4 - ‘Mutata veste’: Griselda between Boccaccio and Petrarch

Summary

In his response to a letter from Boccaccio containing a plea to abandon his studies on account of his age and his already considerable fame, Petrarch gives the first hint as to his translation of the final tale of his friend's Decameron:

Nulla calamo agilior est sarcina, nulla iucundior; voluptates alie fugiunt et mulcendo ledunt; calamus et in manus sumptus mulcet, et depositus delectat, ac prodest non domino suo tantum sed aliis multis sepe etiam absentibus, nonnunquam et posteris post annorum milia. […] Hoc mihi igitur fixum est; quamque sim procul ab inertibus consiliis, sequens ad te epystola erit indicio.

No knapsack is as easy to move as a pen, none more enjoyable. Other pleasures slip away, and bruise as they tickle; the pen tickles as you take it in hand, and it delights when it is put down, and benefits not only its master but many others, often even those who are far away, sometimes even those who follow after thousands of years. […] I have, therefore, settled this, and the next letter to you will be a sign of how far I am from counsels of idleness. (Sen. XVII. 2. 1156/653)

That next letter would contain Petrarch's translation of the tale of Griselda, a tale which did indeed benefit ‘aliis multis sepe etiam absentibus’ (‘many others, even those who are far away’), including Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims. As Harry Bailey says at the tale's close: ‘By Goddes bones, | Me were levere than a barel ale | My wyf at hoom had herd this legende ones!’ (IV. 1212b–d). The following chapters trace the pan-European progress of Patient Griselda, from her first codified appearance at the closing day of the Decameron, through Petrarch's Latin transposition, and finally to her presence in Chaucer's Clerk's Tale. The tale of Griselda's subjection to her husband Walter's cruelties is predicated upon the same intertextual matrix that underpins the tripartite relationship between Petrarch's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, Boccaccio's Filostrato and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. However, there are certain shifts in emphasis which differentiate the Griseldan intertext from the complex translative relations which have been examined thus far.

Perhaps the most fundamental difference concerns Bloomian influence anxiety. As we saw in the second chapter, Bloom posits a pre-Shakespearean, antediluvian golden age centred around Dantean generosity. Yet Petrarch's letter to Boccaccio in which the former rebukes the latter for burning his ‘iuvenilia’ after his having read Petrarch's early vernacular works (Seniles V. 2) may be read as denoting the presence of an anxiety of influence within the generation which immediately followed Dante. Similarly, there is Petrarch's revelation that, when he was a youth, despite being a dedicated bibliophile, he never sought out a copy of the Commedia, for fear of being influenced by it. Such an admission, rather than elucidating Bloom's matrix of benevolent influence, reveals the potentially pernicious shadow that ‘ille nostri eloquii dux uulgaris’ (‘the master of our vernacular literature’, Sen. V. 2. 794/160) could cast over those who followed in what Robin Kirkpatrick terms the wake of the Commedia. Chaucer, however, despite being reluctant (or unable?) to name the true author of his source, relies heavily upon the Filostrato throughout the Troilus, even when he departs from it. Rather than eschewing direct influence from his contemporaries, Chaucer embraces it, just as he asks his ‘litel bok’ to ‘kis the steppes where as thow seest pace | Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace’ (Tr. V. 1786–92).