The seventy-three stories compiled by Straparola in his Pleasant Nights constitute a miscellany, a Renaissance story book, an anthology of folk and literary novelle, fables, wonder tales and jests, a cabinet of literary curiosities, and a dramatized festal entertainment. Straparola was conventional in his use of the framing tale, but enigmatic in referring to all of his stories as favole. He was anomalous in his mixture of high and low styles and boldly experimental in presenting such a large component of materials extrapolated from popular culture. His precise sources, in nearly all cases, are elusive, increasing the likelihood that he relied heavily upon oral productions, of which many of the present stories are the earliest ‘near’ representations. That point is subject to diverse interpretations. His bid for novelty in transcribing these tales into literary form for recirculation through the technologies of print culture was entirely in keeping with the enterprises of the Venetian printers to satisfy the broadening cultural interests and supply the consumption demands of their clientele. That is an important contextual feature of the work in its bid for popularity and frequent republication. But in the process, Straparola hit upon something with far greater cultural and intellectual import than he could have known, insofar as the stories from the ‘folk’ carried in their narrative genes the themes and motifs of their collective heritages. For this reason they assume membership in a grand continuum of tales often reaching back to ancestral forms in ancient Sanskrit and Persian, and as far forward as the folk tales gathered throughout Italy and other parts of Europe in the nineteenth century. How these resemblances came about in both comparative and filiational terms remains a leading question. Straparola knew them only as popular stories from his own times, but their ‘remembered’ traits tie them to the streams of stories that form the great ocean of interconnected world folklore, to borrow from an ancient title. For Straparola’s purchasing public, the collection constitutes a novel compendium – one of the most delectable of all such Renaissance productions. For subsequent ages with a sense of literary hindsight, it is a seminal display of the remarkable variety of literary genres from novelle and facetiae to proto-fairy tales and beast fables then current in both the visible and invisible venues of Renaissance story dissemination. Hence, in its infinite variety, it is a work apt for presentation in many lights in relation to its own age. At the same time, a major portion of the commentaries to follow will be concerned with the relationship of each tale to its own narrative ‘tradition,’ many of which stretch across centuries. That was my calling.
A biographical profile of Straparola is, in all probability, beyond recovery. The name itself, meaning ‘garrulous,’ looks like a playful pseudonym of a kind routinely adopted by members of academies. Yet it is only natural to seek to know what we can about the author of Le piacevoli notti (its two parts published in 1550 and 1553, respectively), because such a designed artifact implies a conscious maker with presumed intentions, after all, and in travelling that hermeneutic loop we feel certain we will know something of value about the stories by knowing what we can about their creator. Paradoxically, however, the intellectual value in knowing the maker depends upon the nature of his cerebral participation in the creative process, and that, in turn, will depend upon a critical profiling of the collection itself – whether it is constituted of literary inventions, of the reworking of novelistic materials by an active ‘author,’ or of material gathered up from contemporary oral and popular traditions and transcribed more or less as it was found. In brief, the work problematizes what constitutes an author.
Certain claims have been made for the man, one of them being that he is the ‘father of the literary fairy tale.’ That, in a sense, is true, because several of his seventeen ‘wonder tales’ were taken over by the French founders of the new genre late in the seventeenth century.1 Without him, they would have had a far more meagre start. But whether Straparola created these tales, and ‘fairy tales’ per se, comes down to his use of sources as well as to the precise defining of a genre. The work of tracing the origins of the ‘fairy tale’ to periods as early as the Middle Ages and beyond has preoccupied the writers of several recent monographs, with no signs of consensus on the critical horizon. Hence there is little agreement that the genre’s inauguration should all come down to Straparola’s creative genius, although there is wide agreement that his collection is a milestone in the assembly and presentation of such tales. In the words of Nancy Canepa, ‘the fairy tale reached full literary autonomy only with Straparola’s Notti and then, of course, with [Basile’s] Lo cunto.’2 That fact is difficult to deny to him, even though the level of his cognizance in matters regarding both genre and posterity remains open to discussion.
Further to the debate, in her review of Ruth Bottigheimer’s Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition, Gillian Adams sought to qualify any claims regarding his pioneering of a genre or the inventing of original stories by reminding readers that Straparola ‘borrowed shamelessly, while protesting his originality, from numerous written sources, ancient, medieval, and contemporary.’3 Accordingly, none or very few of his stories may prove to have been of his own devising, and worse, in his shameless appropriation he may be considered a plagiarist into the bargain. Here is a variation upon the familiar problem posed by the Renaissance humanist habits of imitation and riscrittura, or rewriting, whereby the new is generated out of the works of the ancients, or even the recent masters such as Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Ariosto. This usually entails an assimilation process, a personal interiorizing and regeneration of forms, styles, and contents whereby the imitator once again becomes an author – and an honest one to boot. (To be sure, whether such activity, in all its many levels of expression, is tantamount to larceny is a point for ongoing debate against the moving target of what constitutes inviolable intellectual property as opposed to taking inspiration and building upon the past in the time-honoured manner of humanist scholarship.) But this avenue may prove to be misleading as well insofar as it remains to be determined whether Straparola relied upon literary sources at all, as Adams and others assume.
Our author, at one point, reacts vigorously to accusations of plagiarism, seemingly inculpating himself, but then defends himself by proclaiming that he wrote everything down as he heard it, claiming nothing for himself at all – he was merely the messenger. Whether that is a feint or a truth is still subject to investigation. By my own calculation, after an exhaustive search (and in corroboration of his claim), the count of identifiable written sources employed (the twenty-two translations from Morlini aside) seems to be fewer than half a dozen. For the more than forty remaining tales, there are no compellingly evident literary texts by any reasonable criteria constituting plausible and usable sources upon which he clearly relied. That salient point was not clear to W.G. Waters, who tallied up the book’s contents as fifteen fables derived from the novellieri, twenty-two from Morlini, four from medieval sources, and seven from oriental legends, leaving twenty-two original works.4 This count assumes not only that Straparola worked from written sources, but that where none are found, he may ipso facto be granted authorship. (Waters accepts that any remote cognate version of a story, even as an oriental tale, is as good as a working source, necessitating the understanding that all the changes constituting the Renaissance renditions of the stories were made by Straparola himself.) Such assumptions now appear to be entirely misleading (although Waters goes on to state that ‘a more extended search will very likely find a fresh source for those of the fables in the “Notti” which have heretofore been classed as the original work of Straparola.’) This preliminary statement about Straparola’s sources (to be taken up in section IV below) brings us once again to the question of authorship and the relevance of literary biography. What is the right answer in the case of a man who, by all appearances, relied neither upon written sources nor invented a single story of his own? Is he an ‘author’ in the conventional sense of the term, and if his intentionality is minimized by that doubt, is he a man whose biography will help us understand the stories? At this nadir of his fortune as an ‘author,’ Straparola risks becoming merely the pseudonym of a compiler.
Returning to the defense against plagiarism, one Orfeo dalla Carta, in his greeting ‘to all delightful and loveable ladies’ prefacing the earliest edition, intriguingly explains that the author’s negligent style is no fault of his own because he ‘wrote his fables, not as he wished to write them, but as he heard them from the ladies who related them, adding nothing to them and taking nothing away.’ Surely no one believes this for a moment – taking it all for a conventional apology on the part of a bookseller (or more likely Straparola himself). But, the ladies aside, Straparola may indeed have heard the tales and copied them faithfully. If by some technologically reliable process he actually did record his stories verbatim from his oral sources, then he is working with all the trustworthiness and fidelity of a proper field worker, providing us with an anthology of early modern Italian (European) folklore containing more than forty tales – work completed some 250 years before the Grimm brothers hit upon a similar idea. In this way, his authorial function becomes rather like one of his own riddles. He wrote more than forty stories, borrowed none from literary sources, and yet invented none. What is he? In his own words he has been downgraded to an anthologist, but in those very words the author as folklorist is born.5 Straparola as a scribe was not only the founder of the literary fairy tale; he was the founder of literary ethnography. That claim has mighty implications and may be largely true, even though in his heart, in reproducing these tales as faithfully as possible from oral recitations, Straparola may have thought of himself as their author, having taken them over in typical humanist fashion from a new font of narrative sources apt for literary enhancement. The argument goes in circles. Such is the dilemma surrounding his career in relation to a complex debate concerning authorship, what it is, and how it is to be defined.
Meanwhile, not all readers will be reconciled to the idea of Straparola the folklorist tout court, that he made no ‘contaminating’ contribution to these stories in a quasi-authorial capacity, or that he created no new ones of his own. Authorship now returns by the backdoor. His tales, though from time immemorial in their substances, are nevertheless the children of Straparola’s memory (with its necessary limitations and confabulations), together with his syntax, his vocabulary, and his sense of idiom – unless he had the capacity for instant memorization and perfect recall, or had mastered a method of shorthand. It is counterintuitive to assume that as one of the literati of his era Straparola, in passing the materials of the folk through his own cranium, left no voice, no residue of an active stylist, in his reconstructions. It is in the very nature of the transmission of narratives, orally or in written form, to remember and recompose, to rationalize odd narrative features, combine elements, modernize the diction, heighten motivations, and invent when memory fails. These matters will be taken up in a subsequent discussion of folklore and its transmission. Just how much Straparola might have stylized and modified his originals remains a moot point. And how can we ever know, given the ephemerality of his exact sources?6 In sum, the authorship question hinges upon these competing perceptions of his work: that he was one of the novellieri, a stylist and maker who sometimes turned to popular sources for start-up material, even contributing a few of his own fairy tales along the way; or that he was fundamentally an anthologizer of popular materials, both fantastic as well as realistic, which he set down in a relatively faithful manner for the delectation of his readers. Opinions remain divided.
With these preliminary qualifications in place, we come to the biography of the author-compiler of Le piacevoli notti – one of the scantiest there is, despite the efforts of many to fill out the picture, the most notable being that of Ruth Bottigheimer in her seminal study, Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition. Straparola was presumably born in the Lombard town of Caravaggio, simply because that fact is repeated so often by his bookseller. In his first published work, Opera nova (1508), a collection of poems published in Venice, he called himself ‘Zoan’ – the Lombard spelling of the nickname for Giovanni (Orfeo dalla Carta in his Proem calls him ‘Gioan’). It is related to the name Zanni. This Zoan was known as the ‘straparola’ (literally ‘chatterbox’), but we have no idea when and where he took on the name, or whether it was also applied to other members of his family. ‘Chatterbox’ is as good a nickname as any to distinguish one Zoan from another. It was for this reason that ‘da Caravaggio’ was later added in his publications, in the manner of many another in that age. So he became ‘Talkative John from Caravaggio.’ That he published both of his books in Venice, separated by forty-two years of silence, that he set his story anthology on the island of Murano, and that he published one of his stories (V.4) in Paduan dialect hint at a career of some kind in either Venice or the Veneto. We know too that an application was made to the Venetian Senate for a licence to publish the Nights in the late spring of 1550 in the name of Straparola. His last sign of life is the phrase ‘ad instanza dell’ autore’ (by the author’s instigation), which appeared in the edition of 1555 and those post-dated up to 1557. Ruth Bottigheimer conjectures that his death was the ‘catastrophe’ that led to the estimation of diminished sales on the part of Comin da Trino, the printer, which led in turn to the extended publishing date.7 But why his death should adversely affect sales is not entirely clear. Of the man himself we know little more, despite the efforts of many since the time of La Monnoie in the preface of his edition of 1725 to add to the scanty stock of facts, to paraphrase W.G. Waters.8
The Pleasant Nights was not Straparola’s first publication. Forty-two years earlier his Opera nova appeared in Venice, published by Georgio de Ruschoni (1508). It contained 115 sonnets, 35 strambotti, 7 epistolae, and 12 capitoli, his next-to-last sonnet (no. 114) celebrating his native town and its ruler, Giacomo Secco. In these poems he proved himself a competent versifier in the favoured forms of the day, to which we may attribute all the usual causes for publishing a book of fashionable poetry. It was good enough, in fact, to merit a second edition in 1515, but there is no evidence that it won for him a patron or employment. On the assumption that Straparola was actually present to negotiate the publication of his early work, we may risk placing him for a time in the Serenissima, and then incorporating into his biography the city’s social and political history from 1508 onward. Venice is compact, after all, the lives of many of its famous men well documented, and its many institutions and festivals well researched. Nevertheless, the records of the city have to date borne no evidence that he was there, that he knew Pietro Bembo, partied in Murano, joined an academy, chatted with Anton Francesco Doni, ran for public office, worked as secretary to a well-born patron, or belonged to a charitable organization. That he visited Venice is plausible; who did not? That he lived there, who can say? Moreover, if memory serves, only four of his tales involve the city: the story of ‘Polissena and the Priest’ (I.5), ‘The Widow’s Broken Promise’ (VI.3), the passage of Zambù (XI.4), and that of Pietro Rizzato (XIII.13), none of them textured in Venetian detail. Alternatively, Bottigheimer posits – reasonably, I think – that Straparola may have spent his career in the service of a noble merchant or petty nobleman in or around Padua (five of his stories are set in the city or the region), or perhaps Vicenza. The setting of one of the stories translated out of Morlini is moved from Naples to Vicenza and an unidentified member of the Trissino family, a Signor Hector ‘of the ancient and noble family of the Dreseni’ (XI.4), becomes one of the central characters. There are innuendoes of personal motivation behind these choices, but no more. Pirovano, in his bottom-of-the-page commentaries, faithfully points out the many words in Venetian dialect that dot the stories, including those in the translations out of Morlini. Such regional usage suggests an extended first-hand experience with life in the Veneto, adding credence to his presumed sojourn in the general area. That Straparola applied for and received a licence on 8 March 1550 from the Venetian Senate to publish the Nights – a document which also granted to him a ten-year privilege to reap the benefits of authorship – also serves to place him in the vicinity, at least for a time.9 Pirovano also makes mention of a book that is today in the Biblioteca A. Mai in Bergamo, a copy of Bernardino Corio’s Historia mediolanensis – in Latin, it may be added, in support of his knowledge of the language – bearing the bookplate of one ‘Franc si [the ‘si’ in small letters over the ‘c’] Streparolle,’ presumably our author.10 Yet despite these traces of the maker, we must remain content with a book that is more pertinently a product of a literary age, of commercialized printing and a book-buying public, than it is a work inviting interpretation through the life of a historically documented author. Someone there was with a reliably workmanlike mind, someone who had the brilliant idea of collecting narratives from new quarters, ignoring the humanist antipathy to the ‘lower’ forms of literature while replicating the Boccaccian conventions, someone with an eye to a commercial opportunity, and with a measure of literary talent. Elaborating further in this vein makes nearly all critical appraisal of the work a form of literary biography, for what a man writes may be a large part of the life of his mind, but the conclusions are merely circular and the anxiety misplaced; the raison d’être of Le piacevoli notti does not seem to be autobiographical.
Presumably even years before the publication of the first volume of the Notti in 1550, Straparola had been collecting stories – who can say how? There is no indication – the Morlini translations aside – that more than five or six of them were available to him from written sources. His kinds of materials had not been systematically collected before, at least not in the forms then current among the folk narrators upon whom he must have relied (and relatively the same forms in which they would resurface in ethnographic collections three centuries later). Straparola managed to carry out that work by keeping records – mental or written – of what he heard, from undisclosed sources. He may have relied upon villagers, household members, street professionals, courtesans, or storytellers even higher up the social echelons who had already done the work of lifting elements of the oral culture for the amusement of elite circles. In this resides so much of his importance and originality as a writer.
Once the critical mass to make his collection had been reached, Straparola began at his desk by ensconcing his folk récits in a Boccaccian-style framing tale with its social setting and band of storytellers. He then embellished each night with one of his polite ‘Petrarchist’ poems, and each story with an enigma pulled from another pile. (He may have been the first to join enigmas to stories.) These supplementary appurtenances were entirely in keeping with contemporary practices and conventions, but served to baffle earlier critics, who failed to see the folk materials behind the trappings. In the manner of the novellieri (the many writers of novelle in the tradition of Boccaccio), Straparola went on to equip his characters with historical-sounding names, many from the Reali di Francia.11 Still at his desk, he composed rubrics in lieu of titles in which each story is given in resume, just as in the novelle collections. Finally, he resituated his ‘fables’ in possible geographical places, more often than not Italian cities and towns, a goodly number of them in Lombardy or the Veneto. Such conventions as these were sufficient to convince many that his book was a stock collection of short stories in the Boccaccian manner. For that reason, the originality of his folk miscellany for a long time remained systematically undervalued or misrepresented.12
Nevertheless, the novella-like features cannot be discounted, for they remain central to the design and experience of the work – particularly the Boccaccian cornice or framing tale, which in turn aligns this production, inevitably, with many of the collections of his near contemporaries in those culminating years of the Italian novella. Anton Francesco Grazzini published his Cene in 1545, at the same time that Anton Francesco Doni was incorporating novelle into his larger works. Meanwhile, Giovanni Brevio’s Rime e prose volgari came to light in Rome in 1545. Five years later, in the same year that Straparola’s first volume appeared, Girolamo Parabosco published his Diporti, with the Varii componimenti of Ortensio Lando appearing two years later. Then in 1553, the date of Straparola’s second volume of the Notti, the Dodici giornate of Silvan Cattaneo cleared the presses. Pietro Fortini was active in this same decade, as was Matteo Bandello, who published his first volume of novelle in 1554. Not long thereafter came the Ecatommiti of Giovanni Battista Giraldi (1565) and the Sei giornate of Sebastiano Erizzo (1567). Le piacevoli notti is of their company, seeking to capture the attention of the same book-purchasing clientele. Moreover, to complicate matters a bit more, certain of these authors appear in the annotations to follow, for in their collections there are stories resembling Straparola’s – elaborations upon similar narratives – perplexing the matter of influence in light of the proximity of their publications in time and the geographical distances between them. The comparative prospects are rich, but the logistical barriers and the marked differences in ethos in the stories themselves suggest that such cognate tales came about through means other than direct borrowing. The choices, however, are few: either common written sources now lost; or the circulation of novelle as popular tales through the oral culture. The idea that Straparola might have relied upon the latter fund nearly exclusively for his materials gains in credence by the fact that, on a far less frequent basis, his contemporaries relied upon that same repository, as the novellieri had done since the inception of the genre.
The social world of Straparola’s framing device is curiously conceived, for it consists of a select group of historical men – among them some of the noted literati of the age – and a parallel group of ten idealized, non-historical damsels who, in an order determined by lot, are designated to tell the fifty stories that arguably constituted Straparola’s original design.13 There are some signs of assigning stories to specific narrators, many of the more salacious ones going to the men, conceivably to liberate the girls from telling misogynist or scatological tales otherwise too good to jettison. The upshot, at the cost of the formal design, was that certain of the men – notably Antonio Molino and Benedetto Trivigiano, followed by Antonio Bembo – are prevailed upon to tell ‘substitute’ stories, which turn out to be five of the most ribald of the lot. The design of the work emerges and becomes diversified.
Readers are invited to judge for themselves whether there is a categorical falling off in matters of content, inspiration, and aesthetics in passing from the end of the fifth night to the beginning of the sixth – that is to say, from the 1550 volume to the 1553 volume.14 That impression, I suspect, will depend upon the primacy and excellence assigned to his seventeen ‘wonder tales’ (to the critical prejudice of the remaining works), those stories associated with the later fairy tale and hence the most critically discussed. If these are the markers of Straparola’s originality and genius, with twelve of them in the first volume and only five in the sequel, the later volume may well appear to be inferior. Worth underscoring, however, is that the remaining thirteen tales of the first volume are not ‘wonder’ (fairy) tales. Straparola, at a time of rich supply, also had an interest in popular trickster tales and novelle, ten of the latter having no immediate literary sources and displaying many of the narrative features of oral tales. Thus, while stories involving imaginative royal offspring, fantasy kingdoms, and speaking animals make up nearly half of the first volume, at no time were they Straparola’s exclusive concern. The second volume is considerably more diversified, featuring jest tales, beast fables, anecdotal novelle, bon mot tales and smart replies, pseudo-histories, and two or three of his finest wonder tales. It may be a misplaced bias to say that he ran out of the stories about magic and the miraculous and was compelled to fall back on secondary materials, as some of those ‘filler’ pieces turn out to have long-standing literary pedigrees among the writers of facetiae, fabliaux, and jest books, which form an important part of Straparola’s miscellany. It is clear that, in terms of composition and assembly, tactics do change in the last two nights if only because the last twenty tales, with one exception, are translations from Morlini. Yet even these fall naturally into place, sustaining the spirit of the popular ‘omnium gatherum’ which prevails to the end. Returning to the outset, when the entire cache of stories was still available to the author, we find that variety prevailed even then; the first night is comprised of a novella-exemplum, two popular tales of cunning or trickery, a wonder tale of incest, and a realist novella of adultery and punishment. All appear to have been shaped by the folk imagination, but none is a fairy tale, and only one relies upon supernatural plotting elements. Straparola merits celebration for introducing such wonder tales among his varia and for incorporating them into the soirées of the elite, but they were far from his sole preoccupation. Just how much Straparola prioritized his tales of the fabulous will never be known, but he did not group them together; the design of his work, in effect, imitates the random order in which stories of all kinds might have been told at a social gathering by narrators who do not confine their interests by genre, but simply tell the tales they know, reflecting perhaps the frequency of the story types in the popular culture at large. That aesthetic principle, if it is a principle at all, may prove to be the reigning factor in the design of the work.
It had become a tradition among the novellieri to situate their individual tales within a framing narrative that constituted the social setting in which the tales were doubly presented – first to the audience described within the book, and secondly to us, the readers, who are essentially eavesdroppers treated to a privileged glimpse into an exclusive coterie of nobles and their entourage, all of them engaged in the structured social recreations that denoted privilege and civility. The stories that they hear as viva voce presentations we must read, suspended imaginatively between the fictional representations of time, place, and persons in Renaissance Venice and the concrete reality of the book as an instrument of storytelling. The conventions of the framing fiction through which the recitations of the stories are given historical particularity and dramatic immediacy were an integral part of the collections of the novellieri from the inception of the genre. Giovanni Sercambi (1347–1424) imagined his novelle as a performance for the benefit of high society on the island of Murano, one of the fashionable smaller islands in the Venetian lagoon, famous for its glassworks and for its villa retreats owned by many of Venice’s finest families. It was here that Straparola situated his own collection over a century later, because it was here that Ottaviano Maria Sforza, bishop-elect of Lodi, rented a villa for his daughter Lucrezia in 1536 after exiling himself from his Sforza domains. The mental tease arising over the historicizing of the Nights as a one-time event in the recreational lives of Signora Lucrezia and the members of her literary salon is that the personalities are real, the activities plausible, the circumstances historical, but the actual event impossible, for at no point in the late 1530s were all the convives simultaneously in Venice, or out of prison, or alive. We know that the thirteen nights are a fiction retrofitted upon a pseudo-historical situation and that the stories were never recited by ten demoiselles, and yet it is the conventional prerogative of such authors to visit their collections upon the living or the dead in a complimentary fashion, as though the entire event were a nostalgic portrait of bygone days.
Just why Straparola chooses Ottaviano and Lucrezia, retells their political story, describes how they selected their charming palazzo, and shows how they celebrated the carnival season in their own special way is beyond our knowledge. He tells us nothing of great particularity about them. The setting is entirely conventional and more bookish in the Boccaccian tradition than it is real. Their circle of friends and luminaries is as historical or as fantastic as the author wishes. The probable continually graduates into the merely possible, while illusion is ruled by convention. Straparola tells us all we need to know about his little society in his Proem, but for the record, Ottaviano Maria Sforza was born in 1477 and died around 1541; he was the youngest son of Duke Galeazzo, who was murdered before the boy was born. As an illegitimate son, he was never in line for the throne. He had been made bishop of Lodi but was singularly unpopular and was already in retirement when his office fell under the control of the Holy Roman Empire in 1535. That, rather than hostile relatives, was the cause of his flight. Documentation survives confirming his presence in Venice as late as 1538, but strangely he does not participate in his daughter’s carnival veglie. Lucrezia was not a legitimate daughter, although she managed to become married to one of the non-ruling Gonzagas, Giovanni Francesco, cousin of the marquis of Mantua. She became his widow in 1523. By calling her Lucrezia Gonzaga, rather than by her real name, Sforza, Straparola may be setting up a parallel with the better-known Lucrezia Gonzaga, who ruled over the Mantuan social set and commissioned the stories of Matteo Bandello.15 But it is unclear what Straparola would have gained by evoking either Mantua or Bandello, whose first published volume of novelle, in any case, would not appear for another four years. The greater question is why Straparola favours this widow, foregrounds her story, and sings her praises. Was she a patron, an employer, his hostess, or a fancy known only through hearsay? On these matters the record is silent. But such a lady once breathed the air of mortals and her father spent time in Venice in the late 1530s; that much is historical.
The framing tale suggests that the numbers present were considerably greater than those named. But for lack of further information, our sense of the group shrinks to those who are identified and participate in the recitations. Highest in rank and eminence is Giambattista (Gregorio) Casali of Bologna, a bishop and ambassador to Venice from the court of Henry VIII of England. He was in Transylvania in 1535 and died in Bologna in 1536, putting an early terminus upon his possible presence. On the occasions in which the guests were placed according to social rank, he would have led the way. Just beneath him is Pietro Bembo of Asolani fame, not yet a cardinal, but already a monsignor and a man of prestige and renown who figures prominently in Castiglione’s Il cortegiano. Significantly, he is not drawn into the demeaning enterprise of telling folk tales except for a modest offering on the final night. The merchant of Treviso, Ferier Beltramo, was also present – the man who had come to the aid of the newly arrived exiles, giving them asylum and helping them establish their new lives. On the last night he offers his second little story, and we are told then that he had ‘a cheerful and happy face.’ Beltramo died in 1537, putting a terminus upon his historical participation. Among them, as well, was Bernardo Capello (1498–1565), a poet and friend of Bembo’s with a rather serious turn of mind. His Rime appeared after the publication of the Notti.16 There was also Benedetto Trivigiano, the Venetian poet, who joined in the musical offerings both as a singer and performer on the viol. His fellow musician, Antonio Molino, both a vocalist and violist, was also an actor and comic poet with a specialty in regional dialects. The author, Antonio Bembo, is also present. Both he and Molino tell tales, whereas Bishop Vangelista de’ Cittadini, secretary to Cardinal Triulzi, is named as one of the audience members but takes no part in the activities.17 Among the women are the two matrons, sober and venerable, who are closest to the Signora; they are Chiara Guidiccione and the widow Veronica Orbat from Crema. Completing this little society are the ten damsels, along with a mysterious eleventh named Diana who appears from nowhere to tell two stories. The final count would appear to be seven or eight men and fourteen women.
The ten demoiselles are surely little more than a necessary fiction for the purposes of telling stories and entertaining the guests. Even as the representations of persons they seem to have no real social counterparts. They are tentatively differentiated: one has nice eyes, another has a pretty carriage, while another is a touch arrogant but really quite kind, while yet another has lovely hair and is devoted to the Signora. Another is a touch disdainful but has languishing glances that captures hearts, while another is particularly witty, another particularly virtuous and prudent, while yet another is grave and sedate for her years. But insofar as these distinctions escape the memory of even the most attentive reader, these women tend to become interchangeable. In the little discussions following the stories there are bits of rivalry, a touch of haughtiness here or of pouting there, but no one can recall whether these moods coincide with the initial profiles. The impression is of a bevy of charmers, their attributes condensed from the language of the love poets, their profiles merely preliminary to their functions as flirtatious, socially sophisticated members of an elite gathering who, at the same time, in their classless and anonymous way, are suited to the telling of tales that do not originate in elite culture.18 Who they were or could be in relation to Venetian society as it was historically constituted may hence be the wrong question. The diverse statuses, training, and social circulation of young Venetian women might be investigated to see from whence the Signora might have drawn ten such talented young ladies without family connections or class origins. Are they ladies-in-waiting, friends and companions of the Signora, Venetian debutantes, or courtesans? The answer, I suspect, is none of the above; rather, they are narrators embodied according to carefully calibrated conventions – conventions which permit them to be, at the same time, objects of Platonic admiration, partners in banter, models of innocence, yet instruments of the culturally low and the morally marginal in their erotic enigmas, which they primly recall from the gutter to the amusement of all. As carnival entertainers masquerading as demoiselles of the better classes, or vice versa, they appear to have little ground in documented social history to claim as their own.19 To attribute to them a degree of historical probability is also to assume the currency of folklore on the lips of young women of the better classes as early as the 1530s. That may not have been the case.
The work recommends itself as a repository of materials apt for memorization by those in fashionable circles seeking to replicate the activities epitomized by the Signora’s salon. In that respect, it raises questions about the uses of art and the book itself as an accessory to social practices. In brief, Straparola appears to have fudged a past ‘reality’ to encourage a future employment of his stories as part of his purpose in the commercialization of the folk tale. But he had a problem with decorum to resolve, for who among the elite society could recite the tales of the folk and escape the opprobrium of handling the ‘low’? That dilemma was later confronted by Girolamo Bargagli who, in his Dialogo dei giochi (Dialogue on games, 1572), stated his preference for novelle in the context of social gatherings while objecting to the recitation of favole by dignified guests. Nevertheless, he allowed for their recitation by ‘semplici fanciullette’ (simple, ordinary little maidens) – precisely Straparola’s solution.20 But is this confirmation that by 1572 the Straparolan formula had become common social practice and that actual young girls were invited to fill the roles of the ten demoiselles in the recitation of favole? That may be more than we can know.
Meanwhile, the entire event in Murano is pointedly carnivalesque; not only are the gatherings held on the thirteen nights preceding Lent but there is a sense of licence, liberty, invention, and delectation in the air, together with a measured touch of mischief, a testing of the margins of decorum, which the Signora, in diminishing outbursts, seeks to maintain according to her own working sense of propriety. These negotiations are part of the spirit of play that reigns throughout the work. Lucrezia does not hesitate to cut short an overheated conversation, quell ribald laughter, or terminate indulgent displays of grief, but there is an ambiance of carnival beneath it all. The stories, meanwhile, are incitements to communal response, at times as bald and as indecorous as the plots demand. There is irrepressible laughter, weeping, sniggering, divisions by gender, banter, and discussion. In the process, the collective emotions of the group constitute a form of critical reaction and commentary. Inevitably, as a choral audience (sometimes antiphonally), their display of feelings contributes to our reception of these stories, for by dint of seeking membership in a virtual community defined by hedonics and neurobiological thresholds we are inclined to match our feelings to theirs.
Examples of these group dynamics follow nearly every story. During the telling of ‘Biancabella, or the Damsel and the Snake,’ many of the listeners are several times moved to tears (III.3). By contrast, with the happy issue for Adamantina in marrying King Drusiano, there are no tears of joy or sorrow, but ‘laughter loud and long as everyone remembered the habits of the doll and the manner with which it clamped its teeth into the king’s behind and clawed his nether parts’ (V.2). The Trevisan’s tale of Tia Rabboso (V.4) creates a gender divide, for it particularly pleases the women, so clever is the heroine’s management of her silly husband. But in the end, both sexes in the audience, the men in spite of themselves, nearly split their sides with laughter, thereby making them again of one accord. On the whole, these responses are devoid of subtlety or nuance; by and large they depict merely degrees of empathetic joy or sorrow, or a sense of the ridiculous. But this is quite in accord with the human response system, which has but laughter and tears to express, through its neurophysiological mechanisms, a wide range of emotional colouring along the complex continuum between the improvement of our chances for survival, well-being, and self-advancement, or the inverse. In the end, evolutionary selection has confirmed only these mechanisms for marking increased or decreased adaptiveness: comedy or tragedy. We weep over the diminution of well-being for those about whom we have been brought to care and we laugh on behalf of those who have been delivered from death, oppression, error, or misery. And though we sometimes weep for joy or laugh over the punishment of fools deserving of their adverse fates, all such paradoxes are as familiar to us as our own thoughts. We must interpret our emotions and feelings. These stories are hence exercises in group dynamics, in rising and falling hedonic states of a vital kind, in accordance with the perceived destinies of imaginary persons. In his framing-tale ‘commentary’ through the language of emotions, Straparola is mindful of these simple but archetypal responses to these often simple but archetypal tales. The meanings of these stories begin here.
Among those group responses is not only the laughter that accompanies deliverance from danger into happiness, but the laughter that responds to situational incongruity, comic or hyperbolical sexuality, or downright barnyard humour. Straparola might have revealed more to us than he did concerning the right and wrong social responses to the graphic, erotic, and scatological elements that are so prevalent in the collection. There are times when the women literally bury their faces in their skirts to hide their forbidden amusement or their display of embarrassment or shame with regard to these salacious and risqué stories. The men, meanwhile, take pleasure in discussing them with a frankness designed to exacerbate the women’s show of discomfort. In this way, the stories contribute to the display of sensibilities distinguishing the sexes, amidst laughter that is both aggressive and retiring, with carnival as the justifying context. But just why Straparola took such delight in off-colour tales, and whether he found them in oral circulation in their present forms or amplified their prurient potential, are questions open to discussion, for arguably the Pleasant Nights is one of the lewdest collections of stories to appear in the age of Rabelais. In fact, the magnitude of Straparola’s indulgence was brought home by the number of passages that had to be restored by the present editor to a translation that is in nearly all other ways a supremely faithful and idiomatic rendition of the original. The Victorian readers, unless they read French or Italian, were deprived of all details concerning the farmer who anointed Castorio’s groin, made an incision with his knife, and inserted two fingers into his scrotum, or of the bird that thrust its head right up the donkey’s fundament in search of half-digested grain mixed in the manure, or of the priest who took out the thing which men have and, lifting the lady’s nightgown, inserted it without hesitation into the furrow. There was no case to be made with Waters that Straparola’s bawdy was frank, open, robust, earthy, honest, and innocent.21 Beyond that, there is perhaps little more to add concerning a choice of materials that was most apparently as Straparola liked it and as his readers liked it, in defiance of the censors.
The preliminary or paratextual materials in the two volumes are minimal, consisting in the first volume of an address to the women readers by the bookseller, Orfeo dalla Carta, and another address to the same readership by the author himself in the second. (This ‘Orpheus from the paper’ is very likely Straparola himself, but we will accept the ruse at face value for the time being.) Both statements, hastily read, appear entirely conventional. The bookseller singles out the ladies and chats with them over the nature of their purchase, going on about the author as a well-intentioned man with minor faults who, in a spirit of humility, wished his readers the maximum of pleasure from the best his poor talents could give them. Such a book of entertainments was honest, a gift, a trifle, an act of devotion, a pastime, an idle recreation, while at the same time it was an enormous labour of love, novel in its design, and the result of incalculable obstacles overcome. In courting his female readers in this way, he goes so far as to style himself their personal admirer, one who pays them a perfunctory compliment in offering them a book as a bid for virtual favours. That was all business as usual for authors, but cheeky in the extreme on the part of a man usurping the author’s place. Such are the games authors play.
Read more closely, the amiable ladies are given a medley of opinions: that the book is full of ‘elegance and learning,’ even though other writers may provide them with greater pleasures; that it contains variety, subtle wit, and instruction, yet is poor and negligent in style. How curious. Nevertheless, the failure to achieve stylistic distinction (for inadequacy can only be measured in relation to expectations) is no fault of the author’s. The style is intrinsic to the materials he recorded, for the matter was none of his own (in this case, stylistic poverty is not the measure of the man, but the mark of an honest and careful transcriber). Dalla Carta’s last disclaimer is that Straparola did not really want to publish his stories at all. Then he changes topic, explaining that the book is now a gift from him, their bookseller, who can give them even better stories another time, and thereafter wishes them all happiness and asks to be remembered: ‘Be happy and remember me!’ Quite apart from the question of authorship, how bad a stylist does Straparola (or his bookseller) think he is? Can there be any possible truth in the thought that he was disinclined to publish his wares after applying for the privilege and going to such lengths to gather the requisite materials?
No doubt this was the author himself striking a pose of modesty through a kind of apologia. But had the book already been critically demoted for its modest style, in contrast to the flights of artifice that had become part of the idiom of the novella? Had the novelty of his folk materials and his refusal to tamper inordinately with them by turning them into ‘art tales’ already come back to haunt him? One need only look ahead to the suavitas of Basile in transforming local folk tales into baroque salon pieces of considerable stylistic fancy.22 Moreover, style may be extended to include all such matters as psychological motivation, individuation of characters, linear episodic structuring, mimetic consistency, realistic social settings, extended speeches, and dramatized encounters – indeed, all that pertains to the standards and conventions of the writers in the great Boccaccian tradition. These are precisely the measures of authorship denied to Straparola in following his sources, for they are the qualities typically lacking in folk tales. Their absence was particularly felt by the nineteenth-century critics who placed Straparola among the least accomplished of the novellieri. Did the folk materials, faithfully recorded, likewise fall below the expected standards in Straparola’s day? If, in meeting or anticipating such objections, he forges a preface in the name of a bookseller-publisher, is it conceivable as well that Straparola had no such sponsor and was thus free to invent one? Was Straparola compelled to pitch his own publication and presumably finance it into the bargain? Under such circumstances, he might well have constructed an alter ego through whom he could soften the reception of the book by anticipating criticism of its drab and plain style, while insisting, meanwhile, upon its value as entertainment (dolce) and instruction (utile).
The even stranger ‘apologia’ appended to the second volume would appear to be a result of the fulfillment of his worst fears, that by disclaiming authorship to excuse his style he sets himself up for accusation as a literary plagiarist. That is the issue, at any rate, that provokes his postured indignation in the 1553 greeting to the ladies. But was the accusation true, or was this a trompe-l’oeil of injured merit by which the author creates yet another framing tale around the work, now in relation to its reception in the world of Venetian criticism and gossip? Perhaps there was no better way to arouse interest than to generate a drama of ad hominem attack. But the fumbly and unfocused manner in which he shapes his reply gives little confidence that much of substance was at stake. He begins with a vehement denial of the allegations, only to confess again that his material was entirely recycled, taken over verbatim from his several oral sources. Thus he admits to theft, but not from texts. Or is it because he is trapped by his fictional framing tale, which he has put forward as a historical event? If that truth is to be maintained, then sources become circular insofar as he must now credit his stories exclusively to the young ladies whose recitations he has recorded, or ambiguously, to others who tell them in the manner of the young ladies; it is not clear.23 If it seemed to him a necessary mendacity, it is one that has served to depreciate and devalue his real legacy ever since. The collector of fables had to make a full confession of his hidden practices or else declare himself a maker and creator in some full and conventional sense; Straparola, it seems, could not make up his mind.
The question of plagiarism during the Renaissance pertains, in any case, not only to texts and transcriptions per se, but to training, the authority of the past, and the act of referential creativity. In resuscitating forms, imitating style, committing the touchstones of antiquity to memory, revitalizing speeches, and modernizing plots, the humanist maker works at the edges of plagiarism, driving a thin wedge between inspiration and theft. Shakespeare’s incessant borrowing (barely a single plot was his own) and Barnabe Riche’s compulsive fusion of sources earned praise for the former and condemnation for the latter, although in substance their procedures were the same. In fact, in his Farewell to Military Profession (1580) – the work that introduced novella-writing to England – Riche melded as many as three to eight sources (with echoes from many more) into each of his stories. Straparola, in transferring folk tales into print, was working with materials more patently anonymous and in the public domain than the written sources of the novellieri, yet he does not allow himself to say so in his own defense. He merely rallies his readers to ignore or do worse to the curs who were snapping at him, without troubling himself to explain precisely where he obtained his materials and what he did to them. Thereafter, he wishes the ladies happiness in the manner of Orfeo, assures them that their names are written in his heart, and concludes. The irony here is that of all the authors working in the age of humanism, Straparola is the one who most assiduously avoids the employment of literary sources. Or, as W.G. Waters points out, the more his writing is traced to these popular sources through the efforts of the folklorists, the more the ‘charge of plagiarism’ will be rendered ‘almost meaningless.’24 Indeed.
What holds true for his plots holds equally true for his curious stylistic habits. In the commentaries to follow there appear examples, by no means exhaustive, of Straparola’s remarkable proclivity to integrate the words and phrases of his favourite authors into his stories – Boccaccio and Sannazaro in particular. Why or how he managed to do this only raises more questions about his recollective capacities. Is it conceivable that from his recreational reading he retained a substantial cache of quotable quotations suitable for adaptation to his own endeavours, or did he merely read and write at the same time, tipping in the transformed passages from his reading in a random and opportunist fashion? We are invited to think that his remarkable capacity to remember and transcribe folk tales was of a kind with his equally remarkable capacity to remember enigmas, as well as potentially hundreds of often-mundane passages from the extensive works of several writers. The evidence may be pointing towards a man who enjoyed an outstanding capacity to retain information in ways far exceeding the norm, even in the prime age of mnemonics manuals and guides to enhanced recollection.
One example must serve. In the next-to-last story in the collection (XIII.12), Master Gotfreddo, a humble, common-sense doctor, prefaces his advice to the king with a word about himself in relation to the rich and ostensibly learned physicians there present with the following words: ‘although, among these honorable fathers, I am the most insignificant, the least learned, and the least eloquent, nevertheless I …’ Straparola had written ‘quantunque tra questi onorandi padri il piú infimo e il men dotto e il men eloquente meritamente dir mi possa.’ Many of these words recur in Book VI of Sannazaro’s Arcadia. There Serrano, one of the rustics, a man of the mountains, is asked to sing to the noble company. He replies to Opico, ‘Quantunque il piú infimo e ’l meno eloquente di tutta questa schiera meritamente dir mi possa nondimeno,’ which is to say, ‘although deservedly one may call me the meanest and the least eloquent of all this band, nevertheless not to play the part of an ingrate …’25 Something is there, it would appear, in the word echoes between the two passages. Coincidence is inconceivable, especially with so many similar passages throughout the Notti. Rather, the challenge is for us to imagine how Straparola’s mind worked to bring about such echoes, and particularly those from the works of Boccaccio, often presented in detached and rearranged fashion, with cognate words placed here and there in passages expressing entirely different concepts. In short, Straparola’s vocabulary was extended to include a repository of phrases from which he could take scattered inspiration in matters of diction. That he did so to the end of setting up intertextual resonances for his readers is most unlikely, or at least unrealistic. That he employed the words of others because he could not supply their equivalents on his own appears quite implausible. Was it merely a private pleasure, the compulsive habit of an equally compulsive if not monstrous memory? And was it literary theft? The matter seems morally negligible yet intensely interesting. That whole phrases of others sometimes flew into his mind more readily than his own words is witness to an intellect equipped somewhat differently than the standard-issue brain. As a codicil to the example given above, this practice occurs in one of the late tales translated out of Morlini, suggesting that the same talent responsible for the earlier stories was still at work, that Straparola had not given up in Book XI, leaving the Latin translations to a collaborator – unless that subaltern had cloned his citation habits and dialectal vocabulary in the process. That any of this scattered literary echoing should be deemed an impropriety would altogether seem to miss the point of his achievement in the context of the humanist-trained mind and its referential habits.
A further feature worthy of mention is that each story is provided with a moralizing prelude, dutifully setting up the ‘fable’ as an exemplum illustrating a point of general wisdom, a principle of human nature, or a directive for intelligent and reasonable conduct. The formula is often repeated by the storytellers themselves, promising that the expressed ethical principle will be patently exemplified in the récit to follow. Such preambles are generic to the novella formula and ostensibly represent an act of critical interpretation on the part of the author, as though stories achieve their ends only in themes or abstract principles – each story an allegory guided by an axiom concerning ethical conduct and the considered life. But often there is something peculiar about these inferences, these axiomatic claims imposed upon polyvocal tales, which causes readers to discount them altogether. Quite apart from a resistance to such moralizing, rarely does the precept take a meaningful measure of the story’s range of connotations, ambiguities, and subversive undercurrents. We are promised, for example, that the story of Travaglino (III.5) (about the cowherd who cannot bring himself to lie and is hence rewarded after turning states evidence against himself), will make clear the principle that Truth always prevails, always comes to the surface like oil in water. That ostensible truism is in turn related to the emblem of Truth prevailing over Calumny through the help of her father, Time. But this allegedly universal principle falls palpably short of the story’s many narrative paradoxes. Truth prevails only because Travaglino, after several tries, cannot perfect a cogent lie, and his reputation for truth survives as a virtue only because the circumstances of the bet bring rewards to his patron. His ignorance of these contextual matters produces victory by default rather than by providential guidance or moral resolve. Honesty really is the best policy, as it turns out, but irony beggars the relevance of the universalizing precept.
In closing this discussion of the work’s genre, conventions, textual parts, and social practices, something might be added about the musical performances within Le piacevoli notti. They were an integral part, called for at the outset of each evening, with the guests spontaneously taking part in accordance with their talents. Venetian society, by this time, had demonstrated its desire for secular vocal and instrumental music for precisely these kinds of ‘at-home’ recreational occasions, and music publishers such as Antonio Gardano were answering the demand. That market would only grow as the century advanced, as musical literacy increased among amateur performers from the elite classes, and as such tastes spread throughout the rest of Europe. Of the lyrics sung at the beginning of each night, only a few can be assigned to particular composers and to music that still survives. But those few give reason to think that others, as well, were more than fictive creations on Straparola’s part. On the seventh night, Lauretta performs Giovanni Nasco’s ‘Ardo tremando,’ which survives in a publication by Girolamo Scotto of 1562. Vincenzo Ruffo’s ‘Questa fera gentile,’ performed for the eighth night, can be found in a Gardano publication of 1556. And Nasco’s ‘Se’l tempo invola’ was chosen for the twelfth night, again to be found in a Scotto publication of 1561.26 That is a beginning.
The evidence provided by Straparola concerning performance practices and musical genres is typically slight and imprecise, but he mentions the many instruments involved, including the flutes employed for the dancing, as well as the lutes, viols, lironi, and lira da braccio used to accompany the singing. In naming so many, there are hints of considerable versatility in the instrumentation and variety in the sound colours. This is in keeping with the evidence suggesting that five-part madigrals or canzone might be sung at times a cappella, at others as solos with the lower lines supplied by instruments – such as the lironi upon which two of Straparola’s young damsels are proficient – and at still other times with the vocal lines instrumentally doubled. That Straparola sometimes calls for instruments and sometimes not is evidence of a kind. Musicologists have been debating the question for decades from just such sketchy hints. The canzonets, likewise, could be performed as lute songs or with fuller instrumentation. We are told that the two men at times lead the dancing and at others accompany themselves on lutes or lironi while singing cantilenas or canzonettas together. For the music of night thirteen, they perform ‘Donna quanta bellezza e leggiadria’ to their lutes, whereas they sing a canzona to their lironi for night eleven. This instrument was a large, flat-bridged viol with many sympathetic strings designed for just such chordal accompaniments and is surprisingly prominent in the Notti, given its relatively elusive history. For the ninth night, the Signora asks five of the young ladies to sing a canzonetta specifically accompanied by two such instruments, which they performed in an angelic manner only to be imagined; the instrument produces a wonderfully ethereal sound, and if there were two of them together – and properly tuned – accompanying the ladies’ high voices, the effect may well have been divine indeed.
The affections of these songs, dominated as they were by the humours of love, were undoubtedly an invitation for mannerist renditions employing the subtleties of the human voice and the expressivity of the instruments to achieve the potential sought by the ideals of musical humanism. Such performances were outstanding occasions, moreover, for a show of sprezzatura, of making demanding skills appear simple and spontaneous, so that musical expression might contribute to the graces of courtship. Music was likewise part of the progression of genres that made up the aesthetic designs of the various soirées, culminating in the stories and their scherzo-like enigmas, each of which provided a little closing denouement.
In sum, Le piacevoli notti is a compendium of tales of striking dissimilarity, yet homogenized into a coherent collection by dint of the charming representation of the carnival activities of Signora Lucrezia and her erudite circle. Through a fiction that may or may not have had a basis in fact, the reader’s imagination is carried away to a locus amoenus where storytelling and the playful recitation of enigmas take place amid banqueting, dancing, singing, and conversation. This adaptation of the Boccaccian framing tale enabled Straparola to introduce an altogether new repertoire of folk materials, including novelle, jests, and tales of fancy and magic, into the recreational activities of the elite. His moralizing introits reflecting humanist culture only partially disguise the novelty. There is hence an appearance of orthodoxy, yet it is deceiving; the work is not a complete imitation of the Decameron, but a miscellany of new materials not yet completely naturalized within the world of the book. In all of this, Straparola may have been at least partially mindful of the degree to which his collection was innovative in its style and contents, challenging both the standards of literary decorum and those of social morality. Ultimately, his book appears at the crossroads between learned and popular cultures, originality and plagiarism, decency and immorality, the authorial and the anonymous, the high style of the framing tale and the often low styles of the stories, and finally the crossroads between the folk tale and the fairy tale – one of the most debated features of the work. Still to come are discussions of the tales and their sources (chapter four) and enigmas as a unique and popular genre (chapter five).
In the framing device that depicts the ways in which Lucrezia Sforza presides over her salon of young ladies, matrons, and guests, Straparola provides a formulaic representation of a series of recreational soirées as an actual series of events, thereby socially contextualizing the delivery of his stories while at the same time providing a provisional template for social gatherings in kind. But this was no novelty, for equally to the point the little society in Murano profiles the social gatherings then in vogue among the Venetian high life in general. In effect, bookish conventions and social practices had become synonymous, enabling authors to present their works as transcriptions of lived events. Many have remarked upon the debt of Straparola’s framing tale to the Boccaccian model, having in common the ten narrators, the palazzo, the garden retreat, the organized activities, the inclusion of music, dance, and banqueting (see the end of the fifth night), the choice of a moderator for each day or evening, and the formal procedures of recitation. That he might honour such bookish conventions in a framing device depicting contemporary social practice reveals the degree to which a complex interaction had grown between books and readers. More broadly implicit is that the Boccaccian cornice served as a template for social imitation. Subsequent novellieri, in modifying the conditions and circumstances surrounding the recitation of their stories, diversified the models upon which readers might base the recitations and improvisations within their own social gatherings. Inversely, the activities of gaming circles could also be reflected in the organization of books, as the present work suggests.27
This circularity was fostered throughout the sixteenth century by the new fashion for salon ‘games,’ which had arisen among the gens du bien of Florence, Mantua, Siena, Venice and elsewhere. Their veglie or evening entertainments included not only singing, debating, posing riddles, charades, impersonations, impromptu speeches, and memory games in an ambience of flirtation, but the recitation of fictional narratives of many kinds, presided over by a games master or mistress who set the rules of play, imposed civility, and settled disagreements. In time (as in the Notti), the Boccaccian frame came to resemble an elaborately ‘choreographed’ evening of games, one that demanded of participants a preliminary repertory not only of tales, but of jests, proverbs, devises, characters, love poems, enigmas, mimicries, caricatures, improvisatory speeches, and more. These were among the requisite knowledge attributes of a successful courtier, along with singing, dancing, and the art of conversation. It was perhaps an instance in which life imitated art as gentlemen and ladies equipped themselves to shine in the world of polite society, while authors and musicians, through the emerging book trade, came to their rescue with new materials imaginatively framed within just such social gatherings. These bookish conventions and the play of illusions constitute some of the best that Straparola had to offer, being precisely the kind of projection of novel realities through print culture that the Venetians had come to love.
Just how a literary convention of the novellieri became an urban fad is a chapter in social history only partially written. The format is already clear in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, first published in 1528, which, like Straparola’s framing-tale society, is set in former times, for in the opening pages Castiglione describes his work as ‘a portrait of the Court of Urbino’ involving personalities who by then were deceased.28 Fundamentally, the book is an elaborate colloquium involving some of the finest and wittiest courtiers of the age in conversation over the qualities of the ideal courtier. That discussion, however, emerges in the context of a series of ‘evenings’ governed by the conventions of an organized game. The duchess of Urbino, to whom all defer, deputized her Lady Emilia to organize the first evening’s entertainment. We are given, as in Straparola, the names of all the distinguished male guests, who freely intermix with the ladies of the court, the latter as equal participants. Emilia then calls upon each of the men to propose a game and their suggestions reveal some of the improvisatory favourites then most in vogue. (Straparola’s Signora Lucrezia holds a similar opening forum on the organization of their activities.) Many were flirtatious and bantering in nature, involving love, the battle of the sexes, knowing women’s minds, or revealing one’s own strengths and weaknesses as a lover. At last, the company in Urbino hits upon a self-laudatory game based on the examination of their own social and courtly virtues. The game is never formally adopted, but emerges through their rich conversation over several evenings, presided over by the appointed mistress. Castiglione not only describes the activities, the ordered sequence of dancing, the musical performances, questions, games, and recitations, but he prescribes the ideal ethos, the decorum, and the graces of the players while cautioning against affectation, calling rather for the cultivation of modesty. In so doing, he creates a template for the age. That they are in the celebrated palace of Urbino enjoying food and song is all part of the Boccaccian convention – superimposed upon a pseudo-historical reality, modified by the procedures for organized play.29
This conversational formula, originating perhaps in the medieval love courts in which aristocratic ladies (and sometimes gentlemen) gathered to debate the paradoxes and fine points of conduct according to the precepts of amour courtois, had spread by the sixteenth century to the polite salons of the mercantile classes as well as to the academies. In Siena, members of the Intronati held soirées with their womenfolk, devising and playing games to wile away the time, even when their city was under siege by the Florentines. A retrospective on their activities was written by Scipione Bargagli in his I trattenimenti dove da vaghe donne, e da giovani huomini rappresentati sono honesti et dilettevoli giuochi, narrate novelle, e cantata alcune amorose canzonette, published in Venice in 1587. They spent their evenings playing improvisatory games, telling tales, and playing music in variations upon the formula employed by Straparola. After the conquest of the city, Cosimo I, who was fearful of all manner of potentially seditious gatherings, nevertheless for a time permitted such polite gaming, for in those programmed gatherings there were few opportunities for the subversive. Bargagli describes the social life of the city before 1563 with a tone of nostalgia; after that time, the activities of the Academy of the Intronati, which had fostered such gaming, were suspended for forty years. The games for Bargagli were the epitome of a way of life, an era of social refinement, freedom, and invention that may also have been passing as the spirit of the Counter-Reformation invaded private life.
From that same academy (the Intronati) emerged the most influential of all the books of the age on the delectable arts and multiple formats of the gaming evening: Girolamo Bargagli’s Dialogo de’ giuochi che nelle vegghie sanesi si usano di fare (1572), a dialogue about the games that they used to play in Siena.30 It called for the selection of the master or mistress of the games, to be designated by a laurel wreath in the now familiar fashion, and outlined that person’s responsibility for setting the rules, appointing the order of players, maintaining the spirit of polite conduct, and administering rewards and forfeits, such as the pawning of some personal item which could be redeemed only through reciting a tale or poem, or making an amorous pledge. But above all, it was a full set of instructions for the playing of more than 130 social games of recitation and improvisation, summarizing the entire social phenomenon in the process.
The chapters of greatest interest for our purposes contain Bargagli’s instructions for the recitation of stories.31 Above all, they should be new, notable, true to life, yet full of extraordinary and hence memorable events. Ideally, there should be topical continuity linking one story to another, or a contrasting view to provoke conversation. (Straparola’s organization is notably feeble in this regard, but not entirely deficient.) Moreover, such narratives should always be pleasing in their delivery, whatever the subject, and tailored to the dignity and tastes of the company, especially by avoiding indulgent sorrow or the mockery of religion. (Just such infractions are the subject of commentary or social reaction in Straparola’s collection.) Finally, they should contain examples of liberality, constancy, bravery, loyalty, magnanimity, or their opposites in a cautionary way. These are instructions for improvisatory oral delivery, but aspiring novella writers might want to take notice. And if the story is a familiar one, it should be given a freshened appearance, although it was acceptable that some might wish to show their brio in reciting stories verbatim from the Decameron as a feat of memory. Isabella, in prefacing her story for the twelfth night (XII.5), openly attributes it to Boccaccio, yet introduces changes which make it more suitable to the tastes of the present company, the matter of decorum on that occasion trumping fidelity. Bargagli allows too that narrators may enter into the performance, act out the characters’ parts, and speak in appropriate dialects (of which there are examples in the Nights). Finally, stories are of two kinds: those that ask only for personal reflection and those that invite group responses by raising questions or dubbi, such as determining which character has shown the greatest liberality or performed the most remarkable feat. (Straparola includes several stories in which players and readers are asked to judge: which nun has surpassed the others as in VI.4; which rescuer should marry the heroine, VII.5; who has imposed the meanest trick upon her husband, VIII.1; or who has performed the greatest act of laziness, VIII.1.) Implicit in Bargagli’s perspective is that the recitation of such works in a suitably accomplished and engaging way was central to the activities of polite society and an art to be cultivated through wit and memory by those who aspired to membership.
There is documentation from earlier decades, originating in Venice itself, that concerns the culture of polite gaming. One of the most ingenious of recreations was devised and printed by Francesco Marcolini, namely his Le sorti intitulate giardino di pensieri (1540), comprising 107 games of fortune played with dice on the pages of the book itself – games that touched upon humanist, artistic, and philosophical topoi.32 The book was embellished with woodcuts by Salviati (not the more famous Florentine-Roman Salviati), emblematically representing the themes of the games. The framing device by which the book was placed into play was composed of an assembly of the Venetian literati gathered in Marcolini’s own garden. Once again the book was both a conception for play and the implicit record of a historical event, including a real locus amoenus for the gathering, a master of the revels, and a set of rules that conducted the company through the book’s pages as a kind of memory theatre through which they visited the repertory of great humanist ideas. It was a harbinger of the gaming culture that was to emerge throughout Italy and an early display of the book as a programmed social event.
At the same time that Straparola published his Nights, Innocenzo (Innocentio) Ringhieri published his book of 100 liberal and witty games, Cento giuochi liberali et ingegno.33 This is the only work of the era that does not digress into portraits of gaming societies as elaborate fictions, or into philosophical and moral reflections on the social game, yet it was seminal. Ringhieri presents his activities and their rules tout court with almost ethnographic precision, as though they were fading national and folkloric traditions collected from the people and preserved for posterity. His intended audience was identified specifically as lettered and cultivated aristocratic women for whom such games were a vital form of expression and self-definition; men became participants only when they were invited according to the rules set out by the society of women. The work is suffused, moreover, with the conventions of Petrarchan love contained within the games and perpetuated by the inventions called up by the terms of play. In that spirit, each of the ten books closes with a poem in deference to the model set out by the Decameron. F. Lecercle refers to the entire collection as ‘un Décameron ludique’ (a ‘playing’ Decameron), which at the same time forms a little utopia, a little world withdrawn into its own idealized and microcosmic order, perfect civility, and social hierarchy.34 To be sure, these games of attention, verbal dexterity, wordplay, micro-recitations, and dubbi are particular in their ethos and execution, for they are intent upon putting players out of action when they are led into error, but the appointment of the games master, the structuring of the social order, the Petrarchan overtones, and the Decameronian conventions participate in the same cultural phenomenon that fostered Straparola’s Notti.
Even closer in spirit and procedures to Straparola’s book is Ascanio de Mori’s Giuoco piacevole (1574), which is dedicated to Vincenzo Gonzaga, duke of Mantua, for the exclusive use of the ladies of the court.35 This collection is likewise provided with a historical setting: the city of Brescia at the time of Carnival, 1566. There, a group of young aristocrats found themselves stranded when their theatre play had been cancelled. To wile away their time, they turned to music and social games, one of them the famous ‘Game of Fools’ in which each player must describe the form of madness towards which another person present is most inclined. Cesare Gonzaga had proposed the same in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, and it is the same as is described by Bargagli in his Dialogues (Nos. 71 & 72), Ringhieri in his Cento giuochi liberali (fol. 87, game 71), and Sorel in Les recreations galantes, which may in turn have given the idea to Tommaso Garzoni for his Hospidale de’ pazzi incurabili (1581). This game is a test of social judgment and brinkmanship at its most demanding, but was surely the occasion for much invention, banter, and laughter. Once again, gaming practices and the formatting of a book are brought into close alignment.
Closest to Straparola, however, is the Sienese nobleman, Pietro Fortini, writing just after mid-century; his Le giornate delle novelle de’ novizi and Le piacevoli et amorose notte de’ novizi appear frequently among the commentaries on the stories to follow. Without any conceivable possibility that either knew the work of the other, they hit upon common narrative materials and devised similar story collections reflecting the gaming Zeitgeist. Fortini’s books offer models for the playing of ‘narratives,’ which were often used as ‘forfeits’ or punitive recitations in the context of other games. His five young women and two young men meet in a garden where, first, they weave a crown for the ‘Lord’ of the gathering, and then proceed with the recitations, intermixed with singing and dining. Appropriately, the songs are canzonettas. On the third day, two of the women sing; on the fourth, Ippolito performs a solo to the gravicembalo or harpsichord; and on the seventh day the men sing a dialogue about the palace of Venus and the wiles of fortune. The readings are followed by a grand supper served to the strains of a hidden consort and the performance of a comedy.36 Here again, a fictive society prompts an anthology of narratives that is designed to serve real future gatherings. It is a theatricalized set of veglie, a collection of novelle, a Boccaccian nod, and a book of game narratives intended for the training of ‘novices’ aspiring to perform at such fashionable gatherings.
The intent of this survey is to reveal the specific social practices then in vogue to which Straparola’s Notti contributes. His stories are stories and his book a miscellany, but it is conceived as a social event of a specific historical kind. For a more comprehensive account of the entertainments and cultural practices of Italian Renaissance polite society in the ‘age of Straparola,’ Thomas Frederick Crane’s chapter on the ‘Parlor Games in Italy in the Sixteenth Century’ remains a standard introduction.37 It serves to corroborate the importance of contextualizing Straparola’s literary endeavour within the gaming culture then fashionable in courtly and elite circles. Storytelling had gained a new venue for presentation, further enabling the movement of favole from echelon to echelon in a vertical society through the pressures of demand and supply. That the activities within Straparola’s book were redolent of practices at large, representing them both descriptively and prescriptively through the framing tale tradition of the novellieri, is one of its most salient features. In this regard, the design vacillates between a mere repository of narratives and the employment of stories as ‘turns’ in an organized sequence of play. At the same time, the thriving Venetian book trade, in search of novelty and an expanded clientele, found that it could exploit the mode by creating anthologies of stories apt for reading or recitation during the ‘pleasant evenings’ or veglie of polite society. In that circularity, authors found new and playful modes of layered social representation.
As a coda, it may be added that the procedures involving folk materials and their integration into the gaming activities of the elite were extended into the composition of madrigals. In light of the demonstrated musical talents of those in Straparola’s coterie of performers, it is perhaps not so extraordinary that a demand arose for music books in which activities pertaining to the games were incorporated into madrigal cycles representing, in their aggregate, fictional social occasions into which the singers might project themselves. Such games and social vignettes involving mimicry, tongue twisters, characters, and Petrarchan inventions in social settings created through music began to appear in the late 1560s with Alessandro Striggio’s Il cicalamento about women scrapping with one another while washing clothes before making up and retiring to a bakery for treats. But the most pertinent among them is Orazio Vecchi’s Veglie di Siena (1604), a collection of forty-six madrigals subdivided into three evenings of games in the Sienese fashion in which the same singers take the turns of all the personalities in the gaming set – including Margherita who, for the life of her, cannot get her bisticcio or tongue twister right, despite the fact that the same singers had just shown her how while representing the games master. Here is convention upon convention through several mimetic levels, and it is all quite wonderful. The madrigalists together perform all the requisite parts from choosing the leader to offering social commentary upon the contributions made by each player. Vecchi turned to popular culture for his materials, whether in the imitation of foreign or local dialects, the street cries of the vendors, or the word games of children.38 Musical settings add one further dimension to the gaming culture such as it was enacted in polite societies in ways that marked and defined an era.
A typical profile of affairs to emerge in the commentaries to follow upon many of the individual stories is that they contain familiar motifs known from medieval fabliaux or romances, saints’ lives, or jest books, but that in their present forms are the first of their kind to be written down. Arguably, that paradox can only be resolved through a glimpse into the culture of folklore. The data in the commentaries points to a centuries-long pattern of literary borrowing from story traditions of the ‘folk’ on the part of many medieval and Renaissance writers, stories that otherwise never found ‘whole cloth’ representation in the literary record before the publication of the Piacevoli notti. The implication for Straparola is that he worked with sources, not one of which survives independently, thereby precluding any final judgment about his habits as a writer. Nevertheless, we are not without comparative versions. When folklorists began their systematic collecting and cataloguing of the European folk tale after the middle of the nineteenth century, nearly all of Straparola’s forty or more ‘novelle’ and ‘wonder’ tales reappeared in at least a few cognate versions. Just what that implies is crucial to an appraisal of his work. Complex stories sharing a common nucleus of narrative order and a common vocabulary of literary motifs – sufficient to warrant a single designation in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther type index – arguably must belong to a single story tradition, given the near impossibility for two such creations to have been independently generated.39 If the ‘same’ story, by these criteria, is told by Straparola and by a nineteenth-century raconteur in Lorraine or Iceland, then Straparola’s story must have given rise to the same story all over Europe, or more plausibly must be a close version of that story as it existed among the popular traditions in the sixteenth century. In brief, I take the representation of the tales in Straparola as the first ‘hard evidence’ of their existence in the oral culture of the Renaissance, even though the many allusions to folk characters and motifs in the literatures of prior centuries give proof for many of their greater antiquity. At the same time, the folk record assembled in the nineteenth century – as in the case of ‘Cesarino the Dragon Slayer’ (X.3) or ‘Constantino Fortunato and his Wonderful Cat’ (XI.1) – offers hundreds of variants from across the whole of the Eurasian continent, revealing how such stories become diversified over time and occur in many geographical regions. Such a process entails a ‘theory of evolution’ of its own pertaining to the survival and adaptation of transmitted narratives. The implication for Straparola is that many of his stories appear to have been captured from the repertory of oral tales as they were recited in his era and in his region of the continent; his contribution was to fix each of them in a published record. Stated otherwise, Straparola’s literary productions are typically bookended by fragmentary or variant versions of the tales in former works of literature, as well as by the later renditions collected by folklorists. His participation must hence be calibrated in relation to the cultural practices whereby these stories maintained their identities over centuries independent of their occasional literary adaptations – adaptations from which it is inconceivable for the original folk tales to have been restored.
But these are troubled waters. The nature of folk literature and its genres remains at the centre of intense critical debate on many fronts. Who are the folk? What distinguishes their modes of creativity? How many kinds of popular tales are there? Must they be presented orally? Are they invariably corrupted in the process of committing them to print? More specifically, is Straparola a proto-folklorist or merely another of the novellieri basing his stories on popular narratives? After all, many of the preceding writers of novelle had found inspiration in folk tales. And what should his stories be called? Straparola employed the word ‘favole,’ conveying all the equivocal characteristics of ‘fable’; it would appear to be a discerning choice. But is it because the fable’s miraculous elements and imaginary setting can never happen in the ‘real’ world, whereas the novella’s setting, characters, and action allow for a basis in actual social events?40 The problem with Straparola’s employment of the term is that it refers to all of the stories in the collection and not merely to the seventeen ‘wonder tales’; it is not a synonym for ‘fairy tale.’ The others, although far-fetched and fanciful, even implausible in the extreme, nevertheless feign to have happened in real places and to realistic people at some possible moment in time. Yet they too remain favole to his way of thinking. Is it because of their affiliation with folk culture? Is it thus that he distinguishes himself from the novellieri? Is it because favole are anonymous in nature, stories with established and persistent histories, because they are passed down from generation to generation by word of mouth and hence belong to oral culture?41 The connotations of this term may express as much as we can know about Straparola’s awareness of the uniqueness of the materials he selected, or his awareness of himself as a proto-folklorist.
By inference, if Straparola’s book is a representative anthology of popular literature under the aegis of the favole, then novelle, jests, social vignettes, lives of the saints, fabliaux, and sermon exempla, in parallel to their representations in print culture, were also in circulation among the ‘folk.’ That there is so little distinction between the oral and the literary in terms of content and story types may even prove disconcerting. What, then, demarcates the folk novella from the literary novella? It can only be the legacy or simple fact of oral provenance.
A matter of critical debate is the degree of contamination produced by literary transcription and the fidelity of the tales in relation to their oral recitals. At stake is whether the collection has any validity as a record of popular narrative art. Does not the stylist in the man, especially one with novelistic ambitions, turn transcription to treason, as the old adage has it? N.M. Penzer, in his preface to Giambattista Basile’s Pentamerone, takes for granted that ‘in the pages of all these writers the tales were regularized and often metamorphosed into bourgeois stories shorn as far as possible of the marvelous and nearly always related in the traditional style of the Italian novellieri. This was the case even of Straparola, of whom Grimm wrote that “he strove to tell his stories according to the prescribed and customary form and did not know how to strike a new cord [sic],” and only on two occasions, almost as if he foresaw the need of a new form, did he resort to dialect.’42 In short, many critics in the past have been certain that Straparola had but one voice and style – that of the novella writer – and that his stories were rewritten and enhanced to meet the stylistic tastes of his elite and mercantile class readerships. We have been over this ground before. Penzer assumes that every recorder of fairy tales based on popular models seeks to make them conform, in all essential ways, to the stylistic norms of literary culture. Peter Burke does not go so far, for he honours Straparola as an early collector of popular literature, yet takes for granted that many of the formulas of orality are lost in the transcription: ‘In prose there is not the same need for formulae of this kind [the repeated phrases and stock diction still prominent in poetry] to help the performer along; it is also possible that the folktales from the early modern period which have come down to us in collections like those of Straparola or Timoneda lost their formulae in the course of preparation for the printer.’43 The first temptation to betrayal is the lure of conventional literary forms and styles.
Another challenge, as already mentioned in the discussion of the author versus the compiler, is the compromised capacity to transcribe with precision. One of the early recorders of folk tales was Lucius, who revealed a common dilemma when he overheard, in the form of a donkey, the tale of Cupid and Psyche, which forms the centrepiece of Apuleius’s The Golden Ass: ‘I stood not far off, grieving by Hercules! that I had no tablet and pen to note down so pretty a nonsense.’44 The option is to fill in from what can be remembered, or simply to recreate the fabula in one’s own literary image, as when Apuleius imposed the pantheon of gods upon an old wives’ tale told to a girl in prison. In retrospect we know that the tale of Psyche is far from the originating folk tale, versions of which persisted long enough to supply the source for ‘Beauty and the Beast.’ Lucius’s lament, however, has to do with memory. We can only imagine how Straparola came by so substantial a repertory of popular narratives and what combination of internal and external ‘devices’ he employed to retain what he had heard: rote mental retention, repetition, an impromptu mnemonics system, notes, or shorthand. There are not many options, and no one has suggested that Straparola was himself a professional storyteller who merely inscribed his repertory at the end of his career. The alternative is partial reconstruction and literary confabulation.45
Yet if Straparola was compelled to rely upon his own vocabulary, fall back on his personal habits of syntax, and compensate for his flaws in memory, so was every reciter in the oral tradition. For while it is well to speak of popular culture as the collective creation of ‘the folk,’ the act of transmission is carried out by individuals, each with his or her own lexicon, sense of style, and habits of memory, along with the characteristic deletions and substitutions concerning peripheral detail or the recombinant parts of the plot whereby the tale might be accommodated to his or her times and auditors.46 Turning to literary habits, Basile in Lo cunto de li cunti (The Pentamerone), despite the look of authenticity in his use of local dialect, reshaped the spontaneous recitations of the popular imagination with his own ingenious and picturesque diction, full of wit, craft, and baroque exuberance. Straparola, by contrast, has been slated for his flat and under-fashioned style as one of the least gifted of the novellieri, a writer who produced formulaic plots devoid of descriptive detail, characters short on interiority, and who spoke in simple and unadorned language.47 Ironically, this may be a smoking gun with regard to his preservation of the folk styles and iterative designs. Stylistic evidence in kind will be taken up towards the end of this chapter. From a different perspective, Straparola’s fidelity is implicit in the cases of those stories that are closely approximated in design and ethos by later tales which arguably preserve in later years the very order of narrative that inspired Straparola. The argument appears weaker than the sheer fact of the striking correspondences themselves, many of which will be profiled in the commentaries to follow. Arguably, those resemblances could not have occurred if he had tampered inordinately with the integrity of the stories as he heard them. Hence Michel Bideaux may have the last word, after all, that ‘Straparola was sufficiently inspired by these creations of the popular imagination that he felt no need to spoil them by refined literary elaboration.’48 Vittorio Rossi concurs that Straparola was ‘satisfied to work in the special mode of collecting from the oral tradition the fables of the people and to retell them exactly as he found them without touching and altering anything at all concerning the marvelous and supernatural … The tales did not shed their original ingenuity or their spirit of sympathy …’49 In consequence, with allowances for essential stylizing and the occasional flourish, Straparola’s ‘creations’ remain representative renditions of the versions upon which they are based.
We can never know whether Straparola collected in cottages, mercantile households, or palazzi, whether from professional bards or elderly women, but to understand Straparola’s enterprise we must imagine the scope of Renaissance storytelling culture, for every village and town had its raconteurs, both men and women, and stories were told at all echelons of society, from hovel to court. They were told in workshops and households and they were passed down from generation to generation as vehicles of delight and instruction.50 The point is of singular importance, not only because Straparola is thereby provided with ubiquitous sources, once the idea is conceived of collecting such materials, but because the pervasiveness of that parallel culture intimates not only a contemporary circulation of stories, but a template for a culture that reaches across vast times and spaces back to antiquity and beyond. As Milman Parry projected backwards from contemporary recitations of Yugoslavian epics, we may project similarly from the story cultures of the nineteenth century on the assumption that equivalents of the practices that kept these tales alive existed in former times.
In projecting recent past practices upon more remote past practices, James M. Taggart’s book entitled Enchanted Maidens: Gender Relations in Spanish Folktales of Courtship and Marriage is most instructive.51 Working in rural Spain, Taggart documented practices and interviewed storytellers who explained how they had learned their repertory from family members, how new stories emerged from faraway places, and how some were taken over from books, memorized, and circulated in the oral culture. Older and younger generations were involved in the process. They specified how they had heard the same stories many times over the years and how the most talented in these arts achieved reputations and were in demand. They demonstrated reciting techniques and told how the performers asked for nods and answers, played the audience, and recited in dramatized voices. Some trained regularly and had formidable memories. Stories were also constantly on the move, arriving with new marriage partners, by travel and resettlement, or through travelling merchants. Taggart tells more particularly of the paprika seed pickers in groups of ten to twenty women who, like the tobacco workers, would tell stories as they worked.52 Of particular interest is the manner in which narratives were communally invigilated and how the reciters were sometimes interrupted to be corrected. It was important in all contexts, as a matter of authority, that stories were retold exactly as they were heard and that a conservative sense of the tradition prevailed. At the same time, through a slow process of repetition, rationalization, and accretion, variations emerged and the stories slowly evolved through reconstruction, improvements to logical coherence, contamination from other stories, or conscious accommodation to local settings and concerns. Such stories become patterned and iterative in unique ways, performing their ‘work’ with narrative efficiency and transparency. These practices and values must, in some critical sense, be imputed to the practitioners of oral culture in all ages, without which there could be no evidential rapport among stories separated by such tracts of time – and of which Straparola’s transcriptions bear evidence.
That Straparola was working with folk sources is further confirmed for Burke by the prominence of triple patterns in the structural layers and iterative actions of his work – patterns which characterize folk narratives to the point of obsession. Characters are often grouped in threes in order to carry out triple quests, as when two brothers search for a third, or when three siblings go on a quest for the dancing water, the singing apple, and the truth-speaking bird. Burke takes Straparola in hand and begins with the three opening stories. ‘In the first, a man is told by his dying father to observe three precepts; he breaks them one by one. In the second, an official defies a thief to steal three objects, but the thief succeeds. In the third, a priest is tricked by three rogues, but revenges himself on them in three stages. All of these illustrate what Olrik called “the Law of Three,” another of his “laws of folk narrative.”’53 These are the simple repetitions with variations that lead to structured climaxes at an anticipated rate. The triplicity or trinary rule may be calibrated to the limits of audience memory, or to minimal but sufficient narrative density and variety, as well as to simple plot design: a father’s interdiction, a son’s methodical disobedience, and the felt consequences, as in the first story. The degree of Straparola’s stylistic grooming is difficult to assess with precision, but in substance and design the stories carry so many features of the oral tradition that folk provenance becomes nearly self-evident.
The proclivities of human memory, its strengths and weaknesses in the process, can only be mentioned here, but clearly memory is the vital factor in the remarkable stability of the generic plots, while, at the same time, it is the active agent in the gradual evolution of the particulars whereby nearly every substantive element of character, setting, and stylistic register may receive alteration. It is this much-studied yet quasi-mysterious process that accounts for the idiosyncrasies of the ‘folk’ style, the stratified plot designs, the generic characters, and the gradual transformations that give rise to the major and minor variants that distinguish stories separated by time and geography.54 Thus a perception of substitutions and slippages exists alongside a sense of the remarkable staying power of the central narrative fuse, the story ‘type,’ many of which have persisted over centuries, allowing for the comparative grouping of literally hundreds of variants.
This entire discussion may appear to be drifting away from Straparola’s endeavours, but as stated at the outset, nearly all of the annotations to follow are predicated on the reality of this vast network of storytelling, the work of oral traditions reaching back to antiquity and outward to remote regions of the world where traces exist of the same stories told by Straparola, thereby linking his ‘fables’ to this ‘ocean’ of stories.55 The procedures for handling folklore are not universally agreed upon and thus specific critical approaches require their rationales – hence my anxiety. To begin with, the structural associations among stories do not appear to be merely comparative, as though such variants emerged by coincidence, but the result of an underlying kinship created by the centrifugal force inherent in good stories – stories transmitted through hundreds of minds and corrected on a feedback basis to retain the integrity of their respective identities. Thus what holds true for Jan Ziolkowski concerning the cognate relationships between certain tales from the Latin Middle Ages and their reappearances in the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen holds equally true for Straparola’s tales, their sources, and their analogues.56 Where scattered elements of these stories appear in the medieval literary record, they may at times be literary allusions, but in light of the variants, they are far more readily explained as independent borrowings from the folk – borrowings of specific renditions of the respective story types as they were passed along through the vast network of folk raconteurs.57 This assessment recurs often in the ensuing commentaries as the only plausible explanation of the data that are present.
To posit only this much is to assume a number of critical hypotheses concerning the folk tale which I might otherwise do well not to formulate. My work is not as a folklorist per se, but as an editor of tales with affinities to a world of tales. But those associations led me progressively to a series of hypotheses: that Straparola’s tales cannot be contextualized without a context, which in turn depends upon an historical reconstruction of the story types of which his are often the earliest recorded versions. The reconstruction of those histories entails the recognition of ‘types’ and a sense of their historico-geographic diffusion. That diffusion, moreover, depends upon a theory of genesis, whether all tales in the group must ensue from a common source (monogenesis) or may also arise coincidentally in more than one location (polygenesis). The ‘types’ involved must also be anatomized through a morphological reduction to the common denominators that distinguish one tale from another, on the assumption that we are computationally reliable in the identification of signature elements.58 Comparison is hardly possibly otherwise. These are among the necessary critical prerequisites for imagining the historical place of Straparola’s tales within a sprawling subculture of folk narrative. Support is taken from Peter Burke’s placement of Straparola at the centre of a discussion of folk motifs as the semi-independent building blocks which recur in folk tales, noting their aptness for cataloguing. Thus, ‘if we take the tales which Straparola published in 1550 and look them up in Thompson’s motif-index, it soon becomes clear that they contain many well-known themes.’59 He then follows with several examples illustrating the moveable motifs and their configurations in specific stories. Whether the principles involved in creating these formations constitute a ‘grammar’ or conform to ‘schemata’ is work for the folklorists, but the existence of such a repertory of motifs will find demonstration throughout the commentaries to follow. For further perspectives on the nature of memory, and on the formation of narrative units and motifs as well as their systemic modification, see the opening paragraphs of the Commentary on IV.3, ‘The Truth-Speaking Bird.’
Such an approach, meanwhile, raises concerns among those intent upon escaping the tyranny of source studies as the only test and criterion of the Renaissance fable. The obsession with origins potentially obscures the many other ways in which these stories may be studied, whether thematically, narratologically, culturally, comparatively, stylistically, or in relation to audience reception and book production.60 For an assessment of Straparola in relation to the great ocean of stories, however, it is nearly impossible to avoid theorizing about the production of the folk tale. Those interconnections are to be established not only on comparative grounds, but on an implicitly filiational basis, even if those stemmata cannot be precisely or specifically reconstructed. Perhaps the problem is in the label itself: ‘source studies.’ The remarkable irony in the case of Straparola is that we have no sources for his tales, only vast story traditions – which, in the absence of any proof of invention on his part, become the principal contexts of his tales. We know them according to their properties of membership. Nevertheless, I do not see the investigation of structural motifs as incompatible with many other forms of study, whether comparative, thematic, mythological, stylistic, or cultural, all of which are pursued in the commentaries. My interest in all these approaches, in fact, gave me too much to do in the commentaries that follow.
The commission to research Straparola’s tales as part of that ‘ocean’ of international folklore was made by Giovanni Macchia in the introduction to his edition of Le piacevoli notti (1943). He accepted the profound connection these stories had to oral culture, acknowledged the interchange of motifs, and recognized the need to situate them in relation to this vast narrative world, even as he cautioned against the pitfalls of undertaking so demanding a task. From his perspective in the early 1940s, the oral tradition and the origins of folk stories posed seemingly insoluble problems – problems of the same order as those concerning Straparola’s influence on subsequent authors from Shakespeare to Perrault. ‘These matters are dense like a millenarian forest, which, to penetrate, entails the risk of enchantment, the risk of forgetting the principal work that gave rise to the trip. If in certain ways [Le piacevoli notti] resembles a scientific puzzle, in others it is like a romantic charm which approaches a literature without place or time, full of shadows, not spoiled by history.’61 This was my ‘Bluebeard’s Castle.’ A trek through this forest, following the story leads from record to record, seemed the surest means for taking the measure of Straparola’s many narratives – not as trees in a homogenous forest, to tweak the metaphor, but as individual trees along their respective forest paths.62 Nevertheless, the caveat concerning distraction is well taken, for story traditions are potentially seductive and can easily draw the investigator down many a literary byway. Given the abundance of the undergrowth, even the copious annotations to follow have been terminated at arbitrary points of mere sufficiency. The endless forest, to mix metaphors, had to be contained and selectively managed. Thus when redundancy threatened or potential accounts of cognate tales became incrementally less instructive, the commentaries were rounded off by condensing a great deal of matter into lists accompanied by fat footnotes for the benefit of the curious.
Concerning the precocity of Straparola’s ethnographic enterprise, speculation is free as to why folk tales were never collected in former years in the same concentrated and consistent manner. One theory pertains to the rigid separation between high and low cultures, the elite and the folk, the written and the oral. Yet even Latin, the language of the Church, the schools, and international diplomacy, had been employed now and again in the telling of folk tales, if only for pedagogical reasons, during the more open centuries after AD 1000 – before the remnants of pre-Christian lore came under theological and inquisitorial scrutiny. Elements of folk culture abound in such miscellanies as Egbert of Liège’s (b. 972) Fecunda ratis, Walter Map’s (d. 1209) De nugis curialium, and Gervase of Tilbury’s (d. 1220) Otia imperialia, while the names Boccaccio and Chaucer speak for themselves. The cumulative annotations to follow will bear abundant testimony to the extensive appropriation of folk materials in medieval romance, fabliaux, saints’ lives, exempla collections, and jest books. Traces of the stories are everywhere, but they are never represented as being of the folk, and the conventions of more formalized genres prevail. Straparola, in that regard, is entirely ambiguous in styling himself as an author while at the same time disclaiming authorship of the stories, and in replicating the folk structures while importing bits of humanist phraseology and adding certain appurtenances of the novella. Nevertheless, his production was a first of its kind, a concentrated effort, the product of a ‘moment’ in the sense of the term developed by Patrick Cruttwell, a configuration of historical circumstances that gave rise to the idea of a folk anthology ensconced in the trappings of Boccaccian high culture.63 Just as the moment was right for Shakespeare – the culture of the theatre, the actors, the audiences, and the literary models of Marlowe and Kyd – the moment was right for Straparola: the Venetian book culture and its public, the experiments of the novellieri and poligrafi in popular commercial publishing, the gaming soirées, the published collections of enigmas, the book as a metaphor for places and occasions, the quest for novelty in forms and contents, and the appropriation of low cultures by high cultures in matters of dance, music, poetic forms, and improvisatory theatre.64 His dare was to regale the Signora’s salon with popular narratives as presented by his designer damsels. In a sense, he made no advances over Boccaccio in bringing folk materials into the circle of the novella, but with the difference that he imposed no alternate literary forms, arguably made no reductions to the magic of the wonder tales, maintained many of the vestigial features of ‘uncorrected’ folk narratives, and kept to the plainer styles presumed to characterize his sources.
Turning now to the meaning and interpretation of folk tales, it is in their social ‘usefulness’ that we gain insights into the constancy of their basic designs and the gradual transformation of their peripherals across centuries. The compulsive preservation of their essential conceits accounts for the palimpsest factor through which observers have seen the many anthropologically inspired interpretations of past cultures visited upon the hermeneutics of the folk tale. Accordingly, a tale may have served variously as ancient liturgy, a mythological truth, a legend, a trace of traditional wisdom, an amusing anecdote of our ancestors, or a bit of good advice to the denizens of nurseries, having passed through a sea change of purposes and audiences. Yet arguably, at each moment in this vast chronology, the tale had to prove itself to be culturally useful in terms meaningful to each audience; it had to do cultural work, according to the hypothesis that stories settle into their received forms only when they speak to a vital element of the human experience. The argument seems self-evident that a tale’s survival depends upon its ability to address relevant truths in relation to specific auditors. But applying that principle to a reading of the tales comprising the Notti gives us pause, not because we cannot imagine relevant meanings on their behalf, but because we are hard pressed to describe what Renaissance audiences, both popular and elite, were qualified to understand regarding the emblematic designs and enigmatic allusions of these stories. How far had they progressed in their mentalities along the trajectory from myth to social exemplum to fanciful entertainment? This may be a cul-de-sac.
In alternate terms, it might be ventured that the work conducted in these tales has to do, in all ages, with social relationships, the management of resources, initiation rites, religious observances, the education of children, discipline, justice and fairness, bride selection and marriage, war and combat, the cult of the hero, the management of gender relations, inter-generational conflict, courage, generosity, tenacity, the ages of life, reasonable self-advancement, malignant evil, and leadership. That these negotiations are projected through tales that could never transpire in the real world, involving entities and agents known only to the imagination, is one of the greatest of all literary inventions. Such stories play to the imagination where they assume a reality of their own, while appealing to our inferential capacities to extract insights from their emblematic designs, archetypal conflicts, and generic characters into the psychological and motivational conditions of our own world.65 ‘Magic, charms, disguise and spells are some of the major ingredients of such stories, which are often subtle in their interpretation of human nature and psychology.’66 In the words of Hans Schumacher, the folk tale is ‘a popular form that nevertheless carries intrinsic symbolism, of which it is unaware and makes no effort to explain, and is thus unknown even unto itself.’67 Understanding begins in this paradox; meanings take shape through instruments unaware of their own inflections.
Pursuing the argument in more abstract terms, the folk tale becomes a potential testing ground for the interface between the evolutionary psychologists in search of the biological inheritances composing the phylogenetic brain to which culture plays and the cultural constructivists concerned with the plasticity of learning, whereby programming fills in the mental ‘blank slate’ with human understanding and beliefs. (I am smiling with sincerity.) We are what we are as a species because competition and fitness have shaped our faculties and generic perspectives on the world in terms of our genes, our instincts, our emotional readings of experience, and related biological roles at play in our survival strategies. Nevertheless, there is latitude for self-definition according to customs, mores, selected knowledge, conditioning, and training. Stories change as the world changes, but as the human constitution remains constant and our biological proclivities have evolved too slowly to register change over, say, the last 50,000 years, stories also stay the same. Cro-Magnon laughed, cried, feared, and felt relief according to the identical mechanisms that provoke those responses in modern man. True stories must deal with this double condition of humankind, as folk tales are equipped to do in playing to scenarios of rising and declining fortunes with their attendant emotions while adjusting the social details to accommodate the orientations of immediate audiences, bringing archetypes into alignment with local mores and morals. Straparola’s stories often achieve their resonances in these terms. Such considerations will matter when it comes to the readings of the Notti according to single ideologies or political agendas. But let us move on.
Of salient interest to all recent students of Straparola is a subset of those popular tales to be found in the Nights, referred to above and throughout the commentaries as ‘wonder tales.’ They are the tales of fanciful characters, supernatural events, and fairy-tale-like plots, of magic horses, speaking cats, and seven-headed dragons. It is a bibliographical given that the Piacevoli notti was the first publication in the West in which stories of this kind received substantial representation. Indeed, among them are half a dozen bearing self-evident kinship with some of the world’s best-known fairy tales. The collection not only confirms the circulation of these story types as early as the sixteenth century, but provides evidence, in the case of some, of their developmental pasts, thereby pushing the genesis of the Western fairy tale back to the late Middle Ages.
So why should they not be called ‘fairy tales’ outright? In the first instance, while there are many imaginary creatures, there are very few fairies, and those that appear have perfunctory roles in setting up and resolving the conditions pertaining to the hero or heroine. More pertinently, these creatures lack a home base of their own in a fairy world existing in parallel with the human world.68 In one story, a fairy in a cameo appearance curses a child to be born a pig (II.1) and in a second, a fairy transforms a wild man (V.1). The list may be this short. In other stories, there are voyages to imaginary lands where exploits must be conducted, but these are treated as points along an initiatory route. In the story of ‘Fortunio, the King’s Daughter, and the Mermaid’ (III.4), the hero is abducted and taken to a kingdom under the sea, but nothing of his life with the mermaid is described. Nevertheless, Straparola’s stories are pregnant with precisely the kinds of persons and places out of which the French writers of the conte de fées would build their fairy worlds. Even so, Raymonde Robert argues that subtle but essential attitudes and practices distinguish the tales of Galland and Straparola from those by Le Noble and De Murat, with only the latter qualifying as true ‘fairy tales.’69 Her thesis turns upon the auxiliary helpers in the wonder tales with their purely occasional and functional appearances in contradistinction to the fairy guides and their continual presence in the French conte de fées. The latter genre entails helpers with histories and person-hoods of their own. This came about through the conscious adaptation and overhauling of the narrative sources on the part of the French court and salon writers, in accordance with the tastes and aesthetic ideas of their age. They transformed such folk tales into the conte galant through a process that Ute Heidmann describes as a ‘nouvelle variation générique’ (new generic variation).70 Only then did the fairy tale proper come into existence.
Meanwhile, such subtle distinctions have been downplayed by those who accept ‘fairy tale’ as an appropriate translation of ‘Märchen,’ designating the kinds of stories we all know and recognize by their elemental plotting, castles and princesses, tractable villains, speaking animals, sorcerers and magicians, and heroes and heroines who routinely marry and live happily ever after, thereby fulfilling the wishes of a popular audience. By such usage, the term ‘fairy tale’ as a translation of conte de fées has become established to the point of retroactively taking over many related tales of the supernatural, including those with ghosts returning to life to aid their benefactors. Such a definition easily includes those in the Pleasant Nights, so why resist progress? But then, if usage historically confines the term to the makers of late seventeenth-century France and their imitators, why spoil its specificity? Eager to please, I have opted for a more neutral term.71 Jack Zipes creates space for my indecision in his statement that ‘we lack an adequate history of the transitional period between the folk and fairy tales.’72 In consequence, we are uncertain just where to draw the line. In any case – wonder, folk, or fairy – Straparola knew none of these terms. Yet, no other publication from the period rivals his as an ideal workbook for the study of the intersection between these several classifications – from the oral to the written, and from the folk tale to the fairy tale. Meanwhile, those who mock my demur will be comforted by the fact that Straparola figures prominently in two of the most influential anthologies of fairy tales recently published; one by Jack Zipes, entitled The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm, and the other by Maria Tatar, called The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales.73 They make us all closet collaborators.74
The transformation of a few of Straparola’s wonder tales into fairy tales by the French school of the late seventeenth century receives passing investigation in the following commentaries; critics dealing with the rise of the fairy tale genre in general have made note of his influence, now universally acknowledged, although questions remain concerning scope and degree. We are reminded again of De Murat’s famous confession that she had taken inspiration from him, along with all the others in her group, leaving the particulars to innuendo.75 ‘Ideas’ for stories were his principal contribution, for the degree to which his tales are otherwise altered to accommodate later tastes and values is transparently clear. Quite evidently, as De Murat reveals, the translation of the Notti by Louveau and Larivey (1560 and 1572) had gained a special status among the inaugurators of the conte de fées. In Le conte populaire français: Un catalogue raisonné des versions de France et des pays de langue française et d’outre-mer, Paul Delarue and Marie-Louise Tenèze itemize 155 tales by this group of writers, thirty-six of which are in some fashion based on folk narratives – among which, by their count, eight are inspired directly by Straparola. But an arguably more accurate count, according to the investigations made in the commentaries to follow, might go as high as fifteen. The exact number is clearly a matter of interpretation involving sources and their degrees of influence and inspiration. Hence, the following list is not so much a contradiction as it is a set of suggestions for further study and demonstration, while fortifying the claim on Straparola’s behalf that he was verily the spiritual father or éminence grise of the modern fairy tale.
For further consideration:
The remaining discussions in this chapter pertain to the wonder tales in relation to ideology and the chance that the Notti might have been conceived with the political and economic conditions of Venice, or of certain of its social classes, in mind. It is true that an economic profile might be put upon the Venice of 1550, and it is equally true that folk tales are invariably apt for symbolic interpretation and subversive construction. They sometimes tell wish-fulfillment stories of remarkable good luck wherein bumpkins are rewarded with princesses, or take the reader’s imagination to charmingly faraway places. Indeed, the entire collection, as a literary diversion, might be construed as escapist. In that regard the thoughts of readers are free to indulge in vicarious victories, illusions of self-empowerment, or total evasion on a story-by-story basis. But there are caveats to assuming a high level of intentionality on Straparola’s part. There is nothing sufficiently remarkable about the Venetian economy at mid-century to explain tout court the foundation of a literary genre destined to bring wish-fulfilment solace to the labouring poor. Moreover, the lucky pauper tales are but few and they are buried among love tragedies, tales of theft, adultery, jests, unsavoury adventures in the night, incest, voluntary mutilation, and ritual beheadings. The diversity of the volume poses real problems to the imposition of ideological uniformity of any kind. Even the most promising tales of fantasy compensation are ambiguous. Adamantina marries her king by pulling her doll off his ass. Constantino gets his princess by bullying the peasants and taking over the castle of a man killed in a road accident. Even the focus of these rags-to-riches tales is ambiguous. Moreover, who was both suffering from the Venetian economy and yet likely to be buying Straparola’s expensive tomes?76 Straparola, after all, seems to be pitching his miscellany to the elite clientele he depicts in his framing tale. Perhaps the final challenge is the degree to which the entire collection can be weighted in contrasting terms. Victoria Smith Pozzi took for the prevailing ethos of the work an incremental portrayal of human depravity as sharpsters, cheaters, adulterers, and treacherous friends are profiled in tale after tale.77 Selective approaches may be made in support of these theses, but the cavalier diversity of the overall collection tends to dilute their effect.
To pursue the matter at greater length entails a reconsideration of the folk tale per se as a vehicle of cultural concerns, and of whether the collective vision of the folk is dispositionally that of the downtrodden and the oppressed. Many have dealt with Mikhail Bakhtin’s thesis that fantasy literature fits into an alternate mode of storytelling through which freedom is expressed in opposition to oppression, exercising the power of the subversive by separating discourse from meaning and pushing towards nonsignification by hollowing out the relation of signifiers to signifieds.78 But this position is not as popular as it once was. Among others, Linda Dégh strikes out in a new direction. As early as the feudal era in Europe, folk tales were recited at banquets as fantasies, while for the ‘folk’ those same tales may have pertained to the possible or the probable. But tales of assertion against wicked authority do not seem to be made in the name of a class. Even the folk tales of the nineteenth century are pre-industrial in their perspectives and show no signs of class goals against oppressors. Nevertheless, all folk literature in some sense is a ‘practical criticism of oppressive conditions,’ as when scarcity makes for greed and distribution is inequitable, or when inheritances are mishandled. These are tales generated within basic survival groups (small communities, tribes, or micro-kingdoms) in which humans seek collaborative self-advancement, weighing constantly the levels of individual participation as cheaters and benefactors, and the strategies for realizing personal entitlements within the group.79 Qualifiers are accumulating to suggest that the folk tale is not always the subversive instrument for racial and class protest that agenda-oriented critics had hoped. Jack Zipes concurs in resisting the ideology factor necessary to convert folk tales into sociocultural movements in the name of groups, races, or classes, although he allows for social complaint.80 Such stories may, by all means, deal with hunger, poverty, exploitation, powerlessness, humiliation, injustice, wrongful expulsion, and the quest for compensation (revenge). These are not tales of subversion so much as tales of justice, destiny, and wish fulfilment. Each is a little equity court, doing the work of distributive justice or psychological compensation. Hence, their remarkable capacity to escape class barriers and hold their appeal for readers up and down the social ladder. But that Straparola’s stories represent an economic class or appeal directly to a specific purchasing clientele is open to doubt, given their diversity and the classless nature of ‘folk’ tales in general. Surely, in commercial terms at least, his audience was anyone who liked stories of all kinds and had the money to purchase books.81
That Straparola’s publication alone altered the status or prospects of the realist social novella or jeopardized the future of the great Boccaccian tradition seems improbable, but perhaps his inauguration of wonder tales with their supernatural characteristics in a Boccaccian frame was symptomatic of a genre on the wane. His gesture of rejection, at the least, places him in an anomalous or equivocal position in relation to the dominant fictional form of the preceding two-and-a-half centuries. If we leave him among the novellieri, he is one of those compromising the genre’s conventions; if we remove him, he is among those responsible for challenging its pre-eminence. In effect, all through the preceding era, novelle writers had been catholic in their borrowing proclivities, but a certain centre had held in terms of social ethos and realism, contemporary plots, modest interiorizing of characters, literary topoi – all that pertains specifically to the novella as a story-telling genre. Initially, authors were not particular about its designations. Boccaccio in his Proem to the Decameron spoke of ‘novellas, or fables, or parables, or histories, whatever you wish to call them.’ John Florio echoed this open approach in Queen Anna’s New World of Words: ‘a novel, a new discourse, a tale, a fable, a parable. Also a tiding or newes.’ The spirit of the form was its variety, for such récits were serious or comic and about all social classes. Pietro Bembo celebrated Boccaccio as the very master of variety.82 Meanwhile, Masuccio of Salerno spoke of his creations as histories, emphasizing their truth, or at least their possibility, while Matteo Bandello protested that his stories ‘non sono favole ma vere istorie’ (are not fables but true histories), and Marguerite de Navarre said much the same of hers. But more was at stake than nomenclature; the genre itself was now under assault. The Boccaccian matrix was being undermined. Penzer and others were keen to style Straparola as one of the novellieri who, in keeping with past tolerances, had merely turned to the folk for materials, all of which were entirely transformed by his ‘elite’ authorial interventions. But that was wishful thinking, for, as Paolo Valerio confirms, Straparola was among the earliest to showcase the folk tradition for itself, which in making its gradual appearance was ‘one of the distinctive features of European culture from the late fifteenth century up to the end of the sixteenth.’83 The perceived effect of such departures was the systematic decline of the humanist novella. In the words of Nancy Canepa, ‘the “bourgeois realism” of Boccaccio’s model was on the wane’ in the second half of the sixteenth century.84 Bandello had turned to tales of horror, Straparola to tales of wonder. Thus, just as the literary folk tale threatened to destroy the authentic stories of the folk in the estimation of those writing in defense of popular culture,85 the literary folk and fairy tale threatened to destroy the revered forms of bourgeois culture by catering to new tastes. Straparola’s invention, in fulfillment of his literary moment, disguised as elite culture and proposed to high society, was simultaneously an attack upon the epitomizing form of that culture; he had crossed a line and the historians of the novella have held him to account.
Easily overlooked is the fact that the Piacevole notti is also an anthology of enigmas; there are as many of them as there are stories, making up a collection that, on its own, might fill fifty pages. Clearly this literary forme simple was in vogue, having its own defining properties of obscured questions and projected answers presented in artificial verse, whether octaves or sonnets, formally if not in fact for the purposes of social recreation. The enigma is thus both a private and a communal form, to be enjoyed as a guessing game for solitary readers or be assembled into a prompt book for persons in groups playing the popular game of ‘riddles.’ As a ‘simple form’ in the sense described by André Jolles in his Einfache Formen (1930), it takes its place beside other kinds of guessing games, questions-and-answers, proverbs, emblems, epigrams, characters, jokes, and quotable quotations as a minimal but precise literary entity.86 In the mansion of Renaissance literature, these miniature forms may be confined to storerooms and walk-in closets, but by adjusting the metaphor the book itself, conceived as just such a space, was the perfect vehicle for them. The riddle was ideal content for the book as a topical storehouse or treasury of wit and wisdom, its entries arranged in short, memorable units. Such a conceptualization of the Renaissance book has been explored in recent years by, among others, Lina Bolzoni in The Gallery of Memory: Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Printing Press. For the sixteenth-century Venetian literati, the book was no longer thought of as simply an object with pages containing information, but as a metaphor of its function as a visual encyclopedia, a tree of knowledge, a labyrinth, a memory game, a collection of ciphered codes, a natural museum, a building, gallery, or theatre in which things are stored or displayed, or as an instrument of invention with recombinant parts.87 Its pages presented the visual codes corresponding to the mental operations they incited. In particular, members of the famous academies and the poligrafi were fascinated by the capacities of the book to stir and exercise the memory through its spatial, diagrammatic, and dissonant forms of representation, whether as map, maze, cabinet de curiosité, itinerary, gallery of emblematic pictures, or game board. Enigmas pertain to a specific set of problems, generating epistemic shortfalls which orient attention in the search for specific solutions. The book as their instrument of conveyance becomes part of the message.
That Straparola’s book should combine enigmas with the telling of favole is merely an extension of the compound formula he was seeking to fulfill – one through which the book expresses its literary contents as a social event, making it both passively readable and actively performative. According to the surrounding fictional setting, his songs, stories, and riddles are performed before our eyes as miniature ‘programs’ at a fashionable carnival gathering. The riddle, as a poetic and literary form, is also a feature of the social interchange. An enigma, no matter how prettified as poetry, must ask a question, its answer encoded in the clues embedded in its lines. It is all a matter of language, inferential reasoning, and the reduction of options through a close scrutiny of the verbal prompts; it is an invitation to play. What enigmas require of the computational mind is, in fact, quite complex, even though players grasp intuitively what must be done through a combination of ‘best fit’ trial-and-error reasoning, troping and metaphorizing of the data, and inspirational luck. Riddles are initially disorienting. ‘Georges and Dundes point to the most important technique of confusion in the construction of riddles when they emphasize the importance of establishing internal contradictions or “oppositions” within the riddling description.’88 Riddles play upon anomalies of language and conceptual dissonances. They are little epistemic jags which may be catalogued and remembered both by makers and by the habitués of social gatherings where such games are played.
Enigmas allow for many proximate guesses, yet promise to have only one best answer (unanswerable riddles are grounds for assassination). They are delivered to the company on a competitive basis and test both the wit of the maker and the acumen of the auditors. Socially, they represent a pitcher and batter confrontation, the strike-out or the home run. Hence, on the few occasions in the present work when the enigmas are actually resolved, the young ladies reciting them take umbrage, pouting and planning revenge, which could only come in the form of answering correctly the enigmas of their adversaries ahead of all the others. Just how to account for this bad sportsmanship in a light-hearted setting can only pertain to the instinctual combativeness of animals programmed to measure their survival fitness in intellectual terms. Enigmas, in that regard, carry a social liability, to the degree that their cognitive opacity constitutes the mental acumen of the maker – which, when guessed, diminishes his intellectual stature – while a correct answer is a mark of the cognitive adaptiveness and social fitness of its solver. We are in the world of Solomon and Hiram, king of Tyre, who allegedly gambled fortunes on their respective powers to make and solve riddles. Behind the salon enigma is ritual combat or the mysteries of initiation in which the initiate must complete the quest for answers upon peril of life or reputation.
More specifically, riddles play upon a handful of computational plasticities, as when things described as fact embed tropes or symbolic applications. ‘The man who walks with you but can never catch up with you’ must not be a literal man but the ‘man’ created by your own shadow. All enigmas rely upon such projections of logic, as in the case of the bookworm as that which devours a great deal of literature but never learns a thing. Here, through the pun on ‘devour,’ the literal must be imagined in the place of a metaphor so familiar that it passes unnoticed. The same principle pertains with such buried metaphors as ‘money is the root of all evil,’ which is nothing for our brains to decode, yet requires some reflection to identify the literal behind the metaphoric ‘leap’: root is to money what X is to evil, or tree is to evil what root is to money, or root is to X what money is to evil, or none of these.
Meanwhile, the possibility for double meanings and misguided associations – a built-in feature of the clues and the manner in which they are expressed – recommended the enigma as a form of social play and flirtation, provoking fake prurience and reconciling laughter. Thus any set of clues evoking an object long and narrow that is brought into proximity with a receptacle of any form, especially accompanied by jiggling, shoving, or twisting, is apt for a scatological (Freudian) reading, while an equally apt but innocuous answer would have to do with, say, handles inserted into brooms (one of many possibilities). Straparola indulged in several of these, each time provoking sniggers and the Signora’s disapprobation. Amusingly, in the process, even this monitor of morals demonstrates a ready wit for smut, for she never misses the slightest allusion. This is, of course, the carnivalesque bonus of the double-entendre enigma. As part of the social tension and release, the maker always denies the erotic intent and tosses the guilt back upon the accusing parties.89 There are hints that the ideal enigma was one that reflected some element of the story it followed, and on a few occasions the reciters meet that challenge to the particular delight of the company. But more typically, these enigmas are transitional treats in their own right, little servings of sherbet between courses, generating moments of social interchange.
Riddles were an integral part of medieval culture, most notably as forms of amusement among scholars and clerics. Rua asserts that in Straparola’s times and before, they pervaded the popular traditions as well.90 That fact holds open the prospect that Straparola found many of his enigmas through the same oral traditions that preserved the stories which he collected and that, moreover, enigmas were everywhere. Many of the medieval creations were erudite in nature and were written out in verse. These in turn were polished, elaborated, and preserved for posterity in conjunction with maxims, charms, bestiaries, and instructional poetry. Arguably, these formed the foundation for the Renaissance riddle and were passed from the classroom to the salon. In bookish form they might contain their answer in the title, their wit consisting of the poetic manner in which they pose the questions. Among the earliest publications of such literature is the Adevineaux amoureux, printed in Bruges by Colard Mansion in 1479; it contains a gamut of types, including jesting and obscene riddles as well as wisdom and biblical forms. Another fifteenth-century collection was the Demandes joyeuses en maniere de quolibets which Wynkyn de Worde translated into English and published in 1511.91 As Welsh points out, it brings in the new order of Renaissance wit: ‘What is the cleanliest of all the leaves?’ ‘Why, holly to be sure, for with this leaf no man wipes his arse.’ Cervantes places riddles in his Galatea and composed many of his own. The oldest known from Italy are in Venetian dialect and originated in the eighth century.92 Ettore Allodoli speaks of a generation of writers creating enigmas in the spirit of Berni, Il Mauro, Il Lasco (Grazzini), and Il Burchiello.93 De Filippis also lists Il Burchiello, the Florentine Barber, Domenico di Giovanni (1400–48), along with Sannazaro, Pietro Bembo, Pietro Aretino, Antonio Alamanni, and Ariosto. But those who brought the form to perfection were Angelo (Angiolo) Cenni (Il Resoluto), Ascanio dei Mori da Ceno, Giulio Cesare Croce (of Bertoldo fame), and Giovan Francesco Straparola.94 Rua mentions the enigmas of Doni and Parabosco, poetic developments which came to fruition in the thirty-five enigmatic sonnets of Il Resoluto and the poems of Grazzini.95 With so many luminaries engaged, the popularity of this little genre is hardly to be denied; the circulation of the poems was widespread. For a sampling, Il libro degli indovinelli italiani contains some 1,142 riddles, including many by Pietro Fallone, Paolo Giovio, Luigi Grotto, Firenzuola, Bembo, Angiolo Cenni (Il Resoluto of Siena), Antonio Malatesti, Francesco Moneti, and Giulio Cesare Croce.96 The argument implicit in the listing of so many names is that Straparola’s contribution, while particularized by his juxtaposing of fables and enigmas in an elite social context, is yet a commonplace creation among so many contemporaries practicing the same literary form.
In such a climate of recycled motifs, of variation and polishing, the question of intellectual property re-emerges, now involving the witty kernel of the riddle as ‘idea,’ and the practices of imitation. Regarding Straparola’s originality, Rua takes him for a borrower but specifies no sources (although he repertories the several riddles Straparola borrowed from the popular tradition, as well as those found in a fifteenth-century manuscript in the Riccardiana Library in Florence),97 while De Filippis – the acknowledged authority on the Renaissance riddle and author of the History of the Literary Riddle in Italy to the End of the Sixteenth Century – states nothing untoward about Straparola in placing him among those who trafficked in such materials. The truth in this matter depends upon a carefully qualified definition of what constitutes ‘borrowing,’ for riddles consist of a ‘conceit,’ a poetic form, diction, and embellishment. General inferences based on a limited sampling would suggest that Straparola’s poetic settings are his own, provided he is allowed, on occasion, to take quilt-work inspiration from others in matters of diction. The ‘conceits,’ the witty ideas (What can a man give to a woman but never have for himself? A husband; Why is the moon so pale? It doesn’t get much sleep at night), by contrast, belonged to a lending library of ‘riddle memes,’ many of them circulating freely in the popular culture, apt for endless elaboration and refitting. Straparola recirculates one as old as the hills about the chicken who wears a crown but isn’t a king; wears spurs, but isn’t a cavalier, and so on, concluding story IV.4. Yet, paradoxically, his riddles, reconceived, stylized, and poetically elaborated according to his own talents, become as much his creations as they are the creations of those from whom they are randomly and indifferently derived.
A sampling to follow will indicate that Straparola treated the cupboard of popular enigmas as much his own as he did the trove of tales he reduced to print. That so many of his riddles, most without contemporary written analogues, were collected in the nineteenth century in such publications as the Archivio per lo studio delle tradizioni popolari merely underscores the hypothesis that Straparola collected his wares assiduously from the popular culture of his day. Moreover, that Straparola shares several in common in both of his volumes (1550 and 1553) with Madonna Dafne, whose work was published in 1552, entails that she borrowed from him and then he from her, or that, far more likely, both were supplying themselves from a common popular trove in which such riddles were in ubiquitous supply. That relationship to the ‘sub-literary’ world of oral culture is once again made manifest – a little piece of the Z eitgeist.
One of the remarkable features of Straparola’s style was his penchant for transferring words and phrases from other poetic contexts to his own in piecemeal fashion. The resonances are not at the level of topic or verse, but at the level of word echo. He does this in his stories as well. The enigma following story XIII.7 is a case in point. In effect, he turns a few lines from a Petrarchan canzona (no. 135) into an enigma by implicitly asking, ‘What am I?’ It is a remarkable game of literary metamorphosis, of creating anew from the old by altering registers and purposes. Petrarch rambles through his knowledge of the paradoxes of the natural world in search of images to highlight the moods of love. In the process he hits upon the ‘catopleba’ (Pliny’s catoblepa), a basilisk-like animal which lives in the West, with a slim body and huge head, the eyes of which cause death when looked upon.98 Petrarch’s lines read as follows:
Exists a gentle beast, and one more calm
Than all the rest, but she
Bears woe and plaint and death within her eyes.
Most cautious sight must be
If it in her direction turns; if it
Looks not into her eyes,
The rest of her, then, it can safely see.99
By analogy, the heedless lover, already blinded by love, runs to his death by continuously seeking out his lady’s murderous eyes. Straparola expresses his riddle in eight lines (the standard octave), which merely describes the animal according to its intrinsically enigmatic traits. Signor Beltramo’s auditors take for granted that their task is to identify the creature as a straightforward trivia question about a rarely mentioned mythological beast which had become part of poetic culture, although not by name. Words in Straparola in common with Petrarch’s poem are: ‘l’estremo Occidente,’ ‘queta,’ ‘pianto,’ ‘la mira,’ ‘accorta convien,’ and ‘morte dentro gli occhi porta.’ But they are scattered and used in different contexts. Petrarch writes: ‘una fera è soave et queta tanto’; Straparola: ‘e si dimostra queta, e paziente.’ Straparola either had the Songbook open before him or had it fresh in his memory, making an enigma out of its poetic conceit, while retaining a few scattered words for good measure perhaps from memory, for to pick them off the page at random as he does makes little sense. The relationship between the two provides a glimpse into the Renaissance mind at work: referential, word oriented, retrospective in its search for materials, intertextual, yet in quest of renewal, novelty, and witty metamorphosis in the presentation of the subject. At least in the transposition of poetic material from the high to the low, Straparola makes something light and amusing from the Petrarchisms that, in their overuse, had made the work of the founder seem stuffy.100 In short, his enigmas appear to be his own, but their forms, diction, and ideas have the ‘feel’ of the referential about them.
As stated earlier, the ‘conceits’ themselves were in free flow. All five from Straparola’s second night bear conceptual resemblances to those in the Accademia d’enigmi in sonetti di Madonna Dafne di Piazza (Venice, 1552), and another from the second volume of the Nights, that of story VII.2 about the silkworm, has its counterpart in this same work.101 There were others as well. Rua, moreover, convincingly traces the riddle of the scissors (forbici) of XI.4 to the Sonetti del Risoluto de’ Rozzi (Siena, 1547),102 while the riddle of VII.4 refers unequivocally to the ‘Carità romana,’ the story of Cimon’s daughter who breastfed her father through the grate of his prison. This theme was remarkably handled by another artist from Caravaggio, the great painter of that name who, during his sojourn in Naples in 1607, depicted the scene among the seven works of mercy. This sampling of correspondences implies that Straparola worked in the manner of his contemporaries in his composition of enigmas, resetting many of the tried and proven chestnuts of wit to verses of his own devising through a second level of imitatio of words and phrases fixed in his poetic lexicon through a close perusal of the canonical poets. Such procedures reflect the habits of the times.103
Straparola did his part to maintain the popularity of the enigma, in his way adding to the collective repertory of those in circulation – another probable instance of the circulation of materials between written and oral cultures. Louveau, as part of his translation of the first twenty-five tales into French (1560), provided literal versions of the enigmas, but many fell short of their potential. Pierre Larivey, Italian by birth, in completing the translation (1572), reworked Louveau’s efforts and went so far as to replace some twenty-four of the original enigmas with new ones which he selected out of such Italian authors as Angiolo Cenni. Thereafter, The Pleasant Nights became a supplier of enigmas in its own right. Alexandro Sylvano incorporated several of them into his Quarenta Aenigmas en lengua Espannola, published in Paris by La Casa de Giles Beys in 1581, and a year later in French by the same house as Cinquante Aenigmes françoises. Gabriel Sculteti Onghero took fifty-one and had them published in Leipzig in 1679 by Hans Colero in a self-contained work entitled Degli spiriti generosi. Passatempo Toscano ciò è ingegniosi enimmi di M. Giovan Francesco da Caravaggio. De Filippis concludes his survey by saying that almost all of Straparola’s riddles found favour with European collectors and publishers and enjoyed an independent future of their own.104
Surely only bitten specialists could be interested in the publishing history of The Pleasant Nights. But, in fact, the vicissitudes encountered by this work at the hands of typesetters and churchmen during its first sixty years is something of an epic in the history of book publishing and reception. Questions arising pertain to the number of printings and editions because books are performances looking for approbation as commercial commodities, while demand for copies is a revealing indicator not only of material success, but of the popularity and appeal of the contents. Other questions pertain to the authority of the princeps editions of the two parts and the ongoing participation of the author in the subsequent printings of each. But perhaps the most engaging of them all is the question of ecclesiastical and civic censorship and the textual modifications and excisions introduced in accordance with the increasing rigour of the Counter-Reformation Church concerning fictive representations of the clergy, the devil, the saints, magic, doctrinal issues, and smut. By the end of the century, Straparola’s ‘folk’ anthology will have endured the knife on two major and several minor occasions concerning its anticlerical allusions, irreverence, and blasphemy, to end up a leaner version of its former self by ten stories and many passages. In that respect, its ‘editorial’ history becomes a mirror to the oppressive tastes of the times and a measure of changing values. In effect, we see the spirit of Renaissance secular humanism shutting down before our eyes.
As stated earlier, Straparola produced a pair of volumes that together constitute the whole of the Notti, and while the two parts evince a general homogeneity of style,105 they nevertheless show signs of tinkering and adjusting during the course of their composition and publication. It would seem that he began with ten nights of five stories each, relative to the Boccaccian model, but by 1553 he had discovered that the second set of twenty-five was considerably shorter than the first. He thus added three nights, which he filled with shorter pieces to be found wherever he might, for by the second story of the eleventh night his stock of folk tales had been entirely depleted. So it came about, presumably, that twenty-two of Morlini’s little jests and social anecdotes, full of popular potential but lost to the many who could not read Latin, supplied Straparola with precisely what he needed for translation to balance the books. Initially, with his first compilation of twenty-five stories in hand, accompanied by their rubrics, morals, and enigmas, he had approached the ‘censors’ (the Venetian Senate), received his ‘privilege’ despite objections, and enlisted the services of the printer Comin da Trino di Monferrato, no doubt indirectly through his bookseller. Comin was a prolific printer of popular wares whose press was in the heart of the city near San Giovanni Crisostomo, just to the north-west of the Rialto Bridge; he was from Brescia and had been in Venice since 1540.106 Among his earliest commissions was the re-edition of Pietro Bembo’s Asolani, one of the defining works of the era – the same Bembo who fictively or in reality attended the veglie (evening social gatherings) which form the cornice or framing device of the present collection. Comin had also printed the verse of Antonio Molino. He was inclined to take printing jobs from the dealers who, in fronting some or all of the money, became the actual publishers of the work. In Straparola’s case, the title page of the 1550 edition identifies that man as one Orfeo dalla Carta of Sant’Alvise, a local parish church on a small square in the remote Canareggio district of the city. It was there that his first volume of tales was introduced to the world in January 1551, and it was this elusive bookseller who, ostensibly at least, wrote the preliminary address to the ladies. But no one is quite certain who he was.107 This first collection seems to have done so well that the author was encouraged by the book merchants to make a companion volume, if it had not been planned from the outset (which I believe it was). Meanwhile, sales of the first volume justified a second printing in the same year, entailing the labour-intensive task of resetting the type which had already been disbursed. The book-seller for this second edition had a shop in San Luca at the sign of the Diamond, a far more central location about halfway between the Rialto Bridge and San Stefano, and just off the Grand Canal.
The second volume appeared in 1553, about equal in length to the first but asymmetrical in design, for instead of twenty-five stories there were now forty-eight, spread over eight nights rather than five, with considerably more replacements among the narrators, breaking up the nearly regular design of five young women presenters per evening, their respective ‘turns’ established by drawing their names from a golden vase. (There are signs here of the breakdown of the Boccaccian model.) This publication first appeared in a shop at the sign of the Little Dove in the parish of San Bartholomeo.
Concerning the particulars of the work’s subsequent publication history, the acknowledged specialist is Donato Pirovano, whose scrupulous investigation into the matter will, I should think, exclude a ‘bis’ performance for a very long time. He has travelled the libraries of the world tracking down copies of all of the early printings and editions on a comparative basis, calling here for a simple resume of his data appropriate to a critical edition in translation.108 It is important that he carefully established on sound bibliographical grounds the high priority to be given to the earliest editions of the two parts as the only reliable basis for an edition or translation (which of course includes his own, published in Rome in 2000). He worked backwards by determining that after 1557 there is little of authority to be taken into consideration, for by then the work had already undergone the first round of substitutions on grounds of censorship, after which there appears to have been no further possibility of authorial intervention, reaction, or reparation. It is conceivable that Straparola supplied the two replacement stories inserted in 1555, but he could not have supervised the work’s publication very closely, given the discrepancies concerning the names of the storytellers left over from the unrevised edition. By then approaching his mid-seventies, he presumably died shortly thereafter and his portrait was removed from subsequent editions. Pirovano doubts even the authority of those two replacement stories for VIII.3 (VIII.3A and 3B). Moreover, in the edition of 1555 he found many typographical errors not present in the earlier editions, while the few improvements are merely the corrections of former typographical errors well within the competence of the typesetters. There is no evidence of Straparolan input. This takes Pirovano back to the two earliest editions of the two parts, which, carefully reviewed by a modern editor, provide the only acceptable texts upon which to build a critical edition or authoritative translation.
During the period between 1550 and 1608, there were twenty-nine reprintings or editions of one or both parts of the Nights, the first part printed in 1550 and reprinted in 1551, 1555, 1556, and 1557, and the second part printed in 1553 and reprinted in 1554, 1555, 1556, and 1557. There were thus five printings each of the separate volumes, marketed independently, before they were brought together in 1558 and published as a single work. That combined collection, during the following half-century, enjoyed nineteen editions. Statistically, then, it may be said that the whole of the Piacevoli notti received twenty-four printings in fifty-eight years, the tally of a true bestseller. Straparola had gone through the formal procedures of applying for permission to publish, which, with its reception, meant not only that the book had passed inspection concerning its contents, but that Straparola gained something equivalent to copyright. It had been submitted to the council and approved on 8 March 1550, with five members voting against it. The first volume was probably printed at the author’s expense, which may account for the delays in the printing and the split run while the author calculated his risks and rustled up resources. It is clearly marked ‘In Venegia per Comin da Trino ad instanza dell’autore’ (at the instigation of the author).109 The first traces of censorship appear in the reprinting of the second volume in 1555, in which ‘The Priest and the Image-Carver’s Wife’ (VIII.3), with its patently blasphemous overtones and brutal handling of a lecherous priest, not surprisingly found disfavour and was replaced. The subsequent pages of the work were not disturbed, however, for the length of the two replacements; ‘The Woes of an Old Gallant’ and ‘The Merchant’s Monkey’ occupied the same number of pages. This was the first assault upon the integrity of the collection and the coherence of the framing tale.
That the production of the edition of 1558 passed into the hands of Domenico Giglio is of indifferent importance. Comin da Trino returns to the scene with the edition of 1562 and then dissociates himself from the title. It is with the edition of 1565 that the work arrives at a new critical moment, for the invasion of the censors is now pervasive. Eight stories are revised or rewritten, each one for having represented one or more members of the clergy in a comic or morally unfavourable way. The three nuns in VI.4 no longer perform their outrageous feats but merely deliver their pious homilies, while the amorous priest in I.5 is reduced to a minor clerk. Others among the eight are XI.3, XI.5, XIII.9, XIII.11, and two misnumbered by Pirovano, one of which I can identify as III.1. These changes appear to have become a permanent feature of the text in all subsequent editions. In 1569 the printing was taken over by Domenico Farré and the title was thereafter changed to Le tredici piacevoli notti del S. Gio. Francesco Straparola da Caravaggio. When Altobello Salicato took over in 1573, he claimed that the entire work was diligently revised and corrected. Pirovano provides an elaborate chart of the revisions and corrections imposed during that half-century of printings, revealing many more corruptions than improvements.
Thirty-two years after the major alterations of 1565, the Nights encountered radical censorship and were thereafter published only ‘con licentia de’ superiori.’ In the edition by Daniel Zanetti printed in 1597, five of the stories were suppressed: II.4, ‘The Devil’s Marriage to Silvia Ballastro’; VI.4, ‘Who Will Become Abbess?’ even after the former revisions; XI.5, ‘Frate Begoccio Takes a Wife and Leaves Her’; XII.4, ‘Of the Sons who Disobeyed their Father’s Testament’; and XIII.8, ‘Midnight Feast and Famine.’ This is the result of truly humourless rigour. Three of the five involve members of the religious community, the fourth involves the Devil himself, and the fifth includes arguments concerning the destiny of the soul after death. Other stories are merely mutilated. No more tricks would be practised upon priests, not even the luring of the priest into Cassandrino’s sack in I.2, and no more references to conjuring witches in VII.1. Other changes were made to IX.4, X.4, and even VII.3, as well as to nine other tales. Likewise, the enigmas came under scrutiny and the last, following XIII.13, was patently altered, leaving a collection altogether more straight-laced and proper. There are interesting compensations in these later editions in the form of dozens of woodcuts and additional enigmas, beginning in 1597. In 1598, even the songs and madrigals were censored. The 1599 edition appeared ‘espurgate nuovamente da molti errori e di bellissime figure adonate’; what could possibly be left? Those figures included illustrations from the work of Sansovino, along with 100 enigmas and seven sonnet enigmas by Giulio Cesare dalla Croce. In 1601, four more stories were deleted entirely: IV.5, ‘Flamminio in Seeking Death Discovers Life’; VIII.4, ‘Lattanzio and the Secret Arts of Sorcery’; XI.2, ‘The Grateful Dead’; and XIII.3, ‘On the Liberality of Spaniards and Germans.’ Readers may ponder on their own the plausible reasons for taking umbrage to these seemingly innocuous creations. The cumulative and incremental objections to his stories become tantamount to an anatomy of those censorious times as the imaginations of the ‘superiori’ become increasingly sensitized to the topics and humour of popular culture. What Straparola once thought fit for the carnival recreation of the elite, with the odd polite reprimand, within fifty years found itself considerably reduced. But for some, even this was insufficient. The Piacevoli notti was listed on the Index of Forbidden Books first in Parma in 1580, then by Pope Sixtus V in 1590, and Clement VIII in 1596, and again in 1600, which means, in effect, that all publications of the work after 1590 were in defiance of the papal ban, even though these papal interdictions were not rigorously enforced. Nevertheless, Straparola was finished in Italy for nearly three centuries.110 The Venetian publishers who had retained the rights to this work exclusively for themselves lost a book in high demand, and while Straparola would enjoy circulation in other nations, he would not see a revival in Italy before the edition by Giuseppe Rua at the turn of the twentieth century.111
His nadir was undoubtedly the nineteenth century, for while he was known to specialists and historians, his star had decidedly set – if Rachel Harriette Busk, active in Italy as a folk tale collector in the 1870s, is an acceptable witness: ‘Straparola’s collection seems, in Rome at least, to have fallen into the oblivion which Mr. Campbell says is its merited lot. At least, not only was it not mentioned to me at any of the dêpots where rare books are a spécialité, but my subsequent inquiry for it by name failed to produce a copy.’112 Adding insult to this injury is the entry for the city of ‘Caravaggio’ in Franciscus Arisius’ Cremona literata of 1702, in which Straparola merits a reference merely as the author of a book of ‘favole et enimmi’ (fables and enigmas) listed on the index of the holy inquisition for its sordid obscenities, its obnoxious and vulgar materials, for which reasons Possivinus S.J. and others laboured to liberate the later editions of their iniquities.113
The first twenty-five stories were translated into French quite faithfully by Jean Louveau and published by Guillaume Rouille in Lyons in 1560. The second volume of stories was translated by Jean de Larivey and published in 1572; de Larivey subsequently reworked the entire collection in his own rather freer and more inventive style. Between 1572 and 1589 there were twelve reprints or new editions, some of them published in Rouen, others in Paris. This work became well known and supplied materials for many subsequent French authors. Later editions of this translation appeared in 1699 (all copies lost); 1725, with a preface by La Monnoie and notes by Lainez,114 reissued in 1775; and the editions of the nineteenth century described below. The first German translation appeared in 1575, with subsequent printings in 1582 and 1590, all of which have perished. Johann Fischart refers to this translation in the preface to his Naupengeheurlichen Geschichtklitterung (1577). The next translation containing some twenty-four stories appeared in 1791,115 followed by the partial edition (eighteen stories) translated by Valentin Schmidt for publication in 1817 with his extensive critical annotations. Adalbert von Keller translated twelve for his Italiänischer Novellenschatz, published in Leipzig in 1851. The complete text reappeared again only in 1904, in the translation by Alfred Semerau, as Die ergötzlichen Nächte.116 The Grimm brothers spoke well of these stories in some senses, but warned that they were ‘not merely dirty, but even shameless and obscene.’117 In Spain the work made an early debut, the first in Zaragossa in 1578, in the translation by Francisco Truchado, condensed to twelve nights, after purging it of all obscenity and irreverence. The Honesto y agradable Entretenimiento da Damas y Galanes was printed in Grenada by René Rabut in 1583, and thereafter in Madrid in 1598 and 1612.118 I have not made a methodical enquiry into the number of languages into which Straparola has been translated. But in addition to Spanish, Italian, French, and German there is the Chinese Shi ye tan and the Russian Pri i atnye nochi.119
The translation of The Nights of Straparola made by William George Waters (1844–1928) has received general approbation since its first appearance in 1894. Waters had travelled extensively in Italy, knew the language and its idioms well, and exercised his skills as a translator not only in the present work, but in his translations of Ser Giovanni’s Pecorone, appearing in 1897, and Masuccio’s Novellino, published in 1895.120 In these magisterial endeavours, all three of them sumptuously illustrated by the incomparable E.R. Hughes, ARWS, Waters claimed his place in translation history for having introduced to English readers three of the most important of the Italian novellieri after Boccaccio. The Masuccio and Straparola volumes were published by one of London’s most distinguished late Victorian publishers, the house of Lawrence and Bullen in Covent Garden. Both were printed in two-volume sets, in large quarto format, each edition enjoying a press run of 210 numbered copies on Japanese vellum, bound in half leather and boards with red stamping. The present edition was produced using copy no. 210. The Pecorone was published privately for members of the Society of Bibliophiles in three volumes of 100 numbered copies bound in full leather with gold stamping and gilt-edged pages, the illustrations coloured aquarelles, again by E.R. Hughes.121 Because of the authority and elegance of these translations, the prospect of retranslating Straparola initially seemed both audacious and unnecessary. Readers would be served best by a fully annotated edition of this classic, for it carries a stylistic cachet of considerable imagination and grace.
But with the passage of time, the tinkering began. In the first instance, Waters left parts of the story of the rival nuns (VI.4) in French, on the assumption, one would suppose, that if readers can deal with the language of Racine, they are qualified to know how nuns might remove mustard seeds from the face of a die by farting, or piss through the eye of a needle – otherwise, not. He also resorted to French in VI.2 to avoid explaining how Castorio became reconciled to his emasculation. These little Victorian lacunae were easily enough restored from the original. But upon closer scrutiny, this modesty was more the rule than the exception throughout. We are not told how Adamantina’s little doll (V.2) not only bit down hard upon his majesty’s arse, but also grabbed his jingle bells and squeezed them as hard as it could. There were several more restorations in kind to follow. But once the sanctity of a ‘whole’ text had been broken, the mystique exposed, there was no retreat. At first piecemeal, then more systematically, and ultimately rigorously, the translation was revisited and adjustments ensued by the hundreds if not thousands. The intent was by no means to eliminate Waters’s voice, for in so many ways he got matters exactly right. But he had his own stylistic quirks which he repeated endlessly, such as parenthetic syntax. He was also given to interpretive elaboration, the reinsertion of names, and at times he made the simplest of speakers worthy of the salon, while at others, for the sake of concision, he left out Straparola’s doublings or awkward details. In the original, Adamantina’s doll states: ‘Mamma, mamma, caca,’ on several occasions, but Waters confines this iterative baby talk to: ‘The stool, mother, the stool,’ and then says that ‘the doll replied in the same words as before.’ This is no error, but modern readers can handle the domestic realism of the original. This is equally true for Straparola’s amusing metaphors for sexual activity. Waters was content to report of the serving man who crept into a lady’s bedroom, that he placed himself beside her and without her resistance took his pleasure with her. But the original is clear in the matter; that ‘he took his rod in hand, which was quite rusty, and shoved it into her forge’ (VIII.1). The collection is a veritable study in these playfully off-colour metaphors, taking their cue from Boccaccio, inter alios, who famously gave us the one about running the devil into Alibec’s cave that devolved into sending the Pope to Rome or the Great Turk to Constantinople, inter alia – all of which have their appeal to those of us with arrested adolescent tastes. These too, with apologies, have been restored, with the critical observation that Straparola seemed to go out of his way to find occasions for such constructions, perhaps giving away something of his own compound sense of aesthetics and audiences. Parental supervision advised.
Otherwise, Waters’s outright errors of commission are few indeed. In one instance he took ‘mendicante’ (beggar) for a doctor; a mere slip. In another (VIII.4 at the end), he took a ‘trombone’ for a trumpet and thus could make little of the sliding up and down motion, which he translated as ‘held close and swayed up and down by the player.’ But on the whole, he was closely attentive to the logic of the stories and, in certain cases where Straparola makes little sense, he tweaked the words into intelligibility. This raises new problems for the editor. In this same story of Lattanzio and Dionigi (VIII.4), the boy throws himself into the river ‘e trasformatosi nel pesce squallo, s’attuffò nell’onde’ (and turning himself into a shark fish, plunged beneath the waves), both sharks and waves hardly pertaining to rivers. Waters sensibly translates this passage as ‘a little fish that hides in the deepest water’ to avoid the anomalies. Moreover, the shark would be pursued by a tuna fish, which, without consulting specialists, doesn’t seem to be the natural predator of sharks. One might say that he betrayed the literal sense, but he enhanced the logical coherence of the story and after long debate over these rare instances, I opted to follow him. At stake is the evidence which such apparent lapses may contain concerning confusions in the folk sources that Straparola dutifully preserves. Inversely, Waters slips when he has Violante the princess out collecting pebbles, for her lady-in-waiting is clearly intended, as she later presents the ruby she finds to the princess; and he slips again when he has the ‘cattiva risposta’ (ill-mannered or unfavourable response) to the physician delivered by the princess rather than by the king, who, in the next line, has her called in (‘chiamata la figliuola in presenzia del medico’). These have been adjusted, along with many other critical words and phrases, as when, at the end of XIII.4 where the Signora asks Signor Bernardo Capello to tell a story, the phrase ‘che partecipasse con esso noi’ (who participated with us) is left out as a mere redundancy. If Capello was there, of course he was participating, except that the telltale ‘noi’ also suggests that the author was present. It is a rare moment in the confirmation of Straparola’s fiction that he had been a part of the veglie of which the Nights pretends to be a mere transcription. But more justification for these adjustments and emendations seems ungrateful. Waters remains substantially present in a text which is still essentially his, even though, through myriad stabs of the pen, he has been pervasively altered in microscopic ways in the interests of rendering Straparola’s ‘voices’ with greater diversity and accuracy, while recovering many missing little pieces or significant allusions. In short, his translation has been thoroughly checked and revised against the original. The text employed in this rather arduous task was Donato Pirovano’s critical edition of Le piacevoli notti, published in Rome by Salerno editrice in 2000. His careful rationale for the original texts he employed is set out in the history of the text above.
Herewith, then, is an edition of both parts of the Straparolan original, including the two substitute stories of 1555 as well as all the preliminary materials and enigmas, which are often omitted in popular editions. The titles of the stories are entirely editorial, for there were none in any of the early editions, and by rights they should be in brackets. Richard Burton assigned titles of his own in the two-volume Carrington edition of 1906 that might have been adopted. But the present titles are slightly longer, more descriptive, and more frequently incorporate the protagonists’ names. Burton called X.4 ‘The Strange Testament’; here, it is ‘The Diabolical Testament of Andrigetto di Val Sabia.’ For XI.1, his reads ‘The Fairy as a Cat,’ while mine is ‘Constantino and his Wonderful Cat.’ For XI.3, his ‘Pot Calling the Kettle Black’ is called here ‘Wind, Water, and Shame, or the Gluttony of Dom Pomporio.’ Burton’s have the virtue of brevity, often touching on a feature of the story that requires elucidation through reading. Those in the present edition are more prosaic, being based on the one- or two-sentence rubrics heading each story in lieu of titles in the original. Nevertheless, one of Burton’s decisions in his otherwise strange production nearly prevailed in the title of the present work.122 His The Most Delectable Nights had been my working title since the project’s inception. The Italian ‘piacevoli’ carries a variety of nuances around the concept of pleasing, pleasurable, or delightful. Other synonyms include merry, joyful, pleasant, enchanting, and delectable. Waters could not make up his mind and fell back on ‘The Nights.’ ‘Merry’ has also been used in a modern popular edition. The French employed ‘facétieuse,’ meaning humourous, but with overtones of impish, mischievous. The Germans have preferred ‘ergötzlich,’ meaning delightful, but with overtones of amusing or funny. Both are impressions as well as translations. Insofar as a choice had to be made of an adjective between ‘The’ and ‘Nights,’ after trying out as many as I could think of, it fell on ‘pleasant,’ which, for me, carries the happiest combination of nuances describing the atmosphere surrounding the Signora’s circle in Murano, for the title appears to refer to the occasion itself, rather than to the stories in all their diversity, some of which are by no means mirthful, funny, or pleasant.
The poems and enigmas in the Waters translation remain largely unchanged. These are challenging recreations on his part, effective, and difficult to improve upon in piecemeal fashion. They are very free translations, to be sure, as they were in the case of Larivey’s French. Moreover, because they are, in several cases, translations of the lyrics of known madrigals and canzonets of the era with their often heady Petrarchan overtones, Waters’s Victorian idiom seemed altogether appropriate. The ordering of the stories in books VIII and IX is confusing in the extreme, or was made so by subsequent editors. Within Straparola’s lifetime the first of many deletions took place. Originally, VIII.3 was the tale most likely to offend the clergy: that of the nude priest who simulated Christ on the cross in the image-carver’s shop to escape attention. In its place, Straparola (presumably) substituted two stories of equivalent length, which could be inserted without disturbing the pagination. These have been added to Book VIII as numbers 3A and 3B. Brilliant so far. But Straparola assigned these tales to new speakers without changing the assignment of tales in the opening selection of names or at the ends of the preceding stories. Thus, when subsequent editors, such as Waters, left the replacements in situ and moved the original tale of ‘The Priest and the Image-Carver’s Wife’ to Book IX, confusion reigned. Waters made adjustments, changing names and enigmas, all of which have been restored to the order of the earliest edition.
In need of explanation, perhaps, is the absence of a general bibliography for the commentaries. The reading for these annotations was carried out in three Canadian libraries, including Toronto’s Robarts Library, and in eight of the many libraries at the University of Bologna, supplemented by some 250 titles sent to my own university through the Inter-library Loan System over a three-year period – thus, books at my disposal for limited periods of time. Hence, many of the same works were consulted in whatever editions were available at different times and places. The upshot was that it became impossible to standardize the references to a goodly number of these works short of retracing many steps, reordering many books, and revisiting many places, all to largely ceremonial ends. In consequence, each reference carries its own full bibliographical documentation – the alternative to citing three or four different editions of the same work in a bibliography and encoding all the footnotes to designate which. But virtue may be made of this reality insofar as I have given, in addition to page references, book and chapter numbers as well as titles to facilitate location in whatever editions readers may have available to them (which, in many instances, will not be the same as those available to me). Hence, insofar as each reference is full and complete in itself, the requisite documentation is immediately visible. Readers may find that beneficial. The only drawback is the redundancy of certain publishing information in the footnotes where the same work is employed on multiple occasions. In the bibliographical references, first dates of publication are often found in brackets before the date of the quoted edition, or, when rare early editions are being cited, references to later editions and reprints may also appear.
Moreover, as a matter of convenience, I did not always consult such diversely published works as Grimms’s Fairy Tales and The Thousand Nights and One Night, or Masuccio or Ser Giovanni, for that matter, in the canonic critical editions. When I was merely looking for confirmation of a plotline, I relied on the translations in my own library. But this pertains only to well-known, widely published authors whom readers will consult in their own particular editions, in any case. Most others I read in the only English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Latin (I even tried Portuguese) editions available of these works. But the problem became acute when I found myself in Bologna’s Casa Carducci Library consulting editions of now rare Italian folklore that were, in their day, also published in parallel editions which I had already consulted elsewhere. I simply cite the editions I used when and where I found them. If this merits an apology, you have it.