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Julia
Bolton
Holloway, Sweet New Style:
Brunetto
Latino, Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, Essays,
1981-2010, E-book
GOD'S PLENTY
TERENCE IN
DANTE, BOCCACCIO, CHAUCER, SHAKESPEARE
Homo
sum;
humani
nil
a
me alienum puto.
Heauton Timorumenos 77 (painted on
Michel de Montaigne’s study tower’s ceiling)
’Tis sufficient to say,
according to the proverb, that here is God’s plenty.
John
Dryden on Geoffrey Chaucer
Dedicated to Lucy Walker, who
produced Adelphoe and Phormio in Denver
In the Laurentian Library in Florence are several manuscripts written
out
in Boccaccio’s hand. One, Laurentian Pluteo 38.17, is of all
Terence’s
Comedies. Another,
Laurentian Pluteo 54.32, of all Apuleius’ writings.1 (Plut. 38.17 and
Plut 54.32 are available virtually at http://teca.bmlonline.it/TecaRicerca/index.jsp.)
The
marvellous
mixture
of
two
excellent
African
writers,
Terence
and
Apuleius,
creates
the
Decameron
in Tuscan Italian. Which in turn creates the “God’s plenty” in Middle
English of the Canterbury Tales.
Already,
before
Giovanni
Boccaccio
and
Geoffrey
Chaucer,
Dante
Alighieri,
in
the
same
century,
had
created
the
Commedia
in Florentine Italian, though in exile from that city whose bread has
no salt. Tragedy is about dysfunctional royalty; comedy, instead, is
about healing democracy.2
These authors borrow from Terence his circular theatre and they borrow
from him his plots, his tales. These authors, copying Terence, play
games of dialogue
between noble and labourer,
between women and men, and even children; they play games of tales
within tales, of narrations within narrations, they indulge in
Baktinesque and Gospel Magnificat turnings of the world upside down, in
which the slaves, women and children come out on top to healing
laughter and applause. Such tales like those in Terence manuscripts can
end with 'FELICITER' in
rainbow capitals.
It should be noted that Terence, the freed African slave associated
with the
Scipios in Rome, wrote in such pure Latin that his Comedies
were used throughout Europe in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to
teach that language in monasteries, convents and schools, to both men
and women, and especially to children. England possessed one such (ca.
1150 CE), which came to be owned by St Albans Abbey and is now in the
Bodleian Library (Auct. F.2.13=27603). It is one of
the
thirteen illustrated manuscripts from before 1300 that have survived
for us; these typically provide the actors’ masks on their rack and
often illustrate the plays’ scenes.3 Later manuscripts
could be
lavishly illuminated, giving rise to printed books with woodblocks for
every scene.
There were two strands to the writing of plays. One was of straight
drama. The other came from the law courts of Athens, where logographers
trained defendants in trials to make their own speeches—and who to do
so astutely studied their clients’ psychology and the context of their
crimes in order to present convincingly what was a lie as a convincing
alibi. These became Theophrastus’ Characters
and Terence’s dramatis personae—and
even
Brunetto
Latino’s
examples
of
law
cases
in
the
Athenian,
Roman,
Byzantine,
and
Florentine
agora
in
his
Rettorica
and his Li Livres dou Tresor
III.4 A drama articulated
a grouping of
such character studies, setting the masks, the personae, the
characters, as its machinery, in motion.5 The author
thus multiplied his voices, his own multiple personalities. Terence’s
use of intricate double-plotting created even
further complications and ironical conjunctions.6
For example, in the Adelphoe,
of
the
two
younger
pair
of
brothers,
Aeschinus
is
in
love
with
an
Athenian-born
Pamphila,
who
is about to bear a child, while he pretends
to seize a flute-girl, procuring her in reality for his love-lorn
brother Ctesipho. Sannio is the slave dealer seeking payment for the
flute-girl; Geta is the slave appalled at Aeschinus’ seeming
betrayal.
The older brothers, Demea, the father of both boys, and Micio, who has
adopted the older one, disagree on how to raise them, Demea being
severe, Micio lenient. Sostrata, Pamphila’s mother, laments that her
wronged daughter has no dowry, and she has only a ring dropped by
Aeschinus. All the exchanging and disguising is resolved when the
father and uncle switch places: Demea, who had been harsh, becoming too
lenient.
The Woman from Andros, like
Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale,
tells the story of a shipwreck, the father dying, the baby living. Now
grown, that child, Glycerium, in turn gives birth to a child, its
father’s father Simo preventing the marriage because he believes her to
be the sister of a prostitute. Simo arranges instead for Pamphilus to
marry Chremes’ daughter, with whom Pamphilus’ friend Charinus is in
love. Pamphilus is distraught, nor does the slave Davus’ attempts to
resolve the matter help. Crito arrives and identifies Glycerium as the
lost niece of Chremes and all ends well with the double wedding of
Pamphilus and Glycerium, of Charinus and Chremes’ nameless daughter.
The other four Terentian dramas play similar games with youthful heirs
courting brides and concubines, their fathers instead preoccupied with
rank and dowries. As if in a quadrille danced at Bath in a
Jane Austen novel, the concerns are about class and wealth, in Austen’s
time being about getting a living in the Church or a commission in the
Army. Jane Austen’s mask is Elizabeth Bennett (Austen=Augustinian;
Bennett=Benedictine). Terence’s mask is Geta, the slave, who so
skilfully stage manages the whole that all shall be well. Women and
slaves outside of power yet speak truth to that power. Here is Geta in Phormio defending himself to
Demipho with the argument that he cannot accuse or defend anyone in a
court of law: servom hominem
causam
orare leges non sinunt / neque testimoni dictiost
(‘The laws don’t allow a slave to argue a case in court or to give
evidence’, 292-93). The endings of both novels and plays then have
their protagonists marry and live happily ever after: vos valete et
plaudite.
We should not forget that liturgical dramas of scriptural events and of
saints’ legends were created in the monasteries, whose libraries
contained Terence manuscripts, for the young oblates
to act, thereby learning their Latin and their Gregorian chant
simultaneously—in play. Among these plays was the Winchester/Fleury Officium Peregrinorum
of Luke 24, in which the disguised Christ, with intense dramatic irony,
appears as a pilgrim to Luke and Cleopas, who do not recognize him;
Jesus then dines with them at the inn at Emmaus, blesses, breaks the
bread, and vanishes.7 Other
dramas, such as the Resuscitatio
Lazari and the Visitatio
Sepulchri,
movingly use the scarlet-clad figure of Mary Magdalen, in the first
with Lazarus,
her dying leprous brother. All these dramas were influenced by Terence,
whose manuscripts were copied out in monastic scriptoria and treasured
in monastic libraries. Their continuation, the vernacular cycle plays
for lay audiences enacted by guilds, are also influenced by Terence and
explicitly so in those plays written by the Wakefield Master.8
After Chaucer, there would be a flurry of fine illuminated Terence Comedies
in Paris, often created to educate the King of France’s sons.
Besides the dramatis personae
and scenes of the plays these illustrations, both as manuscript
illuminations and as woodblock prints, could include
a diagram of a theatre, as it was later thought to have been, a
structure somewhat like the Globe of Shakespeare’s production or a
baroque opera house with the spectators ranged in tiers, the mimes on
stage, while Calliopius sings the chorus.9 The 1490, 1493 woodblocks
go
so far as to show the prostitutes plying their trade outside these
theatres, reflecting Plato’s Symposium’s
flute
girls,
the
Gospels’
Mary
Magdalen,
Boethius’
‘whores
of
the
theatre’, and the ‘red
light cum theatre’ districts
of Chaucer’s Tabard Inn and Shakespeare’s London Globe Theatre in
Southwark and New York’s Forty-Second Street.10
I. Terence's Comedies and
Dante Alighieri’s Commedia
For his own theatre of Hell, Dante adopts a structure consisting of
circle upon circle of sinners in whose crimes he, and we, participate.
Their voices create dialogues across time and space. Finally we meet
their ‘author’, the ‘father of lies’, enmeshed in icy silence with
flapping bats’ wings, seeming like a windmill, amidst giants who seem
like towers (Inferno XXXIV).
Dante then turns this tragic theatre upside down, or the right way
round, as he and his now-lost guide Virgil climb into the Antipodes of
Purgatory to find a similar but inverse theatre of comedy, whose
actors/spectators interact upon the cornices of a mountain, now facing
outward instead of inward, to have Dante arrive at Beatrice, leaving
behind Virgil—and tragedy. Ultimately they meet God, the supreme Author
of the drama of mankind, the mirror reverse of bat-like Satan, into
whose playbook all the ‘God’s Plenty’ of the scattered leaves of the
universe are bound and gathered up into one volume (Paradiso XXXIII.85-90, 130-31). God
is thus a mirror to Dante’s Terentian motto, homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto.
Dante first has his mirroring authorial protagonist/sorcerer’s
apprentice journey through lugubrious Hell, guided by Virgil, the poet
of lacrimae rerum, the ‘tears
of things’. The pagan world viewed life
as tragic, to be confronted with Stoicism or Epicureanism. The ambience
of Christendom, instead, saw reality through the lens of mercy, of
redemption, honoring the outsider from power. Needing Latin to be kept
alive for centuries this now Christian cultural ambience turned
naturally to a writer
like Terence, who wrote in a living Latin, the Latin of families, the
Latin presenting the perspectives of slaves, children, and women, all
of whom the Christian Gospels upheld in a similar world upside down.
Hrotsvita and Heloise could feel comfortable, at home, within the pages
of a Terence manuscript. Dante knew this, but elected even further to
write in the vernacular, Florentine, the language which even women and
children had by then come to most readily understand in Tuscany (De vulgari eloquentia,
I.1). He also shows us this culture of oral literature in Italian of
women and children in Paradiso
XV.121-26, in a landscape that foretells
of Boccaccio’s Fiesolan Decameron:
L’una
vegghiava
a
studio
de
la
culla,
e, consolando, usava l’idioma
che prima i padri e le madri
trastulla;
l’altra, traendo a la rocca la
chioma,
favoleggiava con la sua famiglia
di’ Troiani, di Fiesole e di Roma.
One woman watched with loving care the cradle
and, as she soothed her infant, used the way
of speech with which fathers and mothers play;
another, as she drew threads from the distaff,
would tell, among her household, tales of Trojans,
and tales of Fiesole, and tales of Rome.
In doing so, Dante reflects his teacher Brunetto Latino’s choice of
writing in the vernacular. Brunetto’s family came from La Lastra in
Fiesole, Brunetto’s father and brother being notaries to the Bishop of
Fiesole, the Franciscan Filippo da Perusgia, and with him were involved
with embassies to Constantinople,
preserving classical humanism in the Middle Ages, which was then taught
to Guido Cavalcanti, Francesco da Barberino, and Dante Alighieri.
Brunetto translated the classic works of Aristotle and Cicero into
French and Italian but did so while also expecting his students to
learn to write in a living Latin. Joseph Russo has argued
that Dante could have had access to Terence in Verona.11 It is far more
likely that Dante alreadsy knew Terence as a school boy studying under
Brunetto
Latino long before his exile from Florence, in whose libraries can
still be found important manuscripts of Terence predating Dante’s time.
(Florence’s Laurentian Library, http://teca.bmlonline.it/TecaRicerca/index.jsp
has Plut.38.27 and Plut.38.24a; Plut.38.27 being a manuscript of the
ninth to eleventh century, which came to be owned by Giannozzo Pucci,
for whose wedding Botticelli painted a series of paintings illustrating
the Decameron’s Fifth Day’s
Eighth Tale, and then by a Medici son).
One can glimpse Dante’s love of Terence in the commentary written by
his son, Pietro Alighieri, on the Commedia:
Libri titulus est: Comoedia Dantis
Allegherii: et quare sic vocetur, adverta. Antiquitatis in theatro,
quod erat area semicircularis, et in ejus medio erat domuncula, quae
scena dicebatur, in qua erat pulpitum, et super id ascendebat poeta ut
cantor, et sua carmina ut cantiones recitabat, extra vero errant mimi
joculatores, carminum pronuntiationem gestu corporis effigiantes per
adaptionem ad quem libet, ex cujus persona ipse poeta loquebantur ...
et a tale pulpitum seu domunculum, ascendebat poeta, qui de more
villico caneret, talis cantus dicebantur comoedia ... Item quod poeta
in comoedia debet loqui remisse et non alte, ut Terentius in suis
comoediis fecit.12
The title of the book is the Comedy
of Dante Alighieri: and pay attention why it is called so. In antiquity
in the theatre, which was a semicircular area, in the center of which
there was a small edifice, which was called scena, in which was a
pulpit, into which climbed the poet or the cantor, in order to recite
his song or sing it, outside of which where miming actors, who, as the
song was pronounced, adapted the gestures of their bodies to it at
will, according to the person concerning whom the poet was speaking ...
and into such a pulpit or little edifice the poet ascended from which
he sang of common things, therefore such a song was said to be a comedy
... Thus the poet in comedy ought to speak of low things and not high,
just as Terence did in his comedies.
For Dante uses the word comedia,
as
his
son
states,
to
mean
writing
in a humble style. For instance, in
the De vulgari eloquentia, he
says: deinde
in hiis que dicenda occurrunt debemus discretione potiri, utrum
tragice, sive comice ... si tragice canenda videntur, tunc assumendum
est vulgare illustre ... si vero comice, nunc quandoque mediocre,
quandoque humile vulgare sumatur (‘about the possible subject
matters of poetry we must have the judgment to understand whether they
are to be written about in tragedy or comedy ... If they are to be sung
tragically, then the illustrious vernacular is to be used ... Or, if
comically, then sometimes the middle level of the vernacular, sometimes
the low', II.4). In one of his Epistles (XIII.10), Dante notes that the
word comedia signifies
‘rustic song’ (villanus
cantus).
He
add
that
by
nature
comedy
‘deals with certain adverse conditions but
ends happily, as appears from the comedies of Terence’ (comedia
vero
inchoat
asperitatem
alicuius
rei,
sed
eius
material
prospere
terminatur,
ut
patet
per
Terentium
in
suis
comediis). Concerning its diction, comedy employs an
unstudied and low style (vero remisse
et humiliter), and here Dante supports his comments by quoting
Horace’ Ars Poetica (93-96). Then he
finally justifies the title of his own work:
et per hoc patet quod Comedia
dicitur presens opus. nam si ad materiam respiciamus, a principio
horribilis et fetida est, quia Infernus, in fine prospera,
desiderabilis et grata, quia Paradisus; ad modum loquendi, remissus est
modus et humilis, quia locutio vulgaris in qua et muliercule
comunicant.
And from this it is clear that the
present work is to be described as a comedy. For if we consider the
subject-matter, at the beginning it is horrible and foul, as being
Hell; but at the close it is happy, desirable, and pleasing, as being
Paradise. As regards the style of language, the style is unstudied and
lowly, as being in the vulgar tongue, in which even women-folk hold
their talk. And hence it, is evident why the work is called a comedy.13
In the Purgatorio, Dante has
Statius ask Virgil where Terence is, and Virgil replies that he is in
the first circle of Hell, a circle reserved for virtuous pagans like
himself:
‘dimmi dov’è Terenzio
nostro antico,
Cecilio, Plauto e Varro, se lo sai;
dimmi se non dannati, ed in quel
vico.’
‘Costoro e Persio, ed io, a altri
assai,’
rispuose il duco mio, ‘siam con
quel Greco
che le Muse lattar più
ch’altre mai,
nel primo cinghio del
carcere cieco.’ (XXII.97-105)
‘Tell me where is our ancient Terence, and Caecilius
and Plautus, where is Varius, if you know;
tell me if they are damned, and in what quarter.’
‘All these and Persius, I, and many others,’
my guide replied, ‘are with that Greek to whom
the Muses gave their gifts in greatest measure.
Our place is the blind prison, its first circle.’
It is with this encounter with the mask of Statius that we first learn
overtly that Dante has modeled each encounter of two with a third, as
it happens again and again in the Commedia,
upon
that
other
drama,
the
Officium
Peregrinorum (Purgatorio
XXI.7-9). He equates Statius, the secretly baptized Roman poet, with
the disguised Christ, Virgil as the elderly Cleopas, himself as the
younger Luke, the omniscient writer of the text, presenting himself as
the foolish participant in the text, as one whom Christ in the Gospel
chides for
being slow and dull of heart not to recognise the Saviour.14 Indeed,
the Officium
Peregrinorum
takes pains to note that an oblate or the abbot is chosen ad
representandum Christi. He is not Christ but he acts the role,
the
mask, the disguise of Christ, further disguised as a pilgrim who is not
recognized as Christ. In a similar mode, Dante can play games with real
people acted out as masks in a fiction, among them his own teacher,
Brunetto Latino, or pagan poets, such as Homer, Virgil, and Statius.
Terence populates his plays with masks of daughters, wives, and
prostitutes, with merchants, soldiers, sailors, sons, and fathers, the
full spectrum of the social order, as in the prologue of Eunuchus:
qui
magis
licet
currentem
servom
scribere,
bonas matronas facere, meretrices
malas,
parasitum edacem, gloriosum
militem,
puerum supponi, falli per servom
senem,
amare, odisse, suspicari?
(36-40)
How is it more permissible to present a running slave or good
matrons or wicked courtesans or a greedy parasite or a boastful soldier
or babies being substituted or an old man being deceived by his slave
or love or hate or suspicions?
Following the same pattern, Dante adds nuns, monks, and friars,
Emperors and Kings, Popes and Cardinals. Dante places these
Theophrastian and Terentian characters, modeled upon historical persons
within a further machinery, that of teaching Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics,
acquired for Florence by Brunetto Latino, his Master, who translated
the text into the vernacular French and Italian, as well as that of the
Gospels and Christ’s world-upside-down parables.
In the Commedia, we listen to
dramatic voices, but in Italian, to a dramatic dialogue, as if from a
Terence play. We listen to voices which are placed even as if in
Terence’s mansions, in the various circles of Hell, Purgatory, and
Paradise. Aristotle defines tragedy as a work where the recognition,
the anagnorisis, comes too
late, whereas in comedy it is timely. In
Hell, for instance, the knowledge comes too late, as in the scene with
Guido Cavalcanti’s father, in Inferno
X.61-72,15 while in Purgatorio and
Paradiso, knowledge comes in
time
for redemption, as with the recognition by Statius of Virgil to Dante’s
laughter of delight (Purgatorio
XXI.97-136).
Though Dante alludes to Terence’s Comedies
in his writings, it has been suggested that he may not have read the
plays. The mention of Chremes in Epistola
XIII, quoted above, is taken from Horace’s interpretation of Terence. A
reference in Inferno
XVIII.133-36 to the courtesan Thais, a character
in the Eunuchus, shows that
Dante’s use of the play may derive from Cicero’s De amicitia, not from the Eunuchus
itself;16 Hrotsvita also
uses powerfully the figure of
Thais from the writings of the Desert Fathers. But, given his arguments
that we saw above, concerning Terence’ humble style, we can note the
ways in which he switches codes: the poet displays remarkable
versatility, from the proud Ghibelline speech, which as logographer he
concocts for Farinata in Inferno
X, to the common words ‘giri . . . il
villan la sua marra’ (‘let the peasant turn his mattock’), about
a contadino used in Brunetto
Latino’s Inferno XV.96, which
echoes the discourse between laboring
Menedemus and critical Chremes of the Heauton
Timorumenos (53-174).
We can find the Terentian/Gospel hilarity in the account by the
Dominican St Thomas Aquinas of the life of the Franciscan founder, St
Francis of Assisi. Lady Poverty was wed to Christ, then no one wanted
the afflicted widow until St Francis came and married her. Immediately,
all his followers hurriedly pursued her, as if she were the village
prostitute.17 Giotto or a
follower painted that episode in
Assisi’s Lower Church: Lady Poverty in rags, gaunt, emaciated, with
thorns about her, being married to Francis, the singer of love songs to
her.18 Shadowed behind that
hilarity are
those Terentian episodes of the proud poor maidens who are ultimately
revealed to be Athenian citizens with dowries. Boccaccio’s, Petrarch’s,
and Chaucer’s Grisilda is shaped in their mould.
Francis weds
Povertà
The
Marquis
weds
Griselda,
far
right
Despite its tragic ending, the real-life story of Piccarda Donati
resonates with Terentian comedy. Dante places the Donati family
siblings, to whom he was related by his marriage to their cousin Gemma
Donati,
separately: Corso Donati in Hell (discussed in Purgatorio XXIV.82-87), Forese
Donati in Purgatory (Purgatorio
XXIII.40-XXIV.25, 74-103), and Piccarda Donati in Paradise (Purgatorio XXIV. 10-15, Paradiso III.16-123).
Piccarda’s vocation as a virgin nun was brutally violated by her
brother Corso, who kidnapped her from her Clarissan house and forcibly
married her off to his associate Rossellino della Tosa. We find her,
still faithful to her Vows in spirit in the sphere of the Moon in
Paradise.
Ultimately the feliciter of
Dante’s text shall be St Bernard’s Hymn to the Virgin, heaping paradox
upon paradox, that she is daughter of her son, this pregnant maiden,
this madre ragazza, who, as Theotokos, births God in Paradiso
XXXIII.1-39, upon whom Dante and his Beatrice, the wife of another,
gaze.
The Florence of Dante and Boccaccio put into ethical practice the Seven
Acts of Mercy, giving drink to the thirsty, feeding the hungry,
clothing the naked, sheltering the stranger, visiting the prisoner,
tending the sick, burying the dead, building vast hospitals for
pilgrims and for abandoned babies, such as the Buonomini di San
Martino, the Arcispedale Santa Maria Nuova, the most beautiful Ospedale
degli Innocenti, which taught the boys skills and gave the girls
dowries, and the Arciconfraternita della Misericordia members, who tend
to
the sick and dying and who bury the dead, who laid the first stone of
the new Duomo seven hundred years ago, and whose feet each Maundy
Thursday the Cardinal washes. Those ‘world-upside-down’ structures
continue into the present and, side by side with the upstart Medici
ascendancy, shaped a Florence which carefully copied out Terence
manuscripts. The Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana with its manuscripts of
Terence, Apuleius, Dante and Boccaccio, bound in red kermes
leather
with horn labels, brass bosses and iron chains anchoring them to
reading desks, in Michelangelo’s design for them, was open
democratically to the public.
II. Terence's Comedies and
Boccaccio’s Decameron
We are not sure of Dante’s actual reading of Terence, though we can be
certain of his knowledge of him. We know that Giovanni Boccaccio not
only read all of Terence, but he even copied out not only the Commedia of Dante but also all the Comedies of Terence in his own
hand, the latter into the
manuscript, Laurentian Plut. 38.17 (http://teca.bmlonline.it/TecaRicerca/index.jsp).
To
create
his
works,
such
as
the
Teseida
and the Decameron, Boccaccio
blended
together classical writers, among them Statius, Apuleius, and Terence,
as
well as
his beloved Dante.
Again, like Dante, he creates tales within tales, making use of the dramatis personae,
the rank of masks, of daughters, wives, prostitutes, merchants,
soldiers, sailors, sons, and fathers, adding to these masks those of
nuns, monks, and friars. The seven women and the three men, who meet in
the church of Santa Maria Novella in plague tide, and who then journey
with their quarrelling tale-telling servants to the abandoned villas
around Fiesole telling ten tales, each day for a fortnight, create thus
a hundred tales, mirroring Dante’s hundred cantos of the Commedia.
From the midst of tragedy and chaos of the city of Florence during the
plague they come to its beauteous countryside and repeat what Dante had
already described, of women telling tales while they rocked the cradle
and spun the yarn in Fiesole in centuries past. Pampinea, the first
Queen to be crowned to preside over the first day, appoints Dioneo’s
manservant, Parmeno—from the rotuli
of Terence’s plays and racks of
masks—to be steward and to organize their lodgings and meals for each
day, while Chremes as a name is re-cycled for Boccaccio’s Tenth Day’s
Eighth Tale. The voices of Terence, the conversations Dante holds with
those whom he encounters in the
Cantos, the tales Boccaccio's brigata
of ten tell, multiply into the
countless dialogues of countless masks within their dramas, ‘God’s
Plenty’.
Drama had been seen as therapy in the classical world, especially at
the great theatre by Aesculapius’ temple at Epidauros. Similarly the
telling of tales is about healing and salvation, as with Scheherazade
in a Thousand and One Nights.
Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale
is a tale much like those in Terence, of abandoned babies restored to
their parents. Bruno Bettelheim, survivor of Auschwitz, wrote The Uses of Enchantment, advocating
the telling of tales for children.19 Leslie
Silko
showed
how
the
telling
of
tales
among
Native
people
functions
as
consolation.20 Germaine
Greer in her Guardian essay,
‘Grandmother’s
Footsteps’, eloquently advocates the telling of such tales.21
While
Stith
Thompson22 and
Vladimir
Propp23 showed how
these tales share in specific formulae, as indeed we find is the case
in Terence, Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Shakespeare. Nor should we
forget a marvelous bit of self-referentiality in Boccaccio’s Sixth
Day’s First Tale on how not to tell a tale, particularly in confusing
the characters and jumbling the plot, that follows upon the servants’
row, in which Licisca boasts of women’s sexual exploits and
infidelities to put down Tindaro. Chaucer will play the same joke with
his offending, aborted ‘Sir Thopas’ in the Canterbury Tales. We remember such
moments of seeming incompetence and muddle-headedness on stage
engineered by the hero-slaves cum author, who save the day and
organize the plot in Terence's Comedies
and in Luke's Gospel.
Let us now discuss some parallels between Terence’s Comedies and Boccaccio’s Decameron in more detail. In
Terence’s Hecyra,
Pamphilus, in love with the courtesan Bacchis, is married off to
Philumena against his will. She becomes pregnant by him when, in his
drunkenness, he rapes her, not knowing who she is, and takes a ring
from her by force. To hide her pregnancy she leaves her mother-in-law,
Sostrata, and returns to her mother, Myrrina. Laches believes that the
marriage breakdown is due to his wife, not to his son. The child is
born, and Pamphilus acknowledges his wife and son only when the ring is
recognized by Philumena’s mother, Myrrina, through the kindness of
Bacchis, the courtesan with the heart of gold. All ends well, even
though, as Pamphilus says, in an exception to the rule of comedies
(866-69), the parents and his servant ignore the dark secret of his
formerly unknown consummation of marriage.
In the second prologue to the play, Terence requests that it inspire
others to write to follow suit: mea
causa causam accipite et date silentium, / ut lubeat scribere aliis
mihique ut discere / novas expediat posthac pretio emptas meo
(‘For my sake listen to my plea and grant me silence, so that other
authors may be encouraged to write and it may be worth my while in the
future to put on new plays bought at my own expense,’ 55-57). Boccaccio
indeed retells the story in the Decameron,
as
does
Shakespeare
also
in
All’s
Well That Ends Well.
In Boccaccio’s Third Day’s Ninth Tale, Neifile, the Queen for that day,
recounts the story of the unwilling husband, Count Bertrand of
Roussillon, his pregnant wife, Gillette of Narbonne, and a ring.
Gillette wins Bertrand as her husband through curing the King of France
of a fistula; Bertrand is reluctant and replies to the king that he
would never marry a she-doctor. Rejected Gillette then follows Bertrand
to Florence where, disguised as a poor pilgrim, she bears him twins.
Shakespeare next turns the tale back into a play with Bertrand and
Helena/Diana for Philumena and Bacchis in Terence, and doubles the
rings: Helena’s is the gift from the king whom she has healed, to
exchange with Bertrand’s ancestral one. Then Helena appears on stage
not bearing two sons in her arms but heavily pregnant (with twins?).
Both Boccaccio and Shakespeare dwell on the Count Roussillon’s
snobbishness in not wedding/bedding the low-born Helena, while in both
works the King of France disagrees with Roussillon’s arguments, as
later would Louis XIV in supporting Molière and his Tartuffe. Shakespeare then ends the
play with an epilogue straight out of Terence:
[King] The king’s a beggar, now
the play is done.
All is well ended, if this suit be
won,
That you express content; which we
will pay,
With strife to please you, day
exceeding day:
Ours be your patience then, and
yours our parts;
Your gentle hands lend us, and
take our hearts.
Exeunt
omnes. (All’s Well, V,
Epilogue, 335-40)
But the story of the unwanted wife and the ring in Terence, Boccaccio,
and Shakespeare has very ancient roots in drama: a similar literary
device is found in ancient Sanskrit drama, with a notable example in
Kālidāsa's play Abhijñānaśākuntalam
('The Recognition of Shakuntala'), which is based on an episode from
the earlier Indian epic, the Mahabharata.
As
the
title
suggests,
The
Recognition of Shakuntala
revolves around the idea of recognition. It tells the story of King
Dushyanta who, while on a hunting trip, meets Shakuntala and marries
her. A mishap befalls them when he is summoned back to court:
Shakuntala, pregnant with their child, inadvertently offends a visiting
sage and incurs a curse, by which Dushyanta will forget her completely,
until he sees the ring he has left with her. On her trip to Dushyanta’s
court in an advanced state of pregnancy, she loses the ring and has to
come away unrecognized. The ring is found by a fisherman, who
recognizes the royal seal and returns it to Dushyanta, who then regains
his memory of Shakuntala and sets out to find her. After more travails,
they are finally reunited.
All these versions of the tale, whether in India or in Rome or in
Florence or in London, lend themselves to analysis with Stith
Thompson’s Folklore Index
(1955-58) and Vladimir Propp’s ‘Functions’
(1968): ß = absentation; g = interdiction; d = violation; e =
reconnaissance; z = delivery; h = trickery; B = mediation; C =
beginning counteraction; ↑= departure; D = first function of the donor
(testing or interrogation); E = the hero's reaction; F = provision or
receipt of a magical agent [ring/rings]; G = spatial transference
between two kingdoms; ↓ = return; O = unrecognized arrival; M =
difficult task; N = solution; Q = recognition; W = wedding, concluding
with the ‘FELICITER’ of Terence manuscripts.
Emilia tells the Second Day’s Sixth Tale. It is a story in which
disaster at first threatens, then it is resolved, much in the manner of
The Woman from Andros, with
the recognition of a shipwrecked child. Set in the times of Manfred and
the Sicilian Vespers, in the landscapes of Lunigiana and Sicily, it has
one very moving speech by the lost son, Giannotto/Giusfredi, who is
imprisoned for having seduced his host’s daughter. Giannotto/Giusfredi
speaks to Currado, father of the girl:
'Currado', he replied, 'neither
the lust for power nor the desire for riches nor anr other motive has
ever led me ro harbour treacherous designs against your person or your
property. I loved your daughter. I love her still, and I shall always
lover her, because I consider her a worthy object of my love (amai tua figliuola
e amo e amerò
sempre, per ciò che degna la reputo del mio amore). And,
if in wooing her, I was acting in a manner that would commonly be
regarded as dishonourable, the fault I committed was one which is
inseparable from youth (la giovinezza
congiunto), In order to eradicate it one would have to do away
with youth altogether (che se via si
volesse
tòrre, converebbe che via si togliesse la giovinezza),
Besides it would be considered half so serious as you and many others
maintain, if old men would remember that they once were young, and if
they would measure other people's shortcomings against their own and
vice versa. (se
i
vecchi
si
volessero
ricordare
d’essere stati giovani e gli altrui difetti colli
loro misurare e li loro cogli altrui). I committed this fault
not as your enemy, but as your friend. It has always been my wish to do
what you are now proposing, and if I had thought you consent
would be forthcoming, I would have asked you long ago for your
daughter's hand. . . . Send me back to
prison and have me treated as you like. Whatever you do to me, I shall
always love Spina, abnd for her sake I shall always love and respect
her father' (tanto
sempre
per
amor
di
lei
amerò
te e
avrotti in
reverenza).24
These words epitomize Terence’s arguments in many of his comedies, from
Andria to Adelphoe. This is clearly a
Terentian sentiment to be echoed
also in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale,
‘Wostow
nat
wel
the
olde
clerkes
sawe/
That
“who
shal
geve
a
lovere
any
lawe?”’
(I.1163-64).
Terence’s Phormio and the Decameron’s
Fifth Day’s Tenth Tale share the joke, in which what is criticized by
one participant turns out to be a mirroring wrongdoing, which
effectively silences both. Terence’s Phormio
would have been better titled the Geta,
for
he,
the
slave,
is
the
true
hero
and
resolver
of
difficulties.
He
has
been
left
in
charge
of
two
sons,
Antipho
and
Phaedria,
sons of
Demipho and Chremes respectively, two brothers, who are away on
business. Demipho returns first, furious that Antipho has married
dowryless Phanium, through the parasite Phormio’s ruse that an Athenian
citizen left orphaned must be married to her kin. Phaedria is in love
with a flute girl, Pamphila, and cannot buy her from her slave-dealer,
Dorio. In fact, Chremes/‘Stilpho’ has gone to Lemnos seeking his
daughter by a bigamous marriage only to find that she and her mother
had already come to Athens where her mother died, leaving Phanium in
the care of Sophrona, her old nurse. Geta contrives the price for
Pamphila by begging for the dowry for Phanium to marry Phormio. There
is wonderful stage business, to be copied by Shakespeare in Winter’s Tale,
where Geta tells Antipho and Phormio of overhearing, off-stage, of
Chremes telling Demipho of parenting Phanium. Phormio then informs
Chremes’ first wife, Nausistrata. She next defends Phaedria’s
acquisition of the flute girl on the basis that Chremes had thought he
could get away with having two wives.
In Boccaccio’s Fifth Day’s Tenth Tale, told by Dioneo, both wives in
Perugia are being unfaithful to their rich elderly husbands. The story
ends with Pietro de Vinciolo agreeing to let his wife’s lover share
supper with them, and more than that. Likewise in Phormio,
Nausistrata invites the parasite to join them at Chremes’ table. A
similar tale is found in Boccaccio’s Seventh Day’s Eighth Tale, told
again by Neifile, of aged Arriguccio Berlinghetti and his young,
unfaithful and noble wife, Sismonda, where again silence is the
response and resolution. (Compare this tale with the Fourth Day’s Fifth
Tale on
Lisabetta/Isabella and the Pot of Basil, mirrored in Keats’ poem on the
same and in Pre-Raphaelite Holman Hunt’s painting of his dying pregnant
wife,25 which, however,
lacks an analogue in Terence but does
show the power of these tales to be mirrored/echoed through time,
generation upon geneeration.)
Medieval society had adopted classical society’s priestly celibacy for
their clergy. Both Boccaccio and Chaucer give stories concerning
scandals of clergy abuse. The Terence play which comes closest to this
is the Eunuch. Thais, the
courtesan, is given by the captain Thraso (who has a dissolute parasite
companion, Gnatho), an Athenian-born girl, who had been raised with her
as her sister. Phaedria, who is in love with Thais, presents her the
old eunuch Dorus. Chaerea, Phaedria’s brother, in love with Thais’
young ward, disguises himself as a eunuch instead, on the suggestion of
the slave Parmeno, and enters the house to seduce the maiden. Chremes,
her Athenian brother, then arranges her marriage to Chaerea.
In that play a scene caused Terence’s fellow-Carthaginian Augustine’s
concern (City of God
2.7), where Chaerea, the young disguised hero, is sexually aroused
through seeing the erotic painting of Danae where Zeus comes to her in
a shower of gold. Dante’s rendering of the real-life tale of Paolo and
Francesco is in the tragic, though Christian, Arthurian mode and that
scene of pornographic adultery does not partake of the imitatio
Terentii, except for this scene, so deplored by Augustine, when
the
pair read together of the story of Lancelot and Guinevere’s adultery
against their king and her husband, Arthur, which becomes Inferno V.137’s meretricious line, ‘Galeotto fu il
libro e chi lo scrisse’
(‘A
Gallehault
indeed,
that
book
and he who wrote it, too’). Boccaccio even draws that scene
as well as writing it out in Riccardian 1035:
This
engenders further Boccaccio’s:
COMINCIA
IL
LIBRO
CHIAMATO
DECAMERON
COGNOMINATO PRENCIPE GALEOTTO, NEL
QUALE SI CONTENGONO
CENTO NOVELLE,
IN DIECE DÌ DETTE DA SETTE
DONNE
E DA TRE GIOVANI UOMINI
Here begins the book called Decameron, otherwise known as
Prince
Galeotto, wherein are contained one hundred stories told in ten days by
seven ladies and three young men.
Dante and Boccaccio have combined Terence’s scene from the Eunuch
with the Matter of Arthur, where, in the story of Guinevere and
Lancelot, their assignation takes place through the machinations of the
Prince Gallehault, and in the story of Tristan and Isolde, the boatman
who leads that pair astray into adultery is likewise named
‘Gallehault’; Dante’s Inferno
V is a ‘Galeotto’ to Paolo and Francesca in Ravenna and even to himself
and ourselves. Terence is writing plays for the red-light district; the
writers of Arthurian romances, Dante, and Boccaccio are writing ‘pillow
books’.
III. Terence's Comedies and
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
Chaucer never mentions either Terence or Boccaccio, even though he does
refer to Dante and Petrarch. Arguably his clearest use of Terence’s Comedies is of the dramatis personae, where the General Prologue
presents each pilgrim tale-teller assembled at the Tabard Inn and
ambling along the Canterbury road from London. For Chaucer takes up the
Boccaccian frame tale of tales being told, marshaling his pilgrims
together in a flock, not by the Parson, but by Harry Bailly, the
innkeeper of the Tabard, and includes himself amongst their number on
the journey to Canterbury. The General
Prologue
(and especially so in the illuminated Ellesmere Manuscript),
thus
functions like the Masks upon the Rack, so typical of early illustrated
Terence manuscripts, such as that at Oxford (Bodleian Library Auct.
F.2.13=27603).
The Table below gives the correspondences between Terence’s characters
and Chaucer’s:
| Mask |
Terence, Comedies |
Chaucer, Canterbury Tales |
| Meretrix |
Bacchis, Heutontimorumenos
Thais, Eunuchus
Philotis, Bacchis, Hecrya
Bacchis (muta), Adelphoi |
Wife of Bath
Prioress |
| Obstetrix |
Lesbia, Andria |
|
| Nutrix |
Canthara, Heutontimorumenos
Sophrona, Eunuchus
Sophrona, Phormio |
|
| Anus |
Syra, Hecyra
Canthara, Adelphoi |
Wife of Bath |
| Ancilla |
Mysis, Andria
Pythias, Eunuchus |
|
| Virgo |
Blycerium (muta), Andria
Antiphila, Heutontimorumenos
Pamphila (muta), Adelphoi |
Second Nun
Prioress |
Matrona
|
Sostrata, Heutontimorumenos
Nausistrata, Phormio
Sostrata, Myrrina, Hecyra
Sostrata, Adelphoi |
Guildsmen's Wives
Wife of Bath |
Servos, Laborator
|
Davos, Byrria, Andria
Syrus, Dromo, Heutontimorumenos
Parmeno, Sanga, Eunuchus
Davos, Geta, Phormio
Parmeno, Sosia, Hecyra
Geta, Parmeno (muto), Adelphoi
|
Cook; Ploughman; Miller, Reeve; Yoeman; Manciple |
| Lorarius |
Dromo, Andria |
|
| Leno |
Dorio, Phormio
Sannio, Adelphoi |
|
| Libertus |
Sosica, Andria |
Franklin |
| Narvarchus |
|
Shipman |
| Mercator |
|
Merchant, Gildsmen |
| Medicus |
|
Physician |
| Puer |
Dromo, Adelphoi |
|
| Adulescens |
Pamphilus, Charinus, Andria
Clitipho, Clinia, Heutontimorumenos
Phaedria, Chaeria, Chremes, Antipho, Eunuchus
Antipho, Phaedria, Phormio
Pamphilus, Hecyra
Aeschinus, Ctesipho, Adelphoi |
Squire |
| Eunuchus |
Dorus, Eunuchus |
Monk; Clerk; Pardoner; Summoner; Friar; Nuns' Priest; Canon's
Yoeman;
Parson |
| Advocati |
Hegio, Cratinus, Crito, Phormio |
Man of Law |
| Parasitus |
Gnatho, Eunuchus
Phormio, Phormio |
|
| Miles |
Thraso, Eunuchus |
Knight |
| Senex |
Chremes, Crito, Andria
Chremes, Menedemus, Heutontimorumenos
Demes seu Laches, Eunuchus
Demipho, Chremes, Phormio
Laches, Phidippus, Hecyra
Demea, Hegio, Adelphoi |
Reeve |
Harry Bailly, like
Calliopus,
like
Chaucer himself, defies pigeon-holing.
In this arrangement, as had Dante and Boccaccio before him,
Chaucer
adapts the masks of Classical Latin drama to the divisions of Christian
culture which kept aside God’s servants in sexual abstinence, as if
eunuchs, and which divided society into the Three Estates of Ploughman,
Knight, and Monk, each presented in the General Prologue.26 The Ellesmere Manuscript of
the Canterbury Tales27 and the Luttrell Psalter28 are both exquisite—except for
the comic faces and distorted bodies of
some of their characters. Then
one
realizes
that
both
illuminators,
and
also Chaucer himself,
were familiar with Terence’s Comedies,
in
which
this
is
the
tradition.
Terence,
as
much
as
Aristotle,
gave
medieval
culture
a
mirror
in
which
to
view
itself,
albeit
at
times
a
distorting cruel funhouse, a writer’s desk with pigeonholes, a set of
mocking masks to don.
The Ellesmere Canterbury Tales
Miller
The Luttrell Psalter, Psalm
96,
fol. 173
Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde
based on Boccaccio’s Filostrato
is magnificently illustrated in the Cambridge Corpus Christi College
manuscript, with Chaucer in a pulpit structure, a domuncula, preaching
the tale to his king, Richard II, who is clad in cloth of gold, and to
his court; behind them can be seen the scene of the prisoner exchange
of the tale.
In a word, it is constructed as the Middle Ages perceived
Terence’s theatre to be with Chaucer as Calliopus.
The
Canterbury Tales is also filled with references to drama, to
theatre. The Knight’s Tale,
based on Boccaccio’s Teseida,
combines both tragedy and comedy. Its tale of two young men, cousins,
in love with the same maiden, is resonant of many Terentian plots./30
Arcita is tragically killed following his victorious duel/tournament
played out in an elaborate theatre built by Theseus, structured like a
windrose, a compass, where the mansions become temples, replete with
intense allegorical meanings (CT KT
I.1885-1892), while Palamon lives and marries Emelye, following the
funeral games, ‘Ne how the Grekes
pleye / the wake pleyes’ (I.2959-60).
We recall that two of Terence’s plays, Hecyra and Adelphoe,
were performed at the funeral games for Lucius Aemilius Paulus. This
classic construct is echoed in medieval plays in England, such as the Castle of Perseverance, where the domunculus becomes a castle,29
and in the Cornish dramas30.
The Miller’s Tale
machinery involves the play of Herod and the Noah play (I.3384,
I.3513-82). The Wife of Bath enjoys going ‘to playes of myracles’
(III.558). While the Franklin’s Tale
plays with the subtle and noble theatre of dinner entertainments, of
ships seeming to sail on oceans and hunting scenes (V.1141-50,
1189-1204), evocative of Boccaccio’s Fifth Day, Eighth Tale, painted by
Botticelli for the wedding of Giovanozzo Pucci.
Chaucer, though he never mentions Boccaccio, is Boccaccio in
English.
He
rewrites Boccaccio’s Filostrato
as Troilus and Criseyde and
Boccaccio’s (Statius’) Teseida
as his Knight’s Tale.31 the first story of the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer thus
creates of the Canterbury Tales
a sequel as it were, a copy, of Boccaccio’s Decameron.
In addition to Chaucer’s intertextual relationship with Boccaccio and
thus with Terence, there are his acknowledged debts to Dante and to
Petrarch: the Wife of Bath (CT
III.1125-1130) uses Dante’s Convivio
(IV.iii), to argue that ‘gentilesse’
is
not
from
the
hereditary
nobility
but
accessible
to
all
through
the
practice
of
virtue,
an
argument
also
found in Boethius, and influenced by both Terence and the
Gospels; the Friar’s Tale
against the Summonour (CT
III.1520) mentions Dante; the Monk (CT
VII.2407-2462) retells Dante’s infernal tale of Ugolino of Pisa (Inferno XXXIII.1-90), and the
Second Nun (CT VIII.36-49)
translates Paradiso
XXXIII,1-39’s invocation to the ‘Mayde
and
Mooder,
doghter
of
thy
Sone’. Chaucer passes off Boccaccio’s final tale of the Decameron
as Petrarch’s, for Petrarch had admired it so much that he had
translated it into Latin, concealing its true source; Chaucer gave it
to his Clerk of Oxenforde to tell (CT
V.31-33, 1147-48).
To discuss the Decameron and
the Canterbury Tales is to
understand the second as using analogues of the first, rather than as
considering the Decameron as
an open source. The Hundred Tales of the Decameron veer from courtly romance
to raucous fabliau; and so do the Canterbury
Tales. In addition, we see in Chaucer the legends of saints and
the kind of moral and allegorical romance, found in the pages of the Golden Legend and the Gesta Romanorum. The Miller’s, Reeve’s, and Cook’s Tales are more fabliaux than
romance, more Boccaccio than Terence. The Miller’s Tale
is of a January/May marriage, and so is that of the Merchant. In
Boccaccio, this pattern even becomes the tale of the Tenth Day’s Fifth
Story, where the Lady asks the would-be lover for the miracle of a May
garden in January, which will become the Franklin’s Tale, given a local
habitation and a name in Brittany.
But let us pass over the parallels between Boccaccio and Chaucer in
this chapter on Terence’s influence upon both of them, and instead
delight in the fullness of all these authors, their humanity, their
celebration of diversity. E. E. Cummings best caught the Terentian
aspects of boundary transgression, of pyramid busting, of pilgrimage
liminality, in Chaucer’s great comedy:
honour
corruption
villainy
holiness
riding in fragrance of sunlight
(side by side
all in a singing wonder of
blossoming yes
riding) to him who died that death
should be dead
humblest and proudest eagerly
wandering
(equally all alive in miraculous
day)
merrily moving through sweet
forgiveness of spring
(over the under the gift of the sky
knight and ploughman pardoner wife
and nun
merchant frère clerk
somnour miller and reve
and Geoffrey and all) come up from
the never of when
come into the now of forever come
riding alive
down while crylessly drifting
through vast most
nothing’s own nothing
children go of dust.32
Let me also end with a fine aphorism in a Florentine Humanist Terence
manuscript, now in the British Library, that can embrace all our
writers, Terence, Luke, Dante, Boccaccio,
Chaucer, and Shakespeare: quid est
comedia, comedia est imitatio vite, speculum consuetudinis et imago
veritatis (London, British Library, Harley 2526, formerly owned
by Randulphi de Ricasoli of Florence).
Notes
Editions and translations used in this essay are: Terence, Publius Terenti Afer, Comoediae
recognovervnt
brevique
adnotatione
critica
instrvxerunt,
ed. Robert Kauert and Wallace M.
Lindsay (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979)
Oxford
Classical Texts; The Lady of Andros, The
Self-Tormentor, The Eunuch. Sargeaunt, J, trans. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986) Loeb Classical Library 22; Phormio,
The
Mother-in-Law,
The
Brothers, trans. J. Sargeaunt (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1983) Loeb Classical
Library
23; Dante Alighieri, La
Commedia
secondo
l'antica
vulgata (Mondadori, Milan, 1966); Tutte
le
opere, ed.Luigi Blasucci, Luigi, ed.
(Florence, Sansoni, 1987); The Divine Comedy, trans.
Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam, 1902-1986); Giovanni
Boccaccio,
Opere,
ed.
Cesare
Segre (Milan: Mursia, 1978); The Decameron, trans.
C.H.
McWilliam,
(Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1991); Geoffrey
Chaucer, The
Riverside
Chaucer, ed. Benson, Larry D. Benson and
F.N. Robinson (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1987); William Shakespeare, The
Complete
Works. ed. Hardin Craig
and David Bevington (Glenview: Scott,
Foresman, 1973).
1 Italian
Humanist
manuscripts
of Terence derive
from
Angelo
Poliziano’s
copy,
Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze, Banco Rari 97, made from the
fifth-century Vatican 3226 Bembino manuscript in rustic capitals.
2 Victor
Turner, The Ritual
Process: Structure and Antistructure (Chicago: University of
Chicago
Press, 1968) discusses pilgrimage and liminality
which can be applied equally well to comedy, in particular to Terence,
in which social
distinctions are annihilated, as in Moliere’s Tartuffe where the maidservant
Dorine saves the day, and likewise the butler in James M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton.
3 Oxford, Bodleian Library Auct.
F.2.13=27603,
is
published
in
Major Treasures in the
Bodleian Library:
Medieval
Manuscripts in Microform, 9, ed. W.O. Halsall (Oxford, 1978),
and
discussed
in
Otto Pächt and J.J.G. Alexander, Illuminated
Manuscripts
in
the
Bodleian Library (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981),
III.16;
Leslie
Webber
Jones and
C.R. Morey,
The Miniatures of the Manuscripts of Terence Prior to the
Thirteenth
Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1913).
4 Julia Bolton
Holloway, Twice-Told Tales: Brunetto
Latino and Dante Alighieri (Berne: Peter Lang, 1993), 259-85.
5 Mary Hatch Marshall, 'Boethius’
Definition of Persona and
Medieval Understanding of the Roman
Theater',
Speculum 26 (1950), 471-82.
6 Sir William
Empson, ‘Double
Plots,’ Some Versions of Pastoral (New York: New
Directions, 1960), 27-88.
7 Julia Bolton Holloway, The Pilgrim and the Book: A Study of
Dante, Langland and Chaucer (Berne: Peter lang,
1995),
27-55.
8 The
Towneley
Plays.
(1897) England, George F., ed. Early English Text
Society, Oxford. EETS 71.
9 Millard
Meiss, French Painting
in the time of Jean de Berry: The Limbourgs and their Contemporaries (Braziller,
New
York, 1974) passim and plates 7, 19, 63-64,
171-199, 201-221, 226-227, 230.
10 Arthur M. Hind, An
Introduction
to the History of Woodcut.
(New York: Dover, 1963);
Pierre Courcelle, La
Consolation de
philosophie dans la tradition littéraire, antécedents et
posterité de Boèce
(Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1967).
11 Joseph Russo, 'Did
Dante Know Terence?', Italica 24 (1947),
217.
12 Pietro Alighieri,
Commentum
di
Pietro
Alighieri
nelle
redazioni ashburnhamiana e ottoboniana, eds. Roberto Della Vedova,
Roberto e
Maria Teresa Silvotti (Florence: Olschki, 1978),
pp. 8-9.
13 Dante Alighieri, De
vulgari eloquentia,
in Tutte le
opere, ed. Luigi Blasucci (Florence: Sansoni, 1981).
14 Holloway, The
Pilgrim
and
the
Book:
A
Study
of Dante, Langland and Chaucer (Berne: Peter Lang, 1987),
pp.
27-84.
15 Erich
Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation
of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Garden City:
Doubleday, 1957), pp. 151-177.
16 Russo, p. 212.
17 Auerbach, 'St. Francis of Assisi in
Dante’s ‘Commedia’, Scenes
from the Drama of
European
Literature (New
York:
Meridian, 1959), pp. 79-98.
18 Meiss, Painting
in
Florence and Siena after the
Black Death: The Arts, Religion and Society in the Mid-Fourteenth
Century, (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p.
109, fig. 102.
19 Bruno
Bettelheim, The
Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and
Importance
of Fairy Tales (New York: Random House, 1977).
20 Leslie
Silko, 'Language and Literature from the Pueblo Perspective', Tales within Tales: Apuleius through Time,
ed.
Constance
S.
Wright
and Julia Bolton Holloway (New York: AMS Press,
2000), pp. 141-156.
21 Germaine
Greer, ‘Grandmother’s
Footsteps’,
Guardian
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/may/15/germaine-greer-old-wives-tales).
22 Stith
Thompson, Motif-Index
of
Folk
Literature.
A
Classification
of
Narrative
Elements
in
Folktales,
Ballads,
Myths,
Fables,
Mediaeval
Romances,
Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest- Books and
Local
Legends (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 6 vols.
23 Vladimir
Propp, Morphology
of
the
Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott (Austin: University
of Texas
Press, 1968).
24 Giovanni Boccaccio, Opere,
ed.
Cesare
Segre (Milan:
Mursia, 1963-78),
pp.
116-17; Decameron, trans. G.M. McWilliam
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), pp. 119-120.
25 William Holman Hunt
buried his wife Fanny in Florence's 'English'
Cemetery, in a tomb he sculpted for her.
26 Georges
Duby, The
Three
Orders:
Feudal
Society
Imagined, trans. Arthur Goldhammer
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Jill Mann, Chaucer's
Medieval
Estates
Satire
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
27 Theo
Stemmler, The Ellesmere Miniatures of the Canterbury
Pilgrims (Mannheim: University of Mannheim, 1977), Poetria
Mediaevalis 2.
28 Janet
Backhouse, ed. The
Luttrell
Psalter (London: British
Library, 1989).
39 David Anderson,
Before
the
Knight’s
Tale:
Imitation
of
Classical
Epic
in
Boccaccio’s
Teseida
(Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1988).
30 David
Bevington, The Macro Plays: The Castle of Perseverance,
Wisdom,
Mankind: A
Facsimile Edition with Facing Transcriptions (Washington, DC:
Folger Shakespeare Library, 1972).
31 Richard
Southern, The
Medieval Theatre in the Round
(London: Faber and Faber, London, 1957); Markham Harris, The Cornish
Ordinalia. A Medieval Dramatic
Trilogy (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1969).
32 E.E. Cummings, Complete Poems, 1904-1962, ed.
George J. Firmage (New York: Liveright, 1991), 52, p. 661.
Go to:
Brunetto Latino and Dante
Alighieri
I Bankers
and Their Books: Italian Manuscripts in French Exile
II Brown
Ink,
Red Blood: Brunetto Latino and the Sicilian Vespers
III The
Vita
Nuova's Pilgrimage Paradigms
IV
Stealing
Hercules' Club: Inferno XXV's Metamorphoses
Geoffrey Chaucer
V Black and
Red Letter Chaucer
VI Fact
and Fiction: Women in Love
VII
Convents,
Courts and Colleges
VIII The
Tomb of the Duchess Alice
Terence, Dante, Boccaccio,
Chaucer, Shakespeare
IX God's Plenty: Terence in Dante,
Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare
Newest
Epilogue:
Attica State Prison, Boethius the Exile, Dante the Pilgrim
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