Tales From the Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio

  Faint echoes of Dante’s conception of Fortune are heard in the prefatory remarks to Boccaccio’s tale of Alessandro and the abbot (II, 3). The narrator is Pampinea, who states that Fortune controls all human affairs, arranging and rearranging them in her own inscrutable fashion. She shifts them, now one way, then another, then back again, without pursuing any discernible pattern. A more obvious reminder of the passage from Dante occurs in the introduction to the story of Cisti the baker (VI, 2). Once again the narrator is Pampinea, who after claiming that Fortune, far from being blind, has a thousand eyes, uses Dante’s terminology in depicting Fortune, along with Nature, as the two ministers of the world (le due ministre del mondo).

  Boccaccio’s conception of Fortune is distinctly medieval. There is no trace in the pages of the Decameron of the Renaissance idea that Fortune is capable of being controlled by the application of wisdom and forethought, a view most famously propounded by Machiavelli in the penultimate chapter of his treatise on monarchy. Writing in the early sixteenth century, Machiavelli compared Fortune to a river, which will cause enormous damage when it is in flood unless precautions have been taken to contain it by constructing high banks and overflow channels during the dry season. In a memorable and typically provocative phrase, he also compared Fortune to a woman, explaining that one needs to beat and shake it into submission.75 An obvious point of comparison in the Decameron is the tale (IX, 9) of the young man with the shrewish wife who seeks advice from King Solomon, but Boccaccio’s tale contains no reference to Fortune, being simply one of several that reflect the misogynistic sentiments of medieval literature.

  In all of the stories of the Second Day except the last, Fortune is an impersonal and capricious force, against whose operations the individual is incapable of any response other than an attitude of stoical indifference. A second common feature of these stories is their connection with the world of commerce, which assumes prominence in each of the first five stories as well as in the tales of Alatiel (II, 7) and of Bernabò and Zinevra (II, 9). The vicissitudes of Fortune are equated in most of these stories with the ups and downs of characters whose lives are dedicated to commercial enterprise, a typical example being the tale of Landolfo Rufolo (II, 4). Rufolo is a merchant who, determined to multiply his already considerable wealth, sails for Cyprus with a mixed cargo, only to find on his arrival that large quantities of goods similar to his own have already been landed there, forcing him to sell at a loss. He turns to piracy, accumulates a vast fortune, and sails contentedly for home. His ship is seized by heavily armed Genoese traders who take him prisoner, and when his captors are shipwrecked, he manages to survive by clinging for dear life to a chest that is floating on the surface of the sea. He is washed up more dead than alive on the island of Corfu, where he discovers that the chest is full of precious jewels. With these he eventually returns home, having succeeded in his original purpose of vastly increasing his wealth.

  The story of Landolfo Rufolo is the first in the Decameron to be set in the south, and there is no mistaking the tone of nostalgic affection with which Boccaccio describes the Amalfi coast in its opening paragraph. There is also more than a hint of admiration for the spirit of enterprise that has brought prosperity to the numerous merchants who settled in a region familiar to the writer from the days of his youth. The story contains only two characters, Landolfo and the peasant woman who restores him to health after dragging him from the sea off the shore of Corfu. Like most of Boccaccio’s characters, neither is developed in any great psychological depth, their personalities emerging fully formed from the events of the narrative. The distinguishing feature of Landolfo is his acquisitiveness, the motivating force behind all of his actions. The narrator focuses attention on the vicissitudes of the chief character, for which the sea is a sort of emblematic leitmotif. The sea is in fact the most important recurrent image in the narratives of the Second Day, playing a prominent role not only in the tale of Landolfo, but also in those of Beritola (II, 6), Alatiel (II, 7) and Paganino (II, 10). It also features briefly in the stories of Andreuccio (II, 5), the Count of Antwerp (II, 8) and Bernabò and Zinevra (II, 9). The image of the sea, ideal for representing the vicissitudes of Fortune, acts as a link between the main theme of the Second Day and the world of commerce that is depicted in so many of the stories.

  The sea has other associations. In most, though not all, of the stories containing nautical episodes, the sea forms a conspicuous backdrop to an account of passionate love. This is especially true of the story of Alatiel (II, 7), whose erotic odyssey begins with a shipwreck and proceeds by a series of voyages arranged by six of her nine different lovers to seize for themselves the object of their passionate desires, often with fatal results. The second of her lovers, Marato, is flung overboard by the ship’s two Genoese masters who aspire to take his place in her bed. They then engage in a knife duel, in which one is killed and the other severely injured before the ship reaches its port of call. Murderous violence at sea in pursuit of a woman’s love is also recorded in the tales of Gerbino (IV, 4) and Cimon (V, 1). Elsewhere, as in the tales of Bartolomea (II, 10) and Gostanza (V, 2), the sea functions as the calm and benign agent for the successful attainment of the heroine’s secret ambitions. The depth of Gianni da Procida’s love for Restituta (V, 6) is underscored by an oblique reference to the classical myth of Hero and Leander in the introduction to the story, where we are told that Gianni would swim across the stretch of water separating Procida from Ischia if only to gaze ecstatically upon the walls of the house that sheltered his beloved.

  In addition to their exploration of the theme of Fortune, their associations with the world of commerce and their abundance of maritime episodes, the stories of the Second Day of the Decameron illustrate an aspect of Boccaccio’s narrative procedure that has engaged the attention of an outstanding storyteller of more recent times, Alberto Moravia.76 According to Moravia, a delight in weaving tales filled with realistic accounts of adventurous deeds, or what he calls ‘l’estetica dell’avventura’ (‘the aesthetics of adventure’), is the mark of a writer whose personal experience of such matters derives from the breadth of his reading and the powers of his imagination. Whether or not one accepts Moravia’s characterization of the author of the Decameron as the scholar and man of letters absorbed at his desk in the vicarious fulfilment of his own desire for adventure, it is certainly true that Boccaccio explores in unusual detail the possible twists and turns of a narrative that is so uncomplicated in its essentials as to be capable of brief summary in the story’s heading. The account of Alatiel’s multiple couplings is a particularly good example. Another is the famous story of Andreuccio of Perugia (II, 5), where in the course of a single night the hero is the unwilling participant in a quite extraordinary series of perilous adventures. And all the other stories of the Second Day reflect this feature of Boccaccio’s narrative technique, to which some commentators have applied the phrase ars combinatoria.

  In this connection it is instructive to contrast Boccaccio’s treatment of a particular set of circumstances with the way that the same narrative material is handled by others. The story of the three beds (IX, 6), retold by Chaucer in The Reeve’s Tale, is one that had earlier appeared in at least two of the French fabliaux. What distinguishes Boccaccio’s version from the others is the advantage he takes of one further permutation of the story’s basic elements: three beds and a cot in a darkened room, where at different times during the night a husband and wife, their nubile daughter, and two young male lodgers all share their bed by accident or design with more than one of the others. In Chaucer’s version, the tale ends chaotically with the beating and humiliation of the host, a crooked miller, and his awareness that his daughter has been seduced. Boccaccio on the other hand resolves the story to everyone’s satisfaction by having the wife move swiftly into her daughter’s bed, from which she declares that the girl’s honour has remained unimpaired, being supported in her claim by the second lodger’s pretence that his companion has been dreaming.
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  A classic instance of Boccaccio’s delight in telling a complicated, vivid and dramatic narrative is the story of Pietro Boccamazza and Agnolella (V, 3), which incidentally mirrors and documents the lawlessness and factional strife prevalent in the Roman countryside during the ‘Babylonian Captivity’ of the papacy in Avignon. From the initial description of the runaway lovers departing from Rome on horseback to the final account of their marriage and return to the city, the story proceeds via a series of exciting episodes in a manner that foreshadows in rudimentary form the technique adopted by the outstanding narrative poet of the Italian Renaissance, Ludovico Ariosto, in the Orlando furioso. Ariosto so arranges the several strands of the narrative as to lead the reader to a climax in one episode, then switching to another, likewise taking that to a moment of crisis, and so on before he eventually returns to an earlier episode to describe what happened next. In the same way, Boccaccio’s story proceeds alternately from crisis to crisis in the fortunes of the two main characters. When the lovers take a wrong turning, leading to their being set upon by an armed band, Agnolella escapes into a forest, whilst Pietro is seized and about to be hanged from a tree when his captors are in turn attacked by a second armed band. Pietro flees into the forest, where he spends the whole day in a fruitless search for his beloved before tethering his horse to an oak tree and climbing into its upper branches to preserve himself from being attacked by wild beasts and to await the dawn. The scene switches to the cottage of an elderly couple where Agnolella has taken refuge, but the cottage is invaded by yet another armed band. She hides under a pile of straw, narrowly avoiding death from a spear thrown carelessly into the straw by one of the brigands. Once they have left, she is led to safety in a nearby castle. The narrator then returns to the plight of Pietro, still perched in the branches of the oak, from which he witnesses the horrifying spectacle of his horse being devoured by a pack of wolves. Finally he too makes his way to the castle, where the couple are reunited and married before returning to Rome.

  The tales of adventure are frequently spiced with humour, sometimes in the manner of the telling, at other times in the narrative itself. In the account of Landolfo Rufolo’s ordeal in the sea, he is described as ‘having nothing to eat and far more to drink than he would have wished’, and by the following day he ‘had almost turned into a sponge’. The story of Andreuccio (II, 5), set in Naples, includes two splendid comic vignettes of minor characters, to which attention was drawn by Benedetto Croce, himself a Neapolitan, in a well-known essay.77 The first occurs when the hapless Andreuccio, having fallen from an upper storey of the courtesan’s house in the middle of the night into an open sewer, repeatedly hammers on her door to be re-admitted. Various neighbours, awakened by the noise, fling open their windows and advise him to go away, whereupon the woman’s bully sticks out his head and asks who is there ‘in a low, fierce, spine-chilling growl’. Andreuccio looks up and catches sight of a face which

  … clearly belonged to some mighty man or other, who had a thick black beard and was yawning and rubbing his eyes as though he had just been roused from a deep sleep.78

  Andreuccio’s attempt to explain his presence there is cut short by the fearsome-looking newcomer, who showers him with abuse:

  ‘I don’t know what restrains me from coming down there and giving you the biggest pasting you’ve ever had in your life, you miserable drunken idiot, making all this racket in the middle of the night and keeping everyone awake.’79

  Later in the same story, when Andreuccio finds himself imprisoned in a deep tomb with the corpse of a recently dead archbishop, a gang of grave robbers opens the tomb and props up its massive lid. An argument ensues over who should enter the tomb to steal the archbishop’s ruby ring, then a priest steps forward, saying

  ‘What are you afraid of? Do you think he is going to devour you? Dead men don’t eat the living. I will go in myself.’80

  Fortune traditionally favours the brave, but not in this instance. When the priest lays the upper part of his body on the edge of the tomb and swivels round, ready to descend, Andreuccio stands up and grabs one of his legs, giving the priest the impression that he is about to be dragged inside by the corpse. The priest

  … no sooner felt this happening than he let out an ear-splitting yell and hurled himself bodily out of the tomb. The rest of the gang were terrified by this turn of events, and, leaving the tomb open, they all started running away as though they were being pursued by ten thousand devils.81

  The Decameron’s rich vein of comic invention, as seen in the story of Andreuccio, is of course one of the reasons for the work’s timeless appeal. What is impressive is the breadth and variety of its humorous elements. Not only does Boccaccio invent a host of original comic characters, but he presents them in a broad range of situations, frequently using his mastery of comical discourse to heighten his effects. His outstanding comic creation is the naïve and gullible Florentine painter Calandrino, who appears in no fewer than four separate stories, and whose name has become co-terminous in the Italian language with a simpleton. In VIII, 3, Calandrino is deceived into thinking that he has rendered himself invisible by picking up a magic stone, the heliotrope. In an episode that borders on farce, Calandrino’s greedy desire to keep his discovery to himself causes him to remain silent, leaping this way and that in agony as his companions, Bruno and Buffalmacco, pretend that he has left them in the lurch and pelt him with jagged rocks. In VIII, 6, he suffers another indignity, with equally amusing results, by undergoing a lie-detector test staged by Bruno and Buffalmacco to prove that he has stolen his own pig. In IX, 3, he is persuaded by his two companions that he is pregnant, and attributes his condition to his wife’s fondness for lying on top of him during their lovemaking. In IX, 5, he falls in love with his employer’s pretty young mistress, who connives with Bruno and Buffalmacco to land him in a compromising situation where he is discovered and severely beaten by his outraged wife, Monna Tessa.

  Boccaccio’s Calandrino was the prototype for many of the simpleton characters of Italian Renaissance comedy. It is sometimes claimed that in the Decameron he figures in more of the stories than any of the other characters, but that distinction belongs to Calandrino’s two companions, Bruno and Buffalmacco, who appear in all four stories involving Calandrino and also in a fifth, the hoodwinking of the gullible physician, Master Simone (VIII, 9). Almost Rabelaisian in tone, the story is unique in the Decameron for its constant stream of scatological references, culminating in the dumping of the unfortunate Simone at dead of night in a cesspit. Boccaccio’s delight in wordplay, a prominent aspect of the tale’s humour, poses serious problems for the translator, especially in Bruno’s outrageous catalogue of the exotic, high-born ladies with whom he claims acquaintance, and in Buffalmacco’s equally outrageous list of the nobles who form part of the retinue of la contessa di Civilian, or the Countess of Cesspool.

  The distinctively Florentine flavour of the five stories involving Bruno and Buffalmacco stems mainly from their being placed within specifically Florentine contexts, no opportunity being missed to pinpoint the exact location of particular narrative episodes. By contrast, there is one story, that of Monna Belcolore and the priest of Varlungo (VIII, 2), where the setting in the Florentine countryside (contado) is secondary in importance to its dazzling display of Florentine verbal wit. The wordplay here is a vital component of the narrative itself, which moves swiftly along by way of a series of lively and intricately assembled effusions of verbal humour, from the initial description of Monna Belcolore to the equivocal final paragraph, with its account of her eventual conversion to the priest’s way of thinking. Florentinisms and double meanings pour forth in a constant stream, and even the names of the characters contribute to the tale’s overall comic effect. Apart from Belcolore herself and her slow-witted husband, Bentivegna del Mazzo, the narrative includes a whole gallery of other characters whose sole raison d’être is to heighten the humorous effect by the very sound of their odd and at times equivocal Florentine
names. And similar considerations apply to the various references to rustic pursuits, such as Belcolore’s flair for singing and dancing and the priest’s gardening skills that account for the curious presents he sends to the object of his lustful passion. No translation can convey the uniquely Florentine rustic tone of the original text, which is one of the most brilliant examples of humorous writing in medieval literature.

  Wordplay of a different order is to be found in the story of Friar Alberto (IV, 2), set in Venice, where the vain and foolish Donna Lisetta is variously referred to, by antonomasia, as Donna mestola, Donna zucca al vento, Madama baderla, and Donna pocofila. The conversion of such titles into fairly close English equivalents presents no great difficulty: Lady Numbskull, Lady Bighead, Lady Noodle, Lady Birdbrain. But Boccaccio confronts his translators with the most serious problems of all in the tale of Friar Cipolla (VI, 10), whose lengthy and ingenious sermon is shot through from beginning to end with puns and double meanings. Most of Boccaccio’s Italian editors maintain, with some reason, that the catalogue of far-flung places which Cipolla claims to have visited is mainly a list of localities in and around Florence, to which the writer has added a few of his own, such as Truffa (‘Swindleland’), Buffia (‘Prankland’) and terra di Menzogna (‘Spoofland’). The present translation dispenses with the possible Florentine associations of the passage. Truffia and Buffia are converted into Funland and Laughland, and terra di Menzogna into Liarland, thus hinting at a possible extension of the friar’s globetrotting to include the Baltic region and the Celtic fringe. With further adjustments to Cipolla’s exotic place-names, Boccaccio’s surrealistic verbal fantasy is to some extent preserved:

  ‘So away I went, and after setting out from Venison, I visited the Greek Calends, then rode at a brisk pace through the Kingdom of Algebra and through Bordello, eventually reaching Bedlam, and not long afterwards, almost dying of thirst, I arrived in Sardintinia… After crossing the Straits of Penury, I found myself passing through Funland and Laughland,… Then I went on to Liarland…’82