Boccaccio
Selections from
The Decameron
The Cast
Narrator - Stephen Thorne
Pampinea - Nickie Rainsford
Filomena - Alison Pettit
Elisa - Teresa Gallagher
Emilia - Polly Hayes
Fiammetta - Siri O’Neal
Dioneo - Jonathan Keeble
Panfilo - Daniel Philpott
Filistrato - James Goode
The Decameron is one of the greatest literary
works of the late Middle Ages, and perhaps
of all time. Its influence even within
Boccaccio’s own lifetime was immense,
extending (for example) as far as Chaucer in
England, and it was not long before his
reputation rivalled that of his sublime
predecessor in Italian vernacular writing,
Dante himself: indeed, it is a critical
commonplace to regard the Decameron as a
kind of prose secular equivalent of the Divina
Commedia—where Dante chose to set
human life in the context of eternity,
Boccaccio sought to celebrate the pleasures
of this world.
The Decameron, as its name suggests, is a
collection of one hundred prose tales, many
of them only a few pages long but including
a small number of more substantial and
sometimes serious narratives. Boccaccio
provides a framework for the telling of these
tales by imagining a situation in which ten
young people find themselves together for a
period of ten days, and agree to pass the
time by each recounting one story on each day. What lends this simple framing device
such extraordinary power, however, is the
context out of which this situation arises:
Boccaccio had himself witnessed the
terrifying effects of the Black Death on
Florence, which it visited in 1348, and he
begins the Decameron with a justly famous
description of his city withering under the
onslaught of the disease. The details are spelt
out with a masterly blend of objective
reportage and restrained compassion, and at
the end of this introduction he brings in his
seven young ladies. They meet in the church
of Santa Maria Novella and agree to leave
Florence for a stay in the countryside—itself
not spared by the plague, but at least
offering a change of air and a respite from
the claustrophobic terrors of the city. By
chance, three young men with whom the
women are acquainted enter the church, and
the women propose to them that they
should join them on their rural sojourn. The
plan meets with general approval, and so the
mechanism of the narrative(s) is set in
motion. One might note at this juncture the scrupulous care with which Boccaccio insists
on the propriety of relations between the
young people: this is particularly amusing
when one considers the extreme, even
obscene, directness of many of the tales told
by these impeccably brought up young
people. This tension between seemliness and
bawdiness creates a delightful frisson as the
work unfolds.
When the young people arrive at the first
of the idyllic places in which they stay—they
move their residence twice more during the
ten days—they agree to the story-telling
scheme, and appoint a Queen or King to
direct them on each day. Each day, too, will
have a theme to which the tellers must
adhere—the theme for Day Three, for
example, concerns ‘people who, by virtue of
their own efforts, have achieved an object
they greatly desired, or have recovered a
thing previously lost.’
Listeners will probably discover here tales
that they are already familiar with in another
form—lovers of Keats’ work, for instance,
will know the story of Isabella, or the Pot of
Basil, and will find it here as the Fifth Tale of
the Fourth Day. Chaucer uses in The
Canterbury Tales the last story of the
Decameron as The Clerk’s Tale, while The
Reeve’s Tale is very similar to the Sixth Tale of
the Ninth Day. We should not be surprised by this: throughout the Middle Ages and well
into the Renaissance, writers were
accustomed to reshaping other writers’
material, or borrowing from the rich tradition
of folk tales.
What Boccaccio’s stories have in common
is an extraordinary zest for life as it is lived on
the physical level: morality is not exactly
absent, but it almost always plays second
fiddle to a joyous acceptance of life and
appetite. Life is transitory and fragile, and
had best be seized upon with gusto,
ingenuity and humour. Boccaccio is also
splendidly on the side of inherent quality
rather than snobbish regard for class and
‘breeding’: one has only to listen to the First
Tale of the Fourth Day, in which an
incestuously jealous father has his daughter’s
supposedly ‘inferior’ lover put to death, to
realise the energy with which Boccaccio
exposes the cruel folly of judging our fellows
by caste. Feminists will also be delighted by
the feisty Madonna Filippa’s brilliant and
successful defence of a woman’s sexual rights
in the Seventh Tale of the Sixth Day. There is,
then, something startlingly modern about
The Decameron, even as it also paints a
brilliantly vivid picture of late medieval life in
Italy.
The music on this recording is taken from the NAXOS catalogue
Chominciamento di gioia Dance Music
8.553131
Ensemble Unicorn
TheBlack Madonna
8.554256
Ensemble Unicorn
Michael Posch, conductor
Music of the Troubadours
8.554257
Ensemble Unicorn
Adorate Deum Gregorian Chant
8.550711
Nova Schola Gregoriana
Alberto Turco, conductor
