The collections of tales, then, show Renaissance story-telling as a regression from the fourteenth century. The narrative art of Boccaccio, to say nothing of Chaucer, has suffered eclipse. Far from being advanced, it is not even discerned. Renaissance story-telling is generally as inferior as it is abundant. The few well managed stories stand out in sharp relief against the mass of convention and of bungling. But this is not all. Bandello’s tales as rendered (1566-1576) in French by Belleforest and in English through him by Painter and Fenton, are not merely translated; they are dilated and decorated to the point of being actually obscured as stories. Bandello’s forty-ninth tale, already doubled by Belleforest, is trebled in Fenton’s first. Livio and Camilla, told by Bandello in 1,500 words, has nearly 11,000 in Belleforest’s twenty-second, and 16,731 in Fenton’s second. The dilation is by show-pieces of description, by oratory, by moralizing, by allusions to classical mythology and to the “natural” history derived from Pliny, and by those balanced iterations known generically in English as euphuism. Belleforest in his preface (1568) begs the reader’s pardon for not “subjecting” himself to the style of Bandello. “I have made a point,” he says, “of recasting it.” His Continuation informs the Duc d’Orléans in a dedication that he has “enriched with maxims, stories, harangues, and epistles.” So Painter must pause to describe.
There might be seene also a certain sharpe and rude situation of craggy and vnfruictful rocks, which notwithstanding yelded some pleasure to the Eyes to see theym tapissed with a pale moasie greene, which disposed into a frizeled guise made the place pleasaunt and the rock soft according to the fashion of a couerture. There was also a very fayre and wide Caue, which liked him well, compassed round about with Firre trees, Pine apples, Cipres, and Trees distilling a certayne Rosen or Gumme, towards the bottom whereof, in the way downe to the valley, a man might haue viewed a passing company of Ewe trees, Poplers of all sortes, and Maple trees, the Leaues whereof fell into a Lake or Pond, which came by certaune smal gutters into a fresh and very cleare fountayne right agaynst that Caue. The knight viewing the auncientry and excellency of the place, deliberated by and by to plant there the siege of his abode for performing of his penaunce and life (Vol. III, p. 222, of the 1890 reprint).
Description for itself, without function, and even more plainly the other habitual means of decoration, show not only the general habit of dilation, but also the general carelessness of narrative values. So is smothered even the Spanish tale of Don Diego and Ginevra,[72] which Bandello had the wit, or the luck, to repeat in its original sequence. Evidently these versions were looking not to composition, not to the conduct of the story, but only to style.
(e) Pettie, Lyly, and Greene
William Pettie’s A Petite Pallace of Pettie His Pleasure, containing many pretie histories by him set forth in comely colours and most delightfully discoursed (1576) iterates the medieval balance figures and reënforces them with alliteration. Thus his rendering of the tale of Scylla and Minos, after an expository summary and due moralizing, presents:
one Nisus, who had to daughter a damsel named Scilla, a proper sweet wench, in goodliness a goddess, in shape Venus herself, in shew a saint, in perfection of person peerless, but in deeds a dainty dame, in manners a merciless maid, and in works a wilful wench.... But to paint her out more plainly, she was more coy than comely, more fine than well-favoured, more lofty than lovely, more proud than proper, more precise than pure.
If there be any place for such style, surely it is not in story. The story is hardly told; it is decorated, moralized, generalized without narrative salience. The decoration thus abused by Pettie became a vogue through John Lyly (1553?-1606). His Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Euphues and His England (1580) made the schemata of sophistic, especially isocolon, parison, and paromoion,[73] a main item in the curious style called euphuism.
Come therefore to me, all ye lovers that have been deceived by fancy, the glass of pestilence, or deluded by women, the gate to perdition; be as earnest to seek a medicine as you were eager to run into a mischief. The earth bringeth forth as well endive to delight the people as hemlock to endanger the patient, as well the rose to distil as the nettle to sting, as well the bee to give honey as the spider to yield poison (Croll’s ed., p. 93).
Yet if thou be so weak, being bewitched with their wiles, that thou hast neither will to eschew nor wit to avoid their company, if thou be either so wicked that thou wilt not or so wedded that thou canst not abstain from their glances, yet at the least dissemble thy grief. If thou be as hot as the mount Aetna, feign thyself as cold as the hill Caucasus, carry two faces in one hood, cover thy flaming fancy with feigned ashes, show thyself sound when thou art rotten, let thy hue be merry when thy heart is melancholy, bear a pleasant countenance with pined conscience, a painted sheath with leaden dagger (Ibid., p. 104).