The collection of tales made by Marguerite de Navarre, probably with her literary household, and now known as the Heptameron, was first printed as Les Amants fortunés in 1558. Obviously patterned on Boccaccio’s Decameron, it uses the literary frame of an aristocratic house party more realistically. The dialogue in comment on the stories is developed to characterize each person. Thus the collection is made a series of cases (exempla) for social comment. But the tales themselves are inferior. Told simply, without much flavor, “for fear” says the preface, “that beauty of style might prejudice historical truth,” they are usually lucid, somewhat conversational, often lax. There is no mastery of narrative movement. The steadfast purity of the wife is, indeed, a constant motivation in II. 3; but the few salient scenes hardly constitute a sequence. The mere series of events in III. 1 makes eighteen pages tedious and ends in mere reversal. The dialogue of the retold Châtelaine de Vergi (VII. 10; 20 pages) is oftener oratory than narrative. The longest of the tales (I. 10; 32 pages), a romance covering years, has so little salience that it might as well have ended earlier. Most of the tales are either anecdote or fabliau of about seven pages. Put forward as actual, they are sometimes stock medieval tales, especially of the stupidity or brutality of friars, and where they appear to narrate facts, sometimes merely report them without realizing any moment as a scene. Boccaccio, too, has simple anecdotes, in which all the charm is of style; he too prolongs some of his stories without salience; but among his many experiments are five novelle (I. 4, II. 1 and 2, VIII. 8, IX. 6) intensified by their sequence. Far from noticing this difference, the writers of the Heptameron show little awareness of narrative composition. The accompaniment of discussion is better managed than the stories themselves.
(c) Giraldi Cinthio
The collection Hecatommithi (hundred fables) of Giovan-Battista Giraldi, known as Giraldi Cinthio,[69] accumulated through years. Begun apparently in his young manhood, it had reached seventy tales in 1560,[70] was published in 1565, and reprinted in 1566, 1574, 1580, and 1584.[71] (Hecatommithi, ouero cento nouelle, di M. Giovanbattista Giraldi Cinthio, nobile ferrarese: nelle quali, oltre le diletteuole materie, si conoscano moralità vtilissime a gli huomini per il benviuere, & per destare altresi l’intelletto alla sagacità; potendosi da esse con facilità apprendere il vero modo di scriuere toscano ... 4th edition, Venice, 1580.) Thus the moralizing suggestion of the title is confirmed by the sub-title. Here are offered one hundred—indeed, with the preliminary decade, one hundred and ten—exempla. Nor is the collection made less formidable by being classified: ten tales to exhibit the superiority of wedded love, ten to show the risks of dealing with courtesans, ten on infidelity, ten on chivalry, etc. Nevertheless the tales are not all moralities, and in some the moral is not even clear; for here once more are both fabliaux and anecdotes. The frame is once more Boccaccio’s. Young aristocrats, escaped from the sack of Rome (1527), board ship and on a slow cruise entertain one another with tales. The style, though sometimes slack and diffuse, is not dilated for decoration. There is a leisurely introduction; each tale is prefaced by comment on the preceding; and each decade has an epilogue of discussion and verse. The whole ends with a roll of fame commemorating some hundred and fifty men of letters in terza rima, and adding a list of eminent ladies.
Running generally from three pages to ten, the tales, even the few that run to fourteen, remain scenario. II. ii. recounts in fourteen pages a Persian tale of Oronte and Orbecche. V. x. tells at the same length how the virtuous wife of Filogamo, shipwrecked, resisted the Prince of Satalia, and that he was thereupon expelled. In X. viii two quarreling nobles come to blows, are imprisoned by King Louis, and subsequently reconciled by the courtesy of one. Even the tale of the Moorish captain, which has hardly more than eight pages, is not developed narratively. Looking back to it from Othello, one distinguishes the motivation discerned by Shakspere; but in Giraldi’s tale this is either generalized or merely hinted; it does not conduct the narrative.
The composition, then, is generally scenario. If the dialogue sometimes rises to narrative economy, it also becomes sometimes mere oration. Character, often merely typical, rarely suffices for motivation. Unnecessary spreading of the time-lapse betrays a carelessness of focus. There is no habit either of realizing scenes concretely in action, or of conducting them in a sequence.
A typical example is I. v. Pisti, condemned in Venice for killing a man that had sought to debauch his wife, escaped to Ferrara and was banned. The situation is first propounded, and then recounted by his wife. She and his daughter being left in poverty, he wrote anxiously, urging them to maintain their honor. He was betrayed into captivity by two supposed friends, that their father, who was also under Venice ban, might by delivering him up reinstate himself. The father, refusing to take advantage of their treachery, liberated Pisti on condition that he forgive them. Pisti, returning secretly to Venice, bade his wife denounce him to the Signory and claim the reward for his head. She refused in an oration so fervent as to attract the guard, who thereupon arrested him. Going with him to court, she so told the whole story that the Signory pardoned Pisti, restored his property, gave the reward to his daughter for dowry, and even pardoned his false friends’ father. The motivation of an ingenious complication and solution is all here—in the abstract. But the tale in eight pages merely sums up or orates instead of realizing it in scenes. The novella thus remains an exemplum of generosity, instead of becoming a story of Pisti’s wife.
Thus Giraldi, seeking with Bandello news interest and therefore melodrama, proposing an edification often quite dubious, ignored the deeper narrative values. Reporter, manipulator, moralizer, he is not a creator.