Admonitory wit effects a comparable transformation in the next story (I, 9), recounting the way in which a gentlewoman of Gascony, travelling through Cyprus, having suffered a brutal assault from a pack of ruffians, converts the king, a cowardly weakling, into the implacable scourge of all wrongdoers. And the First Day ends with yet another admonitory tale (I, 10), this time featuring a brilliant physician, Master Alberto of Bologna, now ‘an old man approaching seventy’, who reproaches a young gentlewoman and her companions for mocking his amatory feelings towards her, by his witty and delightfully allusive account of the way young ladies go about the eating of leeks.
No specific topic is prescribed for the stories of the First Day, but all are concerned with various forms of human weakness, and all involve the application of the intellectual faculties to correct or modify their harmful effects. Intelligence is thus established as the initial theme of the work as a whole, whilst in the stories of the Second Day the theme of Fortune occupies a dominant position. Boccaccio’s third major theme is Love, which figures prominently in the stories of the following three days, although in several of the stories narrated on those days, especially on the Third Day, Intelligence is an important ancillary theme. As already noted, the protagonists of the story of King Agilulf and the groom (III, 2) embody the qualities of wisdom and ingenuity respectively in their reactions to the events of the narrative. Ingenuity is also the distinguishing feature of the anonymous Florentine noblewoman (III, 3) who hoodwinks a solemn friar into unwittingly acting as pander between herself and the young man on whom she has fixed her amorous longings. The initial description of the lady is significant, stressing as it does the strength of her intellectual character. According to the narrator, Filomena, she was:
a noblewoman of striking beauty and impeccable breeding, who was endowed by Nature with as lofty a temperament and shrewd an intellect as could be found in any other woman of her time.65
The narrative, carefully structured and brilliantly told, includes a smattering of anti-clerical polemic and, by way of justification for the lady’s adulterous quest, a disapproving commentary on arranged marriages (her husband being an immensely rich woollen-draper, incapable of anything more than ‘distinguishing wool from cotton, supervising the setting up of a loom, or debating the virtues of a particular yarn with a spinner-woman’), but the novella’s strength derives from the high degree of sophistication with which the lady pursues and eventually achieves her objective.
The exercise of intelligence in the pursuit of an objective, generally amatory in scope, is seen in most of the other stories of the Third Day, from the initial account of Masetto’s heroic exertions in the convent (III, 1) to the tale, appropriated by Shakespeare in All’s Well that Ends Well, of Gilette of Narbonne’s successful fulfilment of the seemingly impossible conditions imposed by a reluctant husband for the consummation of their marriage (III, 9).
A variant on the same theme (intelligence as the spur in the cause of love) is found in the story of Cimon (V, 1), where the boorish hero, having miraculously acquired wisdom through his chance discovery in a woodland clearing of the sleeping form of the beautiful Iphigenia, employs all his resources of guile and physical strength to secure her as his bride. Whether he is deserving of such a prize, which he obtains through murder and abduction, depends on how much importance one attributes to the underlying intent to echo the myth of Pholus the centaur. The tale that immediately follows (V, 2) is a love story of quite a different kind, and includes an episode where Martuccio Gomito, having been captured and imprisoned by the Saracens, wins his freedom and the grateful esteem of the King of Tunis by providing him with some ingenious advice on how to win a war against a powerful invader.
The form of intelligence displayed in the narratives of the Sixth Day is verbal wit, of which several examples have already appeared in the course of the First Day’s proceedings. The tale of Madonna Oretta (VI, 1) is of special interest, since her clever response to her admirer’s persistent but clumsy attempts at storytelling is preceded by a catalogue of his shortcomings. Like the scene in which Hamlet advises the players on what to avoid in the art of acting, the passage reveals by implication the qualities that Boccaccio considered essential to the art of the storyteller: variety of phrasing, avoidance of repetition, clarity of exposition, and a delivery suited to the characters and incidents being described. Many recent commentators regard the story of Oretta as a metanovella, an extended metaphor on how not to tell a story, and some have sought to argue that its placing at the centre of the work – it being the fifty-first of the hundred stories – is a pointer to the importance Boccaccio attached to it as a key to the art of storytelling.
In her preliminary remarks to the tale of Oretta, Filomena describes shafts of verbal wit as an adornment to graceful manners and polite conversation, comparing them to stars bedecking the sky on cloudless nights. She asserts that the bon mot is better suited to women than to men, it being unseemly for women to go on talking at inordinate length. Her remarks echo almost exactly those of Pampinea in introducing the story of Master Alberto (I, 10). Both Pampinea and Filomena complain about the disuse into which the practice has fallen amongst their women contemporaries, most of whom are incapable not only of producing a witticism at the right moment, but also of recognizing one when they hear it. The point, distinctly anti-feminist, is driven home in the story of Cesca (VI, 8), whose failure to comprehend her uncle’s glaringly obvious piece of advice induces the narrator to compare her to a montons, or a ram, synonymous for Italians with a mutton-head.
Notwithstanding the remarks of Pampinea and Filomena on the subject, in only three of the stories of the Sixth Day is the bon mot delivered by a woman. Apart from the tale of Oretta, the others are the accounts of Monna Nonna de’ Pulci’s biting retort to the banter of the Bishop of Florence (VI, 3) and of Madonna Filippa’s spirited defence of women’s rights (VI, 7), to which reference was made earlier in discussing the question of adulterous love.
Florentines prided themselves on their sharpness of wit, and all the stories of the Sixth Day are set either in Florence itself or in its immediate neighbourhood. The social backgrounds of the protagonists of these tales are remarkably wide, ranging from the most lowly to the professional middle classes and the political élite. In the tales of Cisti the baker (VI, 2) and of Chichibio (VI, 4), both extremes of the social spectrum are represented, but whereas Cisti displays throughout a refined sense of propriety that belies his humble calling, Chichibio’s uncharacteristic bon mot is forced from his lips ‘mysteriously’ by his terror of a master’s wrath. The professional and artistic world of early fourteenth-century Florence is evoked in the account (VI, 5) of Forese da Rabatta and Giotto returning on a summer evening astride emaciated old hacks through a heavy rainstorm from their country retreats. Of special interest in this brief tale is Boccaccio’s eulogy of Giotto and his assessment of his innovatory genius in the art of painting. Whilst Giotto’s realism represents a marked contrast with the Byzantine formalism of his predecessors, the exact reproduction of reality is not a quality one normally associates with the great Florentine painter. But that in effect is what Boccaccio claims to be his outstanding achievement, in a passage claiming that Giotto’s fidelity to Nature was such as to persuade the onlooker to mistake a picture of his for the real thing.
In his fulsome praise of Giotto, Boccaccio takes his cue from Dante, who in a passage from Purgatorio concerning the transitory nature of earthly fame had reminded his readers that Giotto’s reputation had now placed that of Cimabue in the shade.66 Dante comes to mind, also, in the story Boccaccio tells (VI, 9) of Dante’s friend and fellow poet Guido Cavalcanti, where he attributes to Guido the reputation for atheism that had prompted Dante to place the soul of Guido’s father, Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti, in the circle of the flaming tombs reserved for heretics.67 The tombs in Boccaccio’s account were a well-known landmark in the centre of Florence near the church of San Giovanni, and what is interesting about the tale i
s not so much the prompt retort delivered by Guido to the young bloods on horseback who are tormenting him, as the picture it evokes of Florence and Florentine society in the early fourteenth century. No less evocative of the contemporary Florentine social scene is the story (VI, 6) in which Michele Scalza ingeniously proves to the satisfaction of his young companions that the Baronci are the most noble family, not only in Florence, but in the whole wide world.
In narrating the final story of the Sixth Day (VI, 10), Dioneo for the first and only time, unless one takes seriously his curious claim that the Griselda story (X, 10) exemplifies munificence in the person of her husband, conforms to the prescribed topic by portraying a character, Friar Cipolla, who displays verbal ingenuity of a very high order indeed. The remarkable dexterity shown by Cipolla in turning an awkward situation to his advantage represents the apotheosis of the day’s talking point, which covers those who have ‘avoided danger, discomfiture or ridicule’ through resorting to a ‘prompt retort or shrewd manoeuvre’. Cipolla’s capacity for thinking and talking on his feet, comparable, according to the narrator, to the oratorical skills of Cicero and Quintilian, is not the result of a refined upbringing and education, but is simply an inborn and natural gift which he exploits to the full in persuading a not very discerning audience that his flights of fancy are nothing less than gospel truth. In his handling of the provincials who flock to hear his annual sermon, he displays all the qualities associated with a market salesman and many more besides. His triumphant escape from a precarious position, sealed by his daubing of black crosses on the clothes of his hearers, is made possible only because of the lack of sophistication of an audience whose lives ‘still conformed to the honest precepts of an earlier age’. As in the case of the holy friar who is taken in by Ciappelletto’s confession (I, 1), there is no real criticism, either open or implied, of the victims of the deception, but rather a sneaking admiration for the ingenuity of its perpetrator.
Quickness of wit is the distinguishing quality, also, of most of the adulterous wives whose escapades are recounted in the stories of the Seventh Day. Although several of the narratives are traceable to other literatures, notably the French fabliaux, Boccaccio’s elaborate re-working of his source materials renders them distinctively Italian in tone and atmosphere. With the exception of the ninth story, a version of a medieval Latin text, which Boccaccio sets in ancient Greece, the locations of these tales are representative of the flourishing commercial life and prosperous bourgeoisie of fourteenth-century Italy: Florence, Naples, Siena, Arezzo, Rimini, Bologna. One recent commentator has argued that the stories of the Seventh Day reflect the ‘battle for the control of domestic space’68 that inevitably arose in a society where arranged marriages were the norm and where a woman’s only way of preserving the status she had brought to the marriage with her dowry (which passed at once into the hands of the husband) was to establish herself as mistress of her own household.
The battle for the control of domestic space is vividly illustrated in the story (VII, 4) of the wife who, having put her husband to bed thinking him drunk and incapable, finds herself locked out of the house on returning in pitch darkness from an assignation with her young lover. The husband, who on this occasion has merely pretended to be drunk so as to discover his wife’s reasons for packing him off to bed, tells her to go away, and threatens to make an example of her in front of her neighbours and kinsfolk. Having pleaded in vain to be let into the house, the woman, who ‘had all her wits about her’, picks up an enormous stone and flings it down a nearby well, giving her husband the impression that she is committing suicide. He rushes from the house to rescue her, where upon she seizes her opportunity to dash into the house, bolt the door, and subject him to such a torrent of abuse about his drinking habits that she arouses all the neighbours. When word of the incident reaches the ears of her kinsfolk, they hasten to the scene and give the husband a severe hiding before taking away his wife and all of her belongings. He is able to retrieve her only by surrendering total control of domestic space, giving his wife leave to amuse herself at will, provided that she does it discreetly and without his knowledge.
The woman is described as semplicetta, or not unduly intelligent, her ingenious stratagem for regaining entry to the house being attributed to the power of Love. Intelligence is not in fact a quality that is always admired in the women characters of the Decameron, as can be seen from the narrator’s portrayal of Ghismonda (IV, 1) as one who ‘possessed rather more intelligence than a woman needs’.69 But in the story of the werewolf (VII, 1), Lotteringhi’s wife is described as a woman ‘of great intelligence and perspicacity’ (‘savia e avveduta molto’), qualities that she exhibits to the full in her hour of need, not only by inventing a plausible tale to allay her husband’s suspicions, but by extemporizing a rhyming prayer to ‘exorcize’ the nocturnal visitor. The resourcefulness shown by Monna Sismonda (VII, 8), when her husband discovers the length of string that she uses to communicate with her lover, is no less impressive. The story is one that highlights incidentally the tensions that arose from mixed marriages between the daughters of older patrician families and representatives of the newer Florentine social order, the affluent merchant class. The husband is presented as one who ‘foolishly decided to marry into the aristocracy, and took to wife a young gentlewoman, quite unsuited to him’, and towards the end of the story he is subjected to a barrage of violent and vulgar abuse by his mother-in-law, who roundly expresses her contempt for his origins and social pretensions.
Further examples of the celebration of intelligence in the Decameron may be seen in several of the stories of the last three days, but in the tenth and last day the theme is developed in such a way as to provide a grandiose, uplifting climax to the work as a whole. These tales of liberal or munificent deeds, prompted by the exercise of intelligence, have led some of Boccaccio’s modern commentators to argue that his celebration of that quality is a pointer to the work’s underlying morality, in that they show how the application of reason is the key to a virtuous and responsible way of life.70 This may well be true of the edenic, unreal world of the storytellers, and also of some of the least plausible tales of the Tenth Day, such as the one recounting Nathan’s deliberate placing of his life at risk (X, 3) as a token of his unworldly munificence. But as we have seen, the morality of the Decameron is open-ended. The stories are for the most part set firmly in the real world of fourteenth-century Italy. In his countless variations on the theme of intelligence, what Boccaccio is really celebrating is the triumph of the entrepreneurial spirit.
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Fortune, the third of the Decameron’s main themes, is a dominant force in the stories of the Second Day, where the subject for discussion is ‘those who after suffering a series of misfortunes are brought to a state of unexpected happiness’. Like other major writers of classical, medieval and Renaissance times, Boccaccio was strongly attracted to this topic, which he explored in varying degrees of detail, reaching such varied conclusions that it is difficult to attribute to him any single, consistent theoretical viewpoint. In one of his stories (X, 1), he actually tells of a character, Ruggieri de’ Figiovanni, who is persistently dogged by ill fortune. A twentieth-century counterpart to Ruggieri is the American blues singer Pleasant Joseph, who complains in one of his lyrics that ‘Bad luck’s been in my family, ever since I began to crawl,’ and that ‘If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all.’71
If one considers his literary work as a whole, Boccaccio’s views on Fortune may be seen, broadly speaking, to have evolved from a purely fatalistic conception such as that which he expressed in the prologues of both the Filostrato and the Teseida to the idea of Fortune as an instrument of Divine Providence – a position he adopts in several of his later works such as the Amorosa visione and De casibus virorum illustrium.
The idea of Fortune as a divinely created force is seen in a well known passage from Dante’s Inferno, where Fortune is defined as a ‘general minister and guide’
(general ministra e duce)72 of men’s destinies, created by God at the same time that He created the angels who guide and control the heavenly spheres. Dante’s conception of Fortune as a divine force corresponds in its essentials with that of another famous exile, Ovid, who in one of his letters had written of Fortune as the unstable goddess (dea non stabilis).73 It is probably because the ancients thought of Fortune as a deity that Dante, with his habitual inclination to subsume pagan beliefs into the Christian vision of the universe which he sets before us in the Commedia, expounds a theory of Fortune that stresses her divine origin. Nor is it accidental that the spokesman for this theory, as in many other instances where the philosophy of the classical period is modified and made compatible with Christian beliefs, should be Virgil, the poet whom Dante thought of as the bridge between the old world and the new. For Dante, Fortune transfers earthly possessions in her own good time from nation to nation and from family to family, in a way that defies all human understanding. Using a simile borrowed from Virgil, he describes her workings as ‘hidden, like a snake in the grass’.74