Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio (Chaucer Studies) (Chaucer Studies, 40) 1843842017, 9781843842019

Citation preview

spine 18mm A db 31 May 09

Although many of Chaucer’s sources have been exhaustively studied, relatively little work has been done on the influence of his contemporary Boccaccio, a gap which this book aims to fill. It examines the relationship of the comic tales, the so-called fabliaux, in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Decameron, demonstrating that not only did Chaucer draw on Boccaccio’s work, but that he and Boccaccio shared the same comic literary tradition stretching back into antiquity. By putting the tales and the characters side-byside, new light is thrown on Chaucer’s inventiveness and mode of working. Professor CAROL HEFFERNAN teaches in the Department of English, Rutgers University, New Jersey. Cover: A fifteenth-century illustration of Decameron 9, 6: Paris, Bibl. Natl. MS. Fr. 239, fol. 256  v (by permission of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France).

HEFFERNAN

An imprint of BOYDELL & BREWER Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF and 668 Mount Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620-2731 www.boydell.co.uk / www.boydellandbrewer.com

CHAUCER STUDIES XL

Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio Whilst many of Chaucer’s sources have been exhaustively studied, relatively little work has been done on the influence of his contemporary Boccaccio, a gap which this book aims to fill. It examines the relationship of the comic tales, the so-called fabliaux, in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Decameron, suggesting that not only did Chaucer and Boccaccio share the same comic literary tradition stretching back into antiquity, but that Chaucer drew on the Italian’s work; by putting the tales and the characters side-by-side, it throws new light on Chaucer’s inventiveness and mode of working. Professor Carol Falvo Heffernan teaches at the Department of English, Rutgers University, New Jeresey.

CHAUCER STUDIES ISSN 0261–9822

Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of this book

Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

carol falvo heffernan

D. S. BREWER

©  Carol Falvo Heffernan 2009 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Carol Falvo Heffernan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2009 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN  978–1–84384–201–9

D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

1 Introductory Matters

ix 1

2 The Comic Inheritance of Boccaccio and Chaucer

20

3 Parallel Comic Tales in the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales

38

4 Antifraternal Satire in Boccaccio and Chaucer

72

5 Adding Comedy: Boccaccio’s Filostrato and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde

101



Conclusion

129



Bibliography

135



Index

147

In memory of Thomas Farel Heffernan 1933–2009

Preface and Acknowledgments It has been said that tragedy appeals to those who feel and comedy to those who think. The complete works of Chaucer (1342?–1400) and Boccaccio (1313–1375) contain enough of each genre to satisfy the tastes of both kinds of readers. The measure of the artistry of the two medieval poets can only be appreciated by studying the full range of their writing. Without intending to elevate the comic works of Chaucer and Boccaccio above the rest, this book focuses on their comic tales. Chaucer wrote his late in his career when he had the power of someone who had found his true voice and knew fully how to use it. Boccaccio’s comic tales were written midway in his life; he began writing his great narrative masterwork in 1350, shortly after the Black Death struck Florence (1347–49). Chaucer and Boccaccio are borrowers of tales told by others. Part of their art is to know how to select tales that suit their styles and that they can better. Judging from the owners of the extant Decameron manuscripts, Boccaccio’s collection appealed to the merchant class. When Chaucer wrote his second masterpiece, the Canterbury Tales, he clearly had in mind a broader audience than that for which he wrote his first, Troilus and Criseyde, a courtly narrative. Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio examines the relationship of the comic tales – the so-called fabliaux – in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and ­Boccaccio’s Decameron. There is surprisingly little direct study of the comic in Boccaccio and Chaucer. The present book advances the view that not only did Chaucer and Boccaccio share the same comic literary tradition stretching back into antiquity but that Chaucer drew on the Italian’s work. It is a curious fact that while one’s students and the general reader tend to assume that the tale collections are closely related, scholars of Chaucer have, until very recently, doubted that the English poet even knew of the Decameron. Chaucer’s sources in Boccaccio were long thought to be limited to the Teseida, the Filocolo, the Filostrato, and the Ameto – works that influenced ­Chaucer’s more “serious” narratives (i.e., romances such as the Knight’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde). Because the two authors inherited a common comic literary tradition, establishing connections between Chaucer and his predecessor’s comic tales is difficult. There are often other close analogues. One needs to be aware not only of the relationship of their comic tales to the vernacular literature of their day but to the body of comic literature that is anterior. After an introductory chapter that explores the question of when Chaucer’s work became known in Italy and that also examines historical ties between England and Italy, Chaucer and Boccaccio, Chapter 2 discusses comic works and ideas about

x  Preface and Acknowledgments

comedy in the European tradition which precede the comedies of Boccaccio and Chaucer so that the comic narratives of the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales (as well as fabliau aspects of the Troilus) may be understood as part of a continuum shared by both deeply read fourteenth-century authors. Chapter 3 considers parallel comic tales told in both the Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The chapter argues that four specific instances indicate the influence of Boccaccio’s Decameron on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The first is a detail of the Reeve’s Tale that coincides uniquely with a detail in Decameron 9, 6; I argue that although the main source for Chaucer remains the French fabliau, Le Meunier et les deux clers, Chaucer probably knew Boccaccio’s version as well. The second case involves not a specific borrowing but a more general framework. The indication of analogues for the Miller’s Tale has focused on specific motifs out of context, but Boccaccio’s Decameron 3, 4 offers a similar general idea: “men who are as religious as they are gullible are shown the way to salvation by learned men who hatch outlandish schemes in order to be alone to fornicate with the young wives of trusting men. Both schemes take advantage of the husbands’ piety.” Two other comic tales by Chaucer, the Shipman’s Tale and the Merchant’s Tale, assumed to have French sources, indicate the influence of the Italian novella, most especially the trecento novellas of Boccaccio’s Decameron, as I have tried to show. It may not be too much to suggest that for his comic tales in verse Chaucer probably borrowed as much from Italian prose novellas as he did from French fabliaux. Chapter 4 turns to a consideration of satiric portraits of friars in the two tale collections. Although he is not a friar, Chaucer’s con-man par excellence, the Pardoner, is included here as he shares in the greed found on the mendicant way, is a preacher like the friars, and is a special instance of Chaucer’s interest in the moral consequences of corruption. The Pardoner’s portrait becomes especially interesting if there is even a chance that Chaucer knew the Decameron and its tale of Fra Cipolla. The final chapter of this book focuses on Boccaccio’s Filostrato and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, the latter universally recognized as being deeply indebted to the former. Both long narratives are courtly romances, though Chaucer specifically refers to his as a tragedy. My reason for including these works in a book on comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio is that Chaucer’s addition of the manipulations of Pandarus, the lovers’ go-between, and the translation of Troilus to the heavenly spheres at the conclusion of the Troilus introduces comedy into Chaucer’s mix of genres. I owe thanks to many people who contributed to the development of this book. Janet Smarr invited me to present a paper before the American Boccaccio Society at the December 2005 Modern Language Association meeting; that paper evolved into the Pardoner-Fra Cipolla section of Chapter 4. James Weldon and Christa Canitz raised questions about early versions



Preface and Acknowledgments  xi

of this section which helped shape my thinking. Andrea Ciccarelli read early versions of parts of Chapter 3 and made suggestions that improved it. Sue Charkin also read an early version of what became part of Chapter  3 and offered sobering suggestions. Two anonymous readers for Boydell and Brewer who read near final drafts of Chapters 1 through 3 of the book offered detailed comments that were of great assistance to me as work on this book progressed. An invitation from David Raybin and Susanna Fein to present a paper, “Pandaro into Pandarus,” in a session sponsored by The Chaucer Review at the 43rd International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, Michigan (May 2008) gave me an opportunity to try out an idea central to Chapter 5. I am grateful to Rutgers University for a 2006–07 Research Council Grant which supported my research and for a spring 2008 sabbatical which relieved me of teaching duties and committee work so that I could complete the writing of the book. My debts to the librarians of the New York Public Library and the John Cotton Dana Library of Rutgers University are numerous. I am grateful for the steadfast interest Caroline Palmer, Editorial Director of Boydell & Brewer, had in this book. For encouragement and loving support I owe my greatest debt to my husband, Tom, who is always my first reader, and to my son, Geoffrey. Earlier versions of some of the discussions in this book were published in journals and have been modified and expanded. They include “Three Unnoticed Links between Matthew of Vendôme’s Comedia Lidie and Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale,” Notes and Queries, vol. 248 of the continuous series (2003): 158–62; “Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale and Reeve’s Tale, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and the French Fabliaux,” Italica 81 (2004): 311–24; “Boccaccio’s Decameron 6.10 and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales VI. 287–968: Thinking on your Feet and the Set-Piece,” Florilegium 22 (2005): 105–20; and “Two ‘English Fabliaux’: Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale and Shipman’s Tale and Italian Novelle,” Neophilologus 90 (2006): 333–49. I am grateful to Oxford University Press, Indiana University Press, The Canadian Society of Medievalists, and Springer Publications, Inc. respectively for permission to print revisions of these. The Chaucer Review has granted permission to print the seventeenthcentury biographical essay about Galfredo Chaucero from Caron Cioffi’s, “The First Italian Essay on Chaucer,” The Chaucer Review 22 (1987): 53, and Taylor & Francis has granted permission to reproduce Stefano Surigone’s Latin epitaph in praise of Chaucer from Derek Brewer’s Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, 2 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), I, 78–9.

1 Introductory Matters

When is Chaucer Known in Italy?

T

he question may seem an odd one, but it is, in fact, what started me on the road to finding the subject of this book. Scholars of medieval and early modern English literature are used to considering English interest in Italian letters – if not Chaucer’s use of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, then Elizabethan interest in Italian humanism and the Italian sonnet. It is a commonplace that from the point of view of the continent, England in the late Middle Ages was thought to be relatively backward; Boccaccio’s Decameron 2, 3 compares it to Barbary, the north African coast. When I first thought to ask the question – “When is Chaucer known in Italy?” – I approached an Italianist who, like myself, took part in a session of the American Boccaccio Society at a recent Modern Language Association convention. She answered, after just the slightest hesitation, with words that added up to something like, “Late, very late, probably the nineteenth century.” Her assumption was that while France and Germany were aware of Chaucer’s importance by the sixteenth century, Italy, which had given Chaucer so much inspiration, was late in recognizing the English poet. Still, it seemed implausible to me that Chaucer could have gained access to important Italian libraries in 1372 and 1378 while on diplomatic trips to Italy, might even have been observed reading manuscripts of works by Dante and Boccaccio, perhaps have arranged to acquire manuscripts of their works for his own use, and no Italian have been curious enough to ask Chaucer about his literary interests and his own writing. Even Chaucer probably did not think of himself as a writer first. He did not earn his daily bread from writing. The various grants and annuities which he received during his lifetime were not connected to his work as a poet. Those came from his service as a civil servant. Chaucer’s work was well-paid enough to secure for him the leisure to write. Late interest in Chaucer is clear enough in the Italian academy and even in Italian movies. Since the late twentieth century, Piero Boitani – a professor of comparative literature at La Sapienza, the University of Rome, educated there and at Cambridge University – has been a prominent scholar of medieval English literature, starting with his first important book, Chaucer and

2  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

Boccaccio, which appeared in 1977.1 Shortly after World War II, another eminent professor at the University of Rome, Mario Praz, published a volume in Italian entitled Geoffrey Chaucer e i racconti di Canterbury, which contained introductory material and critical commentary in Italian with Chaucer’s text presented in English.2 Most would find the book surprising as Praz is best known for his study of erotic themes in the Age of Romanticism, The Romantic Agony, but he was, in fact, a generalist who wrote on many areas of English literature.3 Twenty years after Praz’s Italian study of Chaucer, an edition of the tales edited by Ermanno Barisone was published in Turin.4 A critical study of the tales, I Racconti di Canterbury: Un’opera Unitaria, by the Italian scholar Franco Buffoni appeared in 1991 but was a reissue of an earlier book published in 1981 as Chaucer: Testone medievale.5 Thus Buffoni’s study actually overlaps Boitani’s prolific work of the early 1980s. It is safe to say that Boitani is today the Italian scholar of medieval English literature with the greatest international reputation. Interestingly, his first major book, Chaucer and Boccaccio, appeared roughly five years after Pier Paolo Pasolini completed his Trilogia della Vita (Trilogy of Life) which included movies based on the Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and The Arabian Nights.6 Pasolini’s film, I Racconti di Canterbury, appeared a few years after his Decameron and won first prize at the 1972 Berlin Film Festival. Like the 1960s British rock-calypso musical based on Chaucer’s tales that was so successful in London and both off- and on- Broadway, Pasolini’s movie privileged the fabliau over the other genres represented in the tale collection. While Nevill Coghill’s production of the Canterbury Tales flashed ornate, brightly colored codpieces and its staging of the Reeve’s Tale emphasized bedroom farce with huge, vertical beds that the actors raced behind as they popped in and out of 1

2 3

4 5

6

Piero Boitani, Chaucer and Boccaccio (Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1977). See especially his English Medieval Narrative in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, trans. Joan Krakover Hall (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, ed. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1983); The European Tragedy of Troilus, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); The Tragic and the Sublime in Medieval Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Mario Praz, Geoffrey Chaucer e I racconti di Canterbury (Rome: Edizioni italiane, 1947). Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony (London: Oxford University Press, 1933). See also Praz’s Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery (London: The Warburg Institute, 1939) and his Mnemosyne: The Parallel between Literature and the Visual Arts (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1970), among many other studies. Geoffrey Chaucer, I Racconti di Canterbury, ed. Ermanno Barisone (Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1967). Franco Buffoni, I racconti di Canterbury: Un’opera unitaria, I Saggi di Testo a Fronte 2 (Milan: Angelo Guerini e Associati, 1991). Originally issued as Chaucer, testone medievale (Udine: Nuova del bianco industrie grafiche, 1981). Boitani, Chaucer and Boccaccio.



Introductory Matters  3

them, Pasolini’s movie focused on phalluses in the Miller’s Tale and Reeve’s Tale and anuses in the Summoner’s Tale and Prologue. Pasolini scholars have been generally harsh in their criticism of the movie. Maurizio Viano complains, for example, “It is not the presence of anal imagery per se that is bad. Rather, it is the degradation into jokes worthy of B-movies.”7 Viano is reacting to Pasolini’s energetic rendering of the fart of the Summoner’s Tale and of the friars inside of Satan’s anus (of the tale’s Prologue) that, in the movie, explode out comically as excrement. There is no apologetic Retraction from Pasolini. He appears at the film’s end as Chaucer, picking up his quill and writing, “The end of the Canterbury Tales, told for the pleasure of the telling.” Sandro Petraglia found I Racconti di Canterbury less good than the movie based on the Decameron that preceded it: “I racconti di Canterbury è un brutto calco divitalizzato … Tutte le storie del primo film si sono coagulate nel secundo in una preziosa ma sottile operazione di rimasticamento” (“The Canterbury tales is a poor devitalized copy … the stories from the first film all have coagulated in the second one in a mannered, but subtle act of rehashing”).8 That may be the case or may simply reflect an Italian’s sense of the relative merits of the two tale collections; Pasolini himself, however, fully entered into the spirit of Chaucer’s comic tales. Caron Cioffi has uncovered a biographical essay about Galfredo Chavcero which appeared in Italian in 1647; nonetheless, on the question of when Chaucer is known in Italy, she is in agreement with the Italianist I consulted at the Modern Language Association convention: “In Italy … his [Chaucer’s] name is practically unknown until the nineteenth century.”9 The passage describing Chaucer’s life and work appeared in Teatro d’huomini letterati by Gerolamo Ghilini. I cite it in English translation: Geoffrey Chaucer, an illustrious knight, also the son of a knight, was born in Woodstock, near Oxford, a city in England; and since he began from his early youth to show signs of an excellent disposition to good, he was sent to the school of that city. There, because of his very quick mind, he advanced so much in the Humanities, in the diligent care of very learned professors, that he was not inferior to any professor among them. In a similar fashion, he became so outstanding in the study of the serious disciplines that if he was not superior he was at least equal to those who, in his day, were considered great scholars. Even as he succeeded in becoming well educated in rhetoric, subtle in mathematics, profound in philosophy, and speculative in theology, so he devoted himself, at an early age, to writing English poetry. He was so successful at it that with good reason he was considered its restorer, and it earned him the reputation of an elegant poet. 7 8 9

Maurizio Viano, A Certain Realism: Making Use of Pasolini’s Film Theory and Practice (Berkeley, California: University of California, 1993), 281–82. Sandro Pretaglia, Pier Paolo Pasolini (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1974), 105. Caron Cioffi, “The First Italian Essay on Chaucer,” The Chaucer Review 22 (1987), 53.

4  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio Having finished his studies in England and desiring to achieve that perfect knowledge of the sciences which perhaps he had been unable to attain in his homeland, he went to France, where he made such progress in them that it was sufficient to secure for him a high place among the most famous literati of that century. He then returned to England and, having settled in London, seat of kings and capital of the kingdom, he devoted himself to the study of letters and, in particular, to the study of history, and to the embellishment of his native English, imitating in this Dante, Petrarch, and others who, for the benefit of studious minds, reformed their native languages. He wrote many works which were printed, and since they are for the most part written in his native language, I will put them here with their respective titles in Italian. They are: The Consolation of Philosophy, 5 books; Chaucer’s Dream; Testament of Criseyde; Lament of Criseyde; Testament of Love, 3 books; The Magdalen, in verse; The Court of Venus; The Love of Thisbe; The Loves of Palamon and Arcite; The Remedy of Love; The Quarrel of Mars and Venus; The Letter of Love; The Art of Loving Roman Style; The Loves of Virtuous Ladies; The Choir of Virtuous Ladies; The Choir of Birds; On Dead Pity; The History of Oedipus and Jocasta; The Siege of Thebes; The Flower of Urbanity; In Praise of Women; The Lament of the Black Knight; On Fame and Her House, 3 books; Songs; Melibee and Prudence; Sins and Remedies; The Praise of Good Women; The Life of Cleopatra; The Life of Thisbe of Babylon; The Life of Dido of Carthage; On Hypsipyle and Medea; The Life of Lucrece of Rome; The Life of Ariadne of Crete; The Life of Philomela of Athens; The Life of Phyllis of Tarsus; The Life of Hypermnestra of Egypt; The Impious Lady; Anelida and Arcite; Chaucer’s Poem; Epigrams; The Cuckoo and the Nightingale; Eight Questions with their Answers; Chronicle of the English Complaint; Stories about Different Things; Love Poems; The Castle of Ladies; Ceyx and the Bird which nests on the Sea; The Roasting Spit of Vulcan; The Lion’s Dignity; On the Death of Duchess Blanche; The Life of Saint Cecilia; Jokes and Witticisms; Comedies and Tragedies. He also translated into English a treatise by Origen; The Comedy by Dante Alighieri; some things by Petrarch; The Book of Art by John Moni, an Englishman [sic; but actually Jean de Meun’s Romance of the Rose] whose work he translated in verse; and many other works are known by this marvelous talent. The others are excellent translations from other languages into his own; all the above are published by a London publisher, with the highest praise for the author. He died at a ripe old age on the 25th of October in the year 1400, and he was buried with honors in the Church of Westminster. Later, in 1555, his remains were transferred to a more honorable marble tomb in the Chapel of Saint Blaise in the same city. On it one reads the following engraved lines …10

Ghilini, an expert on canon law, and a priest, wrote sonnets and other works in Latin as well as in Italian. Cioffi demonstrates clearly that his sketch of 10

Cioffi, 55–56. The Italian text first appeared in Teatro d’huomini letterati aperto dall’abate Gerolamo Ghilini (Venice: Guerigli, 1647), 2: 102–3.



Introductory Matters  5

Chaucer draws heavily on an article in Latin by John Pits from his Relationem historicarum de rebus anglicis (printed in 1619) which itself draws on a biography of Chaucer by John Bale.11 The three lists of Chaucer’s works, given in Italian by Ghilini and in Latin by Pits and Bale, all contain spurious works. Ghilini lists both authentic and spurious works in the same order in which they appear in Pits’ list, omitting the Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Canterbury Tales. Cioffi surmises that the omission of Chaucer’s most famous work is the consequence of Ghilini’s unfamiliarity with the word cantianas in the Latin title, Fabulas cantianas, from the list in Pits. Perhaps, but not likely in such a good Latinist as Ghilini. More likely his priestly background and serious turn of mind, reflected in his pursuit of canon law and his Latin collection of “casi di coscienza,” caused him to reject the tales because of the numerous fabliaux in the collection. He could have known them by reputation even if not by first-hand reading. It seems to me that the only thing that can be said about Ghilini’s seventeenth-century Italian biography of Chaucer with certainty is that Ghilini knew the English poet was important enough to include in his book. His virtual translation of Pits’ Latin into Italian raises doubt about how much first-hand acquaintance Ghilini had with Chaucer’s work. There is earlier evidence of Italian knowledge of Chaucer. When Caxton wanted to eulogize the poet he turned to Stefano Surigone, a humanist from Milan, who came to England in 1454 and worked as a writer and teacher, for a time at Oxford. Surigone’s thirty-four lines of Latin verse in praise of Chaucer, Epitaphium Galfridi Chaucer, per poetam laureatum Stephanum Surigone Mediolanensem in decretis licenciatum, are as follows: Pyerides muse, si possunt numina fletus   Fundere . diuinas atque rigare genas, Galfridi vatis Chaucer crudelia fata   Plangite . sit lacrimis abstinuisse nephas. Vos coluit viuens . at vos celebrate sepultum.   Reddatur merito gracia digna viro. Grande decus vobis . est docti musa maronis,   Qua didicit melius lingua Latina loqui Grande nevumque decus Chaucer . famamque parauit.   Heu quantum fuerat prisca Britanna rudis Reddidit insignem maternis versibus, ut iam   Aurea splendescat . ferrea facta prius Hunc latuisse virum nil . si tot opuscula vertes,   Dixeris . egregiis que decorata modis. Socratis ingenium . vel fontes philosophie,   Quitquid & archani dogmata sacra ferunt 11

Caroline Spurgeon prints Pits’ Latin text in Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, 3 vols. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1960), III: Appendix A, pp. 63–5.

6  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio Et quascunque veils tenuit dignissimus artes   Hic vates . paruo conditus hoc tumulo Ah laudis quantum, preclara britannia perdis   Dum rapuit tantum mors odiosa virum Crudeles parce . crudelia fila, sorores  Non tamen extincto corpore . fama perit: Viuet ineternum . viuent dum scripta poete  Viuant eterno tot monimenta die Si qua bonos tangit pietas . si carmine dignus   Carmina qui cecinit tot cumulata modis Hec sibi marmoreo scribantur verba sepulchro.   Hec maneat laudis sarcina summa sue Galfridus Chaucer vates : et fama poesis  Materne . hac sacra sum tumulatus humo. Post obitum Caxton voluit te vivere cura   Willelmi. Chaucer clare poeta, tuj Nam tua non solum compressit opuscula formis   Has quoque sed laudes . iussit hic esse tuas12 [Pierian Muses, if heavenly powers can pour forth tears and moisten their divine cheeks, lament the cruel fate of the bard Geoffrey Chaucer. Let it be a crime to refrain from weeping. He worshiped you in his lifetime, but [I bid you] honour him now that he is buried. Let a worthy reward be paid to a deserving man. The Muse [or Music] of learned Maro is a great honour to you, the Muse through whose agency the Latin tongue learned to speak better. A great new honour and fame has Chaucer provided for you. By the verses [that he composed] in his [British] mother tongue he made it [as] illustrious as, alas, it had once been uncouth (1) so that now it takes on a golden splendour where formerly it was iron.  One will affirm that there was nothing in which this man was not distinguished (2) if he turns the pages of so many works which [are] embellished with excellent measures. The genius of Socrates or the springs of philosophy, and all the secrets which holy doctrine contains and all the arts that you could wish for – these were in the possession of this most worthy bard [who is] buried in this tiny grave.   Ah, how much renown you lose, famed Britannia, now that hateful death has snatched away so great a man! Cruel [are the] Fates, cruel their threads, O Sisters! (3) Yet even when the body is dead fame does not perish. It will live forever, as long as the poets’ writings 12

The eulogy and its translation (by R. G. G. Coleman) are cited from Derek Brewer, Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, 2 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 1: 78–9. The eulogy has also been printed and translated in David Carlson, “Chaucer, Humanism, and Printing: Conditions of Authorship in Fifteenth-Century England,” University of Toronto Quarterly 64 (1995): 278–80 and in Seth Lerer, Chaucer and his Readers (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993), 155–57.



Introductory Matters  7 live. May all these monuments live in everlasting day. If the good are touched by any piety and if the man who sang songs amassed in so many measures is [himself] worthy of a song (4) let these words as spoken on his own behalf, be inscribed upon his marble tomb, let this remain the crowning burden to his own praise:   ‘I, Geoffrey Chaucer the bard, glory of my native poesy, am buried in this sacred ground.’ It was the eager wish (5) of your admirer William Caxton that you should live, illustrious poet Chaucer. For not only has he printed your works but he has also ordered this eulogy of you to be here]

Surigone’s eulogy, besides appearing at the end of Caxton’s 1478 edition of Chaucer’s Boece, was also inscribed on a monument that Caxton had erected in Westminster Abbey. It is David Carlson’s judgment that “with its invocations of muses, comparisons with ancients, deprecations of the cruel Parcae, the Horatian claim that the poet’s writings make a ‘monumentum aere perennius,’ … Surigone’s poem is a tissue of clichés and stock phrases from humanist eulogy.”13 Yes. It may, however, do a learned humanist an injustice to conclude that “Surigone knew Chaucer poorly, if at all.”14 His poem of praise recognizes that Chaucer had given native English a great boost in a world of Latin and French: “Heu quantum fuerat prisca Britanna rudis:/ Reddit insignem maternis versibus, ut iam/ Aurea splendescat, ferrea facta prius” [“By the verses [that he composed] in his [British] mother tongue he made it [as] illustrious as, alas, it had once been uncouth (1) so that now it takes on a golden splendour where formerly it was iron”]. Nonetheless, a man of the fifteenth century, Surigone admires aureate ornamentation, put in vogue not by Chaucer but his admirer, Lydgate, who modeled his A Complaynt of a Loveres Lyfe and the Temple of Glas on Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess and House of Fame respectively. There is reason to think Chaucer’s writing might have been known to Italians even earlier than Surigone’s eulogy of the English poet, for Surigone is part of a cultural stream that ran between Britain and Italy from the early Middle Ages. Well before the Anglican schism, two archbishops of Canterbury were Italians, St. Anselm and Lanfranc, as were five bishops of Worcester. The presence in Italy of an important Anglo-Saxon manuscript, the so-called Vercelli Book, is explained by A. S. Cook as a gift made by Cardinal Guala Becchieri to the Church of St. Andrew in Vercelli.15 From 1216–18, Cardinal Guala had been in England where he oversaw a priory of

13 14 15

Carlson, 280. Carlson, 280. Cook’s theory, first propounded in the University of California Bulletin (No. 10, 1888), is cited by Stephen J. Herben, Jr., “The Vercelli Book: A New Hypothesis,” Speculum 10 (1935): 91–2.

8  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

St. Andrew at Ely. When he returned to Italy and established a church of St. Andrew in Vercelli, the cardinal, who possessed a large library, is thought to have made a gift to its monastery of the Anglo-Saxon manuscript because it contains the Andreas, one of its most important poems. Lombard Street in London remains to this day a monument to the power exerted by Italian bankers on English politics through the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Several great Italian banking companies had representatives in England; many were from Lombardy and hence the name Lombard Street was given to the area of their operations. And a letter by Edward III, dated April 24, 1370, to Doge Andrea Contarini that recognized the credentials of a Venetian merchant is an early document attesting to the presence of diplomats from Venice in England.16 Many Englishmen went to Italy for their university education during the later Middle Ages. The College of Physicians in London was founded by Thomas Linacre, trained in medicine in Italy, and modeled on Italian institutions of medicine. Italian physicians like Peter de Barulo, alias Peter de Salernia, settled in England. Chaucer could have heard of his arrest in London in May 1387. The Calendar of the Patent Rolls for the reign of Richard II contains this entry for 24 May 1387: “Writ to sheriffs, mayors, bailiffs, ministers and others the king’s subjects to arrest and bring before the king and council brother Peter de Barulo alias Master Peter de Salernia, physician …”17 Whoever he was, and whatever he did wrong, he was a physician of consequence; the title “Master” meant the right to teach medicine or surgery. Most significant of all for literary exchange between fourteenth-century Italy and England is the travel and acquaintances of diplomats with multilingual capabilities and multicultural experience. John Scattergood observes that Chaucer’s main readers “appear to have been career diplomats, civil servants, officials and administrators who were attached to the court and government,” men like Thomas Usk, undersheriff of Middlesex and poet, Sir John Clanvowe, soldier, diplomat, and poet; Ralph Strode, lawyer; and Sir Lewis Clifford, one of Richard II’s chamber knights.18 It was to Clifford that the French poet, Deschamps, gave a volume of his poems to be conveyed to Geoffrey Chaucer whom he had praised in a ballade in 1386.19 Deschamps called Chaucer “grand translateur” for having translated the Roman de la Rose into Middle English and thus planted the rose tree (planté le rosier)

16 17 18

19

Michael Wyatt, The Italian Encounter with Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 20. Carol F. Heffernan, “The Wyse Boke of Maystyr Peers of Salerne …,” Manuscripta 37 (1993): 296. The treatise is in Middle English. John Scattergood, “Literary Culture and the Court of Richard II,” in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, eds. V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 38, 39. Scattergood, “Literary Culture,” 39.



Introductory Matters  9

in England.20 Chaucer numbered many such men among his friends and to two of them he addressed poems. Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton, about the difficulties of marriage, was a ballad for Sir Peter Bukton, who managed Henry Bolingbroke’s estates during his period of exile, and Truth, written for Sir Philip de la Vache, sympathized with him for his declining fortunes and urged him to follow the advice of the poem. John Clanvowe’s Cuckoo and the Nightingale is modeled on Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls; Clanvowe was a knight of the king’s chamber and a close friend of Chaucer. Lewis Clifford was a collector of manuscripts to whom the Duchess of York in 1392 bequeathed two Bibles, two primers, and a treatise on virtues and vices.21 The international connections of well-traveled, literate men such as these contributed to the transmission of texts. Geoffrey Chaucer, himself a diplomat and civil servant who served the court, belonged to this circle of talented men. Their ability to acquire texts helps explain, at least in part, how an English author such as Chaucer could make use of Italian and French manuscripts . Charter members of Philippe de Mézière’s Order of the Passion (established to colonize, rule, and defend the Holy Land), Clanvowe, Clifford, and even John of Gaunt, Chaucer’s patron, might have served as conduits of texts between England – especially England’s poet, Chaucer – and Italy. Mézière was a friend of Petrarch and might “have had access to manuscripts of Italian poems and made them available to those in his circle.”22 This is true, but literary exchanges are not unidirectional. If Deschamps can write a ballade in praise of Chaucer and send him a volume of poems via Lewis Clifford, an Italian might also have heard of the English poet and even read his work as Deschamps presumably had. The absence of manuscripts and early printed texts of Chaucer from Italian libraries is not necessarily evidence that he was not known in Italy. Chaucer is also absent from the list of Richard II’s books compiled in 1384–85, as well as from inventories of books owned by Thomas Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester.23 Richard II’s books are mostly in French and Latin and include many French romances, among them the vulgate Mort Artu, a French Generides, and a Roman de la Rose.24 A list of the books in the possession of Thomas Woodstock includes books of a philosophical or theological nature by St. Augustine, Pope Gregory, and Boethius.25 Although the inventories of the books collected and owned by the king and duke indicate tastes different from those that might attract readers to Chaucer, it cannot be said with any

20 21 22 23 24 25

Brewer, ed., Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, I: 39–42. Scattergood, “Literary Culture,” 35. Michael Hanly, “Courtiers and Poets: An International System of Literary Exchange in Late Fourteenth-Century Italy, France, and England,” Viator 28 (1997): 315. Scattergood, “Literary Culture,” 32, 34. Scattergood, “Literary Culture,” 32. Scattergood, “Literary Culture,” 34.

10  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

certainty that Richard II and the Duke of Gloucester did not read or listen to Chaucer’s poetry (or, for that matter, that they read the books in their collections). Besides the international network of diplomats who could help exchange texts, Chaucer himself had traveled. In 1372, when Chaucer was esquire of the king’s chamber, he journeyed to Genoa to confer about a special seaport in England for the use of Genoese merchants. He left in the company of two Italians, John de Mari and Jacopo Provano (Sir James de Provan), highranking merchants in the service of King Edward. Chaucer went on from Genoa to Florence on secret business of the king’s that had to do with the Florentine Bardi bankers (for whom Boccaccio’s father had worked). Chaucer was sent on this commercial mission because he was a strong thirty-yearold from a mercantile background who could speak and read Italian and endure the harsh travel through the Alps in winter. Of the five months that Chaucer was away (December 1, 1372 to May 23, 1373), three months were spent in Italy. The rest of the time was spent in travel along the Rhine route through Germany to avoid France, engaged in war with England.26 Chaucer was accompanied to Florence by Jacopo Provano, who was negotiating the purchase of ships. The Florentine businessmen with whom they dealt and by whom they were entertained lavishly were bourgeois readers who could talk books. Some of them were the owners of the manuscripts of the Decameron which are today among the rare Boccaccio manuscripts of European libraries: the Bonaccorsi (Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiano, C225), the Verrazzano (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, XC, sup. 106 II), the Fei (Laurenziana, XLII,4), and the Vitali (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, It. 62), all agents of the Bardi company.27 On the way down to Florence from Genoa, Chaucer could have met Petrarch at Padua or nearby Arqua and Boccaccio at Florence or Certaldo, his birthplace outside of Florence. If Chaucer accompanied the English party to Prince Lionel’s wedding to Violante Visconti in 1368, Chaucer would already have seen Petrarch at the wedding reception, if only as someone standing in the same room. One would like to think there was a meeting between Chaucer and Petrarch at which Chaucer received the Latin version of the Clerk’s Tale, Petrarch’s translation of the last tale of the Decameron, directly from “Fraunceys Petrak, the lauriat poete” (IV, the Clerk’s Tale, 31) as the Clerk of Oxenford says to the Host that he did. But that would mean Petrarch would have had to translate Boccaccio’s tale before Chaucer left Italy in March 1373, and, moreover, that the trip to Padua could be fitted into ­Chaucer’s business schedule. As for the date, it is not impossible that Petrarch had already translated Boccaccio’s tale into Latin; Petrarch had 26 27

Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, Inc., 1992), 102. Vittore Branca, Boccaccio: The Man and his Works, trans. Richard Monges (New York: New York University Press, 1976), 200.



Introductory Matters  11

written to Boccaccio on April 28, 1373 that the Tale of Griseldis, with its blots and erasures (“cum lituris obsitam”) was being copied by a friend.28 Donald Howard observes that a war between Padua and Venice at the time would have made the route through Padua that Chaucer needed to travel very risky.29 It is not impossible that Chaucer and Petrarch met and that the poet told him the Tale of Griseldis, but it seems that their meeting would have been difficult to achieve. Although Chaucer never mentions Boccaccio by name, a meeting with this Italian writer seems more likely to have occurred. The absence of Boccaccio’s name in Chaucer’s work may itself point to a meeting between the old literary titan and the young diplomat who wrote when he could find the time. In the ten weeks Chaucer was in Florence, he might have heard some of the tales of the Decameron read out loud as entertainment or he may have read some of the tales in manuscript. Boccaccio’s Decameron was well known in mercantile circles, and Chaucer’s mission in Florence was with the Bardi bankers. In 1373 the Decameron had been circulating for twenty years. During Chaucer’s stay in Florence, Boccaccio was twenty miles away in Certaldo. If Chaucer were interested in meeting Boccaccio the Bardi bankers with whom Chaucer was working would have been able to make arrangements, given Boccaccio’s family ties to the bank. Donald Howard assumes a meeting with Boccaccio did occur and that it probably was not a success. He, in fact, speculates interestingly that the disappointment of the meeting explains Chaucer’s failure to name Boccaccio, even in a work like Troilus and Criseyde, which is heavily indebted to the Italian poet. As Howard observes, … a meeting in which Chaucer somehow felt himself demeaned, or condescended to, or disappointed – a meeting that he left with the uneasy feeling that he had met the great man at the wrong time, or had failed to put his best foot forward, perhaps a meeting in which his own embarrassment and diffidence had made him an unlikely and foolish-seeming companion – all this could explain why he admired Boccaccio’s books but ignored the man himself.30

If there was a meeting between the old Italian poet and the young Geoffrey Chaucer, the most appropriate gift to have brought with him would have been a copy of The Book of the Duchess, written in 1368, and his first important long narrative poem. If Boccaccio, who wrote in Latin and Italian and knew French, could manage Middle English, as Deschamps evidently could, he might have noticed some resemblance to his own first important poem, 28 29 30

Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., “On the Asserted Meeting of Chaucer and Petrarch,” Modern Language Notes 12 (1897): 9. Donald R. Howard, Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1987), 190. Howard, 193.

12  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

the Caccia di Diana, with its scenes of hunting and a lovestruck character. Furthermore, the occasion of the poem, Blanche’s death from the plague, would have registered on the man who wrote so powerfully about the Black Death in the opening of the Decameron. Other works that were completed and that Chaucer could have brought with him on his first journey to Italy are his The Romaunt of the Rose, his translation of part of the Roman de la Rose, and An ABC, an alphabetical prayer to the Virgin; that is, if Speght is correct about its having been written at the request of Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, for her private devotions.31 There was much literary ferment in Florence at this point in time; just a few months after Chaucer’s visit, Boccaccio was to deliver a series of lectures on Dante’s Commedia. All of Chaucer’s early works could also have been taken by the poet on his second Italian journey (May to September 1378) when he was on diplomatic business to Bernabò Visconti, lord of Milan, and to Sir John Hawkwood, one of the mercenary soldiers, or condottieri, who dominated the military scene in fourteenth-century Italy. By this time, Chaucer’s House of Fame, a work which shows the influence of Dante’s Commedia, was complete as well. Hawkwood was then in Bernabò’s service against Verona. Both Bernabò and his brother, Galeazzo II, founded great book collections. Petrarch, who resided in Milan from 1353 to 1361, encouraged the Viscontis’ interest in letters and in making the city of Milan a cultural center. Galleazzo’s collection was housed, twnty-two miles south of Milan, in his palace in Pavia. Both Visconti libraries were well known and in Bernabò’s “there may have been provision for amanuenses and copyists.”32 The death of Edward III’s son, Prince Lionel, shortly after his marriage to Galeazzo’s daughter, Violante, ten years earlier, would have given the Visconti reason to ingratiate themselves with the envoy of the English court. An inventory of 988 volumes in Galeazzo’s library made in 1426 by Filippo Maria Visconti suggests that there, and in the equally vast library of Bernabò, Chaucer could have read Petrarch’s Griselda and sonnets, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Filostrato, Filocolo, and Teseida. Besides volumes by Vergil, Seneca, St. Jerome, Ovid, and Boethius, Galeazzo’s library held the vernacular and Latin works of the fourteenth-century writers, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. In return for the favor of reading these volumes, Chaucer might have left English works of his own to be added to the “moltissimi altri autori et volumi” of Bernabò.33 In view of Chaucer’s use of the works of Boccaccio and Petrarch and Dante’s Convivio after the second journey to Italy, it appears that the lords of Milan sought to put whatever literary sources they had at his service, 31 32 33

See Speght’s second edition of Chaucer (1602). Pearsall, in his biography of Chaucer assigns An ABC to the late 1370s, however (p. 152). Robert Pratt, “Chaucer and the Visconti Libraries,” English Literary History 6 (1939): 198. Pratt, “Chaucer and the Visconti Libraries,” 197. There is no record of the holdings of Bernabo’s library. His castle burned in 1385.



Introductory Matters  13

which is to say that they were acquainted with Chaucer’s literary interests and tried to accommodate them. How better for Chaucer to acknowledge his gratitude then to leave copies of his works for the Visconti? Galeazzo, most especially, was a patron of the arts. Petrarch’s patron from 1353 to 1361, Galeazzo received visits from Petrarch summer after summer even after his departure from Milan.34

Boccaccio of Naples and Florence and Chaucer of London The ties that created resonance between Chaucer and Boccaccio make the Italian writer’s hold on the English poet’s imagination seem not only natural but almost inevitable. Although some of these ties will be recalled later in this study in discussions of particular comic works by Chaucer and Boccaccio, it is useful here to make some mention of these connections within the context of the lives and times of these two authors. Both fourteenth-century writers came from merchant backgrounds, moved easily in court circles, used Latin, French, and their vernaculars, and grew up in cities – Chaucer in London, Boccaccio in Naples and in Florence. As David Wallace observes, “The complex of Latin, French and native vernacular voices and of courtly and mercantile cultures within which the English poet grew to maturity suggests that Chaucer’s London had much in common with Boccaccio’s Naples.”35 The life of Boccaccio (1313–1375) spans most of the fourteenth century. Boccaccio is thought to have been born in Certaldo, outside of Florence, sometime between June and July 1313, or, as Vittore Branca would have it, in Tuscany, more likely Florence than Certaldo (“in terra Toscana, a Firenze più probabilmente che a Certaldo”).36 The idea that he was born to his father’s mistress in Paris and then taken to Florence has long been discounted.37 In 1327, at the age of fourteen, he moved into a Florentine merchant colony to join his father in Naples to train as an apprentice merchant. Boccaccino, his father, was a successful banker, a prior of the Signoria, the executive office of Florence, in 1322, and chief officer of the Bardi bank in Naples by 1327. Also at about the age of fourteen, Chaucer moved out of the merchant milieu he was born into to serve as a page in the home of the Countess of Ulster, wife of Lionel, one of the sons of King Edward III. Thus by 1357, the son of the London vintner, John Chaucer, left the city of London to train in the 34 35 36 37

Howard, 228. David Wallace, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 23. Vittore Branca, Giovanni Boccaccio: Profilo biografico, revised ed. (Milan: Sansoni Editore, 1997), 6. Branca, Giovanni Bocccaccio, 7.

14  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

life of service to a royal court. Later in his career he served as royal esquire to King Edward III and his heir, Richard II. While Chaucer moved into aristocratic, indeed royal, circles, at a young age, Boccaccio remained part of a mercantile world. Boccaccio, nonetheless, brushed against court circles and Chaucer eventually returned to merchant life as a civil servant. In a letter to Francisco Nelli, Boccaccio claims to have had contact with the Neapolitan courtiers from his earliest years: “From my boyhood on I was acquainted with the customs of courtiers and with their way of life.”38 Until the age of twenty-eight, Boccaccio was an aspiring literary figure who moved in the rich and sophisticated Angevin court of Naples. The Neapolitan Angevin dynasty was established in 1260 by Charles d’Anjou, who became Carlo I of Naples. Jean de Meun, who wrote the continuation of the Roman de la Rose, lived in Naples, as did many troubadour poets. In Boccaccio’s time, during the reign of King Robert the Wise of Naples (1309–1343), French continued to be a dominant cultural influence even as King Robert encouraged Latin learning. Throughout his Neapolitan period Boccaccio wrote dream visions and works such as the Filostrato, about the tragic love of Troilo and Cressida, and the Filocolo, based on the French romance Fleur et Blancheflor, in the Italian vernacular under the Angevin influence of French courtly poetry. Boccaccio eventually ceased preparing to be a merchant and began studies in canon law and Latin classics. One of his law professors in Naples was Cino da Pistoia, who had been a friend of Dante and a lyric poet – one of the last – of the dolce stil novo. Pistoia taught civil law at the Neapolitan Studio, a Dominican institution established in 1269. Other scholars from Boccaccio’s Neapolitan period also helped guide his classical learning. Paolo da Perugia, a friend who wrote a compendium of ancient myths, Collectiones, is acknowledged as the inspiration for Boccaccio’s own Latin work on the same subject, Genealogia deorum gentilium (Geneaology of the Gentile Gods). As curator of the Royal Library, Paolo provided an invaluable introduction to the library’s holdings in philosophy and mythology.39 Other important intellectual influences from Boccaccio’s Neapolitan period were the theologian and rhetorician Dionigi da Borgo San Sepolcro and the early humanists Barbato da Sulmona and Giovanni Barrili. Boccaccio returned to Florence, the city of his birth, sometime between 1340 and 1341, but his attraction to the courtly world of Angevin Naples is evident in the several attempts he made to relocate to Naples in 1355, 1362, and 1370. When Chaucer began reading Boccaccio, he must have realized how much their cultural backgrounds had in common. Both writers came as youthful merchant-class outsiders to court 38

39

Cited in English by Wallace, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio, 24, from the Latin original in Giovanni Boccaccio, Opere in versi, ed. Pier Giorgio Ricci (Milan: R. Ricciardi, 1965), 1193. Branca, Giovanni Boccaccio, 32.



Introductory Matters  15

society – the Italian in Naples, and the Englishman in London. Boccaccio knew the Florentine merchant world, but in the aristocratic court of Naples he became familiar with the courtly French culture from which that court derived. The republic of Florence to which Boccaccio returned from court-centered Neapolitan life was in disarray. The first wave of the plague had arrived in 1340. Both the Bardi and Peruzzi banks that had helped Edward III finance the wars with France were in decline after the English king failed to repay his debts. The 1339 failure of the two houses of Bardi and Peruzzi appears to have caused a reversal of fortune in the financial affairs of Boccaccio’s father, who was forced to sell family properties in order to repay personal debts. When the English monarch defaulted and left the Florentine bankers unable to collect a million florins in loan repayment, Boccaccio’s father may have lost his job. Either the Bardi bank underwent a reduction in force or Boccaccio’s father was directly involved in the bank’s ruin. In any event, around the time of Chaucer’s birth in 1340, Boccaccio left Naples and returned to Florence. For a year – from 1342 to 1343 – the libertas of the city of Florence fell to the rule of Walter of Brienne, Duke of Athens, when the city’s Signoria tried to save itself. The autocratic régime of Walter of Brienne had been supported by the bankers’ faction and by Pope Clement VI. But when the régime was overthrown by a coup in 1343, it was led by Bishop Angelo Acciaiuoli; thus, the democratic order which was subsequently established continued to feel ecclesiastical pressure. Boccaccio played a part in the religious dimension of contemporary politics. In 1354, 1365, and 1367, he made journeys to Avignon and Rome as Florentine ambassador to two popes. During the Babylonian Captivity of the Popes, the residence of the Pope in Avignon since 1309 was for Italians the scandal of the fourteenth century. Boccaccio undertook these Florentine embassies to urge the Popes to return to Rome. He also played a part in more secular Florentine political life; “when Florence went to war with the Visconti in 1351,” Boccaccio represented Florence on several diplomatic missions.40 Fourteenth-century London was a merchant city, a bourgeois world such as Chaucer pictures in the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales. People grew up speaking English as their native language, but anyone with social or intellectual pretensions had to know French. Chaucer’s early lyric poems follow French models. University of Pennsylvania MS French 15 includes fifteen lyrics in French by “Ch” which could be the only extant French poems by Chaucer.41 Chaucer’s earliest effort as a courtly love poet was his translation of part of the Roman de la Rose. His first important long narrative poem, The Book of the Duchess, follows French models (i.e., Machaut’s Dit de la 40 41

David Wallace, Giovanni Boccaccio: Decameron (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 11. The poems by “Ch” were discovered by James I. Wimsatt in the 1970s. See Howard, 134 n.

16  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

Fonteinne Amoureuse; Froissart’s Paradis d’Amour). Jean Froissart was clerc de la chamber, in the household of Queen Philippa, from 1360 to 1367.42 It is highly likely, therefore, that Froissart and Chaucer were well acquainted. As for Chaucer’s Latin, his reading was done in miscellanies such as Bodleian Library MS Auct. F. 1. 17, containing extracts from “Virgil, Ovid, Prudentius, Alan of Lille … Matthew of Vendôme.”43 He sometimes used French translations of Latin works to ease his efforts with the original Latin texts. His reading of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is mostly from the Ovid Moralisé. Chaucer, in short, was not the classicist that Boccaccio was. Even so, as a page in a royal household the young Chaucer would have received an education at court comparable to that given to the children of aristocrats. At court he was tutored by a chaplain or clerk and read enough Latin to sustain his ability to read Latin works throughout his life and to translate Boethius’s Latin Consolation of Philosophy into Middle English as the Boece. He never, however, wrote in Latin as Boccaccio did. Besides extending his knowledge of Latin literature, education at court would have made him familiar with French romances and love allegories. It is not likely that Chaucer went on to a legal education at the Inns of Court as some scholars (i.e., Manly and Rickert) suggest.44 After his Italian journeys of 1372–73 and 1378, his poetry changed as he fell under the influence of Italian poets. As Michael West observes, “That Chaucer’s poetics borrowed heavily from Boccaccio and Petrarch in the period following his trips to Italy is a critical commonplace.”45 His travels to Italy on diplomatic missions would have afforded the poet the opportunity to read, listen to, and have copies made of works by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio and, perhaps, to make gifts of his own work, particularly if meetings had been arranged to meet with Petrarch and/or Boccaccio and if Chaucer had been given access to the great collections of the Visconti libraries. Chaucer probably began learning Italian from his early years in the Vintry, as many Italian wine merchants traded and even lived there around Thames Street and Royal Street. The London home on Thames Street in which Chaucer grew up was substantial and located in the ward of the city where wine merchants conducted business. Chaucer’s father, John Chaucer, vintner, was a prominent member of the London merchant community. In 1347 he was appointed deputy in the port of Southampton to John de Wesenham who was in charge of the royal wine cellar.46 In 1364, John Chaucer stood surety (“vouched”) together with other prominent Londoners that Richard Lyon, a wealthy vintner, would do no harm to Alice Perrers, Edward III’s 42 43 44 45 46

Pearsall, The Pearsall, The Pearsall, The Wyatt, 18. Pearsall, The

Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, 68. Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, 32. Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, 34. Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, 14.



Introductory Matters  17

mistress. The document, dated December 9, 1364, guaranteed that “Alice Perrers would be safe from any danger and might go where she pleased and do the king’s business or her own.”47 Chaucer’s father was probably chosen to stand surety because he came from an old family whose wealth went back for several generations. He was well connected and able to smoothe his son’s way to the advantages associated with aristocratic households. In that way John Chaucer was like Boccaccio’s father who, well acquainted with King Robert and all the leaders of the Kingdom of Naples, was able to introduce his son to the world of the court. When Chaucer went to Florence in 1373 to deal with the Bardi, King Edward III’s default was thirty years in the past and the bank had recovered from bankruptcy. London and Florence were connected by the wool trade: England exported wool to Florence and the weavers of Florence bought it and then exported their fabric to London. On June 8, 1374, Chaucer was appointed Controller of the Wool Customs and given the Gatehouse above Aldgate in which to live, a ten minute walk from work. When the rebels of the Peasants Revolt stormed the city of London in 1381, they entered the city through Aldgate over which Chaucer had his apartment. He is believed to have been in London at the time and, therefore, an eyewitness to the events.48 Three years before England’s Peasants Revolt of 1381, the wool-workers of Florence revolted and brought down the Florentine government’s establishment in the interest of saving the republic from a fall into despotism, the sort that typified Visconti rule in Lombardy and that Chaucer refers to in the Monk’s Tale in the sketch of “Barnabo de Lumbardia” whom he calls the “scourge of Lumbardye” (VII, 2399, 2401). There were two great Florentine wool guilds – the Arte di Calimala and the Arte di Lana – and they controlled all the wealth and political power of Florence’s wool trade. They even limited the trade conducted by the adjunct businesses of “dyers, clippers, stretchers, and dressers.”49 The fourteenth century was a period of upheaval throughout western Europe. Italy, in particular, was a stage on which major conflicts of the waning Middle Ages were played: conflicts between feudalism and mercantilism, aristocracy and bourgeoisie, Church and State. Boccaccio’s Neapolitan period took him to the south of Italy where the Kingdom of Naples’ strong aristocracy ruled over an impoverished land peopled by a small middle class and an oppressed peasantry. The Naples of Boccaccio’s youth may have been a strong center for Florentine bankers and merchants, but the cultural enlightenment of the court of King Robert the Wise of Naples did not extend beyond Naples and hardly touched this mercantile colony, though the king was a generous patron 47 48 49

Howard, 8. Howard, 210. Thomas Caldecot Chubb, The Life of Giovanni Boccaccio (Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1969), 24.

18  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

of the arts. Florence, by contrast, where Boccaccio spent early childhood and most of his adult life, owed its wealth to the cloth trade and was dominated by a wealthy middle class of merchants and bankers. The need to draw up contracts led to the growth of law and the work of notaries, some of whom were accomplished poets in Italian and helped set the stage for the flourishing of Italian literature. The dominance of the upper middle class in Florence promoted greater secularization in literature and art. Representations of religious subjects became more realistic and less symbolic. Narration became more important than allegory. In Decameron 5, 5 Boccaccio praises Giotto for what he considers significant in his art – his ability to create an object that appeared to be the thing itself, not a mere likeness. Boccaccio’s preeminent work is the Decameron, and in it narration is all and exists for its own sake, capturing the realities of earthly life. Although Boccaccio bemoaned the six or so years he spent studying canon law in Naples, his experience in the ars dictandi may have contributed to the shaping of his prose style. Boccaccio’s Florence was the Florence of wool merchants, money lenders and workingmen. A ruling class based on commercial achievement had displaced an old ruling class based on blood. Power was no longer in the hands of descendants of patricians like Dante, a Ghibelline exile. Illustrious men of the new era could trace their lineage to places in the agrarian countryside like Boccaccio’s hometown of Certaldo. The non-aristocratic origin of Boccaccio’s birth was rendered more base by his illegitimacy, born as he was of a love affair that his father had while conducting business in Paris. Boccaccio may allude to this in the Ameto, where a character named Ibrida describes his mother as a widow whose home is by the waters of the Seine. The worldly city of Florence in Boccaccio’s day bustled with the commercial energy of the London of a half-century later which Chaucer lived in and captured in the narrative of the Canterbury Tales. Merchandise from Florence was exported as far as Iceland, the Orkney Islands, and China, and her gold florins flowed into North Africa and Syria. More and more new shops were opening within the city itself. In 1338 the Arte di Lana ran two hundred wool shops which produced 80,000 pieces of cloth worth 1, 200,000 florins.50 That same year the Arte di Calimala maintained twenty shops which imported 10,000 pieces of cloth worth 300,000 florins.51 Of the 100,000 people who lived in the city of Florence, 30,000 were employed by the Arte di Lana. It was the wool guilds together with the Silk Guild and the Bankers’ Guild that fueled the growing prosperity of Florence. The wealthy merchants and their employers were served by 300 shoemakers, 146 wool and stone workers, doctors, lawyers, apothecaries, and other tradesman and professionals who labored to meet the needs of the well-off. By 1318 Giovanni Boccaccio’s

50 51

Chubb, 25. Chubb, 24–25.



Introductory Matters  19

father was one of these. He entered into a successful business partnership with Simone Orlandini and Cante and Jacopo di Ammanati. His rapid success is indicated by various offices he held in 1322, 1324, and 1326, among them a consulship of the Bankers’ Guild and membership in the Signoria. When the House of Bardi, a giant of international banking, sent Boccaccio’s father to the southern city of Naples in 1327 to be their Neapolitan representative, he was in his forties and a great commercial success. Under the French house of Anjou, Naples was a glittering capital. When Robert the Wise was crowned, the dynasty had ruled for fifty years. Robert’s grandfather, Charles I, had been a count of Provence who was handpicked by the Pope to replace the existing royal line which displeased the Papacy. King Robert’s father, Charles II, rebuilt the Duomo, saw the churches of San Lorenzo and Santa Chiara rise up, founded a university, and saw French barons establishing palaces above the main town in Forcera and in Nido and Capuana. The Provençal origin of the French dynasty which ruled Naples accounts for the tournaments and jousting that were held at Carbonera, Castello, Capuana, and Correge in the spirit of the troubadours. King Robert “equitavit ad justras” six times in 1337.52 These spectacles are described by Boccaccio in his Elegia di Madonna Fiammeta. Young Giovanni’s early years in Naples began in a different world, however. Florentine businessmen occupied a quarter of the city nearby the sea beside the Porta Nuova. Charles II had given the House of Bardi one of the exchanges in the Ruga Cambinorum near the Pietro del Pesce in the same quarter of Naples. Both Boccaccio and Chaucer grew up and operated in vibrant, influential and varied cultures. Living and writing in the same century, these two comic geniuses shared more than similarities of biography, they shared a comic tradition reaching back into antiquity. That is the subject of the chapter that follows.

52

Chubb, 41.

2 The Comic Inheritance of Boccaccio and Chaucer

T

hat we still read the comic tales of Boccaccio’s Decameron and ­Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and have lost or forgotten those of many other medieval writers is partly an accident of history but mostly a testament to the art of the two fourteenth-century authors, one, the foremost spokesman of humanism that appeared in late medieval – or, as Italian scholars prefer, early Renaissance – Italy and the other, a poet who gave his name to a golden period in early English literature, the Age of Chaucer. Boccaccio’s comic novellas and Chaucer’s fabliaux recreate and make us laugh at the sights, sounds, smells, and, most of all, the voices of fourteenth-century European country and town life. Their tales contain no heroes, just characters whom we recognize as ourselves – no better, possibly worse. When we read the comic tales of each of these writers we “surrender to lower faculties” for a time and forget the “serious affairs of life.”1 Although the distinctive individual talents of Boccaccio and Chaucer are what keep their tales alive while those of other medieval writers are long forgotten, their comic narratives are, nonetheless, part of a continuum that reaches back into the comic spirit of antiquity. This chapter will explore ideas about comedy and comic works that would have been available to both fourteenth-century writers. The texts that I cite in this chapter arose at different times in response to different social, cultural, and aesthetic pressures; some of them were far better known than others, some were hardly known at all. Nearly all of the texts concerning comedy are pertinent to the comic tales of the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales and taken together form a matrix of inherited ideas about the genre. Trying to understand the comic impulse of Boccaccio and Chaucer, especially in literary historical terms, is a daunting enterprise. One needs to consider the relationship of their comic tales to the vernacular literature of their day, the influence of Boccaccio’s novellas on Chaucer’s English fabliaux, and the connection their comic tales have to the body of comic literature 1

Paul G. Ruggiers, “A Vocabulary for Chaucerian Comedy: A Preliminary Sketch,” in Medieval Studies in Honor of Lillian Herlands Hornstein, ed. Robert Raymo and Jess Bessinger (New York; New York University Press, 1976), 208.



The Comic Inheritance  21

that is anterior – not just the late twelfth- and thirteenth-century Old French fabliaux, but the classical inheritance as well. That descends from Aristotle’s theory of comedy, through the Roman plays of Plautus and Terence, to the late classical grammarians, and on through twelfth-century Latin elegiac comedy and observations on the comic mode by such secular medieval writers as Dante and John of Garland. Efforts have been made to study Elizabethan dramatic comedy within the context of the European comic tradition, but little has been done along these lines for the non-dramatic comedy of Boccaccio and Chaucer.2 In fact, there has been little direct study of the comic in either writer and only recently has there been an effort to acknowledge the influence of the Decameron on the Canterbury Tales, tale collections which contain most of the comic work of Boccaccio and Chaucer respectively (although many narratives in each of the collections are “serious”).3

Aristotle’s Theory of Comedy The views of antiquity on the subject of comedy were handed down to the Middle Ages by the grammarians of the late classical period. They drew largely on ideas Aristotle expressed in his Poetics and in his Nicomachean Ethics and Rhetoric, some of which entered into the Hellenistic period after being synthesized by Theophrastus, Aristotle’s pupil and popularizer, and Menander, whose first play was performed in 321 BC, the year after Aristotle’s death. Aristotle’s definition of comedy appears in the Poetics: As for Comedy, it is (as has been observed) an imitation of men worse than average; worse, however, not as regards any and every sort of fault, but only as regards one particular kind, the Ridiculous, which is a species of the Ugly. The Ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not

2

3

For the Elizabethans, see Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), Marvin T. Herrick, Comic Theory in the Sixteenth Century (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1964), and Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Comedy – The Influence of Plautus and Terence (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1994). For the Middle Ages, especially Chaucer, see Versions of Medieval Comedy, ed. Paul G. Ruggiers (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977), Ruggiers, “A Vocabulary,” 193–225, and Kathleen A. Bishop, “The Influence of Plautus and Latin Elegiac Comedy on Chaucer’s Fabliaux,” The Chaucer Review 35.3 (2001): 294–317. The early texts on Chaucerian comedy are T. W. Craik’s The Comic Tales of Chaucer (London, England: Methuen & Co.: 1964) and Helen Storm Corsa’s Chaucer: Poet of Mirth and Morality (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1964). More recently a collection of essays has been edited by Jean E. Jost, Chaucer’s Humor: Critical Essays (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994). An influential statement of the influence of the Decameron on Chaucer’s Tales is Helen Cooper, “Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: Reviewing the Work,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 19 (1997), 183–210.

22  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio productive of pain or harm to others; the mask, for instance, that excites laughter, is something ugly and distorted without causing pain. (Poetics, 5.49a 32–34)4

Pietro Valla, in a 1499 commentary on Plautus, makes the first known use of Aristotle’s definition of the comic: Aristotle says that comedy is an imitation of the worse sort, not as regards every vice but rather the ridiculous part of ugliness. For the ridiculous is a certain fault and ugliness devoid of pain, as a ridiculous face is ugly without being painful.5

Although the Greek text of Aristotle’s Poetics must have been copied during the classical and Byzantine periods, the version of the Poetics that influenced the Middle Ages was Arabic, not Greek.6 The Aristotelian notion of the comedic quality of the ridiculous was probably well known before Valla cited it in the fifteenth century, since Aristotle’s idea was summarized by the Arabic philosopher Averroes (1126–1198), the great commentator on all the major works of Aristotle: In arte vituperandi non quaeritur imitatio secundum omne genus vitii et turpis tantum, sed eius vitii omnis, quod ridiculum est: nempe quod quidem vile est ac turpe, de quo dolendum non est.7 [The target of ridicule is not every kind of base and contemptible behavior but the ridiculous kind, namely that which is base and contemptible but not painful.]

4

5

6

7

Aristotle, Aristotle on the art of poetry, a revised text with critical introduction, translation, and commentary by Ingram Bywater (Oxford, 1909). All subsequent references to the Poetics cite this edition. Related to the ridiculous in comedy were three basic comic character types – the braggart or impostor (alazon), the ironical person (eiron), and the buffoon (bomolochos) – which Aristotle sketched in his Nicomachean Ethics and Rhetoric. These appear as the stock characters of Greek New Comedy. Quoted and translated by Herrick, 8, from Plautinae uigenti comediae emendatissimae cum accuratissima ac luculentissima interpretatione doctissimorum uirorum Petri Vallae placentim ac Bernardi saraceni Veneti (Venice, 1499), Aiir. Richard Janko has argued that the Tractatus Coislinianus, a medieval Greek manuscript of the tenth century (No. 120 in the De Coislin collection in Paris) is a summary of the lost second book of the Poetics which treats comedy. See Aristotle, Poetics I with the “Tractatus Coislinianus,”A Hypothetical Reconstruction of “Poetics II,” and the Fragments of the “On Poets,” translated by Richard Janko (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987). Averroes, Averrois paraphrases in librum poeticae Aristotelis Iacob Mantino hispano hebraeo medico interprete. Ex libro qui Venetiis apud Iunctas anno MDLXII prodiit, ed. Fridericus Heidenhain, in Jahrbücher für classiche Philology, Supplementband 17 (1890): 351–82.



The Comic Inheritance  23

Although Chaucer names Averroes in the Physician pilgrim’s portrait in the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales (I, 433), it would be difficult to prove that Chaucer had access to Aristotle’s linking of the comic to the ridiculous; nonetheless, we do know that Hermannus Alemannus, a monk who lived in Toledo, translated Averroes’ Arabic commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics into Latin by 1256 and that twenty-three manuscripts of this translation survive. His translation, the most important aesthetic statement of the scholastic period, was important enough to be printed in 1481. References to Averroes’ commentary on the Poetics appear soon after its translation into Latin. Roger Bacon (1214?–1294), the English scientist and philosopher, referred to the translation by “master Hermannus,” and Benvenuto da Imola, one of the fourteenth-century commentators on Dante, made extensive use of Hermannus’s translation of Averroes’ “Arabic Poetics.”8 Related to Aristotle’s association of comedy with the ridiculous is the idea expressed in Poetics, 4, that comedies represent the art of blaming, ars vituperandi, and are written in lampooning verses. This view of Aristototle’s Averroes seems to have taken to mean satire, a type of comedy that he would have found consistent with some early Arab poetry which is full of invective; the idea can be seen as possibly applicable to Chaucer’s satiric portraits of the Prioress, Monk, Friar, and Wife of Bath which appear in the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales (provided one allowed for blaming and lampooning that remained sufficiently genial). Apart from Aristotle’s definition of comedy, the Poetics (3–4) offers his views on the origins of comedy in the Greek world. Aristotle understands comedy to be a form that developed from the religious festival procession (komos) ending in a phallic song; such songs evolved into indecent jests and observations on the social scene. As for the etymology of the word “comedy,” he offers two etymologies both of which support his views about the social status of the characters who appear in comedies as opposed to those found in tragedies. According to the first derivation of the word, “comedy” comes from kome, the Megarian word for “village” (Megarian referring to the Dorian people who invaded Greece in 1100 BC and remained linguistically and culturally distinct within the Greek world, especially in Sicily, Sparta, and Corinth). Thus, “comedy” is understood to be an oide (song) about villagers. Cheek by jowl with this etymology, Aristotle offers another from the verb “to revel” (komazein). That comedy, according to Doric tradition, should be a song about villagers Aristotle explains by pointing to the komoidoi (“comedians”) as having been loud revelers who headed out to the countryside after being kicked out of the city precincts because of their loud singing. Either derivation is possible, and each harmonizes with the notion

8

Medieval Literary Criticism: Translations and Interpretation, ed. O. B. Hardison, Jr., Alex Preminger, Kevin Kerrane, Leon Golden (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1974), 86.

24  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

that the characters of comedy are of lower social status than those of tragedy, who are always noble and often heroes out of history. Chaucer’s high-spirited country girl, Alisoun, a veritable force of nature who appears in the Miller’s Tale, could only be linked by marriage to a tradesman like the old carpenter, John, never to a lord: “she was a prymerole, a piggesnye,/ For any lord to leggen in his bedde,/ Or yet for any good yemen to wedde” (I, 3268–70).9 Her tale is told by the churlish miller who leads the procession of Canterbury pilgrims out of town with his loud bagpipes. The countryside, the world of kome, is a place of greater freedom than the city. Chaucer’s comic tale set in the city – the Cook’s Tale – is left an unfinished fragment and provokes speculations as to why. Did Chaucer die before he could finish it? Perhaps, the city setting was less suited to komos than the country. Aristotle makes the distinction between the characters proper to tragedy and comedy in Poetics, 2.48a 17–18: This difference it is that distinguishes Tragedy and Comedy also; the one would make its personages worse, and the other better, than the present day.

This statement reiterates the distinction between the social status of the personages who appear in comedy and tragedy included in his definition of comedy (Poetics, 5.49a 32–34; see above). Besides being about the lowly rather than the noble, Aristotle observed that the characters of comedy are invented, not real, an idea that Boccaccio expresses in his Esposizioni, as we shall see later in this chapter, when he states that comedy is about events that never chanced to happen, but could have – an interesting variant of Aristotle’s dictum that comic characters are invented. “In comedy,” Aristotle comments, authors proceed differently from those producing tragedy: This has become clear by this time: it is only when their plot is already made up of probable incidents that they give it a basis of proper names, choosing for the purpose any names that may occur to them, instead of writing like the old iambic poets about particular persons. (Poetics, 9.51b 11ff.)

Furthermore, Aristotle commended for comedy a happy ending such as is found in the Odyssey. The happy ending “belongs rather to Comedy, where the bitterest enemies in the piece (e.g., Orestes and Aegisthus) walk off good friends at the end, with no slaying of any one by any one” (Poetics, 13.53b 36–39). For Aristotle, Homer is the father of both comedy and tragedy:

9

Chaucer’s works are cited from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). All subsequent citations to Chaucer refer to this edition.



The Comic Inheritance  25

Homer’s position, however, is peculiar: just as he was in the serious style the poet of poets, standing alone not only through the literary excellence, but also through the dramatic character of his imitations, so too he was the first to outline for us the general forms of Comedy by producing not a dramatic invective, but a dramatic picture of the ridiculous; his Margites in fact stands in the same relation to our comedies as the Iliad and Odyssey to our tragedies. (Poetics, 4.48b 34–49a 2)

The Comedy of Antiquity Although the performance of classical stage drama essentially disappeared during the Middle Ages, knowledge of the drama of antiquity persisted. In England there are references to theaters in the twelfth century like that found in an anonymous Anglo-Norman commentary on the Psalms (c. 1165): Ci reprent il ceals ki les theatres soloient hanter por les gius et por les mervelles veoir, que um i faisoit les encantemenz et de la glise ne del servise deu ne prenderoient il guarde, et ne pourquant de plus beles ­miracles et de plus hautes aventures poent il la oir lire et canter quil ne verront el theatre, na la carole ne a behurc.10 [Here he blames those in the habit of attending theatres to see plays and marvels, for there they make magic and pay no attention to the church or the service of God, although they can hear there the reading and singing of finer miracles and greater adventures than they will see in the theatre, or in the round-dance, or at a tournament.]

Notwithstanding such references to theaters, historians are generally inclined to discount the claim that there were theaters in twelfth-century England. Medieval texts, however, of the Greek comedies of Aristophanes have been found in Europe, most notably a manuscript dating from the eleventh century written in Ravenna which alone of all manuscripts of Aristophanes’ plays contains the entire eleven plays.11 By the thirteenth century there were 170 manuscripts of Aristophanes in the Latin west, the most numerous of which were of his Plutus. The Roman comic playwright Terence was a favorite school author and well known throughout the Middle Ages.12 The Terentian characteristics of the tenth-century biblical plays of Hroswitha of Gandersheim make this clear. O. B. Hardison, Jr., believes that “beginning in the 10

11 12

Cited and translated by Keith Bate, “Twelfth-Century Latin Comedies and the Theatre” in Papers of the Liverpool Latin Seminar, ed. Francis Cairns (Liverpool, England: Francis Cairns, 1979), 252. Louis E. Lord, Aristophanes: His Plays and Influence (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1925), 103–04. Doran, 13.

26  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

fourteenth century classical drama began to be read and imitated.”13 At that time (considered the high Middle Ages in England but the early Renaissance in Italy) it was becoming possible to go to the texts that were the actual sources of the information contained in such encyclopedias and floralegia as Isidore of Seville’s seventh-century Encyclopedia and Vincent of Beauvais’ thirteenth-century Speculum Morale. The comic plays of Terence (and Plautus as well) contained intrigue plots with the manipulations of a character (or characters) shaping the action. In Plautus’s Casina, a husband and wife plot against each other; in his Epidicus, the intriguer is a wily slave. Madeleine Doran points out about the intrigue plots of Roman comedy that those of Terence tend to be double plots: “Terence built some of his plays by ‘contaminating’ one plot with another.”14 Marvin Herrick notes that in the Prologue to Terence’s Self-Tormentor he speaks of having turned the two single plots of his Greek sources into a duplex argumentum, generally taken to refer to “two closely related actions involving two sets of characters.”15 Both Doran and Herrick are concerned with the likely influence the complicated plots of Roman comedy had on English Renaissance drama, but quite possibly the comic Roman plots of intrigue together with Terence’s penchant for double plots also had an influence on the much admired double plot of Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale, the fabliau wherein the lover-intriguer’s (that is, Nicholas’s) plotting to get the old husband (John) out of the way with the preposterous story of the coming flood in order to make love to his young wife (Alisoun) intersects with the counter-plotting of the insulted, unsuccessful lover-intriguer (Absolon) and his attempt to gain revenge for humiliation. As far as I know, the possible influence of Terence has gone unnoticed in discussions of the Miller’s Tale’s double plot – Chaucer, to be sure, could have imported the technique of doubling (if he imported the technique at all) from romance where many plot lines are complexly interlaced. In his eminently readable study, Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus, Erich Segal asserts that “Laughter is an affirmation of shared values. It is … a social gesture. Comedy always needs a context …”16 Plautus, he argues, gets his laughs by “Momentarily breaking … society’s rules.”17 Thus, in the face of Roman pietas, which included loyalty owed family, many Plautine comedies dealing with family life breach the responsibilities due it, as in a scene from Plautus’s play, Trinummus, wherein the man of the house leaves home after straightforwardly instructing his wife to worship their house13 14 15 16 17

Medieval Literary Criticism, ed. Hardison, 39. Doran, 154. Herrick, 112. Erich Segal, Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1968), vii. Segal, 9.



The Comic Inheritance  27

hold god – “Be sure a wreath adorns our household God, dear wife” – but concludes his pious instructions with a “wish-she-were-dead joke” delivered as an aside to the audience: “And may I see you dead as soon as possible.”18 The spartan, puritanical atmosphere of the Rome of Plautus’s day is to some degree matched by the constraints placed on fourteenth-century medieval life in Italy and England by the Church; indeed, Chaucerian comedy and that of Boccaccio often enough elicit laughter through limited license. There is a moment in the Miller’s Tale, for instance, where Chaucer playfully juxtaposes obscene and sacred actions to comic effect in his description of the union with Alisoun, the carpenter’s wife, for which Nicholas has schemed so long: Withouten wordes mo they goon to bedde, Ther as the carpenter is wont to lye. Ther was the revel and the melodye; And thus lith Alison and Nicholas, In bisynesse of myrthe and of solas, Til that the belle of laudes gan to rynge, And freres in the chauncel goone synge.  (I, 3650–56)

The contrast between the friars in church singing their hymns of praise to God on waking at dawn and Nicholas and Alisoun concluding their night’s labors in the carpenter’s bed calls attention to the existence of a world the lovers ignore. Kathleen Bishops’s concerns about the influence of Plautus on Chaucer’s fabliaux center on “shared thematic features” and “the continuing presence of Roman comic stock figures” (i.e., the amans senex [old lover] and servus callidus [wily slave]).19 In studying Chaucer’s fabliaux against the background of the Roman comedies of Plautus and medieval Latin elegiac comedy, Bishop observes, “when considering the Old French and Chaucerian fabliaux in juxtaposition, it becomes clear that … the written Latin material that Chaucer knew so well, both directly and indirectly, is vitally, inextricably, and undeniably linked to his comic poems.”20 The earliest scholar to call attention to the relationship of Old French fabliaux to classical drama and medieval elegiac comedy was Edmond Faral.21 His observations were, for the most part, dismissed by the scholars of his day.

18 19 20 21

Segal, 26. Bishop, “The Influence of Plautus and Latin Elegiac Comedy,” 2. Bishop, 1. Edmond Faral, “Le Fabliau latin au moyen âge,” Romania 50 (1924): 321–85.

28  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

The Latin Grammarians The grammarians of the late classical period (i.e., Diomedes, Evanthius, Donatus) were important transmitters of ancient thinking about drama to the Hellenistic and Imperial periods as well as to the Middle Ages. The essays on ancient drama by Diomedes, Evanthius, and Donatus were the principal conduits by which ideas about the drama of antiquity reached the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Diomedes concerned himself with tragedy; Evanthius and Donatus, with comedy. The fourth-century grammarian and commentator on the plays of Terence, Donatus, made the thinking of antiquity on comedy well known to the fifteenth century.22 According to Evanthius’s De Fabula, Roman playwrights added new types of plays to Greek New Comedy, among them plays from Campania, emphasizing debate (atellanae), representations of bawdy characters and subject matter (mimi), and plays having humble plots and plain style (tabernariae).23 Evanthius also classified the various types of Terence’s comedies into three categories: (1) motoriae (lively), (2) statariae (quiet), and (3) mixed (both lively and quiet).24 Basing his observations on the plays of Terence, Evanthius said comedies contained four parts: the prologue, protasis, epitasis, and catastrophe (which works itself out into a happy conclusion).25 Donatus’s essay, De Comoedia, contained definitions of comedy from both the Greek and the Latin; from the Greek is the definition of Diomedes, “Comoedia est fabula diuersa instituta continens affectum ciuilium ac pruiatorum, quibus discitur, quid sit in uita utile, quid contra euitandum” [“Comedy is a treatment of private and civil station that is without danger to life”], and from the Latin, that attributed to Cicero, who defined comedy as “imitationem vitae, speculum consuetudinis, imaginem ueritatis” [“the imitation of life, the mirror of custom, the image of truth.”]26 By the time of the Renaissance, the most common view on comedy was the one attributed to Cicero that appeared in the essay assumed to be written by the fourth-century grammarian.27 The essays by Evanthius and Donatus provided, either directly or indirectly, most of the historical information and definitions of comedy incorpo22 23

24 25 26 27

Herrick, 1. See Terence, Comediae, ed. Nicolaus Camus. London, 1718. This edition contains prolegomena by Donatus and Evanthius, among others. See the new Italian-Latin edition: Evanzio, De fabula/Evanzio; introduzione, testo critico, traduzione e nota di commento a cura di Giovanni Cupaiuolo in Studi latini, 7 (Napoli, 1992),171. Evanzio, 172. Evanzio, 173. See the basic modern text for Donatus, Aeli Donati commentum Terenti, accedunt Eugraphi commentum et Scholia Bembina. Recensuit Paulus Wessner, 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1962), 1: 22. Donatus’s essay appears in Calphurnus’s edition of Terence (Venice, 1476, and Treviso, 1477) and in most subsequent editions of Terence’s comedies.



The Comic Inheritance  29

rated into the medieval tradition. Donatus emphasized the difference between the social ranks found in comedies as opposed to tragedies; comic characters, he observed, “in uicis habitant ob mediocritatem fortunarum, non in aulis regiis, ut sunt personae tragicae” [“live in villages because of moderate circumstances, not in royal palaces as do tragic personages”].28 Even though Donatus had nothing to say about the laughable in his essay on comedy, he did comment on specific examples in Terence. For example, about Eunuch, 4.7.775, an episode in which a braggart soldier assembles household retainers – cooks armed with pots and pans – to storm another household and abduct a girl named Pamphilia, Donatus comments, “facetum autem est, cum a rebus magnis res ridiculae deriuantur” [“It is humorous, moreover, since ridiculous matters are derived from great matters”].29 Paul Ruggiers observed of the Hellenistic inheritance: Such a complex of Hellenistic ideas, reaching back into a classical antiquity long past and often little or totally unknown at first hand, survived in one form or another as formulae in various writers of the Middle Ages, to surface again with renewed vigor and enlarged commentary in the comic theory of the Italian Renaissance.30

Between the Fall of Rome and the dawn of the Renaissance, narrative prose and verse of the Middle Ages attached to themselves a sense of being either serious or not, tragic or comic. Thus, when Chaucer takes leave of his long narrative poem, Troilus and Criseyde, he refers to it as “myn tragedye” (V, 1786); Dante calls his long poem of pilgrimage a commedia.

Twelfth-Century Latin Elegiac Comedy Latin elegiac comedy provides a link between Roman comedy and fabliaux – both Old French and Chaucer’s English fabliaux. These non-dramatic narratives were written in France during the twelfth century in Ovidian elegiac verse, smooth hexameter couplets that were an all-purpose meter which had no relation to laments; Ovid’s about Corinna are concerned with love. Speaking of the Latin elegiac comedy, Babio, Malcolm Brennan comments that it reminds “us of the exciting manipulations of situations by the quick-witted rogues of Roman comedy or of the later fabliaux and comic interludes.”31 Babio is one of about twenty extant Latin elegiac comedies. Fifteen were published in 1931 by Gustave Cohen who rejected the earlier description of them by 28 29 30 31

Donatus, ed. Wessner, 1: 23. Donatus, ed. Wessner, 1: 435. Ruggiers, introductory essay in Versions of Medieval Comedy, 7. Malcolm M. Brennan, Babio: A Twelfth-Century Profane Comedy, Citadel Monograph Series 7 (Charleston: The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, 1968), 34.

30  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

Faral as “Latin fabliaux” in favor of “elegiac comedies.”32 Cohen and his own collaborators did not agree about their form: in his Preface, Cohen refers to them as plays; in the introduction to each of the individual texts, his collaborators state that the elegiac comedies are not plays. That Faral was on the side of Cohen’s team of collaborators is clearly represented by his term for Latin elegiac comedies, “Latin fabliaux.” Their position took hold. F. J. E. Raby’s Secular Latin Poetry places medieval Latin comedies under the heading “The Comedia or Versified Tale.”33 Many of the narratives written in Latin elegiac verse, like Lidia and Babio, contain a fair amount of dialogue. The presence of some dialogue notwithstanding, the term “comedy” is appropriate only in the sense that “comedy” in the Middle Ages referred to humorous narratives written in a plain style, not to a play. Some Latin elegiac comedies are directly indebted to classical drama: the source of Vital de Blois’s Geta is a late Latin adaptation of Plautus’s Amphitryo and that of Alda by Guillaume de Blois is claimed by its author to be a Latin translation of a Greek play of Menander. It is possible that those of the Latin elegiac comedies containing dialogue could have been performed – complete with gestures and differentiations of voices – as dramatic readings before academic audiences, very likely those of the schools of the Loire valley (at Orléans, Blois, and Vendôme). The difficulty of the Latin and high level of rhetorical wordplay in these comic narratives indicate that they are the production of well-educated clerics. The fascination with punning, for example, is especially apparent in the triple pun (a polyptoton) in Lidia, 453–54: “Accedit Pirrumque suis furatur ocellis,/ Et quo iam rapitur sidere rapta rapit.”34 Anyone who has read the ninth tale told on the seventh day of the Decameron along with Matthew of Vendôme’s Comedia Lidie will recognize that the twelfth-century Latin work written in France is Boccaccio’s source. The story of Lidia, passionately in love with her husband’s retainer, Pirro, who refuses to make love to her until she accomplishes three difficult tasks – to which she adds her daring invention of a fourth (making love before her husband’s eyes and convincing him that he did not see what he saw) – follows the version of the tale by the French doctor grammaticus very closely. The plot is identical and even the names of two of the three main characters are retained: Lidia and Pirus are Italianized to Lidia and Pirro; Decius, the husband, becomes Nicostrato. There is, in fact, credible evidence indicating that one of the two extant manuscripts of the Comedia Lidie – Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Pluteus 33.31, 71v–73v – is written in Boccaccio’s own 32 33 34

La Comédie latine en France au XIIe siècle, ed. Gustave Cohen, 2 vols. (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1931). F. J. E. Raby, Secular Latin Poetry, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), II: 54. “She comes and steals Pirrus with her eyes, and with the star by which she is taken, the taken woman takes[him].” The Latin text of Lidia appears in La Comédie latine en France, 1: 226–46.



The Comic Inheritance  31

hand, so that the Italian author must have known the text as intimately as a scribe naturally would.35 The relationship between Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale and Matthew of Vendôme’s Comedia Lydie has, however, never been thought to amount to more than the fact that the concluding pear tree scenes are analogues of one another.36 As for possible links between the English tale and Decameron 7, 9, they are equivocal.37 Chaucer, however, may have been more influenced by Matthew of Vendôme’s Comedia Lidie than we have thus far realized. There are at least three other likely ties between the Merchant’s Tale and the Comedia Lidie besides the pear tree episode which seem to indicate that Chaucer may have had first-hand knowledge of Vendôme’s text. These will be explored fully in the chapter which follows.

Medieval Thinking on the Comic Mode Derek Pearsall interestingly speculates that the source of Umberto Eco’s murder plot, whereby the Church attempts to keep the survival of Aristotle’s manuscript on comedy a secret in The Name of the Rose, is a passage on the nature of laughter – specifically, its anti-authoritarian nature – found in Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World: True ambivalent and universal laughter does not deny seriousness but purifies and completes it. Laughter purifies from dogmatism, from the intolerant and the petrified; it liberates from fanaticism and pedantry, from fear and intimidation, from didacticism, naiveté and illusion, from the single meaning, the single level, from sentimentality.38

35

36

37 38

I am indebted to Dottoressa Antonietta Morandini, Director of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, for bibliographical assistance. See A. C. de la Mare, The Handwriting of Italian Humanists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), I: 25–26; D. M. Robathon, “Boccaccio’s Accuracy as a Scribe,” Speculum 13 (1938), 458–60; Vittore Branca and Pier Giorgio Ricci, Un Autografo del Decameron (Padova: Università di Padova, 1962), 61. Bryan and Dempster divided the analogues for the concluding scene of the Merchant’s Tale, the deception of the old husband in his garden, into two categories: the blind husband and the fruit tree, and the optical illusion (W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster, eds., Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941], 333–56). Among the analogues for Chaucer’s pear tree scene are the Comedia Lydie and Decameron 7, 9 (of the optical illusion type) and a late thirteenth-century or early fourteenth-century Italian novellino (of the blind husband-fruit tree category). Decameron 7, 9 is an analogue that tells the story differently; the husband is not actually blind (though he is deceived). M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), 122–23. Cited by Derek Pearsall, “Versions of Comedy in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” in Chaucer’s Frame Tales: The Physical and Metaphysical, ed. Joerg O. Fichte (Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 1987), 39.

32  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

Thus, a modern theory of laughter is said to be a source for a modern detective story by a medieval scholar. Near the end of Eco’s novel, the English brother, William Baskerville, its main character, offers the following hypothesis about what might be contained in the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics, just as he finds the manuscript everyone believed to be lost: “Gradually this second book took shape in my mind as it had to be. I could tell you almost all of it, without reading the pages that were meant to poison me. Comedy is born from the komai – that is, from the peasant villages – as a joyous celebration after a meal or feast. Comedy does not tell of famous and powerful men, but of base and ridiculous creatures, though not wicked; and it does not end with the death of the protagonists. It achieves the effect of the ridiculous by showing the defects and vices of ordinary men. Here Aristotle sees the tendency to laughter as a force for good, which can also have an instructive value: through witty riddles and unexpected metaphors …”39

Brother Baskerville mostly summarizes what was transmitted to fourteenthcentury Europe about Aristotle’s theory of comedy. Some of what Eco puts into his character’s mouth would have been familiar to the Italian novelist and scholar of medieval literature from the Italian Trecento view of comedy – especially the definition of comedy which Dante included in his famous Epistle to Can Grande della Scala in which the poet explained his intentions in the Divina Commedia: Comoedia vero inchoat asperitatem alicuius rei, sed eius material prospere terminatur … in modo loquendi … comoedia vero remisse et humiliter; … si ad materiam respiciamus, a principio horribilis et foetida est … in fine prospera, desiderabilis et grata …; Ad modum loquendi, remissus est modus et humilis, quia locutio vulgaris in qua et mulierculae comunecant. (Epistola, X)40 [Whereas comedy begins with sundry adverse conditions, but ends happily … in style of language … comedy is unstudied and lowly … if we consider the subject-matter, at the beginning it is horrible and foul … at the close it is happy, desirable, and pleasing. … As regards the style of language, the style is unstudied and lowly, as being in the vulgar tongue, in which even women-folk hold their talk.]41

Dante’s explanation of the word comedy is based directly on the treatise on comedy by Donatus.42 The highly logical distinctions and formal defini39 40 41 42

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (New York: Warner Books, 1984), 574. Dantis Alagherii Epistolae; The Letters of Dante, edited and translated by Paget Toynbee (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1920), 176–77. Dantis Alagherii Epistolae, 200–1. Medieval Literary Criticism, 147.



The Comic Inheritance  33

tions that typify the style of the epistle and distinguish it from other critical works by Dante (i.e., the Convivio and the De Vulgari Eloquentia) has caused scholars to doubt its genuineness; nonetheless, the epistle, which is not mentioned until 1390, long after Dante’s death, remains significant as a statement of medieval thought on the genre of comedy. Also familiar would have been Boccaccio’s writing about comedy which appears in the prologue to his critical commentary on Dante’s Divine Comedy: “comedies recount things which never chanced to happen, although they are not so diverse from the habits of men that they may not have happened.”43 Familiar too would have been the echoes of Dante’s words found in Boccaccio’s declaration that the novellas of the Decameron “non solamente in fiorentin volgare e in prosa scritte … sono e senza titolo, ma ancora in istilo umilissimo e rimesso” (Giornata IV, introduzione, 331) [“I have written, not only in the Florentine vernacular and in prose, but in the most homely and unassuming style,” (Introduction to Fourth Day, 284)].44 Moreover, just as Dante’s Divine Comedy eschews Latin for the sake of mulierculae, Boccaccio’s work must be written in the vernacular for the women in love to whom the Decameron is dedicated: “… per ciò che né a Atene, né a Bologna, o a Parigi alcuna di voi non va a studiare, più distesamente parlar vi si conviene che a quegli che hanno negli studii gl’ingegni assottigliati” (Conclusione Dell’Autore, 912) [“And besides, since none of you goes to study in Athens, or Bologna, or Paris, you have need of a lengthier form of address than those who have sharpened their wits with the aid of their studies,” (Author’s Epilogue, 801)]. Dante, Boccaccio and Chaucer knew what medieval rhetoricians had to say about the kind of language and the subject matter that was appropriate to comedy. In his Poetria nova, written between 1200 and 1216, Geoffrey of Vinsauf states that “Attamen est quandoque color vitare colores,/ Exceptis quos sermo capit vulgaris usus/ Offert communis”45 [“It is sometimes a color to avoid colors, except those that common speech knows or that common usage affords.”]46 Geoffrey’s textbook was popular: fifty manuscripts of the Poetria nova are extant, twenty of them in English. An Englishman who 43 44

45

46

The prologue to Esposizioni sopra La Comedia di Dante, translated by N. S. Thompson in his Chaucer, Boccaccio, and the Debate of Love (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 180. Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Vittore Branca (Milan: A. Mondadori, 1985). All citations to the Decameron in Italian refer to this edition. All references to the Decameron in English refer to Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam, 2nd ed. (New York: Penguin, 1995) unless otherwise indicated. Geoffroi de Vinsauf, Poetria Nova in Les arts poètiques du XIIe au XIIIe siècle; recherches et documents sur la technique littéraire du moyen âge, ed. Edmond Faral (Paris, 1924), 197–262. Cited by Ian Thomson, “Latin ‘Elegiac comedy’ of the Twelfth Century,” in Versions of Medieval Comedy, ed. Paul G. Ruggiers (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press), 64 (from Poetria Nova, Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts, ed. James J. Murphy

34  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

studied at Paris, Geoffrey of Vinsauf taught in England and also traveled to Rome. Chaucer refers somewhat ironically to Geoffrey and a lament on the death of King Richard that appears in the work: O Gaufred, deer maister soverayn, That whan thy worthy kyng Richared was slayn With shot, compleynedest his deeth so soore, Why ne hadde I now thy sentence and thy lore The Friday for to chide, as diden ye?  (Nun’s Priest’s Tale, VII, 527–31)

Plain language suited the low, humorous subject matter of comedy. As John of Garland puts it: A correct comedy has the following cast: a husband and wife, an adulterer and the adulterer’s accomplice – or his critic – and the adulteress’s nurse, or the husband’s servant. … A comedy is a humorous poem beginning in sadness and ending in joy …47

John’s comic theory embraces the kind of comedy found in the movement of Dante’s Commedia from the pains of the Inferno to the joy of Paradiso as well as that in Roman comedy and medieval fabliaux. Chaucer’s definition of comedy is given to the pilgrim Knight when he breaks in on the Monk’s catalogue of men “that stood in greet prosperitee” (VII, 1975) but fell to tragedy. The Knight’s definition brings the Monk’s Tale to an end by displacing the tragic view with the comic: “I seye for me, it is a greet disese, Whereas men han been in greet welthe and ese, To heeren of hire sodeyn fal, allas! And the contrarie is joye and greet solas, As whan a man hath been in povre estaat, And clymbeth up and wexeth fortunate, And there abideth in prosperitee Swich thing is gladsome, as it thynketh me, And of swich thing were goodly for to telle.”  (VII, 2771–79)

The structure of the Decameron, which opens on its first day of storytelling with a tale about Ser Ciappelletto, “il piggiore uomo … che mai nascesse” (1, 1, 34) [“the worst man ever born,” (26)] and ends on the tenth day with the story of Griselda, a portrait of ideal womanhood, shows that Boccaccio

47

[Berkeley, California, 1971], 32–108. The quotation appears on p. 10 in Jane Kopp’s translation in Murphy). John of Garland, The Parisiana Poetria of John of Garland, ed. and trans. Traugott Lawler (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1974), ch. 4, p. 81.



The Comic Inheritance  35

shares the view of comedy as a movement from bad to good, negative to positive. When we think of the comedies of Chaucer and Boccaccio, however, we are probably not thinking so much of the definition of comedy as we are of its form or genre. The closest Chaucer comes to giving his comic tales a name is in the prologue to the Miller’s Tale: … this Millere He nolde his wordes for no man forbere. But tolde his cherles tale in his manere.  (I, 3167–9)

A churl’s tale, he warns, will reflect his vulgar nature: The Millere is a cherl; ye knowe wel this, So was the Reeve eek and othere mo, And harlotrie they tolden both two. Avyseth yow, and put me out of blame, And eek men shal not maken ernest of game.  (I, 3182–86)

We can infer what Boccaccio thought about his comic novellas from what he says in the Proemio (Prologue) to the Decameron: Intendo di raccontare cento novelle, o favole o parabole o istorie che dire le vogliamo (7) [I shall narrate a hundred stories or fables or parables or histories or whatever you choose to call them. (McWilliam, 3)]

Favole can be translated as “fabliaux,” an appropriate enough term for Boccaccio’s comic tales, but many of the novellas of the Decameron are not comic and, therefore, more likely in the categories of parabole or istorie. The only extant Middle English fabliau before Chaucer is Dame Sirith whose unique appearance is in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 86, a manuscript which contains another comic tale, The Fox and the Wolf, which once was considered a fabliau, but has now been reclassified as a beast fable. Likewise, the Auchinleck MS (National Library of Scotland), an early fourteenth-century compilation, contains A Pennyworth of Wit, which once was regarded as an early English fabliau, but is now thought to be too moral to deserve that classification.48 It is a wonder that, as Rossell Hope Robbins put it, “such a lively comic poem [Dame Sirith] bred no exemplars for the

48

Henry Seidel Canby argued that besides Chaucer’s Middle English fabliaux, there were three earlier examples: Dame Sirith, The Fox and the Wolf, and A Pennyworth of Wit (“The English Fabliaux,” Publications of the Modern Language Association (1906): 200–14). For the contemporary assessment see Melissa Furrow, “Middle English Fabliaux and Modern Myth,” English Literary History 56 (1989): 1–18.

36  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

next hundred years.”49 Piero Boitani offered a plausible explanation for the absence of comic verse in thirteenth-century England: Because of the oral character of its material, and because of the Church’s domination over official culture, manuscripts were not widely produced and circulated until the second half of the fourteenth century.50

Chaucer’s comic tales are typically referred to as English “fabliaux”; Boccaccio’s, as “novellas” (novelle, in Italian). The tales Chaucer wrote for churlish Canterbury pilgrims like the Miller, Reeve, Cook, and Shipman are thus likened to the versified thirteenth-century French tales R. Howard Bloch writes about in terms of their scandal for “the excessiveness of their sexual and scatological obscenity, their anti-clericalism, antifeminism, anti-courtliness, the consistency with which they indulge the senses, whet the appetites (erotic, gastronomic, economic).”51 More than 150 French fabliaux are extant and many appear to have been composed by professional jongleurs for public entertainments, some of them at court. The Danish scholar, Per Nykrog, argued that their origins are courtly, not bourgeois, as Bédier proposed, and that their characters come from the trades and that their tone reflects the condescension of the upper class.52 N. S. Thompson has argued that novellas and not fabliaux were the model for Chaucer’s comic tales. He points out that both Boccaccio and Chaucer create narratives wherein “Stock types and plots become miraculously transformed by local settings and particularized individuals who occupy worlds of surprising moral ambiguity.”53 Though not discounting the influence of French fabliaux on Chaucer nor stressing the position of place and character in the novellas, I reach a similar conclusion in a 2004 article on Chaucer, Boccaccio, and the French fabliaux: “The fact that Chaucer wrote verse narratives like the French composers of fabliaux, not novellas in prose like Boccaccio, did not keep Chaucer from borrowing as much from one body of narrative as the other. If we can speak of prose romances, we can probably consider a new term for Chaucer’s comic tales: metrical novellas.”54 The Italian novella begins in the thirteenth-century vernacular collection known as Il Libro di novelle e di bel parlar gentile (commonly called Il 49 50 51 52

53 54

Rossell Hope Robbins, “The English Fabliaux: Before and after Chaucer,” Modern Sprak 64 (1970): 236–37. Piero Boitani, English Medieval Narrative in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, 28. R. Howard Bloch, The Scandal of the Fabliaux (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 11. Per Nykrog, Les Fabliaux: Étude d’histoire littéraire et de stylistique médiévale (Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1957). His book refuted the views of J. Bédier, Les Fabliaux (Paris: Champion, 1893). N. S. Thompson, Chaucer, Boccaccio, and the Debate of Love, 220. Carol Falvo Heffernan, “Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale and Reeve’s Tale, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and the French Fabliaux,” Italica 81 (2004): 324.



The Comic Inheritance  37

Novellino). A short prose form, the novella developed from medieval Latin exempla. Its roots are found in the anecdotes of popular sermons, parables, and fabliaux. The term “novella” is etymologically related to the verb novellare (to narrate, recount) and the noun which signifies “novelty” (novità). The genre’s newness is embodied in the vernacular language of the flowering cultural center that was medieval Tuscany – the Tuscan dialect of Italian. The novella reaches its highpoint in Boccaccio’s Decameron, which uses the new form and the Tuscan vernacular to reach a broad reading public made up primarily of women whom Boccaccio wishes to console and delight (Proemio, 7). Only a small fraction of the tales contained in the thirteenthcentury Novellino and one third of Boccaccio’s Decameron (composed in 1351; revised, 1370) contain fabliau plots. Like Chaucer, Boccaccio “is fully medieval in his selection of stories, which are from the general international fund”: his own native tradition, French fabliaux, and the writers of antiquity.55 The “tradition of French fabliaux and the Italian poeti giocosi” – those poets of wine, food, women, and gambling, among them Cecco Angiolieri and Folgore da San Gimignano – has been called the heart of Boccaccio’s comedy.56 The chapter which follows considers parallel comic tales found in Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Some represent close analogues like Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale and Boccaccio’s Decameron 8, 1, built on the common novella motif of the beffa, “a prank by which a schemer is unmasked and repaid in kind.”57 Others are related more loosely.

55 56 57

Medieval Comic Tales, ed. Derek Brewer, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 1996), xxviii. Giuseppe Mazzotta, The World at Play in Boccaccio’s “Decameron” (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986), 161. Mazzotta, The World at Play in Boccaccio’s “Decameron”, 190.

3 Parallel Comic Tales in the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales

W

hile the indebtedness of Chaucer’s versified comic tales to thirteenthcentury French fabliaux has been closely studied by scholars, their relationship to the prose tales of Boccaccio’s Decameron has been studied less and with greater reservation.1 The relationship between the comic tales of Chaucer and Boccaccio deserves more attention, at least as much as that given to the English poet’s tales and the French fabliaux. Many of the French antecedents are judged to be “lost”; whereas, Boccaccio’s tales are there for the reading and it is increasingly clear that Chaucer knew them. Even when the relationships between the English and Italian comic tales turn out to 1

Among the best studies of Chaucer and French fabliaux are the relevant chapters in Charles Muscatine’s Chaucer and the French Tradition (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1957), Thomas D. Cooke, Old French and Chaucerian Fabliaux: A Study in their Comic Climax (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1978), and John Hines, The Fabliaux in English (London and New York: Longman, 1993). Also generally useful is Larry Benson and Theodore Andersson, Literary Contexts of Chaucer’s Fabliaux: Texts and Translations (Indianapolis, Indiana: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971). Among early examinations of links between the Canterbury Tales and the Decameron is an unpublished dissertation which examines possible connections, broadly considered (Richard Guerin, “The Canterbury Tales and Il Decamerone,” University of Colorado diss., 1966), and a reconsideration of the issue (Donald McGrady, “Chaucer and the Decameron Reconsidered,” The Chaucer Review 12 [1977]: 1–26). A few scholars have addressed some comic tales specifically. An early article by Peter Beidler discussed a medical thread which appears to tie Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale to the Decameron (“Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale and the Decameron,” Italica 50 (1973): 275) and in two independent articles Boccaccio’s Decameron 8, 1 has been discussed as an analogue to Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale, both articles stopping short of the claim that the Italian prose tale is Chaucer’s source (Richard Guerin, “The Shipman’s Tale: The Italian Analogues,” English Studies 52 [1971]: 412–19; Carol F. Heffernan, “Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale and Boccaccio’s Decameron VIII, I: Retelling a Story,” in Courtly Literature: Culture and Context, ed. Keith Busby and Erik Kooper [Philadelphia and Amsterdam: John Benjamin, 1990], pp. 261–70). Two recent studies indicate a renewal of interest in Chaucer’s knowledge of Boccaccio, though neither focuses specifically on the fabliaux. There is a collection of essays edited by Leonard Michael Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen, The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales: New Essays on An Old Question (Madison, New Jersey: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), and N. S. Thompson’s Chaucer and Boccaccio and the Debate of Love (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).



Parallel Comic Tales  39

be more those of analogues than of sources and derivatives, much can be learned from a comparative examination of style. This chapter begins with a consideration of the first two English fabliaux told in Fragment I of the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale and Reeve’s Tale, and their possible links to Boccaccio’s Decameron. They are the comic tales that Chaucer’s readers encounter first and remember best. The chapter then turns to two of Chaucer’s comic tales assumed to have French fabliaux sources, the Shipman’s Tale and the Merchant’s Tale. The evidence of the influence of the Italian novella – especially novellas of Boccaccio’s Decameron – suggests that the novellas deserve the same status as sources or close analogues as do the French fabliaux. A word on the genre is in order. “Les fabliaux sont des contes à rire en vers” [Fabliaux are stories in verse that make one laugh] – thus Joseph Bédier summed up the genre in his seminal study.2 His study followed on the publication of the collection of medieval French fabliaux edited by Montaiglon and Raynaud in the nineteenth century.3 The Nouveau recueil complet des fabliaux, edited by Noomen and Boogard, pays homage to that important earlier edition in its title.4 Most of the extant 150 comic tales in Old French narrative verse were composed in the thirteenth century, but the earliest date to the twelfth and the latest, to the fourteenth century. They have come down to us in forty-three manuscripts dating to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries wherein the fabliaux appear side by side with courtly poems, testifying to the varied tastes of aristocratic audiences and the wide repertoire of the jongleurs who entertained them.5 The fact that the compilers and scribes who 2 3

4 5

Bédier, Les Fabliaux. Recueil général et complet des fabliaux des xiiie et xive siècles, imprimés ou inédits, publiés avec notes et variants d’après les manuscrits, eds. A. de Montaiglon and G. Raynaud, 6 vols. (Paris: Libraire des Bibliophiles, 1872–90). Nouveau recueil complet des fabliaux, eds. Willem Noomen and Nico van den Boogaard, 10 vols. (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1983–98). A comic exchange in Les Deux Bordeors ribauz shows that the jongleur’s abilities extended to a variety of literary forms: fabliaux as well as romance, epic, and lyric:

Ge sai contes, ge sai flabeax; Ge sai conter beax diz noveax, Rotruenges viez et noveles, Et sirventois et pastoreles. Ge sai le flabel du Denier, Et du Fouteor à loier, Et de Gobert et dame Erme, Qui ainz des eiz ne plora lerme, Et si sai de la Coille noire; Si sai de Parceval l’estoire, Et si sai du Provoire taint Qui o les crucefiz fu painz; Du Prestre qui menja les muires Quant il devoit dire ses heures; Si sai Richait, si sai Renart,,,

40  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

made the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century manuscripts included sacred and profane, crude and sophisticated texts side by side led Nykrog to question Bédier’s assumption that fabliaux were intended for a bourgeois audience.6 The best of the fabliaux suggest authors (and audiences) with considerable learning and sophistication, those associated with court and church. Clerks may well have composed and recited fabliaux alongside the jongleurs; clerks, it has been pointed out, “are interestingly, the only class of people uniformly admired in the fabliaux …”7 The clerical connection may explain why the Old French fabliaux bear an interesting relationship to non-dramatic Latin “comedies” written in elegiac distichs. Most of them come from the Loire valley in France and date from the second half of the twelfth century. Early Latin comedies written in France by Vital de Blois, such as Geta and Aulularia, even suggest the Old French fabliaux reach back to the ancient Latin comedy of Plautus (though the Roman’s works were intended for the stage).8 The non-dramatic Latin comedies written in France and the fabliaux contain common themes (i.e., the eternal triangle and the deceived husband) as well as character types (the sensual young woman of engin [cunning], the tricked husband, the clever lover [usually a squire, clerk or priest]). The Latin comedies could rightly be called Latin fabliaux.9 Chaucer’s relationship to the French fabliaux has long been a subject of study since, of the twenty-one completed Canterbury Tales, six are fabliaux: the Miller’s Tale, the Reeve’s Tale, the Merchant’s Tale, the Shipman’s Tale, the Summoner’s Tale, and the Friar’s Tale. Derek Brewer well observed in his discussion of the fabliaux for Beryl Rowland’s Companion to Chaucer Studies, “Chaucer’s own handling of the genre shows both his deep under

6 7 8 9

De Charlemaine et de Roulant Et d’Olivier le conbatant

[I know stories, I know fabliaux. I can tell fine new tales, rotrouenges old and new, and sirventois and pastourelles. I know the story of the Penny (not a fabliau), and of the Fucker for hire, and Gombert, and about Dame Erme who never shed a tear, and about Black Balls. I know the story of Percival, and the dyed Priest who was painted along with the crucifixes, and the Priest who ate mulberries when he was supposed to be saying his hours. I know about Richeut and Renart … Charlemagne and Roland and Olivier the fighter.] Cited and translated by Charles Muscatine in The Old French Fabliaux (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), 6. Per Nykrog, Les Fabliaux: Étude d’histoire littéraire et de stylistique médiévale (Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1957; Geneva: Droz, 1973), 46. Muscatine, Old French Fabliaux, 7. Muscatine, Old French Fabliaux, 14. Later in this chapter I attempt to demonstrate that one such Latin comic tale – the twelfthcentury Comedia Lidie – may well be a common source of both Boccaccio’s Decameron 7, 9 and Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale. Janet L. Smarr links Chaucer and Boccaccio with reference to the Comedia Lidie in “Mercury in the Garden: Mythographical Methods in the Merchant’s Tale and Decameron 7.9,” in The Mythographic Art: Classical Fable and the Rise of the Vernacular in Early France and England, ed. Jane Chance (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1990), 209.



Parallel Comic Tales  41

standing of it, in its original French form, and his transformation of it.… these indecent anecdotes were Chaucer’s greatest interest in his maturity.”10 The fabliaux among the Canterbury Tales are fundamental to Charles Muscatine’s early study of the stylistic contrasts between the “ideal” and the “realistic” tales of the collection: Chaucer and the French Tradition (published in the same year as Nykrog’s Les Fabliaux).11 These comic tales have an important position in the Canterbury Tales: we have a courtly romance followed by two fabliaux (three if the Cook’s fragment is counted) in the first fragment, followed by a pious tale (the Man of Law’s Tale, fragment II), and then the Wife of Bath’s romance followed by two more fabliaux (in fragment III). Half of the tales in the first half of the collection are fabliaux.12 In 1998, Barbara Nolan applied her sense of Chaucer’s orchestration of the Canterbury Tales as a miscellany containing all medieval genres (romance, fabliau, saint’s life, parody, beast fable, Breton lay, sermon) to her study of manuscripts containing French fabliaux. Not primarily concerned with definition of genre nor the establishment of intended audience, she settled on matters codicological. Nolan emphasizes that manuscript compilations which contain fabliaux are miscellanies much like Chaucer’s wherein “The fissures, the tensions, the conflicts between scriptural history or saint’s lives or religious allegories or courtly lais or chronicles of kings on one hand and fabliau-farce on the other lie open to laughter.”13 Thus, she applies Chaucerian intertextuality to anthologies containing fabliaux and insinuates a question – is it possible that Chaucer “knew and aimed to mimic … what he found in one or several manuscripts” of the sort she discusses?14 There is, as far as I know, no extensive examination of Boccaccio’s knowledge of Old French fabliaux. If a general statement of Charles Muscatine’s is correct, Boccaccio was likely to be well acquainted with them: “in a large sense … twelfth-century French (with Provençal) was the seminal vernacular literature of the high Middle Ages. It is behind Dante and Petrarch, Boccaccio and Machaut, the dolce stil Nuovo, Minnesang, and English and German romance.”15 Moreover, though Boccaccio was probably born in Certaldo, a

10 11 12 13 14 15

D. S. Brewer, “The Fabliaux” in Companion to Chaucer Studies, ed. Beryl Rowland (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 247. Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1957), and Per Nykrog, Les Fabliaux (Copenhagen, 1957). Thomas D. Cooke emphasizes the position of the fabliaux in Old French and Chaucerian Fabliaux, 170–71. Barbara Nolan, “Turning over the Leaves of Medieval Fabliau-Anthologies: The Case of Bibliothèque Nationale MS. francais 2173,” Medieval Perspectives 13 (1998): 11. Nolan, 9. This interesting structural question is one she clearly intends to explore further. Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition, 6. In a recent article, Luciano Rossi argues that scholarship on Boccaccio’s debt to medieval French literature is littered with half truths because the matter is so complex: “Quando però ci si chieda cosa sia in realtà un fablel, la risposta non è semplice, perchè lo stesso termine tecnico antico-francese ha subito … un

42  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

small village outside of Florence, in 1313, his education really took place, as discussed in Chapter 1, in the learned courtly atmosphere of the Angevin kingdom of Naples to which the family moved in 1327, making his acquaintance with the fabliaux even more likely. As the son of a wealthy Florentine banker, Boccaccio would have found the doors of Neapolitan society open to him – not just those of wealthy, cultured Florentine émigrés, but those of the Angevin court as well. The most telling evidence of the influence of the French fabliaux on Boccaccio is the prominence of plot in the narratives of the Decameron; “le récit,” according to Bédier, is the essence of French fabliaux.16 Nearly one third of the one hundred tales which make up the Decameron are comic and could be thought of as fabliaux. The high frequency of comic tales is accounted for by the work’s premise. The title – Decameron – which Boccaccio gave his collection of novellas is Greek for “of the ten days” and underscores its premise: in the midst of the chaos caused by the Black Death, ten upper-class young Florentines withdraw to a garden in the hills of Fiesole, turning their backs on tragic horror, to pass the time (for ten days) telling one novella each for every day of their stay. The likelihood that both Chaucer and Boccaccio listened to court readings of fabliaux and also read them for themselves does not eliminate the possibility of direct relationships between their English and Italian comic tales. On the contrary, the coincidence of their tastes in comedy would naturally lead Chaucer, who wrote his Canterbury Tales in the late fourteenth century, to seek out the comic masterwork of the early fourteenth-century Italian author. While there is general agreement that Chaucer used Boccaccio’s Teseida, from which he actually summarized more than 1,000 lines in 139 lines of the romance told by the Knight, there has been considerable doubt until recently as to whether or not Chaucer even knew of the Decameron. Apart from the Knight’s Tale, Chaucer also drew on the Teseida for such works as the Parliament of Foules, Troilus and Criseyde, the House of Fame, and the Legend of Good Women. Robert Pratt’s assessment is still accurate: … of all Italian writings, except Dante’s Commedia, the Teseida served Chaucer the most widely. It formed the basic material out of which he created The Knight’s Tale, and was the source of passages in Anelida and Arcite, The Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde, The Legend of Good Women, The Franklin’s Tale and possibly The House of Fame.17

16 17

importante evoluzione” (“In Luogo di Sollazzo: I Fabliaux del Decameron” in Leggiadre Donne: Novella e Racconto Breve in Italia, ed. Francesco Bruni [Venice: Marsilio, 2000], 14). Bédier, p. 6. Robert Pratt, “Chaucer’s Use of the Teseida,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 72 (1947): 598.



Parallel Comic Tales  43

Piero Boitani, whose Chaucer and Boccaccio is the most elegant and detailed comparison of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and Boccaccio’s Teseida, concludes that “The Teseida works on the ‘remembraunce’ of the English poet at the deepest level, that of the formulation of thoughts and images into words. Besides the recurrence of single words and more general echoes, the actual number of translations and suggestions proves this.”18 Despite Boitani’s use of the word remembraunce, he assumes that Chaucer acquired a manuscript of the Teseida “in Italy in 1373” during his first trip there or “in England either before or after 1373” from merchants or friars.19 Thus Boitani understands the Teseida to be a direct source since he assumes that Chaucer had access to a manuscript.20 Boccaccio’s Decameron, composed about forty years before Chaucer began writing the Canterbury Tales, contains analogues to approximately one quarter of Chaucer’s tales. Scholarship has long been inclined, nonetheless, to discount the influence of the Decameron on the Canterbury Tales, partly because there are also analogues elsewhere, some of them closer.21 Establishing sources, analogues, even “influences” is problematic for, as Helen Cooper observes of Chaucer, “he will have worked with a copytext when producing a translation, but he clearly also had an exceptional memory for words – for phrases, cadences, maxims, and stories. This in turn raises a further problem, because of the frequency with which medieval works, and especially moral and didactic ones, repeat the same adages and use the same examples. It is often difficult to be sure from which of various works Chaucer might have derived an idea …”.22 Still, there is an impressive enough number of parallels between the two masterly fourteenth-century tale collections to suggest that the Decameron is at least as much an influence on Chaucer as other works by Boccaccio that are acknowledged sources (the Teseida, the 18 19 20

21

22

Piero Boitani, Chaucer and Boccaccio, Medium Ævum Monographs, New Series 8 (Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1977), 105. Boitani, Chaucer and Boccaccio, p. 72. Mary Hamel and Robert R. Edwards respectively offer useful statements about what a source is in Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, ed. Robert M. Correale with Mary Hamel, I (Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 2002), 269 and 214. The conclusion of Hubertis M. Cummings in The Indebtedness of Chaucer’s Works to the Italian Works of Boccaccio, University of Cincinnati Studies 10, part 2 (Cincinnati, Ohio: University of Cincinnati Press, 1916), was echoed in scholarship for more than fifty years; that is, that the Decameron did not influence Chaucer “in the inception, or in the composition of either the frame-work of The Canterbury Tales or the Tales themselves” (p. 198). In 1941, Robert Pratt and Karl Young concurred in Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, eds. W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941), 20. Tatlock, by 1950, however, was unwilling to consider the matter closed (John S.P. Tatlock, The Mind and Art of Chaucer [Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press], 90). Helen Cooper, The Canterbury Tales, Oxford Guides to Chaucer, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 11.

44  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

Filostrato, the Filocolo, the Ameto). It is well known that both Chaucer and Boccaccio apologize for their more churlish tales by making disingenuous appeals to the need for realism. In the Prologue to the Miller’s Tale, Chaucer defends himself:    … I moot reherce Hir tales alle, be they better or werse, Or elles falsen som of my mateere.  (I, 3173–75)

He further pleads, Blameth nat me if that ye chese amys. The Millere is a cherl; ye knowe wel this.  (I, 3181–82)

Similarly, writing in the “Conclusion” to the Decameron to defend himself against the charge that he “nello scriver queste novelle troppa licenzia usata, sì come in fare alcuna volta dire alle donne e molto spesso ascoltare cose non assai convenienti né a dire né a ascoltare” (909) [has “taken too many liberties, in that I have sometimes caused ladies to say, and very often to hear, things which are not very suitable to be heard or said by virtuous women” (McWilliam, 798)], Boccaccio says: … se alcuna cosa in alcuna n’è, la qualità delle novelle l’hanno richesta … (909)23 [… if any of the stories is lacking in restraint, this is because of the nature of the story itself … (McWilliam, 798)]

There are also clear parallels between two of Chaucer’s more sober tales – the pious Clerk’s Tale and the Franklin’s Tale – and the Decameron: Chaucer’s capricious Walter is closer to Boccaccio’s cruel husband (in Decameron 10, 10) than Petrarch’s (in his Latin version of the tale), and the final question about which of the characters is most generous is left unanswered in both the Franklin’s Tale and Decameron 10, 5, a variant of a story also told in Boccaccio’s Filocolo, generally regarded to be Chaucer’s direct source.24

23 24

With respect to the question of comic realism see also Boccaccio’s Proem and Introduction to the Fourth Day as well as Chaucer’s General Prologue (I. 731–3). John Finlayson has made the argument for considering Decameron 10, 10 a source of the Clerk’s Tale (“Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale,” Studies in Philology 97 (2000): 255–75). Amy W. Goodwin and Thomas J. Farrell (in “The Clerk’s Tale,” in Sources and Analogues, ed. Correale with Hamel, I: 101–67) consider it the most relevant analogue (at p. 103). As scholars become more ready to accept Boccaccio’s Decameron as a text with which Chaucer was familiar, Decameron 10, 5 may be seen to have as much claim as the Filocolo as a source for the Franklin’s Tale. See, however, Robert Edwards who prefers the claims of the Filocolo (in “The Franklin’s Tale,” in Sources and Analogues, ed. Correale with Hamel, I: 214).



Parallel Comic Tales  45

Among Chaucer’s comic tales, his Shipman’s Tale and Decameron 8, 1 and the Merchant’s Tale and Decameron 7, 9 are strong analogues. For more than seventy years it was assumed that the source of the Shipman’s Tale was a lost French fabliau.25 The thesis of my 1990 article on the relationship of Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale to Boccaccio’s Decameron 8, 1 was cautious, “I propose merely that by studying Chaucer’s handling of the story by Boccaccio we may form a very good idea of the direction in which he modified the received French fabliau (if there was one). Surely the prominence of the plot of Decameron, VIII, i coupled with the sense the tale leaves the reader with, that it is one where the characters are barely there at all, lead one to suspect that the supposed lost French fabliau probably resembles Boccaccio’s tale very much.”26 More recently, Peter Beidler has called Decameron 8, 1 a “hard analogue,” but hesitates to use the term “source.”27 In the case of the Merchant’s Tale, Decameron 7, 9 is one analogue among many others. I advance the idea, later in this chapter, that both the ninth tale told on the seventh day of the Decameron and the Merchant’s Tale may well be indebted to the twelfth-century Latin comedy written in France – Comedia Lidie, quite possibly the common source. There are, nonetheless, motifs shared by Boccaccio’s and Chaucer’s tales not found in other analogues that also indicate Chaucer’s knowledge of Decameron 7, 9.28 What can be said about the relationship of Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale and Reeve’s Tale to the Decameron? They are, after all, the two fabliaux most familiar to and beloved by Chaucer’s readers, specialist and general reader alike. Only the Prologue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale exceeds them in popularity. They are also the first fabliaux a reader of the Canterbury Tales encounters. These considerations together with the fact that Chaucer wrote most of the extant medieval English fabliaux – a very small corpus, indeed – make the question a natural one to raise. The essential plot of the Reeve’s Tale is found in five analogues which are earlier than Chaucer’s tale: the French Le Meunier et les II clers and De Gombert et des II clers, the German Das Studentenabenteur and Irregang und Girregar, and the Italian Decameron 9, 6.29 In each of the analogues, as 25

26 27

28 29

Such was the influence of a statement by John Spargo in Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale: The Lover’s Gift Regained, Folklore Fellows Communication No. 91 (Helsinki, 1930), 56: “there is no a priori reason why the Shipman’s Tale should not have been taken over almost verbatim from an Old French fabliau.” Heffernan, “Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale and Boccaccio,” 262. Peter Beidler, “Just Say Yes, Chaucer Knew the Decameron: Or, Bringing the Shipman’s Tale Out of Limbo,” in The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales, eds. Leonard Michael Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen (Madison, New Jersey: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), 25–46. Beidler, “Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale and the Decameron,” 266–84. Texts and translations of these works (except for Boccaccio’s novella) appear in Benson and Andersson, 88–193. W. M. Hart’s “The Reeve’s Tale,” in Sources and Analogues, eds.

46  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

in Chaucer’s tale, two young men find lodging in the home of another man who has a beautiful wife, a young daughter, and an infant. At night one young man slips into bed with the daughter, and shortly thereafter the other moves the infant’s cradle from the wife’s bed and places it near his. The result of the transfer of the cradle is that the wife goes to the bed of the second young man when she returns to bed after getting up for a moment in the middle of the night. The wife thinks it is her husband’s bed and the young man is quick to take advantage of her mistake. Also confused by the misplaced cradle is the first young man who decides to return to his own bed but instead beds down with the daughter’s father to whom he brags about his sexual exploits, having mistaken him for his young companion. A fight breaks out between the father and young man. The next morning the young men depart leaving the father badly beaten or deluded in thinking nothing really happened between his daughter and the young lodger. Except for minor details, the story line in all six versions is close. The thirteenth-century French fabliau, Le Meunier et les II clers, is generally agreed, however, to be the closest analogue to the Reeve’s Tale.30 As in Chaucer’s tale, the two clerks in the French fabliau take wheat to be ground at a mill where the miller steals their horse and wheat. While the young men in all versions are clerks or scholars, the theft of wheat and horse (or setting horses free) occurs only in the Reeve’s Tale and Le Meunier.31 Thus the French fabliau and Chaucer’s tale are clearly related. But there is also a unique parallel between Decameron 9, 6 and the Reeve’s Tale that deserves to be considered as important as that of the parallel thefts in Le Meunier and Chaucer’s fabliau: the moment when the wife, who has got up in the night, is about to re-enter the bed where her husband is sleeping but then catches herself in what she thinks is a mistake and speaks out loud about almost jumping into bed with a guest. Then she, of course, does just that. The moment when the wife notices that there is no cradle by the bed is handled by Chaucer in a way so close to Boccaccio’s as to suggest paraphrase. Boccaccio writes: La donna, avendo cerco e trovato che quello che caduto era non era tal cosa, non si curò d’altramenti accender lume per vederlo, ma garrito alla gatta nella cameretta se ne tornò, e a tentone diritamente al letto dove il marito dormiva se n’andò; ma, non trovandovi la culla disse seco stessa:

30

31

Bryan and Dempster provides only Le Meunier (untranslated), 126–47. Peter Beidler’s “The Reeve’s Tale,” in Sources and Analogues, ed. Correale with Hamel, I, includes texts and translations of Le Meunier, Decameron 9, 6 and a Flemish version of De Gombert, pp. 28–73. Beidler, “The Reeve’s Tale”, 24; Benson and Andersson, 100; Hart, “The Reeve’s Tale,” 124. See Beidler’s “Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale, Boccaccio’s Decameron, IX, 6, and Two ‘Soft’ German Analogues,” The Chaucer Review 28 (1994): 237–51. In Boccaccio’s tale the two young men are only identified as being from Florence. They could be scholars, but might just as likely be bourgeois men about town.



Parallel Comic Tales  47 “Oimè, cattiva me, vedi quel che io faceva! in fé di Dio, che io me n’andava dirittamente nel letto degli osti miei”; e, fattasi un poco più avanti e trovando la culla, in quello letto al quale ella era allato insieme con Adriano si coricò, credendosi col marito coricare. (777–78) [Having discovered the cause of the noise and assured herself that nothing important had fallen, the woman swore at the cat, and, without bothering to light a lamp and explore the matter further, returned to the bedroom. Picking her way carefully through the darkness, she went straight to the bed where her husband was lying; But on finding no trace of the cradle, she said to herself: ‘How stupid I am! What a fine thing to do! Heavens above, I was just about to step into the bed where my guests are sleeping.’ So she walked a little further up the room, found the cradle, and got into bed beside Adriano, thinking him to be her husband. (McWilliam, 680)]

Chaucer reworks this passage and even retains the direct discourse of the wife:    … the wyf hir rowtyng leet, And gan awake, and wente hire out to pisse, And cam again, and gan hir cradle mysse, And groped heer and ther, but she foond noon. “Allas!” quod she, “I hadde almost mysgoon; I hadde almost goon to the clerkes bed. Ey, benedicite! Thanne hadde I foule ysped!” And forth she gooth til she the cradle fond. She gropeth alwey forther with hir hond, And foond the bed, and thoghte noght but good, By cause that the cradle by it stood.  (I, 4214–24)

In both passages the homely reason for getting up in the night enhances the domestic atmosphere of the comic tales. Chaucer’s wife needs to relieve herself and Boccaccio’s gets up to investigate a disturbance which is caused by a cat.32 The direct discourse of both passages includes religious oaths (“benedicite” in Chaucer; “in fè di Dio” in Boccaccio) and explicit statements about almost getting into bed with the lodger by mistake (“I hadde almost mysgoon;/ I hadde almost goon to the clerkes bed”; “vedi quell che io faceva … che io me n’andava dirittamente nel letto degli osti miei!”). And finally, both passages describe the wife as fumbling in the dark for the infant’s cradle (“She gropeth alwey forther with hir hond,/ And foond the bed”; “E fattasi un poco più avanti e trovata la culla”). The paraphrase at

32

In Boccaccio’s tale, Adriano, Pinuccio’s friend, gets up to relieve himself. His casually moving the cradle out of his way later happens to confuse the wife who, to his surprise, accidentally goes to his bed. Adriano’s reason for getting up may have given Chaucer the idea of the miller’s wife going out “to pisse” (I. 4215).

48  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

points is so close as to be almost translation, suggesting that Chaucer was not merely depending on recollection of a tale read on an early trip to Italy but actually had a copy of Decameron 9, 6. Another point of contact between Chaucer’s and Boccaccio’s telling of the story which has, as far as I know, gone unnoticed is that in both their tales the daughter’s favors do not have to be won with a ring. In the Reeve’s Tale Aleyn simply goes to Malyne’s bed and is received, and likewise in Decameron 9, 6, Pinuccio went to Niccolosa’s bed and was accepted, even gladly (“lietamente,” 777). In Le Meuniere et les II clers, however, a clerk has to go to a bin where the daughter is kept at night and bribe her with a ring – albeit one snatched from the hearth andiron – before they make love. While the connections between the French fabliau and the Reeve’s Tale are close, those between Chaucer’s tale and Boccaccio’s seem equally so. That said, the approaches taken by Boccaccio and Chaucer to telling the story are very different. Revenge is no issue in Boccaccio. There is no wheat to steal from young clerks who go to a mill because, in the Italian tale, the horses are carrying not wheat but a couple of insignificant saddle-bags stuffed with straw. Furthermore, the motivation for travel is not to turn wheat into flour but for Pinuccio to spend the night with the host’s young daughter with whom he has already fallen in love. It is as if Boccaccio knows Le Meunier et les II clers and has purposely decided to toss out the whole business of the wheat. Let it be worthless straw! Also, the journey of the two young men is mere pretense: they have circled the city of Florence with their horses but tell the host that they are returning from Romagna and need lodging because it is too late to reach Florence. As soon as everyone is in bed, Pinuccio goes to the bed of Niccolosa. Adriano is not envious of his friend’s lovemaking; he has, in fact, gone to a lot of trouble to help Pinuccio win his goal. Adriano gets to make love to the wife because he thoughtlessly pushed the cradle out of his way when going to relieve himself. The happy lovemaking was not the result of premeditation. In Chaucer’s account, John gets jealous of Aleyn who has bedded down with the miller’s daughter, and so moves the cradle on purpose so as to confuse the mother who is tricked into John’s bed by his clever maneuver. There are mean spirits all around in Chaucer: Aleyn goes to bed with Malyne to get revenge for the stolen wheat and John ensnares the miller’s wife because his friend has someone in bed with him and he does not. In Boccaccio, on the other hand, one friend helps get another friend into bed with his beloved and, quite by accident, the beloved’s mother ends up in bed with the helpful young man. Instead of the violent beatings at the end of the Reeve’s Tale, in Boccaccio’s novella “un subito avvedimento d’una buona donna avere un grande scandalo tolto via” (775) [“a good woman’s presence of mind averted a serious scandal” (677)]. When the wife hears her husband quarreling with the young man who bragged about sleeping with their daughter, she gets out of Adriano’s bed, gets into her daughter’s, and convinces her husband that she has been there all night and that Pinuccio is



Parallel Comic Tales  49

a talkative, foolish, sleepwalker. Boccaccio’s version is a softer, funnier story – terse, witty, and swift to get to the playful denouement. Chaucer begins his tale with a focus on the miller and his family, not the clerks, the point at which Boccaccio starts, and the result is the introduction of social issues that are absent from the Italian version. The miller and his wife are caught up in the social stratification of the town and Chaucer so portrays their characters that the reader senses immediately that pride will have its fall. Symkyn the miller is snobby, his “highborn” wife is the daughter of the village priest and, because they want their daughter to marry high on the social ladder, poor Malyne is twenty and still unmarried. It is Symkyn’s pride that tempts him to cheat the two Cambridge clerks who carefully guard their wheat while it is being milled. He is the type of the tradesman who thinks he can outsmart the university boys. Ranged above the portraits in the tale are the interactions between the pilgrims (Reeve versus Miller) and genres (fabliau versus romance) of Fragment I of the Canterbury Tales; these further enlarge the combative tone of the English version of the story. Growing out of the Reeve’s determination to “quite” the Miller, his tale is an altogether more angry, nasty one than Boccaccio’s. Boccaccio’s version is about lust; Chaucer’s about anger, and the difference affects the storyteller’s attitude towards his characters. In Boccaccio the wife is described as a very beautiful woman (“assai bella femina,” 775) and her daughter is also beautiful, but graceful and young as well – fifteen or sixteen years old (“una giovanetta bella e leggiadra, d’età di quindici o di sedici anni,” 775), while in Chaucer the wife is put down as having as much dignity as ditch water (she “was as digne as water in a dich,” I, 3964) and the daughter is said to be both overweight – a “wenche thikke” (I, 3973) – and over the hill (“twenty yeer,” I, 3970). The relationship between the Miller’s Tale and its analogues is different from that between the Reeve’s Tale and its nearest relatives, Le Meunier et les II clers and (I would argue) Decameron 9, 6. No one analogue contains the complete plot of the Miller’s Tale. Traditionally, scholarship has discussed Chaucer’s tale and its various analogues in terms of three motifs – the predicted flood, the misplaced kiss, and the hot poker – found separately or in some combination in the analogues. All three elements are found in a fourteenth-century Flemish fabliau, Dits van Heilen van Beersele, and their presence, Stith Thompson believed, strengthened “the argument for a lost French fabliau” being Chaucer’s direct source.33 There are two Italian novellas, one from the fifteenth century, the other from the sixteenth, the earlier of which contains both the misplaced kiss and poker motifs, and the later only the 33

Stith Thompson, “The Miller’s Tale,” in Sources and Analogues, eds. Bryan and Dempster, 106. Peter Beidler (in “The Miller’s Tale,” in Sources and Analogues, eds. Correale with Hamel, II: 249–75) argues that the Middle Dutch Heile van Beersele is “a direct source” (p. 265) based on its narrative structure and early date.

50  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

flood prediction. Both novellas are too late, however, for Chaucer to have known, though oral transmission or lost, earlier versions are always a possibility (along with lost French fabliaux). Also late is the fifteenth-century tale by Hans Folz which includes only the misplaced kiss.34 Unlike Stith Thompson or Benson and Andersson, Helen Cooper also cites Decameron 3, 4 as an analogue. Since, however, Cooper uses the traditional system of plot motifs, she designates it a “remote” one.35 Considering how little like the Miller’s Tale the closer analogues are, it may be that plot motifs are not the most significant elements connecting Chaucer to his analogues or sources. Even a casual reading of Decameron 3, 4 reveals that Chaucer picked up important cues from Boccaccio that helped him shape the scene of the lover’s arrangements for the tryst in the Miller’s Tale. Chaucer’s approach to the scene simultaneously displays the ingenuity of the would-be lover, the gullibility of the husband, and the happy complicity of the wife – just as in Boccaccio. Chaucer’s use of cues taken from Boccaccio and the variations he worked on them are at least as significant as the borrowing of one or another plot motif. In both Decameron 3, 4 and the Miller’s Tale men who are as religious as they are gullible are shown the way to salvation by learned scholars who hatch outlandish schemes in order to be alone to fornicate with the young wives of the trusting men. Both schemes take advantage of the husbands’ piety. In the Miller’s Tale, Chaucer begins to emphasize the simple religious faith of John, Alisoun’s husband, at the very point where Nicholas, the Oxford scholar who lodges in carpenter John’s house, starts to put his scheme into action. This emphasis helps make credible John’s acceptance of Nicholas’s prediction of the coming second flood and his willingness to follow the scholar’s advice about how to prepare for it. The carpenter swears “by Seint Thomas” (I, 3425); invokes God (I, 3427); prays, “Help us, Seint Frydeswyde!” (I, 3449); makes an observation about the limitations of human reason (“Men sholde nat knowe of Goddes pryvetee,” I, 3454); praises the common man whose only knowledge is his faith (“Ye, blessed be alwey a lewed man/ That noght but oonly his bileve kan!” I, 3455–56); invokes “Seint Thomas” a second time (I, 3461); takes an oath “by Jhesus, hevene kyng!” (I, 3464); urges the apparently entranced Nicholas to “thenk on Christes passioun!” (I, 3478); says a prayer – “Jhesu Crist and Seinte Benedight,/ Blesse this hous from every wikked wight,/ For nyghtes verye, the white pater-noster!” (I, 3483–85); urges the clerk to “Thynk on God” (I, 3491) as working men do. All this Chaucer piles on before Nicholas begins to tell the husband what to do to prepare for the coming flood, assuring him that it is “Cristes conseil that I seye” (I, 3504). 34 35

These analogues appear in Benson and Andersson, 26–38, 46–60, and Sources and Analogues, eds. Bryan and Dempster, 106–23. Cooper, The Canterbury Tales, 96. McGrady, “Chaucer and the Decameron Reconsidered,” cites Decameron 3, 4 as a tale upon which Chaucer drew.



Parallel Comic Tales  51

Similarly, Boccaccio at the outset of Decameron 3, 4 establishes the husband as a man of piety. Puccio di Rinieri was a spiritual person (“tutto dato allo spirito,” 252) who joined the Third Order of St. Francis and became Brother Puccio (“si fece bizzoco di quegli di san Francesco e fu chimato frate Puccio,” 252). Boccaccio even suggests that limited intelligence caused Puccio to become a religious fanatic: E per ciò che uomo idiota era e di grossa pasta, diceva suoi paternostri, andava alle prediche, stava alle messe, né mai falliva che alle laude che cantavano i secolari esso non fosse, e digiunava e disciplinavasi, e bucinavasi che egli era degli scopatori (252) [Being a simple, well-intentioned soul, he recited his paternosters, attended sermons, went to mass, and turned up infallibly whenever lauds were being sung by the lay-members. Moreover, he practiced fasting and other forms of self-discipline, and it was rumored that he was a member of the flagellants. (McWilliam, 216)]

Just three paragraphs later, Boccaccio has the monk give Puccio bizarre instructions about what he needs to do to achieve sainthood (and to clear the monk’s path to the paradise of the wife’s bedroom). The monk’s instructions in Decameron 3, 4 and Nicholas’s counsel are equally outrageous. The monk tells Puccio about a special form of penance that requires forty consecutive days of fasting, sexual abstinence, and, most importantly, the recitation of prayers said with arms outstretched and eyes fixed on the sky. The prayers are to be said from Compline to Matins. Puccio is further instructed that while he is free thereafter to sleep, he must find the time to attend three masses, remain in church until Vespers and then at Compline to return again to the room in his house where he prays, gazing at the sky, and starts the cycle of penitential ritual all over again. Puccio’s skywatching Compline prayers go on nightly for forty days while, in the next room, his wife and the monk eat, drink, and make love together. One night their actions cause the floor to shake so hard that the husband calls out from prayers in the next room to inquire what is happening. The quick-witted wife informs him that fasting is causing her to toss about in bed. Her gullible husband believes her and continues his Paternosters; the lovers continue their pleasures undisturbed, the wife triumphantly saying to her lover: “Tu fai fare la penitenzia a frate Puccio, per la quale noi abbiamo guadagnato il Paradiso” (257) [“You make Friar Puccio do the penance, but we are the ones who go to Paradise!” (221)]. Nicholas, the clerk in the Miller’s Tale, offers to teach John to “saven hire [Alisoun, the wife] and thee and me” (I, 3533). He gets to sleep with the carpenter’s wife by convincing him that to escape a calamitous flood which he predicts is coming, John must hoist three wooden tubs to the rafters, one each for the wife, the clerk, and himself. Like Boccaccio’s monk, the

52  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

clerk urges the husband’s abstinence: “Thy wyf and thou moote hange fer atweynne/ For that bitwixe yow shal be no synne” (I, 3589–90). All three climb to the rafters, get into their tubs, but the wife and clerk retreat to the bedroom as soon as John falls asleep. Before he does, however, he prays the Paternoster like Boccaccio’s Brother Puccio: “Now, Pater-noster, clom!” seyde Nicholay, And “Clom!” quod John, and “Clom!” seyde Alisoun. This carpenter seyde his devocioun, And stille he sit, and biddeth preyere.  (I, 3638–41)

Compared to the Flemish, German, and later Italian analogues, Decameron 3, 4 may be distant, yet the spirit, style, and shape of the episodes that get the husband out of the way of the wife and lover are similar enough to suggest that we have here an instance of memorial borrowing. Chaucer probably read the tale, remembered it, and produced something close to it when he set up the tryst in the Miller’s Tale. In his critical commentary to the variorum edition of the Miller’s Tale, Thomas Ross cites an observation made by Chaucer’s eighteenth-century editor, Thomas Tyrwhitt, apropos of Chaucer’s handling of sources and analogues in the comic tales: “he is generally satisfied with borrowing a slight hint of his subject, which he varies, enlarges, and embellishes at pleasure, and gives the whole the air and colour of an original.”36 This statement certainly seems to apply to Chaucer’s handling of the tryst-plotting episode in Decameron 3, 4 discussed above. The comic novellas of Boccaccio’s Decameron along with French (sometimes Flemish) fabliaux provided Chaucer with material that he could rework and reimagine in his own comic tales. An examination of Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale and his Shipman’s Tale, and their relationship to Italian novellas, most especially those of Boccaccio’s Decameron, bears this out as well. Although there is no known source for either of Chaucer’s tales, it has been said of both that they derive from lost French fabliaux.37 In fact, the two fabliaux are indebted to Italian models regardless of any other sources and influence. No one would deny that the French tradition of fourteenth-century European culture was common to both Boccaccio and Chaucer and that it affected their comic vision among other aspects of their art. Charles Muscatine’s analysis of the stylistic tension between the “ideal” and “realistic” Canterbury Tales – Chaucer and the French Tradition, the classic study on the subject 36

37

Thomas Tyrwhitt, The Canterbury Tales (1798), 87; cited by Thomas W. Ross in his edition of Chaucer, The Miller’s Tale, Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, II, 3 (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), 4. See Germaine Dempster, “On the Source of the Deception Story in the Merchant’s Tale,” Modern Philology 34 (1936–37): 133–54, and Spargo, Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale.



Parallel Comic Tales  53

– persuaded readers long ago of the significance the French fabliau had for the English poet; more recently, in an important article, Luciano Rossi, the authority on Italian novellas of the Trecento, has assessed the indebtedness of Boccaccio’s Decameron to French fabliaux.38 The very term, “fabliaux,” that literary critics have applied to six of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales – the Miller’s Tale, the Reeve’s Tale, the Merchant’s Tale, the Shipman’s Tale, the Summoner’s Tale, and the Friar’s Tale – suggests that one need look no further than “contes à rire en vers” to understand the source of Chaucer’s comic tales.39 It may, nonetheless, expand our understanding of these English tales to take a look at their relationship to the Italian novella. The merest glance at Bryan and Dempster’s Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales or at the two volumes of its new incarnation (completed under the editorship of Robert Correale with Mary Hamel) indicates that Italian novellas are highfrequency entries.40 The fact that both Chaucer and Boccaccio knew French fabliaux does not remove the likelihood of their mutual influence by Italian novellas nor of Chaucer’s indebtedness to Boccaccio’s early fourteenthcentury collection. The novella, a short prose vernacular tale, first appears in the late thirteenth century in the Libro di novelle e di bel parlar gentile, commonly known as Il Novellino.41 The form grew out of Latin prose exempla and didactic literature but also embraces fabliaux. The French fabliau, Du chevalier qui fist sa dame confesse, appears, for instance, in a short prose version in Il Novellino, and Bryan and Dempster cite a fabliau-like novella from an early manuscript of Il Novellino which they consider an analogue to Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale.42 The genre represented by Il Novellino develops into its most artistic form in the short prose tales of the Decameron, one third of which are comic. Not all novellas are. They include “material drawn from courtly tales and chivalric romance, from the Bible and hagiography, from written and oral sources.”43 One need only think of the exemplary tale that is Decameron 10, 10, about the patience of long-suffering Griselda – the final novella in Boccaccio’s collection, told in the Italian vernacular, which Petrarch later retold in Latin – a version of which Chaucer gives his pilgrim clerk to tell. That novellas are in prose rather than verse is a reminder of their roots in didactic literature: 38 39 40 41 42

43

Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition, and Rossi, “In Luogo di Sollazzo,” 13–27. Joseph Bédier’s famous definition of fabliaux appears in his seminal study, Les Fabliaux. Sources and Analogues, eds. Bryan and Dempster, and Sources and Analogues, ed. Correale with Hamel, vol. 1. (2002) and vol. 2 (2005). Il Novellino, ed. G. Favati (Genoa, 1970). The novella which derives from the fabliau, Du chevalier qui fist sa dame confesse, appears in Novellino e Conti del Duecento, ed. Sebastiano Lo Nigro (Turino, 1989); see Magliabechiano Strozziano II. III. 343 no. V., 329. In Sources and Analogues, eds. Bryan and Dempster, see 341–43 (which quotes from MS Panciatichiano 32, no. 19) for the fabliaulike novella which is an analogue to the Merchant’s Tale pear-tree deception scene. Gloria Allaire, ed., The Italian Novella (New York: Routledge, 2003), “Introduction,” 1.

54  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

medieval prose is mostly in Latin; vernacular literature is usually written in verse. Boccaccio invents a vernacular prose style for this collection of novellas which escapes from the formality of Latin models and creates the effect of colloquial speech overflowing with spontaneity. This idiomatic prose style elaborated for his novellas becomes the life blood of Boccaccian comedy. Thus, for example, Boccaccio sets the limited intelligence of the old, pious Puccio di Rinieri before us with a chatty description of his fanaticism in Decameron 3, 4: “E per ciò che uomo idiota era e di grossa pasta, diceva suoi paternostri, andava alla prediche, stava alle messe, né mai falliva che alle laude che cantavano i secolari esso non fosse.”44 The description is terse and ironic and quickly sets the old husband up to be tricked by a lascivious cleric. The parallel character, old John, of Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale, as we have seen, an analogue of Decameron 3, 4, unfolds more slowly over many lines of verse; likewise, the fullness of Chaucer’s satirical portrait of January, a similar amans senex, makes him a veritable Jamesian creation – and the Merchant’s Tale twice as long as the Miller’s Tale. Chaucer, as I have observed in another place, tends to maximize characterization when retelling stories.45 A consequence of the difference between the styles of the two great fourteenth-century storytellers is that when reading Boccaccio one may miss Chaucer’s rich characterization and when reading Chaucer, the reader may find his storytelling a bit clogged by comparison to Boccaccio’s exuberant pace. It is probably the energetic prose style that Boccaccio invents for his one hundred novellas, much more than his organizing frame, that leads David Wallace to the bold and somewhat surprising claim that the Decameron “becomes the prototype of the modern novel … a text of first resort for writers across Europe long after Chaucer and Dante have been abandoned as medieval curiosities.”46 In 1968, when Paul Ruggiers’ chapter on “The Italian Influence on Chaucer” first appeared in Beryl Rowland’s Companion to Chaucer Studies, the heavy-hitters within the world of Chaucer scholarship were divided on the question of Chaucer’s knowledge of Boccaccio’s Decameron. Robert A. Pratt and Karl Young doubted that Chaucer knew it – “Chaucer does not mention the Decameron, he borrows no stories directly from it, and no copy or translation of it can be traced in England during the period of his life.”47

44

45 46 47

Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Branca, 252; “Being a simple, well-intentioned soul, he recited his paternosters, attended sermons, went to mass, and turned up infallibly whenever lauds were being sung by lay-members,” McWilliam, 216. Heffernan, “Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale and Boccaccio,” 262–66. David Wallace, Giovanni Boccaccio: Decameron (Cambridge, 1991), 3. Sources and Analogues, eds. Bryan and Dempster, 20. Cited by Ruggiers in “The Italian Influence on Chaucer,” in Companion to Chaucer Studies (Toronto and London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 154.



Parallel Comic Tales  55

John S. P. Tatlock, on the other hand, believed the poet possibly did know the collection of tales: “In view of his taste for reading and inexhaustible curiosity, it is incredible that he had not heard of the Decameron, and indeed seen it.”48 Within the past thirteen years several major Chaucerians have clearly asserted their belief that Chaucer was deeply influenced by the Decameron. In his biography of Chaucer, Derek Pearsall is emphatic: “There had been many story collections before, and some with a narrative frame, but the only one that decisively influenced Chaucer was Boccaccio’s Decameron.”49 So is David Wallace: “the most significant witness to the Decameron’s influence in England is Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Six of Chaucer’s two dozen stories find parallels in the Decameron.”50 Likewise convinced of Chaucer’s knowledge of Boccaccio’s Decameron, Helen Cooper doubts, however, that Chaucer owned a copy. Because it seems to her that none of the “various parallels in Boccaccio offers an indisputable verbal source for any of the tales,” Cooper credits Chaucer’s good memory for his “elaboration of a model recalled from the Decameron.”51 To be sure, Chaucer’s memory for his reading in a preprint age must have been very strong – much greater than we can easily imagine.52 Parallels, however, between Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale and Decameron 9, 6 discussed at the beginning of this chapter indicate that several are close paraphrases which even carry over direct discourse, suggesting that the English poet had a copy of Boccaccio’s tale and was not merely drawing on the memory of a tale read on an early trip to Italy. Especially notable are the parallel descriptions of the moment when the wife who has got up in the night is about to get back into her bed but notices that there is no cradle beside it and comments that she almost jumped into the wrong bed. The consensus is that the longest of Chaucer’s comic tales, the Merchant’s Tale, is at its core, a fabliau. Germaine Dempster, the early scholar of sources and analogues, argued the case for a non-extant French fabliau source.53 In 1971 Larry Benson and Theodore Andersson concluded that the tale has “a fabliau nucleus – adultery in a pear tree” and that the situation “draws on that inexhaustible source of humor, the cuckold comedy.”54 Similarly, several years later, Thomas D. Cooke judged the Merchant’s Tale to be one which

48 49 50 51 52 53 54

Tatlock, The Mind and Art of Chaucer, 90. Cited by Ruggiers in “The Italian Influence on Chaucer,” 154. Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, Inc., 1992), 240. Wallace, Giovanni Boccaccio: Decameron, 111. Cooper, “Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: Reviewing the Work,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 19 (1997): 199. See Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Dempster, “On the Source of the Deception Story in the Merchant’s Tale,” 133–54. Benson and Andersson, 203–04.

56  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

“builds on and resembles a well-known fabliau plot.”55 John Hines wrote, more recently, “There is no mistaking the clear fabliau structure of the tale of the old man – becoming in the course of the tale a jealous old husband – who takes a young wife and is cuckolded.”56 Scholars acknowledge, at the same time, literary parallels in non-French literature that is extant, some of it as early as (or earlier than) thirteenthcentury Old French fabliaux. The young wife’s flamboyant cuckolding of her husband and the deception of him in a pear tree is found in a Latin, non-dramatic comedia, written in the second half of the twelfth century somewhere in the Loire valley of France: the Comedia Lidie. This narrative composed in elegiac distichs was, without question, the source of Boccaccio’s Decameron 7, 9.57 As mentioned briefly in the preceding chapter about comedy before Boccaccio and Chaucer, three motifs in the Merchant’s Tale indicate that Chaucer too may well have known the Comedia Lidie. They are (1) the use of mythological associations for main characters, (2) Chaucer’s apparent playful inversion of Vendôme’s negative passage on marriage and wives within January’s encomium on the same topics, both texts of which appear early in their respective tales, and (3) his retention of the root word of Vendôme’s witty polyptoton, “rapitur … rapta rapit” (Comedia Lidie, 454)58 in his penetrating insight into January’s inner life; that is, that he is carried away by himself – “ravysshed in a traunce” (Merchant’s Tale, IV, 1750). The nature of these connections, especially items 2 and 3, suggests that Chaucer could have had access to Vendôme’s text. Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale and Matthew of Vendôme’s Lidia are both full of classical references: twenty-four in the Latin tale59 and twenty-three in the Merchant’s Tale.60 Boccaccio sets the ninth tale told on the seventh day of

55 56 57

58

59

60

Cooke, 185. Hines, 177. Vittore Branca, editor of the definitive edition of the Decameron, writes in his notes to Decameron 7, 9, “È una delle pochissime novelle di cui sia chiara e sicura la fonte” (1090; “It is one of the few novellas whose source is clear and sure”). Benson and Andersson state simply that “This twelfth-century Latin fabliau is so close to Boccaccio’s novella that it must be regarded as Boccaccio’s immediate source” (204). Carol Falvo Heffernan’s “Three Unnoticed Links between Matthew of Vendôme’s Comedia Lidie and Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale,” Notes and Queries 50 (June 2003): 158–62 argues that the Latin comedia is a common source for the Merchant’s Tale and Decameron 7, 9. See also Smarr, “Mercury in the Garden: Mythographical Methods in the Merchant’s Tale and Decameron 7, 9,” 209. All references to this text are cited from Lidia in La Comédie latine en France au XIIe siècle. The playfulness of the polyptoton appealed to the French doctor grammaticus; see also “Dux … ducem … ducitur … ducit,” below, p. 58. Ioue, 11; Amphitruona, 11; Helyadum, 23; Penelope, 131; Lucretia, 131; Thaydis, Thays, 134; Sabina, 137; Ypolitus, 244; Phedra, 244; Truie, 247; Ypoliti, 251; Bromii, 359; Iouis, 376; Deucalionis, 426; Niobe, 429; Circe, 429; Medea, 430; Lays, 430; Flegetonteis, 432; Tyndaridis, 441; Ioui, 442. Orpheus, 1716; Thebes Amphioun, 1716; Theodomas, 1720; Bacus, 1722; Venus, 1723;



Parallel Comic Tales  57

the Decameron in Greece, specifically in “Argo, antichissima città d’Acaia” (612) [“Argos, the most ancient city of Achaia”], but there is not one classical allusion to gods, goddesses, or other mythological figures.61 The Italian’s tale about marital infidelity and female cunning is told in the most literal way possible, though, in broad terms, the setting in Argos may suggest the city’s association with Hera.62 Among the many classical references in the Latin and Middle English tales there are two analogies that are particularly revealing about how Chaucer and Vendôme thought about their comic tales. They are Matthew of Vendôme’s explicit comparison of Lidia and her husband’s knight, Pirrus, to Phaedra and Hippolytus respectively – Pirrus ut Ypolitus, Lidia Phedra manet  (244) [Pirrus is like Hippolytus, while Lidia is like Phaedra]

– and Chaucer’s implicit analogy between the all too human couple, May, the young wife, and her old husband, January, on the one hand, and the couple from the realm of faery, the goddess Proserpina and the god Pluto, on the other. May, in the conclusion to the Merchant’s Tale, is provided with her ready explanation by the goddess Proserpina when Pluto restores sight to May’s blind husband, January, just in time for him to see his wife in flagrante delicto with her lover, Damian, in the branches of the pear tree. May is, with all the beauty and youth contained in the image evoked by her name, clearly meant to be associated with the daughter of Demeter (the Greek corn goddess), Proserpina, and wintry January with Pluto, her raptor and god of the Underworld. Vendôme is interested in his stand-offish lover and the passionate wife; Chaucer focuses more on the aged husband and his wife’s youth. The French author, therefore, likens Pirrus to the anti-sexual Hippolytus reacting to Lidia’s intense, Phaedra-like desire, setting her tasks so difficult to perform as to make a rendezvous all but impossible: she must kill her husband’s favorite falcon, pluck hairs from his beard, and extract one of his teeth before Pirrus will trust the sincerity of her love, while Chaucer sees in the wealthy old man’s marriage to the young girl the carrying off of Proserpina to Hades by the Roman god of the underworld, Pluto – but also something else. Before he was associated with death, Pluto was god of wealth (from Greek Plouton, “the rich one,” from ploutos, wealth), a detail particularly suited to the circumstances of this marriage in the story told by

61 62

Ymeneus, 1730; Mercurie, 1734; Parys, 1754; Eleyne, 1754; Venus, 1777; Venus, 1875; Priapus, 2034; Pluto, 2038; Proserpina, 2039; Piramus, 2128; Thesbee, 2128; Pluto, 2211; Jovis, 2224; Pluto, 2227; Proserpyna, 2229; Pluto 2254; Proserpyne, 2264. All English translations of Italian and Latin in this section are my own. Hera, the deity of marriage and the life of women, was worshipped in classical times at the Heraeum, six miles north of Argos (The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 2nd ed., eds. N. G. L. Hammond and H. H. Scullard [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991], 106).

58  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

the Merchant pilgrim who is himself not only rich but recently and unhappily married.63 Chaucer does not appear to be copying Vendôme, but he may be playfully rearranging. Early in the Merchant’s Tale, there is a lengthy and well-known passage on the serenity of married life and the virtues of wives (IV, 1263–1398) which old January speaks to his counselors, Justinus and Placebo, to whom he turns not so much for advice as for encouragement in his decision to marry at the age of sixty. The passage begins, “Noon oother lyf,” seyde he, “is worth a bene, For wedlok is so esy and so clene, That in this world it is a paradys.” Thus seyde this olde knyght, that was so wys. And certeinly, as sooth as God is kyng, To take a wyf it is a glorious thyng, And namely whan a man is oold and hoor; Thanne is a wyf the fruyt of his tresor.  (IV, 1263–70)

The rest of the long passage sustains this sunny view of wives and married life. A completely opposite view of marriage and of wives is expressed shortly after the start of Vendôme’s tale. Lusca, the faithful servant of Lidia, goes to Pirrus to tell him her mistress is suffering for love of him and will die without his return of her affection. Pirrus, however, expresses loyalty to Lidia’s husband, Decius, and cuts off Lusca’s efforts at persuasion. There follows immediately thereafter a passage on female vices and the danger they pose to husbands: Est modo uel facilis uel modo nulla fides: Dux amat hanc, non illa ducem; male ducitur ille; Quo uult, quo non uult, Lidia ducit eum. Mel sibi propinat uerbis rebusque uenenum, Que fido lateri uipera nexa iacet. Dux, uigila! uigilare decet ne mordeat illa, Que grauius reliquis uipera uirus agit; Et si dux uigilet, uigilantem lambere nouit; Ludere dissimulans ledere cauda solet. Ne se conseruet, ne sit sibi corumodus ipse, A se feminea fraude recedit homo.  (Lidia, 80–90) [Fidelity comes easily or does not come at all. The duke loves Lidia; she does not love the duke, which conduces, unhappily, to

63

In the light of January’s blindness, it is of further interest that in Aristophanes’ Plutus there is a description of the curing of Plutus’s blindness, after which, knowing where he goes, Pluto visits honest men only.



Parallel Comic Tales  59 her conducting him hither and yon as she wills. In words she toasts his health and in deeds pours a draft of poison; she lies beside the faithful, honest man and entwines herself about him like a snake. Beware, oh Duke, watch out for a bite that is deadlier than any other snake’s. And even if the duke is alert, she knows how to tear him to pieces; she pretends to play, then stings with her tail. Deceived by women, men lose track of how to take care of themselves.]

Though the passage is presented from the narrator’s point of view, that view coincides with what we understand Pirrus’s thinking to be at this early point in the tale. Pirrus could just as well have spoken the words. The placement of Vendôme’s passage parallels Chaucer’s: like the speech given to January, it comes at the beginning of the tale. Chaucer seems to have created for January – on the verge of marriage – a kind of dialogue with the views expressed byVendôme’s woman-hating narrative voice, a voice which breaks in just at that point in the comedy where Lidia’s servant, Lusca, is trying to engineer the start of her married mistress’s affair. Though Vendôme’s passage is not as long as January’s speech on the bliss of married life, the French author does expand on its sour view of wives when he returns to the misogynistic theme after the completion of the second task (Lidia’s pulling hairs out of her husband’s beard): “Femina uipereis homini blandita uenenis;/ Est miranda suis ipsa Chimera modis:/ Nunc leo, nunc serpens, nunc est capra; trux, uaga, feda” (333–35) [“Woman cajoles her husband, but she is a poisonous viper, she is the Chimera herself, appearing in all her different aspects, sometimes a lion, sometimes a serpent, sometimes a goat, ferocious, insatiable, hideous.”] And so the narrator continues for fourteen more lines. Like January’s view of marriage, that of Vendôme’s narrator pervades the text. In Boccaccio’s Decameron 7, 9 there are no speeches on women or marriage, just the unfolding action of the comic tale. Once Lidia’s affair with Pirrus is on its way, Vendôme enlists a playful polyptoton, noted briefly in Chapter 2 (p. 30), to express the mutual rapture which is at long last shared by Pirrus and Lidia: Accedit Pirrumque suis furatur ocellis, Et quo iam rapitur sidere rapta rapit.  (Lidia, 453–54) [She comes and steals Pirrus with her eyes, and with the star by which she is taken, the taken woman takes [him].]

Chaucer takes this witty expression of the reality of mutual rapture and replaces it with an image of January’s solitary, almost delusional self-ravishment : This Januarie is ravysshed in a traunce, At every tyme he looked on hir face;

60  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio But in his herte he gan hire to manace That he that nyght in armes wolde hire streyene.  (IV, 1750–53)

The verbal similarities are striking: the Middle English verb, ravissen, “to carry away,” derives from Old French, ravir, which is etymologically related to Latin rapere, “to seize and carry away forcibly; to rape.” Chaucer’s description contains not just the idea of being carried away but the glance; Lidia’s eyes seduce Pirrus and January continually looks at May’s face. We can, perhaps, also modify an observation made by Peter Beidler about a medical thread connecting Chaucer’s tale to Boccaccio’s and in so doing enlarge the possible Chaucer-Vendôme connections by one more. Beidler has pointed out that “It is possible that Chaucer may have taken the suggestion for May’s pretending to be a doctor from Boccaccio’s Lidia.”64 Indeed, the Italian heroine assures her husband that she can perform the extraction of his tooth as well as any doctor (“senza alcun maestro io medesima tel trarrò ottimamente,” 619) and her claim may provide Chaucer with the idea for May’s claim that she is able “to heele” (line 2372) her husband’s blindness and for her reference to “my medicyne” (line 2380). It is, however, also possible that Chaucer could have got the idea directly from Vendôme’s tale which likewise contains Lidia’s performance of dental extraction. Her husband, Decius, speaks to her as if she were truly wise in matters medical: “Quid mihi consilii dabit, aut quam Lidia mentem?/ Ars que subueniet, que medicina mihi?” (403–04) [“What counsel do you give me, my Lidia? What treatment will get me out of this predicament? What remedy?”]. Lidia looks into his mouth like a doctor and delivers a medical diagnosis: “Si tibi dens noceat, vellatur …; Si sit causa mali, cedet ab ore malum” (405–06) [“If your tooth is doing the harm, let it be extracted …; If it’s the cause of the trouble, remove the illness from your mouth.”] Finally the question of how likely it is that Chaucer read Matthew of Vendôme’s Comedia Lydie needs to be addressed and, if he did read it, where and when. It is well established, as observed in Chapter 1 (pp. 10–11), that Chaucer traveled to Genoa and Florence in 1372–73 and that he did not return to England until May 23, 1373, after some six months had passed, during which time he had, among other charges, to negotiate a loan with one of the banking houses of Florence. Less clear is whether or not Chaucer may have gone to Italy as early as 1368, perhaps, attending the wedding of Prince Lionel to Violante Visconti on May 28, 1368.65 We know that Chaucer was in Italy between May 28 and September 19, 1378. Those four months involved negotiations in Milan with Bernardo Visconti and his son-in-law, Sir

64 65

Peter Beidler, “Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale and the Decameron,” Italica 50 (1973): 275. Haldeen Braddy, “New Documentary Evidence Concerning Chaucer’s Mission to Lombardy,”Modern Language Notes 48 (1933), 507–11.



Parallel Comic Tales  61

John Hawkwood.66 During the six months he certainly had between 1372 and 1373, Chaucer might have had time to read in Italian private libraries and may have heard of Boccaccio’s work on Dante, already in progress in 1373, in preparation for lectures the Italian writer would give at the University of Florence. Boccaccio, born in Certaldo in 1313, was brought to Florence at the age of six. In Naples by 1328, he returned to Florence in 1340, where he began to immerse himself in the study of classics.67 That was the period when Boccaccio assembled the eclectic gathering of classical literature and medieval works which make up MS Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Pluteus 33.31.68 This Miscellany is precisely the sort of work that Derek Pearsall thinks Chaucer tended to lean on for his knowledge of Latin works. He comments, “Probably much of Chaucer’s knowledge of classical writings came from anthologies and miscellanies containing extracts and purple passages, with or without authorship attributions and glosses.”69 The Miscellany, copied by Boccaccio, and containing the Comedia Lydie, also includes Ovid’s Ibis, his Amores, poems from the Appendix Vergiliana and the Priapeia, Fulgentius as well as medieval works, among them the Microcosmus and Megacosmos of Bernardus Silvestris and several comedies, including the Lidia, attributed to Vendôme, and Alda by Guillaume de Blois.70 It seems most unlikely that this manuscript, put together for Boccaccio’s personal use, would have been made available to Chaucer between 1372 and 1373 when the English poet was in Florence and when the Italian poet was hard at work on his Dante lectures and just two years away from death (in 1375). It is an open question, however, whether this manuscript might have been available for reading after Boccaccio’s death when Chaucer was again in Italy in 1378.71 One would like to think Chaucer had read it, especially as this manuscript not only contains Vendôme’s Lidia, but Vergil’s Priapea as well; Priapus, god of gardens and over-size genitals, plays a part in the Merchant’s garden. 66 67 68 69 70 71

Ruggiers, “The Italian Influence on Chaucer,” 142. Angelo Ottolini, “Introduction,” in Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Decamerone, ed. Michele Scherillo, 6th ed. (Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1951), xviii. “Mostra di Manoscritti, Documenti e Edizioni,” VI, Centenario della morte di Giovanni Boccaccio, Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, 22 maggio – 31 agosto, 1975, 122. Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, 32. “Mostra,” 123. Besides Boccaccio, we know of two other owners of Pluteus 33.31. One is Cosimo di Medici (1389–1464), the Florentine banker and grandfather of Lorenzo di Medici. Though Cosimo’s early life coincided with the time Chaucer was at work on the Canterbury Tales (1387–1400) and might have valued the use of the Lidia in thinking about the Merchant’s Tale, there is no evidence that Chaucer was in Italy again after 1378, and it is anyway unclear just when Cosimo acquired the manuscript. It is known that before Cosimo had it, the manuscript belonged to “Antonij Petrei”; that is, Antonius Petreus. Who he was is unknown. If he acquired it soon after Boccaccio’s death in 1375 and if he lived in Italy, it is possible that this very manuscript could have been put at Chaucer’s disposal on his Italian trip of 1378.

62  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

And after Ovid, Vergil is Chaucer’s favorite classical author. It is more probable that other manuscripts in Italy’s private libraries to which Chaucer had access may have contained the text. Boccaccio, after all, seems to have made his copy in Florence during the 1340s from another text. Moreover, Chaucer could even have read it outside of Italy in a manuscript that was then extant – at Oxford, perhaps. The only other manuscript now known to us which also contains the Comedia Lydie is in Austria – National Library of Vienna, MS 312. Although Chaucer could have read the Latin Comedia Lydie, I agree with Peter Beidler that he may have taken May’s pretending to be a doctor from Boccaccio’s Lidia.72 Beidler has argued furthermore that, though influenced by Decameron 7, 9, Chaucer’s tale told by the Merchant is directly related to “Un Uomo Ricco E La Sua Donna,” a tale from the Italian Novellino, the collection of Italian novellas gathered in 1280.73 The early date of some of these extant analogues – most especially the highly rhetorical and lengthy Latin work acknowledged to be the direct source of Boccaccio’s novella – should raise some serious questions about the presumption of the Old French fabliau origins of Chaucer’s comic tale. The most elaborate versions of this tale of adultery in the pear tree are Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale (which is 1,173 lines long) and the Latin Comedia Lidie (556 lines in length). Both take a long time to get to the pear tree episode – approximately 890 lines in Chaucer, about 500 lines in the Latin poem. The pear tree scene, in which the old husband sees his wife making love with a young man in the branches of the tree and is then either deceived into believing that the tree is magical and creates ocular delusions (the comedia version and Boccaccio’s) or that (as in Chaucer’s version) the wife allowed the seduction to cure his blindness, is the plot element which gives the tale its unique identity among other comic tales of cuckoldry. The episode, however, which is only a small fraction of the total lines of verse in both the Middle English and Latin narratives, contains only part of the tales’ meaning. Chaucer begins with an ironic treatment of January’s praise of marriage and his delusions about the blissful state, he then takes the reader to the marriage bed of the old husband and his bride, May, and finally describes a garden which is constructed for their al fresco lovemaking. The twelfthcentury Latin poet prefaces the pear tree episode with Lydia’s accomplishing three proofs of love for her husband’s retainer (and her love object): killing the favorite falcon of her husband, pulling a tuft of hairs from his chin, and extracting one of his teeth. Though the Middle English and Latin versions of the tale focus on different things on their way to the pear tree deception scene, the long lead-ins of both narratives present self-conscious explorations 72 73

Beidler, “Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale and the Decameron,” 275. Beidler, “Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale and the Decameron,” 266–84. The Novellino tale is printed (and translated) in Benson and Andersson, 238–41.



Parallel Comic Tales  63

of passionate love and its excesses, the fundamental problem underlying each of the comedies which overflow, however, with irony, hilarious puns, and physical humor. In the Comedia Lidie, the love of the old man’s wife for the young man is made Phaedra-like in intensity: Stat; cadit; errat; hebet; nunc huc, nunc affluit illuc: Spes, pudor, ingenium, mens vaga, cecus amor. Cum duce quando sedet, si transit Pirrus, et illa Incumbit lateri, languida visa, ducis. … Nocte vigil, si quando tamen sit victa sopore, Sompniat, et “Pir! Pir!” garrula lingua sonat.74

Chaucer makes the sixty-year-old bachelor, January, who decides to become May’s husband, the character whose love lacks restraint. “Ravyshed in a traunce” (IV, 1750), he pursues the delusion that he can love May, his private rosebud, as if he were Guillaume de Lorris’s Lover in the spring of life. In a magnificent simile, Chaucer captures the false images that constitute January’s soul, in disarray from obsessive daily and nightly dreaming about the erotic possibilities of marriage. The fair shapes and forms of his feverish brain are likened to the images reflected in a mirror set up in a cheap bazaar: Heigh fantasye and curious bisynesse Fro day to day gan in the soule impresse Of Januarie aboute his marriage. Many fair shap and many a fair visage Ther passeth thurgh his herte nyght by nyght, As whoso tooke a mirour, polished bright, And sette it in a commune market-place, Thanne sholde he se ful many a figure pace.  (IV, 1577–84)

January’s blindness to true images resonates beyond this context and anticipates things to come (i.e., a wife who does not love him, her taking a young lover, their brazen frolic in the branches of a tree over the husband’s head, January’s actual physical blindness). The distortions of January’s restless brain projected in the mirror reverse the process of the distorting mirrors familiar from carnival fun houses. They make the beautiful ugly; the mirror on January’s soul transmutes the ugly into beauty. The Latin poet’s characterization of Lydia likewise prepares for the future: her willingness to do any 74

Benson and Andersson, 208; they translate (209): “She stops, faints, wanders, moons; now she rushes here, now there./ Hope, shame, character become confusion and blind love./ When she sits with the Duke, if Pyrrhus passes by,/ she appears to be faint and leans on the Duke./ … Wakeful at night, but if now and again overcome by sleep/ She dozes, her talkative tongue says, “Pyr! Pyr!”

64  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

desperate thing to win a lover. Like its Latin source, Boccaccio’s Decameron 7, 9 contains a wanton wife who becomes besotted with her husband’s servant, but the Italian author’s main interests lie elsewhere and he is terse about the matter: Di costui Lidia s’innamorò forte, tanto che né dì né notte che in altra parte che con lui aver poteva il pensiero. (613) [With this young man, Lydia fell desperately in love, to such an extent that her thoughts were fixed upon him alone at every hour of the day and night. (McWilliam, 533–34)]

Whereas the Comedia Lidie and Decameron 7, 9 both depict an overwrought wife of a rich old man who initiates a love affair with her husband’s young servant, Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale sketches an old man’s obsession with his young wife-to-be before marriage and later within it.75 Boccaccio’s primary concern in Decameron 7, 9 is the subject of female cunning (a feature of the Comedia Lidie as well). All ten tales told on the seventh day of storytelling in the Decameron, in fact, take as their subject the “beffe, le quali o per amore o per salvamento di loro le donne hanno già fatte a’ suoi mariti, senza essersene avveduti o sì” (557) [“the tricks which, either in the cause of love or for motives of self-preservation, women have played upon their husbands, irrespective of whether or not they were found out” (McWilliam, 484)]. Chaucer cares much more about anatomizing the character of the cuckolded husband than about exposing female cunning (however brilliant the depiction of May’s trickery of blind January may be in the pear tree episode of the Merchant’s Tale). Chaucer brings the portrait of old January to its nadir the morning after the marriage when the husband is seen from the perspective of the young wife in her bridal bed: The slake skyn about his nekke shaketh Whil that he sang, so shaunteth he and craketh. But God woot what that May thoughte in hir herte, Whan she hym saugh up sittynge in his sherte In his nyght-cappe, and with his nekke lene.76  (IV, 1849–53) 75

76

Even though January’s servant is said to be “so ravysshed on his lady May/ That for the verray peyne he was ny wood” (1774–75), the reader hardly notices because it is normal for a young squire to love someone like “fresshe May” (1782). In the thirteenth-century tale, “Un Uomo Ricco e La Sua Donna,” of the Novellino, though we are told that the wealthy husband was “molto geloso” (very jealous), the one who is said to suffer is the man who initiates the affair and expresses that he is dying for love of the rich man’s wife (Benson and Andersson, 238–39). In Boccaccio’s pastoral romance, the Ameto, six nymphs narrate stories of love. One nymph, Agapes, recounts that she was given to “un vecchio, avvegan che copioso …” (Giovanni Boccaccio, “L’Ameto, Lettere, Il Corbaccio,” in Scrittori D’Italia, N. 182, Opere, V, ed. Nicola Bruscoli [Bari: Laterza, 1940], 94). All references to the Ameto refer to this edition.



Parallel Comic Tales  65

By making January the comic target, Chaucer creates a downfall that is not merely an illustration of female cunning, but a morally satisfying denouement as well. January’s decision to marry young May violates Nature, who, in the Parlement of Fowles, Chaucer shows mating like with like “By evene accord” (678). It is Reason in Nature that gives the formel eagle the right to choose her mate: … she Shal han right hym on whom hire herte is set, And he here that his herte hath on hire knet.  (Parlement of Fowles, 626–28)

January lacks reasonableness. The epitome of January’s foolishness is the private pleasure garden that he constructs to help him “lyve ful deliciously” (Merchant’s Tale, IV, 2025): So faire a gardyn woot I nowher noon. For, out of doute, I verraily suppose That he that wroot the Romance of the Rose Ne koude of it the beautee wel devyse; Ne Priapus ne myghte not suffise, Though he be god of gardyns, for to telle The beautee of the gardyn and the welle, That stood under a laurer alwey grene. Ful ofte tyme he Pluto and his queene, Proserpina, and al hire fayerye, Disporten hem and maken melodye Aboute that well, and daunced as men tolde.  (IV, 2030–41)

Old January most defiantly flung himself into Narcissus’s well when his selfcentered pursuit of pleasure led him into the futility of marrying young May, who does not love him. The literary allusion to the allegorical love garden of the Romance of the Rose in the passage above heightens the distortion of January’s lust for May and, furthermore, throws into high relief the crudeness of her lover’s swift intercourse with her in the phallic center of January’s garden – the branches of the pear tree. The reference to the Romance of the Rose, among other literary allusions (e.g., to Eden, the Song of Solomon) that appear in the course of the lengthy description of January’s pleasure garden, The repulsive senility of the husband, described by the nymph, Agapes, resembles May’s reaction to January. Among the many signs of age which Agapes mentions, the following recall May’s bridal morning details: “le sue guance, per crespezza ruvide …,” “il sottile collo ne vena ne asso nasconde” (94). The Ameto and the Decameron were the most widely diffused of all Boccaccio’s works in Italy. Bryan and Dempster conclude that such “resemblances between young Agapes’ picture of her old husband and the description of January are not likely to be accidental” (Sources and Analogues, 339). In view of the symbolic overtones of Agapes’ name, these early erotic tales by Boccaccio might be taken as allegories.

66  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

permits a moral element to enter the scene of the blind old man’s deception. Such literary allusions suggest serious ideals (i.e., love, chastity) the opposites of which dominate the comic scene (lust, adultery, and so on). This mix of seriousness and comedy may be derivative of the novella’s didactic origins. In the climatic episode, Pluto, god of wealth and January’s sponsor, provides January’s vision, on the one hand, while Proserpina, Pluto’s possession and May’s patroness, gives May her ready excuse, on the other. Chaucer’s January does not really believe May’s explanation that her “struggle with a man upon a tree” (IV, 2374) was intended to heal his blind eyes – “Struggle?” quod he, “Ye, algate in it wente! God yeve yow both on shames deth to dyen! He swyved thee; I saugh it with myne yen.”  (IV, 2376–78)

There is a pear tree story in the Novellino tale – “Un Uomo Ricco E La Sua Donna” – that is a version close to Chaucer’s in which the cuckolded husband is blind (not merely deluded as in Decameron 7, 9). In the Novellino tale, however, when God gives the old man vision to see the wife’s tryst, he is satisfied with her incredible excuse, “S’io non avessi fatto choisié, tue non n’averesti mai veduto lume.”77 Chaucer’s substitution of the classical gods, Pluto and Proserpina, for the Novellino’s God and St. Peter effectively expands the implications of his mordant tale of marriage into the eternal (and pagan) realm. Furthermore, the expansion together with the allegorical dimension of the pear tree garden in the Merchant’s Tale takes its garden locale beyond the more typical domain of a fabliau garden, as exemplified, for example, by the opulent but limited one found in Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale. The Merchant’s Tale garden is at once comic and otherworldly. Early scholarship on Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale, as in the case of the Merchant’s Tale, hypothesized derivation from a lost French fabliau. John Spargo’s postulation of a non-extant French fabliau source in his 1941 study, Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale: The Lover’s Gift Regained, was considered authoritative for several decades.78 Spargo’s influence is seen, for instance, in a comment made by Thomas D. Cooke in his 1978 study, Old French and Chaucerian Fabliaux, which is fairly typical for the time: “Although the ‘Shipman’s Tale’ has no known source, readers generally agree that it comes closest in both style and content of all of Chaucer’s fabliaux to the French.”79 More recently, in a survey of scholarship on the question of Chaucer’s knowledge of Boccaccio’s Decameron in which he urges “scholars to consider the first tale of the eighth day of the Decameron as a hard analogue to the Ship77 78 79

Benson and Andersson, 240; “If I had not done thus with him, you would never have seen the light” (241). Spargo, Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale. His views are summarized in Sources and Analogues, eds. Bryan and Dempster, 439–46. Cooke, 172.



Parallel Comic Tales  67

man’s Tale, an analogue with near-source status,” Peter Beidler is still careful to take account of Spargo; he adds the caveat, “It is remotely possible that Chaucer could have known a French fabliau version now lost to us, but we have no evidence that such a fabliau ever existed.”80 In an essay on Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale and Boccaccio published in 1990, I also was burdened by caution (“I propose merely that by studying Chaucer’s handling of the story told by Boccaccio we may form a very good idea of the direction in which he modified the received French fabliau [if there was one]”).81 As early as 1977, Donald McGrady, however, did not hesitate to clearly assert the primacy of the influence of Italian novellas on Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale: “the story of the Shipman was based chiefly upon Sercambi’s novella [No. 31], with additions from the Decameron.”82 McGrady was, in part, emboldened to reach his conclusion by Richard Guerin’s persuasively comprehensive summary of the numerous parallel plot elements and details which exist between the tales of Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Sercambi. Some of these also appear in an elaborate three-column chart drawn up earlier by Robert Pratt.83 Though the listing of parallel plot elements and other details shared among the Italian and English tales may smack of the old-fashioned methodology of nineteenth-century Germanic philologists, the accumulation of so many parallel details cannot be explained away as the result of co­incidence. It seems obvious that the sources for Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale are Italian – Boccaccio’s Decameron 8, 1, certainly. And the English poet may also be indebted to the second tale of day eight in the Decameron.84 Boccaccio’s own summaries which precede Decameron 8, 1 and 8, 2, respectively, clearly indi80 81 82 83

84

Beidler, “Just Say Yes, Chaucer Knew the Decameron,”, 42–43. Heffernan, “Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale and Boccaccio,” 262. McGrady, “Chaucer and the Decameron Reconsidered,” 11. McGrady, 10–11: “Nearly every significant element of plot and characterization in the Shipman’s Tale is also present in at least one of the Italian stories: the wife needs money the following Sunday (Sercambi/Chaucer); the husband requests prompt repayment (Sercambi/ Chaucer); the husband leaves the next day (Sercambi/Chaucer); the following Sunday the lover gives the wife the money (Sercambi/Chaucer); the wife and the lover spend time together only until the next day (Sercambi/Chaucer); the lover tells the husband he has returned the money to the wife (Sercambi/Chaucer/Boccaccio, VIII,1); the husband is surprised that his wife had not told him of the return of the money (Sercambi/Chaucer); she replies that she had not considered the money as repayment on a loan (Sercambi/Chaucer); the lover does not tell the husband he intends to return the money to the wife (Chaucer/ Boccaccio, VIII,1); the husband and the lover are friends (Chaucer/Boccaccio, VIII,1); the wife insists upon absolute secrecy (Chaucer/Boccaccio, VIII, 1); the lover is a cleric (Chaucer/Boccaccio, VIII,2); and the season of the year – summer – is an important part of the setting (Chaucer/Boccaccio, VIII,2)”. The passage is quoted from Richard Guerin, “The Shipman’s Tale: The Italian Analogues,” 419. Robert A. Pratt includes most of these connections between the tales in a three-column chart in “Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale and Sercambi,” Modern Language Notes 55 (February 1940): 143–44. In his contribution on “The Shipman’s Tale,” (Sources and Analogues, II, ed. Correale with

68  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

cate that the two novellas are fundamentally the same tale, the money paid for the lady’s favors in 8, 1 being replaced by a cloak in 8, 2: Novella 1 Gulfardo prende da Guasparruolo denari in prestanza, e con la moglie di lui accordato di dover giacer con lei per quegli sì gliele dà; e poi in presenza di lei a Guasparruol dice che a lei gli diede, e ella dice che non è il vero.85 Novella 2 Il prete da Varlungo si giace con monna Belcolore, lasciale pegno un suo tabarro; e accattato da lei un mortaio, il rimanda e fa domandare il tabarro lasciato per ricordanza: rendelo proverbiando la buona donna.86

All the tales of the eighth day are told under the rule of Lauretta and take as their theme, tricks that people play on one another, men as well as women. In Decameron 8, 1, a tale told by a woman (Neifile), the person who is tricked is a woman who deserves reprisal because, as she says, “colei esser degna del fuoco la quale a ciò per prezzo si conduce” (636) [“any woman who strays from the path of virtue for monetary gain deserves to be burnt alive” (McWilliam, 552)]. Decameron 8, 2 is told by a man, Panfilo, who claims his tale exposes the lechery of priests who seduce wives but whose tale ends, nonetheless, as does 8, 1, with the wife being made a fool of (albeit by a priest-lover who gets her favors for free). Sercambi’s novella, “De Avaritia E Lussuria,” is a redaction of Decameron 8, 1 in which the wife is actually a prostitute whose rendezvous with the trickster/seducer – here a German soldier, Bernardo – is described in close, vulgar detail.87 It is unlikely, however, that Chaucer knew Sercambi’s novella, as his collection of novellas was composed in 1400, too late for Chaucer to have known them.88 In all four narratives illicit love flourishes in money-conscious settings, three of them bourgeois, wherein characters are shown earning money,

85

86

87 88

Hamel), John Scattergood states, “these stories [Decameron 8, 1 and 8, 2] are the closest analogues to The Shipman’s Tale and may even be its sources” (p. 570). Boccaccio, 636; McWilliam translates, “Gulfardo borrows from Guasparruolo a sum of money equivalent to the amount he has agreed to pay the latter’s wife in return for letting him sleep with her. He gives her the money, but later tells Guasparruolo, in her presence, that he has handed it back to his wife, and she has to admit it” (551). Boccaccio, 640; McWilliam translates, “The priest of Varlungo goes to bed with Monna Belcolore, leaving her his cloak by way of payment; then, having borrowed a mortar from her, he sends it back and asks her to return the cloak which he had left with her as a pledge. The good woman hands it over, and gives him a piece of her mind” (554). The Italian text (and English translation) is printed in Benson and Andersson, 312–19. For the dating of the collection of novellas, see Luciano Rossi, ed., Giovanni Sercambi: Il Novelliere (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1976), 1: xix–xx. Helen Cooper, in her essay, “The Frame,” in Sources and Analogues, eds. Correale with Hamel, I: 2, takes Sercambi’s novelliere out of the running by putting its date of composition at 1400.



Parallel Comic Tales  69

getting loans, and wanting money to realize desires, and one, agrarian, also focused on acquiring things, though they are humble. In Decameron 8, 1, the beautiful wife, Madonna Ambruogia, is married to a merchant. She is willing to have an affair with her husband’s friend, as “fosse cosa che ella avesse per alcuna sua cosa bisogno” and “che ricco uomo era” (637) [“since he was well off and she wanted to buy something for herself ” (McWilliam, 552–53)]. In Decameron 8, 2, a priest tempts a farmer’s wife into bed with him while her husband is off doing business with a lawyer. His enticements are simple gifts : “un paio di scarpette o … un frenello o … una bella fetta di stame” (643) [“a pretty little pair of shoes, or a silk head-scarf, or a fine woolen waistband” (McWilliam, 557)]. The wife replies that she already owns such things, but what she needs is money – “se voi mi prestate cinque lire, che so che l’avete, io ricoglierò dall’usuraio la gonnella mia del perso e lo scaggiale dai dì delle feste” (643) [“if you’ll lend me five pounds, which a man like you can easily afford, I shall call at the pawnbroker’s and collect my black skirt and the waistband I wear on Sundays” (McWilliam, 557)]. Sercambi’s novella, De Avaritia E Lussuria, depicts the same upscale acquisitive world of Decameron 8, 1. The wife is married to “un banchierei e mercadante” [“A banker and merchant”] and is described as “una moglie giovana di vintiquattro anni bella e balda … e molte volte avendo fatto fallo al suo marito, più tosto per dinari che per amore ad altri portasse” [“a young wife of twenty-four years, beautiful and bold … who had tricked her husband many times, rather for the money than for the love she bore others”].89 Chaucer captures this sexmoney nexus in the opening lines of the Shipman’s Tale which has been said to suggest, in the female voice of its narrator, that the tale told by the sailor was originally intended for the Wife of Bath90 – five-times married, the first three times to rich old men to whom she was frequently unfaithful:   A marchant whom dwelled at Seint-Denys, That riche was, for which men helde him wys. A wyf had of excellent beautee; And compaignable and revelous was she, Which is a thing that causeth more dispence Than worth is al the chiere and reverence That men hem doon at festes and daunces Swiche salutaciouns and countenances Passen as dooth a shadwe upon the wal; But wo is hym that payen moot for al! The sely housbounde, algate he moot paye, He most us clothe, and he moot us array.  (VII, 1–12)

89 90

Italian and facing-page translation in Benson and Andersson, 312–13. See W. W. Lawrence, “Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale,” Speculum 33 (1958): 56–68.

70  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

The woman’s voice threatens, moreover, that if the husband doesn’t pay, someone else will: “Thanne moot another payen for oure cost,/ Or lene us gold, and that is perilous” (VII, 18–19). At the conclusion of all four tales, the lover tricks the avaricious woman out of her ill-gotten gains (the lover’s gift regained motif of folklore). But in three of them – Decameron 8, 1, the Shipman’s Tale, and Sercambi’s novella – the wife is also humiliated by the knowledge that the lover did not think enough of her allures to pay for the pleasure of sleeping with her with his own money. In those three versions, the lover asks the husband for a loan which he then later claims to have repaid to the wife. Only in Chaucer’s version does the wife not return the money because it has already been spent. The wife in the Shipman’s Tale offers, therefore, to repay her husband in bed, a solution that would be appropriate to the Wife of Bath and her “coltes tooth” (Prologue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale, 602) – if she were originally meant to tell this as her tale. In a sex-money exchange, the wife invites her husband to score it upon her taille. The often-cited pun that ties together the sexual connotations of the wife’s taille with tally, in the sense of account-keeping, concludes Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale with punning as delightful as that which ends Boccaccio’s Decameron 8, 2 – a parallel between Chaucer and this analogue which seems to have escaped notice. Usually short on dialogue, Boccaccio wrote witty exchanges for the conclusion of Decameron 8, 2 built around sexual punning on the mortar and pestle. The priest-lover of the tale tells the husband that he left his cloak with the wife as security for borrowing her mortar which he is returning in exchange for the garment. He succeeds thereby in enjoying the wife’s sexual favors at no cost. The husband, becomes incensed that the wife has asked the priest for security on the loan of a mortar, and insists angrily that in the future the priest should be given whatever he wants – even l’asino (645) [“ass” (McWilliam, 559)]. Furious, the wife asks a sacristan to deliver a message to the priest which says, “voi non pesterete mai più salsa in suo mortaio” (645) [“you won’t be grinding any more of your sauce in her mortar” (McWilliam, 560)]. To which the priest replies, “s’ella non ci presterà il mortaio, io non presterò a lei il pestello” (645) [“if she doesn’t lend me her mortar, I shan’t let her have my pestle” (McWilliam, 560)]. Outwitted and angry, Boccaccio’s wife has only enough spirit left in her for wordplay; whereas, Chaucer’s wife, even though she is embarrassed and discomfited by the lover’s clever scheming, emerges virtually unscathed. Thus two of Chaucer’s comic tales assumed to have French fabliaux sources, the Shipman’s Tale and the Merchant’s Tale, indicate the influence of the Italian novella, most especially the trecento novellas of Boccaccio’s Decameron. Scholars have given much attention to Chaucer’s appropriation of French vernacular literary tradition, especially the fabliau. It is well, however, to bear in mind Luciano Rossi’s cautionary observation apropos of Boccaccio’s debt to medieval French literature; that is, that the matter is so



Parallel Comic Tales  71

complex as to be littered with half truths.91 It may not be too much to suggest that for his comic tales in verse, Chaucer borrowed as much from Italian prose novellas as he did from French fabliaux. Chapter 4 turns to antifraternal satire in the Decameron and in ­Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale and Summoner’s Tale. Boccaccio’s Fra Cipolla, it will be suggested, may have influenced Chaucer’s portrait of the Pardoner.

91

Rossi, “In Luogo di Sollazzo,” 14.

4 Antifraternal Satire in Boccaccio and Chaucer

S

atiric representation of friars is a particular form of anticlericalism found in both Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Friars play principal roles in eight tales of the Decameron (Decameron 1, 1; 1, 6; 3, 3; 3, 4; 3, 7; 4, 2; 7, 1; 7, 3). Chaucer’s portrait of the corrupt Friar Hubert is the longest of all the pilgrim descriptions in the General Prologue. Moreover, Friar John of the Summoner’s Tale as well as Friar Hubert’s own tale (against which the Summoner retaliates with his about a friar) sustain the satirical antifraternal tone of Friar Hubert’s portrait. Preoccupation with the faults of the mendicant orders in Boccaccio and Chaucer reflects a general fascination with antifraternalism in late medieval vernacular literature. Friction broke out between the secular clergy of the Church and the regular orders – friars were “regulars” because they lived by a “rule” or regula – when the mendicant fraternal orders were granted Papal recognition in the thirteenth century. The Black Friars, followers of St. Dominic (recognized in 1216), the Grey Friars of the Franciscan Order (approved in 1223), the White Friars or Carmelites (given Papal approval in 1226), and the Augustinians (recognized in 1256) all represented threats to the parish priest because they had been given the right by the Pope to hear confessions, bury the dead, and to preach. The thirteenth-century controversies between the secular clergy and fraternal orders at the University of Paris, fueled by the polemics of the Professor of Theology, William of St. Amour, are the source of a long tradition of attacks on friars.1 The mendicant orders, Dominicans and Franciscans, found their way into the University of Paris and became a source of violent conflict as tension grew between clerical members of the University and the new orders of friars. The founding core of Masters who were seculars wanted to deny professorial status to the regulars such as the Dominican, John of St. Gilles, and the Franciscan, Alexander of Hales. It took frequent orders from the popes to establish the rights of friars to preach and teach wherever they wished. When the former Dominican, Alexander IV, became Pope enemies of the friars, among them William of St. Amour who defamed friars in his sermons and writings, lost their professorial positions. In 1256 William of St.

1

A good account of the Parisian controversy is Gordon Leff ’s Paris and Oxford Universities in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1968).



Antifraternal Satire  73

Amour shaped his main charges against the friars into the De Periculis Novissorum Temporum (The Perils of the Last Times). Pope Alexander IV ordered the book burned and its author exiled. The trials sustained by the University of Paris culminated in a burst of antifraternal writing in all the European vernacular literatures, especially the imaginative. Indeed, the figure of the friar had become a comic stereotype by the fourteenth century. By then there was no enthusiasm for friars among laymen and quarrels broke out within the orders themselves between those who sought to avoid criticism by discouraging the old begging, wandering life in favor of building stable communities and those who wanted to follow the model of the original founders. G. M. Trevelyan wrote, “In the Fourteenth Century the English friars, Franciscan and Dominican, were two powerful corporations with a host of enemies. The secular clergy in whose churches the friars poached, carrying off their flocks and their fees under their very faces, hated the friars scarcely less bitterly than did the Wycliffite reformers, who saw in Franciscan and Dominican their chief popular rivals.”2 England’s most effective defender of the secular church against the mendicants was Richard FitzRalph whose Defensio curatorum (Defense of the Curates [1357]) presents complaints of the English clergy against the fraternal orders. FitzRalph originally presented the argument in his own defense at the Papal Court in Avignon. His friend, Richard de Bury, another secular scholar, took part in the attacks against the mendicant orders in his Philobiblon wherein he complains about “threefold care of superfluities … Of the stomach, of dress, and of houses.”3 Moral Gower, Chaucer’s friend and fellow poet, in his Vox Clamantis, engages in harsh invective against “those in the order of mendicant friars who go astray … those who conspire under the shadow of feigned poverty for worldly riches, as if they would bring all the earth under their dominion.”4 In Chaucer’s fabliaux and Boccaccio’s novellas about friars the Aristotelian telling of what might happen rather than of what has happened sometimes brings poetic truth in touch with historic reality; most obviously, the greed of some who followed the mendicant way is made comic capital of by both Boccaccio and Chaucer.5 Within that body of medieval imaginative literature in which antifraternalism is a feature, Dante’s criticism of friars is

2 3

4 5

G. M. Trevelyan, History of England, 3 vols. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1953), I: 249. Richard de Bury, The Love of Books: The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury, translated by E. C. Thomas (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, 1888; rpt. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1966), 38. John Gower, The Major Latin Work of John Gower, translated by Eric W. Stockton (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962), 182. Cf. Decameron, 1, 6, for example, and the portraits of the Friar in the General Prologue and the friar of the Summoner’s Tale among others.

74  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

most influential on Boccaccio. Paradiso, XI, 124–32 comments on the worldliness of the followers of St. Dominic.6 Ma il suo peculio di nuova vivanda È fatto ghiotto sì ch’ esser non puote che per diversi salti non si spanda; e quanto le sue pecore remote e vagabonde più da esso vanno, più tornano all’ovil di latte vote. Ben son di quelle che temono il danno, e stringonsi al pastor; ma son sì poche, che le cappe fornisce poco panno.  (Paradiso, 138) [But his flock hath grown so greedy for new viands, it may not be but that through diverse glades it strayeth; and the more his sheep distant and wandering depart from him, the emptier of milk they return forwards. There are of them, indeed, who fear the loss and cleave close to the shepherd, but they are so few that little cloth doth furnish forth their cowls  (Paradiso, 139)]

A passage on conflict in the Franciscan Order follows in Paradiso, XII, 112–26. Ma l’orbita, che fe’ la parte somma di sua circonferenza, è derelitta, sì ch’ è la muffa dov’ era la gromma. La sua famiglia, che si mosse dritta coi piedi alle sue orme, è tanto volta, che quel dinanzi a quel di retro gitta; e tosto si vedrà della ricolta della mala coltura, quando il loglio si lagnerà che l’ arca gli sia tolta. Ben dico, chi cercasse a foglio a foglio nostro volume, ancor troveria carta u’ leggerebbe: Io mi son quell ch’ io soglio; ma non fia da Casal, nè d’ Acquasparta, là onde vegnon tali alla scrittura, che l’un la fugge e l’ altro la coarta  (Paradiso, 150) [But the track which the highest part of its circumference took hath been so abandoned, that there now is mould where once was crust. 6

The Paradiso of Dante Alighieri (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1958).



Antifraternal Satire  75 His household, who marched with straight feet in his footprints hath turned so round, that the toe striketh on the heel’s imprint; and soon shall sight be had of the harvest of the ill-culture when the tares shall wail that the granary is taken from them is reft from it. I well allow that whoso should search leaf after leaf through our volume, might yet find a page where he might read: I am as I was wont; but not from Casale, nor from Acquasparta shall he be, whence come such to our Scripture that the one shirketh, the Other draweth it yet tighter.  (Paradiso, 149/151)]

In Inferno, XXVII, 67–129, Dante’s Count Guido da Montefeltro is presented as an illustration of the corruptibility of the ideal of the friars. Guido was a politician and soldier who became a Franciscan late in life only to fall back into his old political manipulations in order to further the ambitious goals of Pope Boniface VIII, “il gran prete … che mi rimise nelle prime colpe” [“the Great Priest … who brought me back to my first sins”].7 Both Chaucer and Boccaccio were influenced by the French antifraternal literary tradition. Jean de Meun’s portrait of Faus Semblant, a friar in the army of Amours, the god of love, captures the friar’s association with the worldly, monied life of the city: Si n’ai mes cure d’ermitages, j’ai lessié deserz et boschages, et quit a saint Jehan Baptiste du desert et menoir et giste. Trop par estoie loign gitez; es bours, es chateaus, es citez faz mes sales et mes palés, où l’en peut corre a plein alés; et di que je suis hors du monde, mes je m’i plunge et m’i affonde et m’i aese et baigne et noe Mieuz que nul poisson de sa noe.8 [“I’ve little love for hermitages, woods, And deserts. Wilderness and hut and lodge I leave to John the Baptist; too remote Are they from burgs and cities where I build My castles and my palaces and halls To which a man at full speed may retreat And say that he’s renounced the worldly life. 7 8

The Inferno of Dante Alighieri (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1958), 302–03. Guillaume di Lorris and Jean de Meun, Roman de la Rose, ed. F. Lecoy (Paris: CFMAChampion, 1970), lines 11671–11682.

76  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio There I immerse myself in worldliness And bathe and swim and dine and take my ease Better than any fish that swims with fin.9]

It has been observed that “Faus Semblanz is … much more pervasive in Chaucer’s work than in Boccaccio’s. Friar Hubert shows distinct affinities with him, both in abandoning the poraille in favour of the ‘rich and sellers of vitaille’ (General Prologue, I, 243–8; cp. Roman, 11,208–38) and in busying himself with marriages and legal affairs (General Prologue, I, 258; cp. Roman, 11,649–62).”10 Chaucer, after all, had translated the French Roman de la Rose into Middle English. His speech by Fals-Semblant is a catalog of charges against friars: they place burdens on those unable to bear them, their clothes are excessively lavish, they are full of pride, etc.: “… they wolde bynde on folk alwey, That ben to be begiled able, Burdons that ben importable; On folks shuldris thinges they couchen, That they nyl with her fyngris touchen.” … “Her bordurs larger maken they, And make her hemmes wide alwey, And loven setes at the table, The firste and most honourable;”  (Romaunt of the Rose, lines 6900–914)

Many of these charges are among the anti-mendicant complaints in the writing of William of St. Amour. For mendicant lechery there would, of course, have been many possible literary sources behind the pilgrim Friar’s hanging about society ladies (“worthy women of the toun”), married women (“faire wyves”), and young girls (“yonge women”), some of whom he may have made pregnant and married off – “He hadde maad ful many a marriage/ Of yonge women, at his owene cost” (I, 212–13). Not the least of these is one in Langland’s Piers Plowman where the allegorical figure of Peace refuses a lecherous friar entry into the Church: I knewe such one ones nouȝte eighte winter passed, Come in thus ycoped at a courte ther I dwelt, And was my lordes leche and my ladyes bothe.

9 10

Guillaume di Lorris and Jean le Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. Harry W. Robbins (New York: Dutton, 1962), 241. Nicholas Havely, “Chaucer, Boccaccio, and the Friars,” in Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, ed. Piero Boitani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 256.



Antifraternal Satire  77 And at the last this limitour tho my lorde was out, He salued so owre women til somme were with childe!  (XX. 351–55)11

Unlike members of earlier monastic institutions, friars became part of the urban scene. The Dominican Order established itself in Rome, Paris, and Bologna. Rome had the priory of St. Sixtus and that of Santa Sabina. Black Friars taught and studied theology in Paris and law in Bologna. Twenty-five Franciscan convents were founded in Belgium and northern France and the Franciscans had the Sacro Convento in Assisi. Friars served at court as confessors to members of the aristocracy. In Piers the Plowman’s Creed, written after 1393 by an unknown author, a man without learning who seeks instruction in the Creed turns to friars of each of the four orders.12 The friars of each order in turn assure him that it is unnecessary to learn the Creed; all he needs to save his soul is to contribute to the expenses of the Order. The man leaves in disgust at the friars’ magnificent buildings and luxurious lives. As discussed in Chapter 1, the life of Boccaccio was essentially a city life like Chaucer’s. It began in 1313 in Certaldo, a small town outside of Florence, continued for a time in Naples (1327–40), and then was lived out mostly in Florence (1340–75), except for brief stretches of time when he lived in Ravenna (1346–47) or was on missions (to Bavaria in 1352, to Avignon in 1354, to Rome in 1367) or visiting Petrarch (in Padua in 1352 and 1368, and Milan in 1359). Chaucer, who was born in London in the early 1340s, led an active life of affairs and writing which was conducted for the most part in London with frequent travel to Oxford and Cambridge. His service to the royal family took him abroad: to France (in 1359–60, 1368, 1369, 1370, 1376–77), to Spain (in 1366), and to Italy (1372–73, 1378). Both authors led the kind of lives that brought them into contact with friars in towns and cities. In Certaldo, Boccaccio’s birthplace, the Augustinians ran the church; they also ran Santo Spirito, in Florence, the church which Boccaccio attended when he lived there. An important Augustinian, Dionigi da Borgo San Sepolcro, served at the court of Robert the Wise when Boccaccio was growing up in Naples and had access to the court and probably its royal library. This Augustinian classicist and astrologer, a friend of the poet Petrarch, may even have been young Boccaccio’s mentor. The personal association with Augustinians may account for the fact, pointed out by Vittore Branca, Boccaccio’s biographer and editor of definitive editions of his works, that the Decameron attacks Franciscans and Dominicans, but never Augustinians.13 Cormac 11

12 13

William Langland, The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman, ed. W. W. Skeat, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886). This passage is cited by Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 41. Pierce the plougmans crede, Early English books online (London: Reynold Wolfe, 1553). Branca, Giovanni Boccaccio: Profilo Biografico, revised ed. (Milan: Sansoni Editore, 1997), 30 (“mai sono attaccati I prediletti agostiniani”).

78  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

O’Cuilleanain, author of an important book on religion in the Decameron, calls “friars … the quintessence of the Decameronian Church” and takes note of “the urban setting of their actions.”14 As for Chaucer, there is less direct evidence of his association with friars. A court poet and civil servant, he could hardly avoid knowing members of the mendicant orders since, like him, they served the king. Dominicans were the king’s confessors from the time of Henry III to Richard II; Carmelites enjoyed the patronage of John of Gaunt just as Chaucer did; Augustinians, among them Robert Waldeby, who eventually became Archbishop of York, also gained royal favor. The only significant suggestion of Chaucer’s personal connection with friars is a tantalizing reference by Thomas Speght in his 1598 edition of the Workes of Chaucer to the poet’s having been fined for beating a Franciscan friar in Fleet Street, … Master Buckley did see a Record in the same house, where Geoffrey Chaucer was fined two shillings for beating a Franciscane fryer in Fleetstreete (sig. b. ii)

but the records he refers to from the Inner Temple have never been found.15 Buckley, said to have seen the record of the fine, was the person who took care of the Inner Temple records in Speght’s day, so that such a record may, indeed, have existed in the sixteenth century. The record would appear to indicate Chaucer’s energetic hostility to friars (or that this particular friar, at least, got his goat). The longest, uninterrupted stretch of antifraternal criticism in the novellas of the Decameron is found in the seventh tale of day three, a novella for which there is “no known source” and “which must therefore be deemed to be entirely of Boccaccio’s invention.”16 It should, nonetheless, not be taken as containing Boccaccio’s own antifraternal attitudes, as the diatribe is delivered by a character who has just learned the reason why his mistress, another man’s wife, gave him up: a friar advised her against adultery in confession. Tedaldo’s attack against friars takes up one third of Decameron 3, 7 and is a sort of compendium of the charges frequently leveled at the friars. Their clothes are extravagant: “larghe e doppie e lucide e di finissimi panni” (281) [“ample habits, generously cut and smooth of texture, and made from the finest of fabrics” (McWilliam, 243)]. Friars are lecherous. Far from fishing with nets for Christians to enlarge the ranks of followers of Christ, they ensnare women in their copious habits for their own sexual pleasure:

14 15 16

Cormac O’Cuilleanain, Religion and the Clergy in Boccaccio’s “Decameron” (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1984), 104. R. A. Caldwell, “Joseph Holand, Collector and Antiquary,” Modern Philology 40 (1943), 295–301. A. C. Lee, The Decameron: Its Sources and Analogues (1909; rpt. New York: Haskell House Publishers Ltd., 1972), 91.



Antifraternal Satire  79 “E quale col giacchio il pescatore d’occupar ne’ fiumi molti pesci a un tratto, così costoro, con le fimbrie ampissime avvolgendosi, molte pinzochere, molte vedove, molte atre sciocche femine …” (281) [“And like the fisherman who tries to take a number of fish from the river with a single throw of his casting-net, so these fellows, as they wrap themselves in the capacious folds of their habits, endeavour to take in many an over-pious lady, and many another simpleton …” (McWilliam, 243)

Tedaldo adds, moreover, that the friars preach against lust to clear the field of rivals for the women they desire: “Essi sgridano contra gli uomini la lussuria, acciò che, rimovendosene gli sgridati, agli sgridatori rimangano le femine” (282) [“They denounce men’s lust, so that when the denounced are out of the way, their women will be left to the denouncers” (McWilliam, 244)]. Also, friars condemn usury but use the money left them by repentant usurers to live richly: “essi dannan l’usura e i malvagi guadagni, acciò che, fatti restitutori di quegli, si possan fare le cappe più larghe, procacciare i vescovadi” (282) [“They condemn usury and ill-gotten gains, so that people will entrust them with their restitution, and this enables them to make their habits more capacious and procure bishoprics” (McWilliam, 244)]. Although Tedaldo’s diatribe contains ideas found scattered through the antifraternal tales of the Decameron, it is a comic trick to ensnare a gullible wife into rekindling an affair and thus an ambiguous measure of Boccaccio’s own thinking about the friars. It is, nevertheless, tempting to see Tedaldo’s ambiguous witness against friars as comparable to Boccaccio’s. On the one hand, Boccaccio owed friars his education and may even, as some scholars believe, have joined their ranks in later life, but, on the other, he was also a bachelor who fathered five illegitimate children.17 The comic pleasure of the tale, however, comes not so much from the reader’s enjoyment of Tedaldo’s antifraternal diatribe as from the delight taken in watching the melancholy, scorned lover win back his mistress with confident ingenuity. He had been right all along – some human agency caused the rupture in the love affair not the mistress’s lack of love. After seven years pass, Tedaldo finds out who talked his mistress into ending the affair and does something effective about it – he wins her back. Frate Alberto of Decameron 4, 2 is one of Boccaccio’s great heroes of artistic imagination. His fantastic account, made to the credulous, selfabsorbed Monna Lisetta, of the Angel Gabriel’s desire to take on physical form so that he can make love to her has numerous analogues in eastern and western literature, but Boccaccio’s version of the tale is unique in its surreal depiction of a world in which reality and the magical are combined.18 His tale is told by Pampinea as the true story of a rogue, Berto de la Massa,

17 18

O’Cuilleanain, 52–3. Lee, 123–35.

80  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

who became a Franciscan friar, Frate Alberto, and moved to Venice where there is always a welcome, as she says, for the scum of the earth (“a Vinegia, d’ogni bruttura ricevitrice,” 350). There he meets Monna Lisetta, a nitwit who considers herself to be an exceptional, even a celestial, beauty. The friar presents his story of the lovelorn Angel Gabriel in everyday terms: “Questo agnol Gabriello mi disse che io vi dicessi che voi gli piacete tanto, che più volte a starsi con voi venuto la notte sarebbe, se non fosse per non ispaventarvi. Ora, vi manda egli dicendo per me che a voi vuol venire una notte de dimorarsi una pezza con voi.” (353) [“The Angel Gabriel asked me to tell you that he had taken such a liking to you that he would have come to spend the night with you on several occasions except for the fact that you might have been frightened. He now charges me to inform you that he would like to come to you on some night in the near future and spend a little time in your company.” (McWilliam, 306)]

Not only does the stupid, narcissistic woman believe the absurd story, she responds to it with an absurd stipulation that matches the absurdity of Frate Alberto’s account. That is, the angel would be welcome provided that he did not desert her for the Virgin Mary: … ma con questo patto, che egli non dovesse lasciar lei per la Vergine Maria, ché l’era detto che egli le voleva molto bene, et anche si pareva, ché in ogni luogo che ella il vedeva, le stava inginocchione innanzi … (354) [… only if he promised not to desert her for the Virgin Mary, of whom it was said that he was a great admirer, as seemed to be borne out by the fact that in all the paintings she had seen of him, he was invariably shown kneeling in front of the Virgin. (McWilliam, 306)]

Monna Lisetta’s gross misinterpretation of one of the central mysteries of Christianity earns her Pampinea’s nickname, “Madonna baderla” (353) [“Lady Noodle” (McWilliam, 306)]. The creativity with which Frate Alberto victimizes the foolish woman neutralizes the comic revelation of clerical abuse because the victimization is undertaken with the kind of cunning ingenuity that is so highly prized in the fabliau tradition and because Monna Lisetta’s stupidity is so contemptible. If the supposed negotiations of the angel’s tryst is handled in ordinary, real-world terms, Frate Alberto’s arrival as the Angel Gabriel is given an unearthly Chagallesque quality. He appears in Monna Lisetta’s bedroom transformed into a winged angel who advances towards her, blessing her as she drops to her knees before the white manifestation (“questa cosa così bianca,” 355). The affair between the Venetian lady and her “angel” proceeds until her bragging about it to certain lady friends alerts her brothers who then



Antifraternal Satire  81

break in upon Monna Lisetta and the “Angel Gabriel.” The friar’s deceptions are uncovered in the Piazza San Marco, an appropriate setting suggestive of Venetian ecclesiastical, mercantile, and civic interests. When Frate Alberto dives through the lady’s bedroom window into the canal below “avendo lasciate l’ali” (357) [“leaving his wings behind” (McWilliam, 310)], the splash seems to anticipate the bedroom farce of the films of Vittorio De Sica and Marcello Mastroianni by six hundred years. The tale of the inquisitor, Decameron 1, 6, exemplifies clerical greed. The inquisitor referred to is believed to be modeled on a real historical figure, Pietro della Aquila, who was inquisitor in Florence in 1345 and whose greed is illustrated in many anecdotes.19 Those found guilty of heresy by Papal Inquisition could be sentenced to penalties ranging from fasting and prayer to imprisonment and loss of property. In the tale, a greedy Franciscan inquisitor is put on the trail of a rich merchant, reported to him by someone who heard him brag about a certain wine in his cellar that was of such high quality that Christ himself would drink it. The inquisitor extorts a lot of money from the rich man, who tries to avert a dangerous trial for blasphemy, until one day the rich victim makes a clever remark that so exposes the hypocrisy of the inquisitor that he is a victim no more. The merchant cites a passage from Matthew XIX. 29, that he says made him feel very sorry for the inquisitor and his community of friars: “And everyone that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name’s sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life.” When pressed to explain, the rich man replies that he fears the friar and his brethren will surely drown in the next world when they receive a hundred for every one cauldron of leftover vegetable-water he had seen the friars distribute daily to the poor standing outside the friary. The laughter of the inquisitor’s brethren at this indication of the slight charity of the friary, prompts the inquisitor to swallow his anger and to tell the rich man that he did not need to return again. The antagonists of the tale are characterized only as “il buono uomo” (“the good man”) and “lo ’nquisitore” (“the inquisitor”) suggesting a simple clash of good and evil. The lack of generosity in feeding the poor would not be lost on Pampinea’s audience of Florentine aristocrats who could not fail to know that the Franciscian inquisitor had a reputation for setting a rich table of food and drink for his community and for the notables who frequently dined with them at Santa Croce in Florence.20 The inquisitor, less concerned with strengthening flagging faith than filling empty coffers (“alleviamento di miscredenza … empimento di fiorini della sua mano,” 65) recalls an aspect of Chaucer’s own satiric portraits of friars.21 19 20 21

Girolamo Biscaro, “Inquisitori ed eretici a Firenze (1319–1334),” Studi medievali, n.s. 6 (1933): 161–207, and Lee, 22. Biscaro, 161–207. See Janet Levarie Smarr’s “The Tale of the Inquisitor (I. 6),” in The “Decameron”: First

82  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

In Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale as in Boccaccio’s tale of the inquisitor, the victim of a greedy friar finds a clever means to end their relationship. Chaucer’s angry and bedridden Thomas, however, releases himself from the clutches of a begging friar not with witty words but with an insulting fart. Although in this tale Chaucer is dealing with a corrupt friar, rather than with sexual highjinks as in fabliaux like the Miller’s Tale and Reeve’s Tale, being smart and triumphant is still essential to the comedy. As Derek Pearsall so aptly says of this tale (and its companion-piece, the Friar’s Tale), “Though not strictly speaking fabliaux, they operate according to the same basic comic rules, namely, that the criterion by which human beings are judged successful is the extent to which they find means fully to satisfy their appetites and manipulate the world by their smartness, to their will.”22 Chaucer suggests a comic relationship to the Miller’s fabliau, the “cherles tale,” when he uses the term “cherles dede” (III, 2206) to refer to the gross insult with which Thomas got even with Friar John. The wife of the lord whose confessor Friar John is comments on the vulgar gift at the end of the tale, “A cherl hath doon a cherles dede” (III, 2296). When he first enters the home of the poor couple from Holdernesse in Yorkshire, Friar John’s air of entitlement suggests that he is used to being a winner: he brushes the cat off its bench so that he can have a comfortable seat (III, 1775–77), kisses the lady of the house and embraces her tightly and without self-consciousness (III, 1803–05), and he even gives her an order for a meal of capon liver, fine bread, and roasted pig’s head (III, 1839–41). Much of the comic pleasure of the tale comes from watching the power shift in the direction of poor Thomas, who up to this time has been the arrogant friar’s prey. Thomas listens patiently to a sermon on ire, prompted by his wife’s complaint about his, passes up an invitation to confess (he already has to the local curate), and endures Friar John’s tiresome and inaccurate account of the early history of friars. Thomas has much to be angry about: his own illness, the recent death of a child, and the pointlessness of his many gifts to this friar. So, when, after the long homily on ire, the friar claims a pre-Christian antiquity for friars (“… syn Elye was, or Elise,/ Have freres been, that fynde I of record,” III, 2116–17) and begs for gold, Thomas is at his wits’ end: This sike man wex wel ny wood for ire.  (III, 2121)

When the friar makes the direct request for money – “Yif me thane of thy gold, to make oure cloystre” (III, 2099) – Thomas releases his contempt. He

22

Day in Perspective, ed. Elissa B. Weaver (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 148–59. Derek Pearsall, “The Canterbury Tales II: Comedy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, eds. Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 174.



Antifraternal Satire  83

leads Friar John into thinking the gift will be a substantial one by urging him to share it equally with his fellow friars. Then he is ready for victory: And whan this seke man felte this frere Aboute his truwel grope there and here, Amydde his hand he leete the freere a fart.  (III, 2147–49)

A French fabliau by Jacques de Baisieux, Dis de le Vescie a prestre, contains a similar situation; a priest who on his deathbed is badgered by friars to make an offering to them, angrily makes a gift of his bladder and tells them to keep pepper in it.23 The French tale involves public shaming of the friars because the dying priest has them return to his bedside the next day with their prior and makes a public announcement of the insulting gift before the entire town. In Chaucer’s account of the obscene gift, the gift is given to the friar privately and suddenly with just twenty lines of verse separating the sick man’s proposal of the gift and the friar’s shocked reception of it. The knowledge of the insult to the friar expands only because he departs in rage from Thomas’s home to the inn where he is staying and from there to the manor of a lord whose confessions he frequently hears. At the lord’s manor he engages the thinking of the lord and his squire, Jankyn, on the apparently insoluble problem of the indivisible gift of a fart. Too sure of himself like Chaucer’s sleazy Pardoner – discussed at the end of this chapter, although not a friar – Friar John has not merely fallen into Thomas’s trap, but he gets caught up in the problematic “ars-metrike” of dividing the fart. Pearsall seems to me right on the mark when he observes of this conclusion that “Humour gets the better of satire, and Chaucer … seems to prefer complicity with the world of his creatures to moral criticism.”24 The squire’s “ars-metrike” that arranges the twelve friars around a wheel with Friar John at the center to divide the “gift” equally prolongs the laughter after the climax of the tale is achieved. It is not needed to further satirize the friar, but serves to extend the laughter and comic pleasure. The squire Jankyn imagines a grand celebration in the lord’s manor for which Thomas will be brought to repeat his stinky philanthropy. A ritual division of Thomas’s fart will pass it on to twelve more friars who press their noses to the spokes of the ceremonial cartwheel: “Thane shal they knele doun, by oon assent, And to every spokes ende, in this manere, Ful sadly leye his nose shal a frere.”  (III, 2262–64)

23

24

Printed in Benson and Anderson, 344–59, and Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, eds. Correale with Hamel, 2 vols. (Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 2002), II: 462–77 (with facing-page translations into English). Pearsall, “Canterbury Tales II: Comedy,” 176.

84  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

Sick Thomas of the tale needed only the satisfaction of delivering the vulgar insult to Friar John. Chaucer, his creator, needed the comic fun of extending the ridicule by taking the order to divide the “gift” to an absurdly literal comic end. Even Helen Storm Corsa, who is more concerned with the moral dimension of Chaucer’s comic tales than Pearsall, responds warmly to the delight of this anti-climax: “it is the transforming of that ‘gift’ from the apparently impossible fantasy into the possible reality that constitutes the real joy of this tale, for it translates moral condemnation into comic practicality.”25 The dramatic context of the Summoner’s Tale about the friar is the quarrel between the Summoner and the pilgrim Friar which somewhat replicates the tension that Chaucer created to enliven the interaction between his Miller and Reeve. Their hostility is inherent in the clash between friars and secular clergy, especially over the right to hear confession. Although the Summoner was not an ecclesiaste himself, he served the ecclesiastical courts as a server of summons. The quarrel between the Summoner and Friar erupts at the end of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue (III, 829–50), where a comment of the Friar’s elicits a complaint from the Summoner: A frere wol entremette hym everemo.  (III, 834)

The quarrel between the two pilgrims is picked up again in the Friar’s Prologue, which follows the conclusion to the Wife of Bath’s Tale. In the Prologue to the Friar’s Tale, Hubert makes clear his intention to unleash his disdain for the pilgrim Summoner – and summoners in general – in a comic tale: I wol yow of a somonour telle game. Pardee, ye may wel knowe by the name That of a somonour may no good be sayd.  (III, 1279–81)

His tale is a short one about a summoner who meets and is captured by the devil; in telling this tale the Friar is, in effect, saying to the Summoner that summoners can go to hell! As the tale opens, the summoner is on his way to bring an old woman to the court of his superior, the archdeacon, on charges of lechery but in reality he is planning to win a bribe from her for himself. The Friar makes clear the evils of the summoner’s profession and also the particular sins of the summoner’s superior, the archdeacon: he is a blackmailer, a friend of prostitutes, someone who takes bribes, etc. The devil, disguised as a yeoman, is hunting for souls when the two travelers meet. They fall into friendly conversation and the summoner learns that his fellow traveler is someone who, like himself, is after whatever he can get: “For sothe, I take al that men wol me yive” (III, 1430). Even after the devil reveals his identity to 25

Helen Storm Corsa, Chaucer: Poet of Mirth and Morality (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame, 1964), 187.



Antifraternal Satire  85

the summoner, the summoner seems too dense to realize that he is in danger, for, as the devil explains, he is one of “… Goddes instrumentz, And meenes to doon his comandementz, Whan that hym list, upon his creatures, In divers art in diverse figures.”  (III, 1482–86)

The erudite exchange between the summoner and devil seems to lull the summoner into feeling safe with his traveling companion, despite the devil’s assurance that the summoner soon will know more about hell than Vergil and Dante. Instead of becoming anxious, the summoner promises his loyalty to the devil who explains that he will continue to accompany the summoner on his travels until forsaken by him. Embarrassed by his profession – “He dorste not, for verray filthe and shame/ Seye that he was a summonour, for the name” (III, 1393–94) – the summoner may feel that fellowship with the devil confers status on him. The devil, after all, appears to be a gentleman with polite manners, and a scholar. In his early study of Chaucer’s comic tales, Craik astutely observed that much of the comedy in this tale comes from Hubert’s getting his audience on the devil’s side: “certainly we must prefer the urbane, witty, ironical fiend to the brutal, vulgar, conceited summoner.”26 Craik would probably concur with Pearsall’s more recent opinion about how Chaucerian comedy works: “To demolish one’s victim effectively, he must be shown to be stupid … pathetically gullible.”27 For Craik, the Friar’s Tale is primarily comic for its depiction of character, even though it satirically unmasks the system of making Church revenue from the sins of its members. He considers the tale “a comedy” because of “its conceited summoner offering the fiend advice” who ends up “the victim of his own cunning and complacency.”28 The tale certainly can be seen as the comedy of an overreaching summoner who fails to see that the devil is better than he is at “evere waiting on his pray’ (III, 1376). From the very beginning of the encounter between the two travelers – summoner and devil-in-yeoman’s-disguise – the devil knows that the summoner will “with me to hell yet tonight” (III, 1636), as he is to announce to him near the end of the tale. With fine irony Chaucer begins their falling into casual conversation with the devil asking, “Wiltow fer today?” (III, 1387) and the unsuspecting summoner answering, “Nay” (III, 1388). After the episode of the angry carter who wishes that his horses and cart which get stuck in the mud would go to the devil, the corrupt summoner advises his companion to grab the easy-pickings. But the devil, in his

26 27 28

T. W. Craik, The Comic Tales of Chaucer (London: Methuen & Co., 1964), 107. Pearsall, “Canterbury Tales II: Comedy,” 175. Craik, 100.

86  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

humanity, as it were, passes; the carter does not mean what he says. The widow, however, on whom the summoner practices extortion and whom he insults as having cuckolded her husband, does mean it when she wishes that the summoner and the pan he tries to rob from her would go to the devil. The poor widow is innocent of any crime and thereby highlights the stupidity of the boorish summoner. As a victim, she has a right to her curse and here the fiend does feel justified in snatching his prey, the summoner, to hell: “Thy body and this panne been myne by right” (III, 1635). Throughout the Friar’s Tale the summoner is portrayed as impervious to the reality that he is in the presence of a con-man who is better than he is. The Friar’s tale has not been wasted, however, on the pilgrim Summoner who has heard himself (and his kind) be called not only stupid but damned. Even before he retaliates with the Summoner’s Tale, the angry Summoner gets even in the Prologue to his tale; he tells the anecdote of the friar who goes to hell and is shown where his fellow friars have their residence there: Right so as bees out swarmen from an hyve, Out of the develes ers ther gone dryve Twenty thousand freres on a route.  (III, 1693–95)

Thus, the furious Summoner responds immediately, and with as much vulgarity as he can, that friars also have a home in hell. Chaucer may have been acquainted with Boccaccio’s portraits of friars in the Decameron, for Chaucer’s dealings with Italian merchants and bankers brought him into contact with the segment of Italian society which possessed more than “two-thirds” of the Decameron “manuscripts written between the late Trecento and early Quattrocento.”29 He would have heard about the Decameron from Italian merchants and bankers in London, but in the five months he spent in Italy from December 1, 1372 until May 23, 1373 he could have read the work or even carried off a manuscript of it. Though Chaucer had traveled to Genoa on a trading mission, his expense receipts to the Exchequer for travel during this period indicate that he had also been in Florence, Boccaccio’s place of residence.30 The eager dissemination of the Decameron through upper middle-class merchant and banking families such as the Bardi, the Buondelmonti, and Acciaiuoli is suggested by these words, written by Francesco Buondelmonti when he lent his cousin, Giovanni Acciaiuoli, his copy of the Decameron:

29 30

Vittore Branca, Boccaccio: The Man and his Works, trans. Richard Monges (New York: New York University Press, 1976), 199. Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, Inc., 1992), 102. Pearsall doubts that Chaucer would have met Boccaccio, who was “old and crotchety, and very distinguished” and probably unwilling to meet “young travelers of no rank, and from England, of all places” (104).



Antifraternal Satire  87 I am having it delivered to you because I trust you more than anyone else and I hold it most dear; and do be careful not to lend it to anyone …31

The popularity of the work would have been likely to bring the Decameron to Chaucer’s attention and it has been suggested that Boccaccio’s antifraternalism “would have been an added incentive for Chaucer to acquire a copy.”32 Perhaps, but Boccaccio’s antifraternal tales are not particularly concerned with the spiritual consequences of corrupt friars. De Sanctis observed in his Storia della Letteratura Italiana that in the Decameron Boccaccio “prende il mondo com’ è” [“takes the world as it is”] and that is a “mondo cinico e malizioso della carne” [“a cynical and malicious world of the flesh”], for Boccaccio wrote “la nuova ‘commedia,’ non la divina, ma la terrestre” [“the new ‘comedy,’ not the divine but the earthly”].33 Tedaldo’s lengthy sermon on the hypocrisy of friars in Decameron 3, 7 is not so much a comprehensive list of complaints – though it is that – as a bit of strategy used to hilarious effect by a frustrated lover. However hilarious the comic gift of the fart is in the Summoner’s Tale, Chaucer’s Friar John appears spiritually lost because his defects, shared with the pilgrim Friar, mark him as Friar Hubert’s double. The summoner of the Friar’s Tale does harm to the widow of the tale, a member of the Christian community, and therefore deserves to be snatched to hell by the fiend. Chaucer keeps the moral consequences of corrupt friars in view in part because of the spiritual pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Thomas Beckett which is the fictive frame of the Canterbury Tales; whereas, in Boccaccio’s cornice the aristocrats are fleeing the dread of dying of the plague in Florence for the delights of storytelling and living and eating well in the hills of Fiesole. For the brigata taking pleasure in delight is being alive. This difference in attitude towards clerical corruption is especially evident in Boccaccio’s portrait of Fra Cipolla and Chaucer’s of the Pardoner. Boccaccio’s Fra Cipolla appears in Decameron 6, 10, and Chaucer’s Pardoner in Canterbury Tales, VI. 287–968 (the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale).34 Boccaccio gives particular emphasis to the importance of his Cipolla by placing the master preacher in the last tale told on the sixth day of storytelling (the day when wit is the common theme of all ten tales). Chaucer’s preacher appears in the tale preceding Fragment 7 of the Canterbury Tales; it is in Fragment 7 that poetic language becomes a central theme. In both 31 32 33 34

Branca, Boccaccio, 198. Havely, 259. Francesco De Sanctis, Storia della Letteratura Italiana (Milan: A. Mondadori, 1961), 321, 339. That is the Pardoner’s position according to the order of the tales most widely adopted in modern editions, that of the Ellesmere manuscript (San Marino, California, Huntington Library MS EL. 26. C. 9). The Ellesmere manuscript, produced in 1410, is generally thought to have arrived at the best order of the fragments which were left unordered after Chaucer’s death.

88  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

Boccaccio’s Decameron 6, 10 and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales VI. 287–968, words are power, and in both tales it is significant that those words appear in sermons, a popular form of medieval literature listened to by literate and illiterate, aristocrats and lowly alike. Preachers of sermons in the Middle Ages were as much literary figures as were storytellers; they competed with the secular entertainers for the attention of popular audiences and resorted to “artifices similar to those of their old rivals.”35 A few Chaucerians – primarily concerned with other matters – coupled Boccaccio’s Fra Cipolla with Chaucer’s Pardoner as early as the 1970s and 80s, a period when most Chaucer scholars were still unwilling to concede that there was any evidence at all that Chaucer made use of the Decameron. Jill Mann, in her discussion of the Pardoner in Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire, places Chaucer’s preacher within the context of literature satirizing false relics, and after a brief survey of works by Guiot de Provins, Gautier de Coincy, and Adam de la Halle comments, “Such satire on the clerical use of false relics attains its most sophisticated development in the Decameron.”36 She then proceeds to summarize Boccaccio’s novella of Fra Cipolla. The Italian author’s handling of the friar’s relics, Mann suggests, raises the possibility that Boccaccio is a doubter of religion itself: “In describing relics that never existed, Boccaccio seems to come near to satirizing the whole nature of religious belief – the abandonment of a ‘common-sense’ basis for belief means also an inability to distinguish genuine mystery from fraudulent mystification.”37 Ten years later, in an essay that ranges broadly over the works of Chaucer and Boccaccio and takes as its purpose to “draw attention to the dissimilarities between the Canterbury Tales and the Decameron,” Robin Kirkpatrick, discussing witty language as “an essential feature of Boccaccio’s comedy,” makes an allusion to “Cipolla – Boccaccio’s Pardoner.”38 By 1990, in Chaucerian Theatricality, John Ganim undertakes a comparison of the Pardoner and Ciappelletto – not Cipolla – another character (and, like Cipolla, a liar) who appears in Decameron 1, 1 in order to consider “ways in which Chaucer’s poetic project constitutes a reading or a response, to Boccaccio’s.”39 With Ganim’s 1990 publication, we are on the threshold of the decade in which the pendulum begins to move toward the idea that Chaucer

35 36 37 38

39

G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1961), 16. Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire, 150–51. Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire, 152. Robin Kirpatrick, “The Wake of the Commedia: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Decameron,” in Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, ed. Piero Boitani (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 201–30, at 201 and 213. John Ganim, Chaucerian Theatricality (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990), 57.



Antifraternal Satire  89

did know Boccaccio.40 Ganim, in fact, suggests that he might as usefully have discussed Decameron 6, 10. He points out that “There are other confidence men in Boccaccio worthy of comparison with the Pardoner. The story of Cipolla … is one of those.”41 Most recently, in a volume of essays which focuses on the story collections of the two fourteenth-century authors, Linda Georgianna uses Boccaccio’s Cipolla and Chaucer’s Pardoner to illustrate the difference between their views on anticlericalism. Georgianna calls the Pardoner “Chaucer’s reinvention of a quintessentially Boccaccian character.”42 In contrast to Jill Mann, who finds Boccaccio’s tale of Fra Cipolla a serious satirical comment on religion, Georgianna argues that it is less “biting” than Chaucer’s portrait of the Pardoner. Linda Georgianna’s judgment of the relationship of the Pardoner’s Tale to Decameron 6, 10 is that Boccaccio’s tale is “its analogue.”43 The term “analogue” seems appropriate only in the most general sense of one tale being like the other in some of its aspects. We are not dealing with strict literary analogues like the story of the pound of flesh in the Gesta Romanorum which may be thought of as an analogue to the episode in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice with a similar plot. The tales by Boccaccio and Chaucer, after all, have obviously different storylines, but they do have in common the fact that Dioneo’s novella about Fra Cipolla’s sermon and the Pardoner’s tale are both essentially examples of the most common literary genre encountered by the average medieval person – the sermon – and that they are delivered by corrupt preachers who exemplify mastery of their craft. Boccaccio is more comfortable than is Chaucer with the implicit parallel between the verbal artistry of his corrupt preacher and his own. This may be because the novella about Fra Cipolla appears in day six wherein the theme of words coming to the rescue repeats the underlying premise of the entire Decameron; that is, that storytelling can be a defense, even against the horrors of the plague. The controlling theme for all the stories of day six of Boccaccio’s Decameron is set at the conclusion of the fifth day of storytelling: chi con alcuno leggiadro motto, tentato, si riscosse, o con pronta risposta o avvedimento fuggì perdita o pericolo o scorno. (506)

40

41 42 43

See Beidler’s summary of shifting scholarly attitudes about Chaucer’s knowledge of Boccaccio’s Decameron, in “Just Say Yes, Chaucer Knew the Decameron: Or, Bringing the Shipman’s Tale Out of Limbo,” in The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales, eds. Leonard Michael Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen (Madison, New Jersey: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), 25–46. Ganim, 59. Linda Georgianna, “Anticlericalism in Boccaccio and Chaucer: The Bark and the Bite,” in The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales, eds. Koff and Schildgen, 148–76, at 154–56. Georgianna, 167.

90  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio [those who, on being provoked by some verbal pleasantry, have returned like for like, or who, by a prompt retort or shrewd manoeuvere, have avoided danger, discomfiture or ridicule. (McWilliam, 441)]

Decameron 6, 10, approximately the midpoint of Boccaccio’s collection of novellas, is the story of a preacher, Fra Cipolla, whose quick-witted oratory and improvisational skill enable him to escape from a potentially embarrassing practical joke. Among the other tales of day six that take up the subject of wit are Decameron 6, 5, concerning Giotto’s reply to Forese’s jibe about being dressed poorly, and Decameron 6, 7, which includes Madonna Filippa’s speech against the unjust punishment of adulterous women. The eloquence of Madonna Filippa in Decameron 6, 7 not only saves her from death – the punishment for adultery – but persuades the legislators of Prato to change the unfair law governing the penalty against women convicted of adultery. But many of Boccaccio’s best characters have great wit. One of these is Ciappelletto who appears outside of day six (in Decameron 1, 1). Ciappelletto, among the worst men in the world, creates such a picture of virtuous life in his false deathbed confession that his lies convince his confessor of his holiness; moreover, Ciappelletto becomes venerated as a saint after the confessor delivers a hagiographical sermon. Like Boccaccio, Chaucer places an accomplished preacher – the Pardoner – near the midpoint of his tale collection (judged by the Ellesmere manuscript, generally thought to have arrived at the best ordering of the fragments of the Canterbury Tales). Although the Pardoner’s Tale concerns an “artist of language,” as C. David Benson has described the Pardoner, it is in Fragment 7, which follows, that Chaucer makes the subject of poetic language a prominent theme in such tales as Sir Thopas and the Nun’s Priest’s Tale.44 By the end of his tale words fail the Pardoner, however. Harry Bailly’s vulgarity rises up to meet the Pardoner’s invitation to buy his patently false relics and, like Boccaccio’s unlettered45 Fra Cipolla, the rude Host manages to turn the tables on the clever man who seeks to make a fool of him: Thou woldest make me kisse thyn olde breech And swere it were a relyk of a seint Though it were with thy fundement depeint.  (VI, 948–50)

Chaucer makes the incapacity of the Pardoner manifest at the conclusion of his tale by giving him no words: This Pardoner answered nat a word: So wroth he was, no word ne wolde he seye  (VI, 956–57)

44 45

C. David Benson, Chaucer’s Drama of Style: Poetic Variety and Contrast in the Canterbury Tales (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 44. Boccaccio, “niuna scienzia avendo,” 398; McWilliam, “illiterate,” 469.



Antifraternal Satire  91

It takes the quick maneuver of the pilgrim Knight to ease the tension by getting Harry and the Pardoner to “kiss-and-make-up.” Thus, a major difference between the tales is that at their conclusion, Boccaccio’s Fra Cipolla is triumphant while Chaucer’s Pardoner is defeated. Before the final silence, though, Chaucer’s Pardoner has had much to say. His Prologue (VI, 329–462) explains his preaching technique, and his Tale, which like Dioneo’s novella about Cipolla is almost all sermon, displays two distinct rhetorical styles – one loose (VI. 463–660) and the other tight (VI. 661–903). The loose style – full of apostrophe, exclamation, illustration, digression, and other rhetorical devices – strikes out noisily at the vices of the tavern (gluttony, gambling, and swearing). By contrast, the exemplum about the three rioters is “tight”; that is to say, highly focused and restrained. Augustine called this style “subdued,” appropriate to teaching.46 Apart from the explanatory Prologue, it is clear that the Pardoner, in contrast to Fra Cipolla of Boccaccio’s novella, delivers the same sermon (VI. 463–903) over and over again. It is a set-piece: I kan al by rote that I telle. My theme is alwey oon, and evere was  (VI, 332–33)

Had the Pardoner been free to deliver “som myrthe or jape” (VI, 319), as Harry Bailly requested after the maudlin Physician’s Tale, the pilgrims might have witnessed an impromptu performance. His quick assent to the Host’s request – “It shal be doon … by Seint Ronyon!” – indicates that he is willing enough, even if he seems to need to buy time by stopping to eat, “But first,” quod he, “here at this alestake I wol bothe drynke and eten of a cake.”  (VI, 321–22)

The “gentils” object, however, to hearing any “ribaudye” and close off the Pardoner’s chance to try out something new in a merry key. Although he consents to telling them “som moral thing” (VI, 324), he repeats that he needs to pause for refreshment and thought: “I moot thynke” (VI, 327). If his theme is always the same – Radix malorum est Cupiditas – and his sermon is memorized, about what does he pause to think? The one new element that he decides to insert before his set-piece is the Pardoner’s Prologue. Since he has the “moral thing” – the Pardoner’s Tale – “by rote,” the only thing that he needs to pause over and think through is his analysis of his preaching. That revelation is what he refers to as “som honest thing” (VI, 328). The Pardoner makes the Prologue an opportunity not only to analyze his preaching technique but also to discuss candidly what motivates his life’s work. “First” (VI, 335), he explains, a preacher needs to win the confi46

Saint Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr. (Indianapolis, Indiana: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), Bk. 4, ch. 19, 145.

92  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

dence of his audience by displaying his credentials. The Pardoner begins his sermons, therefore, by showing his listeners the bishop’s seal on his letter of authorization and his papal bulls. Also, he tells his fellow pilgrims that he speaks a few words of Latin before making a pitch for his dubious relics (i.e., the shoulder bone of the holy Jew’s sheep that heals sick cattle, cures sheep of scabs, causes farm animals to multiply, and brings about trust in jealous husbands, or the mitten that brings abundance to the land of the farmer who wears it when sowing his fields). He brags about the trick that has yielded “an hundred mark” (VI, 390): that is, he announces to the congregation that only those without sin can benefit from his relics. Then, having described the effectiveness of his props and very profitable gaude, the Pardoner gives an account of animated gesture in preaching: Thanne peyne I me to strecche forth the nekke, And est and west upon the peple I bekke, As dooth a dowve sittynge on a berne. Myne handes and my tonge goon so yerne That it is joye to se my bisynesse.  (VI, 395–99)

To what end? His stated reason for preaching is straightforward: I preche of no thing but for coveityse.  (VI, 424)

The Pardoner is conscious, furthermore, of the irony that his constant theme is the same as his dominant personal vice: Thus kan I preche agayn that same vice Which that I use, and that is avarice.  (VI, 427–28)

Money enables him to avoid physical labor – “I wol nat do no labour with myn handes” (VI, 444) – and continue the clean work of preaching. After just 133 lines, the Pardoner turns to his regular set-piece by gracefully acknowledging the desire of his fellow travelers – “Youre liking is that I shal telle a tale.” The first part of the Pardoner’s Tale – the part I have called stylistically “loose” – plays to the crowd. This is the part of the Pardoner’s sermon that in its freewheeling style most resembles Fra Cipolla’s. The Pardoner ranges over the sins of gluttony, gambling, and swearing in a way that takes every opportunity to sensationalize and to turn histrionic. After, for example, reminding the listening pilgrims that drink led Lot to commit incest with his daughters and caused Herod to permit the murder of John the Baptist, the Pardoner falls into an harangue that recalls the hysterical style of the Prioress recounting the murder of the little clergeon. Full of emotionalism, he exclaims: O glotonye, ful of cursednesse! O cause first of oure confusioun!



Antifraternal Satire  93 O original of oure dampnacioun, Til Crist hadde boght us with his blood agayn!  (VI, 498–501)

After attributing the loss of Paradise as well as sour breath, slurred speech, and impaired faculties to gluttony, the Pardoner indulges in a picturesque digression. If, as a late medieval tractate on preaching says, “Preaching … is the fitting and suitable communication of the Word of God,” this digression takes the Pardoner far from his announced text in 1 Timothy 6. 10, Radix malorum est cupiditas.47 His digression evokes faraway places in Spain and France which supply red and white wines to the shops of London: Now kepe you fro the white and fro the rede, And namely fro the white wyn of Lepe That is to selle in Fysshstrete or Chepe. This wyn of Spaigne crepeth subtillly In othere wynes, growynge faste by, Of which ther ryseth swich fumositee That whan a man hath drunken draughts thre, And weneth that he be at hoom in Chepe, He is in Spayne, right at the toune of Lepe – Not at the Rochele, ne at Burdeux toun –  (VI, 562–71)

Just three glasses of the powerful wine of the Lepe district will make a Londoner drinking at home in Chepe feel transported to Spain. The digression makes the sort of claim that might seem to defeat the Pardoner’s ostensible purpose, but he takes the risk to achieve the colorful effect. Besides, by this point he has said nearly all he set out to about gluttony and is ready to move on to the next two sins. These get far less space than gluttony, the sin with which the Pardoner captured his audience’s attention (in 105 lines). He moves rapidly through gambling (39 lines) and swearing (31 lines) and closes in on his sermon’s exemplum: “now wol I telle forth my tale” (VI, 660). The exemplum about the three rioters who set out to slay Death is the “tight” part of the Pardoner’s set-piece. It even connects smoothly to the preceding loose harangue about the sins of the tavern because the rioters have been drinking there “Longe erst prime” (VI, 661) when they swear revenge on Death for having slain a friend of theirs, “Fordronke, as he sat on his bench” (VI. 675). The Pardoner’s exemplum is a fine instance of the kind of illustrative stories with pointed morals that were used to great effect by such preachers as Jacques de Vitry and Caesarius of Heisterbach.48 The exemplum 47

48

The tractate is translated by Harry Caplan, Of Eloquence: Studies in Ancient and Medieval Rhetoric, eds. Anne King and Helen North (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1970), 52–78. The line cited appears at p. 54. The sermons of Jacques de Vitry (c. 1160–1240), a late medieval preacher, are rich in exempla. See The Exempla, or illustrative stories from the Sermones Vulgares of Jacques de Vitry, ed. Thomas Frederick Crane (New York: B. Franklin, 1971). The Dialogue of Miracles

94  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

focuses sharply on the Pardoner’s theme of avarice. The three rioters find Death by following the Old Man’s directions to “the croked wey” (VI, 761) whereby they discover gold florins, desire for which causes them to kill one another as each of them angles to gain sole possession of the treasure. The two older men stab the youngest of the trio to death after he returns with a meal of bread and wine, only to die themselves from a poison the young man put in the wine which is so exotic that even Avicenna “Wroot nevere in no canon, ne no fen,/ Mo wonder signes of empoisoning” (VI, 890–91). Having brought his set-piece to this customary highpoint, the Pardoner falls back into the loose style of the sermon’s first-half – “O cursed synne of alle cursednesse! O traytours homycide …” (VI, 895ff.) – and quickly moves into his regular call for the buying of pardons (which elicits Harry’s uncommon reaction): Myn hooly pardoun man yow alle warice, So that ye oofre nobles or sterlynges, Or elles silver broches, spoones, rynges.  (VI, 906–8)

So locked is the Pardoner into his memorized set-piece that he cannot stop the performance once it gains momentum. He catches himself in a memory lapse – “o word forgat I in my tale” (VI, 919) – inserts the nearly forgotten call to buy relics and then makes the critical error: he extends an invitation to the Host to make the first purchase. When Harry Bailly lets fly his astonishingly gross insults, the Pardoner is too stuck in his familiar sermon mode to think of a quick retort. Chaucer’s Pardoner is a highly skilled preacher, but lacks the mental agility of Fra Cipolla. Boccaccio’s preacher can think on his feet. He is a mendicant friar who travels the countryside collecting alms for the Society of St. Anthony. Fra Cipolla is the kind of preacher who preaches in churches as well as in streets and fields, and who is able to reach rustic audiences with homely stories and language. During the homily of a mass held in their local church, Fra Cipolla promises the villagers of Certaldo that later that day, outside in the public square, he will show them a feather from the wing of the Angel Gabriel (in reality a parrot feather) in return for offerings of money. Two practical jokers decide to sabotage Fra Cipolla’s afternoon performance by stealing into his bedroom while the friar is dining somewhere in town and replacing the parrot feather contained in a reliquary with a lump of coal. Later, when Fra Cipolla is preaching to the crowd of Certaldesi who have assembled to see the Angel Gabriel’s feather, and the preacher ascends to the point in his sermon where he dramatically opens the casket, he switches rhetorical gears effortlessly as soon as he sees the coals where the feather should be. In a tour de force of by Caesarius of Heisterbach (c. 1180–c. 1245) is a collection of moral tales which could be used as exempla in sermons.



Antifraternal Satire  95

eloquence and improvisational wit, Cipolla proves himself unabashed as he launches into a bogus account of his travels to the Holy Land: Ma non per tanto, senza mutar colore, alzato il viso e le mani al cielo, disse sì che da tutti fu udito: “O Iddio, lodata sia sempre la tua potenzia” (544) [Without changing color in the slightest, however, he raised his eyes to Heaven, and in a voice that could be heard by all the people present, he exclaimed “Almighty god, may Thy power be forever praised.” (McWilliam, 474)]

As Fra Cipolla catalogues relics that he supposedly saw on a pilgrimage, his invention is boundless. He relates what the Patriarch of Jerusalem showed him: “Egli primieramente mi mostrò il ditto dello Spirito Santo così intero e saldo come fu mai, e il ciuffetto del serafino che apparve a san Francesco, e una dell’unghie de’ gherubini, e una delle coste del Verbum-caro-fatti-alle finestre e de’ vestimenti della Santa Fé catolica, e alquanti de’ raggi della stella che apparve a’ tre Magi in Oriente, e una ampolla del sudore di san Michele quando combatté col diavolo …” (546) [“First of all he showed me the finger of the Holy Ghost, as straight and firm as it ever was; then the forelock of the Seraph that appeared to Saint Francis; and a cherub’s fingernail; and one of the side-bits of the Wordmade- flash-in the pan; and an article or two of the Holy Catholic faith; and a few of the rays from the star that appeared to the three Magi in the East; and a phial of Saint Michael’s sweat when he fought With the Devil.” (McWilliam, 475)]

McWilliam captures well the confusing chatter of the friar when he translates “Verbum-caro-fatti-alle finestre,” which means literally “The Word made precious at the window,” as “The Word made flash-in-the-pan” (475). In the friar’s gibberish the incorporeal and abstract take on concreteness: the Holy Ghost can have a visible finger and abstract articles of faith can be displayed. Cipolla’s mystifying catalogue of relics renders the crowd ready to accept the coals as the very coals over which St. Lawrence was roasted and met his martyrdom. The simple villagers of Certaldo believe Fra Cipolla’s explanation that his carrying off the wrong reliquary was an act willed by God: “mi pare esser certo che volontà sia stata di Dio e che Egli stesso la cassetta de’ carbone ponesse nelle mie mani, ricordandom’io pur testé che la festa di san Lorenzo sia di qui a due dì.” (547) [“it was the will of God … it was He who put the casket of coals into my hands, for I have just remembered that the day after tomorrow is the feast of St. Lawrence” (McWilliam, 476)]

96  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

The Friar is so secure in his having won over the credulity of the crowd that he becomes even more outrageously inventive, claiming that in exchange for their offerings he can inscribe their clothes with crosses made with St. Lawrence’s coals and they will be protected thereby from fire for a whole year. As he marks up their white smocks and shawls and doublets, collecting more money than ever before, he adds with further invention that the miraculous coals can never be worn down no matter how much he writes with them. It is, of course, verbal wit not physical hocus-pocus that defines Fra Cipolla’s improvisational exuberance and gets him out of the tight spot into which the two young pranksters put him. From the outset of Decameron 6, 10, its narrator, Dioneo, sets the friar’s rhetorical powers before his listener by likening his unlettered genius to the skills of classical rhetoricians, e oltre a questo, niuna scienzia avendo, sì ottimo parlatore e pronto era, che chi conosciuto non l’avesse, non solamente un gran rettorico l’avrebbe estimato, ma avrebbe detto esser Tulio medesimo o forse Quintiliano (540) [He was quite illiterate, but he was such a lively and excellent speaker, that anyone hearing him for the first time would have concluded, not only that he was some great master of rhetoric, but that he was Cicero in person, or perhaps Quintilian. (McWilliam, 470)]

Medieval treatises on ars praedicandi adapted classical rhetoric. St. Thomas Aquinas was one of those who approved of the use of the pagan arts of rhetoric, taught by ancient rhetoricians like Cicero and Quintilian, by Christian preachers. His warning about the arts of persuasion, however, underscores what is reprehensible in a preacher like Fra Cipolla (or Chaucer’s Pardoner): He who strives mainly for eloquence does not intend that men should admire what he says, but rather tries to gain admiration for himself. Eloquence is commendable when the speaker has no desire to display himself, but wishes only to use it as a means of benefiting his hearers, and out of reverence for Holy Scripture.49

Guibert de Nogent, a twelfth-century Benedictine abbot of St. Mary of Nogent and a master of Ciceronian rhetoric, strikes a similar note in his Liber quo ordine sermo fieri debeat (A Book about the Way a Sermon Ought to be Given). Trying to account for the fact that many in the religious life refuse to preach, Guibert explains:

49

The passage is quoted by Brother Joachim Walsh, O.P., “St. Thomas on Preaching,” Dominicana 5 (1921): 6–14, at 13. Walsh locates the passage in Aquinas’s Opuscula without naming the specific short work. I am grateful to Dr. Inez I. Ringland, Rebecca Crown Library, Dominican University for sending me this obscure article. I was led to this article by a citation in Caplan, 41.



Antifraternal Satire  97 Some … despise it because of pride: they see that many preachers display themselves arrogantly and for the sake of vanity, and they wish to avoid the epithet “sermonizers,” which describe so contemptible a breed, a class which Gregory Nazianzen called “ventriloquists, because they speak for the belly’s sake (pro suo ventre loquintur).”50

Well before the practical joke puts the novella in motion, Fra Cipolla’s delight in language is displayed in the way he is said to present his servant of three names – “Guccio Balena” (Whale), “Guccio Imbratta” (Befoul), “Guccio Porco” (Pig) (541) – to his friends. Fra Cipolla tells everyone that Guccio had nine failings and when asked what they were he would answer in a virtuoso display of rhymed epithets: “egli è tardo, sugliardo e bugiardo; negligente, disubidente e maldicente; trascutato, smemorato e scostumato; …” (541) [“he’s untruthful, distasteful and slothful; negligent, disobedient, and truculent; careless, willess and graceless” (McWilliam, 471)]. The clever wit of Cipolla’s sermon is less directed towards the religious education of the illiterate Certaldo rustics than it is intended to demonstrate to his fellow Florentine pranksters that he is cunning enough to preach his way out of their trap. Style, not content, is what counts in Fra Cipolla; he is far more concerned with secular rhetoric (and self-aggrandizement) than he is with Christian teaching. Hence, Boccaccio’s observation about the friar, “niuna scienza avendo” [“He was quite illiterate”]. The fourteenth-century preaching manual, Forma Praedicandi (The Form of Preaching), the only known work by Robert of Basevorn, makes clear how dangerous ignorance in a preacher is. Basevorn writes that a “need for one actually preaching is competent knowledge … otherwise, the blind leads the blind, and both fall into the ditch (Matt. 15:14, Luke 6:39).”51 The rustics are robbed and cheated, but the Florentine company of storytellers, pranksters, and Boccaccio’s readers are entertained. That Boccaccio’s Fra Cipolla is treated as a hero of verbal wit is unsurprising as the name “Cipolla” (Onion) and the story’s setting in Certaldo – the supposed birthplace of Boccaccio – suggest that the preacher is the storyteller’s alterego. In the third paragraph of Decameron 6, 10, Dioneo, its narrator, says of Certaldo, “quel terreno produca cipolle famose per tutta Toscana” (539–40) [“the soil in those parts produces onions that are famous throughout the whole of Tuscany” (McWilliam, 469)]. While that might be literally true, the many

50

51

Guibert de Nogent, A Book about the Way a Sermon Ought to be Given, trans. Joseph M. Miller, in Readings in Medieval Rhetoric, eds. Joseph M. Miller, Michael H. Prosser, and Thomas W. Benson (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1974), 162–81, at 163. Robert of Basevorn, The Form of Preaching, trans. Leopold Krul, O.S.B., in Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts, ed. James J. Murphy (Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001), 109–215, at 124. (MRTS Reprint Series, Number 5. Originally published by University of California, Berkeley, 1971).

98  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

layers of an onion also serve as an image for fiction, the kind represented by the Decameron, intended for solace rather than for the didactic seed of truth at its core. The vernacular novellas of the Decameron made Boccaccio famous not merely through all Tuscany but throughout all of western Europe.52 The layers of an onion contain no seed; as Millicent Marcus well observes, “The fact that Cipolla’s falsifications occasion no moralizing gloss … indicates the great distance Boccaccio has traveled in freeing his fictions from any obligations to interpretive systems beyond the text.”53 The reaction of Fra Cipolla’s two trickster friends to his getting himself out of a tight spot with words exactly matches that of the brigata of the cornice (or frame). The two men “avevan tanto riso, che eran creduti smascellare” (547) [“laughed until they thought their sides would split” (McWilliam, 477)]. The elegant Florentine storytellers all laughed heartily as well at the tale. Chaucer’s preacher, on the other hand, is silenced and exposed at the end of his tale so that he can do no further harm while on the pilgrimage to Canterbury among his fellow pilgrims. He had by then already delivered a serious treatment of his sermon’s theme – money is the root of all evil – in his exemplum. By comparison to Boccaccio’s Fra Cipolla, Chaucer’s Pardoner is a preacher who comes close to preaching truth. He fails, in the end, because of himself, not because of his preaching technique. The Pardoner has what St. Thomas Aquinas referred to as “an orderly discourse” but he lacks “the virtue of good works.”54 The embodiment of cupidity, not charity, the Pardoner cannot resist trying to shakedown the spiritual community of pilgrims of which he is a part. Chaucer’s confidence man is an altogether darker portrait than Boccaccio’s exuberant Fra Cipolla. The Pardoner’s memorized sermon is an illustration of what Bishop Kenneth Untener talks about in a recent discussion of preaching when he comments, “none of us improves simply by doing it over and over. Practice doesn’t make perfect. It makes permanent.”55 Or does it? The Pardoner’s set-piece on the theme, “money is the root of all evil,” even if unintentionally, causes the preacher to delve into his interior to explore his own vice over and over again. According to Guibert de Nogent, “no preaching is more efficacious than that which would help man to know himself, that

52 53

54 55

Wallace, Giovanni Boccaccio: Decameron (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 2. Millicent J. Marcus, An Allegory of Form: Literary Self-Consciousness in the Decameron, Stanford French and Italian Studies 18 (Saratoga: Anma Libri, 1979), 67. See also Georgianna’s discussion of Boccaccio’s emphasis on wit rather than corruption in “Anti­ clericalism in Boccaccio and Chaucer,” 148–76. Quoted by Walsh, 11, who indicates the source in Aquinas as his Commentary on St. John without further detail. The passage from Walsh is cited by Caplan, 48. Bishop Kenneth Untener, Preaching Better (Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1999), 4.



Antifraternal Satire  99

which brings out into the open all that is deep within him, in his innermost heart, that which will shame him, finally, by forcing him to stand clearly revealed before his own gaze.”56 Guibert is, of course, talking about the effect such preaching has on the preacher’s audience. In Chaucer’s tale, however, it takes the combination of the Pardoner’s self-exposure in his Prologue with his attempt to sell his relics at the close of his tale to provoke the vulgar insults of the Host which, in turn, shame the Pardoner into silence. The happiest interpretation of this silence is that it might signal an epiphany whereby the Pardoner is turned into the most affected member of his audience, one more ready for the spiritual journey to Canterbury. Even if we assume Chaucer knew Cipolla, we would not expect so creative a poet to merely copy him. The English poet’s having taken pains to depict his preacher as trapped in the cupidity about which he preaches reveals Chaucer’s concern with the high purpose of preaching, and the problem of the relationship of art and doctrine, a concern which, in the Retraction to the Canterbury Tales, leads Chaucer to disown them – along with other “worldly” poems of his such as Troilus and Criseyde and The Book of the Duchess – and to thank God for his having written legends of saints, homilies and moral works like his translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. Decameron 6, 10 and the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale are comic but they are not fabliaux; the comedy of these tales appears in the oratorical performances of preachers who are also con men. The coincidence of genre, character, theme, and placement between Boccaccio’s Decameron 6, 10 and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales VI, 287–968 becomes especially interesting if there is even a chance that Chaucer knew the Decameron and its tale of Fra Cipolla. In the recently completed update of Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Mary Hamel does not include Decameron 6, 10 among the sources of the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale.57 She does, however, allow that two Florentine sources for the Pardoner’s exemplum about the three rioters who go in search of Death – a novella from the Libro di Novelli et di Bel Parlar Gentile and a play, Rappresentazione di Sant’ Antonio – suggest “that Chaucer came across the story in the course of his visit to Florence in 1373.”58 It seems to me equally likely that Chaucer might have come across the Decameron and the story of Fra Cipolla in that same year. Two years earlier, in 1371, as discussed in Chapter 1, Boccaccio had returned to Florence from Naples and recopied and revised the Decameron, already a popular work throughout Europe.59 In 1373, while Chaucer was in Florence,

56 57 58 59

Guibert de Nogent, 173. Mary Hamel, “The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale” in Sources and Analogues, ed. Correale with Hamel, I: 265–320. Hamel, 281. Wallace, xiii.

100  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

Boccaccio began to lecture on Dante, a poet who influenced both the Italian and English poet. Though there is no evidence that Chaucer attended these lectures, there is no doubt that he would have been interested enough in both the subject and the speaker to have sought them out.

5 Adding Comedy: Boccaccio’s Filostrato and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde

C

haucer’s originality in using Boccaccio’s Filostrato as his principal source for Troilus and Criseyde consists primarily in his introduction of comedy into the Italian’s romance of unhappy love. The transformation of Pandaro, the go-between, into Pandarus, scheming architect of the love affair of Troilus and Criseyde, creates a fabliau thread in the English version that effects character dynamics between Pandarus and each of the lovers, moving them often in the direction of comedy. The comic aspect of the Troilus is not limited to fabliau. It includes the divine comedy of the hero’s translation to the celestial eighth sphere, another innovation that Chaucer adds to his source, as well as the creation of a heroine with unique skills in coping with Fortune which contribute to her individual comedy. Chaucer, nonetheless, calls his poem a tragedy. That he ends the work by looking forward to a comedy to be written in the future suggests, however, that the poet was fully conscious of the impact of the comic strain of the Troilus and intended to repeat his success in the fabliaux of the Canterbury Tales. Pandarus, in particular, is a creation with as much power as the Pardoner or the Wife of Bath. Troilus and Criseyde is the subject of a chapter in an earlier book of mine about melancholia.1 I frequently include the work in a course I teach on medieval English romance literature. As Chaucer’s work contains such variety, it will be useful first to consider the genre of its source, the Filostrato, and of the Troilus itself, before turning to its comedy.

Genre Filostrato In the mid-1380s Chaucer used Boccaccio’s Filostrato as his main source for Troilus and Criseyde. Barry Windeatt asserts in his 1984 edition of Chaucer’s Troilus (with facing-page Filostrato), “Ch evidently worked directly from

1

The Melancholy Muse: Chaucer, Shakespeare and Early Medicine (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 1995), 66–94.

102  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

the Italian poem, which can at a glance be seen to determine the distribution of the narrative into stanzas and lines, as well as pervasively influencing his vocabulary in every stanza that Ch translates.”2 What kind of poem was Chaucer’s principal source? The Filostrato is a long narrative poem focused on the subject of love. It is an early verse narrative of the young Boccaccio written in 1335 when the Italian was in his twenties and working in the popular romance tradition of the cantare, a verse narrative comparable to Middle English tail rhyme romance.3 For the Filostrato Boccaccio adopts the traditional cantare metrical form: a stanza made up of eight hendecasyllabic lines that rhyme abababcc. While not an ottava rima stanza, the Middle English tail rhyme stanza is in four parts (aab ccb ddb eeb). Like the tail rhyme romance the cantare grew out of a popular oral tradition of performance. Branca believed cantari were recited outdoors in the open piazzas much as A. C. Baugh thought the shorter Middle English romances were performed in taverns and market places.4 Significantly the cantare and Middle English tail rhyme romances reached the height of their popularity about the time Chaucer set out for Florence in 1372.5 The love story of Troilo and Criseida – their meeting, falling in love, and passionate affair – which is developed over the first three books of the Filostrato is entirely Boccaccio’s invention. It may very well be that the Italian poet created his account of the start of the affair, as Barry Windeatt suggests, “through the available structures of romance archetypes” (i.e., the hero’s first sight of the beloved and his falling in love, the confession of love to the confidant or go-between).6 Indeed, Boccaccio’s reference to his service in the court of Love among aristocratic men and women in the first words of the Proem to the Filostrato seems as much a description of time spent in the realms of romance literature as a snapshot of his sojourn in the court of King Robert of Naples and Sicily (The Two Sicilies):

2 3

4 5 6

Barry Windeatt, “Introduction” to Troilus and Criseyde: A New Edition of “The Book of Troilus” (London and New York: Longman, 1984), 4. On the influence of the cantare on the Filostrato see Vittore Branca’s Il Cantare Trecentesco e il Boccaccio del Filostrato e del Teseida (Florence: Sansoni, 1936); on the similarities between the cantare and Middle English metrical romances, see N. R. Havely, ed. and trans., Chaucer’s Boccaccio: Sources of “Troilus” and the Knight’s and Franklin’s Tales (Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 1980). David Wallace discusses both romance traditions in Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio (Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 1985), 75–93. Branca, Il Cantare, ix–x, and A. C. Baugh, “The Middle English Romances: Some Questions of Creation, Presentation, and Preservation,” Speculum 42 (1967), 1–31, at 19. Wallace, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio, 87. Barry Windeatt, Troilus and Criseyde, Oxford Guides to Chaucer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 145.



Adding Comedy  103 Molte fiate giá, nobilissima donna, avvenne che io, il quale quasi dalla mea purizia infino a questo tempo ne’ servigi d’Amore sono stato, ritrovandomi nella sua corte intra i gentili uomini e le vaghe donne dimoranti in quella parimente con meco … [Many times already, most noble lady, it has happened that I, who almost from childhood to the present time have been in the service of Love, finding myself in his court among noble men and beautiful ladies who were dwelling in it together with me …]7

The story of the love affair was intended, the narrator explains in the opening Proem, to mirror Boccaccio’s disappointed love for Filomena (to whom the Filostrato was dedicated). Troilus and Criseyde are mentioned in passing in two medieval works that developed the Troy legend which would have been known to Boccaccio (and Chaucer), Benoit’s Roman de Troie (c. 1160) and Guido delle Colonne’s Historia Troiana (1287), but Boccaccio makes the story of the lovers the subject of his poem. He focuses attention exclusively on the intimate story of two people in love and a few of the people in their circle. As in most of the cantari, Boccaccio tells his story in a clear, direct fashion, emphasizing, however, the sensual and intimate while reducing the role of battle, a subject that played a larger role in the typical cantari. Boccaccio keeps the context of the Trojan War in the background. C. David Benson rightly observes, “Filostrato is nothing like the dream visions that had been the inspiration of the English poet’s early work; instead it is a story set in the real world that explores the intimate personal relations of a small number of characters.”8 Boccaccio even describes the houses, gardens, and streets of Troy. It is as if Boccaccio (and later, Chaucer) caught the same bus as Margaret Mitchell whose novel set against the Civil War is more riveting than most historical studies. The attitude toward love shared by Boccaccio’s Troilo, Pandaro, and Criseida is best stated by Criseida when she compares marital love to love paramours in Filostrato II. 73–749:   Ed ora non é tempo da marito, e se pur fosse, la sua libertate servare é troppo piú savio partito. L’amor che vien da sí fatta amistate É sempre tra gli amici assai gradito, ma, sia quanto vuol grande la biltate che a’ mariti tosto non rincresca, vaghi d’aver ogni dí cosa fresca. 7

8 9

Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Filostrato, Italian text edited by Vincenzo Pernicone, translated with an introduction by Robert apRoberts and Anna Bruni Seldis (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1986), 4–5. C. David Benson, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 19. Il Filostrato, trans. apRoberts and Seldis, 88–89.

104  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio   L’acqua furtive assai piú dolce cosa é che il vin con abbondanza avuto; cosí d’amor la gioia che sia nascosa, trapassa assai del sempre mai tenuto marito in braccio; adunque vigorosa ricevi il dolce amore, il qual venuto t’é fermamente mandandolo Iddio, e soddisfa al suo caldo disio. [“Now is not the time for a husband and even if it were, to keep one’s liberty is much the wiser part. Love which comes from such friendship is always very pleasing between lovers, but, let beauty be as great as one wishes, it will soon grow distasteful to married men, who desire something fresh every day. “Stolen water is a far sweeter thing than wine had in abundance; so the joy of love which is hidden surpasses greatly that of a husband always held in one’s arms; then receive with zest the sweet love which is certainly sent to you by God and give satisfaction to his burning desire.”]

Commenting on the love portrayed by Boccaccio’s Filostrato, its translators, Robert apRoberts and Anna Bruni Seldis, write in their introduction, “Boccaccio presents what he regards as a perfect affair, and its salient feature is that very sensuousness which love paramours affords and marriage cannot. The immorality of clandestine love is what marks such love as an ‘alto appetito’ (“high desire,” II. 26).”10 Readers of a more Robertsonian persuasion – Chauncey Wood, Robert Hollander, and Janet Smarr – concur that Boccaccio portrays sensual love powerfully; they, however, interpret the poet’s intention as the display of the moral error of sensuality.11 As Wood puts it, “the Filostrato is not what its immediate narrator claims it to be: a poem of seductive encouragement. … Boccaccio takes a clearly disapproving attitude toward illicit passion.”12 Wood’s mentor and friend, D. W. Robertson, Jr., in A Preface to Chaucer, had discussed Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde as a medieval tragedy in which the characters were motivated by cupiditas, loving earthly things for themselves, and hence doomed to destruction.13 The narrator, like Troilus in the eighth sphere, would have the poem’s audience choose celestial

10 11

12 13

apRoberts and Seldis, xxiv. Robert Hollander, Boccaccio’s Two Venuses (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), Janet Levarie Smarr, Boccaccio and Fiammetta: The Narrator as Lover (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1986), and Chauncey Wood, The Elements of Chaucer’s Troilus (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1984). Wood, 30. D. W. Robertson, Jr., A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1962), 472–502.



Adding Comedy  105

love over “thise wrecched worldes appetites” (V. 1851). This reading informs Wood’s (as well as Smarr’s and Hollander’s) approach to the Filostrato. The Proem to the Filostrato, in which the narrator likens his love for his beloved to Troilo’s love for Criseida, makes clear that he yearns to experience the kind of love Troilo and Criseida consummated: E se cosí siete avveduta come vi tengo, da esse potrete comprendere quanti e quali siano i miei disii, dove terminino e che cosa piú ch’altro dimandino e se alcuna pietá meritano. [And if you believe you are as I believe you to be, you will be able to understand the greatness and the nature of my desires, what their limit is and what thing more than any other they ask for, and if they merit any pity.]14

Boccaccio undertakes the telling of Troilo’s suffering so that his beloved, Filomena, will understand the poet-narrator’s feelings reflected in the son of King Priam. In the Filostrato Criseida’s desire matches Troilo’s; Pandaro’s work as go-between, therefore, requires no complex engineering. Criseida herself irons out the details with Pandaro for her first rendezvous. And before the moment of consummation she freely casts off her shift the better to be held in Troilo’s arms. Near the very end of the Filostrato (VIII. 32), where Boccaccio draws various conclusions from his love story, his praise of sensuality suggests that even after the unhappy turn of events, Criseida might still qualify as a worthy love object:   Perfetta donna ha piú fermo disire D’essere amata, e d’amar si diletta; … queste son da seguire … [The perfect lady has a stronger desire to be loved and takes delight in loving. … These are to be followed …]15

What Chaucer found in Boccaccio’s Filostrato was a straightforward narrative in verse about carnal love told in the brisk manner of the popular Italian cantare. Chaucer tempers the sensuality of Boccaccio’s romance by making his Criseyde more hesitant and by giving his characters, especially Troilus, idealized sentiments about love would be out of place in the Filostrato. Chaucer’s poem is courtly and written for an audience that understands fin amor. It is the Filostrato’s greatest legacy.

14 15

Il Filostrato, trans. apRoberts and Seldis, 14 and 15. apRoberts and Seldis, 412–13.

106  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

Troilus and Criseyde That literary genres were very much on Chaucer’s mind as he composed his first great masterpiece is unsurprising. The famous miscellany of medieval narrative forms that is the Canterbury Tales has accustomed Chaucer’s readers to the fact that the poet took pleasure in playing with literary genres and contrasting and combining them, sometimes even within individual tales such as the Merchant’s Tale – part romance and part fabliau. The many references to literary genres within Troilus and Criseyde signal Chaucer’s sensitivity to the romance and to the comic potential within his story of unhappy, tragic love. The narrator of Troilus and Criseyde specifically uses the terms tragedye and comedye in the concluding book of Troilus: Go, litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye, Ther God thi makere yet, er that he dye, So sende might to make in som comedye!16  (V. 1786–88)

Calling his “tragedye” litel seems to add a note of ironic depreciation as if to say, I know tragedies are supposed to be about matters more important than love affairs. Gloom settles over the long narrative poem in Book I as soon as Troilus is overcome by love melancholy after falling in love (he thinks, hopelessly) with Criseyde. At the center of the work and before the passage describing the consummation of the love of Troilus and Criseyde – the earliest erotic poetry in the English language – the poet invokes Calliope, muse of epic poetry, Caliope, thi vois be new present, For now is need: sestow nought my destresse, How I mot telle anonright the gladnesse, of Troilus, to Venus heryinge?  (Prologue to Book III, 45–48)

The opening verses of Book I, moreover, sound the epic cadence, albeit not for battle; the poet states his theme as in the formulaic opening of an epic:   The double sorwe of Troilus to tellen, That was the kyng Priamus sone of Troye, In lovynge, how his aventures fellen Fro wo to wele, and after out of joie, My purpos is, …  (I. 1–5)

Chaucer announces his theme in recognizable epic fashion fully conscious that his subject falls outside of traditional themes of the classic epic. The writers of these are named at the end of the poem when Chaucer imagines

16

References to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde refer to the text in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).



Adding Comedy  107

the Troilus following the lead of ancient writers of epic: “Vergile … Omer, Lucan, and Stace” (V. 1792). The reader is thus indirectly invited to measure Troilus against the traditional epic hero. The word roumaunce appears in Book III when Pandarus, having accomplished bringing Troilus and Criseyde together, … drow hym to the feere, and took a light, and fond his contenaunce, As for to looke upon an old roumaunce.  (III. 978–80)

And earlier, in Book II, when Pandarus comes upon Criseyde and her ladies reading a romance, his niece greets him saying, “This roumaunce is of Thebes that we rede” (II. 100). Criseyde’s reading of a romance tends to bring the narrative action of the Troilus into referential relationship with the romance genre. Certainly, in the first two books of the poem, Troilus’s suffering from love melancholy and Criseyde’s being smitten by the sight of Troilus riding below her window, are the stuff of typical romance literature. Nowhere, however, is the Troilus itself referred to as a romance. The only direct generic term assigned to it is tragedye and that term is specifically juxtaposed to comedye (V. 1786, V. 1788). Chaucer’s alertness to genre is partly attributable to his awareness of the various genres of his sources for the Troilus story (in Guido delle Colonne’s Historia Troiana and in the narratives of Dares and Dictys, for instance, the story is presented as history, while in Benoit de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie and in Chaucer’s principal source, Boccaccio’s Filostrato, romance features dominate). The English poet’s inheritance of sources written in different genres contributes to the mixed generic character of Troilus and Criseyde which makes the poem richer than it would be had it been designed as a work written in one clearly defined genre. From Boccaccio, Chaucer inherited not just the story of the lovers but the curve of the action: first an ascent towards the consummation of love and then the falling away from it towards loss. The structure of the action embodies very simply the Boethian definition of tragedy which appears in Chaucer’s own translation of The Consolation of Philosophy – “Tragedye is to seyn a dite of a prosperite for a tyme, that endeth in wrecchidnesse” (Boece, Glose, ii, pr. 2). Unhappy love that leaves one overcome, prostrate (filostrato), is made the subject of the poet’s “litel tragedye.” Some early readers felt that “tragedye” does not adequately account for the poem. Robert Kilburn Root described the poem as “first a comedy and then a tragedy.”17 D. W. Robertson, in an early essay, is uneasy with the idea of tragedy in Troilus and Criseyde.18

17 18

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Book of Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Robert Kilburn Root (Princeton, New Jersey; Princeton University Press, 1926), 409. D. W. Robertson, Jr., “Chaucerian Tragedy,” English Literary History 19 (1952): 1–37.

108  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

He argued that Chaucer meant something more than the de casibus theme of the fall of a great man because the poem is “rooted firmly in Christian doctrine and Boethian philosophy.”19 Robertson’s article strains to have its cake and eat it too: there is tragedy but Boethian philosophy cancels out its reality. Helen Storm Corsa thought the comic figure of Pandarus heightened the tragic dimension of the narrative: “By as much as he ceases to be comic he becomes part of the tragic vision at the end.”20 Close to Robertson’s thinking, John Steadman argues that Chaucer was aware of the contradiction between the literary convention of tragedy and the essentially anti-tragic philosophy of Boethius that shows that the worldly goods we do not want to lose are worth nothing and that eternal happiness is found elsewhere.21 And Monica McAlpine views Chaucer as attempting to achieve a new conception of tragedy and comedy out of the narrator’s “struggle to integrate tragedy with love”.22 Although Troilus is a Trojan prince of the House of Priam, Chaucer is not primarily concerned with his tragedy as a part of the Fall of Troy. The poet is more interested in the depiction of the psyche of someone who begins as a scoffer of love, develops into a noble lover, and then comes face to face with betrayal. Chaucer even makes Troilus’s actual death on the battlefield coincide with the loss of love. The poet tempers the tragic end by moving the ideal lover to the heavenly spheres from which point he laughs at those on earth lamenting his demise – laughter seemingly the marker of the transmutation of tragedy into divine comedy in a dimension beyond this world. The poem’s action is framed by laughter: Troilus’s laughter at the start is that of a scoffer at lovers; his laughter at the end is that of a lover whose perspective has expanded beyond the earthly realm. Chaucer’s creation of a Troilus less experienced in love than Boccaccio’s Troilo allowed him to enlarge and re-imagine the character of Pandaro as Pandarus. Chaucer’s Pandarus completely changes the plot action of Books II and III from what is in Boccaccio’s poem at the start of the affair. Chaucer’s go-between alters character dynamics, introducing a kind of comedy that has to do not with the divine but the world of fabliaux, the antithesis of the idealized world of romance. His introduction of fabliau elements into his tragic love story is his most original departure from Boccaccio’s Filostrato. In developing a fabliau thread in the Troilus, Chaucer discovers one of his 19

20 21 22

Robertson’s essay is reprinted in Chaucerian Criticism, eds. Richard J. Schoek and Jerome Taylor (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1961), 86–121. The quotation appears at 118. Helen Storm Corsa, Chaucer: Poet of Mirth and Morality (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1964), 49. John Steadman, Disembodied Laughter: Troilus and the Apotheosis Tradition (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1972), 93–8. Monica McAlpine, The Genre of Troilus and Criseyde (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1978), 9.



Adding Comedy  109

greatest strengths as a writer which, at the end of his career, he carries over into the many fabliaux of the Canterbury Tales the best of which play off the romances like ironic commentaries (i.e., the Miller’s Tale following the Knight’s Tale). He appears to have those fabliaux in mind already when he alludes to “som comedye” at the close of Troilus and Criseyde. The end of the poem also looks to comedy in the Dantesque sense (which will be taken up later in this chapter).

The Addition of Comedy Pandarus, architect of love Boccaccio’s Filostrato is devoid of comedy but, largely because of Chaucer’s expanding and recreating the role of Pandarus beyond that of Pandaro, comedy becomes an important element in plot action and characterization in Chaucer’s Troilus. To accomplish bringing Troilo and Criseida together in the Italian poem Pandaro could be left a mere messenger between lovers of matched desire disposed enough to lovemaking so as to arrange things themselves. To bring the more passive lovers of the Troilus together Chaucer draws on the trickery of go-betweens associated with Latin elegiac comedies, French fabliaux, and the novellas of the Decameron. In 1967, Thomas Garbaty was the first, as far as I know, to point out that the twelfth-century Latin comedy, Pamphilus, contains elements that Chaucer incorporates into the first three books of Troilus.23 That Chaucer knew the work there can be no doubt; he cites it in both the Tale of Melibee (CT, VII, 1556, 1558, 1561) and the Franklin’s Tale (CT, V, 1109–15). Among the many similarities between the Pamphilus and the first three books of Chaucer’s Troilus, the most significant include the lovers’ choice of an experienced go-between (Anus, Pandarus), the go-between’s advice to the ladies to carpe diem and not hesitate because of shame or points of honor, the invitation to the ladies to have dinner at the home of the go-between, a wind heard when the lover appears while the lady is eating, the lovers left alone, the consummation of their love, and the ladies’ accusation of the go-between’s trickery the morning after. More recently, in a study of the western literary tradition of the go-between, Medieval Go-Betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus, Gretchen Mieszkowski focuses on two traditions of intermediaries that inhabit separate literary worlds: aristocratic go-betweens for love who appear in idealized romances (e.g., Glorizia, Boccaccio’s Filocolo, Lunete, Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain) and go-between’s for sexual conquest, hired from the lower classes who operate with tricks and inhabit Latin elegiac comedies (e.g., Lidia, 23

Thomas Jay Garbaty, “The Pamphilus Tradition in Ruiz and Chaucer,” Philological Quarterly 46 (1967): 457–70.

110  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

Pamphilus) and fabliaux (e.g., Le Prestre et Alison, Auberee).24 What makes Pandarus so fascinating, she argues, is that he is an “impossible amalgam” of both traditions.25 The amalgam may contribute to the complexity of Pandarus much as the mix of genres leaves Troilus and Criseyde a kind of hybrid; however, it is the fabliau element of which the go-between for lust is key that makes for comedy. Chaucer’s Pandarus is given more words to speak than either Troilus or Criseyde, and he is twice as talkative as Boccaccio’s Pandaro.26 The increased talk is directly related to the larger role he plays as the architect of the love affair. The Pandarus who, in Book I of the Troilus, offers his services to his friend, moaning for love “that straight unto the deth myn herte sailleth” (I. 603–6), is an older friend with a reputation for having been unlucky in love. When Troilus, therefore, hesitates to accept help from Pandarus, an unsuccessful lover giving advice to a would-be lover, he wittily retorts with a comparison of himself to a whetstone: “A whetstone is no kerving instrument,/ But yet it maketh sharppe kervyng tolis” (I. 631–32). The retort is a blatant reference to impotence. Pandarus urges his friend to do something to win the lady – what is the point of languishing “Unknowe, unkist, and lost, that is unsought” (I. 810)? – and gets Troilus to identify her. So eager is Pandarus to aid Troilus to achieve where he has failed that he promises, “Were it for my suster, al thy sorwe,/ By my wil she sholde al be thyn to morwe” (I. 860–61). In fact, once Pandarus elicits the identity of the beloved – Criseyde – Love’s strategist turns out to be her uncle and Troilus’s guarantee of success (“And I thi borugh?” I. 1039). In the Filostrato, Pandaro is Criseida’s cousin, and presumably close in age to her as well as to his friend, Troilo. Pandaro makes his appearance in Book II of Filostrato, Standosi in cotal guisa un di soletto nella camera sua Troiol pensoso vi sopravvenne un troian giovinetto d’alto legnaggio e molto coraggioso; il qual veggendo lui sopra il suo letto giacer disteso e tutto lacrimoso, “Che è questo,” gridò, “amico caro?”  (Fil. II. 1) [One day while Troilo was brooding in such a way alone in his room, a Trojan youth of noble lineage and of great spirit entered unexpect-

24 25 26

Gretchen Mieszkowski, Medieval Go-Betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus (New York and Houndmills, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Mieszkowski, 3. Sanford B. Meech, Design in Chaucer’s “Troilus” (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1959), 9.



Adding Comedy  111 edly, who, seeing him lying stretched out and all tearful on his bed, cried out, “What is this, dear friend?”]27

Pandaro has no greater experience than the lovers who appear to be his contemporaries. As Pandarus begins plotting how to win Criseyde for Troilus his mental process is likened to an architect’s planning the design of a building: For everi wight that hath an hous to founde Ne renneth naught the werk for to bygynne With rakel hond, but he woll bide a stounde, And sende his hertes line out fro withinne Aldirfirst his purpos for to wynne. Al this Pandare in his herte thoughte, And caste his werk ful wisely or he wroughte.  (I. 1065–71)

Chaucer here translates from Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria nova, where the architectural metaphor describes the art of poetry rather than that of love. Pandarus, in devising how best to win Criseyde for Troilus, is a “plotter” much as a writer is. The main points of Pandarus’s engineering are the intrigues he sets in motion in Books II and III – actions not found in the Filostrato – which are designed to bring about the seduction of Criseyde. One intrigue is set in the house of Deiphebus, and the other in Pandarus’s home. Those gathered together at Deiphebus’s house believe they are there to protect Criseyde from Polyphete, said (falsely) to have made a threat against her property. In reality Pandarus is enabling Troilus to speak with his niece for the first time. Troilus is to go to Deiphebus’s house and then immediately to bed, saying that he is sick with a fever. There is more than a little irony in the fact that the hostess at Deiphebus’s party is Helen, the cause of the tragic Trojan War itself, and that she will speak of Troilus’s “illness” after Criseyde is made willing to meet Troilus. Book III begins with Troilus rehearsing what Pandarus tells him to say to Criseyde when she visits the supposedly sick prince: Lay al this mene while Troilus, Recordyng his lesson in this manere: “Mafay,” thoughte he, “thus wol I sey, and thus; Thus wol I pleyne unto my lady dere; That word is good, and this shal be my chere; This nyl noughte foryeten in no wise.”  (III. 50–55)

Just as Troilus moves to leave his bed and fall on bended knee before Criseyde, who arrives to ask for his protection as prince of the House of Priam, he forgets the lines he has practiced: 27

Il Filostrato, trans. apRoberts and Seldis, 50–51.

112  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio And sire, his lessoun, that he wende konne To preyen hire, is thorough his wit ironne.  (III. 83–84)

Eventually Troilus speaks from his heart and asks for her pity. Once she feels assured that he intends chivalric service and will protect her honor, Criseyde accepts him as her knight. Thankful that intrigue number one has succeeded, Pandarus hastens to put intrigue number two into play. He tells Troilus and Criseyde that he will arrange an opportunity for further conversation at his own home: “And lat se which of yow shal here the belle To speke of love aright!” – therwith he lough – “for ther have ye a leiser for to telle.”  (III. 198–200)

In private Pandarus admits to Troilus that he is acting as a pander in manipulating the affair “To doon thi lust and holly to ben thyn” (III. 276). He goes to invite Criseyde to his home for dinner on a day which threatens to storm. His niece accepts the invitation after being assured that Troilus will not be present. But the artificer has designed his plot with gusto: Now al is wel, for al the world is blynd In this matere, both fremed and tame, Thys tymbur is al redy up to frame; Us lakketh nought but what we witen wolde A certeyn houre, in which she comen sholde.  (III. 528–32)

Pandarus arranges for Troilus to arrive before Criseyde and deposits him under a trapdoor which is connected to a closet, the litel closet in which Criseyde sleeps when the storm makes it necessary for her to stay overnight at Uncle Pandarus’s house. There is no such ruse in the Filostrato. Pandaro and Troilo go to Criseida’s house where Troilo enters through a secret entrance (“in parte segreta,” Part III, 24) and waits for Criseida to come after everyone goes to sleep. She then descends stairs to where Troilo is hiding and leads him up the stairs to her bedroom (“ ’n camera ne girò,” Part III, 30). Pandarus’s scheme to get his more shy lovers into bed takes advantage of his home’s architecture.28 Besides the “litel closet” in which Criseyde sleeps and the trapdoor connected to it under which Troilus waits to join her, there is the stewe (III. 601), a room with a fireplace where Pandarus sits. It is connected to the closet by the trapdoor through which Troilus waits to pass. Pandarus persuades his niece to allow Troilus into the litel closet by urging her to explain away Troilus’s alleged jealousy of the rumored (and concocted) rival named Horaste (III. 797). Criseyde’s long speech about jealousy causes 28

H. M. Smyser, “The Domestic Background of Troilus and Criseyde,” Speculum 31 (1956): 297–315, and Saul N. Brody, “Making a Play for Criseyde: The Staging of Pandarus’s House in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,” Speculum 73 (1998): 115–40.



Adding Comedy  113

Troilus to faint, necessitating Pandarus’s undressing Troilus and dropping him into Criseyde’s bed with the advice, “Swouneth nought now” (III. 1190). His presence comically saves the day but also adds a note of discomfort to the love scene as he withdraws to the fireplace and remains in the room with the lovers. The scene belongs to Pandarus as much as to them; the lovers are together because of the go-between’s comic engineering, a fact which undeniably makes them appear a bit ridiculous right before their great love scene. Such engineering will not be needed by “sodeyn Diomede”; whatever else Troilus’s faint may mean, it clearly differentiates the two lovers of Criseyde. After a night of lovemaking and an exchange of vows with Criseyde, Troilus returns to his palace and Pandarus enters his niece’s closet. He makes a joke about the rain keeping people up all night, puts his arm under the sheets and kisses Criseyde. The moment is bawdy, lecherous, and some have suggested incestuous.29 Boccaccio’s Part III of Filostrato takes just 232 lines to narrate how Troilo arrives at night at Criseida’s house and the two lovers go to the lady’s bedroom for a night of love. Chaucer’s invention of the two social events designed by Pandarus in the fiction of the narrative to bring the two very different lovers together protracts the time taken to get to Criseyde’s bed – 1,260 lines. Pandarus’s plot for the intrigue at his home inserted by Chaucer into the narrative structure inherited from Filostrato is the stuff of fabliaux with their comic entrances and exits through secret doors. Representative is the thirteenth-century Le Prestre et Alison in which a secret door as well as a hidden attic room off a bedroom trick a lustful priest into bed with Alison, the village prostitute, instead of the twelve-year-old virgin, Marion, whom he thinks he has paid Hercelot, the go-between, to procure for him. When the priest arrives he sees the young virgin enter the bedroom but does not see her slip into the attic room. Also unknown to the priest is that Alison, the prostitute, has already been let into the bedroom by Hercelot through the secret door.30 Equally reminiscent of the comic world of the fabliaux is the sheer concreteness of the numerous physical details of the setting in the consummation scene of Book III of Troilus, most of them architectural: the trap door through which Pandarus brings Troilus to Criseyde from the adjacent stewe (III. 741–42), the pryve and goter (III. 785–88) through which Pandarus falsely explains to Criseyde that Troilus entered the house, the fireplace and chimney to which Pandarus withdraws, the room divided by the travers (III. 674) so that Criseyde’s ladies can sleep outside of her bedroom 29

30

But see Robert apRoberts, “Contribution to the Thirteenth Labour: Purging the Troilus of Incest,” in Essays on English and American Literature and a Sheaf of Poems, eds. J. Bakker, J. A. Verleun, and J. v.d. Vriesenaerde, Costerus n.s. 63 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987), 11–25. Windeatt, however, has reminded us that romances too have “comings and goings” through secret doors, as in the twelfth-century romance, Eracle (Troilus and Criseyde, Oxford Guide, 170.)

114  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

to make her feel secure, etc. Such specific details contribute to the realism of fabliaux and their emphasis on the physical side of human life. Fabliau associations permit an unattractive light to be shed on Pandarus despite his wit, energy, and engaging talk. C. S. Lewis observed of him long ago, “When you are in the hands of such a man you can travel first class through the length and breadth of England on a third-class ticket; … drinks will be forthcoming at hours when the rest of the world goes thirsty.”31 He energetically promotes the love affair of his friend but will cynically advise Troilus to find some other woman to love when Criseyde betrays him. Moreover, as Windeatt comments, the romance heroine in the grip of Pandarus’s manipulations can “appear as gullible as a character in a fabliau.”32 The hero’s swoon, likewise, which is full of anguish where it appears in Part IV of Boccaccio’s Filostrato, looks comic when Chaucer shifts it to the bedroom scene of Book III of Troilus where Pandarus has been playing with all the physical details of the setting. Why Chaucer decided to make the hero look ridiculous right before the great love scene is impossible to know, but that he designed the juxtaposition of the ridiculous and the sublime intentionally there can be no doubt. Pandarus and Criseyde; Pandarus and Troilus Pandarus’s relationship to the two major characters, his friend, Troilus, and his niece, Criseyde, is the source of several comic episodes. Pandarus and Criseyde enjoy a playful intimacy which makes their relationship attractive and full of mirth. Unlike Boccaccio’s Criseida, Chaucer’s Criseyde has a sense of humor; however, she “laughs only when she is with her uncle.”33 Book II of Troilus is predominantly comic in tone; it contains a great deal of dialogue between uncle and niece. Criseyde, whom we know from the start will yield to her lover, resists her uncle’s efforts on behalf of his friend. That situation produces comic irony, but the fact that we know she will ultimately betray Troilus adds an undertone played in a minor key. Pandarus first comes upon Criseyde with her ladies one May morning when they are reading a romance. He urges her to put away her book and widow’s veil and dance with him: “Lat us don to May som observaunce” (II. 112). She at first puts him off with apparent moral outrage or, perhaps, mock shock, “I? God forbade! Quod she, be ye mad? Is that a widwes life, so God yow save?”  (II. 113–14)

31 32 33

C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 190. Windeatt, Troilus and Criseyde, Oxford Guide, 171. Benson, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, 90.



Adding Comedy  115

Criseyde insists that she should let younger women do the dancing while she engages in more suitable pursuits such as reading saints’ lives. But she is enticed to play along with Pandarus’s game of words when he intimates that he knows a way to make her dance. Curious, she asks if the war might be over. She has been living in fear for some time: “is than th’assege aweye?/ I am of Grekes so fered that I deye” (II. 123–24). He rejoins that it is something better but he is not saying (“ne nevere shal, for me/ This thing be told to yow,” II. 134–35). They engage in chit-chat for nearly 100 lines, during which Pandarus gets up twice to leave, before Criseyde can no longer resist asking him to tell her what is on his mind: “Shall I nat witen what ye meene of this?” (II. 226). He backs off; she urges him on (“For Goddes love, whither it be wel or be amys,/ Say on,” II. 313–14). He announces that Troilus is dying for love of her and, if he does die, he, Pandarus, will kill himself (“with this knyf my throte kerve,” II. 325). He urges Criseyde to be more friendly to Troilus and advises her to carpe diem. Criseyde accuses her uncle of moral betrayal and claims to want to die herself (II. 427). Not to be undone, Pandarus, for his part, declares that he too will die (II. 446) by doing something dreadful. The comedy of the scene turns on exaggerated emotions on both sides. Criseyde appears to believe Pandarus’s threat of suicide as she detains him at II. 447 by grabbing hold of his robe when he heads for the door. She promises to show Troilus mercy in order to save her uncle’s life. Delighted, Pandarus declares, “ther were nevere two so wel ymet” (II. 586) to which Criseyde objects that her uncle has overstepped himself, “Nay, therof spak I nought, ha, ha” quod she, “As helpe me God, ye shenden every deel!”  (II. 589–90)

She recognizes that Pandarus is making more of her promise than she intended. The interchange breaks off at this point with both players having acquitted themselves well in an histrionic game of tears and high emotion. Alfred David judges this interchange to be “one of the most delightful scenes that Chaucer ever wrote” whose “comedy depends in large measure on our response to the tragic acting of Pandarus and Criseyde.”34 David argues brilliantly that Criseyde enters into play with Pandarus so naturally because she understands his spirit of “bodily laughter” which asserts “the pleasures of eating, loving, and being alive” in this world.35 Uncle and niece are seen as being aligned by nature with a spirit akin to that found in Shakespeare’s most festive of comedies, Twelfth Night, which David cites,

34

35

Alfred David, “Chaucerian Comedy and Criseyde,” in Essays on Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Mary Salu (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, and Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1979), p. 96. David, 91.

116  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio What is love? ’Tis not hereafter, Present mirth hath present laughter, What’s to come is still unsure.  (Twelfth Night, II, iii, 47–49)36

Criseyde may have objected to Pandarus’s going too far in his assumption that his niece and Troilus are well suited (II. 582–95), but very shortly thereafter, when Criseyde sees Troilus ride past her window on his way back from battle, her reaction makes clear that she is smitten, “To hirself she seyde, ‘Who yaf me drynke?’ ” (II. 651). With Pandarus she alternates between cool reserve and moral indignation at the revelation of Troilus’s love. Left alone to reflect, she succumbs, but she has had some direction from the noisy crowd below her window in the streets, “Se, Troilus/ Hath right now put to flighte the Grekes route!” (II. 649–51). How can she resist? Such a prince, such a hero, and he loves her! Part of this shifting of attitudes has to do with Criseyde’s sense of her position as a woman (“we wrecched women nothing konne,” II. 782; “The tresoun that to women hath ben do!” II. 793). By nature she is romantic, but she is practical too. Her first action in the poem is, after all, to fall on her knees before Hector to beg for his protection in a kind of tableau of the suppliant woman – a smart move if you are the daughter of a traitor such as Calchas, who has gone over to the Greek side. Calchas’s gift of prophecy took him from Troy to the Greek camp (it will later cause him to make the Greeks bring his daughter out from Troy as well). Angered by Calchas’s betrayal, the town is vindictive and wants to burn “al his kyn” – that means Criseyde – “fel and bones” (I. 91). Moreover, as a widow, she is unprotected by a husband in time of war when women must sometimes defend themselves against violence. Late in Book II, when Pandarus comes to deliver a letter from Troilus, he draws Criseyde away from her attendants with a white lie: he has practical matters to talk over with her brought to him by a “Greek espie” (II. 112). Alone at last in a garden, Pandarus delivers Troilus’s declaration of love to a seemingly aloof Criseyde whose cool suggests that she is reluctant to take the letter. Her attitude leads him to force the letter on her by finally plunging it into her bosom, ‘Refuse it naught,’ quod he, and hente hire faste, And in hire bosom the letter down he thraste  (II. 1154–55)37

There follows chatter and joking about whether or not they should go into the hall to dine before Criseyde steals a moment to withdraw first to her chamber to read Troilus’s letter. Pleased by its contents, she plays a joke of her own on Pandarus. Seeing him standing alone in the study, Criseyde 36 37

Quoted by David, 90. In the Filostrato Criseyde takes the letter from Pandaro and places it in her bosom herself (II. 113). In Chaucer a joke is tinged with sexual titillation.



Adding Comedy  117

sneaks up on him and grabs him by the hood, saying triumphantly, “Ye were caught er that ye wiste” (II. 1182). When Criseyde here plays a trick on the unsuspecting trickster, Chaucer introduces the notion that, quite possibly, Criseyde is not her uncle’s victim but rather a woman complicit in the game of her own entrapment.38 That uncle and niece are in accord is signaled even before Criseyde agrees to answer Troilus’s letter when they “sette hem down and ete” (II. 1184). At heart Pandarus and Criseyde are cakes and ale people who are more inclined to eat than fast. Pandarus knows how to make Criseyde laugh so hard “That she for laughter wende for to dye” (II. 1169) precisely because that – die – is what someone of her nature intends most definitely not to do. At least through the middle of Book III, Criseyde might be seen as participating in a Chaucerian comedy that “makes light of the hereafter.”39 Pandarus judges Criseyde to be capable of celestial love but feels that more natural “love of kynde” has greater claim on her nature (II. 1374). Not all Chaucerians respond to the humor of the scene between Pandarus and Criseyde. C. S. Lewis, evaluating Criseyde’s decision to grant her love to Troilus, has this to say, Chaucer has painted a touching and beautiful picture of a woman by nature both virtuous and amorous … a woman who in a chaste society would certainly have lived a chaste widow. But she lives in Troy … where love has nothing to do with marriage. … If … she yields, she commits no sin against the social code of her age and country.40

Much more sober is Chauncey Wood, who criticizes Criseyde for lack of prudence in giving in, against her better judgment, to Pandarus’s urging her to cast off her widowhood and get up and dance.41 Wood sees Pandarus’s invitation to join the dance as the beginning of an internal debate within Criseyde akin to that in The Romance of the Rose wherein the Lover struggles against Reason in his determination to win the rosebud and serve the God of Love. Seeing the interchange in terms of the medieval debate tradition causes Wood to ignore entirely the comic overtones of the repartee between Pandarus and Criseyde. For Wood the heroine is flawed because of “her falling in with

38

39 40 41

Cf. Robert Hanning, “Come in Out of the Code: Interpreting the Discourse of Desire in Boccaccio’s Filostrato and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,” in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde: “Subject to alle Poesye.” Essays in Criticism, ed. R. A. Shoaf (Binghamton, New York: Medieval and Renaissance Texts, 1992), 134. Hanning’s comment on this line is that it “suggests the possible need for a reversal of assumptions about who is manipulating whom in this part of the poem.” David, 99. Lewis, 183. Wood, 132.

118  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

Pandarus’s general proposal even when she knows he is not a good counselor. …”42 If Wood is on the right track in interpreting in terms of the debate tradition, then the tone of the interchange, it seems to me, should invite the reader to recall the Placebo-Justinus debate called for by January in the Merchant’s Tale. There Chaucer handles the convention humorously. Although Criseyde is much too practical to inhabit January’s world of trance and fantasy, she is as inclined as the knight to love and to follow the advice of the counselor who tells her what she wants to hear. Pandarus, however, the architect of love, “largely ignores the possibility that Criseyde might desire Troilus on her own.”43 This results as much from Criseyde’s assuming a position between complicity and resistance as it does from Pandarus’s need to control and thus create a role for himself within the affair. There can be no doubt that Criseyde wanted to yield to Troilus in the consummation scene of Book III where she matches Troilus’s desire and tells him: “Ne hadde I er now my swete herte deere,/ Ben yold, ywis, I were not here!” (III. 1210–11). Pandarus’s interview with Troilus in Book I, after entering his friend’s bedroom unexpectedly and hearing his moaning, has comic overtones even though the hero is found to be in a desperate state. In this book Chaucer explores Troilus’s obsessed anxiety with thoughts of Criseyde after he sees her in the temple and falls in love with her at first sight: And whan that he in chamber was alone, He doun upon his beddes feete hym sette, And first he gan to sike, and eft to grone, And thought ay on hire so, withouten lette, That, as he sat and wook, his spirit mette Right of hire look, and gan it new avise.  (I. 358–63)

It is clear that the hero, so fixated on the object of desire that he can barely stand up, is suffering from the lover’s malady that Chaucer would depict most fully in the portrait of Arcite, suffering the pangs of love for Emelye, in the Knight’s Tale (I, 1361–76).44 From the start Pandarus thinks in physicianly terms and alludes to “Phebus, that first fond art of medicine” (I. 659) as he intervenes to aid a friend whom he thinks may actually die. The Troilus whom Pandarus sees before him appears to be in a bad way: … longe he ley as stylle as he ded were; And after this with sikynge he abreyde,

42 43 44

Wood, 137. Hanning, 133. See chapter 3, “Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde: Courtly Love and the Disease of Love,” of my The Melancholy Muse: Chaucer, Shakespeare and Early Medicine, 66–94.



Adding Comedy  119 And to Pandarus vois he lente his ere, And up his eighen caste he, that in feere Was Pandarus, lest that in frenesie He sholde falle, or elles soone dye; And cryde, “Awake!” full wonderlich and sharpe; “What! Slombrestow as in a litargie?”  (I. 722–30)

Troilus, however, is not so badly off that he cannot tell his friend to ease up: “I am not deef; now pees, and crye namore” (I. 753). Moreover, when he refers to Pandarus’s “wordes” and “lore” (I. 754) there is comic suggestion that Troilus has found Pandarus’s proverb-laden rhetoric hard to take. An accumulation of aphorisms such as Pandarus’s “ ‘wo hym that is alone/ for, and he falle, he hath non helpe to ryse’ ” (I. 694–95) and “ ‘to wrecche is consolacioun/ To haue another felawe in hys peyne.’ ” (I. 708–9) leads Troilus to finally complain that proverbs are useless – “thi proverbs may me naught availle” (I. 756) – and that Pandarus should drop his aphoristic manner of talk (“Lat be thyne olde ensaumples,” I. 760). Pandarus shares with Hamlet’s Polonius a tendency to sprinkle his language with sententious phrases and proverbs, especially when giving advice. And, as with Polonius, Pandarus’s motives undercut the effect of even the best of his aphoristic remarks. Pandarus casts himself in the role of priestly confessor as well as that of physician. He sees himself as a Priest of Love who needs to make Troilus repent of having called the god of Love “ ‘Seynt Idiot, lord of thise foles alle.’ ” (I. 910). This mantle he takes on in a mirthful spirit shortly after he sees Troilus blush at his request for his beloved’s name and realizes that his friend at last is going to reveal it – “ ‘A ha!’ quod Pandare, ‘here bygynneth game.’ ” (I. 868). Troilus plays along as acolyte to Pandarus’s role as Priest: “Now bet thi brest and sey to God of Love ‘Thy grace, lord, for now I me repente, If I mysspak, for now my self I love.’ Thus sey with al thyn herte in good entente.” Quod Troilus, “A, lord! I me consente, And preye to the my iapes thow foryiue, And I shal neuere more whyle I live”  (I. 932–38)

For his part, Pandarus encourages and cheers the new convert as he promises to win Criseyde for him. So complete is the religious conversion of Troilus that Pandarus effects in the former heretic in Book I that when the lover enters the bliss of Criseyde’s bed in Book III, Pandarus playfully asks Troilus to pray for him as if he had become one of the saints of Love (III. 342). The request is not merely witty; it marks a victory for Pandarus. Without him Troilus would never have arrived at this point. Overall the comedy of the second half of Book I is serio-comic, focusing at once on a love that threatens death yet verges on the absurd. Through all the japes and talk between Pandarus and

120  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

Troilus one idea about love emerges clearly: its power is irresistible. Troilus is the hero because he is in love. By Books IV and V, however, Pandarus becomes scornful of Troilus’s faithfulness. Once the happy ending of the love affair is made impossible by the exchange of Criseyde for Antenor, Pandarus, in the spirit of the fabliaux, suggests that Troilus find himself another woman. The comic figure of Pandarus in its vulgarity and practicality provides ironic contrast to the love of the passive melancholic Troilus and the hesitant, fearful Criseyde. Pandarus’s conception of love is purely sexual and heightens the more ideal quality of Troilus’s. The go-between’s busy, energetic manipulations are comic as he bustles about to accomplish the lovers’ joy in Book III. He is the agent of their good fortune and bliss. Pandarus can do nothing, however, to reverse the direction towards tragedy that the love affair takes in Books IV and V. His moment of insight comes in Book V, when he knows that he cannot change Troilus’s pain to joy as he did in the first half of the narrative: “My brother deer, I may do the namore./ What sholde I seye? I hate, ywys, Crisseyde;/ And God woot, I wol hate hire evermore!” (V. 1730–33). When he ceases to be comic, Pandarus becomes part of the tragic end of the love affair he helped make possible. Without him, Criseyde would not have yielded to Troilus and without his intervention, Troilus would never have made bold to win Criseyde on his own after being struck by the sight of her angelic beauty. The ending and comedy The first line of Troilus and Criseyde announces the poem’s unhappy subject, “The double sorwe of Troilus” (I. 1). Fifty-four lines later the double sorrow of Troilus is specifically said to consist in two things, … in lovynge of Criseyde, And how that she forsook hym er she deyde.  (I. 55–56)

The narrator returns to these ideas at the very end of Book V in more rhetorical form: Swich fyn hath, lo, this Troilus for love! Swich fyn hath al his grete worthynesse! Swich fyn hath his estat real above, Swich fyn his lust, swich fyn hath his noblesse! Swich fyn hath false worldes brotelnesse! And thus bigan his loving of Criseyde, As I have told, and in this wise he deyde.  (V. 1828–34)

The end was clearly announced in the beginning. Muscatine observed, “That the poem is a criticism as well as a celebration of secular life is announced



Adding Comedy  121

in its very first line.”45 In much the same way Donaldson commented, “the moralitee of Troilus and Criseyde (and by morality I do not mean ‘ultimate meaning’) is simply this: that human love, and by a sorry corollary everything human, is unstable and illusory.”46 So much poetry (more than 8,000 lines) is moved through between Books I and V that it is no wonder that Donaldson must re-emphasize his reservation about the poem’s meaning, “The meaning of the poem is not the moral, but a complex qualification of the moral.”47 The comedy that is added to the “litel … tragedye” of this romance is part of the qualification. The comic vision might even be thought of as the “third view” that Muscatine posits as a response to the poem’s ambiguous juxtapositions: “To present secular idealism as a beautiful but flawed thing, and to present practical wisdom as an admirable but incomplete thing, to present them, indeed, as antithetical and incongruous to each other, is by implication to present a third view, higher and more complete than either. This philosophical third view … is made explicit in the ending.”48 By the end of the Troilus, both Criseyde and Troilus can be seen in terms of comedy, albeit different kinds. The final eighteen stanzas of the Troilus, usually referred to as the Epilogue, place the sad outcome of the romance within an ethical context. Tragedy is concerned with swings of Fortune between happiness and misery, weal and woe. To the Boethian philosopher these changes belong to the temporal realm. Within the poem, Troilus’s happiness or suffering is tied to the presence or absence of his mistress. When he is translated from the unhappiness of his love affair (and from death at the hands of Achilles on the battlefield) in this world – the stage of the poem – to the eighth sphere of the Ptolemaic universe, he is moved to the realm of changelessness and true felicity as described by Boethius and the Church Fathers. There the tragic outcome of the love story is displaced and becomes divine comedy in a context of Boethian as well as Christian values. Chaucer was clearly dissatisfied with Boccaccio’s conclusion in the Filostrato which leaves Troilo dead and ends with a complaint about fickle women. From the perspective of the eighth sphere Chaucer’s Troilus can laugh at those who mourn his death (V. 1821) because loss, whether it be of life or a mistress such as Criseyde, has no meaning in a realm without change. The comic resolution of the Epilogue is what “moral Gower” and “philosophical Strode,” the poet and philosopher to whom Chaucer dedicated his poem, would have seen as the inevitable outcome of Troilus’s search for constancy in love. The Troilus of celestial laughter, however, is no longer human; he is a soul and, as such, beyond 45 46 47 48

Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1957), 162. E. Talbot Donaldson, Speaking of Chaucer (London: Athlone Press, 1970), 92. Donaldson, 92. Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition, 132.

122  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

the vicissitudes of Fortune (which includes Cupid’s arrows). “The dead,” as Howard put it, “can laugh.”49 It is doubtful that the Troilus who laughed at lovers in Book I could have passed so swiftly to “the holughnesse of the eighte spere’ (V. 1809) as the Troilus who suffered through the ups and downs of Books II through IV. The first laughter sprang from ignorant arrogance, the second from harsh experience. The narrator of the Epilogue ends by extolling the movement from love for the created to love for the Creator as an advance: O yonge, fresshe folkes, he or she, In which that love up groweth with youre age, Repeyreth hom fro worldly vanyte, And of youre herte up casteth the visage To thilke God that after his ymage Yow made …  (V. 1835–40)

From his new perspective Troilus perceives the insignificance of the world, “This litel spot of erthe” (V. 1815), which was the place on which his “litel … tragedye” was enacted. Barry Windeatt suggests that “the implications of Troilus’ ascent as comedye in transcending earlier tragedye” derive from the Divine Comedy.50 Shortly after having prayed that God (V. 1788) send him “might to make in som comedye” Chaucer closes Troilus and Criseyde with a hymn to the Trinity – Thow oon, and two, and thre, eterne on lyve, That regnest ay in thre, and two, and oon, Uncircumscript, and al maist circumscrive.  (V. 1863–65)

– which precisely translates a stanza from Dante’s Paradiso: Quell’uno e due e tre che sempre vive   E regna sempre in tre e ‘n due e ‘n uno,  Non circumscritto, e tutto circunscrive.  (Paradiso, xiv, 28–30)

For this “litel … tragedye” to end happily – the expected conclusion of a comedy – the hero had to be taken beyond the boundaries of the world of the narrative, which is to say, beyond the temporal world. So too did Emily Dickinson, whose affections for an Anglican minister – referred to in “I shall know why – when Time is over” as a type of Peter who failed to keep his promise – left her feeling frustrated and betrayed. Emily, who throughout her forty years of writing gave expression to the conflicting claims of heaven and earth, looked to “the fair schoolroom of the sky”: 49 50

Donald R. Howard, Chaucer: His Life, his Works, his World (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1987), 370. Windeatt, Troilus and Criseyde, Oxford Guide, 132.



Adding Comedy  123 I shall know why – when Time is over – And I have ceased to wonder why – Christ will explain each separate anguish In the fair schoolroom of the sky – He will tell me what “Peter” promised – And I – for wonder of his woe – I shall forget the drop of Anguish That scalds me now – that scalds me now!51

The temporal world is the world of human love of which little tragedies may be made (as well as great ones involving nations like Troy, whose fall Chaucer keeps in the distance). The poet, nonetheless, even if ironically, claims epic status for his love story when in Book III (III. 45) he invokes Calliope, the epic muse, before the great consummation scene. The little tragedy, moreover, is part of the larger one outside of the love story. Plautus, in the Bacchides (953–55), refers to a belief that the early death of the young Troilus was a sign of the coming Fall of Troy.52 It is the noble lover and his intimate love story, not the warrior and the fall of a great nation, that interested Chaucer, who tells his reader that he should read “in Omer, or in Dares, or in Dite” (I. 146) if he wants to know about war. It is as if Chaucer, in focusing on the love story of Troilus and Criseyde, decided to give greater space to the tragic love story of Dido and Aeneas than Vergil allowed it in the Aeneid. The tragic theme of worldly mutability expressed in terms of the changing fortunes of love engaged Chaucer more than the same theme expressed on the large canvas of the destiny of a nation. As Corsa wrote, wondering what it was that attracted Chaucer to Boccaccio’s Filostrato: “What it was that compelled his interest in the story cannot be known; perhaps it reflected his concern with the nature of Love.”53 The Troilus is about the hero’s change of Fortune, his tragedy, ultimately qualified by the divine comedy of the poem’s end. No one calls Troilus and Criseyde the Criseyde, but obviously the story is hers as well. It has no heavenly conclusion; her story simply stops: Ne me ne list this sely woman chyde Forther than the storye wol devyse. Hire name, allas! Is punysshed so wide, That for hire gilt it oughte ynough suffise.  (V. 1093–96)

Chaucer leaves Criseyde’s story unfinished. It is Henryson who tells us, a hundred years later in his Testament of Cresseid, that she has been cast off 51 52 53

Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas Johnson (Boston: Little Brown, 1960), Poem 193. Windeatt, Troilus and Criseyde, Oxford Guide, 143. Corsa, 40.

124  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

by her Greek lover, Diomede, become a prostitute, and begs with others like herself who are afflicted with leprosy: “begging fra hous to hous/ With cop and clapper lyke ane lazarous.”54 Leprosy fits the crime of lechery; Henryson’s Cresseid is an outcast from Nature for denying Love. A parliament of the gods Cynthia and Saturn pronounces leprosy, placing Cresseid’s offense in a cosmic context. She is punished for “brukkelnes,” her lightness in love. Henryson sets his poem in the bleak season. A sudden storm of April at the poem’s beginning is meant to be symbolic, a kind of punishment: “Schouris of haill can fra the north discend.”55 Henryson’s blatant sentence has no parallel in Chaucer. The most negative comments we get on Criseyde in Chaucer’s poem are the last words of Troilus and Pandarus. When Troilus finds the brooch he gave Criseyde pinned to Diomede’s captured clothes and realizes Criseyde’s unfaithfulness, his final comment says it all, “I have it nat deserved” (V. 1722). As for the naturally talkative Pandarus, his last words in the poem come near to suggesting the inexpressibility topos: “I kan namore seye” (V. 1743). Chaucer’s Criseyde is an unfinished portrait because his conception of his heroine is of a woman who reinvents herself whenever Fortune’s wheel turns downward. When we first meet her she is a widow whose precarious position is made worse when her father becomes a traitor and escapes to the Greek camp leaving Criseyde alone and friendless in Troy. She manages to gain the protection of Hector and when we meet her in Book II as Pandarus comes to go-between for Troilus, she is clearly living in an opulent setting with ladies in attendance and the leisure to be entertained with readings from popular romance literature. Criseyde is presented from the start as a woman who has the strength to contend effectively with her fate. She must or else face ruin. She is not a person of privilege like Troilus, prince of the House of Priam; Criseyde is a widow dressed in black (“this in blak,” II. 534). Whether she is manipulated by Pandarus into the affair with Troilus or complicit, she becomes mistress to a prince who is “Ector the secounde” (II. 158) whose position offers the security she needs to conquer her fears. When she is exchanged for the Trojan prisoners of war and finds herself in the Greek camp under the protection of her traitorous father, Calchas, she is without reliable support and meets her father unhappily: She seyde ek, she was fayn with hym to mete, And stood forth muwet, milde, and mansuete.  (V. 193–94)

She intended to be loyal to Troilus forever, but once she is made vulnerable again, Criseyde adjusts to political reality – “To Diomede algate I wol be

54 55

Robert Henryson, “The Testament of Cresseid,” in Poems, ed. Charles Elliot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 99. Henryson, 90.



Adding Comedy  125

trewe” (V. 1071). She is too fearful not to compromise. Inwardly, however, she belongs to Troilus. It is only of him that she can say “love, al come it late,/ Of alle joie hadde opned hire the yate” (III. 468–69). It is Criseyde’s ability to compromise and respond practically to reality that associates her experience with comedy rather than tragedy. She is the type of character who refuses to be conquered by Fortune yet does not rise above her either. If he is thrown from her wheel, he seeks a way to rise again. Thus he continues to go round and round on Fortune’s wheel, accepting and enjoying her gifts without despising them for their transcience.56

Fortune is an idea fundamental to comedy: what goes down on Fortune’s wheel can rise up again. For this reason Alfred David says of Criseyde that “She is a comic creation of such vitality that it challenges the idea of tragedy”;57 one does not, however, encounter a de ascensu theme in medieval literature. Criseyde’s home in which she lives fully is “This little spot of erthe” (V. 1815). Pandarus is the linchpin of comedy in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Without the development of the character beyond Boccaccio’s Pandaro there would be no fabliau intrigues to bring the lovers together throughout Books II and III; no juxtaposition of the comic and melodramatic in the second half of Book I when Pandarus probes for the source of Troilus’s suffering; no sprightly mirth in the dialogue of Book II between Uncle Pandarus and his niece, Criseyde. The pragmatism of the artificer of love, Pandarus, plotting the love affair constantly qualifies and calls into question the idealism of the conventional medieval lover of romance – Troilus – even as the go-between operates within the conventions of ideal medieval love. The constant juxtaposition of wele and woe, comic and tragic, in Chaucer’s poem gives emphasis to the complexity and fragility of the human experience of love and of life itself. Chaucer’s narrative is more realistic for its doubleness than Boccaccio’s straightforward romance of tragic love. In Shakespeare’s satirical Troilus and Cressida (1602) the love affair becomes that of a seductive woman and a sensual man. Pandarus, whose vice does not seem to be confined to any particular age or country, is made an object of satire. In Act III, which corresponds to Chaucer’s Book III, for example, Shakespeare portrays Pandarus as leeringly suggestive when he tells Troilus She’s making ready, she’ll come straight. You must be witty now. She does so blush, and fetches her winds so short … I’ll fetch her … Come, come, 56 57

David, “Chaucerian Comedy and Criseyde,” 93. David, 103.

126  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio what need you blush? Shame’s a baby. … So, so, rub on, and kiss the mistress … (III, ii, 31–52)58

Gone is the charm and warmth of Chaucer’s go-between. He has become, as Donaldson observed, “a very seedy uncle compared to Criseyde’s, and one intent on serving her up on a platter to his friend Prince Troilus.”59 Shakespeare’s version of Pandarus’s conversation with Cressida the morning after the consummation scene is more explicit and more coarse than Chaucer’s. Shakespeare has Pandarus deliver lines spoken in prose that prophesy the literary tradition of associating his name with the go-between, “let all pitiful goers-between be call’d to the world’s end after my name; call them Pandars” (III, ii, 201–03). Pandarus’s scene with Helen of Troy in Act III, scene i, captures well the atmosphere which surrounds her, especially in the tone of his song that concludes their dialogue: These lovers cry, O ho, they die! Yet that which seems the wound to kill Doth turn O ho! To ha, ha, he! So dying love lives still.  (III, i, 121–24)

This scene, Helen’s only scene in Troilus, reveals her as self-absorbed and banal in response to Pandarus’s love song, perhaps debunking her as the prime reason for the Trojan War. Shakespeare’s Troilus, a diminished hero prostrated by infatuation, is all hot passion as is evident in his first account of his feelings for Cressida, … I tell thee I am mad In Cressid’s love; thou answer’st “she is fair;” Pour’st in the open ulcer of my heart Her eyes, her hair, her cheek, her gait, her voice; Handlest in thy discourse, O that her hand, In whose comparison all whites are ink.  (I, i, 51–56)

Troilus seeks fulfillment in love on a purely sensual level. As for Cressida, she has toughened. After a tearful parting from Troilus, she greets the Greek warriors with kisses in a fashion that Ulysses comments on as being entirely in excess of custom. As she is passed from one kissing man to the next, Ulysses responds with outrage, “Fie, fie upon her! … her wanton spirits look out/ At every joint and motive of her body” (IV, v, 55–58). She is on her way to being seduced and becoming a plaything for the Greeks. More concerned with war than Chaucer, Shakespeare in Troilus demonstrates that one effect 58 59

William Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1984). E. Talbot Donaldson, The Swan at the Well: Shakespeare Reading Chaucer (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), 85.



Adding Comedy  127

of the war is to make the Trojan Cressida unfaithful to her lover, Troilus, in favor of the Greek Diomede. The play comes between Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra, two other plays that set lovers within a context of political conflict. Compared to them, Troilus and Cressida is much more focused on the war than on the lovers. From Act I, scene iii to Act III, scene ii Shakespeare carefully establishes the main theme as the Trojan War even as he holds out the promise of romance in the first two scenes of Pandarus’s going-between in the interest of bringing the lovers together. Though there is no evidence that the play was ever performed in Shakespeare’s time, his play was popular with modern audiences who lived through the two world wars. Shakespeare wrote a bitter, bawdy satire in the spirit of Juvenal with no room for ridiculous antics. The address to the reader, however, that appears in the 1609 quarto printed by Richard Bonian and Henry Walley stresses the comical nature of the play, Eternal reader, you have here a new play … passing full of the palm comical; for it is a birth of your brain that never undertook anything comical vainly … this author’s comedies … are so framed to the life that they serve for the most common commentaries of all the actions of our lives, showing such dexterity and power of wit that the most displeased with plays are pleased with his comedies.60

That quarto, however, refers to the play as a “History” as does another quarto also published in 1609, which calls it a “Famous History.” The First Folio, on the other hand, called the play The Tragedy of Troilus and Cressida, underlining the fact that a principal problem of this “problem play” or “dark comedy” is generic. To the extent that Shakespeare does not end the play with the fall of Troy or the death of Troilus, and that we do not know what happens to Cressida, Shakespeare wrote a comedy. Chaucer knew that in the retelling of Boccaccio’s Filostrato he was composing a tragedy: Troilus is sad at the poem’s beginning and will be sadder still at its end; his blissful love affair is destined to be short-lived, and his beloved, who intends to be true, will betray him. Chaucer, nonetheless, makes his long poem about the fragility of earthly love richer and more complex by adding comedy. Comedy expands the range of interpretation of the love story and suggests that the reader and artist cannot, like God, know its fyn. We do not know where Mercury, the psychopompous (guide of dead souls), took Troilus after his death and ascent to the eighth sphere of the Ptolemaic universe. We have an even more inconclusive end to Criseyde’s story. Indeterminateness brings Chaucer’s art closer to life as it is really lived. Not only is the fyn of Troilus and of Criseyde unknown, but, in the

60

William Shakespeare, The History of Troilus and Cressida, ed. Virgil K. Whitaker (Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin, 1972), 24.

128  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

end, the poem leaves the reader unclear about what to make of the experience of reading a text that is sometimes heroic, at other times absurd; sometimes comic and just as often intensely serious. Such bewilderment on the part of the reader aligns Troilus and Criseyde with the difficulty of making sense of life itself. The characters are themselves cognizant of the ambiguities: “My good, in harm; myn ese eke woxen helle is; My joie, in wo; I kan sey yow naught ellis, But torned is – for which my lif I warie [curse] – Everich joie or ese in his contrarie.”  (V. 1376–79)

Early on, Pandarus locates the effect of his activities somewhere between comedy and tragedy, “Bitwixen game and ernest” (III. 254).

Conclusion

T

he prayerful “Go litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye” at the end of Troilus and Criseyde looks forward hopefully “ther God thi makere yet, er that he dye,/ So sende might to make in som comedye.” No prayer could have been more fully answered than in the fabliaux of the Canterbury Tales. In borrowing Boccaccio’s popular romance, Chaucer had much already worked out for him but his recreation of Pandaro as Pandarus set in motion the poet’s natural comic spirit which reached its heights in the fabliaux of Chaucer’s second masterpiece. The sad teller of Boccaccio’s story transforms himself into the genial pilgrim-observer of the diversity of humankind who has an especially good ear for capturing stories, especially humorous ones. It is in using Boccaccio’s Filostrato as the main source for Troilus and Criseyde that Chaucer discovered that the comic elements which he introduced into his “litel … tragedye” were worthy of repetition in a more extended comic enterprise. The fabliau thread that he spun out of Pandaro to produce Pandarus, architect of the love affair of Troilus and Criseyde, is the thread that becomes key to Fragment I of the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer’s comedy, however, is not so much derivative of Boccaccio’s as part of a common European comic tradition that both poets inherited and revived. When Boccaccio and Chaucer drew on French fabliaux the vogue for that genre in medieval French literature had already passed. The comic vision of the two poets is one of the reasons for the continued pleasure the poetry of Chaucer and Boccaccio gives. To some, Erich Auerbach, for example, Boccaccio may loom as a more significant writer of the European comic tradition than Chaucer. In Mimesis, Erich Auerbach discusses the novella of the Decameron – 4, 2 – that was examined in Chapter 4 of this book; that is the novella in which the angel Gabriel has an affair with a foolish Venetian woman, Madonna Lisetta. Commenting on the crisis of the novella in which Lisetta brags to her confidante about her lover from heaven, thus sending a rumor through Venice which reaches the ears of her relatives who then catch “the angel,” Auerbach observes of Boccaccio, “His prose … reflects the schooling it received from antique models.” But Auerbach also points out that “the stylistic devices which Boccaccio employs are anything but purely popular.”1 Auerbach draws

1

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. by Willard Trask (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1957), 180.

130  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

attention to Boccaccio’s piling up of the colloquial and dialectical forms in Lisetta’s excited conversation with her confidante, so that her praise of Gabriel’s sexual prowess spills out in Venetian – “mo vedi vu” – making the delight in vulgarity all the more comic.2 Such colorful liveliness in Boccaccio’s prose raises it above his antique models and results in a conversation which Auerbach rightly describes as “psychologically and stylistically a masterly treatment of a vivid everyday scene.”3 Boccaccio uses the past with individual originality. The ambushing of Lisetta’s angel Gabriel by her relatives occurs in the quiet of a night which ends with Frate Alberto’s dive into Venice’s canal. The catastrophe comes in “a burst” produced by “a tempest of verb forms: sentendo, e avvisato, levatosi, non avendo, aperse, e si gittò.”4 When Auerbach turns to a consideration of this novella’s setting he comments, The setting is much more clearly specified than in the [French] fablel. The events of the latter may occur anywhere in rural France, and its dialectal peculiarities, even if they could be more accurately identified, would be quite accidental and devoid of importance. Boccaccio’s tale is pronouncedly Venetian.5

For Auerbach there is a “gulf between the art of the fablel and the art of Boccaccio” whom he judges to be “a man who shapes his stories according to his own creative will.”6 What this famous German scholar who taught French and Romance philology at Yale in the 1950s would have said about ­Chaucer’s relationship to the literary tradition he inherited we can only speculate. Mimesis, a landmark in literary criticism, says not a word about Chaucer; whereas, chapter nine, entitled, Frate Alberto, opens, “In a famous novella of the Decameron (4,2) …”7 Auerbach’s praise of Boccaccio’s narrative style for its superiority to its sources and its lively rendering of the everyday reminds one of the kinds of things Chaucerians say about the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer drew on the same comic tradition as Boccaccio but drew on him as well. The Miller’s Tale, the Reeve’s Tale, the Merchant’s Tale, and the Shipman’s Tale all show the influence of the Italian prose novella, not just the versified French fabliau. Matthew of Vendôme’s Comedia Lidie is the source of Boccaccio’s Decameron 7, 9; Chaucer seems to have been acquainted with both the twelfth-century Latin elegiac comedy and Boccaccio’s novella. Boccaccio and Chaucer view comedy as a movement from bad to good: “As whan a man hath been in povre estaat,/ And clymbeth up and wexeth fortu2 3 4 5 6 7

Auerbach, Auerbach, Auerbach, Auerbach, Auerbach, Auerbach,

181. 180. 181. 186. 186. 177.



Conclusion  131

nate” (VI, 2275–76). There is comedy in the movement of the Decameron itself from Ser Ciappelletto, the worst of men, who appears in the first tale, to Griselda, the best of womanhood, who appears in the final tale. Both Boccaccio’s and Chaucer’s satiric portraits of friars contribute to late medieval antifraternal literature in which the friar had become a comic stereotype. Behind each writer’s friars the French antifraternal literary tradition is felt, most especially Jean de Meun’s Faus Semblant. Boccaccio’s Frate Alberto and Fra Cipolla, Chaucer’s pilgrim Friar and his Pardoner – no friar yet a greedy enough preacher to suggest a friar – are among the great literary portraits produced by both comic writers. What G. K. Chesterton said of Chaucer’s satiric portraits may apply even more to Boccaccio’s – that he would like his comic creatures to go on unchanged: Chaucer often sounds satirical; yet Chaucer was not strictly a satirist. Perhaps the shortest way of putting it is to say that he already inhabits a world of comicality that is not a world of controversy. He makes fun of people, in the exact sense of getting fun out of them for himself. … He does not want the Friar and the Wife of Bath to perish; one would sometimes suspect that he does not really want them to change.8

Likewise with Pandarus, we may question the motivation of the character, unlucky in love, in engineering the secret meeting of Troilus and Criseyde, and judge his emotional life to be led vicariously, but that does not affect the delight we take in watching him arrange rendezvous, carry letters, manipulate his niece and his friend, and drop a swooning lover into bed. He too is among the great comic creations of Chaucer whom we are content to have stay just the way they are. It is a little harder, however, to be sure about the Prioress. The Nun’s Priest’s Tale seems to offer indirect criticism of the Prioress by showing how like Pertelote the hen she is and how unlike the widow, which is to say, unlike the Priest, since he feels spiritually akin to the old widow described at the beginning of the tale. The related theme of the dangers of listening to the counsel of women, a common antifeminist thread in clerical writing, and, therefore fitting to the character of a clergyman, seems to suggest that the Prioress – as a woman and, most especially, for all her specific private weaknesses – is probably not a good convent head and should certainly be regarded as intellectually inferior to her Priest. The Prioress is so obviously flawed as a nun that she deserves what she gets as a target of satire from a Priest worthy to be a spiritual guide. That said, there is something unattractively bullying and smug about satirists even when their criticism is so indirect, so artful, so light as to leave their targets oblivious of the fact that they have been hit. The satirist must always have that quality which keeps Harry in awe of the Clerk and the Nun’s Priest sure of what he

8

G. K. Chesterton, Chaucer (New York: Pellegrini and Cudahy, 1949), 199.

132  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

is doing in his tale – his certainty. Against the Pardoner Chaucer waves the finger of morality more vigorously, but even the Pardoner, reprehensible as he is, has a place on the Canterbury Way where sinners as well as saints can tread their way to Jerusalem. The Pardoner will need correction, Chaucer seems to say, but his counterpart in the Decameron, Fra Cipolla, is off the hook. Boccaccio takes pure delight in the wit from his hometown (Certaldo) who appears to be an alter-ego of the writer himself, a many-layered artistic onion, the staple crop of the medieval Italian town. Some modern creators of comic characters are no more censorious of their imperfections. Fielding’s Tom Jones may be rash and full of impulse but he has a “good nature.” Shakespeare’s Falstaff is a deceitful coward and a voluptuary but also a great wit. When he says to Prince Hal in 1 Henry IV, “banish plump Jack, and banish all the world” (II, iv, 479–80), most of the audience is on the side of the lover of “sack and sugar” (II, iv, 470). Mark Twain’s Pap, Huckleberry Finn’s father, is an astonishing anti-social figure who stands against the civilizing virtues that the Widow and Miss Watson instill in his son, Huck. Pap demands that he quit school, stop reading, and stop attending church. It is not until the nineteenth century that Chaucer’s comedy is appreciated. Troilus and Criseyde was considered his major work until the seventeenth century. C. S. Lewis points out that When the men of the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries thought of Chaucer, they did not think first of the Canterbury Tales. Their Chaucer was the Chaucer of dream and allegory, of love romance and erotic debate, of high style and profitable doctrine.9

Samuel Taylor Coleridge offers an extended observation about Chaucer’s comedy in 1834, I take unceasing delight in Chaucer. His manly cheerfulness is especially delicious to me in my old age. How exquisitely tender he is, and yet how perfectly free from the least touch of sickly melancholy or morbid drooping! The sympathy of the poet with the subjects of his poetry is particularly remarkable in Shakespeare and Chaucer, but what the first effects by a strong act of imagination and mental metamorphosis, the last does without any effort, merely by the inborn kindly joyousness of his nature.10

Later in the century, in 1880, Matthew Arnold, however, argues that comedy is a limitation in Chaucer’s poetry: “His superiority in substance is given by his large, free, simple, clear yet kindly view of human life. … The substance of Chaucer’s poetry, his view of things and his criticism of life, has largess,

9 10

Lewis, The Allegory of Love (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 205. See Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion: 1357– 1900, 3 vols. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1960), III, 433.



Conclusion  133

freedom, shrewdness, benignity; but it has not high seriousness … which Aristotle assigns as one of the grand virtues of poetry.”11 Chaucer’s own retraction to the Canterbury Tales, read in a certain way, that is, as a serious deathbed utterance, seems to place the English poet in Arnold’s camp. Chaucer prays That Christ have mercy on me and foryeve me my giltes;/ and namely of my translacions and enditynges of worldly vanities, the whiche I revoke in my retracciouns:/ as is the book of Troilus; … the tales of Canterbury, thilke that sownen into synne; … and many another book, if they were in my remembrance, and many a song and many a lecherous lay … But of the translacion of Boece de Consolacione, and othere bookes of legends of seintes, and omelies, and moralitee, and devocioun,/ that thanke I oure Lord Jhesu Crist … (CT, 1086–88)

These are the words that Chaucer wrote in the last years of his life and with which he took leave of his work: “Here taketh the makere of this book his leve.” Among the renounced works are the Troilus and those tales of Canterbury that “sownen into synne,” presumably the fabliaux, although they are all of them moral. The philosophical and religious works are the only ones he clearly stands by. Chaucer’s Retraction catches the penitential spirit of the Parson’s treatise on the seven deadly sins that precedes it. Not all agree that this passage, which appears in all the complete manuscripts of the tales, should be seen as a penitent’s death-bed utterance, a confession of sins. Some regard it as yet another example of Chaucer’s ironic humor. It is true that the secular works that he retracts are specifically named; whereas, the religious works are simply grouped by type (i.e., legends, homilies) as if to indicate a clear “select bibliography” for fame’s sake. Chaucer’s personal statement in the Retraction can be related to the actual course Boccaccio followed at the end of his writing life. After finishing the Decameron, Boccaccio wrote no more imaginative literature in the Italian vernacular. It is probable that the moralizing counsel of the venerable older poet, Petrarch, was responsible for changing the direction of Boccaccio’s literary output. The Italian writer’s works were composed mostly in Latin after the Decameron was completed. He copied manuscripts at Montecassino and created an anthology for his own personal use known as the Zibaldone Magliabechiano, and began work on two influential Latin works, De casibus virorum illustrium and De mulieribus claris. The first is a collection of cautionary tales about famous men from biblical, Roman, and medieval history. A similar moral perspective dominates De mulieribus claris which

11

Matthew Arnold, “The Study of Poetry” in Essays in Criticism (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1883), 31–32.

134  Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

contains biographies of famous women ranging from Eve to Joanna of Naples. By 1370 it was rumored that Boccaccio had become a monk.12 In short, at the end of the lives of both Chaucer and Boccaccio, poets revered for their comic vision, each stood up for didactic purpose in literature, the English poet in what may be among his last words, his farewell to the Canterbury Tales, and the Italian poet in the new direction in which he took his final literary works.

12

Vittore Branca, Boccaccio: The Man and his Works, trans. Richard Monges (New York: New York University Press, 1976), 190.

Bibliography Allaire, Gloria, ed. The Italian Novella. New York: Routledge, 2003. apRoberts, Robert. “Contribution to the Thirteenth Labour: Purging the Troilus of Incest.” In Essays on English and American Literature and a Sheaf of Poems. Eds. J. Bakker, J. A. Verleun, and J. v.d. Vriesenaerde. Costerus n.s. 63. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987. 11–25. Aristotle. Aristotle on the art of poetry, a revised text with critical introduction, translation, and commentary by Ingram Bywater. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909. ———. Poetics I with the “Tractatus Coislinianus,”A Hypothetical Reconstruction of “Poetics II,” and the Fragments of the “On Poets.” Translated by Richard Janko. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987. Arnold, Matthew. Essays in Criticism. New York: Macmillan and Co., 1883. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Translated by Willard Trask. Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1957. Averroes. Averrois paraphrases in librum poeticae Aristotelis Iacob Mantino hispano hebraeo medico interprete. Ex libro qui Venetiis apud Iunctas anno MDLXII prodiit. Ed. Fridericus Heidenhain. In Jahrbücher für classiche Philology, Supplementband 17 (1890): 351–82. Bakhtin, M. Rabelais and his World. Translated by H. Iswolsky. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1965. Basevorn, Robert of. The Form of Preaching. Translated by Leopold Krul, O.S.B. In Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts. Ed. James J. Murphy. Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001. 109–215. [MRTS Reprint Series, Number 5. Originally published by University of California, Berkeley, 1971]. Bate, Keith. “Twelfth-Century Latin Comedies and the Theatre.” In Papers of the Liverpool Latin Seminar. Ed. Francis Cairns. Liverpool, England: Francis Cairns, 1979. 249–62. Baugh, A. C. “The Middle English Romances: Some Questions of Creation, Presentation, and Preservation.” Speculum 42 (1967): 1–31. Bédier, J. Les Fabliaux. Paris: Champion, 1893. Beidler, Peter. “Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale and the Decameron.” Italica 50 (1973): 266–84. ———. “Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale, Boccaccio’s Decameron, IX, 6, and Two ‘Soft’ German Analogues.” The Chaucer Review 28 (1994): 237–51.

136  Bibliography

———. “Just Say Yes, Chaucer Knew the Decameron: Or, Bringing the Shipman’s Tale Out of Limbo.” In The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales. Eds. Leonard Michael Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen. Madison, New Jersey: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000. 25–46. ———. “The Miller’s Tale.” In Sources and Analogues of The Canterbury Tales. Vol. 2. Ed. Robert M. Correale with Mary Hamel. Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 2005. 249–75. ———. “The Reeve’s Tale.” In Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales. Ed. Robert M. Correale with Mary Hamel. Vol. 1. Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 2002. 28–73. Benson, C. David. Chaucer’s Drama of Style: Poetic Variety and Contrast in the Canterbury Tales. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. ———. Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. London: Unwin Hyman, 1990. Benson, Larry and Theodore Andersson. Literary Contexts of Chaucer’s Fabliaux: Texts and Translations. Indianapolis, Indiana: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971. Biscaro, Girolamo. “Inquisitori ed eretici a Firenze (1319–1334).” Studi medievali, n.s. 6 (1933): 161–207. Bishop, Kathleen A. “The Influence of Plautus and Latin Elegiac Comedy on Chaucer’s Fabliaux.” The Chaucer Review 35.3 (2001): 294–317. Bloch, R. Howard. The Scandal of the Fabliaux. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Boccaccio, Giovanni. “L’Ameto, Lettere, Il Corbaccio.” In Scrittori D’Italia, N. 182. Opere, V. Ed. Nicola Bruscoli. Bari: Laterza, 1940. ———. Decameron. Ed. Vittore Branca. Milan: A. Mondadori, 1985. ———. The Decameron. Translated by G. H. McWilliam. 2nd ed. New York: Penguin, 1995. ———. Il Filostrato. Italian text edited by Vincenzo Pernicone, translated with an introduction by Robert apRoberts and Anna Bruni Seldis. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1986. ———. Opere in versi. Ed. Pier Giorgio Ricci. Milan: R. Ricciardi, 1965. Boitani, Piero. Chaucer and Boccaccio. Medium Ævum Monographs. New Series 8. Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1977. ———, ed. Chaucer and the Italian Trecento. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1983. ———. English Medieval Narrative in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. Translated by Joan Krakover Hall. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1982. ———, ed. The European Tragedy of Troilus. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. ———. The Tragic and the Sublime in Medieval Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.



Bibliography  137

Braddy, Haldeen. “New Documentary Evidence Concerning Chaucer’s Mission to Lombardy.” Modern Language Notes 48 (1933): 507–11. Branca, Vittore. Boccaccio: The Man and his Works. Translated by Richard Monges. New York: New York University Press, 1976. ———. Il Cantare Trecentesco e il Boccaccio del Filostrato e del Teseida. Florence: Sansoni, 1936. ———. Giovanni Boccaccio: Profilo biografico. Revised ed. Milan: Sansoni Editore, 1997. ———, and Pier Giorgio Ricci. Un Autografo del Decameron. Padova: Università di Padova, 1962. Brennan, Malcolm M. Babio: A Twelfth-Century Profane Comedy. Citadel Monograph Series 7. Charleston: The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, 1968. Brewer, Derek. Chaucer: The Critical Heritage. 2 vols. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. ———. “The Fabliaux.” In Companion to Chaucer Studies. Ed. Beryl Rowland. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968. 247–67. Brody, Saul N. “Making a Play for Criseyde: The Staging of Pandarus’s House in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde.” Speculum 73 (1998): 115–40. Bryan, W. F. and Germaine Dempster, eds. Sources and Analogues of ­Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941. Buffoni, Franco. I racconti di Canterbury: Un’opera unitaria. I Saggi di Testo a Fronte 2. Milan: Angelo Guerini e Associati, 1991. ———. Chaucer, testone medievale. Udine: Nuova del bianco industrie grafiche, 1981. Caldwell, R. A. “Joseph Holand, Collector and Antiquary.” Modern Philology 40 (1943): 295–301. Canby, Henry Seidel. “The English Fabliaux.” Publications of the Modern Language Association 21 (1906): 200–14. Caplan, Harry. Of Eloquence: Studies in Ancient and Medieval Rhetoric. Eds. Anne King and Helen North. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1970. Carlson, David. “Chaucer, Humanism, and Printing: Conditions of Authorship in Fifteenth-Century England.” University of Toronto Quarterly 64 (1995): 274–88. Carruthers, Mary J. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Book of Troilus and Criseyde. Ed. Robert Kilburn Root. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1926. ———. The Canterbury Tales. The Ellesmere manuscript. San Marino, California, Huntington Library MS EL. 26. C. 9. ———. The Miller’s Tale. Ed. Thomas W. Ross. Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, II, 3. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983.

138  Bibliography

———. I Racconti di Canterbury. Ed. Ermanno Barisone. Torino: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1967. ———. The Riverside Chaucer. Gen. ed. Larry D. Benson. 3rd ed. Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. ———. Troilus and Criseyde: A New Edition of “The Book of Troilus.” Ed. Barry Windeatt. London and New York: Longman, 1984. ———. The Workes of Our Ancient and Learned Poet, Geffrey Chaucer. Ed. Speght. London: printed by Adam Islip, 1602. Chesterton, G. K. Chaucer. New York: Pellegrini and Cudahy, 1949. Chubb, Thomas Caldecot, The Life of Giovanni Boccaccio. Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, Inc., 1969. Cioffi, Caron. “The First Italian Essay on Chaucer.” The Chaucer Review 22 (1987): 53–61. La Comédie latine en France au XIIe siècle. Ed. Gustave Cohen. 2 vols. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1931. Cooke, Thomas D. Old French and Chaucerian Fabliaux: A Study in their Comic Climax. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1978. Cooper, Helen. The Canterbury Tales. Oxford Guides to Chaucer. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. ———. “Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: Reviewing the Work.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 19 (1997), 183–210. Reproduced as “The Frame.” In Sources and Analogues of The Canterbury Tales. Ed. Robert M. Correale with Mary Hamel. Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 2002. 1–22. Corsa, Helen Storm. Chaucer: Poet of Mirth and Morality. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1964. Craik, T. W. The Comic Tales of Chaucer. London: Methuen & Co.: 1964. Cummings, Hubertis M. The Indebtedness of Chaucer’s Works to the Italian Works of Boccaccio. University of Cincinnati Studies 10, part 2. Cincinnati, Ohio: University of Cincinnati Press, 1916. Dante. Dantis Alagherii Epistolae; The Letters of Dante. Edited and translated by Paget Toynbee. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1920. ———. The Inferno of Dante Alighieri. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1958. ———. The Paradiso of Dante Alighieri. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1958. David, Alfred. “Chaucerian Comedy and Criseyde.” In Essays on Troilus and Criseyde. Ed. Mary Salu. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, and Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1979. 90–104. De Bury, Richard. The Love of Books: The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury. Translated by E. C. Thomas. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1888; rpt. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1966. The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales: New Essays on An Old Question.



Bibliography  139

Eds. Leonard Michael Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen. Madison, New Jersey: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000. Dempster, Germaine. “On the Source of the Deception Story in the Merchant’s Tale.” Modern Philology 34 (1936–37): 133–54. De Sanctis, Francesco. Storia della Letteratura Italiana. Milan: A. Mondadori, 1961. Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas Johnson. Boston: Little Brown, 1960. Poem 193. Donaldson, E. Talbot. Speaking of Chaucer. London: Athlone Press, 1970. ———. The Swan at the Well: Shakespeare Reading Chaucer. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985. Donatus. Aeli Donati commentum Terenti, accedunt Eugraphi commentum et Scholia Bembina. Recensuit Paulus Wessner. 2 vols. Stuttgart: B.G. Teubner, 1962. Doran, Madeleine. Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964. Eco, Umberto . The Name of the Rose. New York: Warner Books, 1984. Edwards, Robert. “The Franklin’s Tale.” In Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales. Ed. Robert M. Correale with Mary Hamel. Vol. 1. Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 2002. 214–55. Evanzio. De fabula/Evanzio; introduzione, testo critico, traduzione e nota di commento. Ed. Giovanni Cupaiuolo. In Studi latini 7. Naples, 1992. Faral, Edmond . “Le Fabliau latin au moyen âge.” Romania 50 (1924): 321–85. Finlayson, John. “Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale.” Studies in Philology 97 (2000): 255–75. Furrow, Melissa . “Middle English Fabliaux and Modern Myth.” English Literary History 56 (1989): 1–18. Ganim, John. Chaucerian Theatricality. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990. Garbaty, Thomas Jay. “The Pamphilus Tradition in Ruiz and Chaucer.” Philological Quarterly 46 (1967): 457–70. Geoffroi de Vinsauf. Poetria Nova. In Les arts poétiques du XIIe au XIIIe siècle; recherches et documents sur la technique littéraire du moyen âge. Ed. Edmond Faral. Paris: E. Champion, 1924. 197–262. Georgianna, Linda. “Anticlericalism in Boccaccio and Chaucer: The Bark and the Bite.” In The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales. Eds. Leonard Michael Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen. Madison, New Jersey: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000. 148–76. Ghilini, Geralomo. Teatro d’huomini letterati aperto dall’abate Gerolamo Ghilini. Venice: Guerigli, 1647. Goodwin, Amy W. and Thomas J. Farrell. “The Clerk’s Tale.” In Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales. Ed. Robert M. Correale with Mary Hamel. Vol. 1. Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 2002. 101–67.

140  Bibliography

Gower, John. The Major Latin Works of John Gower. Translated by Eric W. Stockton. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962. Guerin, Richard. “The Canterbury Tales and Il Decamerone.” Unpublished University of Colorado diss., 1966. ———. “The Shipman’s Tale: The Italian Analogues.” English Studies 52 (1971): 412–19. Hamel, Mary . “The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale.” In Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales. Ed. Robert M. Correale with Mary Hamel. Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 2002. 265–320. Hanly, Michael. “Courtiers and Poets: An International System of Literary Exchange in Late Fourteenth-Century Italy, France, and England.” Viator 28 (1997): 305–21. Hanning, Robert. “Come in Out of the Code: Interpreting the Discourse of Desire in Boccaccio’s Filostrato and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde.” In Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde: “Subject to alle Poesye.” Essays in Criticism. Ed. R. A. Shoaf. Binghamton, New York: Medieval and Renaissance Texts, 1992. 120–37. Hart, W. M. “The Reeve’s Tale.” In Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Eds. W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941. 124–47. Havely, Nicholas. “Chaucer, Boccaccio, and the Friars.” In Chaucer and the Italian Trecento. Ed. Piero Boitani. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. ———, ed. and trans. Chaucer’s Boccaccio: Sources of “Troilus” and the Knight’s and Franklin’s Tales. Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 1980. Heffernan, Carol Falvo. “Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale and Reeve’s Tale, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and the French Fabliaux.” Italica 81 (2004): 311–24. ———. “Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale and Boccaccio’s Decameron VIII, I: Retelling a Story.” In Courtly Literature: Culture and Context. Eds. Keith Busby and Erik Kooper. Philadelphia and Amsterdam: John Benjamin, 1990. 261–70. ———. The Melancholy Muse: Chaucer, Shakespeare and Early Medicine. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 1995. ———. “Three Unnoticed Links between Matthew of Vendôme’s Comedia Lidie and Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale.” Notes and Queries 50 (June 2003): 158–62. ———. “The Wyse Boke of Maystyr Peers of Salerne …” Manuscripta 37 (1993): 290–321. Henryson, Robert. “The Testament of Cresseid.” In Poems. Ed. Charles Elliot. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963. 90–101. Herben, Jr., Stephen J. “The Vercelli Book: A New Hypothesis.” Speculum 10 (1935): 91–94. Herrick, Marvin T. Comic Theory in the Sixteenth Century. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1964.



Bibliography  141

Hines, John. The Fabliaux in English. London and New York: Longman, 1993. Hollander, Robert. Boccaccio’s Two Venuses. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. Howard, Donald R. Chaucer: His Life, his Works, his World. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1987. John of Garland. The Parisiana Poetria of John of Garland. Edited and translated by Traugott Lawler. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1974. Jost, Jean E, ed. Chaucer’s Humor: Critical Essays. New York: Garland Publishing, 1994. Kirpatrick, Robin. “The Wake of the Commedia: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Decameron.” In Chaucer and the Italian Trecento. Ed. Piero Boitani. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 201–30. Langland, William. The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman. Ed. W. W. Skeat. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886. Lawrence, W. W. “Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale.” Speculum 33 (1958): 56–68. Lee, A. C. The Decameron: Its Sources and Analogues. 1909; rpt. New York: Haskell House Publishers Ltd., 1972. Leff, Gordon. Paris and Oxford Universities in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1968. Lerer, Seth. Chaucer and his Readers. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993. Lewis, C. S. The Allegory of Love. New York: Oxford University Press, 1958. Lord, Louis E. Aristophanes: His Plays and Influence. Boston: Marshall Jones, 1925. Lorris, Guillaume di and Jean de Meun. Roman de la Rose. Ed. F. Lecoy. Paris: CFMA-Champion, 1970. ———. The Romance of the Rose. Translated by Harry W. Robbins. New York: Dutton, 1962. Mann, Jill. Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Marcus, Millicent J. An Allegory of Form: Literary Self-Consciousness in the Decameron. Stanford French and Italian Studies 18. Saratoga: Anma Libri, 1979. Mare, A. C. de la. The Handwriting of Italian Humanists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. Mather, Jr., Frank Jewett. “On the Asserted Meeting of Chaucer and Petrarch.” Modern Language Notes 12 (1897): 1–11. Mazzotta, Giuseppe. The World at Play in Boccaccio’s “Decameron.” Prince­ton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986. McAlpine, Monica. The Genre of Troilus and Criseyde. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1978.

142  Bibliography

McGrady, Donald. “Chaucer and the Decameron Reconsidered.” The Chaucer Review 12 (1977): 1–26. Medieval Comic Tales. Ed. Derek Brewer. 2nd ed. Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 1996. Medieval Literary Criticism: Translations and Interpretation. Ed. O. B. Hardison, Jr., Alex Preminger, Kevin Kerrane, and Leon Golden. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1974. Meech, Sanford B. Design in Chaucer’s “Troilus.” Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1959. Mieszkowski, Gretchen. Medieval Go-Betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus. New York and Houndmills, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Miola, Robert S. Shakespeare and Classical Comedy – The Influence of Plautus and Terence. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1994. “Mostra di Manoscritti, Documenti e Edizioni.” VI. Centenario della morte di Giovanni Boccaccio. Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana. 22 maggio – 31 agosto, 1975. Muscatine, Charles. Chaucer and the French Tradition. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1957. ———. The Old French Fabliaux. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986. Nogent, Guibert de. A Book about the Way a Sermon Ought to be Given. Translated by Joseph M. Miller. In Readings in Medieval Rhetoric. Eds. Joseph M. Miller, Michael H. Prosser, and Thomas W. Benson. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1974. 162–81. Nolan, Barbara. “Turning over the Leaves of Medieval Fabliau-­Anthologies: The Case of Bibliothèque Nationale MS. francais 2173.” Medieval Perspectives 13 (1998): 1–31. Nouveau recueil complet des fabliaux. Eds. Willem Noomen and Nico van den Boogaard. 10 vols. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1983–98. Il Novellino. Ed. G. Favati. Genoa: Fratelli Bozzi, 1970. Novellino e Conti del Duecento. Ed. Sebastiano Lo Nigro. Turin: TEA, 1989. Nykrog, Per. Les Fabliaux: Étude d’histoire littéraire et de stylistique médiévale. Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1957; Geneva: Droz, 1973. O’Cuilleanain, Cormac. Religion and the Clergy in Boccaccio’s “Decameron.” Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1984. Ottolini, Angelo. “Introduction.” In Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Decamerone. Ed. Michele Scherillo. 6th ed. Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1951. i–xxvi. Owst, G. R. Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1961. The Oxford Classical Dictionary. 2nd ed. Eds. N. G. L. Hammond and H. H. Scullard. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Pearsall, Derek. “The Canterbury Tales II: Comedy.” In The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer. Eds. Piero Boitani and Jill Mann. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003.



Bibliography  143

———. The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, Inc., 1992. ———. “Versions of Comedy in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.” In ­Chaucer’s Frame Tales: The Physical and Metaphysical. Ed. Joerg O. Fichte. Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 1987. 35–49. Pierce the plougmans crede. Early English books online. London: Reynold Wolfe, 1553. Plautus. Plautinae uigenti comediae emendatissimae cum accuratissima ac luculentissima interpretatione doctissimorum uirorum Petri Vallae placentim ac Bernardi saraceni Veneti. Venice, 1499. Pratt, Robert. “Chaucer and the Visconti Libraries.” English Literary History 6 (1939): 191–99. ———. “Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale and Sercambi.” Modern Language Notes 55 (February 1940): 142–45. ———. “Chaucer’s Use of the Teseida.” Publications of the Modern Language Association 72 (1947): 598–621. Praz, Mario. Geoffrey Chaucer e I racconti di Canterbury. Rome: Edizioni italiane, 1947. ———. Mnemosyne: The Parallel between Literature and the Visual Arts. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1970. ———. The Romantic Agony. London: Oxford University Press, 1933. ———. Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery. London: The Warburg Institute, 1939. Pretaglia, Sandro. Pier Paolo Pasolini. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1974. Raby, F. J. E. Secular Latin Poetry. 2 vols. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956. Recueil général et complet des fabliaux des xiiie et xive siècles, imprimés ou inédits, publiés avec notes et variants d’après les manuscrits. Eds. A. de Montaiglon and G. Raynaud. 6 vols. Paris: Libraire des Bibliophiles, 1872–90. Robathon, D. M. “Boccaccio’s Accuracy as a Scribe.” Speculum 13 (1938): 458–60. Robbins, Rossell Hope . “The English Fabliaux: Before and after Chaucer.” Modern Sprak 64 (1970): 236–37. Robertson, Jr., D. W. “Chaucerian Tragedy.” English Literary History 19 (1952): 1–37. Reprinted in Chaucerian Criticism. Eds. Richard J. Schoek and Jerome Taylor. 2 vols. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1961. II, 86–121. ———. A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1962. Rossi, Luciano. “In Luogo di Sollazzo: I Fabliaux del Decameron.” In Leggiadre Donne: Novella e Racconto Breve in Italia. Ed. Francesco Bruni. Venice: Marsilio, 2000. 13–28. ———, ed. Giovanni Sercambi: Il Novelliere. Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1976.

144  Bibliography

Ruggiers, Paul. “The Italian Influence on Chaucer.” In Companion to Chaucer Studies. Ed. Beryl Rowland. Toronto and London: Oxford University Press, 1968. 139–61. ———, ed. Versions of Medieval Comedy. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977. ———. “A Vocabulary for Chaucerian Comedy: A Preliminary Sketch.” In Medieval Studies in Honor of Lillian Herlands Hornstein. Eds. Jess Bessinger and Robert Raymo. New York: New York University Press, 1976. 193–225. Saint Augustine. On Christian Doctrine. Translated by D. W. Robertson, Jr. Indianapolis, Indiana: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958. Scattergood, John. “Literary Culture and the Court of Richard II.” In English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages. Eds. V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983. 29–43. ———. “The Shipman’s Tale.” In Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales. Ed. Robert M. Correale with Mary Hamel. Vol. 2. Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 2005. 565–81. Segal, Erich. Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1968. Shakespeare, William. The History of Troilus and Cressida. Ed. Virgil K. Whitaker. Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin, 1972. ———. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1984. Smarr, Janet Levarie. Boccaccio and Fiammetta: The Narrator as Lover. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1986. ———. “Mercury in the Garden: Mythographical Methods in the Merchant’s Tale and Decameron 7.9.” In The Mythographic Art: Classical Fable and the Rise of the Vernacular in Early France and England. Ed. Jane Chance. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1990. 199–214. ———. “The Tale of the Inquisitor (I. 6).” In The “Decameron”: First Day in Perspective. Ed. Elissa B. Weaver. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. 148–59. Smyser, H. M. “The Domestic Background of Troilus and Criseyde.” Speculum 31 (1956): 297–315. Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Eds. W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941. Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales. Ed. Robert M. Correale with Mary Hamel. 2 vols. Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 2002, 2005. Spargo, John. Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale: The Lover’s Gift Regained. Folklore Fellows Communication No. 91. Helsinki, 1930. Spurgeon, Caroline F. E., ed. Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion. 3 vols. New York: Russell and Russell, 1960. Steadman, John. Disembodied Laughter: Troilus and the Apotheosis Tradition. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1972.



Bibliography  145

Tatlock, John S. P. The Mind and Art of Chaucer. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1950. Terence. Comediae. Ed., Nicolaus Camus. London, 1718. _______. Afri Poetae Lepidissimi Comoediae Omnes. Ed. Giovanni Calfurnio. Venetiis: Apvd Joannem Mariam Bonellvm, 1563. Rare Books (New York Public Library). Thompson, N. S. Chaucer, Boccaccio, and the Debate of Love. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Thompson, Stith. “The Miller’s Tale.” In Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Eds. W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941. 106–23. Thomson, Ian. “Latin ‘Elegiac comedy’ of the Twelfth Century.” In Versions of Medieval Comedy. Ed. Paul G. Ruggiers. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 51–66. Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts. Ed. James J. Murphy. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1971. Trevelyan, G. M. History of England. 3 vols. Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1953. Tyrwhitt, Thomas. The Canterbury Tales. London, 1798. Untener, Bishop Kenneth. Preaching Better. Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1999. Viano, Maurizio. A Certain Realism: Making Use of Pasolini’s Film Theory and Practice. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1993. Vitry, Jacques de. The Exempla, or illustrative stories from the Sermones Vulgares of Jacques de Vitry. Ed. Thomas Frederick Crane. New York: B. Franklin, 1971. Wallace, David. Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985. ———. Giovanni Boccaccio: Decameron. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Walsh, O.P., Brother Joachim. “St. Thomas on Preaching.” Dominicana 5 (1921): 6–14. Windeatt, Barry. Troilus and Criseyde. Oxford Guides to Chaucer. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Wood, Chauncey. The Elements of Chaucer’s Troilus. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1984. Wyatt, Michael. The Italian Encounter with Tudor England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Index

A Pennyworth of Wit, 35 Acciaiuoli, Bishop Angelo, 15 Acciaiuoli, Giovanni, 86 Alda. See de Blois, Guillaume Alexander IV, 72 Alexander of Hales, 72 Alighieri, Dante, 23, 33, 61; (Divina) Commedia, 12, 32, 33, 34; Convivio, 12, 33; Epistle to Can Grande della Scala, 32–33; De Vulgari Eloquentia, 33 Amphitryo. See under Plautus analogue, 45, 66, 67, 89 Andreas, 8 Angiolieri, Cecco, 37 antifraternalism, 73, 78 apRoberts, Robert, 104 Aristophanes: Plutus, 25 Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics, 21; Poetics, 21, in Arabic, 22; definition of comedy, 21–22; origins of comedy, 23–25; Homer as father of comedy and tragedy, 24–25; Rhetoric, 21 Arnold, Matthew, 132 Arte di Calimala. See under Florence. Arte di Lana. See under Florence Auberee, 110 Auerbach, Erich, 129, 130 Augustinians, 77 Aulularia. See under de Blois, Vital Averroes, 22–23 Avicenna, 94 Babio, 29, 30 Bacon, Roger, 23 Bakhtin, M.: Rabelais and his World, 31 Bardi bank, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19 Barisone, Ermanno: I Racconti di Canterbury, 2 Baugh, A. C., 102 Becchieri, Cardinal Guala. See under Vercelli Book

Barrili, Giovanni, 14 Bédier, J., 36, 39, 40 Beidler, Peter, 45, 67 Benson, C. David, 103 Benson, Larry and Theodore Andersson, 50, 55 Bishop, Kathleen, 27 Black Friars, 72 Bloch, R. Howard, 36 Boccaccino, 13 Boccaccio, Giovanni: The Ameto, 44; Caccia di Diana, 12; Decameron 1, 1, 34, 90, (Ser) Ciappelletto, 34–35, 90, 131; Decameron 1, 6, 81; Decameron 2, 3, 1; Decameron 3, 4, 50, 52, 54, Puccio di Rinieri, 51–52, 54; Decameron 3, 7, 78–79, 87, Tedaldo, 78, 79, 87; Decameron 4,2, 79–81, 129, 130, Monna Lisetta, 79, 80, 81, Frate Alberto, 79, 80, 81, 130, Angel Gabriel, 79, 80, 81; Decameron 5, 5, 18; Decameron 6, 7, 90; Decameron 6, 10, 87–89, 90, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, Fra Cipolla, 71, 87, 88, 89, 90, 94, 95, 97, 132; Decameron 7, 9, 31, 45, 56, 62, 64, 130; Decameron 8, 1, 37, 45, 67, 68, 69, 70; Decameron 8, 2, 67, 68, 69, 70; Decameron 9, 6, 45–50, 55; Decameron 10, 5, 44; Decameron 10, 10, 53; Decameron, Conclusion, 44; Decameron, Proemio, 35; black death, 12, 42; Decameron manuscripts, 10; the title, 42; De Casibus Virorum illustrium, 133; De mulieribus claris, 133; Elegia di Madonna Fiammeta, 19; Esposizioni, 24; The Filocolo, 14, 44, 109; The Filostrato, 14, 44, 101–5, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 121, 129, Criseida, 114, Pandaro, 101, 105, 110, 111; Genealogia deorum gentilium, 14; Teseida, 42, 43; Zibaldone Magliabechiano, 133;

148  Index Certaldo (birthplace), 10, 13, 41, 61, 77, 97; Florence (birthplace?), 13; knowledge of French fabliaux, 41–42; journeys to Avignon and Rome, 15, 77, Ravenna, 77, Bavaria, 77; lectures on Dante, 61, 100; views on comedy, 33 Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy, 16, 99, 107 Boitani, Piero, 1, 2, 36, 43 Bonian, Richard, 127 Branca, Vittore, 77, 102 Brennan, Malcolm, 29 Brewer, Derek, 40 Buffoni, Franco, 2 Bukton, Sir Peter, 9 Buondelmonti, Francesco, 86 Caesarius of Heisterbach, 93 cantare, 102, 105 Carlo I of Naples. See d’Anjou, Charles Carlson, David, 7 Carmelites, 78 Caxton, William. See under Surigone, Stefano Certaldo. See under Boccaccio, Giovanni Chaucer, Geoffrey: An ABC, 12; Boece, 16; The Book of the Duchess, 11, 15; The House of Fame, 12; Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton, 9; The Parliament of Fowls, 9, 65; The Romaunt of the Rose, 12; Truth, 9; Troilus and Criseyde, 99, 101, 106–9, 129, 132; the ending, 120–25, Criseyde, 112, 114–18, 124, Deiphebus, 111, Diomede, 113, 124, Pandarus, 101, 108, 109–20, 125, Polyphete, 111, Troilus, 108, 112, 118–20; The Canterbury Tales: The Clerk’s Tale, 10, 44; The Cook’s Tale, 24; The Franklin’s Tale, 44, 109; The Friar’s Tale, 40, 71, 85, 86, 87; The Knight’s Tale, 43, 118; The Merchant’s Tale, 31, 39, 40, 45, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 64, 70, 106, 130, January, 57, 59, 65, May, 57, Pluto, 57, 66, Proserpina, 57; The Miller’s Tale, 24, 26, 27, 35, 39, 40, 45, 49, 50–52, 54, 130; The Monk’s Tale, 17; The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, 131–32, the Prioress, 131; The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale, 87–89, 90, 91, 92, 98, 99, the Pardoner, 71, 87, 88, 90, 92, 93, 94,

99, 132; The Reeve’s Tale, 39, 40, 45, 49, 55, 130; The Retraction, 99, 133; The Shipman’s Tale, 37, 39, 40, 45, 52, 66, 70; The Summoner’s Tale, 40, 71, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, Friar John, 82, 83, 84; The Tale of Melibee, 109; The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, 45, 70, 84; birth in London, 77; comic genre, 35; defintion of comedy, 34; French lyrics, 15; knowledge of Italian, 16; travel in Italy, 10–13, 16, 77; to Oxford and Cambridge, 77, to Spain, 77 Chaucer, John, 13, 16 Chesterton, G. K., 131 Cioffi, Caron, 3, 4, 5 Clanvowe, Sir John, 8, 9; The Cuckoo and the Nightingale, 9 Clifford, Sir Lewis, 8, 9 Coghill, Nevill: production of the rockcalypso Canterbury Tales, 2 Cohen, Gustave, 29 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 132 Collectiones. See da Perugia, Paolo Comedia Lidie. See under Matthew of Vendôme comedye, 106, 107 Contarini, Doge Andrea, 8 Cooke, Thomas D., 55, 66 Cooper, Helen, 43, 50, 55 Corsa, Helen Storm, 108 Craik, T. W., 85 The Cuckoo and the Nightingale. See under Clanvowe, John cupiditas, 104 Dame Sirith, 35 d’Anjou, Charles, 14 da Borgo San Sepolcro, Dionigi, 114, 77 da Imola, Benvenuto, 23 da Perugia, Paolo, 14; Collectiones, 14 da Pistoia, Cino, 14 Dares and Dictys, 107 Das Studentenabenteur, 45 da San Gimignano, Folgare, 37 da Sulmona, Barbato, 14 “De Avaritia E Lussuria.” See under Sercambi, Giovanni David, Alfred, 115, 125 de Baisieux, Jacques: Dis de le Vescie a prestre, 83 de Barulo, Peter, 8 de Blois, Guillaume: Alda, 30, 61

de Blois, Vital: Geta, 30, 40; Aulularia, 40 de Bury, Richard: Philbiblon, 73 de casibus, 108 Decius. See under Matthew of Vendôme De Comoedia. See under Donatus De Fabula. See under Evanthius De Gombert et des II clers, 45 de Mari, John, 10 de Mézière, Philippe, 9 de la Vache, Sir Philip, 9 della Scala, Can Grande. See under Alighieri, Dante delle Colonne, Guido: Historia Troiana, 103, 107 de Meun, Jean, 14 de Nogent, Guibert, 96, 99 De Periculis Novissorum Temporum (The Perils of the Last Times), 73 de Sainte-Maure, Benoit: Roman de Troie, 103, 107 de Salernia, Peter. See de Barulo, Peter De Sanctis, Francesco, 87 Deschamps, 8, 9, 11 de Vitry, Jacques, 93 Dickinson, Emily, 122 Diomedes, 28 di Rinieri, Puccio. See under Boccaccio, Giovanni: Decameron 3, 4 Dis de le Vescie a prestre. See de Baisieux, Jacques Dits van Heilen van Beersele, 49 Dominicans, 72, 73, 78; Dominican order, 77 Donaldson, E. Talbot, 121, 126 Donatus, 28, 29: De Comoedia, 28, 32 Doran, Madeleine, 26 Du chevalier qui fist sa dame confesse, 53 Eco, Umberto: The Name of the Rose, 31–32 Edward III, 8, 13, 14, 16, 17 epic, 106, 107 Evanthius, 28; De Fabula, 28 exemplum, 93, 98 fabliau(x), 20, 30, 35, 36, 38, 39, 41, 53, 70, 83, 108, 114, 129 Faral, Edmond, 30 Faus Semblant. See under Roman de la Rose Fitz Ralph, Richard: Defensio curatorum (Defense of the Curates), 73

Index  149 Fleur et Blancheflor, 14 Florence, 15, 17; Arte di Calimala, 17, 18; Arte di Lana, 17, 18; plague, 15 Folz, Hans, 50 The Fox and the Wolf, 35 Fra Cipolla. See under Boccaccio, Giovanni, Decameron 6, 10 Franciscan(s), 72, 73, 77 Frate Alberto. See under Boccaccio, Giovanni: Decameron 4, 2 Friar Hubert, 72, 84, 131 Friar John. See under Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Summoner’s Tale Froissart, Jean: Paradis d’Amour, 16 Galeazzo II, 12; inventory of his library. See Visconti, Filippo Maria Ganim, John, 88, 89 Garbaty, Thomas, 109 Generides, 9 Geoffrey of Vinsauf: Poetria nova, 33–34, 111 Georgianna, Linda, 89 Ghilini, Gerolamo: Teatro d’huomini letterati, 3–4 Giotto, 18 Gloucester, Duke of, 10 Gower, John, 121 Grey Friars, 72 Griselda, 34 Hamel, Mary, 99 Hardison, O. B., 25–26 Hawkwood, Sir John, 61 Henryson, Robert: Testament of Cresseid, 123–24 Hermannus Alemannus, 23 Hollander, John, 104, 105 Homer. See under Aristotle Howard, Donald, 11 Hroswitha of Gandersheim, 25 The Iliad, 25 Irregang und Girregar, 45 January. See under Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Merchant’s Tale John of Garland, 34 John of Gaunt, 78 John of St. Gilles, 72 Kirkpatrick, Robin, 88

150  Index

Naples, 15, 61, 77 Nelli, Francisco, 14 Nolan, Barbara, 41 Noomen and Boogard: Noveau recueil complet des fabliaux, 39 novella(s), 20, 35, 36, 37, 53, 68, 69, 70, 130 Il Novellino: See Il Libro di novelle e di bel parlar gentile Nykrog, Per, 36, 40, 41

Pamphilus, 109, 110 Pandaro. See under Boccaccio, Giovanni: Filostrato Pandarus. See under Chaucer, Geoffrey: Troilus and Criseyde Pasolini, Pier Paolo: Trilogia della vita, 2; I Racconti di Canterbury, 2–3; Reviewed by Maurizio Viano, 3; by Sandro Petraglia, 3 Pearsall, Derek, 31, 55, 82, 83 Peasants Revolt, 17 Perrers, Alice, 16 Peruzzi bank, 15 Petraglia, Sandro. See under Pasolini, Pier Paolo Petrarch, Frances: Tale of Griseldis, 11, residence in Milan, 12, 77; in Padua, 77 Piers Plowman, 76 Piers the Plowman’s Creed, 77 Pirrus. See under Matthew of Vendôme Pits, John: Relationem historicarum de rebus anglicis, 5 Plautus, 30, 40; Amphitryo, 30; Trinummus, 26; Erich Segal, Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus, 26–27 Pluto. See under Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Merchant’s Tale poetic giocosi, 37 Poetria nova. See Geoffrey of Vinsauf Polonius, 119 polyptoton, 30 Pratt, Robert, 42, 54 Praz, Mario: Geoffrey Chaucer e i racconti di Canterbury, 2 Le Prestre et Alison, 110, 113 Prince Lionel, 10; marriage to Violante Visconti, 10, 60; death, 12 The Prioress. See under Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Nun’s Priest’s Tale Proserpina. See under Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Merchant’s Tale Provano, Jacopo Provano (Sir James de Provan), 10

O’Cuilleanain, Cormac, 77–78 The Odyssey, 25 oide, 23 ottava rima, 102 Ovid Moralisé, 16

Raby, F. J. E., 30 Rappresentazione di Sant’ Antonio, 99 Richard II, 9, 10, 14 Robert the Wise of Naples, 14, 17, 19, 77, 102

komazein, 23 kome, 23 komoidoi, 23 komos, 23 Latin elegiac comedy, 29–31, 40 Lewis, C. S., 114, 117, 132 Il Libro di novelle e di bel parlar gentile (Il Novellino), 36, 53, 66, 99 Lidia. See under Matthew of Vendôme Lidia. See under Matthew of Vendôme Lydgate, John: A Complaynt of a Loveres Lyfe, 7; The Temple of Glass, 7 Machaut: Dit de la Fonteinne Amouureuse, 16 Mann, Jill, 88 Margites, 25 Matthew of Vendôme: Comedia Lidie (Lidia), 30, 31, 45, 56–64, 109, 130; Decius, 30; Lidia, 30, 59; Pirrus, 30, 57, 59 McAlpine, Monica, 108 Le Meunier et les II clers, 45, 46, 48, 49 Mitchell, Margaret, 103 Montaiglon and Raynaud, 39 May. See under Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Merchant’s Tale McGrady, Donald, 67 Mieszkowski, Gretchen, 109 Monna Lisetta. See under Boccaccio, Giovanni: Decameron, 4, 2 Mort Artu, 9 Muscatine, Charles, 41, 52, 120–21

Robertson, Jr., D. W., 104, 107, 108 Robbins, Rossell Hope, 35 Roman de la Rose, 9, 14, 117 Roman de Troie. See de Sainte-Marie, Benoit Root, Robert Kilburn, 107 Ross, Thomas, 52 Rossi, Luciano, 53. 70 roumaunce, 107 Rowland, Beryl, 40, 54 Ruggiers, Paul, 29, 54 Santo Spirito, 77 Scattergood, John, 8 Segal, Erich. See Plautus Seldis, Anna Bruni, 104 (Ser) Ciapelletto. See under Boccaccio, Giovanni: Decameron 1, 1 Sercambi, Giovanni: “De Avaritia E Lussuria,” 68, 69 Shakespeare, William: Troilus and Cressida, 125–27 Smarr, Janet, 104, 105 source, 45, 67 Spargo, John, 66 Speght, Thomas, 78 Steadman, John, 108 Strode, Ralph, 8, 121 Surigone, Stefano: Epitaphium Galfridi Chaucer, 5–6; William Caxton’s 1478 edition of Chaucer’s Boece, 7 tail rhyme stanza, 102 Tatlock, John S. P., 55 Tedaldo. See under Boccaccio, Giovanni: Decameron 3, 7 Terence, 25; Self-Tormentor, 26 Theophrastus, 21

Index  151 Thompson, N. S., 36 Thompson, Stith, 49, 50 tragedye, 106–107 Trevelyan, G. M., 73 Troilus. See under Chaucer, Geoffrey: Troilus and Criseyde Tyrwhitt, Thomas, 52 Ulster, Countess of, 13 “Un Uomo Ricco E La Sua Donna,” 62, 66 Univeristy of Paris, 72, 73 Untener, Bishop Kenneth, 98 Usk, Thomas, 8 Valla, Pietro, 22 Vercelli Book, 7; gift of Cardinal Guala Becchieri, 7–8 Viano, Maurizio. See under Pasolini, Pier Paolo Visconte, Violante. See Prince Lionel Visconti, Bernabò, 12, 17, 60 Visconti, Filippo Maria, 12 Waldeby, Robert, 78 Wallace, David, 13, 54, 55 Walley, Henry, 127 Walter of Brienne, 15 White Friars, 72 William of St. Amour, 72, 76 Windeatt, Barry, 101, 122 Wood, Chauncey, 104, 105, 117 Woodstock, Thomas, 9 Young, Karl, 54 York, Duchess of, 9 Yvain, 109

CHAUCER STUDIES I MUSIC IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER, Nigel Wilkins CHAUCER’S LANGUAGE AND THE PHILOSOPHERS’ TRADITION, II J. D. Burnley ESSAYS ON TROILUS AND CRISEYDE, edited by Mary Salu III IV CHAUCER SONGS, Nigel Wilkins V CHAUCER’S BOCCACCIO: Sources of Troilus and the Knight’s and Franklin’s Tales, edited and translated by N. R. Havely VI SYNTAX AND STYLE IN CHAUCER’S POETRY, G. H. Roscow VII CHAUCER’S DREAM POETRY: Sources and Analogues, B. A. Windeatt VIII CHAUCER AND PAGAN ANTIQUITY, Alastair Minnis CHAUCER AND THE POEMS OF ‘CH’ in University of Pennsylvania MS IX French 15, James I. Wimsatt CHAUCER AND THE IMAGINARY WORLD OF FAME, Piero Boitani X INTRODUCTION TO CHAUCERIAN ENGLISH, Arthur O. Sandved XI CHAUCER AND THE EARLY WRITINGS OF BOCCACCIO, David XII Wallace CHAUCER’S NARRATORS, David Lawton XIII CHAUCER: COMPLAINT AND NARRATIVE, W. A. Davenport XIV CHAUCER’S RELIGIOUS TALES, edited by C. David Benson and XV Elizabeth Robertson EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MODERNIZATIONS FROM THE XVI CANTERBURY TALES, edited by Betsy Bowden THE MANUSCRIPTS OF THE CANTERBURY TALES, Charles A. Owen Jr XVII CHAUCER’S BOECE AND THE MEDIEVAL TRADITION OF XVIII BOETHIUS, edited by A. J. Minnis THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE EQUATORIE OF THE PLANETIS, Kari Anne XIX Rand Schmidt CHAUCERIAN REALISM, Robert Myles XX CHAUCER ON LOVE, KNOWLEDGE AND SIGHT, Norman Klassen XXI CONQUERING THE REIGN OF FEMENY: GENDER AND GENRE IN XXII CHAUCER’S ROMANCE, Angela Jane Weisl CHAUCER’S APPROACH TO GENDER IN THE CANTERBURY TALES, XXIII Anne Laskaya CHAUCERIAN TRAGEDY, Henry Ansgar Kelly XXIV XXV MASCULINITIES IN CHAUCER: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, edited by Peter G. Beidler CHAUCER AND COSTUME: The Secular Pilgrims in the General Prologue, XXVI Laura F. Hodges XXVII CHAUCER’S PHILOSOPHICAL VISIONS, Kathryn L. Lynch XXVIII SOURCES AND ANALOGUES OF THE CANTERBURY TALES [I], edited by Robert M. Correale with Mary Hamel

XXX FEMINIZING CHAUCER, Jill Mann XXXI NEW READINGS OF CHAUCER’S POETRY, edited by Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard XXXII THE LANGUAGE OF THE CHAUCER TRADITION, Simon Horobin XXXIII ETHICS AND EXEMPLARY NARRATIVE IN CHAUCER AND GOWER, J. Allan Mitchell XXXIV CHAUCER AND CLOTHING: Clerical and Academic Costume in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Laura F. Hodges XXXV SOURCES AND ANALOGUES OF THE CANTERBURY TALES [II], edited by Robert M. Correale with Mary Hamel XXXVI THE LEGEND OF GOOD WOMEN: Context and Reception, edited by Carolyn P. Collette XXXVII CHAUCER AND THE CITY, edited by Ardis Butterfield XXXVIII MEN AND MASCULINITIES IN CHAUCER’S TROILUS AND CRISEYDE, edited by Tison Pugh and Marcia Smith Marzec XXXIX IMAGES OF KINGSHIP IN CHAUCER AND HIS RICARDIAN CONTEMPORARIES, Samantha J. Rayner

spine 18mm A db 31 May 09

Although many of Chaucer’s sources have been exhaustively studied, relatively little work has been done on the influence of his contemporary Boccaccio, a gap which this book aims to fill. It examines the relationship of the comic tales, the so-called fabliaux, in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Decameron, demonstrating that not only did Chaucer draw on Boccaccio’s work, but that he and Boccaccio shared the same comic literary tradition stretching back into antiquity. By putting the tales and the characters side-byside, new light is thrown on Chaucer’s inventiveness and mode of working. Professor CAROL HEFFERNAN teaches in the Department of English, Rutgers University, New Jersey. Cover: A fifteenth-century illustration of Decameron 9, 6: Paris, Bibl. Natl. MS. Fr. 239, fol. 256  v (by permission of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France).

HEFFERNAN

An imprint of BOYDELL & BREWER Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF and 668 Mount Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620-2731 www.boydell.co.uk / www.boydellandbrewer.com