Tales From the Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio

by Giovanni Boccaccio

  ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.’

  (Inferno, XXVI, 119–20) need to observe certain standards of behaviour (‘We could go and stay together on one of our country estates, shunning at all costs the lewd practices of our fellow citizens and feasting and merrymaking as best we may without in any way overstepping the bounds of what is reasonable’), and this same concern for propriety is seen in her spirited declaration that ‘it is no more unseemly for us to go away and preserve our honour [I’onestamente andare] than it is for most other women to remain and forfeit theirs [lo star disonesta-mente].’ When one of her companions, Neifile, objects that their retreat to the country in young men’s company will bring disgrace and censure upon them all, she is promptly told (by Filomena this time) that if a woman lives honestly and with a clear conscience, then people may say whatever they like, for God and Truth will defend her.

  These are noble sentiments, totally in keeping with the aristocratic ethos which informs the world of the lieta brigata, whose impeccable and carefully regulated mode of existence, with its leisurely, civilized daily routine of bodily and spiritual refreshment, its country walks, its noontide siestas, its games and pastimes, its polite conversations, its singing, dancing, and decorous merrymaking, above all its delight in beauty, whether natural or created by man, reflects the Golden Age, the first and best age of the world, in which the poets of antiquity envisaged mankind in a state of ideal prosperity and happiness. Such an ideal world, the attractions of which are greatly enhanced by the circumstances of its creation in direct antithesis to the barbaric and anarchic urban life described by Boccaccio in the opening pages of the Introduction, can exist only in the imagination of the author and his readers, so tenuous is its connection with everyday reality. It is above all for this reason that none of the individual members of the lieta brigata, not even Dioneo with his penchant for non-conformity and mischievous humour, acquires credibility as a fully formed individual composed of flesh and blood.

  When one turns to the stories themselves, the unreality or artificiality of the frame becomes even more apparent. For although they, too, are exquisitely constructed literary artefacts, their events unfold within the orbit of common human experience, and they positively swarm with individuals who, however extraordinary or outrageous the situations in which they may have their being, are almost always convincing in purely psychological terms. This palpable contrast between the characters of the frame and the characters of the stories is only marginally due to differences (which in any case are relatively slight) in the manner of their presentation. The chief reason for the contrast lies elsewhere, in the fact that the lieta brigata inhabits an unreal world, the world of the artist as distinct from the world of man, and its members are, collectively, the personified abstractions of certain cherished ideals, doubtless associated in the mind of the author with the courtly Neapolitan society in which he had spent the years of his adolescence and early manhood, and to which in later life he was wont to look back with a profound sense of nostalgia.

  Whatever the frame’s personal overtones, it is clear that the society it depicts is aristocratic and élitist, and that the culture and refinement it embodies are far removed from the practical, workaday world with which Boccaccio is largely concerned in the novelle. This tonal antithesis between the world of the storytellers and the world of the narratives serves to highlight their separate, contrasting realities. But what the two worlds have in common is their persistent emphasis on the role of intelligence in human affairs. Of the eight days to which a single narrative topic is assigned, three are devoted specifically to stories concerned with quickness of wit or resourcefulness. The topic for the Sixth Day is ‘those who, on being provoked by some verbal pleasantry, have returned like for like, or who, by a prompt retort or shrewd manoeuvre, have avoided danger, discomfort or ridicule’. The tricks played by women upon their husbands form the subject-matter of the Seventh Day, whilst the Eighth Day is given over to tales about ‘tricks that people in general, men and women alike, are forever playing upon one another’. This last topic is one which could cover a large number of the remaining stories in the Decameron, and tales of verbal pleasantries are by no means confined to the Sixth Day, so that, viewed in its entirety, the Decameron is abundantly stocked with illustrations of human ingenuity.

  There is nothing unusual in this. Other collections of short stories, like the anonymous Novellino that preceded the Decameron and Franco Sacchetti’s Trecentonovelle that followed it, could be described in similar terms, and indeed it would be a dull series of narratives that did not accord an important role to the workings of people’s intelligence. What is interesting about Boccaccio’s treatment of the theme is his elevation of intelligence to a position in the scale of human values which places it on a par with the highest of the traditional virtues. This celebration of intelligence for its own sake is largely responsible for the ambiguous moral tone of the Decameron, a feature which forms a notorious stumbling-block for those critics and commentators who seek to extract from the work a coherent and consistent system of ethics.56

  The tone of moral ambiguity is established in the very first of the hundred tales, which concerns the arch-villain Ser Cepperello, who by making a false confession to a holy friar on his death-bed is reputed to be a saint, and is thereafter revered as Saint Ciappelletto. Cepperello is hired by a rich Italian merchant to recover certain loans in Burgundy, a province notorious for the lawlessness of its inhabitants, but shortly after his arrival there he falls mortally ill in the house of two Florentine money-lenders, with whom he has taken up lodging. His hosts are faced with an awkward dilemma. Knowing of his thoroughly evil past, they are certain that no priest will give him absolution, and that his body will be refused burial in consecrated ground, in which case, being already unpopular because of their profession, they will incur the open hostility of the locals, possibly forfeiting their property and their lives. If on the other hand they turn a dying man out of the house, their prospects will be no less bleak, for Cepperello, prior to his illness, had done nothing to offend the Burgundians, on the contrary issuing his first demands ‘in a gentle and amiable fashion that ran contrary to his nature’. Their conversation is overheard by their guest, who, as Boccaccio puts it in a characteristically acute psychological aside, ‘was sharp of hearing, as invalids invariably are’. He persuades them to send for the holiest and ablest friar they can find, to whom he makes a death-bed confession which convinces the friar that he has led an extraordinarily devout and blameless life, with the result that he not only receives Extreme Unction, but his body is carried in solemn procession to the nearby monastery, where it is buried with pomp and ceremony in a marble tomb, thereafter being held in such veneration by the Burgundians that he is known as Saint Ciappelletto. What is more, Boccaccio adds, it is claimed that through his intercession God has wrought many miracles, and that He continues to work them for the benefit of anyone who commends himself devoutly to this particular Saint.

  There are those who detect in the story of Ciappelletto a desire on Boccaccio’s part to ridicule the Church and religious practices in general, especially the cult of saints and the belief in miracles. But although an element of scepticism is undoubtedly woven into the narrative, at no point does it assume the vigorous polemical overtones observable elsewhere in the Decameron, for instance in the story of Tedaldo (III, 7) or of Friar Rinaldo (VII, 3), and the holy friar who receives Ciappelletto’s confession is presented in a more sympathetic light than most of the numerous friars, abbots, monks and priests of Boccaccio’s other novelle. In fact, as Erich Auerbach somewhat disapprovingly notes, Boccaccio adopts a completely neutral position vis-à-vis the singular events he describes, neither condemning nor approving the penitent’s sneering contempt for confession in the hour of death.57 It is true that the tale is prefaced and rounded off with a series of pious observations on the infinite and all-seeing mercy of God, but these are no more than deliberate set-pieces, designed it seems to avert t
he charge of irreligiousness which a bare recital of the narrative would otherwise certainly have provoked. Nor does the remarkable catalogue of Ciappelletto’s nefarious practices, concluding with the statement that ‘he was perhaps the worst man ever born’, imply, as Branca suggests,58 that Boccaccio is adopting a disapproving attitude towards the character. On the contrary, in the remainder of the tale Ciappelletto controls the situation so masterfully as to arouse the reader’s sneaking admiration.

  The lengthy description of Ciappelletto, establishing him as a forger, a liar, a hypocrite, a promoter of discord, a sadist, a psychopath, a blasphemer, an alcoholic, a pederast, a glutton, a gambler and a swindler is from the stylistic point of view quite unique in the Decameron, with the possible exception of the portrait of Gucci in the story of Friar Cipolla (VI, 10). The method normally used by Boccaccio to introduce his characters involves the communication of an absolute minimum of information, and the characters acquire depth and consistency through their participation in the narrative, rather than through what the author tells us about them. In departing from his normal practice for the tale of Ciappelletto, the author clearly had in mind the peculiar requirements of this particular narrative, which depends for its effect upon establishing from the very beginning that Ciappelletto is the personification of evil, that he is in fact ‘the worst man ever born’. Only then is it possible to savour to the full the crescendo of effrontery that marks Ciappelletto’s subsequent confession and that provides the story with its raison d’être. Unless the reader is made aware of the penitent’s grossly iniquitous past, the motivation for the false confession is non-existent and the narrative becomes meaningless. Hence the lengthy portrait of Ciappelletto is no more and no less than a narrative device, quite insusceptible to a moralistic reading. In other words, it tells the reader everything he needs to know about Ciappelletto, and nothing at all about Boccaccio except that he was a shrewd craftsman, aware of the need to adapt his technique to the demands of a particular story.

  What the tale of Ciappelletto, viewed as a whole, does tell us about Boccaccio is that he was alive to the paradoxes and inconsistencies of the established social order, and that he took a mischievous delight in directing attention towards them. There is no mistaking the tone of gleeful admiration in which he recounts Ciappelletto’s stage-by-stage deception of the saintly, unsuspecting friar, a process involving the creation of a fictitious persona completely antithetical to Ciappelletto’s true character. This contrast between appearance and reality, between seeming and being, is the fulcrum on which the opening tale of the Decameron is delicately balanced, and it would be possible to argue that it is one of the most prominent recurrent motifs of the work as a whole, that it is in fact the mainspring of the narrative process in the majority of the hundred tales.

  Another of the Decameron’s recurrent motifs, and one which has been analysed in some detail by Branca,59 is the entrepreneurial spirit that was so important a factor in establishing the economic prosperity of fourteenth-century Florence, and that seems to motivate a number of the characters in Boccaccio’s stories, or at least to form part of the background to many of the narratives. The more obvious examples of this are to be found in the Second Day, where the topic for discussion (‘those who after suffering a series of misfortunes are brought to a state of unexpected happiness’) is itself conducive to the telling of stories set in the business and mercantile world, with its attendant hazards and opportunities, its see-saw movements between the extremes of ruinous loss and prodigious profit. But the motif of commercial enterprise (in Branca’s phrase, the ragion di mercatura, which he sees as the dominant force of fourteenth-century Italy, as distinct from the ragion di stato of the Renaissance) is by no means confined to the stories of the Second Day. It is an important element in at least a score of the other novelle, and the Decameron as a whole, including the framework, reflects the mores and aspirations of the enterprising and industrious Florentine middle class which succeeded the feudal aristocracy of medieval Italy, and to which the author himself decidedly belonged.

  The ragion di mercatura provides a sort of key to the interpretation of many of the stories, but it requires to be used with discretion. In the case of Ciappelletto, for example, it has been suggested, by Branca, that Boccaccio is here expressing his distaste for the inhumane and unscrupulous practices through which vast private fortunes were frequently accumulated,60 or, to use a modern expression, what the author is doing is condemning the unacceptable face of capitalism. But an interpretation along these lines can be valid only if the narrator’s prefatory and concluding remarks are read as reliable pointers to the writer’s own opinion of Ciappelletto (instead of as the tongue-in-cheek declarations of piety that they patently are), and if moral as distinct from narrative significance is attached to certain passages, such as the one describing the main character as ‘perhaps the worst man ever born’ and the quite literally rhetorical question of the two money-lenders:

  ‘What manner of man is this, whom neither old age nor illness, nor fear of the death which he sees so close at hand, nor even the fear of God, before whose judgement he knows he must shortly appear, have managed to turn away from his evil ways, or persuade to die any differently from the way he has lived?’61

  The answer to their question is simply that Ciappelletto, unlike the majority of Boccaccio’s contemporaries, is an unbeliever, that he is supremely indifferent to the possibility of eternal damnation, a possibility which is non-existent so far as he is concerned. When the narrator, Panfilo, declares in his concluding remarks that Ciappelletto ‘should rather be in Hell, in the hands of the Devil, than in Paradise’, he is doing no more than expressing the sentiments of Boccaccio’s average reader, which do not necessarily coincide with those of the author himself. It is therefore at the very least dubious whether the author intended that the account of Ciappelletto’s death-bed confession should be read as a kind of cautionary tale against the dire consequences of shedding one’s scruples in the pursuit of the materialist goals of the ragion di mercatura.

  A much more fruitful way of applying the interpretative key of the ragion di mercatura is that suggested by Giovanni Getto,62 who uses it to rebut the view, first formulated by Croce,63 that Ciappelletto’s confession is the logical culminating tour deforce in the career of a master-artist in the craft of deception, that it is motivated by no more than the desire to die in the manner in which he had lived. Nero’s dying words, ‘Qualis artifex pereo’ (‘What an artist dies with me!’), correspond exactly, in the view of Croce and others,64 with the dying sentiments of Ciappelletto. But as Getto points out, Ciappelletto’s offer to assist his hosts in resolving their dilemma is motivated by stronger and more deeply inbred sentiments than these. When, having eavesdropped on the anxious conversation of the two money-lenders, he attempts to reassure them (‘I don’t want you to worry in the slightest on my account, nor to fear that I will cause you to suffer any harm. I heard what you were saying about me and I agree entirely that what you predict will actually come to pass, if matters take the course you anticipate; but they will do nothing of the kind’), he is in effect displaying the same kind of hard-headed business sense that had originally prompted his employer to commission his services as a debt-collector, and that the money-lenders themselves presumably possess. His instinctive adherence to the ragion di mercatura is seen in the fellow-feeling (or as Getto engagingly suggests, the omertà) he displays towards the usurers, and in his total agreement with their assessment of the problem confronting them.

  Like the tale of Ciappelletto, all of the stories of the First Day without exception are concerned in one way or another with the operation of human intelligence. The second story is about Abraham the Parisian Jew, who is converted to Christianity after visiting Rome. Whilst he is there, he observes the depravity of the leaders of the Church, and concludes that any religion that can survive and prosper with so much corruption at its head must of necessity be the one true faith. The conclusion of the story p
aradoxically illustrates the theme of intelligence at the same time as it drives home its anticlerical polemic. Abraham, a hard-headed man of business, reaches his decision to convert to Christianity through the application of his experience and his assessment of observable facts. In the next story (I, 3), another Jew, Melchizedek, ingeniously avoids falling into a trap laid for him by Saladin (who has demanded to know which of the three main religions is the one true faith) by telling a story about three precious rings, all indistinguishable from one another, of which only one is authentic. The tale’s purpose is to illustrate the impossibility of choosing between established faiths. All are equally valid to the unprejudiced observer.

  The fiercely anti-clerical tone of the second story is tempered in the fourth, where a monk and his abbot, each caught in turn by the other in amorous dalliance with a comely wench smuggled into his cell by the former of the two, reach a gentleman’s agreement on their future handling of a delicate situation. From the concupiscence of the religious, Boccaccio next turns to a story (I, 5) involving the concupiscence of a king, and of how it was held at bay by the resourcefulness of a young gentlewoman, the Marchioness of Montferrat, whose husband was away on a Crusade. The stratagem of the chicken banquet leads in turn to a story (I, 6) concerning food of an altogether different quality, where a man accused by an inquisitor of blasphemy humiliates his persecutor with a witty remark concerning the watery soup doled out to the poor by the inquisitor and his fellow Franciscans.

  The shaming of a parsimonious benefactor forms the subject, also, of the tale that follows (I, 7), but this time it is brought about by the elaborate telling of a story within a story by one Bergamino, described as ‘a faster and more brilliant talker than anyone could ever imagine’ (‘oltre al credere di chi non l’udí presto parlatore e ornato’). The target of Bergamino’s timely parable is Can Grande della Scala, whose sudden fit of meanness towards his guest is totally out of character, whereas the protagonist of the following tale (I, 8), Ermino Grimaldi, is not only the richest man in Italy but also so much of a miser that his name has become synonymous with avarice. The transformation of his character is effected by the sharp riposte (‘Let Generosity be painted there’) of a distinguished courtier, Guiglielmo Borsiere, to his request for a suitable topic for a new picture he intends to commission for the main hall of his house in Genoa.