Volume I Part 1 (1/2)
The Palace of Pleasure.
Volume 1.
by William Painter.
PREFACE.
The present edition of Painter's ”Palace of Pleasure,” the storehouse of Elizabethan plot, follows page for page and line for line the privately printed and very limited edition made by Joseph Haslewood in 1813. One of the 172 copies then printed by him has been used as ”copy” for the printer, but this has been revised in proof from the British Museum examples of the second edition of 1575. The collation has for the most part only served to confirm Haslewood's reputation for careful editing.
Though the present edition can claim to come nearer the original in many thousands of pa.s.sages, it is chiefly in the mint and c.u.mmin of capitals and italics that we have been able to improve on Haslewood: in all the weightier matters of editing he shows only the minimum of fallibility.
We have however divided his two tomes, for greater convenience, into three volumes of as nearly as possible equal size. This arrangement has enabled us to give the t.i.tle pages of both editions of the two tomes, those of the first edition in facsimile, those of the second (at the beginning of vols. ii. and iii.) with as near an approach to the original as modern founts of type will permit.
I have also reprinted Haslewood's ”Preliminary Matter,” which give the Dryasdust details about the biography of Painter and the bibliography of his book in a manner not too Dryasdust. With regard to the literary apparatus of the book, I have perhaps been able to add something to Haslewood's work. From the Record Office and British Museum I have given a number of doc.u.ments about Painter, and have recovered the only extant letter of our author. I have also gone more thoroughly into the literary history of each of the stories in the ”Palace of Pleasure” than Haslewood thought it necessary to do. I have found Oesterley's edition of Kirchhof and Landau's _Quellen des Dekameron_ useful for this purpose. I have to thank Dr. F. J. Furnivall for lending me his copies of Bandello and Belleforest.
I trust it will be found that the present issue is worthy of a work which, with North's ”Plutarch” and Holinshed's ”Chronicle,” was the main source of Shakespeare's Plays. It had also, as early as 1580, been ransacked to furnish plots for the stage, and was used by almost all the great masters of the Elizabethan drama. Quite apart from this source of interest, the ”Palace of Pleasure” contains the first English translations from the _Decameron_, the _Heptameron_, from Bandello, Cinthio and Straparola, and thus forms a link between Italy and England.
Indeed as the Italian _novelle_ form part of that continuous stream of literary tradition and influence which is common to all the great nations of Europe, Painter's book may be termed a link connecting England with European literature. Such a book as this is surely one of the landmarks of English literature.
INTRODUCTION.
A young man, trained in the strictest sect of the Pharisees, is awakened one morning, and told that he has come into the absolute possession of a very great fortune in lands and wealth. The time may come when he may know himself and his powers more thoroughly, but never again, as on that morn, will he feel such an exultant sense of mastery over the world and his fortunes. That image[1] seems to me to explain better than any other that remarkable outburst of literary activity which makes the Elizabethan Period unique in English literature, and only paralleled in the world's literature by the century after Marathon, when Athens first knew herself. With Elizabeth England came of age, and at the same time entered into possession of immense spiritual treasures, which were as novel as they were extensive. A New World promised adventures to the adventurous, untold wealth to the enterprising. The Orient had become newly known. The Old World of literature had been born anew. The Bible spoke for the first time in a tongue understanded of the people. Man faced his G.o.d and his fate without any intervention of Pope or priest.
Even the very earth beneath his feet began to move. Instead of a universe with dimensions known and circ.u.mscribed with Dantesque minuteness, the mystic glow of the unknown had settled down on the whole face of Nature, who offered her secrets to the first comer. No wonder the Elizabethans were filled with an exulting sense of man's capabilities, when they had all these realms of thought and action suddenly and at once thrown open before them. There is a confidence in the future and all it had to bring which can never recur, for while man may come into even greater treasures of wealth or thought than the Elizabethans dreamed of, they can never be as new to us as they were to them. The sublime confidence of Bacon in the future of science, of which he knew so little, and that little wrongly, is thus eminently and characteristically Elizabethan.[2]
[Footnote 1: It was suggested to me, if I remember right, by my friend Mr. R. G. Moulton.]
[Footnote 2: There was something Elizabethan in the tone of men of science in England during the ”seventies,” when Darwinism was to solve all the problems. The Marlowe of the movement, the late Professor Clifford, found no Shakespeare.]
The department of Elizabethan literature in which this exuberant energy found its most characteristic expression was the Drama, and that for a very simple though strange reason. To be truly great a literature must be addressed to the nation as a whole. The subtle influence of audience on author is shown equally though conversely in works written only for sections of a nation. Now in the sixteenth century any literature that should address the English nation as a whole--not necessarily all Englishmen, but all cla.s.ses of Englishmen--could not be in any literary form intended to be merely read. For the majority of Englishmen could not read. Hence they could only be approached by literature when read or recited to them in church or theatre. The latter form was already familiar to them in the Miracle Plays and Mysteries, which had been adopted by the Church as the best means of acquainting the populace with Sacred History. The audiences of the Miracle Plays were prepared for the representation of human action on the stage. Meanwhile, from translation and imitation, young scholars at the universities had become familiar with some of the masterpieces of Ancient Drama, and with the laws of dramatic form. But where were they to seek for matter to fill out these forms? Where were they, in short, to get their plots?
Plot, we know, is pattern as applied to human action. A story, whether told or acted, must tend in some definite direction if it is to be a story at all. And the directions in which stories can go are singularly few. Somebody in the _Athenaeum_--probably Mr. Theodore Watts, he has the habit of saying such things--has remarked that during the past century only two novelties in plot, _Undine_ and _Monte Christo_, have been produced in European literature. Be that as it may, nothing strikes the student of comparative literature so much as the paucity of plots throughout literature and the universal tendency to borrow plots rather than attempt the almost impossible task of inventing them. That tendency is shown at its highest in the Elizabethan Drama. Even Shakespeare is as much a plagiarist or as wise an artist, call it which you will, as the meanest of his fellows.
Not alone is it difficult to invent a plot; it is even difficult to see one in real life. When the _denouement_ comes, indeed--when the wife flees or commits suicide--when bosom friends part, or brothers speak no more--we may know that there has been the conflict of character or the clash of temperaments which go to make the tragedies of life. But to recognise these opposing forces before they come to the critical point requires somewhat rarer qualities. There must be a quasi-scientific interest in life _qua_ life, a dispa.s.sionate detachment from the events observed, and at the same time an artistic capacity for selecting the cardinal points in the action. Such an att.i.tude can only be attained in an older civilisation, when individuality has emerged out of nationalism. In Europe of the sixteenth century the only country which had reached this stage was Italy.
The literary and spiritual development of Italy has always been conditioned by its historic position as the heir of Rome. Great nations, as M. Renan has remarked, work themselves out in effecting their greatness. The reason is that their great products overshadow all later production, and prevent all compet.i.tion by their very greatness. When once a nation has worked up its mythic element into an epos, it contains in itself no further materials out of which an epos can be elaborated.
So Italian literature has always been overshadowed by Latin literature.
Italian writers, especially in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, were always conscious of their past, and dared not compete with the great names of Virgil, Ovid, Horace, and the rest. At the same time, with this consciousness of the past, they had evolved a special interest in the problems and arts of the present. The split-up of the peninsula into so many small states, many of them republics, had developed individual life just as the city-states of h.e.l.las had done in ancient times. The main interest s.h.i.+fted from the state and the nation to the life and development of the individual.[3] And with this interest arose in the literary sphere the dramatic narrative of human action--the Novella.
[Footnote 3: See Burckhardt, _Cultur der Renaisance in Italien_, Buch II., especially Kap. iii.]
The genealogy of the Novella is short but curious. The first known collection of tales in modern European literature dealing with the tragic and comic aspects of daily life was that made by Petrus Alphonsi, a baptized Spanish Jew, who knew some Arabic.[4] His book, the _Disciplina Clericalis_, was originally intended as seasoning for sermons, and very strong seasoning they must have been found. The stories were translated into French, and thus gave rise to the _Fabliau_, which allowed full expression to the _esprit Gaulois_. From France the _Fabliau_ pa.s.sed to Italy, and came ultimately into the hands of Boccaccio, under whose influence it became transformed into the _Novella_.[5]
[Footnote 4: On Peter Alphonsi see my edition of Caxton's _aesop_, which contains selections from him in Vol. II.]
[Footnote 5: Signor Bartoli has written on _I Precursori di Boccaccio_, 1874, Landau on his Life and Sources (_Leben_, 1880, _Quellen des Dekameron_, 1884), and on his successors (_Beitrage zur Geschichte der ital. Novelle_, 1874). Mr. Symonds has an admirable chapter on the _Novellieri_ in his _Renaissance_, vol. v.]
It is an elementary mistake to a.s.sociate Boccaccio's name with the tales of gayer tone traceable to the _Fabliaux_. He initiated the custom of mixing tragic with the comic tales. Nearly all the _novelle_ of the Fourth Day, for example, deal with tragic topics. And the example he set in this way was followed by the whole school of _Novellieri_. As Painter's book is so largely due to them, a few words on the _Novellieri_ used by him seem desirable, reserving for the present the question of his treatment of their text.
Of Giovanne Boccaccio himself it is difficult for any one with a love of letters to speak in few or measured words. He may have been a Philistine, as Mr. Symonds calls him, but he was surely a Philistine of genius. He has the supreme virtue of style. In fact, it may be roughly said that in Europe for nearly two centuries there is no such thing as a prose style but Boccaccio's. Even when dealing with his grosser topics--and these he derived from others--he half disarms disgust by the lightness of his touch. And he could tell a tale, one of the most difficult of literary tasks. When he deals with graver actions, if he does not always rise to the occasion, he never fails to give the due impression of seriousness and dignity. It is not for nothing that the _Decamerone_ has been the storehouse of poetic inspiration for nearly five centuries. In this country alone, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dryden, Keats, Tennyson, have each in turn gone to Boccaccio for material.
In his own country he is the fountainhead of a wide stream of literary influences that has ever broadened as it flowed. Between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries the Italian presses poured forth some four thousand _novelle_, all avowedly tracing from Boccaccio.[6] Many of these, it is true, were imitations of the gayer strains of Boccaccio's genius. But a considerable proportion of them have a sterner tone, and deal with the weightier matters of life, and in this they had none but the master for their model. The gloom of the Black Death settles down over the greater part of all this literature. Every memorable outburst of the fiercer pa.s.sions of men that occurred in Italy, the land of pa.s.sion, for all these years, found record in a _novella_ of Boccaccio's followers. The _Novelle_ answered in some respects to our newspaper reports of trials and the earlier _Last Speech and Confession_. But the example of Boccaccio raised these gruesome topics into the region of art. Often these tragedies are reported of the true actors; still more often under the disguise of fict.i.tious names, that enabled the narrator to have more of the artist's freedom in dealing with such topics.