The Decameron

by Giovanni Boccaccio

  This new moral attitude, which reflects the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie and the decline of feudalism, and which incidentally foreshadows the spirit of the Renaissance, is seen over and over again in Boccaccio’s treatment of amatory material. We find it vigorously expressed, for instance, in the exciting and humorous tale (III, 2), pointedly set in the age of feudalism, of the groom at King Agilulf’s court who, having fallen deeply in love with Agilulf’s consort, cleverly achieves the gratification of his desires and returns unscathed to his normal, lowly duties. The story is really concerned with honour, and how it may best be preserved. All cats are grey in the dark, and the groom brings his desires to fruition by impersonating the king so as to gain admittance, at dead of night, to the lady’s bedchamber. But no sooner has he completed his amorous mission and departed the scene than the king himself turns up in the darkened room and enters his wife’s bed with the same object in view, only to discover from his wife’s solicitous concern for his health that someone has been there before him. It is at this point in the narrative that Boccaccio inserts the first of two revealing authorial asides. Throughout the story, the cleverness of the groom and the wisdom of the king are repeatedly stressed, and when Agilulf correctly deduces that his wife has been taken in by an outward resemblance to his own physique and manner, he wisely decides, since neither the queen nor anyone else appears to have noticed the deception, to keep his own counsel and beat a tactful retreat. Boccaccio, through his narrator Pampinea, comments as follows:

  Many a stupid man would have reacted differently, and exclaimed: ‘It was not I. Who was the man who was here? What happened? Who was it who came?’ But this would only have led to complications, upsetting the lady when she was blameless and sowing the seeds of a desire, on her part, to repeat the experience. And besides, by holding his tongue his honour remained unimpaired, whereas if he were to talk he would make himself look ridiculous.31

  The idea that honour, in certain circumstances, is best preserved by keeping up appearances, and suppressing painful realities, is one that would exercise a particular appeal upon the practical minds of the merchants, traders and entrepreneurs who constituted the author’s ideal readership. And the steps which Agilulf takes to track down the seducer of his unwitting queen would also commend themselves, for their logic and ingenuity, to an audience schooled in the intricacies and subterfuges of a highly competitive commercial world. What Agilulf does, in fact, is to proceed at once to the sleeping-quarters of his servants, where he tests the heartbeats of each of the sleeping forms until he eventually reaches the groom, discovers that his heart is pounding, and rightly concludes that this man is the culprit. He then shears away a portion of the hair on one side of the groom’s head, using a pair of scissors that he had brought along for the purpose, the better to identify him when he summons a general assembly of the household the following morning. The groom’s resourcefulness is equal to the occasion, and he shears the hair of all his sleeping fellow-servants in exactly similar fashion, so that the identity parade next morning concludes with no more than a stern word of warning from the king to show the culprit that his deed has not passed undetected:

  ‘Whoever it was that did it,’ he said, addressing the whole assembly, ‘had better not do it again. And now, be off with you.’32

  There then follows the second of Boccaccio’s authorial interventions in this particular novella, when, through Pampinea, he declares:

  Many another man would have wanted all of them strung up, tortured, examined and interrogated. But in so doing, he would have brought into the open a thing that people should always try their utmost to conceal. And even if, by displaying his hand, he had secured the fullest possible revenge, he would not have lessened his shame but greatly increased it, as well as besmirching the fame of his lady.33

  The story of Agilulf and the groom is an excellent example of the author’s ability to transform an improbable series of events into a superficially convincing realistic narrative. The conversion of fantasy into the realm of the possible is what constitutes the Decameron’s peculiar dynamic. But granted that Boccaccio’s main purpose is storytelling, this is not to deny the relevance of his occasional asides, which in this instance are especially revealing in that they show the clear-headed, practical common sense that he brings to bear upon the highly emotive question of marital honour. His vindication of Agilulf’s low-key response, first to the discovery that his marriage-bed has been violated by a stranger and then to the thwarting of his scheme to identify the culprit, is reminiscent for its clarity and persuasiveness of that section of his earliest major narrative work, the Filocolo, where the thirteen questioni d’amore are debated. Indeed, it would not be unduly fanciful to suggest that Boccaccio, in constructing several of the novelle in the Decameron that treat of love and honour, for example Bernabò and Zinevra (II, 9), Gilette of Narbonne (III, 9), Gentile de’ Carisendi (X, 4), Messer Ansaldo (X, 5), King Charles the Old (X, 6) and Titus and Gisippus (X, 8), was drawing upon the experience he had acquired, in composing the questioni d’amore sequence in the earlier work, of debating the finer points of a topic that had engaged the minds and sensibilities of many of his medieval predecessors. The fact that two of these stories (those of Gentile de’ Carisendi and Messer Ansaldo) were first narrated by Boccaccio in the relevant episode of the Filocolo tends to confirm the view that not only the overall structure of the Decameron but also the mode of presentation of several of the individual tales are ultimately traceable to the youthful exercises in casuistry that fill the fourth book of the earlier work. Like many other tales in the Decameron, the story of Agilulf and the groom summons from its reader the proverbial response ‘Se non è vero è ben trovato’ (‘If it is not true, it is a happy invention’). If one considers the plot objectively, many of its vital particulars (the facility with which the groom gains access to the queen’s bedchamber, the coincidence of the king’s arrival on the scene immediately after the groom’s departure, the failure of any of the servants to wake up during the king’s protracted investigation in their sleeping-quarters, and likewise their failure to notice the shearing of their hair, and so on) are seriously lacking in verisimilitude. In this respect, the tale conforms to the Johnsonian dictum that the essence of comedy consists in ‘the fictitiousness of the transactions’. Hence it is possible to view the story as a questione d’amore in which the subject for discussion is whether a husband who finds that his wife has unwittingly committed adultery should communicate his discovery to others (including his wife) or maintain a façade of ignorance. In his authorial asides, Boccaccio strongly advocates the latter alternative, giving as his reason that only in this way will the husband’s honour (to say nothing of the lady’s reputation) remain unimpaired. But one should note in passing that with his customary playful malice, the author offers, almost by way of an afterthought, the secondary reason that if the wife were made aware of what had happened, she would begin to desire a repetition of the experience. It is at such moments as this (and the Decameron contains many other similar observations) that the conventional view of Boccaccio as the champion of the gentle sex appears to require revision, and that the misogynistic outpourings of the Corbaccio begin to look a little less atypical of the writer than is generally thought.

  The overt misogyny of the Corbaccio springs from a deeply rooted conviction (possibly implanted by some painful personal experience) of woman’s faithlessness, a theme that the author had already explored in considerable depth in his version of the story of Troilus and Cressida, the Filostrato. But whereas the Filostrato chronicles the delusion and bewilderment of the youthful and inexperienced idealist, the Corbaccio reflects the spleen and vindictiveness of one whose mature awareness of the instability of sexual relationships has conducted him to the wildest extremities of cynicism. In the Decameron, on the other hand, Boccaccio adopts a relatively objective posture towards the question of the effect upon human relationships of instinctive sexual forces. His mood may in fact be likened to that wh
ich prompted Shakespeare to declare that

  When my love swears that she is made of truth,

  I do believe her, though I know she lies.34

  The verbal ambiguity (‘Though I know she lies’) would have appealed to Boccaccio, and he would also have appreciated the consummate irony of Byron’s classic description of the surrender to sexual passion:

  A little still she strove, and much repented,

  And whispering ‘I will ne’er consent’ – consented.35

  Byron’s couplet comes repeatedly to mind when reading Boccaccio’s account of the successive couplings of Alatiel (II, 7), the Egyptian princess who, having been sent by her father to marry his wartime ally, the King of Algarve, is shipwrecked off the coast of Majorca and then passes through the hands of nine different men before being restored to her father, whom she convinces of her virginity before setting off once more to become the King of Algarve’s wife. Virginity, like honour, resides in appearances, as the author stresses in the proverbial sally with which he concludes this extraordinary narrative:

  A kissed mouth doesn’t lose its freshness: like the moon it turns up new again.36

  It is beside the point to inquire whether one can describe Alatiel as a virgin without some risk of terminological inexactitude. What matters is that she is able to play the part with conviction, and thus ensure a long and contented marriage for herself and her husband.

  But of course the fascination of the story lies, not so much in its paradoxical, fairy-tale conclusion, as in its vivid account of Alatiel’s adventures, in which the disparity between resolution and deed, so often a feature of irregular sexual relationships, is a continual source of refined, ironic humour. When the princess is shipwrecked, she implores the three surviving members of her female retinue to preserve their chastity, ‘declaring her own determination to submit to no man’s pleasure except her husband’s – a sentiment that was greeted with approval by the three women, who said they would do their utmost to follow her instructions’. But it takes no more than an abundance of good food and precious wines to destroy such pious sentiments and bring her to bed with Pericone, the first of her lovers. Boccaccio’s mischievous comment at this point nicely highlights the impotence of good resolutions in the face of the unremitting demands of the flesh:

  She had no conception of the kind of horn that men do their butting with, and when she felt what was happening, it was almost as though she regretted having turned a deaf ear to Pericone’s flattery. And without waiting to be bidden before spending her nights so agreeably, often it was she herself who issued the invitation, not so much with words, since she could not make herself understood, as with deeds.37

  Of Alatiel’s nine separate lovers, three (Pericone, Marato and the Prince of Morea) are violently done to death by men who, fascinated by her beauty, are seized by an all-consuming desire to possess her; a fourth is seriously mutilated in a murderous duel with his brother arising from an argument over who is to have precedence in the enjoyment of her favours; a fifth (the Duke of Athens) is last reported defending his territory against an invading army that has been assembled to avenge the murder of her previous lover; a sixth (Constant) is taken prisoner by the Turks, who have learned that he is leading a dissolute life with his stolen mistress on the island of Chios, leaving himself wide open to attack; a seventh (Uzbek) is killed by a punitive expedition sent to avenge his treatment of Constant; an eighth (Antioco) dies peacefully is his bed, partly, one is encouraged to assume, because of his amorous exertions; whilst the ninth and last (the unnamed Cypriot merchant) is deprived of his mistress whilst away on a trading expedition in Armenia. Alatiel’s four-year progress is thus for the most part attended by death and destruction, by internecine strife occasioned by the accident of her quite extraordinary beauty. It could be argued that Boccaccio is here presenting a latter-day version of the legend of Helen of Troy, but those critics, like Branca, who assert that the central theme of the novella is ‘beauty as the cause of misfortune’ are attributing too much importance to the tragic elements of the story and minimizing the tone of light-hearted banter in which even its most blood-curdling episodes are recounted. Had Boccaccio wished to tell a tale of suffering and woe, he would surely have told it differently, and located it among the stories of the Fourth Day.

  The heroine’s name, Alatiel, itself provides a clue to the lines along which the tale should be interpreted, for it is an anagram of ‘La Lieta’, or The Contented Lady. Here one should bear in mind the cabalistic science or superstition known as onomancy, based on the oracular principle of the nomen omen, meaning that a name conceals a prophecy. According to this ‘science’, with which Boccaccio was certainly familiar, the anagram of a proper name, a surname, or a forename may reveal the natural gifts or the destiny of a person or an institution. What the author seems to be suggesting is that the vicissitudes of Alatiel, far from arousing the emotions of pity and terror associated with tragedy, will evoke a kind of vicarious, voyeuristic pleasure, and possibly even envy, especially amongst his lady-readers. This at any rate is the clear implication of his description, at the beginning of the following tale, of the reaction of the lady members of the company to the chronicle of Alatiel’s adventures:

  The ladies heaved many a sigh over the fair lady’s several adventures: but who knows what their motives may have been? Perhaps some of them were sighing, not so much because they felt sorry for her, but because they longed to be married no less often than she had been.38

  In his scattered references to the lady-mernbers of the lieta brigata, the author consistently emphasizes the strength of their moral character and their adherence to Christian precepts, and thus his suggestion that their reaction to the tale of Alatiel may possibly be attributed to envy rather than to pity neatly highlights the ambivalence commonly to be found in attitudes towards sexual relationships. What he is intimating, in fact, is that the desire for a variety of sexual experiences is a natural one, even among the most upright and God-fearing of Christians, and in recounting the story of Alatiel’s adventures he gives form and consistency to the unspoken sexual fantasies of his readership. That capacity for converting fantasy into apparent reality is one of the reasons for the Decameron’s enduring popularity, for its timeless relevance to the human condition. But Boccaccio’s marginal comment on the ladies’ reaction to the tale of Alatiel has to be read in conjunction with the story’s lengthy preamble, one of the longest in the whole of the Decameron, where the narrator, Panfilo, presents an elegant disquisition on the subject of happiness, thus foreshadowing the anagrammatic relevance of the name of the heroine.

  The burden of his argument is that men and women should rest content with whatever has been granted to them by ‘the One who alone knows what we need and has the power to provide it for us’. From this it follows that those ladies who go to extraordinary lengths to improve the attractions bestowed on them by Nature are courting, if not disaster, at all events a state of unhappiness. Physical beauty can be a source of suffering, and the story of Alatiel, which follows, is represented by Panfilo as a cautionary tale. This no doubt is the reason why Branca and others see the vicissitudes of Alatiel as a demonstration of the misfortune that physical beauty inevitably brings to its possessor. But as the author makes abundantly clear, the misfortunes of Alatiel are of brief duration. Whenever she is bereft of one of her lovers, she is very quickly ‘consoled’ by his successor, and she herself is almost totally unaffected by the trail of death and destruction that, by the accident of her beauty, she leaves in the wake of her amorous peregrinations. One commentator has likened her to a queen-bee, interpreting her various adventures as a kind of repeated copulative ritual leading ineluctably to the death of her successive partners:

  The story’s impact hardly resides in Alatiel’s anguished consciousness of her disastrous beauty (an allure that drags her to misfortune and her numerous lovers to their death), but rather in the very superlativeness of the beauty and therefore of the pleasure which she offers th
e male world. This ‘maraviglioso piacere’ poetically justifies her lovers’ deaths. They seem to be repeating the zoological phenomenon of the male-bees who burn up their existence in a fatal coitus with the queen-bee.39

  But this too seems an over-simplification of the events of the narrative. Whilst it is certainly true that the tale is concerned with the instinctive, elemental forces of sexual attraction, the correlation between copulation and death is insufficiently consistent to support such a thesis. (Only four of Alatiel’s nine lovers in fact are destroyed as a direct result of their involvement with her.) The fascination of the story of Alatiel resides primarily in its convincing and dramatic enactment, in realistic terms, of a preposterous sexual odyssey, in the course of which such cherished concepts as purity, chastity and virginity are subjected to a fierce and sometimes taunting scrutiny. Panfilo’s high-minded introductory discourse, together with his dire warnings of the consequences of artificially enhancing one’s natural accomplishments, elegantly synthesizes the conventional, puritanical precepts relating to the pursuit of happiness. But the theory he expounds is to a large extent belied by the ensuing narrative, as well as by the postscript, which, as we have seen, underlines the ambivalence of his listeners’ response to the account of the heroine’s adventures.