IN 1566, exactly a decade before ‘The Theater’ opened in Shoreditch, William Painter, Clerk of the Ordnance at the Tower of London, published the first collection of prose short stories in English, promisingly called The Palace of Pleasure. Reading these stories now, it is difficult to avoid seeing them either as antecedents of the drama, or as antecedents of the novel, and in both cases as rather lumbering prototypes of a more sophisticated literary form. Yet, this is clearly not how Boccaccio stands in relation to subsequent Italian literature and it is Boccaccio who determines the ultimate character of Painter’s landmark collection. He tells us in his preface that he has translated a good deal from the Decameron, but only intends to include ten stories in the present volume and will save the rest for ‘another tome’, unless somebody else ‘with better stile to expresse the author’s eloquence’ beats him to it. He anticipates and claims to welcome competition because ‘the works of Boccaccio for his stile, order of writing, gravitie, and sententious discourse, is worthy of intire provulgation’ (1: 11). There is an air of defensiveness about this, since Painter is well aware of how the subject matter of his stories is likely to be interpreted by his more high-minded English readers and he wants to assert Boccaccio’s status as an elevated author and a master of vernacular prose style. This is why he opts for the rather pompous term ‘provulgation’ to describe his Englishing of these tales. He is anxious to explain why they should be made common, but doesn’t want them to sound too common; nonetheless, in a later century C. S. Lewis was to rate them as common as muck when he described the Palace as ‘dung or compost for the popular drama’.1
Painter was absolutely right in anticipating both the popularity that this new literary form would enjoy with English readers and the odium it might attract from the custodians of good taste and public morals. The second volume he had planned appeared in 1567 and almost immediately Geoffrey Fenton published a competing collection, Certain Tragicall Discourses, which had four stories on exactly the same subjects as those of Tome 2 of the Palace. A complete Palace came out in 1575 and in the following year George Pettie produced his slimmer variation on the winning formula, A Petite Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure, which went through six editions to 1615. There were similar offerings from Thomas Fortescue (1571) and Robert Smythe (1577), while George Whetstone and George Turberville both published collections of verse stories in 1576. Whetstone’s book, The Rock of Regard, versified some of Painter’s tales and he followed this with a prose collection called The Heptameron of Civil Discourses (1582), which was successful enough to reappear in 1593 with the new title, Aurelia: The Paragon of Pleasure and Princely Delights. So Painter’s initial volume let loose a spate of publications in the genre of short prose fiction, with a particular concentration around the time that the new playhouse opened in 1576, and it was not long before the fashion for this kind of literature met with a backlash from the likes of the pedagogue Roger Ascham (Queen Elizabeth’s former tutor) and the playwright-turned-Puritan Stephen Gosson. The grounds of Ascham’s attack on ‘Italianate tales’ has been wittily analysed by R. W. Maslen, but the gist of his and Gosson’s censure is that this material is morally corrupting and socially subversive.2 What is not in doubt is the impact that the new prose fiction made. When Lewis called it ‘dung’ he meant of course that it was a fertilizing agent, so his remark is not entirely contemptuous, but he underestimated the importance of the genre in its own right. What Painter introduced to English from Boccaccio was exactly the kind of generic and stylistic flexibility that is traditionally associated with Shakespeare: the mixing of comedy and tragedy and the moving between high and low stylistic registers. What he introduced from his classical models (especially Livy) was the kind of controversial ethical framework that characterizes much of Elizabethan literature, both dramatic and non-dramatic; and what he took from his other modern sources was an inventory of plot material that could be rhetorically deployed by resourceful characters to serve their own ends, as Lorna Hutson has argued.3 This volatile mix ensured that the new prose fiction was innovative, experimental, and explosive, as one might expect a keeper of munitions to appreciate. It is no wonder that Ascham was alarmed.
But how do we read these stories now, in view of their later eclipse first by the drama and then by the novel? One of the difficulties of getting a purchase on them is that Painter himself is uncertain as to the genre he is working in. The genesis of the Palace has been well described by Andrew Hadfield, who points out that its original title had been ‘The City of Civility’ and that Painter had initially gone to Livy for his material, a choice that was ‘a bit subversive because of [Livy’s] republican sympathies’.4 Livy is the source for the first five stories in the Palace, and other classical authors (Aelian, Aulus Gellius, and Plutarch) dominate up to tale 30, when Boccaccio first appears. There is no doubt that the genre represented by Livy is ‘history’. But the term ‘history’ is used very flexibly in sixteenth-century English to cover both fact and fiction and fiction masquerading as fact. There is a rough equivalent in modern Italian la storia, which means history in the modern sense, but also a fictional story and even (as in modern English ‘just telling a story’) a load of rubbish. The veracity or otherwise of this kind of material is a hugely sensitive issue, not just for Painter, but for other writers of fiction in the period, and it culminates in Sidney’s assertion in the Apology for Poetry that for the poet ‘nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth’ (103). All are aware that fiction is fraught with moral danger. In the case of Painter, this anxiety is evident in the ambiguous way he refers to the stories in his collection. In the dedication to the Earl of Warwick he explains that it all started when he chanced upon a copy of Livy in the meagre holdings of the armoury library and decided to translate some of these ‘straung Histories’ into English. But when he moves on to the more modern writers, his terminology starts to shift, as he refers to ‘these histories (which by another terme I call Novelles)’, and in the dedication to the reader that follows, he uses ‘histories’ and ‘novelles’ interchangeably, though with the order reversed, because he is now addressing the reading public rather than an aristocratic patron: ‘[t]hese novelles then … [are] profitable and pleasaunt Histories, apt and meete for all degrees …’ (1: 13). Painter seems to have been the first person to use the term ‘novel’ in English to refer to short prose fiction and he takes it from Boccaccio, who is even more elastic in his generic description of the stories in the Decameron, calling them ‘a hundred stories or fables or parables or histories’ [‘cento novelle o favole o parabole o istorie’] (1995: 3). Though Painter starts out with Livy, it is Boccaccio, along with his followers, Marguerite of Navarre and Matteo Bandello, who determines the direction that The Palace of Pleasure would eventually take.5
Painter’s change of direction is extremely significant and this is apparent in his change of title as well as his change of terminology. When the book was entered in the Stationers’ Register as ‘The Cytie of Cyuelitie’ in 1562, Painter clearly had in mind a work of political counsel, where ‘civility’ is almost tautological since it points to issues of civil order or justice within a state or ‘city’. At least, that is how the stories from Livy that begin the volume might be described and Painter’s original title seems to have been chosen with those in mind. ‘The Palace of Pleasure’, on the other hand, gestures to the very different, aristocratic milieu of the Decameron, or rather of its cornice or narrative frame, where seven ladies and three young men escape from plague-ridden Florence to a country estate, ‘a palace, built round a fine, spacious courtyard, and containing loggias, halls, and sleeping apartments’, where they tell their stories (19). The Italian novelle are quite deliberately not ‘of the city’. Where the ‘city of civility’ template would have required readers to focus uncompromisingly on the rigours of civic duty, its redesignation as the ‘palace of pleasure’ releases them into an environment that allows the possibility of social experiment and a more flexible understanding of identities determined by rank and gender. In a word, Painter’s move from the city to the palace redirects the genre from the political to the social and this is in turn reflected in his shift of terminology from history to ‘novelles’. But while he may he may have been the first English writer to use that term to refer to the prose short story, the word was already available to mean ‘news’ or ‘gossip’ as a Gallicized version of Old English ‘tidings’.6 In that respect, ‘novelles’ originate in oral reports and can be understood as operating within the social framework of conversation. So one way of understanding Painter’s choices is to see them in terms of a shift in the meaning of ‘civility’: from the fundamentally political sense of the civic to the more social sense that is represented by the term ‘civil conversation’. This is roughly how short prose fiction in English develops in the decade before the theatre.
The last reason why Boccaccio was important to Painter is that he was able to confer status on a deeply suspect genre that might have been seen as little more than pulp fiction, as it were, without any of the sophisticated referencing of a Quentin Tarantino. The classical histories were not in need of an apology: as Painter points out, Cicero had described ‘what difference of commoditie, is between fained fables, and lively discourses of true histories’ (1: 14). The Boccaccian novella, on the other hand, while not mythological, was certainly of dubious authenticity and far from being concerned only with the ruling classes and with momentous political events. At the same time, Boccaccio had the status of being one of a triumvirate of Italian vernacular writers, along with Dante and Petrarch, and in England was sometimes given the title ‘Poet Laureate’. What Painter is trying to do in his ‘provulgation’ of Boccaccio and his followers is to create a new kind of prose fiction which is more socially inclusive (‘meete for all degrees’) but which has behind it the authority of the premier vernacular stylistic model for prose in early modern Europe.
The most obvious way in which the stories of The Palace of Pleasure are more socially inclusive is in the prominence they give to women. However, Painter begins with the ‘true history’ of Livy, not the novelle of Boccaccio, and his first story comes with an austere warning that it will have none of the feminine trappings of chivalric romance. The story concerns the wars between the Romans and the Albans and their agreement to settle matters in a combat between three men from either side, who will fight ‘not for sportes of Ladies, or for precious prises, but for Countrie quarell and libertie of Native soyle’. The wars themselves are described as ‘much like to a civile contention almost, betwene the father and the sonne’ (1: 15, 17). So this is political territory, and designated masculine, but the story also redefines affairs of state in terms of kinship and views civil issues from a familial and personal perspective. After the combat, the surviving champion, Horatius, discovers that his sister has been betrothed to one of the slain opponents, whereupon he kills her for what he calls her ‘unreasonable love’. He is condemned to death for this act, but his father pleads eloquently that he should be spared for both public reasons (his son’s service to the state) and private ones (he doesn’t deserve to lose both his children). The outcome is that Horatius is acquitted ‘rather through the admiration of his [father’s] vertue and valiance, than by justice and equity of his cause’ (1: 21). The reader is invited to marvel at the strictness of Roman law, but is also allowed the satisfaction of knowing that the father’s ‘valiance’ will ensure that he doesn’t lose his other child. The lesson to be drawn, as Painter has already told us in his preface, is that you should ‘learne how to behave thy selfe with modestie after thou hast atchieved any victorious conquest’ and avoid ‘committing a facte unworthy of thy valiaunce’ (1: 11). ‘Immodest’ hardly seems an adequate way of describing the murder of a sister and the woman in this story is clearly expendable and her role negligible. Yet even here, at the gate of the palace, there are signs of a contrary direction, and the outcome doesn’t quite have the effect Painter claims for it. After all, the rigour of the law is softened by the eloquence of a suppliant and the decision to relax it is taken not by a judge but by ‘the people’. This is clemency by popular decree.
Painter’s second tale is a version of the tragic subject of Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece and the third is about the lifting of a siege of Rome. Novel 4 concerns Coriolanus, also familiar to us from Shakespeare, though he went to Plutarch rather than Painter for his plot and there are some significant differences in emphasis in the Livy–Painter, Plutarch–Shakespeare versions of the story. This is not the place to rehearse those differences, but it is worth noting here that Painter’s head-note provides a more partisan interpretation of events than we get in Shakespeare, with its succinct opening, ‘Martius Coriolanus goinge aboute to represse the common people of Rome with dearth of Corne was banished’ (1: 29). In the story itself, Painter shows that since the people are reluctant to fight because they need to till the land, Coriolanus’s actions explicitly deny them the fruits of their labour. The effect of this injustice is to create a sense of the need for cooperation between patrician and plebeian, as we see after Coriolanus’s banishment and defection to the Volscians. Despite previous contention ‘betwene the people and the fathers’, fear of invasion has now united them and ‘linked their mindes together, in the bands of concord’. It is agreed that Coriolanus’s mother and wife should be delegated to plead with him not to attack Rome, as happens in Shakespeare, though here Painter adds, interestingly: ‘whether the same was done by common consent, or by the advise of the feminine kind, it is uncertaine’ (1: 32–3). Coriolanus’s mother, who is called Veturia in this version (Volumnia is his wife), does indeed make an impassioned speech, but Coriolanus is also moved by the tears of the suppliant women who have come to support Veturia and Volumnia. This is very much a female group effort and it is recognized as such by the city: ‘[t]he Romains disdaigned not to attribute to women, their due prayse: for in memorie of this deliverie of their Countrie, they erected a Temple, Fortunae Muliebri, to Womens Fortune’ (1: 34). And not only that, but a group effort that identifies the interests of women with those of the common people, as the values of the peaceable, agrarian social stratum win out over those of the elite warrior class.
The last of the sequence of five stories from Livy concerns Appius and Virginia, later tuned into a play by one ‘R.B.’ and then by Webster. This is a tale about the abuse of the law, but it is also about class struggle. Appius is one of a new kind of Roman official called Decemviri, who have been appointed to draft revisions to the law, and having conceived a violent desire for a maiden, Virginia, whose father is away fighting with the Roman army, he contrives a legal fraud to have her identified as the daughter of his bondswoman and therefore his property. Virginia is defended by Icilius, her betrothed, and her father, Virgilius, is recalled from the army to rescue her. However, when the latter gets back to Rome he realizes that she is in a hopeless position and decides to kill her rather than allow her to be ‘ledde to the rape like a bondswoman’ (1: 40, my italics). It is this last point that turns out to be the central issue: not the rape or the honour killing, but the enforced servitude. Eventually, Appius is put on trial and charged that ‘against the order and forme of lawe (thou thy selfe being judge) wouldest not suffer the freman, to enjoye the benefite of his freedome, during the processe made of servitude’ (1: 44). So this is a prototype of the ‘corrupt magistrate’ motif, but the wording of the charge (with its reference to ‘the freman’) gives it a political dimension at the same time as it obliterates the memory of Virgilia herself. That political dimension supplies the wider context for the story. Icilius and Virgilius are supported by ‘the multitude’ and it is popular hatred of the corrupt and arbitrary power of the Decemviri that leads to a stand-off between the people and the senate. The senators, who are known as the ‘fathers conscript’ of the city, recognize that the Decemviri must be purged, but they also recognize that their malpractices have shifted the balance of power, ruefully observing that ‘[w]e shall soner wante our Fathers and Senatours, than they their plebeian officers. They bereved and toke awaye from us the fathers a newe kind of authoritie, which was never sene before, who now feeling the sweetnesse thereof, will never geve it over’ (1: 42). This ‘new kind of authority’ is democracy.
Painter does not use the D-word, but Hadfield is certainly right to suggest that the classical stories at the start of the Palace are ‘a bit subversive’. While the moralistic glosses that Painter inserts from time to time show him trying to steer the reader in a safe direction, they completely fail to put a cap on the democratic energies that his subject matter releases. In one sense, then, his aim of being socially inclusive is over-fulfilled. In another respect, however, it certainly isn’t, since the status of women in these stories is inconsistent, to say the least. It is when Painter moves to Boccaccio that women in turn move to central narrative positions: many of these tales might in fact be grouped under the title ‘Women’s Fortune’, to borrow the tag from the Coriolanus story, and they feature women in roles that are to some degree independent of the authority of father or husband. The switch from classical to Italian material, or from the city of civility to the palace of pleasure, may seem abrupt, and there is no doubt that it represents a change in Painter’s interests and in his plan for the volume as a whole. The austere political culture of freedom and bondage, of ‘valiaunce’ and paternal honour killing, and of the ever-present threat of popular insurrection that Painter extracts from Livy, is superseded by a shifting social world that focuses on a cluster of themes concerning interpersonal relations, marriage, and inheritance. But it would be wrong to think that the one is more serious than the other. It is perfectly true that the Palace is bulked out with some lighter, fabliau-derived stories, and even jest-book material, but to English readers of the 1560s it would have seemed to offer a kaleidoscope of social possibility for modern life: these are not old histories but ‘news’, sensational reports of goings on elsewhere.7 The most extreme example of this aspect of the novella form is provided by the frame of the Decameron itself, which was born out of the social catastrophe of the Black Death: beyond the palace and the garden paradise and the elegant, aristocratic narrators lay the traumatized, plague-ridden city of Florence.8 What was happening there in 1348 might have made anything seem possible, and some sense of this survives, over two centuries later, even in stolid English translation.
There are ten stories from the Decameron in Tome 1 of the Palace, followed by seven from Bandello and fifteen from Marguerite of Navarre, both of whom were working in the Boccaccian tradition. There is obviously some risk in trying to find a common thread to link the Italianate material with the classical stories, but the subject of fathers and daughters is one fairly obvious point of connection, and it also helps to illustrate both Painter’s shift from the political to the social and his refocusing of the collection on the female role. In the stories from Livy the term ‘father’ has both civic and familial status, as Latin patres covers both the patrician class, the senators or ‘fathers conscript’, and the biological fathers who are so often at the heart of the action. The personal is always framed by the political. In Painter’s Decameron tales what matters is the father–daughter, not the father–son relationship and how it impacts on her desires and marital destiny.9 One story that would certainly have appealed to English readers is Novel 34, ‘The King of England’s Daughter’ (Decameron 2.3). In this tale, a Florentine financial agent called Alexandro, on his way home from London after his employers have been bankrupted, encounters the newly appointed abbot of one of the finest abbeys in England, who is travelling to Italy with an impressively large retinue. The young abbot is smitten with Alexandro and they are soon on familiar terms, so much so that when they stay overnight at an inn they end up sharing a bed, despite the abbot’s elevated status. The reader has probably been anticipating the scene that follows: ‘The Abbot laying his arme over him, began to attempte suche amorous toyes, as be accustomed betweene twoo lovers: whereof Alexandro mervayled muche, and doubted that the Abbot being surprysed with [i.e. suddenly seized by] dishonest love, had called him to his bedde of purpose to prove him’ (1: 134). The reader may also have anticipated the next development, which is that the abbot is revealed to be a woman, the King of England’s daughter no less, and that she is going to Rome so that the Pope can place her in marriage. But free of her father’s control and at large in the world, she is able to gratify her desires with what is, quite literally, passing trade. All is made respectable, nonetheless, as a makeshift betrothal takes place in bed, the Pope later sanctions the marriage, and back in England the King is reconciled to his new son-in-law. This is romance at the far reaches of the preposterous and its excitement for the reader lies in the tantalizing prospect of illicit love mixed with the other unconventional opportunities that it opens up for a daughter on the road between two fathers. A fortunate traveller indeed.
Another independent daughter appears in Novel 38 (Decameron 3.9) where Giletta of Narbonne, whose father is a physician, manages after his death to cure the King of France of a fistula and is allowed to take her pick of the young men of the court as a reward. The story is well known as the source of Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well, so I will not discuss it in detail here. Again, there are two fathers, but their ability to control the daughter is neutralized, one because he is dead and the other (the King) because he is in her debt: ‘“Thou hast well deserved a husbande (Giletta) even such a one as thy selfe shalt chose”’, he promises (1: 173). Again, there is the discrepancy of social status, but with the genders reversed: here, it is the woman who is low-born and her obstacle is not the paternal veto, but her prospective husband’s disdain for her commonness. Giletta, however, is able to make her own fortune, since she is as skilled in plot contrivance as she is in medicine and her resourcefulness eventually enables her to claim the husband she desires. Stories like this stand at the beginning of a tradition of romantic prose fiction in English, but the promise of fulfilment in the narrative is marked not just by the announcement, ‘Reader, I married him’, though that happens too, but also by the earlier moment when Giletta is in a position to say, ‘Reader, I got to choose’.
Both these stories end happily, but the last in the Boccaccio tranche, Novel 39, which concerns Tancredi and Gismonda, does not. The mixing of comedy and tragedy is a characteristic of the Decameron, as it was to be of Shakespeare, and the intensity of feeling in this story is sharpened by the outcomes of what has gone before. (In Boccaccio it is the first of the tragic tales of Day 4.) In this story, Gismonda is a young widow, ‘lustie, and more wise peradventure than a woman ought to be’, who returns to her father Tancredi’s house when her husband dies and since her father ‘for the love he bare unto her’ doesn’t want her to remarry, she decides to take a secret lover. The man she chooses, Guiscardo, is one of the servants and is of ‘very base birth (but in vertue and honest condicions more noble than the reste)’ (1: 180). When Gismonda discovers that her room can be accessed from a cave, the couple are able to pursue their assignations undetected. Tancredi, however, is also in the habit of visiting his daughter in her room and one day, when she is in the garden with her maids, he sits down on a stool by her bed, draws the curtains and falls asleep. Gismonda and Guiscardo then appear and make love on the bed, while Tancredi decides ‘to kepe him selfe secrete’ so that he can watch them ‘privelie’, which he does as they make love for ‘a great time, as they were wont to do’ (1: 183). (The logistics of this are those of sexual fantasy.) Afterwards, he confronts his daughter, but in a way that suggests that the voyeuristic experience has effected a role reversal: ‘[w]hen hee had spoken those woordes, he kissed her face, weping verie bitterly like a childe that had ben beaten’ (1: 184). The mixture of tenderness and chastisement (the kiss is Painter’s invention) helps to reinforce the suggestion that Tancredi’s private view has been an emasculating experience. This is the moment at which power is transferred from father to daughter. Tancredi’s anguished response is to have Guiscardo executed and then to send his heart to Gismonda in a golden chalice, a gesture that acts both as an emblem of revenge and as a perverse love token, as if to say: I offered you my heart, now have his. Unlike her tearful father, however, Gismonda exercises extreme self-control. She pours poison into the chalice, drinks it, and dies while pressing her lover’s heart to her own. Tancredi is broken by his daughter’s death and allows the two lovers to be buried together.10
It is also significant that in a story about a father’s desire for a widowed daughter she should choose a man of lower social status as her lover. This is a reiterated theme in the Palace, appearing in the stories of Anne of Hungary and the Lady of Burgundy, for example, as well as the Duchess of Malfi. Here, it enables the male relative to conceal his real feelings (perhaps also from himself) beneath a cloak of conventional outrage. But the difference in rank also enables the woman to stake her claims for independent choice, as Gismonda powerfully does in her speech to Tancredi:
First of all you see, that of one masse of fleshe we have all received flesh, and that one Creatour hath created every lyving creature, with force and puissance equally, and wyth equall vertue: which vertue was the first occasion that made the difference and distinction of us all that were borne, and be borne equall, and they that obtayned the greatest part of vertue, and did the workes of her, were called noble, the rest continuing unnoble. (1: 186)
Gismonda’s rhetorical resources are impressive, but it would be futile to argue on the basis of this speech (which follows conventions of its own) that Painter is a social radical. The point is rather that the Italianate tales extend the realm of the possible, in social and sexual terms, despite Painter’s efforts to put a moralistic spin on this dangerously suggestive material. In many of these stories, women can be seen to be agents in their own lives, whether fortunately or unfortunately, and the effect of the strong undercurrents of illicit sex, both in the playful homoeroticism in the novel about the King of England’s daughter and in the more serious tale of Tancredi’s incestuous desire, is to lend some legitimacy to relationships that are illicit only in terms of social difference.
It would be futile, too, to look for much thematic consistency between the classical and the Italianate tales, and my point, anyway, is to argue for a transition from political to social concerns between the two classes of material. Yet Gismonda’s defiant speech on equality certainly resonates with the democratic murmurings of the Livian stories and provides a political frame for the shift of power from father to daughter. That political frame is even more apparent in Giletta’s story, which comes immediately before Gismonda’s. Here we are told that after marrying the reluctant Beltramo, she returns independently to her husband’s country, where ‘perceyving that through the Countes absence all thinges were spoiled and out of order, shee like a sage Ladye, with great diligence and care, disposed his things in order againe [and] … restored all the countrie againe to their auncient liberties’ (1: 174). Giletta certainly has an impressive range of recuperative skills and though the genre may allow the heroine to choose her man, we don’t really expect her to turn into a humanist prince as well. What’s more, the phrase ‘auncient liberties’ has a distinctly republican ring about it. It’s a Livian touch that has no place in Shakespeare’s dramatized version of the story. We might say that this is a point at which ‘novel’ and ‘history’ meet, but we might also say that elements of this kind show that prose fiction works in a different way from drama. It suggests how narrative fiction is able to provide the kind of contextual layering for action, and for interpretation of action, that is difficult to convey in the more compressed, speech-based medium of drama.
At this point we need to ask why Painter should have decided to relocate from the city of civility to the palace of pleasure in the first place. The obvious explanation is that for sound commercial reasons he wanted to target a female readership. Redescribing the ‘histories’ as ‘novelles’, with their connotations of news and chatter, and then retitling the collection, is consistent with that change of direction and is part of the wider agenda of ‘provulgation’ and democratization that we have already seen. Indeed, Painter’s move is probably the first significant moment in English print culture in which a literary form is reshaped by a publishing decision to reach out to a female audience. It is a moment that is repeated not just in the subsequent history of the novel, which is well documented, but eventually in the publication of ‘news’ itself, as John Carey has shown in The Intellectuals and the Masses. Carey describes how Lord Northcliffe, founder of the Daily Mail, introduced a women’s section to the paper, started up the women’s weeklies, Forget-Me-Not and Home Chat during the 1890s, and then launched the first tabloid, The Daily Mirror, in 1903.11 While the social conditions of the two periods are obviously very different, there is a parallel in the way in which a masculine form, the newspaper as ‘history’, is diversified into social and domestic life and broadened from being simply a vehicle for matters of public record to a being medium that could represent itself more intimately as a form of conversation.
If the most striking feature of the composition of Tome 1 of the Palace is its sudden change of direction, there is certainly no mistaking Painter’s intentions at the opening of Tome 2. In the epistle to his employer at the armoury, Sir George Howard, Painter offers a vigorous defence of the public benefits of translation, and the provulgation agenda is continued in the address to the reader, where he claims to provide profit and delight to all degrees from emperors to ‘the rudest vilage girle’ (2: 157). Then, reminding readers that the first tome had opened with a contest between six gentlemen, he announces that ‘[i]n this second parte, in the Forefront, and first Novell of the same, is described the beginninge, continuaunce and ende of a Woman’s Commonwealth’ (2: 159). The story of the Amazons was obviously designed to appeal to a female audience, but it is also evidence of a greater interest in design itself: Tome 2 has considerably more framing, commentary, and other authorial interventions than the first volume does, and this rudimentary cornice suggests another Boccaccian touch. The problem (and this is not very Boccaccian) is that many of these interventions are of an earnestly moralizing kind, and Painter’s efforts to appeal to a female readership are continually being compromised by the stubborn set of platitudes he dispenses as he tries to make sense of his rather shocking material. For the modern reader, there are few more depressing examples of this than his conclusion to ‘The Duchesse of Malfi’: ‘You see the miserable discourse of a Princesse love, and of a Gentleman that had forgotten his estate, which ought to serve for a lookinge Glasse to them which bee over hardy in makinge Enterprises’ (3: 43). The programme of democratization and popularization represented by the Palace may be genuine enough, even if it is driven primarily by commercial interests, but its social and ethical implications are not really within Painter’s control.
This is precisely the opposite of what happens in George Pettie’s spin-off from Painter, The Petite Pallace of Pettie His Pleasure, published in 1576, the first year of ‘The Theater’ and the year following the appearance of the two-volume edition of Painter’s work. Unlike Painter, Pettie goes to considerable trouble to construct a narrative persona who is very much in control: knowing, mannered, and smooth. But the feminist posturings of the Petite Pallace are certainly fake, designed as much for the entertainment of male wits as for the satisfaction of the young gentlewomen to whom they are so assiduously addressed.12 All this is filtered through the fictional device of the paratexts where the stories are presented not by Pettie himself, but by a friend, one ‘R.B.’, who explains in his dedication ‘to the gentle Gentlewomen Readers’ that the tales can’t be compared with ‘the former Pallaces of Pleasure’ because those volumes ‘containe Histories, translated out of grave authors & learned writers: and this containeth discourses, devised by a greene youthfull capacitie, and reported in a manner ex tempore’. In fact, Painter decided to move beyond history, as we have seen, but where he aimed to rework history as a novel, Pettie turns it into something else again: discourse. ‘Novelles’ have oral characteristics too, as I have also suggested, but ‘discourses’ are more artful than news or chatter. In the ‘Letter of G.P. to R.B.’ that follows the dedication, Pettie describes the social context of his stories: they are ‘Tragicall trifles, whiche you have heard mee in sundrie companies at sundrye times report’ (Pettie 1938: 5). But while he wants them to carry an air of effortless spontaneity, he is also ready to acknowledge that they are in fact self-consciously crafted. If anyone objects to ‘some wordes and phrases, used contrary to their common custom’, he says, then think of these as being like ‘new fashions in cutting of beardes, [or] in long wasted doublets’ (6). The new fashion that the stories adopt is the rhetorical one that Lyly was to make famous two years later as Euphuism, and it is characterized by repeated alliteration, matching clauses and phrases of equal length, and figures of parallelism and antithesis—doublets in both senses of the term. It is meant to look good and sound good, especially when Pettie gets close to the reader and whispers in her ear. This is a long way from armourer Painter’s manly common sense.
It is also a long way from Livy. What Pettie does is to rewrite Livian civility as civil conversation, translating history into style, a move that he went on to substantiate in 1581 with his English version of the first three books of Stephano Guazzo’s Civil Conversation. (Pettie produced no English Boccaccio, but Bartholomew Yong, who translated the fourth book of Guazzo’s work in 1586, published his Amorous Fiammetta the following year.) Pettie continues in the direction that Painter followed when he abandoned the city of civility for the palace of pleasure, but in doing so he takes Painter’s alternative title a good deal more literally. The civic or political dimensions of civility that reappear even in Painter’s Boccaccian tales are completely abandoned here and replaced by a world in which the personal is everything. Turning civility into style, Pettie’s ‘discourses’ are underpinned, in the end, by a philosophy of self-gratification. This is not, it should be stressed, what civil conversation meant to Guazzo, but it is what Pettie reduces it to in the Petite Pallace.
The subject matter of Pettie’s collection is entirely classical, but it is given a complete Italian makeover, something that is immediately apparent in the Livian stories he takes over from Painter, ‘Icilius and Virginia’ and ‘Curiatius and Horatia’. In the first of these, Icilius is not a young Roman patrician, but ‘a courtier of Italy’ (110), while in the second story Curiatius goes into Rome every day ‘to deale with marchants in matters of waight’ and on one of these trips spots Horatia ‘sittinge at her Fathers dore to take the aire, and to recreate her selfe with the sighte of those that passed by’ (167). This sounds much more like fourteenth-century Florence or Naples than ancient Rome. Indeed, it sounds exactly like a Decameron tale. What this means is that the Livian stories are reconstructed to foreground the young couples. Where Painter translates Livy, Pettie translates Painter, and when he retitles the story generally known as ‘Appius and Virginia’ by replacing Appius with Icilius, he removes the legal and political confrontation that was its defining feature in both Livy and Painter. What we get instead is courtship strategy, and the obstacle to fulfilment, at least initially, is not the corrupt magistrate who threatens enslavement and rape, but Icilius’s lack of patrimony. Although Appius’s scheme is not completely erased, it is pushed towards the end of the narrative so that it becomes merely an impediment to the satisfaction of the young lovers rather than a context and precondition for the story as a whole. The civic aspect of civility disappears. In Pettie’s version of the story, the last word goes to Virgilia, who is not mutely slaughtered as she is in Painter, but is allowed to make a grand gesture of self-sacrifice, demanding that her father kills her because ‘your power is to weake to wreak the wrong which is offred mee, and your force is to feeble to fence mee from the fury of my foes’ (123). So Pettie’s final Italianate twist to Livy is to take us back to the territory of parental control and the transfer of power from fathers to daughters. The father holds the knife, but under his daughter’s direction.
The second Livian story (Novel 1 in Painter) sets out on a similar course. Much is made of the emotional trials of Curiatius, the young Alban who offers Euphuistic declarations of love to his Roman mistress, only to receive ‘waspish’ replies in return. Then follows a scene reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet, when he attempts to woo Horatia at a masked ball, 13 but Curiatius has less immediate success than Romeo and it is not until he threatens to remove himself to a far country that Horatia relents and they are betrothed. Then comes the civil war which, like the corrupt magistrate motif in the earlier story, is moved to a later point in the narrative so that it can appear simply as a tragic turn of events, rather than as a primary context. Those events are essentially the same as in Painter, but the details are different, as Pettie eyes the female reader. When her brother returns victoriously from the combat, Horatia spots him wearing ‘the coate armour of her Curiatius which she her selfe with needle work had curiously made’ (182). It is a human touch that would have been quite out of place in Painter’s Livy, but what is added in the way of fine colouring is a good deal less than what is removed with regard to matters of rather more substance. After Horatia’s death, Appius is not put on trial and there is no opportunity for the legal and ethical issues of the events to be debated. With Pettie, we are emphatically not in the city of civility.
So what are we to make of Pettie’s translation of Painter? It seems inadequate simply to repeat that the notion of civility has moved from the political to the social, since the social in the Petite Pallace is presented merely as surface. What is really extraordinary about Pettie is the faux-moralistic glossing that he uses to finish off his stories, which looks very much like a parody of Painter’s earnest struggles to impose order on chaos. The ‘moral’ Pettie appends to the story of Icilius and Virginia is quite outrageous: young ladies should avoid tyrants, especially if they are older men; indeed, they should avoid older men altogether, because they will not only be jealous but probably impotent into the bargain. Stick to younger men, then:
And if your parentes in some curious or covetous respecte goe about otherwise to dispose of you, humbly request them that you may chuse where you like, and link where you love, that you may be married to a man rather than mony. (125)
In reducing a story of political oppression and legal corruption, in which a daughter is killed to avoid being raped, to an advertisement for the pleasure principle, counselling that a girl should make sure she gets enough sexual pleasure in marriage, Pettie’s tongue is firmly in his cheek. This is a deliberate travesty of the more serious explorations of the woman’s right to choose in Painter’s Boccaccian tales. And though the ‘moral’ is ostensibly designed for the enjoyment of Pettie’s female readers, the recommendation that they should ignore parental wishes and marry young men with no inheritance on the grounds of their sexual prowess sounds very much as though Pettie is addressing his gentlemen readers, over his shoulder, as it were. That much seems clear from the equally outrageous ‘moral’ of ‘Curiatius and Horatia’, which is that the tragedy is all Horatia’s fault, because if she hadn’t resisted Curiatius for so long, by the time war broke out he would have been a married man and would have been allowed ‘to trye his manhood at home with his wife’ (183) instead of being conscripted. It is not Horatius’s fault, because he would have saved his sister’s soul by preventing her probable suicide. And finally, in his summing up, Pettie reaches an almost Wildean level of ironic insouciance: ‘to avoyde inconveniences, take time in time … and with Horatia hurte not your selves and your friendes with dayntynesse’ (184).
To invoke Wilde here is to test the meaning of the ‘subversive’, because it suggests how the notion of civility might evolve from the matter of government to that of manners while retaining its disruptive edge and, above all, its capacity for questioning both social and literary convention. This is exactly what Pettie is doing in his mockery of tritely moralizing attempts to defuse the explosive potential of the story matter that came into English through Boccaccio and the Boccaccian tradition. And though his immediate target is Painter, Pettie’s tales ultimately have the effect of exposing a contradiction in the Decameron itself, where women are expected to observe an ideal of sexual propriety and yet not be unresponsive to the ardent passions of young men. Painter had declared that histories are ‘like a Mistresse of our life’ (2: 150) because they inspire the male reader to behave virtuously. In Pettie’s case, the mistress is the reader herself, whose imagined sexual im propriety he artfully exploits in order to produce an entirely specious code of conduct in which the real end is the gratification of male desire. That this is subversive is recognized in the third of the prefatory epistles to the Petite Pallace, ostensibly from the printer to the reader. Where Painter had thought Boccaccio ‘worthy of intire provulgation’, the author of the Petite Pallace, the author claims, ‘was not wylling to have it common, as thinkinge certaine poynts in it to bee to wanton’ (8). Pettie was as aware as Ascham that the new Italianate fiction was a Pandora’s box and when he went on to translate Guazzo he would also become aware that ‘civil conversation’ was not just a matter of sweet-talking young ladies, however cleverly this might expose the emptiness of platitudes on correct behaviour, but an ethically grounded ideal of social conduct most fully expressed through the institution of marriage. Recognition of this was to be the next stage in the evolution of the English novella, as we can see from George Whetstone’s Heptameron of Civil Discourses, published the year after Pettie’s translation of Guazzo. But that is another story.
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