The ten days

Decameron

IV. Love and death

The fact that Boccaccio should have grappled with tragedy is probably indicative in that he wanted to show himself capable to rising to such a literary challenge. In the course of this day, which starts with this polemic reply to detractors, who express their perplexity at the work’s literary quality, is engaged a confrontation with classical antecedents, the fourth book of the Aeneid, in Ovid’s Heroides and Metamorphosis, and also earlier romances such as Lais by Maria di Franca and the myth of Tristan and Isolde.

It is above all on the themes of love and death that the hapless loves of the fourth day of the Decameron are constructed. The mournful epilogue, that recalls Tristan and Ovid, one should above all consider the most fortunate episode of Pyramus and Thisbe, narrated in the Metamorphosis, concerns eight novellas out of ten (1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9), thus acting as the most repeated link in a day that is strongly interdependent. Another linking agent for the single novellas is the persistent use of topos of romance tradition, such as that of the eaten heart[1] (1 e 9) and the common tomb for the lovers (1, 7, 8, 9). Tancredi, Prince of Salerno, serves his daughter Ghismonda the heart of her lover Guiscardo in a goblet (1). Punishment befalls Ghismonda as she infringes the noble code, whereby she should have chosen a lover of her own rank and not a young valet like Guiscardo, but behind Tancredi’s horrendous gesture there would also seem to be an immoderate and ambiguous fatherly affection as well as  irritation at his daughter’s insubordinate behaviour, plainly spoken in the monologue with which the emancipated heroine defends the legitimacy of her amorous sentiment.

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[1]L. Rossi, Il cuore, mistico pasto d’amore: dal Lai Guirun al Decameron, in Studi provenzali e francesi ‘82, L’Aquila 1983, pp. 28-128.