Boccaccio\'s Decameron Day Four Story Two Begins

Boccaccio's Decameron Day Four Story Two begins on an ironic note. Among the plague-shy aristocrats who are Boccaccio's assembled storytellers, the King has specifically requested a sentimental love tragedy to suit his mood, and requests it directly from Pampinea. But as Boccaccio tells us, Pampinea is in no mood to oblige the King straightforwardly here: "she decided, without straying from his theme, to tell a humorous story. She began in this way: The man who is wicked and thought to be good / Can do no wrong, for no one believes that he would." There are two things worth noting at the outset then: that to some extent the comedy in this tale may represent a sentimental and sad love-story misdirected into the low stuff of comedy (due to the King's request and Pampinea's refusal to grant it, which invites us to question whether in some way the story does grant it) and also that we are in the realm of moralized tales -- the couplet at the beginning reassures us that the story that follows will have a moral purpose, despite what will turn out to be its somewhat racy particulars. Pampinea claims that the story is to demonstrate "the hypocrisy of the monks" and reveal "exactly what it is that they keep hidden beneath their bulging habits" which sounds like another way of hinting that the clerical celibacy must conceal a rampant priapism. But the monk in Pampinea's tale is hardly typical: he is in fact an inveterate liar and all-around wicked fellow from Imola, named Berto della Massa. When he soon exhausts the patience of Imola, he moves to Venice -- that "receptacle of all sorts of wickedness," Pampinea says -- where he transforms himself into a monk and "in this disguise pretended to lead an ascetic life, praising repentance and abstinence." The comedy, of course, hinges upon this fake monk meeting an extravagantly attractive and extravagantly stupid woman, Madonna Lisetta or "Lady Dimwit," as Pampinea puts it.

It is at this point in the narrative that we begin to understand the method: for Boccaccio comedy is grotesque, it is the opposite of refined. In a word -- which is particularly necessary, given the Venetian setting and the ultimate involvement in the plot -- it is carnivalesque. This means the frank sexuality is accompanied by a level of lurid cartoonishness, and indeed the strategem whereby the fake monk gets Lady Dimwit into bed is a perfect example of the sort of inverted sublime of Boccaccio's grotesque humor -- Brother Alberto sets it up so that she believes she will be visited by the Angel Gabriel, then instead he turns up (pretending the Angel has possessed his body) and proceeds to ravish Madonna Lisetta. Much as this skirts potential blasphemy, in Boccaccio's hands we are reassured of Alberto's wickedness and moreover its inverted parody pays a sort of homage, particularly as the Roman Catholic humanists of the Renaissance were apt to emphasize the incarnation of Jesus Christ -- the specific bodily character of his existence and his sacrifice -- as being the thing that justified the Renaissance's renewed interest in things otherwise potentially profane. In any case, the entire thing seems more like a Venetian carnival episode, considering the story as a whole hinges upon a succession of masks, donned by an inveterate liar. Alberto pretends first to be a monk, then to be the Angel Gabriel -- then in punishment he is turned into a "wild man" (like a traveling circus freak) and dressed as a bear, and publicly stripped and humiliated before the crowd. In other words, it proposes a set of moralistic tableaux related to the idea of mendacity being like a set of disguises, which will eventually lead to disaster and public shame.