The Decameron
The Decameron, subtitled Prince Galehaut and sometimes nicknamed l'Umana commedia, is a collection of short stories by the 14th-century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio. The book is structured as a frame story containing 100 tales told by a group of seven young women and three young men; they shelter in a secluded villa just outside Florence in order to escape the Black Death, which was afflicting the city. The epidemic is likely what Boccaccio used for the basis of the book which was thought to be written between 1348 and 1353. The various tales of love in The Decameron range from the erotic to the tragic. Tales of wit, practical jokes, and life lessons also contribute to the mosaic. In addition to its literary value and widespread influence, it provides a document of life at the time. Written in the vernacular of the Florentine language, it is considered a masterpiece of early Italian prose.
Title
The book's primary title exemplifies Boccaccio's fondness for Greek philology: Decameron combines Greek δέκα, déka and ἡμέρα, hēméra to mean "ten-day ", referring to the period in which the characters of the frame story tell their tales.Hexaemeron was a familiar title in Boccaccio's day. It was commonly used for sermons and treatises commenting on the biblical story of the creation of the world, which took place in six days. The tradition goes back to Patristic literature, notably Ambrose of Milan’s Hexaemeron also known as Exameron. In thirteenth-century Italy Bonaventure still authored Collationes in Hexaemeron in the same tradition. Exploring the links between the Decameron and hexaemeral literature's exposition of creation usually structured in six chapters, scholarship pointed out that Boccaccio’s ten narrators intervene following a cataclysmic outbreak of plague as though they were metaphorically re-creating a world through their stories, day after day. The mischievous critique of monastic culture contained in Boccaccio’s book also led some to wonder whether the erudite title Decameron might not comprise a parodistic dimension.
Boccaccio's subtitle, Prencipe Galeotto, refers to Galehaut, a fictional knight sometimes called haut prince in the 13th-century Lancelot-Grail. Galehaut was a close friend of Lancelot, but an enemy of King Arthur. When Galehaut learned that Lancelot loved Arthur's wife, Guinevere, he set aside his own ardor for Lancelot in order to arrange a meeting between his friend and Guinevere. At this meeting the Queen first kisses Lancelot, and so begins their love affair. Through this notorious episode, Galeotto had become the epitome of the romantic go-between in the Italian imagination – a Cupid able to bind two hearts. By subtitling his book Prencipe Galeotto, Boccaccio signals that he hopes his stories will bring young lovers together, providing them with an opportunity to use storytelling as a vehicle of flirtation and ultimately fall in love. This reading finds confirmation in a memorable passage from Dante's Divine Comedy where two lovers explain they have fallen madly in love while reading the Lancelot-and-Guinevere story to one another, so that, in a sense, the romance had functioned as their very own Galehaut or "romantic go-between". The idea was encapsulated in Dante's oft-cited verse: "Galeotto fu ’l libro e chi lo scrisse", crystallizing at once the image of Galeotto-as-book and book-as-love-dart. The verse is spoken in Hell, in the circle of the lustful, by Francesca da Rimini as she tries to justify her forbidden liaison with her half-brother and paramour Paolo Malatesta, blaming the Lancelot-and-Guinevere story for impassioning them to lovemaking.
The description of Galehaut's munificence and savoir-faire amidst this intrigue impressed Boccaccio. By invoking the name Prencipe Galeotto in the alternative title to Decameron, Boccaccio also alludes to a sentiment he expresses in the Proem of the Decameron about the aim of his text: his compassion for women deprived of free speech and social liberty, confined to their homes and, at times, lovesick. He contrasts this life with that of the men free to enjoy hunting, fishing, riding, and falconry.
Frame story
In Italy during the time of the Black Death, a group of seven young women and three young men flee from plague-ridden Florence to a deserted villa in the countryside of Fiesole for two weeks. To pass the evenings, each member of the party tells a story each night, except for one day per week for chores, and the holy days during which they do no work at all, resulting in ten nights of storytelling over the course of two weeks. Thus, by the end of the fortnight they have told 100 stories.Each of the ten characters is charged as King or Queen of the company for one of the ten days in turn. This charge extends to choosing the theme of the stories for that day, and all but two days have topics assigned: examples of the power of fortune; examples of the power of human will; love tales that end tragically; love tales that end happily; clever replies that save the speaker; tricks that women play on men; tricks that people play on each other in general; examples of virtue. Due to his wit, Dioneo, who usually tells the tenth tale each day, is allowed to select any topic he wishes.
Many commentators have argued that Dioneo expresses the views of Boccaccio himself. Each day also includes a short introduction and conclusion to continue the frame of the tales by describing other daily activities besides story-telling. These framing interludes frequently include transcriptions of Italian folk songs. The interactions among tales in a day, or across days, as Boccaccio spins variations and reversals of previous material, forms a whole and not just a collection of stories. Recurring plots of the stories include mocking the lust and greed of the clergy; female lust and ambition on par with male lust and ambition; tensions in Italian society between the new wealthy commercial class and noble families; and the perils and adventures of traveling merchants.
Analysis
Beyond the unity provided by the frame narrative, the Decameron provides a unity in philosophical outlook. Throughout runs the common medieval theme of Lady Fortune, and how quickly one can rise and fall through the external influences of the "Wheel of Fortune". Boccaccio had been educated in the tradition of Dante's Divine Comedy, which used various levels of allegory to show the connections between the literal events of the story and the Christian message. However, the Decameron uses Dante's model not to educate the reader but to satirize this method of learning. The Catholic Church, priests, and religious belief become the satirical source of comedy throughout. This was part of a wider historical trend in the aftermath of the Black Death which saw widespread discontent with the church. Many details of the Decameron are infused with a medieval sense of numerological and mystical significance. For example, it is widely believed that the seven young women are meant to represent the Four Cardinal Virtues and the Three Theological Virtues. It is further supposed that the three men represent the classical Greek tripartite division of the soul. Boccaccio himself notes that the names he gives for these ten characters are in fact pseudonyms chosen as "appropriate to the qualities of each". The Italian names of the seven women, in the same order as given in the text, are Pampinea, Fiammetta, Filomena, Emilia, Lauretta, Neifile, and Elissa. The men, in order, are Panfilo, Filostrato, and Dioneo.Literary sources
Boccaccio borrowed the plots of almost all his stories. Although he consulted only French, Italian and Latin sources, some of the tales have their origin in such far-off lands as India, the Middle East, Spain, and other places. Some were already centuries old. For example, part of the tale of Andreuccio of Perugia originated in 2nd-century Ephesus. Even the description of the central motivating event of the narrative, the Black Plague, is not original, but is based on a description in the Historia gentis Langobardorum of Paul the Deacon, who lived in the 8th century. Boccaccio also drew on Ovid's works as inspiration. He has been called "the Italian Ovid" because of his writing.File:Peter Paul Rubens, Frans Snyders and Jan Wildens - Cimone and Efigenia.jpg|thumb|310px|The story of Cimone and Efigenia, the First Story from the Fifth Day, work by Peter Paul Rubens, Frans Snyders and Jan Wildens
The fact that Boccaccio borrowed the story lines that make up most of the Decameron does not mean he mechanically reproduced them. Most of the stories take place in the 14th century and have been sufficiently updated to the author's time that a reader may not know that they had been written centuries earlier or in a foreign culture. Also, Boccaccio often combined two or more unrelated tales into one.
Moreover, many of the characters actually existed, such as Giotto di Bondone, Guido Cavalcanti, Saladin, and King William II of Sicily. Scholars have even been able to verify the existence of less famous characters, such as the tricksters Bruno and Buffalmacco and their victim Calandrino. Still other fictional characters are based on real people, such as the Madonna Fiordaliso from tale II, 5, who is derived from a Madonna Flora who lived in the red light district of Naples. Boccaccio often intentionally muddled historical and geographical facts for his narrative purposes. Within the tales of the Decameron, the principal characters are usually developed through their dialogue and actions, so that by the end of the story they seem real and their actions logical given their context.
Another of Boccaccio's frequent techniques was to make already existing tales more complex. A clear example of this is in tale IX, 6, which was also used by Chaucer in his "The Reeve's Tale", which more closely follows the original French source than does Boccaccio's version. In the Italian version, the host's wife and the two young male visitors occupy all three beds and she also creates an explanation of the happenings of the evening. Both elements are Boccaccio's invention and make for a more complex version than either Chaucer's version or the French source.