The Tale of Tales
Page 4
By 1608 Basile was back in Naples, where he finally managed to get a foot in literary circles, probably due to the fact that his sister Adriana, a singer, was on her way to becoming a celebrated diva. With her fame came connections and influence, and she was energetic in seeing that her brother’s talents were better appreciated. In Naples Basile continued to exercise the profession of courtier, writing songs, devices, anagrams, and occasional verse for the celebration of significant events in the life of his patrons; organizing festivities and spectacles; and undertaking administrative and secretarial tasks.
The first known works by Basile are three letters in Neapolitan, dated 1604 (he wrote several others between 1604 and 1612), which, together with the dedication “A lo re de li viente” (To the king of the winds), were published as the preface to his friend Giulio Cesare Cortese’s Neapolitan mock epic, La vaiasseide (The epic of the servant girls), in 1612. Here Basile also used for the first time the anagrammatic pseudonym with which he later signed all of his Neapolitan works: Gian Alessio Abbattutis (“abbattuto” means dejected or depressed). Basile’s first work in Italian, the poem Il pianto della vergine (The tears of the virgin), was published in 1608. In this same year he composed a number of courtly and encomiastic works, and 1609 saw the first edition of Madriali et ode (Madrigals and odes), a volume of limited literary interest that nevertheless constituted another milestone in his literary career.4
In 1611 Basile published a marine pastoral set in Posillipo, Le avventurose disavventure. This genre, a variation on the ever-popular pastoral in which shepherds become fishermen, nymphs, mermaids, and so forth, shared many motifs—kidnapping, misplaced love, disguise, capricious fortune, final recognitions, and marriages—with the fairy tale. The choice of marine pastoral was also an attempt to rewrite a conventional genre in a distinctly Neapolitan key, an enterprise that not only allowed for a “native” space of literary creativity but also aggressively promoted local historical identity and popular cultural heritages, all of which would, later, receive their most exhaustive and spectacular expression in The Tale of Tales.5
In 1611 Basile became a founding member of the Neapolitan Accademia degli Oziosi, one of the most important academies of its day and a crossroads of Italian and Spanish culture. Basile’s personal device was a snail at the foot of a mountain, and his academic name “Il Pigro,” the same he had used at the Stravaganti in Candia. In 1612 were published the Egloghe amorose e lugubri (Amorous and lugubrious eclogues), the musical drama Venere addolorata (Venus afflicted), as well as numerous occasional pieces. Later in this same year Basile traveled to Mantua to join his sister Adriana, who had been part of the Gonzaga court for several years and had acquired a feudal estate. In 1613 Basile, too, received the favors of the new duke Ferdinando, who named him one of his court gentlemen. He also continued to publish; the Opere poetiche (Poetic works) of 1613 contained re-editions of most of Basile’s works of 1608–12.
By the end of 1613 Basile was back in Naples, and in subsequent years served as feudal administrator for various landed nobles of the kingdom of Naples. In 1615 he was in Montemarano (province of Avellino); in 1617 in Zuncoli, under the Marquis of Trevico, Cecco di Loffredo; in 1618 with the prince of Avellino, Marino Caracciolo; and in 1619 he was named governor of Avellino. Although these were “prize” jobs for someone like Basile, this life of continuous changes of residence and allegiance must have been tiring; much of the anticourt sentiment that permeates The Tale of Tales and the other dialect works was probably based on experiences accumulated during these years.
Indeed, Basile declared his profound disillusionment with court life in the facetious dedication (“A lo re de li viente”) to Cortese’s La vaiasseside, one of the most important works of the nascent dialect tradition.
It would be a good idea never to publish anything, but if this mistake really has to be made, my view is that the dedication should be to the wind. He must, indeed, be the greatest man in the world, for I hear him mentioned by everyone, who all say they work for him. Just look at those who serve in the courts: you serve now, you serve later, you serve today, you serve tomorrow, . . . and then, suddenly, it’s night for you, you’re told to turn yourself around and get out! You can truly say that you’ve served the wind, and God only knows how many of those fellows there are who, instead of awarding you satisfaction, at the last minute send you away with an accusation of theft. The lover paces the floor, coughs, sneezes, runs, perspires, pines away, swells up with emotion, and when he expects at least a wink of the eye from his coy sweetheart, he finds that he has labored in vain, for the wind! [. . .] And so the poor poet—sonnets over here, verses of every other sort over there, madrigals for this one and barzellette for that one—as soon as he collects his wits finds himself with an empty head, a shrunken stomach, and ragged elbows, one foot sunk in misery, . . . and always naked as a louse. Everything he does goes to the wind, just as my own affairs have.6
At this time Basile also embarked on philological editions of a selection of classic texts of the sixteenth-century Petrarchan and mannerist lyric traditions (Pietro Bembo, Giovanni della Casa, Galeazzo di Tarsia). The intensive cataloguing evidenced in these philological works was paralleled by, and perhaps preparatory to, the cataloguing of popular material that provided the foundation for Basile’s two major dialect works, Lo cunto de li cunti and Le muse napoletane (The Neapolitan muses), on which Basile had probably started working as early as 1615 and which he may have been reading to friends and colleagues in the Neapolitan academies.
The third part of Basile’s Madriali et ode came out in 1617; in 1619 he published Aretusa, a pastoral idyll; and in 1620, he wrote the musical drama Il guerriero amante (The warrior lover) specifically for performance by his sister Adriana, by this time a coveted national star. It was through her intercession with the viceroy Antonio Alvarez de Toledo that Basile, after serving for a few years (1621–22) as royal governor of Lagolibero (in the Basilicata region), acquired the far more prestigious position as governor of Anversa in 1626. In 1624 Basile published Immagini delle più belle dame napoletane ritratte da’ loro propri nomi in tanti anagrammi (Images of the most beautiful Neapolitan ladies, portrayed by their own names in anagram), appearing on the frontispiece of this work, for the first time, as “Count of Torone,” a designation that signaled his entrance into the “titled” bourgeoisie. He published fifty more Odes in 1627; and among Basile’s final works was one of the first musical dramas to be performed in Naples, Monte di Parnaso (Mount Parnassus [1630]), set to music by Giacinto Lombardo. In this period Basile also wrote a version of Heliodorus’s Aethiopica, titled Del Teagene, which was published posthumously in 1637.
Basile’s last job was at the court of the duke of Acerenza, Galeazzo Pinelli, who named Basile governor of Giugliano (in the province of Naples) in 1631. But it was a short-lived position. After the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 1631, a flu epidemic, so severe in its effects that it was compared by many to the plague, hit Naples and the surrounding areas, and Basile was one of its victims. He died on February 23, 1632, and was buried, after an elaborate funeral, in Giugliano’s Santa Sofia church.
One of the only bits of documentation of Basile’s life by his contemporaries is a “capsule” from the collection of biographies Glorie degli Incogniti, published by the homonymous Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti in 1637.
After he had applied himself, in the flower of his youth, to chivalrous pursuits just as much as to the study of the choicest letters, he became the true epitome of an exquisitely refined gentleman. Along with the knowledge of the most noble disciplines, he also learned several languages. [. . .] The literary merits of Giovan Battista were rendered more worthy of respect by his eminently courteous manners, by the sincere affection that he showed toward his friends, and by his perpetual cheerfulness of spirit, for which he was deemed the life of conversations. And so he conquered not only the affection of the gentlemen and ladies that he frequented in private,
but also the grace of the most exalted, who held him quite dear. And although fortune did not fail to test him by acquainting him with the hostility that she often declares to great minds, keeping him constantly distracted in troublesome occupations, he never lost heart. Up to his last breath he maintained a very peaceful tenor of life, since at the time that death took him from the living he was nourishing substantial hopes.7
After Basile’s death, Adriana was instrumental in getting Del Teagene published, and she probably also arranged for the publication of Le muse napoletane (1635) and Lo cunti de li cunti (1634–36). We might wonder at Basile’s lack of editorial self-promotion with regard to the dialect works, considering his otherwise meticulous management of his literary affairs. Perhaps he did not deem them appropriate to publish or, possibly, felt that there was less need for their diffusion on a wide scale. Basile’s ideal audience, in fact, consisted of the communities revolving around the small courts where he served and the Neapolitan academies of which he was a member; the preferred mode of consuming a work like The Tale of Tales was, most likely, the oral setting of “courtly conversation.”8
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Basile’s Italian works, so well received during his own life, ceased to be republished shortly after his death and by the end of the seventeenth century had fallen into oblivion. The popularity of The Tale of Tales, on the other hand, has through the centuries steadily increased. There is no trace nor any mention in early biographical material on Basile of an autograph or indeed any sort of manuscript, and thus little is known about the time or modality of the composition of The Tale of Tales. It was initially published as five separate volumes: the first and second days in 1634 by the Neapolitan press of Ottavio Beltrano; the third in 1634 by Lazzaro Scorriggio, also of Naples; the fourth in 1635 by Scorriggio; and the fifth in 1636 by Beltrano. The Neapolitan bookseller and champion of Neapolitan culture Salvatore Scarrano was the author of a dedication appearing in day 1 in which Lo cunti de li cunti was referred to with an alternate name of Pentamerone, although it is uncertain whether this was done on the initiative of the editor or by Basile himself. In this dedication Scarrano also makes much of the “great delight and happiness” bound to be caused by Basile’s ornamentation of his “little tales” with “so much word-play and so many sayings and so many extravagant conceits.” This is no easy task, he continues, quoting from a letter by the eminent humanist Pico della Mirandola, since “to write in an erudite manner of funny things and fairy tales requires a sharper intellect than to hold forth on very serious subjects or to discourse eloquently. It is, in fact, more difficult to mold a beautiful statue out of mud than out of bronze or gold.”
Later editions of The Tale of Tales were based on this editio princeps, and in the seventeenth century there were many of them: in 1637 a partial edition of the first two days (published separately), the first edition of which had already sold out (Beltrano); and complete editions in 1645 (Camillo Cavallo of Naples), 1654 (Cavallo), 1674 (Antonio Bulifon of Naples, with the primary frontispiece title given, for the first time, as Il Pentamerone), 1679 (Bartolomeo Lupardi of Rome), and 1697 (Mechele Loise Mutio of Naples). Basile’s opus thus appears to have encountered near immediate success; already by the 1637 edition the editor notes how the first volumes were “received by the world with great applause, because of the poetic brilliance and skill found therein and because of the new genre, which will make them, I believe, immortal.”
Frontispieces from the first edition of days 1 and 5.
Throughout the seventeenth century The Tale of Tales acquired some popularity outside Naples, perhaps due to the fact that the general public had a passing familiarity with Neapolitan, which was frequently used at the time in theater, especially the commedia dell’arte. The eighteenth century saw six more Neapolitan editions, two in Bolognese dialect, and six editions of an abridged Italian translation. In the next century there was another edition in Neapolitan, four more in Bolognese, and three in Italian; the first important editions in other European languages also began to appear. Felix Liebrecht’s German translation was published in 1846, followed by recastings of the same translation in 1888 and 1909. Basile’s work was first translated into English as the Pentamerone by John Edward Taylor in 1848 (with illustrations by George Cruikshank), and reedited in 1850, 1852, and 1902; in 1893 Sir Richard Burton published a new translation.
The twentieth century produced three more English editions: the first in 1911, which included only thirty of Taylor’s translated tales; the second in 1927 and 1928, a version of Burton’s translation; and the third the complete, new translation (though from Benedetto Croce’s Italian, not the original Neapolitan) by Norman Penzer in 1932. In 2001 Jack Zipes published a Norton anthology titled The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm, in which he included Italian translations of twenty-three of Basile’s tales.
In Italian, the eminently readable and excellently annotated (though not always faithful to the original) translation by the literary historian, critic, and philosopher Benedetto Croce dates from 1925. In the last several decades in particular Basile has begun to receive the scholarly attention he merits, which has resulted in a number of new editions. These include Mario Petrini’s philological Neapolitan edition (1976), Michele Rak’s bilingual edition (with his own Italian translation) in which he supplements Croce’s apparatus with extensive notes and an introduction of his own (1986), and Ruggero Guarini’s translation (1994). The Neapolitan composer and musicologist Roberto de Simone issued a provocative “rewriting” of The Tale of Tales in 2002, and there have been other recent initiatives aimed at familiarizing a younger readership with Basile’s work, such as the publication, one day at a time (the first in 2004 and the second in 2005), of an abridged and simplified version by L’Isola dei Ragazzi.
As for elsewhere in Europe, where there has also been considerable recent appreciation of Basile, a French translation by Francoise Decroisette was published in 1995, and a team led by the folklore scholar Rudolf Schenda produced a new German translation in 2000.
BASILE AND NEAPOLITAN
Italian dialects, especially major ones like Neapolitan, were not at Basile’s time nor indeed have ever been limited to the function of jargon or street lingo or, as in other nations, markers of class. Moreover, although a dialect is commonly understood to be “one of the subordinate forms or varieties of a language arising from local peculiarities of vocabulary, pronunciation, and idiom” (Oxford English Dictionary), most Italian dialects differ significantly from standard Italian in morphology and syntax as well, resulting at times in mutual incomprehensibility among dialect speakers from different regions. In Basile’s time, as until relatively recently (the political unification of Italy into a nation-state took place in 1861, along with the institution of mandatory schooling and national conscription, both factors that encouraged the use of a “national” language), the majority of Italy’s population spoke exclusively dialect, which was in effect their “mother tongue.” Even “bilingual” Italians generally spoke dialect in many more contexts than they did Italian—in the family, with friends, and to do business in their native cities. Indeed, it was only with the advent of television nearly a century after unification that it could be truly said that Italian entered in full force into the households of Italians, and today a good deal of private and public affairs are still conducted in dialect in many places.
Before the mid-nineteenth century “Italian” was thus above all the language of literature and of a relatively small elite of intellectuals, nobles, and statesmen. Although it originally owed much linguistically to the Tuscan dialect of the “three crowns” of vernacular literary tradition—Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75), and Francesco Petrarca (1304–74), literary Italian has been throughout the centuries a work in progress. Indeed, the questione della lingua, or language question, remained a central fixture of cultural debate in Italy from Dante onward;
one of its principal discussions revolved around whether one regional variety of the vernacular should form a common foundation for written and spoken Italian (and, if so, which), or whether, instead, a hybrid, composite vernacular containing elements from various sources should be adopted.
But by Basile’s time there existed literary corpi not only in “Tuscan” Italian (which included among its Renaissance additions Machiavelli, Ariosto, Castiglione, and Tasso) and in Latin; there had already been literary experiments in a number of dialects as well. In the case of Neapolitan, some sort of tradition had been in place for several centuries, although it is generally agreed that “modern” dialect literature, or a literature that could rival the Tuscan tradition in artistic sophistication and complexity, was born at this time due to the efforts of Basile and his contemporaries Giulio Cesare Cortese and the pseudonymous Felippe de Scafato Sgruttendio. Among the dialect genres that enjoyed great popularity at Basile’s time were the villanelle, lyric variations on pastoral themes; the canzune massicce, or “massive songs,” longer poetic works similar to the epic; and the later farse cavote or cavaiole, theatrical farces deriving their name from the proverbially slow-witted inhabitants of Cava, in the province of Salerno. The thematic core of these works was, not surprisingly, description of life in Naples and the surrounding areas, and ranged from celebration of people and places to “micro-historical” chronicles of real or invented events, just as the register could range from the comic, traditionally the domain of nonstandard literary languages, to the pathetic. This literature evolved at the margins of institutionalized genres for the obvious reason that its local themes and language made a wide diffusion difficult, but also for the less obvious reason that in a period in which Spain was striving to consolidate its colonialist regime in southern Italy, a literature whose depiction of local realities was often veined with anti-Spanish and anticolonial sentiment was regarded suspiciously by official culture. The dialect writers of Basile’s generation, in particular, showed themselves capable not only of creating a rapport with “high” tradition in the form of parody but also of employing sophisticated formal resources—often borrowed in part from the same elite tradition—to construct a thematics of difference in works that were themselves the foundations of an alternative tradition.