latter, in fact, that he borrowed, whether directly or through an intermediate medieval Latin text, the broad outlines of the tales concerning the sodomitical husband, Pietro di Vinciolo (V, 10), and Peronella and the tub (VII, 2). The second of these stories contains whole phrases translated literally from Apuleius, whilst the fact that Boccaccio was well acquainted with Ovid’s Metamorphoses is attested by his having transcribed it, in a manuscript still preserved in the Florentine Biblioteca Laurenziana, at around the time when he was working on the Decameron.

  From a structural viewpoint, however, the most obvious of the Decameron’s antecedents were the collections of stories that had originated in the East during the early Middle Ages and were circulating, in translation, throughout western Europe in Boccaccio’s own lifetime. One such collection was the Panchatantra, literally The Five Heads, originally written in Sanskrit at some time before AD 500, which, like the Decameron, takes the form of a frame-story containing several other stories. Occasionally, this basic design is further complicated by the insertion of yet another story within the story being told, so that the structure resembles that of a Chinese box, with its succession of interior spaces. Traces of this procedure may be glimpsed, also, in the Decameron, where the author sometimes makes his fictive storytellers preface their tales with an account of how or by whom the tale was originally told. The most obvious instance of this distancing device is the story of Federigo degli Alberighi and his precious falcon (V, 9), where the narrator, Fiam-metta, attributes the tale she is about to relate to one Coppo di Borghese Domenichi, to whom she devotes a fulsome tribute in her opening remarks.

  If, as seems likely, Boccaccio knew the Panchatantra, it was probably in the considerably modified Latin version of the work, Liber Kelilae et Dimnae, otherwise known as the Directorium humanae vitae, which John of Capua produced around 1270. John’s version was based, by way of a Hebrew translation, upon the eighth-century Arabic version of the text, Kalilah wa Dimna, which in turn was based upon a sixth-century Pahlavi, or Old Persian, translation from the original Sanskrit. The names Kalilah and Dimnah were those of two jackals in the first of the Panchatantra’s five books, which, designed originally as a Mirror for Princes, or Fürstenspiegel, uses the Aesopian device of narrating animal fables in order to impart a moral – in this case, that guile and cunning are essential in the management of human affairs. In view of the prominence accorded to the role of intelligence in the Decameron, it could be argued that the affinity between Boccaccio’s collection of tales and these oriental fables is not only structural but also thematic.

  The Panchatantra, also known as The Fables of Bidpai (or Pilpay), from the word bidbah, which was the name given to the chief scholar at the court of an Indian prince, was not the sole oriental antecedent for a collection of tales boxed within a frame-story.Anothe
r compendium, perhaps still more germane to an understanding of the genesis of the Decameron, was the collection of eastern tales which entered western literature by way of Greek, Latin and French versions, commonly known as The Seven Wise Masters. This recounts the story of an emperor whose son is alleged by his stepmother to have attempted to seduce her, whereupon the son is sentenced to death. (There is an evident parallel between this narrative and the tale of the Count of Antwerp and the Queen of France which forms the subject of the eighth novella of the Decameron’s, Second Day.) The son is unable to refute his stepmother’s allegation because she has caused him to lose the power of speech for a period of seven days, during which time the emperor’s seven advisers, who represent the seven liberal arts, in turn supply the emperor with a story that reveals the cunning of women and the evils of summary jurisdiction. Their advice is nullified by the wicked queen, who each night relates a tale to the emperor designed to strengthen his resolve to carry out the sentence. When the seven days have elapsed, the young prince, having regained the use of his tongue, tells his father a tale which embodies the whole truth, thus exposing the malice of the queen, who gets her deserts (by prevailing oriental standards) by being burned at the stake.

  As in the case of the Panchatantra, so with The Seven Wise Masters (in Italian, Il libro dei sette savi), the work’s affinity to the Decameron is not just a question of external structure, for of Boccaccio’s fictive narrators the seven female members of the so-called ‘happy band’ (lieta brigata) all possess in full measure the quality of wisdom (saviezza) that distinguishes the storytellers in the earlier work. Each of the seven young ladies is described from the start as being wise (savia ciascuna), whereas the three young men are introduced merely as being very agreeable and gently bred (assai piacevole e costumato ciascuno).

  It is with the structural analogy, however, that one is here more closely concerned, and in this connection one should note that both in The Seven Wise Masters (otherwise known, incidentally, as the Dolopathos) and in the Decameron, the telling of stories is the means whereby the spectre of imminent death is held at a manageable distance, in the one case death by execution, in the other, death from bubonic plague. The classic example of this sort of structural scheme is The Thousand and One Nights, but it may also be seen in the eighth and ninth books of the Metamorphoses, or Golden Ass, of Apuleius, some of whose stories are, as already noted, the ultimate source for tales found in the Decameron.

  In devising the frame of his narrative masterpiece, Boccaccio doubtless took account of many other precedents, for instance the dialogues of Cicero and the Saturnalia of Macrobius, a work that seems to have influenced the scheme of the questioni episode in the Filocolo. But no amount of source hunting can obscure the fact that the frame of the Decameron is a unique and original creation, the product of a fertile and imaginative intellect which had already supplied the impetus for several of the more important genres of western literature.

  In view of what has already been said about the Decameron’s oriental antecedents, in particular about the occasional complexity of their boxed structure, it is of interest to note that what is usually referred to as the cormice (i.e. the world of the storytellers) is in reality a frame-within-a-frame. Much critical attention has been focused in recent years on the Decameron’s structure, and many elaborate and ingenious theories about it have been given an airing, but in essence what the reader is presented with is a threefold structural scheme. The three levels on which the Decameron works could be defined, for the sake of clarity, as the world of the author, the world of the narrators, and the world of the narratives. The reader is introduced to the first of these worlds in the Prologue, on the surface autobiographical but in reality reflecting a widely used literary convention resorted to by the author in several of his earlier writings. Thus the world of the author, like the other two worlds, is itself a literary fiction, for in the Prologue he claims to be pursuing a natural human instinct by displaying compassion for the sufferings of others, in particular the sufferings caused by unrequited love, and he pretends that this is the sole raison d’être of the entire work. Having himself undergone and recovered from such an experience, Boccaccio writes, he is well qualified to prescribe a form of solace, which he intends to offer to ladies rather than to men, as the latter have many alternative ways of diverting their thoughts from the cause of their afflictions. For the sake, then, of ladies in the throes of love, he proposes

  to tell a hundred tales, or fables or parables or histories, call them what you will, told in ten days by a worthy group of seven ladies and three young men formed in the recent season of deadly pestilence, along with certain songs that were sung by the ladies for their pleasure.8

  Boccaccio’s alternative designation of his tales as ‘fables or parables or histories’ reflects with curious precision the three main sources of his narrative material: the French fabliaux, the Latin exempla and the Italian and Latin medieval chronicles. But why he should have attributed the canzonette to the ladies alone in this passage, rather than to all ten members of the brigata, which was the scheme he was eventually to adopt, is not at once apparent. The explanation tentatively offered by Vittore Branca is that the author originally intended that all ten songs should be sung by the ladies. But this is merely the first of several points in the work where Boccaccio seems to overlook the presence and participation, within the world of the narrators, of the three young men. It is therefore more likely that he at first envisaged his collection of tales as having a septenary structure, a thesis which has been persuasively argued by Giorgio Padoan.9 The fact that already, in the pages of the Comedía delle ninfe fiorentine, he had employed in rudimentary outline just such a structural scheme, and that the seven young nymphs of the earlier work were explicitly presented as embodying the seven virtues, seems significant in this connection, implying as it does that he had similar allegorical intentions in planning the structure of his major work. The Prologue is the first of three passages in the Decameron in which the author explicitly addresses his readers concerning his aims and intentions, the others being the Introduction to the Fourth Day and the author’s concluding remarks (Conclusione dell’autore). All three of these passages are characterized by an ambivalent, tongue-in-cheek intonation, and it would be unwise to interpret them too literally, but the theories they embody concerning the function of literature provide some sort of insight into Boccaccio’s view of art and society.

  In all three passages, the impression is studiously fostered that the Decameron is written exclusively for ladies suffering from the pangs of unrequited love, and the author claims to be offering them his comfort and advice. But if one probes below the surface of this outward declaration of his intentions, it is very soon apparent that he is addressing himself to a much wider readership, and that the three passages in question, especially the second and third, have a very different object. Their purpose, in fact, is to establish the aesthetic validity of the literary genre, narrative prose fiction, to which the Decameron belongs. Before Boccaccio, no one in western Europe had ever considered prose fiction to be worthy of serious study, and for more than a century after his death it continued to be regarded as a frivolous literary pursuit. One of his most distinguished successors in this branch of literature, Franco Sacchetti (1335–1400), author of the collection of stories known as the Trecentonovelle, describes himself as a ‘uomo discolo e grosso’ (‘a crude, unlearned man’), though in fact he was nothing of the sort. The note of self-deprecation is found in the Prologue to his collection, where a handsome tribute to Boccaccio is qualified by a phrase suggesting that, in some respects, his predecessor’s outstanding genius had been misapplied.

  No such doubts can ever have assailed Boccaccio, who seems intent, in the three passages he addresses to the reader, on proving the worthiness of the task to which he has committed himself. The Prologue, with its fictive explanation of the origins and the objectives of the Decameron, is marked by a tone of extreme self-assurance and, from
a technical viewpoint, by a virtuoso display of several of the most admired procedures of medieval rhetoric, the so-called ars dictandi. The opening words conform to the widely accepted practice of beginning with a proverb, in this case that it is human to take pity on people in distress (umana cosa è aver compassione degli afflitti). A similar opening statement is found in the Fiammetta,10 but in the earlier work it was much more elaborate and carried far less impact. Here it is pithy and direct, and rounded off by a rhetorical feature that occurs again and again in the Prologue, and partly accounts for its distinctive tone of high seriousness: the metrical sequence known as the cursus planus, consisting of a dactyl followed by a spondee (e.g. dégli afflítti). Another rhetorical feature woven into the opening, and reminiscent of the initial sonnet of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, is the nostalgic evocation of an all-consuming love. But whereas in Petrarch, and for that matter in the stilnovisti, where this poetic motif is most extensively explored and elaborated upon, the love is platonic or unrequited or both, in Boccaccio there is a strong suggestion of reciprocity. The reason it caused him so much suffering, he is careful to stress, was not the cruelty of his lady-love, but the immoderate passion engendered within his mind by a craving that was ill-restrained.11

  However, it is in the second ad lectorem passage, the Introduction to the Fourth Day, that the polemical intention of these authorial interventions (i.e. to establish the credentials of the genre in which Boccaccio was writing) can best be observed. It begins with a paragraph on Envy, which is likened to a fiery and impetuous wind whose effects, as the author disingenuously explains in an image borrowed from Dante, are normally felt in the highest of high places. Why then should the stories he has so far written, and which are already in circulation, have attracted so much hostile comment? After all, they are no more than novellette (‘little tales’) which bear no title and are written, not only in the Florentine vernacular and in prose, but in the most homely, unassuming style that anyone could imagine. Whatever the meaning of the phrase senza titolo (and it possibly connotes no more than ‘unpretentious’, though Boccaccio used the same phrase elsewhere to describe Ovid’s Amores, in order to indicate the discontinuity of its material), it is obvious that he is here adopting an extreme defensive posture and that heavy irony is his chosen weapon. For the tales of the first three days, already circulating, are written in a style that is elegant to a fault, and more than worthy of stylistic comparison to any vernacular prose works (including those of Dante) which had preceded them. The false modesty of his description of the tales so far written is of course an example of a conventional medieval literary posture, seen also in several of his earlier works and in those of other writers such as Petrarch, who referred to his great series of vernacular poems, the Canzoniere, as nugellae, or there trifles, and who was well aware of their exceptional worth, even if he did regard his costive Latin epic, the Africa, as the work by which posterity would measure his poetic stature. In spite of Dante’s magnificent example, vernacular writing continued to be treated with distrust, and it was evidently for this reason, among others, that Boccaccio felt the need to justify his choice of linguistic medium for his prose masterpiece. As for the self-effacing phrase he uses to describe his style (istilo umilissimo e rimesso), it should be noted that his commentary on the first seventeen cantos of Inferno (Esposizioni sopra la Comedía di Dante) includes a very similar phrase to refer to the ‘comic’ style of Dante’s poem (lo stilo comico è umile e rimesso).