A Manual of Italian Literature

by Francis Henry Cliffe

[CHAPTER IV.]

BOCCACCIO AND THE PROSE WRITERS OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.

Giovanni Boccaccio was born in 1313 in Paris, the son of a Florentine merchant and a French-woman. His father had property in the hamlet of Certaldo, and the author always signed himself "Boccaccio da Certaldo." He was destined, first for commerce, then for the study of the law, but finding neither avocation congenial, he after his father's death, devoted himself entirely to his favourite pursuits. He was honoured with the favour of King Robert of Naples and with the love of the King's daughter, Maria, whom he celebrates in his poems under the name of Fiammetta. His zeal for the writers of antiquity was not inferior to that of Petrarch. He sent for Leontius Pilatus to teach him Greek. He devoted large sums to the purchase and reproduction of the works of classical writers. He seems to have been an amiable and honourable man, free alike from pride like that of Dante, and from vanity like that of Petrarch. He repented in later years of the somewhat frivolous character of many of his writings, took holy orders, and spent the last days of his life at Certaldo. When Florence endowed a chair for the explanation of the Divine Comedy, Boccaccio was the first to be appointed. He wrote a life of Dante and began a commentary on the Inferno, which, however, he did not live to finish, dying at Certaldo on the 21st of December, 1375.

Boccaccio was a most fertile writer, both in Latin and in Italian. His Latin works have but little merit and are vastly inferior to those of Petrarch in strength and originality of thought. His Italian poems are heavy and uninteresting, but he has the credit of inventing the "Ottava Rima," the stanza in which Ariosto and Tasso subsequently wrote their immortal epics. Praise-worthy as these works were for the time in which they were written, he would not occupy a high position in the literature of his country, had he not proved himself in other productions to be the first great writer of Italian prose. His romantic stories, Il Filocopo, La Fiammetta, l'Admeto, are written in a flowing and pleasing style; his Life of Dante and Commentary on the Inferno are valuable for the information they impart, but the crowning glory of his literary career is the collection of stories published under the title of Il Decamerone.

The terrible plague that swept over the earth in the middle of the Thirteenth Century, known in history as the "Black Death,"[1] ravaged Florence with peculiar malignity, and Boccaccio feigns that five ladies and their cavaliers took refuge in a villa in the neighbourhood and beguiled their leisure by telling stories to each other. Being a collection of tales told by various characters, the Decamerone bears a certain resemblance to another memorable work of the Fourteenth Century, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, but happier than his great contemporary, Boccaccio lived to complete his design.

The work opens with a noble description of the Plague of Florence, but this gloomy and terrible introduction gives no forecast of the light, festive and occasionally indecorous character of many of the tales. Others, however, are highly picturesque and even poetical, and some have a special interest for English readers as being the sources whence Shakespeare drew All's Well that Ends Well, and Cymbeline,—Dryden, Theodore and Honoria and Sigismonda and Guiscardo, and Keats Isabella, or the Pot of Basil.

Boccaccio had every quality of a great novelist. His style is varied, flexible and animated, and his idiom is so purely Tuscan that it was held up as a standard by the Accademia della Crusca, and if any fault can be found with it, it is that the copiousness of his vocabulary sometimes leads him into florid and redundant amplifications. His characters are drawn with considerable skill. His dialogue is invariably natural and appropriate. His incidents, though sometimes overstepping the limits of decorum, are ingenious and entertaining. The work gives a brilliant panorama of the men and manners of Italy in the Fourteenth Century.

No writer has derived more advantage from the admiration of other writers than Boccaccio. Great poets are indebted to him for the plots of some of their most successful works. Great painters have vied with each other in illustrating the brilliant scenes of his Decamerone. Great philologians and grammarians have expressed their admiration for the purity and elegance of his style. Brilliant as his services were to the literature of his country, they have received a more than ample measure of reward from the gratitude of posterity.

Italy produced in the Fourteenth Century many other prose writers of note, though none so eminent as Boccaccio.