The Stealth Classic (The Decameron, Part 1)

In Part 1 of our discussion on Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron, we welcome editor Wayne A. Rebhorn to discuss the author's life and historical times, similarities among Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Dante, and the use of storytelling to both distract and make meaning during catastrophic times. 

Wayne A. Rebhorn is the Celanese Centennial Professor of English at the University of Texas, where he teaches English, Italian, and comparative literature. His translation of Boccaccio’s Decameron won the 2014 PEN Center USA’s Literary Award for Translation.

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of The Decameron, go to https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393427882.

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter at @TNL_WWN and Bluesky at @nortonlibrary.bsky.social. 

Transcript

[Music]  

[Mark]: You are listening to the Norton Library podcast where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W.W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host Mark Cirino with Michael von Cannon producing. Today we present the first of our two episodes devoted to The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio as we interview its editor, Wayne A. Rebhorn. In part one, we learn who Boccaccio was and what he wrote, the historical time in which he lived, and his rich legacy. We discuss the structure of this great work, what is being dramatized, and what themes emerge from the Decameron. Wayne A. Rebhorn is the Mildred Hayek Vacek and John Roman Vacek Chair in English at the University of Texas where he teaches English, Italian, and comparative literature. His translation of Boccaccio's Decameron won the 2014 Penn Center USA's Literary Award for Translation. It is so nice to have him with us today. Wayne Rebhorn, welcome to the Norton Library podcast.  

[Wayne]: Well, thank you for inviting me. I appreciate it.  

[Mark]: Well, it's such a pleasure to have you on to get to discuss your new edition of Giovanni Boccaccio's the Decameron. And Wayne, I thought we would start by talking about Boccaccio himself. Who is this writer? Where and when did he live? What do we need to know about him in order to tackle this work? 

[Wayne]: You don't need to know a huge amount, but he's a very interesting guy in some ways. I don't think there's been an adequate biography. Maybe there couldn't be because [there are] probably not enough details, but he was born probably, it's not 100% sure, in a tiny town called Certaldo, which is about oh maybe, not even like 40 or 50 miles to the southwest of Florence. And he may have been born in Florence. We–– it's just simply not known. And his his father–– uh, well, he was illegitimate by the way, but then so were a lot of other kids in in those days. And his father worked for the Bardi bank, B-A-R-D-I. And they were, uh, like the Medici, they were bankers and they were very, very wealthy and the father was not–– he was a functionary in the bank, he was not, he's not like a partner or something. So Boccaccio was, uh, raised by him and he took Buccaccio to Naples in, uh, about 1325 I think like that, something like that, because the Bardi Bank had a, you know a branch there, and, uh, his father wanted him to study at the studio which was the, essentially the University of Naples and study canon law, and he didn't like it at all, and, uh, never got a degree, never finished his, his course of studies, but he met lots of people there and they encouraged his literary endeavor. And so when he was young, this is before the Decameron, let's say think–– the figurative Decameron, about 1348, [13]49, when the plague struck Florence as a kind of midpoint in Boccaccio's life, before that, when he was in Naples and after he came back to Florence in around 1340 or 1341 he, uh, he wrote, he wrote a lot of stuff, tons of poetry and, uh, not lyric poetry, but long, long poems of different sorts, allegorical poems, very much medieval stuff. And, uh, basically except for scholars, people don't read that anymore, it's not of much interest to them. And so he loved being in Naples. It was wonderful, very rich ... by Naples, of course, Naples was the center of the center of the head of all of southern Italy and Sicily in the period. So, it was a large kingdom, and wealthy, and it was–– he was attracted to the court, to its elegance, to its wealth, to its, uh, opulence, and so on. He would have stayed there if he could have, but he didn't get, you know, a kind of permanent invitation to hang on, to be a hanger on, so he went back to Florence. He always had, to some degree, money problems and writing was not–– was a way to make money, but not the way we do nowadays because they didn't have copyright. You couldn’t publish your work and and be sure that you would get a percentage of the royalties and so of the income from it. So he, uh, he wrote and he wrote and he wrote and he had patrons of various sorts who would reward him. He met Petrarch, the, uh, the model poet for Italians. There had been poets before him, of course, Dante most famously, and poets afterwards, but Petrarch really–– he wrote a sonnet sequence which is what we know him for mostly nowadays. This became a model for sonnet sequences all over Europe and so on. So he was–– but even in his time he was pretty well known. However, at this time in his life, he was also a dedicated classical scholar because one of the things about the renaissance –– word means of course rebirth –– it's the rebirth of classical antiquity. That's too limited a definition, but nevertheless, Petrarch was part of that. He went around to monasteries trying to find old manuscripts of classical texts and so forth and so on. And, uh, there are people–– classical poets like Collus the great Roman poet, we would not have unless somebody found it in a monastery somewhere and then published it. But in the second half of Petrarch's life, after the Decameron, he mostly writes in Latin and he writes like–– he did something on the, on the pagan gods identifying them because you have to think this, we didn't have like the internet and we didn't have, uh, Google and things like that. So, who were these these hundreds of classical deities sprinkled throughout classical literature and, uh, [he wrote on?] famous women and that sort of thing, from the ancient world primarily but not exclusively. So, he was a scholar. Again, nobody but scholars will read this. The one book we all read by Boccaccio is, of course, the Decameron. 

[Mark]: So, how would the Decameron have been disseminated at that time?  

[Wayne]: I'm sure it was disseminated by manuscript. They didn't have printing, there’s like a century and plus before that happened. So, and we know that because at the beginning of day four, he–– Boccaccio spends some time defending what he's doing for various criticisms. He'll come back and defend it again in the very last, the close, conclusion of the work. But, uh, it's imost likely that he already had disseminated a part of it in manuscript. And I don't know honestly whether he did–– I know that the manuscript people, in which everybody bases their editions is held in the library in Berlin and it is in his hand and it goes way back. It's not complete but there's a manuscript in Florence. I don't think it's in his hand which gives us the complete Decameron we have now between the two of them. And, uh, so, uh, he must have shown it as he was writing it in in chunks, I don't know, with friends.  

[Mark]: Wayne, you mentioned Dante and Petrarch, and in considering Boccaccio along with those other two writers as sort of a triangulation, how is it helpful to look at them as a trio? In what ways are they similar or dissimilar?  

[Wayne]: Well, let me, let me, uh, answer that by saying that for the Italians, they have looked for, I think since at least the 16th century, looked back at those three writers as the founders of Italian literature. What they called them are Le Tre Corone, the three crowns. And, uh, Dante for the long poem, obviously, Boccaccio, I mean Petrarch, for the lyric––he wrote a collection of lyrics famously, uh, that, uh, was imitated all over Europe and then Boccaccio for prose. and Boccaccio’s work was translated into various vernaculars including French and English for instance, um, and, uh, it became a kind model for how you put together a, uh, a series of stories which have a frame around them that the Italians call a cornice, which you thought you'd have around a picture, thus tying them all together. And so, um, there were imitations of Boccaccio later on in the, mainly in the 16th century but 15th century too, I think. I don't know a whole lot about them to be honest but he was clearly, he clearly had an impact. His prose was art prose, the kind of prose that a writer would aspire to write and so forth and so on, and, uh, and so that's, that's why he was important for the Italians. He's also important on the world stage, I think, because he is such a great writer and because his prose, the collection of the Decameron, the collection of stories is such a wonderful collection. He is less well known than Petrarch and less well, much less well known than Dante. Dante's sort of, everybody knows, at least has some idea of Dante, Dante's Inferno, Dante's hell, whatever. Um, fewer know about Petrarch and the sonnet and lyric poetry in general. And uh, I'm afraid to say I'm sorry to say that Boccaccio is just sort of, like a–– he's a sort of stealth, he produced a sort of stealth classic in the Decameron. It’s there but, you know, I don't know–– the Decameron? The Decamera-what? 

[Mark]: [Laughter] Your introduction, Wayne, talks a lot about the plague that seems to have had a great impact not only on Boccaccio's life but also on the composition of the Decameron. In what way was that such a major event?  

[Wayne]: Well, I mean, historically, it was a huge event. I mean, it wiped out the population or like a third, a half of the population of Florence and went and spread all over Europe. Uh, and there was nothing they could do about it. They didn't have antibiotics and they, uh, you know, they didn't have any way of preventing themselves from getting infected because houses were built in such a way... they were not, I mean, not... the rats that carried it, the brown rat I think it was, um, uh carried the fleas that had the plague in them, would be everywhere, not running around your floor but, you know, hiding and stuff like that and they'd come out and the fleas would go jump off and they jump onto people and the fleas would bite the people and the people would get the plague. So there's almost no way of stopping it. In fact, what I've read about is that the plague really stopped in the 18th century when they started making houses better, more insulated, more protected because the plague's still out there. You know, we could, you can still get plague.  

[Mark]: So Wayne, this plague, did this impact how Boccaccio approached the project? Did it motivate him to address it in some way?  

[Wayne]: Yes, I think it did. Let me tell you an anecdote about my teaching of Boccaccio. I was teaching Boccaccio in a course in the fall of 2001, specifically on 9/11 and I was, I came into the university and everybody was talking about what had happened to one of the twin towers and, uh, I watched for a while on television before I went to my class. I think it was, class was like at 11:00 which would have been about noon in New York City and you know, with horror everybody was looking at this awful thing that had happened and I said what I do, what shall I do? Should I just dismiss the class? Should I, uh, invite the class to talk about the effect of 9/11 on them? Which we did a bit, we did, but I also thought, “Why not why not Boccaccio?” He’s writing this work, this wonderful work in response to the plague. I'm sure what must have happened, though I have no evidence for this at all, but I'm sure it must have happened... he must have said, "Gee, we're going through a plague, uh, why don't I write stories?” What do people find comforting when they're faced with the calamity of the magnitude of the plague? And I think they turn to stories because stories have, well, for nothing else, and they certainly have more than that, but they have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They end, there's a terminus, and with the plague you're in the middle of it, you have no idea if this is ever going to end. And so I think that's what, what happened. I might add just as a footnote to that that my translation did fairly well in terms of sales and it took off during the the pandemic for obvious reasons. People were thrown back upon themselves. They couldn't go out and mingle with the crowds anymore and so forth and so couldn't go to restaurants, so they read. And there could be no more perfect work than the Decameron to deal with the, uh, cataclysmic effect of the plague on people's lives, of the pandemic, and 2001.  

[Mark]: Wayne, one more question about that. Would you say that Boccaccio is writing then to distract people or to cheer them up, to give them some kind of sustenance, or is it to investigate some philosophical or religious meaning behind the plague?  

[Wayne]: I'd say, it's a terrible thing to say, it's both. He's writing–– because the stories will distract you. I mean, you know, why do they have TV sets in hospital rooms? You're there lying in misery or whatever and at least you can watch whatever is, the tube is showing. And I think that's, that's certainly part of it. Um, but I think he has... what would you say, larger fish to fry? I think he also wants people to re-evaluate the way they think about life, their relationships, relationships to other people, their societies and stuff like that. He's not a revolutionary, but he does have, I can put it, more serious aims than just being a distraction.  

[Mark]: You talked a little bit earlier about the structure that Boccaccio chose for this huge work. Can you say a little bit more about how this text is structured? And is this the first such time a work has been structured in such a way? Where is Boccaccio getting this design from?  

[Wayne]: Well, I think we can't know for sure. The guy sort of like, he's like Shakespeare. He didn't keep a diary like, “Today I think I'll do 100 tales,” and that sort of thing. 

[Mark]: [Laughter] Hmm. 

[Wayne]: That would be, that would be very nice, but he didn't. But what we can deduce is this: um, he, I think, he originally started with a collection of stories being told by seven women. He then decided to add three men. So the ladies definitely outnumbered the men in this this collection. Uh, and he had a model that he could work with existing in Tuscan uh, literature, namely Dante's Divine Comedy. By the way, he didn't call it the Divine Comedy. That's a 16th century Italian label for it. Anyway, uh, the Divine Comedy has 100 cantos: 34 in Inferno with a sort of introductory canto, and then 33 in Inferno, 33 in Purgatory, 33 in Paradise. And so I'm sure it was absolutely natural for him to think, “Well, how am I going to, how many stories am I going to write?” And so he decided 100 stories. He may have had fewer in mind initially but that, that became what he decided to ... what we have as the Decameron. And the name of course is from the Greek root for 10, not that Boccaccio and people in his culture generally knew Greek––they didn't––but they knew a few things. And, uh, so I think that his was, you could see his thing as a homage to Dante of course, uh, but also as a kind retort or an alternative. And people talked about, you know, if if Dante writes the Divine Comedy, Boccaccio writes the Earthly Comedy, so I think that, you know, if Dante's, uh, comedy was defined as the, called the Divine Comedy in the 16th century, and I think people knew kind of that, even if it didn't have that title, and Boccaccio’s work can be seen as a response to that, a repost. Not necessarily a contradiction, I mean not rejection of Dante but rather it's about life on earth. And, uh if I may talk a little bit about the structure, I think that reveals a great deal as well as the individual tales do too, but the structure is that he starts out with a bunch of tales in the first day. This is, remember, this is a response to the plague and to this devastation of human society and so on. And the thing he focuses on on the first day is how, uh, is what you might call linguistic virtuosity, uh, quickwittedness, an ability to roll with the punches and that sort of thing. And also he focuses on the way human beings can use their intelligence to get what they want while preserving some kind of social world around them. So you can see in a certain sense The Decameron is not just an escape from, but it's kind of, it has an almost revolutionary––not quite revolutionary––effect of saying well, if we just lived in our world like this way we'd be better off. So that––the key thing for him in all of his stories really is ingenial intelligence, wit, cleverness and the ability to create stories because a lot of the stories have characters creating stories within the stories that get them out of a jam or allow them to get something they want and so on. And, uh, for instance, the very first story which I was going to talk about in more detail is really, the chief character is faced with the proposition––he's dying, not of the plague, but he's dying––and he's worried that he's staying with a couple of, uh, money lenders, Florentine money lenders, Burgundy, and he's afraid he's going to get kicked out in the street cause he's also, his reputation is he's a really bad guy [and] does all sorts of wicked things throughout his life. And so they won't want him around. And he wants to die in his bed. And so he has to invent, uh, a self in order to be able to stay there and to survive. And you can see now why I think this this, this text just took off during our pandemic because how do you survive something like that? And of course, it's also a comic tale and it's a sort of a, you know, a thumb in the eye or a finger in the air to conventions and to the Catholic Church among other things because what Ciappelletto––his name is Ciappelletto, this character in the first tale––what he does is he invents a self by way of a confession. Here he is, he's faced with death, he's faced with more than death, he's faced with going to hell, and so he says to his the the two Italians with whom he's living, he said, "Go get me a priest and I'll make a confession to him, but make sure he's a dumb priest, right? That he's not too smart." 

[Mark]: [Laughter] 

[Wayne]: And so, he begins telling us this confession, which is that, you know, his life turned 180 degrees in the opposite direction. Everything he does is saintly and so forth and so on. And he, uh, the priest helps him off by saying, you know, tell me more. Here's another sin to deal with and so forth and so on, and he confesses every sin, but they're all very, very pale versions of sins. Like, once I cursed my mom, I should never have done that. And so forth and so on. And he, uh, he turns himself into a saint kind of in the priest's eyes. And the priest goes back to his––I think he's a friar or something. Anyway, he goes back to his monestary and he says, "We've got this guy. We got to make him into a saint." And he's, as I say, as the story starts out, he's the worst man who ever lived. And he's dying and he's trying to get at least have a nice comfortable bed to stay in until he passes into the next world or wherever that may be. And, uh, think about that story in terms of the context of the plague. What are, what are the things that plague does to you? It frightens the hell out of you, right? It could be you. You could be dying. You could be a corpse put on the street to be collected by the gravediggers or whatever. And he has the––I wouldn't call it courage but in a certain sense it is––to face that and say, “No I'm not going to give into, I'm not going to see life as preparation for death, I'm going to see life as what it is now. I'm going to live it fully and truly.” And so he faces death unafraid and you think about that just as a response to the plague, it must have been what Boccaccio was after. Of course it's not––all the stories aren’t like this one but they they kind of echo it because they are an embrace of life in its richest ways, uh, in rich ways and that's what I think, u,h was the one of the attractions of the text when Boccaccio showed it to his contemporaries because he was, he was a classic about the time, by the time he finished writing the thing I think, just as Petrarch was a classic and Dante was a classic in Boccaccio’s own time. By the 16th century, they were the big three as it were of Italian literature. And I think it's,uh, message––well, there are many messages in the Cameron––but the message [is] that you should face life without living in dread of the plague striking you down tomorrow. 

[Mark]: Do these stories have a grand arc? Can you go in and out of any of the hundred stories out of sequence and you'll get just the same amount? Or is there a kind of a larger narrative that connects all of these sequentially? 

[Wayne] Well, you can certainly read the stories in and of themselves. They all, they have, because they have a beginning, a middle, and an end, they have characters having to deal with threats to their livelihood or to their lives and things like that, and also just wanting to get into bed with somebody else's wife or what have you. And so there is a structure there, but you could also look at the whole evolving structure of the Decameron itself. Um, Day One is about characters who, you know, get what they want, get out of jams or whatever using their wit, but it doesn't have a theme. Day Two has a theme. The theme is fortune. Fortune is like all the unpredictable, all the contingent things in the world around us we can't deal with, unless we can. And so these are human beings in Day Two who are in all sorts of situations where they're kind of buffeted around by the winds of fortune but who nevertheless seem to come out okay at the end. And then in Day Three, the characters choose a different theme which is “Let's talk about fortune but how characters manage it.” So, it's even more forceful about how human beings can in fact manage the difficulties they have. Day Four is about tragedy, where the irrational inside people [and] outside people subjects you to awful things. You can see how the plague is always in the background here. And then, uh, Day Five is about comedy. Let's take Day Four and turn it upside down. And now the characters manage to get out of jams, manage to survive, and so on. Day Six is really just jokes. It's witty quips, witty remarks.  

[Mark]: Hmm 

[Wayne} But that sort of boils down The Decameron to its essence. You're capable to do things with language. You entertain, you put things in their place. Day Seven, you think, well, if you think about the six days of creation, day seven should be heaven. Quite on the contrary: Day Seven is about wit gone crazy amuck. It's about characters doing sometimes quite nasty things to one, another almost killing people because they're manipulating them with their own intelligence. And that goes on for three days. Day Eight is a freeze of Day Seven and Day Nine is a free topic, but it seems more the same. And then on Day Ten, uh, which is that––the guy who chooses the theme is named Panfilo, which means all loving or all lover of everything––uh, he says let's talk about magnanimity, generosity, even self-sacrifice, which is a kind of complement to the egotism that was unleashed in the Seventh Eighth and Ninth days and turned very ugly at times. So, you can see there's a structure here.  

[Mark]: Yes.  

[Wayne]: It doesn't lead to a conclusion. It's not like in the conclusion, Boccaccio doesn't say, “Okay, let's go out and reform Florence. Let's transform our society.” It's merely, pick up what you can from this, the characters go back to their normal lives, and they they've had their fun, they've had a chance to think through their stories. Because we think through stories, we always do, and they've done that. They've never sort of summed it up and said “Oh yes, we need to do this, that or the other thing.” But you as the reader can pick up things from that. The only time there's one story, uh, which is in––I'm pretty sure it's in Day Five but anyway, where, uh, a woman is condemned to death in I think it's either Prato or Arezzo, so it's not a town in Tuscany, and she's brought before a magistrate and she says “I want to defend myself,” which is already unusual. Women didn't, you know, speak in public and so forth and so so on in those days and she says, um, basically the story she tells is––not a story, but the proposition she offers the judge is, you know, “Ask my husband has he always been satisfied with me sexually,” cause she's had a lover and that's why she's been condemned to death. Ask my husband if he's been satisfied with her in terms of going to bed and stuff. And the husband says, "Yes, he has been." And she says, "Well, so, if you know, basically I fed my husband and I have leftovers, what should I do? Throw them to the dogs?" 

[Mark]: [Laughter]  

[Wayne]: And she justifies this with this gustatory metaphor, you know, why it’s okay for her to have had a lover. And everybody cheers for her in the court. She gets off and not only that, the people of the town transformed their law so they no longer punish extramarital sex with death. So, it's one story in the Decameron where a social change is produced.  

[Mark]: Wayne Rebhorn, thank you so much for coming on the Norton Library Podcast to discuss your edition of The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. Thank you, Wayne. 

[Wayne]: You're welcome. Of course. It's been a pleasure.  

[Mark]: The Norton Library edition of the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, edited by Wayne A. Rebhorn is available now in paperback and eBook. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles.