Il Novellino: The hundred old tales

by Unknown

A modern story-teller would have filled several pages describing the lugubrious procession in the heart of the night from grave-yard to scaffold, and have described at length the feelings of the knight and the woman, with ample reflections on feminine nature; while the stars, the countryside, black cypresses, notes of melancholy owls, the sentinels at the city gates would all have been usefully dragged in to impress the reader.

The Middle Ages was childish perhaps in its love of the marvellous and marvellous stories, but the audiences of the old giullari and jongleurs certainly did not lack imagination. In this they [[28]]were like children who are rich in it, and to whom a bare swift tale with sharply outlined facts is dearer than all the considerations and artifices with which a clever tale-teller may embellish it.

If it is not correct to state that people to-day have less imagination than folk in the Middle Ages, it is very likely true that as they have so many more calls on it, it easily becomes tired and loses in elasticity. Those with lively imaginations like to add a good deal themselves to a story that is told them, and such was the case with the listeners to the stories given in this collection. They would probably have resented the guillare overloading his narratives with subsidiary facts, descriptions and artificial holding of the interest. They could do that kind of thing very well themselves. In fact, we have internal evidence from the Novellino itself that lengthy stories were not to the taste of the listeners of those times. In Novella No. LXXXIX, we read of a giullare “who began a story that never ended”. One of the hearers interrupts the story-teller, and assures him that the person “who taught him the tale did not teach him all of it”. The giullare [[29]]ask why and is answered: “Because he did not teach you the end”.

Some writers have put forward the theory that the stories contained in the Cento Novelle Antiche were only the synopses of longer stories, the index, so to speak of a much larger book that has been lost. But it seems to me that for the considerations before mentioned this is not the case. The novella in its infancy was always a brief narration, and even when we come to Boccaccio and his wider manipulation of material, the tales even then are not long as we judge the length of stories nowadays.

Certainly the modern man who lives a much less physical existence than his forbears, and has perforce to use his imagination and other intellectual faculties to a far greater extent than did the elder folk, requires his stories completely filled in so that they leave him little work to do. The Tired Business Man who takes the place of the bold baron and the fat bourgeois of the old days exacts from his modern jongleurs that they give him the least possible intellectual fatigue. [[30]]

A number of the tales seem to belong especially to the period, and differentiate themselves from the older ones in the collection where the monkish and Latin flavour clings still through the freer prose of the new idiom. Many of them have quite a Boccaccio touch, and already we seem to hear the round jovial laugh, the sensual yet humanistic mockery of the great Florentine. Among these we may mention the story of the Woman and the Pear-tree, which is not to be found in the original Gualteruzzi edition of 1525, but comes from the Panciatichiano MS. The picture of the two lovers up in the branches of the pear-tree, while the blind husband clasps the trunk of the tree below is worthy of the author of the Decameron. The ending of the story, however, seems to be more in keeping with the period.

The curious dialogue between God and Saint Peter, blasphemous almost at first sight and yet innocent in its curious naivete and simplicity, is the kind of thing we find in our period. It is on a par with that other extraordinary story of God and the minstrel who went partners together, which is obviously an old and favourite tale and [[31]]much in the style of the duecento. Borghini left it out of his edition, perhaps thinking it was offensive to religious sentiment.

Boccaccian is Novella No. XLIX, the story of the Physician of Toulouse, though the tale would appear to come from the French. So too is the story about the parish priest Porcellino, whose name is certainly chosen to give further point to the tale. In the same category comes Novella LXII, the tale of Messer Robert of Burgundy. The story in fact appears in the Decameron.

Many of the narratives have quite a different character to this rich mirthful mockery. Tales like that relating to Prester John, to the wise Greek whom a king kept in prison, the “Argument and Sentence that were given in Alexandria”, Antigonus and Alexander, the Land Steward who plucked out his own eye, belong to another epoch altogether and form part of the monkish and ascetic heredity of the Novellino.

A few (four or five) of the stories are frankly indecent, and are always expurgated from popular editions of the work in Italy, a course [[32]]which I have followed here. Two or three of the present collection are also a trifle free, but I have decided to leave them in their place, with a few unimportant excisions and alterations.