Their verses were so sweet"
Of these three great Italians Dante was by far the least known, and William Thomas, in his Dictionarie (1550) defines "Dante Aldighieri" as "the name of a famous poet in the Italian tongue," while he does not think it necessary to explain who Petrarch and Boccaccio are.[690] Sir Philip Sidney, it is true, refers to Dante several times, with the other two, and even mentions Beatrice in his Defence of Poesie, yet there is no trace of Dante's influence in his work. The only writer after Chaucer who shows internal evidence of knowing Dante fairly well is Sir John Harrington, the translator of Orlando Furioso. In his Apology of Poetry he refers to Dante's relations to Virgil, and in the Allegorie of the fourth book of his translation he translates the first five lines of the Inferno:—
"While yet my life was in the middle race
I found I wandered in a darksome wood,
The right way lost with mine unsteadie pace ..."[691]
Spenser does not mention Dante though he used him; but in the Epistle to Gabriel Harvey prefixed to the Shepherd's Calendar he speaks of Boccaccio as well as of Petrarch and others.
TITLE-PAGE OF THE SECOND VOLUME OF THE FIRST ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF THE "DECAMERON." (ISAAC JAGGARD, 1620)
That Boccaccio was well known in England, at least by name, in the fourteenth century, seems certain. Sacchetti (1335-1400) in the Proemio to his Novelle writes as follows: "... and taking into consideration the excellent Florentine poet Messer Giovanni Boccaccio, who wrote the Book of the Hundred Tales in one material effort of his great intellect, ... that (book) is so generally published and sought after, that even in France and England they have translated it into their language ... and I, Franco Sacchetti, though only a rude and unrefined man, have made up my mind to write the present work." All trace of any such translation, if indeed it was ever made, has been lost.[692] In fact, it might seem that the only man in England at that time really capable of carrying out such a task, worthily at least, was Geoffrey Chaucer, who, though for some reason we can never know he refused to mention Boccaccio's name, adapted and translated the Teseide, the Filostrato, and it seems, three tales from the Decameron—the first of the Eighth Day, the fifth of the Tenth Day, and the tenth of the Tenth Day.[693] May it not have been Chaucer's work to which Sacchetti referred? It was not until 1566 that any translation even of isolated stories from the Decameron appeared; in that year and the following Painter's Palace of Pleasure was published, which contained sixteen stories translated from the Decameron. Then in 1579 came the Forest of Fancy, by H. C., in which two more appeared, while Tarlton's News out of Purgatorie (1590) contained four more, and the Cobler of Caunterburie, published in the same year, two more. These and other translations of isolated stories will best be shown by a table.[694]
Such were the stories from the Decameron that had been translated in English when in 1620 the first practically complete edition appeared, translated inaccurately, but very splendidly, apparently from the French version of Antoine Le Macon. Isaac Jaggard published it, in folio in two parts, with woodcuts, and the title bore no translator's name. In 1625 this edition was reprinted, the title bearing the legend "Isaac Jaggard for M. Lownes":[695] other editions appeared in 1655 and 1657 and 1684, making five editions in all during the seventeenth century. In 1700 Dryden's translations appeared of the Three Tales: Decameron, IV 1, V 1, and V 8. A new translation, practically complete, appeared in 1702, and was, I think, twice reprinted in 1722 and 1741. Certainly eight editions were published in the nineteenth century[696] and two have appeared already in the twentieth.[697] The first really complete translation to appear in English, however, was that of Mr. John Payne, printed for the Villon Society (1886), but the first complete translation to pass into general circulation was that of Mr. J. M. Rigg, 1896-1905, which is rendered with a careful accuracy and much spirit.