The Decameron

by Giovanni Boccaccio

  In the story of Ghismonda, Tancredi opposes the laws of nature, not only by neglecting to find a second husband for his beautiful and intelligent widowed daughter, but also by severing with savage ferocity the liaison she has formed with Guiscardo. Both of these ill-considered actions stem from his own paternal love for Ghismonda which, as Boccaccio makes abundantly clear in the preamble to the narrative, as well as through his account of Tancredi’s reactions to the events of the story itself, is so excessive as to border upon the incestuous. There are other stories in the Decameron where a father is outraged upon discovering that his daughter is, without his knowledge, actively and willingly involved in a sexual relationship, but it is only in the tale of Ghismonda that the sense of outrage is attributed, by implication, to the father’s repressed incestuous feelings. In most other instances, it arises from the father’s conviction that the young man with whom his daughter has formed a relationship is her social inferior, and it is instructive to note that once he has been reassured that this is not the case, the liaison is formalized by marriage and allowed to flourish. The point can best be illustrated by a comparison between the tragic outcome of Ghismonda’s love for Guiscardo, and the joyous resolution of Caterina’s love for Ric-ciardo, in the celebrated story of the song of the nightingale (V, 4). There is an obvious resemblance between these two narratives, in that both are concerned with the ingenious means through which a beautiful and resourceful young woman evades a watchful father and brings her lover to her bed, where the father eventually discovers them together. But whereas Tancredi, having restrained his initial impulse to vent his anger upon them, holds his peace and remains hidden so that he can pursue what he mistakenly considers a more prudent course of action that will do less damage to his honour, the father of Caterina, Messer Lizio, rouses his wife and conducts her to her daughter’s bed, where she ‘saw for herself exactly how her daughter had taken and seized hold of the nightingale, whose song she had so much yearned to hear’.

  The mother’s first impulse is to waken Ricciardo and shower him with abuse, but she is ordered by her husband to hold her tongue, for he has already devised a more sensible solution to their parental dilemma. Since Ricciardo is rich, and comes of noble stock, the problem can be resolved to the satisfaction of all four parties (father, mother, daughter and impetuous young lover) by compelling the youth to marry the girl at once, before being allowed to leave the house. When Ricciardo wakes up, he is presented by Messer Lizio with a simple choice: either take Caterina as his lawful wedded wife or prepare to meet his Maker. Ricciardo, with Caterina’s ready approval, chooses the first alternative, where-upon Messer Lizio borrows one of his wife’s rings, and Ricciardo marries Caterina there and then without moving from the spot, her parents bearing witness to the event. Once the relationship has been formalized in this manner, and his daughter’s honour (and by extension his own) is no longer compromised, Messer Lizio withdraws with his wife, leaving the newly wedded pair to recommence their amorous sport:

  As soon as her parents had departed, the two young people fell once more into each other’s arms, and since they had only passed a half-dozen milestones in the course of the night, they added another couple to the total before getting up. And for the first day they left it at that.26

  The ethos of the Decameron is generally regarded, with good reason, as a faithful barometer of the enormous and far-reaching changes which had gradually come about in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in the structure of Italian society, largely as a result of the decline of the feudal aristocracy and the ever-increasing vitality of the bourgeoisie, especially in the spheres of banking and commerce. Boccaccio’s own family had typified, through successive generations, this fundamental shift from a feudal society to one based largely upon the enterprise of the new merchant classes. As already seen earlier, his father, originally a smallholder in the Florentine contado, had moved at an early age to Florence itself, where he gradually achieved a position of importance in the city’s banking fraternity. The practical, common-sense, hard-headed values of the prosperous bourgeois society in which Boccaccio was raised are everywhere apparent in the Decameron, which in turn exerted its greatest appeal upon those who shared and practised those values, hence the classifying of the Decameron as ‘the epic of the bourgeoisie’. The account of Messer Lizio’s sensible resolution of the problem created within his household by his wayward daughter’s premature consummation of her love for Ricciardo may be construed as typifying the scale of values by which the fourteenth-century Italian bourgeoisie regulated their lives, and to which Boccaccio himself wholeheartedly subscribed.

  But underlying the bourgeois values that the Decameron so clearly represents, there is also a noticeable regard for the code of conduct associated with the old feudal aristocracy, for whom the concept of honour was not so much a question of keeping up appearances as of strict adherence to a generally recognized series of rules governing polite behaviour, which set the nobility apart from their social inferiors. The tragic outcome of Ghismonda’s love for Guiscardo is as much due to the collision between these two diverse ethical codes as to any incestuous overtones of Tancredi’s affection for his daughter. In the brief but stupendous description of Tancredi’s reaction to his witnessing of the passionate sexual encounter between Ghismonda and Guiscardo, the reader suddenly becomes aware of the full implications of the preamble to the novella, where Tancredi had been described as ‘a most benevolent ruler, and kindly of disposition, except that in his old age he sullied his hands with the blood of passion’, and where it had been pointed out that he had ‘but a single child, a daughter’, of whom he was ‘as passionately fond… as any father who has ever lived’. His sense of outrage on waking to discover the two lovers locked together in amorous embrace is thus fully understandable as the natural reaction of one who has been deceived in the object of his deep affection. And likewise his over-reaction to the discovery – the brutal murder of Guiscardo and his sending of the young man’s heart to his daughter in a golden chalice – is explicable in purely psychological terms. But in the lengthy central episode of the novella, reporting the heated exchanges between Tancredi and Ghismonda concerning the propriety of her love for Guiscardo, it is the clash between the old feudal values and the new bourgeois ethic that holds centre stage, and there is little doubt that Ghismonda, representing the latter, has the better of the argument. Tancredi reproaches his daughter on two grounds: firstly, that she has given herself to a man who was not her husband, and secondly, that she has chosen to bestow her favours upon one whose rank was inferior to her own. In answering the first of these charges, Ghismonda in effect enlarges with convincing eloquence upon the simple statement that Guiscardo has already uttered: ‘Amor può troppo piú che né voi né io possiamo.’ She is made of flesh and blood, not of stone or iron, she is still a young woman, subject to the laws of youth and full of amorous longings, intensified by her brief marriage, which had enabled her ‘to discover the marvellous joy that comes from their fulfilment’. It is only natural that a woman in her condition should have sought a lover. Nor did she choose a lover at random, as many another woman would have done, but she consciously and deliberately selected a man who, notwithstanding his humble origins, displayed all the qualities associated with true nobility. If Tancredi would abandon the notion that a man’s nobility is measured by the quality of his ancestry, and compare impartially the lives, customs and manners of each of his nobles with those of Guiscardo, he would be forced to conclude that Guiscardo alone is a patrician whilst all of his nobles are plebeians.

  The concept of nobility expounded here so lucidly by Ghismonda is not of course an invention of Boccaccio’s own, for it had been adumbrated in the thirteenth century by Guido Guinizzelli, the poet acknowledged by Dante as founder of the dolce stil novo, and thereafter it became a staple theme of the Italian lyric until well into the following century. For the stilnovisti, nobility of lineage counted less than what they termed nobility of the heart. The term ‘
gentil core’ (‘noble heart’) became a recurrent feature of the poetic vocabulary of the period. The songs with which Boccaccio brings each of the ten days of the Decameron to a close are the last significant specimens of that great poetic tradition which stretches back, via Cino da Pistoia, Dante and Guido Cavalcanti, to Guido Guinizzelli. But whereas in the poetry of the stilnovisti the sophisticated définitions of love and nobility had assumed the character of a refined intellectual exercise, Boccaccio appears to accept their validity, and he proceeds to examine their practical implications within a series of carefully delineated contexts.

  It is above all in the story of Cimon and Iphigenia (V, I) that Boccaccio makes his most brilliant and original contribution to that tradition, by incorporating one of its principal themes (the ennobling power of feminine beauty) within the framework of a prose narrative. The story tells of Cimon, the uncouth and witless son of a noble and prosperous Cypriot gentleman, who is a source of so much affliction to his despairing father that he is sent away to live in the country, where the rusticity of his manners will attract less attention. One afternoon as he is shambling doltishly through a wood on one of his father’s estates, he comes upon a clearing surrounded by very tall trees, in a corner of which there is a lovely cool fountain. A beautiful girl is lying asleep beside it, and her dress is so flimsy that scarcely an inch of her fair white body is concealed from Cimon’s admiring gaze. The effect of such wondrous beauty upon the boorish youth is electrifying. Not only does he fall deeply in love with, the girl, Iphigenia, but in order to win her hand in marriage he totally abandons all his former habits and becomes, within the space of four years, the most graceful, refined and versatile young man in the island of Cyprus.

  The violent manner in which Cimon eventually succeeds in his ambition to marry the fair Iphigenia carries distinct echoes of the myth of Pholus, the centaur named by Dante in Inferno (XII), who, at the wedding of Pirithous and Hippodamia, got drunk and attempted to rape the bride and other women present. In similar fashion, Cimon recruits an armed band to storm Iphigenia’s wedding banquet and carry her off after slaughtering all those, including her prospective bridegroom, who attempt to get in his way. The violence is paralleled in several of the stories of the Fourth Day. Apart from the tale of Tancredi and Ghismonda, two other stories (IV, 5 and IV, 9) owe their tragic conclusions to the blind and unthinking adherence to an outmoded concept of honour, the first within a bourgeois setting and the second in a context that is feudal and aristocratic. All three stories share one other element in common, namely the inclusion within the narrative of an incident or episode that is peculiarly horrifying and macabre. In the Ghismonda story, there is the structurally vital episode of the golden chalice containing the heart of her lover, over which she weeps copious tears that, mingled with a poisonous fluid, she eventually imbibes in the presence of her bewildered ladies-in-waiting. She then arranges herself decorously on her bed, holds the heart of her dead lover close to her own, and silently waits for death to release her from her suffering. The whole of this episode is so macabre that in the hands of a less shrewd and sensitive writer it would seriously have risked emerging as farce. But so skilfully does Boccaccio arrange his material, so carefully does he construct an atmosphere of ritual, that the tone of high seriousness is never unduly disturbed, and the final impression is one of poignant tragedy and mysterious grandeur.

  Boccaccio’s handling of the improbable tale of Lisabetta da Messina (IV, 5) is no less secure, and the tragic fate of the heroine is if anything even more compelling. The story is familiar to English readers from Keats’s romanticization of its details in a famous poem.27 Boccaccio’s version is altogether more sinewy and straightforward, and the motives of the various characters are more clearly defined. Lisabetta, the unmarried sister of three young and wealthy merchants, falls in love with the handsome young manager of their commercial enterprises, Lorenzo, who, after his amorous liaison with the girl has been discovered, is lured into the countryside by her three brothers and murdered in cold blood, his body being interred in a shallow grave. He appears to her in a dream, tells her how he was murdered, and describes the place where her brothers have buried his body. She goes to the spot with a maidservant, uncovers the young man’s body, and, ‘seeing that it was impossible for her to take away the whole body (as she would dearly have wished), she laid it to rest in a more appropriate spot, then severed the head from the shoulders as best she could and wrapped it in a towel.’ Like Ghismonda, she drenches her gruesome treasure with copious tears, then she buries it in a pot, ‘in which she planted several sprigs of the finest Salerno basil, and never watered them except with the essence of roses or orange-blossom, or with her own teardrops’. Once again, therefore, the macabre element of the narrative assumes strong ritualistic overtones which lend it an aura of high seriousness, and the tale proceeds ineluctably to its tragic albeit grotesque conclusion when, deprived by her brothers of her pot of basil, Lisabetta ultimately cries herself to death.

  In the third tale (IV, 9) of this ‘trilogy of horror’, a Provençal knight, Guillaume de Roussillon, murders his best friend, Guillaume de Cabestanh, after his discovery of his wife’s adulterous liaison with the latter. Having torn the heart from Cabestanh’s breast, he hands it over to his cook, telling him it is the heart of a wild boar, and ordering him to use it in preparing the finest and most succulent dish he can devise. Boccaccio’s subsequent description of the cook’s labours comes perilously close to being interpreted as black humour:

  The cook took away the heart, minced it and added a goodly quantity of fine spices, employing all his skill and loving care to turn it into a dish that was too exquisite for words.28

  But, having almost allowed his tragic tale to degenerate into farce, Boccaccio instantly reverts to a serious narrative tone with his description of the supper à deux during which the lady devours the dish to the last morsel. There follows an account of the ensuing conversation between husband and wife, when Roussillon tells her what she has eaten, whereupon she delivers a noble and dignified speech before flinging herself to her death from a lofty casement.

  The deliberate placing of these three stories at the beginning (Ghismonda and Tancredi), the middle (Lisabetta), and the end (Roussillon and Cabestanh) of the tragedy-oriented Fourth Day is indicative of Boccaccio’s overall conception of what constitutes good tragedy, at the same time offering further confirmation of the extreme care he exercised in the disposition of his tales within the total narrative framework. In his regard for symmetry, and his manifest preoccupation with structural patterns based upon numbers that possessed mystical associations, the author reveals the extent to which, from the strictly formal point of view, he is influenced by medieval models, in particular of course by the Commedia. As for his conception of tragedy, it is clearly one that is based upon Latin rather than Greek models, and especially on the tragedies of Seneca, whose emphasis upon horror, cruelty and violence was to find favour with so many Renaissance playwrights, both in Italy and in England.

  There were also, nevertheless, a number of possible medieval precedents for Boccaccio’s ‘trilogy of horror’. One has only to think of certain episodes in the Commedia such as the gruesome tale of Ugolino’s death in the tower of hunger (torre della fame), itself gruesomely introduced and terminated by the description of Ugolino’s eager champing at the nape of his adversary’s neck.29 But the specifically Senecan connotations of Boccaccio’s concept of tragedy are undeniably present, both in his systematic recourse, in all three of his major tragic novelle, to the macabre as a generator of tragic sentiment, and in the close parallels between the story of Roussillon and Cabestanh (IV, 9) and Seneca’s Thyestes. As one Boccaccio scholar puts it, a shade contentiously perhaps, ‘the final section of this tragedy is conspicuous for a series of macabre conceits and amphibologies based on erotic/gastronomic doubles entendres. There is a constant play on love for one’s family and love for the flesh of one’s family; on possession by physical embrace and poss
ession by incorporation in the digestive tract.’30

  Whatever the force of Seneca’s influence on Boccaccio’s concept of tragedy, the three tales we have here been considering are all concerned with the satisfaction of honour, and it is significant that in two of them the murder of the transgressor brings such opprobrium upon the perpetrators of the deed that they are forced to flee for their lives, whilst in the third (IV, 1), the protagonist makes tardy repentance for his cruelty and sees that the remains of the two young lovers are honourably interred together in a single grave. Likewise, in the concluding lines of the tale of Roussillon and Cabestanh, it is reported that ‘people were sent out from the castles of the lady’s family and of Guillaume de Cabestanh to gather up the two bodies, which were later placed in a single tomb in the chapel of the lady’s own castle amid widespread grief and mourning.’

  The inference is reasonably clear. In all three stories, the author, by directing his reader’s sympathy towards the lovers, and condemning the actions of those who cruelly severed their respective liaisons, is proclaiming the supremacy of natural laws over any rigidly constructed and strictly interpreted code of ethical conduct. It is as though Francesca’s prophecy in the fifth canto of Inferno of her husband’s ultimate fate, ‘Caina attende chi a vita ci spense’ (‘Caina [the lowest part of Hell] awaits the one who extinguished our lives’), which Dante almost certainly intended as a pointer to her calculating vindictiveness, is interpreted literally and validated through the analysis of three sets of circumstances that are not dissimilar from her own. Where Dante would have us condemn, Boccaccio commends. The difference in attitude is to some extent explained by a difference in temperament. Where Dante, the arch-conservative, looks back to a rigidly formalized code of behaviour that is characteristic of a feudal, hierarchical society, Boccaccio’s liberal, forward-looking instincts lead him firmly in the direction of a form of morality that allows for the unhindered interplay of natural passions and emotions.