The Decameron: The Final Six Novels (Everyman Paperback)

There have been and will be many adverse criticisms of The Decameron. Even in its own day, five centuries ago, although popularly received it was censored heavily. Those who find fault with it on moral grounds are those who take a one-sided view of the work. It is true that the reader may with diligence discover one seemingly faithful wife among the many women in the book-those gay, scheming Italian beauties most of whom are adulteresses making fools of their husbands and who live in the arms of their Apollo-like lovers; and that amorous adventures seem to have a prominent place in Boccaccio's thought and writing even by the standards of Renaissance Italy. But these are conventions one gladly accepts; in the foolish husbands, crafty friars, ardent lovers, proud merchants-and Boccaccio knew his world-the spirited romancer finds situations for displaying his great comic genius, flavoured with the world's most delicate irony, turning witty stories into literature instead of into bawdy tales. When he had occasion Boccaccio could just as soon draw the honest peasant, the hard-working artisan, the man of good society, the heroic adventurer. There are real people in Boccaccio's great book but in the end it is the nature of the telling rather than the characters that absorb. Boccaccio's sources have been traced as Egyptian, Arabian, Persian, French, but he was unaware of them, for he methodically gathered material from tales current all over Italy. Once they were transmuted by the magic of his pen they were literature and their influence became permanent.

These ingenious nouvelles fertilized such masters as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dryden, Keats, Tennyson, to name only our own country's debt.