Christopher Morley

“ But Shakespeare’s love is almost modern and quite different from Boccaccio’s. In the Decameron healthy young men do die of it, blooming young women are brought in a few days to death’s door, but a moment’s glimpse of the adored one sets their pulses leaping again. The countess falls in love with the steward and sends him word of her passion. He thinks it only a ruse to test him and asks for a sign. Accordingly she kills her husband’s favorite hawk, tugs out a hank of his beard, and pulls out one of his most useful teeth ”

“ He throws his whole soul into the story. He has a lingering way of telling his tales, knitting in the little stitches with such a deft, happy touch—we can almost feel the drowsy Italian afternoon, and see the little circle gathered about the fountain in breathless attention. If it be pathetic—well and good, he is pathetic with a will, though now and again trembling on the verge of laughter. “The story told by Fiammetta had more than once brought the tears to the eyes of the ladies, her companions,” he says, after the tragic tale of Ghismonda and Guiscardo. ”

“ Boccaccio’s obscenity loses its wickedness by its utter candour. To use a phrase of his own, it is an “honest sprightliness.” Nothing is too high nor too low for his great ringing laughter.
No one ever enjoyed sheer farce more than Boccaccio. Like Shakespeare he is wonderfully successful with his fools. There are the delightful trio—Calandrino the Butt, Bruno and Buffalmacco, the practical jokers—who come into several of the tales. ”

“ It will be well to say something on this topic of medieval love, for making love was the great pastime of the middle ages, and most of the tales in the Decameron deal with amourettes. It is all most fantastic to our modern eyes, very exciting, very brightly coloured, but with a touch of grossness. ”

“ Boccaccio had the true story-teller’s knack, he can take the most trivial incident and make it significant. Hark to Hazlitt, who knew what he was talking about. He says: “Does not Baccaccio pass to this day for a writer of ribaldry, because his jests and lascivious tales were all that caught the vulgar ear, while the story of the Falcon is forgotten? There is indeed in B’s serious pieces a truth, a pathos, and an exquisite refinement of sentiment which is hardly to be met with in any other prose writer whatever.”
We have hit upon one of the secrets of the Decameron. ”

“ Ten young people of good birth, most of their families and relatives dead, flee the stricken city and find themselves sole occupants of a palace where (by the divine dispensation of story-books) rooms are already set with fresh flowers, the cellars stocked with rare wines, even the beds made and the bedrooms aired. ”

“ There are very few husbands in the Decameron who do not suffer from righteous jealousy. In those days this was all a matter of course. There is a charming alba (or dawn-song) by a Provençal troubadour of the thirteenth century, supposed to be sung outside the windows of the wife and her lover to warn them of the return of her husband. The point is that the singer expressly prays the aid of the Almighty for his friend and invokes confusion upon the jealous spouse. The Lord is all on the side of the medieval lover and the husband is nowhere. ”

“ All the ordinary conditions of existence are subverted, the customary reserve and refinement of polite life is utterly abandoned in the face of this imminent horror, and everyone does what seems best at the moment. ”

“ Besides the much-imposed-upon husband, the all-enduring wife was a favourite theme for the medieval tale-teller, and this plot continued a universal favourite until the modern feminist movement began. Boccaccio’s famous extravaganza of Griselda (“Patient Grizzel”) is perhaps the most imitated story in literature. Medieval lovers were capable of anything, would believe anything—I can vouch the popular ballads to warranty, or Boccaccio’s lady who was easily persuaded that the Angel Gabriel was sore enamoured of her. ”

“ It was written by a man of thirty-five or so who had seen much of life, a man full of humour and tenderness and ribaldry, a man who expressed as well as anyone the double attitude of the middle ages towards woman—the utmost reverence for woman in the abstract, as idealized in the Mother of Christ ”