Having thus neatly disposed of objections to his style and language, the author goes on to list five specific criticisms that he claims have been directed at him, concerning the thirty stories so far written. First, he says, he is accused of being a womanizer, who takes an unseemly delight in consoling and entertaining the ladies and in singing their praises.12 The second criticism follows on from the first, and centres on the disparity in age between himself and his young female readers. No man of Boccaccio’s age, say his critics, should be discussing the ways of women and providing for their pleasure.13 But since Boccaccio was about thirty-five years old when he wrote these words, one is inclined to ask how seriously they were meant to be taken, and a similar question mark hangs over the third of the alleged criticisms of his tales. This consists of the simple proposition that he would be acting more sensibly if he were to spend his time in the company, not of young women, but of the Muses in Parnassus.14 He then goes on to claim that there are others, who, far from advising him to practise the art of poetry, would prefer that he applied himself to the business of earning his daily bread.15 And finally, he writes, there are those who try to belittle his efforts by claiming that his versions of the stories he has told are not consistent with the facts.16
Of the five charges supposed to have been levelled against him by his critics, this last is the most disingenuous of all, yet it is entirely consistent with the tone of the whole passage, which is more a series of mirthful observations than a chronicle of his alleged shortcomings. Only the most naïve of his readers could ever have supposed that his stories were faithful accounts of real historical events. But this is an impression he seeks to foster elsewhere, most notably in the Introduction to the First Day, but also in the preambles or postscripts to individual tales, for instance in the concluding paragraph of the story of Gianni Lotteringhi and the werewolf (VII, 1), where he solemnly presents alternative versions of the story he has just told, plumping for the one he claims to have greater historical accuracy. The quest for verisimilitude is one that Boccaccio never abandons, whether in telling a highly implausible tale or, as in the Introduction to the Fourth Day, in purporting to list the complaints of his critics.
Whatever his motives may have been for pausing to address his readers at the beginning of the Fourth Day (and, as we have sought to indicate, they probably had more to do with his awareness of the humble status of vernacular prose fiction and his determination to see that it was raised than with the five specific charges he mentions), Boccaccio exploits the occasion for a further display, if any were needed, of his mastery of the storyteller’s craft. Employing the tools of the narrator to refute the charges of his critics, he recounts the tale of one Filippo Balducci, prematurely widowed, who retreats with his two-year-old son to a cave on the slopes of Monte Asinaio, or ‘Mount Donkeyman’, a pun on Monte Senario, where Florentine hermits traditionally sought refuge from the cares of the secular world. The boy grows up to manhood in blissful ignorance of the world and its vanities, but one day persuades his father to take him on one of his periodic trips to obtain essential supplies from the charitable people of Florence. The young man marvels at the palaces, houses, churches, and other urban features of interest, but what arouses his curiosity to fever pitch is the spectacle of some fair young ladies, elegantly dressed, who are coming away from a wedding, or as Boccaccio playfully describes it, seizing on the word’s plurality, ‘un paio di nozze’ (‘a couple of nuptials’). In vain does the father insist that these attractive creatures are evil, and attempt to divert his son’s attention away from them, being forced in the end to supply the young man with a name for them, papere, (literally ‘goslings’, though ‘birds’ would perhaps convey the sense better in present-day colloquial English). To his son’s earnest plea that they should take one of these creatures home with them, so that he could give it something to fill its beak, the father replies: ‘Io non voglio; tu non sai donde elle s’imbeccano!’ (‘I won’t do it; you don’t know whereabouts they do their pecking!’).
The tale of Filippo Balducci, sometimes referred to as the 101st story of the Decameron, is often thought of as unfinished, perhaps because Boccaccio himself tells us so:
But before replying to any of my critics, I should like to strengthen my case by recounting, not a complete story (…), but a part of one, so that its very incompleteness will set it apart from the others.17
Although it may lack intentional finality, in which respect it differs not at all from several of the other tales, the story of Balducci is in fact complete, and has served its purpose, if indeed it was designed to demonstrate, as the author claims, that there is nothing remotely unnatural in taking a lively interest in the opposite sex. But is that the real purpose of the story, for which incidentally there are scores of antecedents in oriental and western literature, though none so finely wrought as this? Is it not more likely that it is pressed into service at this juncture to sustain the initial fiction that the Decameron was written as consolatory material for ladies in the throes of love? In contrast to the mood of most of the stories to which it acts as preamble, the overall tone of this opening sequence to the Fourth Day is extremely light-hearted, interspersed as it is with puns, double meanings and lively banter. Yet beneath the outwardly nonchalant air one detects a deep inner seriousness, which is nowhere more apparent than in the author’s rebuttal of the charge that he has abandoned the Muses. The passage not only offers a good example of the ambivalent tone of the whole, it also confirms the desire to place this genre of writing fairly and squarely within the realm of poetry:
That I should stay with the Muses in Parnassus, I declare to be good advice, but all the same we can no more abide with the Muses than they can abide with us. If, on leaving them behind, a man delights in seeing what resembles them, that is not something worthy of blame: the Muses are ladies, and albeit the ladies are not worth as much as the Muses, yet at first sight they resemble them, so that, even if they pleased me for no other reason, they should please me for this; besides, ladies caused me to compose a thousand lines of verse, whereas Muses never caused me to write any. They helped me, certainly, and showed me how to write those thousand lines; and perhaps in writing these things, no matter how humble they are, they have come to stay with me more than once, perhaps to serve and to honour the resemblance the ladies bear to themselves: wherefore, in weaving these tales, I am straying less distant from Mount Parnassus and from the Muses than many may venture to think.18
The outward display of nonchalance here conceals a firm belief in the seriousness of the task to which Boccaccio has committed himself and a deep conviction of its poetic worth and lasting significance. And this same blend of surface frivolity and inner seriousness characterizes, too, the third and last of the ad lectorem passages, the Epilogue or Conclusione dell’autore, where he briefly replies to certain objections which may perhaps have arisen in the minds, not so much of his critics, as of his readers in general.
The brevity of the Epilogue is deceptive, in that a number of important questions are addressed, such as the style and language of the Decameron, its ‘truth to life’ and the propriety of its subject-matter. Each of these questions elicits from Boccaccio a viewpoint that is at the same time rationally argued and vigorously expressed. When, for instance, he asks whether ladies who are truly virtuous should have narrated or listened to some of the stories told in the body of the work, he supplements the stock response of medieval rhetoricians to such questions (i.e. that no story is so improper as to prevent its being told, provided it is told in language that itself remains within the bounds of propriety) with a string of observations that are both witty and full of good sense. In the first place, he says, the nature of the story dictates the manner of its telling, so that what might seem to be lack of restraint on the part of the author is really a reflection of the lack of restraint implicit within the narrative, which could not have been told in any other way without distorting it beyond recognition. In making this point, he presumably h
ad in mind such tales as those of Rustico and Alibech (III, 10) and of Caterina and the nightingale (V, 4), each of which demands explicitness in the telling. Secondly, however, there is the question of lexical improprieties, as exemplified in words in common use that may carry sexual overtones, words like foro (‘hole’), caviglia (‘rod’), mortaio (‘mortar’) and pestelb (‘pestle’). Here Boccaccio would seem to be treading on treacherous ground, for there are scores of examples in the Decameron of his exploiting the double meaning of words in this category, not to mention one conspicuous instance in the penultimate paragraph of the Epilogue itself, where he writes of the sweetness of his tongue (lingua), to which he claims that a lady who is a neighbour of his will readily bear full witness.Incorrigible punster that he is, Boccaccio turns to the visual arts for his defence, observing that the points of saintly swords (those of St Michael and St George) are often depicted slaying serpents and dragons, whilst the feet of Our Lord are fixed to the cross with at least one nail, a word that in the Italian (chiovo) carries strong sexual overtones. Boccaccio’s exuberant wit boils over at this point into something very close to blasphemy, but his most telling line of defence against the lexically prudish, reminiscent in its imagery of a passage from Guinizzelli’s canzone beginning ‘Al cor gentil repara sempre Amore’, is his statement that
No corrupted mind ever construed a word wholesomely: and just as seemly words leave no impression on a mind that is corrupt, so words that are not so seemly cannot contaminate a mind that is well ordered, any more than mud contaminates the rays of the sun, or earthly filth the beauties of heaven.19
Two other features of note in the Epilogue are the author’s final, ironic comment concerning the fiction that the work is intended only for ladies with time on their hands, and the explanation he supplies for the headings with which each of the stories is presented to the reader. As to the first, Boccaccio reminds those who complain of the excessive length of some of the tales that he had presented them from the outset ‘all’oziose e non all’altre’, or to no ladies other than those who had nothing to do. If his readers have other ways of spending their time, he says, it would be foolish of them to waste it in reading his tales, no matter how briefly they were told. The mock dismissive tone is heightened still further by a reference to the major centres of learning in the ancient world (Athens) and modern world (Bologna and Paris) respectively. None of his fair readers, he asserts, will have studied in places of that kind, where reading-matter must of necessity be brief if students are to make good use of their time.
Considering the overall tone of these authorial interventions, which is one of exuberant irony, this last assertion could be taken as the final token of an ever-present feature of the Decameron: its solid connection with the practical, everyday world of fourteenth-century bourgeois society, and its distrust of the intellectualism fostered by the academies, here expressed in the notion that academic scholarship concerns itself with the examination of minutiae to the exclusion of material that, whilst taking longer to produce its impact, might conceivably bring greater mental refreshment. And a further instance of this regard for the practical aspects of literary consumption is the explanation he offers for the headings to the stories. These, he says, are supplied specifically for the purpose of allowing the reader to select the stories that will please, and ignore the ones that are liable to ‘sting’:
But whoever goes reading among these should leave alone the ones that sting and read the ones that please: so as not to deceive anyone, each bears the mark on its brow of what lies hidden in its bosom.20
In the Epilogue, the author also reminds his readers of the circumstances in which the tales were supposed to have been told. They were told by young people, neither in a church nor in the schools of philosophers, but in gardens, in a place designed for pleasure. The wheel has come full circle, and the reader is given a final reminder of the Elysian world of the storytellers.
* * *
For all the dramatic intensity of its opening account of the plague, what strikes one most forcibly about the Decameron’s second plane of reality, the world of the lieta brigata, is its literariness, its artificiality, its sense of unworldliness. Poetically real, it is a very different world from the tangible world of the stories themselves. The coded implications of the world of the storytellers are at once apparent from the choice of their initial meeting place. They do not meet in the cathedral, or in one of Florence’s more centrally situated churches, but in the church of Santa Maria Novella, which had only recently been incorporated within the walls of the city. The choice of assembly place is an early pointer to the author’s delight in wordplay, since its very name foreshadows the imminent participation of the young people who forgather in Santa Maria Novella in the telling of novelle.
But it is when Boccaccio introduces the various members of the group to his reader that the allusive implications begin to flow in earnest. In an effort to preserve the illusion of historical objectivity that has been studiously fostered in his description of the plague and its effects, he claims that he could tell us their actual names, but will refrain from doing so in order to protect them from possible future embarrassment. The embarrassment of which he writes is that which would result from the stories that will follow, all of which they either listened to or recounted themselves.
The protective pseudonyms supplied by Boccaccio for the ten members of the lieta brigata have given rise to much speculation. Confining ourselves to the facts, we may note that all of the names carry literary or mythological overtones and that several of them had already appeared as the names of characters in one or more of Boccaccio’s earlier vernacular writings. Pampinea, literally ‘full of vigour’, is a name that had already appeared in the Comedía delle ninfe fiorentine. Fiammetta, ‘little flame’, was the name of the female protagonist and narrator of the Elegia, as well as that of the presiding figure in the questioni d’amore sequence in the Filocolo. Filomena, ‘the beloved’ or ‘the lover of song’, was the dedicatee of the Filostrato, whilst Emilia, ‘she who allures’, was the object of the intense rivalry of Palamon and Arcite in the Teseida. Of the other three ladies’ names, Elissa is a variant on the original name of Virgil’s Dido, Neifile (‘newly enamoured’) probably represents, according to Branca, the poetry of the dolce stil novo and of Dante himself, whilst Lauretta is the diminutive form of Petrarch’s Laura. Thus these last three are associated with the poets (Virgil, Dante and Petrarch) whose work Boccaccio most greatly admired.
The names of the three young men have similar associations. Panfilo, ‘all loving’, was the young Florentine whose desertion of the Neapolitan Fiammetta gave rise to her outpourings of sorrow in the Elegia. Filostrato, ‘defeated by love’, was the name given by Boccaccio to his narrative poem on the love of Troilus for the faithless Cressida. The name of the most lively of all the storytellers, Dioneo, is based on the legend, reported by Homer in the Iliad, that the goddess of Love, Aphrodite, was the daughter of Dione by Zeus, hence Dioneo’s propensity for the telling of erotic tales, and his prescribing of the topic for the tales of adulterous wives in the Seventh Day.
The ten members of the lieta brigata clearly have allegorical and symbolic overtones, but opinions differ over what exactly they are supposed to represent. One of the most convincing and well argued theories of recent years has been that of the American scholar Victoria Kirkham, who detects in the frame of the Decameron an allegorically resonant structure that derives key features from Aristotelian–Thomistic ethics.21 The ten narrators participate in a drama of the human soul, a drama which ‘pits the rational appetite against the lower irascible and concupiscible appetites, a trio of forces personified by the three male narrators’. Reason ultimately dominates Anger and Lust, with the assistance of the seven virtues, represented by the seven young ladies. The tripartite division of the soul into the nobler, intellectual power of reason and the baser human emotions of anger and lust was a long-standing concept whose roots may be traced back from the Summae of
the medieval scholastic philosophers through the patristic writings of Augustine and Jerome to the dialogues of Plato.