Tales From the Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio

by Giovanni Boccaccio

  In the frame of the Decameron, the representative of Reason is Panfilo, who introduces the storytelling with his tale (I, I) of the arch-villain Ciappelletto, a tale sandwiched between pious and outwardly sincere declarations concerning the loving-kindness and all-seeing wisdom of God. Panfilo also presides over the Tenth Day, with its series of uplifting tales on the subject of liberal and munificent deeds. On receiving the crown at the end of the Ninth Day, he had been told by his predecessor, Emilia, that it would be his task to compensate for the failings of herself and the others who had already filled the office he is about to assume. ‘Her charge,’ as Kirkham shrewdly remarks, ‘suggests the corrective capacity of reason.’ The member of the company associated with the concupiscible appetite, or Lust, is easy to identify. Dioneo is the narrator of the first ‘improper’ tale of the Decameron, concerning the sexual frolickings of the monk and the abbot (I, 4), and it is he who secures for himself the privilege, for the remaining nine days, of always being the last contributor to the day’s storytelling. With the exception of the tale of Friar Cipolla (VI, 10) and of the patient Griselda (X, 10), all of his stories are concerned with sexual gratification, and it is Dioneo who shrugs aside the objections of his female companions and persists in prescribing the topic for the string of salacious tales that are told on the Seventh Day. Kirkham makes a characteristically wry comment on the musical instrument played by Tindaro to accompany the dancing at the end of the day:

  It is appropriate that only Dioneo’s day evokes the bagpipes. An instrument that Chaucer’s earthy miller could also well ‘blow and sowne’, the evocatively shaped cornemuse, was an established Priapic symbol.

  The third member of the male trio, representing the irascible appetite, is Filostrato, who prescribes the topic for the tragic tales of the Fourth Day, and whose reign is marked by frequent displays of irritability. His own story on that day describes how the fraternal love of Guillaume de Roussillon and Guillaume de Cabestanh is transformed into murderous hatred.

  That the seven young ladies represent the seven virtues is the obvious conclusion to be drawn from the fact that their prototypal counterparts, the seven nymphs of the Comedía délie ninfe florentine, are specifically said by the author to fulfil that symbolic function. In the Decameron, Boccaccio offers no such direct indication of their figurative role, but that is not surprising in view of his initial presentation of the ladies as actual people whose true identity he will conceal by providing them with pseudonyms. It is therefore left to the reader to deduce what each of them represents, through careful analysis of the textual evidence. Of the four cardinal virtues, Prudence could be represented by more than one of the ladies, but the prime candidate is clearly Pampinea, whose eloquent reasoning persuades her companions to take the prudent course of retiring to the countryside. Temperance and Fortitude are represented, according to Kirkham’s analysis, by Fiammetta and Filomena respectively, because, following the rule of the attraction of opposites, the first is matched with the concupiscible Dioneo, whilst the second is loved by the irascible Filostrato. Justice, the fourth of the cardinal virtues, can be assumed to be represented, through a process of deduction and elimination, by Lauretta, who, like the three already mentioned (and unlike the remaining three), is accompanied on her excursion to the countryside by a maidservant.

  We are thus left with Neifile, Elissa and Emilia as representing the three theological virtues, and it can hardly be coincidental that these three are elected sovereign for the Third, Sixth and Ninth Days respectively. Triadically placed in the order of their presentation in the Comedía delle ninfe fiorentine, Charity is represented by Neifile, Hope by Elissa, and Faith by Emilia.

  It remains an open question whether this kind of tentative clarification of the allegorical implications of the frame sheds any light on the work as a whole or on the intentions of its author. At most, it shows that the connection between the Decameron and earlier, explicitly allegorical works such as the Caccia di Diana, the Teseida, the Comedía delle ninfe fiorentine and the Amorosa visione is closer than used to be supposed. It also supports the now fashionable view that the author of the Decameron, by according a decisive role to Reason in the person of Panfilo as against the appetites of Anger and Lust as represented by Filostrato and Dioneo, was more attached to orthodox Christian values than his earlier reputation would suggest. But perhaps the most important contribution it makes is in revealing one aspect of the extreme care with which the structural foundations of his prose masterpiece were laid.

  Another noteworthy aspect of Boccaccio’s concern with the work’s structure is his handling of the popular medieval topos of the locus amœnus. The three locations where according to the author the stories of the Decameron were told have certain elements in common, but there are also one or two striking contrasts. The first locus amœnus is described in the Introduction to the First Day, and it sets the scene and creates the atmosphere for the storytelling of the first two days. Although its isolation is stressed (‘the spot in question lay some distance away from any road’), it is in fact situated no more than two miles from Florence, presumably in the area of Fiesole, for it is a palace perched on the summit of a hill. The description of the place occupies a single paragraph, brief but surprisingly full of detail. Not only does the reader obtain a clear picture of the interior of the palace, with its spacious courtyard, its loggias and its richly decorated apartments, but the surrounding gardens and meadows are also sketched in, and there are references to wells of cool, refreshing water and cellars of precious wines. Finally, the pristine orderliness of the palace interior is given emphasis, with references to its speckless appearance, its neatly made-up beds, its profusion of freshly cut flowers, and its floors carpeted with rushes.

  The image conjured up by this first locus amœnus is in fact that of an aristocratic country residence characterized by its extreme sense of order and purity, features that contrast markedly with the conditions, described earlier in such vivid detail, which the members of the lieta brigata have left behind them in Florence. There is no very obvious hint, as yet, of the symbolic connotations of the world of the storytellers, but simply a straightforward, realistic account of a patrician rural retreat. Even the lush green meadow where the young people assemble later in the day to begin their storytelling is economically described: its resemblance to an earthly paradise, or Garden of Eden, is at best only marginal. We are still moving within the realm of the historically possible.

  The second locus amœnus occurs at the beginning of the Third Day. The change of location has been decreed by Neifile, who on being elected Queen at the end of the Second Day has advised her companions that they should desist from telling stories on the next day, a Friday, out of respect for Our Lord who was crucified on that day. Nor should they tell stories on the Saturday, this being the day on which young ladies are wont to wash their hair and rinse away the week’s grime from their persons, and to refrain from all further activities out of respect for the approaching sabbath. And she decrees that on the Sunday they should move on to their second rural retreat, in order to avoid the possibility of being joined by others.

  Many of the particulars in the passages describing the brigata’s transfer to their two rural retreats are identical. In both, the distance travelled is no more than two miles, whilst the palace itself, with its spacious courtyards, its loggias, its deep well providing a supply of cool water, its richly stocked wine cellars and its seasonable flowers, is set on a small hill. The similarities between the two locations should alert one to the fact that they exist only in the mind of the author, but that has not prevented commentators, from Renaissance times down to our own, from identifying them as actual places, the first on the hill known as Poggio Gherardi, near Fiesole, and the second as the Villa Schifanoia, at Camerata. Theories of that sort, still perpetuated by the modern tourist industry, may safely be discounted.

  What distinguishes the second locus amænus from the first is the elaborate description of a walled garden.
Its air of orderliness and its numerous sensual delights are dwelt upon at considerable length, conveying the impression of a place that is set beyond the boundaries of common human experience. The prominence accorded to gardens in medieval literature dates roughly from the year 1240, when Guillaume de Lorris, in the first section of the French poem in octosyllabic couplets, Roman de la Rose, had composed a dream allegory recounting the wooing of a girl, symbolized by a rosebud, in a garden representing courtly society. It was the second, much longer section of the poem, written by Jean de Meung around 1280, with its mass of encyclopaedic detail, that accounted for the remarkable popularity of the poem among other medieval poets. Chaucer, who translated roughly a third of the poem into Middle English (The Romaunt of the Rose), was one of several writers who came strongly under its spell, and so too, many years before, did Boccaccio. Descriptions of marvellous gardens similar to that of Guillaume de Lorris had appeared in several of Boccaccio’s earlier works, notably the Amorosa visione, but here in the Third Day of the Decameron his intention is made unmistakably clear by the company’s unanimous assertion that ‘if Paradise were constructed on earth, it was inconceivable that it could take any other form.’ The topos of the paradiso terrestre, the Earthly Paradise or Garden of Eden, was one that appealed strongly to medieval writers, especially after Dante’s visionary treatment of the theme in the concluding cantos of his Purgatorio, where the Garden of Eden is envisaged as a wooded region surrounded by Lethe, the stream of forgetfulness. But whereas Dante locates the Earthly Paradise in the afterlife, at the summit of the mountain of Purgatory, rising in sheer and aweinspiring majesty from the waters of the southern hemisphere, Boccaccio characteristically implies that it is still accessible to those determined to escape from their literally (as well as symbolically) plague-ridden life on earth.

  Woods and streams are a prominent feature of the Decameron’s third locus amœnus, the so-called Valley of the Ladies, described in the concluding section of the Sixth Day. The valley is perfectly circular in shape, and surrounded by six hills, each with a castle-like palace perched on its summit. A waterfall issues forth from a gorge between two of the hills, forming a clear stream on reaching the floor of the valley. The stream in turn forms a lake in the valley’s centre, and from the lower end of the lake a second stream makes its way to the narrow defile that provides the valley’s only means of access. This last particular offers a clue (if any were needed) to the valley’s significance, recalling as it does the passage from St Matthew’s gospel giving notice that ‘strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.’ Apart, however, from its obvious paradisal connotations, the Valley of the Ladies has been seen as the culminating point of a highly complex allegory, in which the cormice is viewed as representing Art or Poetry, without which society is meaningless.22 If that is so, the six castles dominating the valley could be taken to represent the six days of storytelling in the Decameron already in place, while the crystal-clear lake at its centre could signify the font of artistic inspiration to which the storytellers are led in preparation for the remainder of their narrative endeavours. When the seven young ladies (and later on, the three young men) discard their clothes and bathe in the waters of the lake, they are in effect renewing their commitment to the artistic process on which they had embarked at Pampinea’s bidding on the first day of their spiritual and aesthetic retreat.

  There is one final point to note about the Decameron’s second plane of reality – the world of the narrators – and that is the passage in the introductory section to the Ninth Day, where the ten young people, returning from their morning walk, are described in terms that almost seem to foreshadow the figures as well as the spirit of a Botticelli painting of the Renaissance:

  They were all wreathed in fronds of oak, and their hands were full of fragrant herbs or flowers, so that if anyone had encountered them, he would only have been able to say: ‘either these people will not be vanquished by death, or they will welcome it with joy.’23

  What is implied here is that in their pastoral retreat, the band of storytellers figure forth a state of pre-lapsarian innocence, at one with the paradisal world they inhabit. That impression is reinforced at numerous other points in the frame, where the author is at pains to stress the absolute propriety of their proceedings and relationships, whatever may be said about the material of their narratives. Like all good allegories, the world of Boccaccio’s ten narrators can be interpreted in many different ways, but its dominant characteristics are its pristine candour and absence of guile.

  III. THE WORLD OF THE NARRATIVES

  In the popular imagination the Decameron is regarded first and foremost as a collection of tales concerned mainly with the ingenious stratagems adopted by wives and the religious to achieve the gratification of their sexual desires. In both cases, an act of infidelity is involved, on the one hand to matrimonial vows, on the other to the vow of celibacy. The hypocrisy of the clergy and the wantonness of women were the two favourite targets of the medieval satirist, and it is not therefore surprising that these two themes should occupy a prominent position in a work which, however strongly it anticipates the ethos and spirit of the Renaissance, is rooted so firmly in medieval culture. Yet when one considers the Decameron as a whole, one cannot fail to be impressed by the extraordinary range of its subject matter, and by the consequent impossibility of fitting it into any single descriptive category. Whilst it is true that it is well stocked with tales of adulterous wives, and in fact one whole day, the seventh, is devoted exclusively to variations on that topic, there is also a large number of stories in which the virtues of conjugal fidelity are prominently displayed and roundly extolled, a good example being the tale of Messer Torello and his wife, Adalieta (X, 9). That is not to say that Boccaccio was more attached to conventional Christian morality than is popularly thought, as recent criticism, especially in America, has tended to assert, or that some kind of apologia is required for his apparent condoning of sexual promiscuity. Circumstances alter cases, and if any explanation is needed for the loose interpretation of the Seventh Commandment common to many of Boccaccio’s characters, it may be found in the tragic story (IV, 1) which opens the proceedings on the Fourth Day.

  In that famous tale, concerning Ghismonda’s ill-fated love for Guiscardo, there is a phrase which neatly encapsulates the naturalistic attitude to human relationships that Boccaccio consistently adopts, especially in his handling of amatory material. The phrase is spoken by Guiscardo, and is all the more memorable because he says nothing else in a narrative conspicuous for the lengthy speeches of its two other leading characters. Guiscardo has been arrested on the orders of his master, Tancredi, whilst on his way to the bedchamber of Tancredi’s daughter, Ghismonda. When Tancredi charges him with disloyalty to a benevolent master, Guiscardo tersely replies that ‘Amor può troppo piú che né voi né io possiamo’ (‘The power of Love is greater than your power or mine’). The words are reminiscent of Virgil’s ‘Omnia vincit Amor; et nos cedamus Amori,’ (‘Love conquers all; let us then yield to Love!’).24 But they also recall Francesca’s celebrated justification of her love for Paolo in the fifth canto of Dante’s Inferno, where she pleads that Love compels a loved one to love in return (‘Amor, che a nullo amato amar perdona…’). Whereas Dante, however, intends that his reader shall reject this superficially attractive and plausible defence of the surrender to sexual passion, Boccaccio both in the story of Ghismonda and elsewhere in the Decameron seems intent upon showing its validity. Not only that, he implies that any attempt to interfere with the natural progression of instinctive forces is doomed to failure, sometimes with disastrous results for the parties concerned.

  The story of Ghismonda is a clear illustration of this principle, which finds expression on the theoretical plane in the author’s warmly argued reply to his critics in the Introduction to the Fourth Day. There, as was seen earlier, Boccaccio lists the various objections that have been raised, or so at least he c
laims, to the tales already told, the first of these objections being that he is altogether too fond of the ladies, and that it is unseemly for him to take so much pleasure in entertaining them, consoling them and singing their praises. In answering this charge, Boccaccio characteristically employs the tools of his own craft, narrating the tale of a young man who, brought up from early childhood by a pious widowed father in total isolation, visits Florence for the first time, and no sooner catches his first glimpse of a group of young women than all his desires, all his curiosity, all the leanings of his affection are centred upon them, and them alone. The moral of the tale is self-evident, but in case anyone has failed to apprehend it, the author spells it out in a passage which, with its emphasis upon the strength and pleasures of natural affection, offers some indication of his essentially naturalistic philosophy. Ostensibly addressing his lady readers, Boccaccio writes:

  When you consider that even an apprentice hermit, a witless youth who was more of a wild animal than a human being, liked you better than anything he had ever seen, it is perfectly clear that those who criticize me on these grounds are people who, being ignorant of the strength and the pleasures of natural affection, neither love you nor desire your love, and they are not worth bothering about.25