The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Giovanni Boccaccio · a frame collection of a hundred tales in prose · a Proem, ten days of ten tales with their frame and ten ballate, the author’s defence and his Conclusion · c. 1353 · scored on Boccaccio’s Florentine, read from knowledge, with G. H. McWilliam’s translation (1972; second edition 1995) beside it for sense; no text in hand, and no translation quoted
Mode
Frame collection of novelle; tragedy, romance, fabliau, exemplum, adventure and the witty retort set in one company’s game of telling
Mythos
The flight from the city of death to the walled garden; a commonwealth founded, kept and given up; the go-between of Inferno V; the false saint, the patient wife, the three rings
Phase
The plague of 1348 in Florence; ten days of tales in a stay of about a fortnight in the country, from the founding of the company to its return
Presentation
Prose; a Proem, ten days of ten tales, each day under a ruler and, on eight of them, a theme, with its introduction, conclusion and closing ballata; the author’s defence opening the fourth day; the author’s Conclusion
Register
From the grave inventory of the plague and the long Latinate period to servants’ speech, friars’ patter and a Venetian’s dialect; the obscene told in the high style
Scale
Ten tellers and a hundred tales; Florence, the Mediterranean and its courts, from the Sultan of Babylon to the peasant of Lamporecchio
Governing Proposition
In the plague of 1348, with the dead carried out of doors and every bond in Florence dissolved, seven young women and three young men leave the city for the country, give themselves a ruler for each day, and tell ten tales a day for ten days before going back. The wager of the book is that men and women are governed, under no visible providence, by Fortune, desire and wit, and that a civil order death has broken can be rebuilt by speech and rule: a hundred tales told in turn by a company that judges them by delight.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Before any tale the author speaks in his own voice. The Proem opens “Umana cosa è aver compassione degli afflitti” (“It is a human thing to have compassion on the afflicted”), and the afflicted it has in mind are women in love, shut in their rooms with their thoughts. The book is offered to them, not to scholars. Its rubric gives it a second name, prencipe Galeotto (“Prince Galehaut”), the go-between of the fifth canto of the Inferno, where Francesca names the book she was reading as the go-between of her fall. Boccaccio takes the name on purpose. His book will carry desire as that one did, and it will be told without a hell beneath it.
Then the first day opens on the plague of 1348 in Florence, and the voice is plain. The narration lists what happened as an inventory: the dead carried out of doors, the city emptying, kin abandoning kin, the law fallen silent because those who kept it were dead or shut away. It does not raise its voice, and the passage has the grandeur of the plain record. Every bond that holds a city together is shown coming apart, one by one, until there is nothing left to govern and no one to govern it.
Out of that dissolution the book founds a city. Seven young women, Pampinea, Fiammetta, Filomena, Emilia, Lauretta, Neifile and Elissa, and three young men, Panfilo, Filostrato and Dioneo, leave Florence for the country. They give themselves a constitution: each day a ruler, seven women and three men in turn; each teller one tale a day; a ballata to close each day. Ten days of tales fill a stay of about a fortnight. Dioneo holds a privilege of his own, to tell last and to leave the theme. The company keeps itself chaste. The licence of the book will be in the tales, never in the telling, and the first day, under Pampinea, has no theme at all.
Movement II
The first tale is a fraud perfectly made. Ciappelletto, as wicked a man as the book can find, lies dying among strangers and makes a confession so false and so finely judged that the friar who hears it takes him for a saint, and after his death he is venerated. The misdirections are timed exactly, each sin confessed a scruple too small to be a sin. The tale discloses how sanctity is manufactured, by credulity and by those who need a saint, and it is told in the grave style of a saint’s life, so that the style is itself the joke.
The second and third tales turn to the three faiths. The Jew Abraham is converted to the Church by what he sees of the court of Rome, judging the institution by its survival rather than its conduct. Then a Sultan puts a question to a Jew, which of the three laws is the true one, and is answered with a story of a father, three sons and three rings so alike that no one can say which is the first. The question is left open, and the book lets it stand open. Truth among the three faiths is undecidable, and the ring parable became the type of tolerance.
The second day, under Filomena, takes up the first of the book’s powers. Its theme is Fortune: those who are thrown down and brought, past hope, to a happy end. Landolfo Rufolo is taken by pirates; Andreuccio spends a night in the streets of Naples that strips him of everything and gives him more. Fortune here is no providence. It is a wheel, and the tales show it turning. Several turn it in the same way, and the day is one of the places where the hundred could lose a tale without losing what it knows.
Movement III
The third day, under Neifile, is given to industry: what is gained or regained by wit and effort. It opens in a garden the book describes with care, a walled place of order and beauty inside the larger flight from the city. At its close Dioneo, with his licence, tells of Alibech and the hermit Rustico, who teaches her to put the devil into hell. It is the most indecent tale in the book, told at the end of a day of decorum by the one voice permitted to tell it, and the company laughs and blushes.
At the opening of the fourth day the author breaks into his own book. Critics, he says, have found the tales unworthy of his age and of the Muses. He answers with a tale of his own, unnumbered: Filippo Balducci, widowed, raises his son apart from the world, and when the boy first sees women in Florence he asks what they are. His father calls them papere (“goslings”), and the boy wants one. Desire is nature, and nature is not to be argued down. Then, under Filostrato, the day turns to loves that end in grief.
Ghismonda stands before her father, who has killed her lover, and receives the heart in a golden cup. Lisabetta keeps her murdered lover’s head in a pot of basil and weeps over it. Another lover’s heart is served to his lady to eat. Between them Frate Alberto, in Venice, passes himself off as the angel Gabriel to a lady of that city, and the tale catches the speech of Venice. The fifth day, under Fiammetta, gives love a happy end after misfortune: Nastagio sees, in the pinewood of Ravenna, a woman hunted and torn by dogs; Federigo, ruined, serves his one falcon to the lady who has come to ask him for it.
Movement IV
The sixth day, under Elissa, is the shortest in its matter: the quick retort, the word that saves the speaker. Its tales are slight by design. Chichibio the cook, who has served his master a crane with one leg, insists that cranes have only one, and saves himself with a retort. Frate Cipolla, who has promised a village a feather of the angel Gabriel and finds coals in its place, improvises his relic as he preaches. At the close of the day the women go apart to a valley of their own, a natural order set beside the ordered garden.
The seventh day, under Dioneo, is given to the tricks wives play on husbands, and the eighth, under Lauretta, to the tricks people play on one another. Calandrino, the painter, is made to believe that a stone has made him invisible, and walks home through Florence pelted by his friends Bruno and Buffalmacco. The style is the comedy: the long Latinate period, built for grave matter, gravely narrates the gull. But the mechanism of cuckold and gull repeats across the two days more often than the knowledge needs, and these are days that stay level.
The ninth day, under Emilia, is free again. Through all of it the frame keeps its order. The company eats, walks, sings its ballata and goes to bed; the women blush and laugh at what Dioneo tells; no one in the garden does what the tales describe. That chastity against the licence of the tales is the book’s argument about telling and doing. The anarchy of the middle days and the order of the frame stand side by side, held together by juxtaposition more than by any one design.
Movement V
The tenth day, under Panfilo, is given to liberality and magnificence. The book that began with Fortune ends with virtue, in tales of kings, knights and lords outdoing one another in generosity, and the hundred acquire a direction: from what happens to men, through what they win by wit and lose to love, to what they give. Whether the ten days truly climb to this one is a question the book poses by its order and does not answer.
The hundredth tale is Dioneo’s. Gualtieri, Marquis of Saluzzo, marries Griselda, a poor man’s daughter, and tests her past reason, through her children and her place as his wife, and she bears every trial without complaint until he restores all of it. Dioneo tells it as magnificence, and calls the marquis’s conduct matta bestialità (“mad brutishness”). The company argues the tale. The cruelty is praised as virtue and ironised by its teller in one breath, and the book’s law, nature, fortune and wit without miracle, strains here more than anywhere. Griselda, the wife tested past reason, was carried from this page across Europe.
Then the company goes back to Florence, after about a fortnight in the country, and the commonwealth of ten is given up by its own choice. The author closes with his Conclusion, defending the book’s licence again. A hundred tales have answered the hundred cantos of the Commedia with a comedy that has no hereafter. What the book has shown is how a city that death has unmade can be made again, for a time, by ten people speaking in turn under a rule they set themselves.
Act III · The Twelve
The architecture is compelled: ten tellers, ten days, a hundred tales, answering the hundred cantos of the Commedia. The themes move from Fortune through industry, love lost and love won, the saving word and the trick to magnificence; the plague is required, since without it the garden means nothing; and without Dioneo’s licence the book loses its disorder inside order. What holds the axis lowest is the subtractive test applied tale by tale. The retorts of the sixth day are slight by design; the seventh and eighth days repeat the mechanism of cuckold and gull more often than the knowledge needs; several adventures of the second turn on the same wheel. Perhaps a sixth of the hundred is permitted rather than compelled: removed, such a tale costs the symmetry, not what the book knows.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: men and women are governed, under no visible providence, by Fortune, by Nature, which is desire, and by ingegno, wit and resource; and a civil order can be rebuilt by speech and rule after death has dissolved every bond. The plague shows the dissolution exactly, kin abandoning kin and the law fallen silent, and the company answers it with a self-governing city of ten. Ciappelletto’s confession shows sanctity manufactured by credulity; the three rings leave truth undecided between three faiths. Filippo Balducci’s son, who takes women for papere, shows desire as nature, not to be argued down. Held from the top because the inner life it discloses is mostly of the act, rarely of the self.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Height is real and intermittent, as a comic book’s must be. The dreadful ceiling is the plague, the dead carried out of doors and the city emptied, grandeur reached in a plain inventory. The fourth day has its tragic heights: Ghismonda before her father with her lover’s heart in a golden cup, Lisabetta weeping over the pot of basil that holds the head, the eaten heart. Nastagio’s vision of the hunted woman in the pinewood of Ravenna reaches terror; Federigo’s falcon, served to the lady who came to ask for it, a quiet height of loss. Ciappelletto’s confession and Frate Cipolla’s sermon are transport of the comic kind. But perhaps fifteen tales of the hundred rise, and the bulk of the second, seventh and eighth days stays level by design.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Myth built in the frame and made in several tales. The frame is load-bearing archetype: a flight from a city of death into a walled garden, a little Eden, where ten young people found an ordered commonwealth for a fortnight and then go back. The book names itself in its rubric prencipe Galeotto, the go-between of the fifth canto of the Inferno, and so sets itself against Dante’s Francesca. In the tales, figures have become types while staying particular: Griselda, the wife tested past reason; Ciappelletto, the false saint; Calandrino, who believes a stone has made him invisible; the ring parable, the type of tolerance; the heart served to the beloved. Held below the top because many tales use the type without building it, and the frame, once set, is lightly worked in the middle days.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance: the preachers’ exempla, the Novellino, the French fabliaux and romances, the Eastern frame tales that reached Europe through the Disciplina clericalis and the Seven Sages, and the Commedia. The turn is large. The exemplum’s moral frame is taken away and a company that judges tales by delight and wit put in its place; the comic and obscene matter of the fabliau is set in a high Latinate prose kept until then for grave subjects; a hundred tales answer a hundred cantos with a human comedy that has no hereafter; and the book is offered to women in love, not to scholars. The stake is in the text, in the author’s defence opening the fourth day and again in the Conclusion. Held from the top because frame tale and novella were both inherited, transformed rather than founded.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. Without the frame the hundred would be an anthology; with it they are acts of a society, told in turn under a ruler, the hearers’ laughter and blushes recorded, so that the book’s claim, that narrative is how a people recovers order and pleasure in the face of death, is enacted, not stated. The order of the themes gives the hundred a direction, from Fortune to magnificence. Dioneo’s privilege builds licence into law, so that the most indecent tale and the most troubling come from one licensed voice. The chastity of the company against the licence of its tales is the form’s own argument about telling and doing. Held below the top: within a day the order of the tales is often loose, and the ballate are conventional in themselves.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Six and a half centuries of return are the evidence. Its prose became the model of Italian in the Renaissance; dramatists, poets, painters and a film-maker have each taken a different book from it, the ring parable for one, the basil pot for another, the bawdy for a third, the whole for the last. Griselda alone has not exhausted its interpreters, because the teller who calls the marquis’s conduct matta bestialità then tells it as magnificence, and the company argues the tale. Semantic and formal depth both yield: the frame keeps opening the questions of who speaks and who judges, and of whether the ten days climb to the tenth. Held from the top because many of the tales, taken singly, are exhausted at a reading.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The field was the vernacular narrative of fourteenth-century Europe: romance in verse and prose, fabliau, exemplum and Dante. The intrinsic force: the book founded Italian literary prose and made the novella a high form, joining frame and short tale into a structure that holds a whole society. It stops below the very top because Dante had made the larger rupture in the same language a generation before. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Bembo made Boccaccio’s prose the standard of Italian (1525), and the Crusca’s dictionary followed; the frame collection was taken up by Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron, by Bandello and by Basile; the Canterbury Tales stand in its line, though whether Chaucer knew the book is unsettled; Cervantes wrote the Novelas ejemplares in its wake; Shakespeare drew on its tales; Lessing took the ring parable into Nathan der Weise, Keats the basil pot, La Fontaine the bawdy tales, Botticelli Nastagio and Pasolini the whole.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over six and a half centuries. The form is whole: the text survives entire in the author’s own hand, nothing lost, and nothing is charged to it. Presence is continuous: copied from the fourteenth century, then printed, translated into the languages of Europe and then of the world, taught without break in Italy as the foundation of its prose, and carried into painting, theatre, opera and film. The charges fall on presence. The Index of 1559 and the expurgated editions that followed gave readers a censored book for a time, though the full text was never lost; and outside Italy the work is read more in selection than whole, and more in the academy than out of it, though less so than most medieval prose. Fame lends nothing here; the record carries the figure.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Judged on Boccaccio’s Florentine, the making is load-bearing. The prose builds long Latinate periods, the verb held to the end, and lays them over low matter and high alike, so that the style is itself the comedy when it gravely narrates a trick. Beside the periods run quick dialogue, the speech of servants and friars and the mimicry of other cities: the Venetian of Frate Alberto’s tale, the Neapolitan streets of Andreuccio’s night. The narrative craft is exact: the misdirections of Ciappelletto’s confession, the single falcon of Federigo’s poverty, Chichibio’s crane with one leg, Cipolla’s improvised relic. The costs: the periodic manner grows heavy in the frame and the graver tales, and the ballate are competent and no more. The music of the original prose is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Alibech and Rustico, the hermit’s putting of the devil into hell, and Griselda’s trial; the obscene and the near-sacred, both told by Dioneo. They obey one law: a world of nature, fortune and wit, without miracle, in which a story’s worth is weighed by the company. The same law holds the plague, the courtly tragedies and the tricks, and the company’s decorum governs the telling of every tale. Narrowness is not the cause: the range runs from the Sultan of Babylon to the peasant of Lamporecchio. What lowers it: the magnificence of the tenth day, Griselda above all, strains the law, a cruelty praised as virtue and ironised by its teller; and the ordered frame and the anarchy of the seventh and eighth days meet by juxtaposition more than by integration.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Many orders are held in one structure. Death and history: the plague of 1348 in Florence. The city and its commerce: merchants, notaries, usurers, bankers, the trade of Genoa and Naples, the pirates who take Landolfo Rufolo. The Church: friars, abbesses, the court of Rome, sanctity and fraud. Rule: the Sultan, the kings of Sicily and Aragon, the Marquis of Saluzzo, the company’s own elected monarchy. The family: fathers and daughters, marriage, adultery, inheritance. Labour and class: peasants, gardeners, cooks, the painters Bruno and Buffalmacco. The sacred: three faiths and a ring. Sexuality in every form the century spoke of; the garden and the valley of the ladies. Each order is a field where fortune, desire and wit play. Held from the top because consciousness is thin, the self seen in action rather than reflection.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.4, Pressure on Tradition at 9.3 and The Made at 9.2. A text whole in its author’s hand and present for six and a half centuries, the Index notwithstanding; the founding of Italian literary prose and of the novella as a high form, its reach running from Bembo to Pasolini across the literatures of Europe; and a Latinate period laid over low matter and high alike, so that the style is itself the comedy.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.9, held by the tales the hundred could lose: the slight retorts of the sixth day, the repeated mechanism of cuckold and gull in the seventh and eighth, and the adventures of the second that turn on one wheel, perhaps a sixth of the whole. Next above it, The Sublime at 8.2: heights in every register, from the plague to Federigo’s falcon, reached in perhaps fifteen tales of the hundred. The music of Boccaccio’s prose is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5, by four tenths. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 9.2, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.4, Pressure on Tradition at 9.3, The Unconcealment at 9.0, The Swerve at 9.0 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by two tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 7.9, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.1. Every summit condition is met. The twelve sum to 106.4, an average of 8.87, which rounds to 8.9; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, scored as one framed work in Florentine prose, written after the plague of 1348 that its frame narrates: the Proem, the frame (the introductions and conclusions of the ten days, with the ten ballate), the hundred tales, the author’s defence that opens the fourth day, and the author’s Conclusion. The tales are not judged apart from the frame. The text judged is the one transmitted in Boccaccio’s own late autograph, the Berlin manuscript Hamilton 90. No Italian text or translation was in hand, nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on the Italian. Translation · G. H. McWilliam’s (Penguin, 1972; second edition 1995), read beside for sense, chosen because it keeps the frame entire, renders the dialect tales with some care for register and does not soften the bawdy. Its English is not charged to the book, and no translation is quoted: Italian is quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s own literal English after it, and everything else is paraphrased. The counts on this page (ten tellers, seven women and three men; a hundred tales, seventy of them told by women; ten rulers; eight themed days and two free; ten ballate) are taken from the book’s architecture. Citations are by day. Many tales of the second, seventh, eighth and ninth days are known to this reading in outline, and the music of the original prose, its periodic rhythm, is beyond it; neither is credited or charged. Facts that could not be verified, among them the years of composition, the date of the autograph, the length in words, the date of the first printing, the place where the company first meets, the days of the stay kept free of tales, and the plays Shakespeare took from the book, are not given; whether Chaucer knew the book is stated as open.