Carol Falvo Heffernan - The Comic Inheritance of Boccaccio and Chaucer

Boydell & Brewer
D. S. Brewer
Chapter Title: The Comic Inheritance of Boccaccio and Chaucer
Book Title: Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

Book Author(s): CAROL FALVO HEFFERNAN
Published by: Boydell & Brewer, D. S. Brewer. (2009)
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2
The Comic Inheritance
of Boccaccio and Chaucer
T hat we still read the comic tales of Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales and have lost or forgotten those of many other medieval
writers is partly an accident of history but mostly a testament to the art of the
two fourteenth-century authors, one, the foremost spokesman of humanism
that appeared in late medieval – or, as Italian scholars prefer, early Renais-
sance – Italy and the other, a poet who gave his name to a golden period in
early English literature, the Age of Chaucer. Boccaccio’s comic novellas and
Chaucer’s fabliaux recreate and make us laugh at the sights, sounds, smells,
and, most of all, the voices of fourteenth-century European country and town
life. Their tales contain no heroes, just characters whom we recognize as
ourselves – no better, possibly worse. When we read the comic tales of each
of these writers we “surrender to lower faculties” for a time and forget the
“serious affairs of life.”1
Although the distinctive individual talents of Boccaccio and Chaucer are
what keep their tales alive while those of other medieval writers are long
forgotten, their comic narratives are, nonetheless, part of a continuum that
reaches back into the comic spirit of antiquity. This chapter will explore ideas
about comedy and comic works that would have been available to both four-
teenth-century writers. The texts that I cite in this chapter arose at different
times in response to different social, cultural, and aesthetic pressures; some
of them were far better known than others, some were hardly known at all.
Nearly all of the texts concerning comedy are pertinent to the comic tales of
the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales and taken together form a matrix
of inherited ideas about the genre.
Trying to understand the comic impulse of Boccaccio and Chaucer, espe-
cially in literary historical terms, is a daunting enterprise. One needs to
consider the relationship of their comic tales to the vernacular literature of
their day, the influence of Boccaccio’s novellas on Chaucer’s English fabliaux,
and the connection their comic tales have to the body of comic literature
1 Paul G. Ruggiers, “A Vocabulary for Chaucerian Comedy: A Preliminary Sketch,” in Medi-

eval Studies in Honor of Lillian Herlands Hornstein, ed. Robert Raymo and Jess Bessinger
(New York; New York University Press, 1976), 208.
The Comic Inheritance 21
that is anterior – not just the late twelfth- and thirteenth-century Old French
fabliaux, but the classical inheritance as well. That descends from Aristotle’s
theory of comedy, through the Roman plays of Plautus and Terence, to the late
classical grammarians, and on through twelfth-century Latin elegiac comedy
and observations on the comic mode by such secular medieval writers as
Dante and John of Garland. Efforts have been made to study Elizabethan
dramatic comedy within the context of the European comic tradition, but little
has been done along these lines for the non-dramatic comedy of Boccaccio
and Chaucer.2 In fact, there has been little direct study of the comic in either
writer and only recently has there been an effort to acknowledge the influence
of the Decameron on the Canterbury Tales, tale collections which contain
most of the comic work of Boccaccio and Chaucer respectively (although
many narratives in each of the collections are “serious”).3
Aristotle’s Theory of Comedy
The views of antiquity on the subject of comedy were handed down to the
Middle Ages by the grammarians of the late classical period. They drew
largely on ideas Aristotle expressed in his Poetics and in his Nicomachean
Ethics and Rhetoric, some of which entered into the Hellenistic period after
being synthesized by Theophrastus, Aristotle’s pupil and popularizer, and
Menander, whose first play was performed in 321 BC, the year after Aristo-
tle’s death. Aristotle’s definition of comedy appears in the Poetics:
As for Comedy, it is (as has been observed) an imitation of men worse
than average; worse, however, not as regards any and every sort of fault,
but only as regards one particular kind, the Ridiculous, which is a species
of the Ugly. The Ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not
2 For the Elizabethans, see Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Eliz-
abethan Drama (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), Marvin T.
Herrick, Comic Theory in the Sixteenth Century (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois
Press, 1964), and Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Comedy – The Influence
of Plautus and Terence (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1994). For the Middle Ages,
especially Chaucer, see Versions of Medieval Comedy, ed. Paul G. Ruggiers (Norman,
Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977), Ruggiers, “A Vocabulary,” 193–225, and
Kathleen A. Bishop, “The Influence of Plautus and Latin Elegiac Comedy on Chaucer’s
Fabliaux,” The Chaucer Review 35.3 (2001): 294–317.
3 The early texts on Chaucerian comedy are T. W. Craik’s The Comic Tales of Chaucer
(London, England: Methuen & Co.: 1964) and Helen Storm Corsa’s Chaucer: Poet of
Mirth and Morality (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1964). More
recently a collection of essays has been edited by Jean E. Jost, Chaucer’s Humor: Critical
Essays (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994). An influential statement of the influence of
the Decameron on Chaucer’s Tales is Helen Cooper, “Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales: Reviewing the Work,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 19 (1997), 183–210.
22 Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio
productive of pain or harm to others; the mask, for instance, that excites
laughter, is something ugly and distorted without causing pain.
(Poetics, 5.49a 32–34)4
Pietro Valla, in a 1499 commentary on Plautus, makes the first known use of
Aristotle’s definition of the comic:
Aristotle says that comedy is an imitation of the worse sort, not as regards
every vice but rather the ridiculous part of ugliness. For the ridiculous is
a certain fault and ugliness devoid of pain, as a ridiculous face is ugly
without being painful.5
Although the Greek text of Aristotle’s Poetics must have been copied during
the classical and Byzantine periods, the version of the Poetics that influenced
the Middle Ages was Arabic, not Greek.6
The Aristotelian notion of the comedic quality of the ridiculous was prob-
ably well known before Valla cited it in the fifteenth century, since Aristotle’s
idea was summarized by the Arabic philosopher Averroes (1126–1198), the
great commentator on all the major works of Aristotle:
In arte vituperandi non quaeritur imitatio secundum omne genus vitii
et turpis tantum, sed eius vitii omnis, quod ridiculum est: nempe quod
quidem vile est ac turpe, de quo dolendum non est.7
[The target of ridicule is not every kind of base and contemptible behavior
but the ridiculous kind, namely that which is base and contemptible but
not painful.]
4 Aristotle, Aristotle on the art of poetry, a revised text with critical introduction, transla-
tion, and commentary by Ingram Bywater (Oxford, 1909). All subsequent references to the
Poetics cite this edition. Related to the ridiculous in comedy were three basic comic char-
acter types – the braggart or impostor (alazon), the ironical person (eiron), and the buffoon
(bomolochos) – which Aristotle sketched in his Nicomachean Ethics and Rhetoric. These
appear as the stock characters of Greek New Comedy.
5 Quoted and translated by Herrick, 8, from Plautinae uigenti comediae emendatissimae
cum accuratissima ac luculentissima interpretatione doctissimorum uirorum Petri Vallae
placentim ac Bernardi saraceni Veneti (Venice, 1499), Aiir.
6 Richard Janko has argued that the Tractatus Coislinianus, a medieval Greek manuscript of
the tenth century (No. 120 in the De Coislin collection in Paris) is a summary of the lost
second book of the Poetics which treats comedy. See Aristotle, Poetics I with the “Tractatus
Coislinianus,”A Hypothetical Reconstruction of “Poetics II,” and the Fragments of the “On
Poets,” translated by Richard Janko (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co.,
1987).
7 Averroes, Averrois paraphrases in librum poeticae Aristotelis Iacob Mantino hispano
hebraeo medico interprete. Ex libro qui Venetiis apud Iunctas anno MDLXII prodiit, ed.
Fridericus Heidenhain, in Jahrbücher für classiche Philology, Supplementband 17 (1890):
351–82.
Although Chaucer names Averroes in the Physician pilgrim’s portrait in

the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales (I, 433), it would be difficult
to prove that Chaucer had access to Aristotle’s linking of the comic to the
ridiculous; nonetheless, we do know that Hermannus Alemannus, a monk
who lived in Toledo, translated Averroes’ Arabic commentary on Aristotle’s
Poetics into Latin by 1256 and that twenty-three manuscripts of this transla-
tion survive. His translation, the most important aesthetic statement of the
scholastic period, was important enough to be printed in 1481. References
to Averroes’ commentary on the Poetics appear soon after its translation into
Latin. Roger Bacon (1214?–1294), the English scientist and philosopher,
referred to the translation by “master Hermannus,” and Benvenuto da Imola,
one of the fourteenth-century commentators on Dante, made extensive use
of Hermannus’s translation of Averroes’ “Arabic Poetics.”8
Related to Aristotle’s association of comedy with the ridiculous is the
idea expressed in Poetics, 4, that comedies represent the art of blaming, ars
vituperandi, and are written in lampooning verses. This view of Aristototle’s
Averroes seems to have taken to mean satire, a type of comedy that he would
have found consistent with some early Arab poetry which is full of invec-
tive; the idea can be seen as possibly applicable to Chaucer’s satiric portraits
of the Prioress, Monk, Friar, and Wife of Bath which appear in the General
Prologue of the Canterbury Tales (provided one allowed for blaming and
lampooning that remained sufficiently genial).
Apart from Aristotle’s definition of comedy, the Poetics (3–4) offers his
views on the origins of comedy in the Greek world. Aristotle understands
comedy to be a form that developed from the religious festival procession
(komos) ending in a phallic song; such songs evolved into indecent jests and
observations on the social scene. As for the etymology of the word “comedy,”
he offers two etymologies both of which support his views about the social
status of the characters who appear in comedies as opposed to those found
in tragedies. According to the first derivation of the word, “comedy” comes
from kome, the Megarian word for “village” (Megarian referring to the
Dorian people who invaded Greece in 1100 BC and remained linguisti-
cally and culturally distinct within the Greek world, especially in Sicily,
Sparta, and Corinth). Thus, “comedy” is understood to be an oide (song)
about villagers. Cheek by jowl with this etymology, Aristotle offers another
from the verb “to revel” (komazein). That comedy, according to Doric tradi-
tion, should be a song about villagers Aristotle explains by pointing to the
komoidoi (“comedians”) as having been loud revelers who headed out to the
countryside after being kicked out of the city precincts because of their loud
singing. Either derivation is possible, and each harmonizes with the notion
8 Medieval Literary Criticism: Translations and Interpretation, ed. O. B. Hardison, Jr., Alex
Preminger, Kevin Kerrane, Leon Golden (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1974), 86.
that the characters of comedy are of lower social status than those of tragedy,
who are always noble and often heroes out of history. Chaucer’s high-spirited
country girl, Alisoun, a veritable force of nature who appears in the Miller’s
Tale, could only be linked by marriage to a tradesman like the old carpenter,
John, never to a lord: “she was a prymerole, a piggesnye,/ For any lord to
leggen in his bedde,/ Or yet for any good yemen to wedde” (I, 3268–70).9
Her tale is told by the churlish miller who leads the procession of Canterbury
pilgrims out of town with his loud bagpipes. The countryside, the world of
kome, is a place of greater freedom than the city. Chaucer’s comic tale set
in the city – the Cook’s Tale – is left an unfinished fragment and provokes
speculations as to why. Did Chaucer die before he could finish it? Perhaps,
the city setting was less suited to komos than the country. Aristotle makes the
distinction between the characters proper to tragedy and comedy in Poetics,
2.48a 17–18:
This difference it is that distinguishes Tragedy and Comedy also; the one
would make its personages worse, and the other better, than the present day.
This statement reiterates the distinction between the social status of the
personages who appear in comedy and tragedy included in his definition of
comedy (Poetics, 5.49a 32–34; see above).
Besides being about the lowly rather than the noble, Aristotle observed
that the characters of comedy are invented, not real, an idea that Boccaccio
expresses in his Esposizioni, as we shall see later in this chapter, when he
states that comedy is about events that never chanced to happen, but could
have – an interesting variant of Aristotle’s dictum that comic characters are
invented. “In comedy,” Aristotle comments, authors proceed differently from
those producing tragedy:
This has become clear by this time: it is only when their plot is already
made up of probable incidents that they give it a basis of proper names,
choosing for the purpose any names that may occur to them, instead of
writing like the old iambic poets about particular persons.
(Poetics, 9.51b 11ff.)
Furthermore, Aristotle commended for comedy a happy ending such as is

found in the Odyssey. The happy ending “belongs rather to Comedy, where
the bitterest enemies in the piece (e.g., Orestes and Aegisthus) walk off good
friends at the end, with no slaying of any one by any one” (Poetics, 13.53b
36–39). For Aristotle, Homer is the father of both comedy and tragedy:
9 Chaucer’s works are cited from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed.
(Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). All subsequent citations to Chaucer refer
to this edition.
Homer’s position, however, is peculiar: just as he was in the serious style

the poet of poets, standing alone not only through the literary excellence, but
also through the dramatic character of his imitations, so too he was the first
to outline for us the general forms of Comedy by producing not a dramatic
invective, but a dramatic picture of the ridiculous; his Margites in fact stands
in the same relation to our comedies as the Iliad and Odyssey to our tragedies.
(Poetics, 4.48b 34–49a 2)
The Comedy of Antiquity
Although the performance of classical stage drama essentially disappeared

during the Middle Ages, knowledge of the drama of antiquity persisted.
In England there are references to theaters in the twelfth century like that
found in an anonymous Anglo-Norman commentary on the Psalms (c. 1165):
Ci reprent il ceals ki les theatres soloient hanter por les gius et por les
mervelles veoir, que um i faisoit les encantemenz et de la glise ne del
servise deu ne prenderoient il guarde, et ne pourquant de plus beles miracles
et de plus hautes aventures poent il la oir lire et canter quil ne verront el
theatre, na la carole ne a behurc.10
[Here he blames those in the habit of attending theatres to see plays and
marvels, for there they make magic and pay no attention to the church or
the service of God, although they can hear there the reading and singing
of finer miracles and greater adventures than they will see in the theatre,
or in the round-dance, or at a tournament.]
Notwithstanding such references to theaters, historians are generally inclined

to discount the claim that there were theaters in twelfth-century England.
Medieval texts, however, of the Greek comedies of Aristophanes have been
found in Europe, most notably a manuscript dating from the eleventh century
written in Ravenna which alone of all manuscripts of Aristophanes’ plays
contains the entire eleven plays.11 By the thirteenth century there were 170
manuscripts of Aristophanes in the Latin west, the most numerous of which
were of his Plutus. The Roman comic playwright Terence was a favorite
school author and well known throughout the Middle Ages.12 The Terentian
characteristics of the tenth-century biblical plays of Hroswitha of Gander-
sheim make this clear. O. B. Hardison, Jr., believes that “beginning in the
10 Cited and translated by Keith Bate, “Twelfth-Century Latin Comedies and the Theatre”
in Papers of the Liverpool Latin Seminar, ed. Francis Cairns (Liverpool, England: Francis
Cairns, 1979), 252.
11 Louis E. Lord, Aristophanes: His Plays and Influence (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1925),
103–04.
12 Doran, 13.
fourteenth century classical drama began to be read and imitated.”13 At that

time (considered the high Middle Ages in England but the early Renaissance
in Italy) it was becoming possible to go to the texts that were the actual
sources of the information contained in such encyclopedias and floralegia as
Isidore of Seville’s seventh-century Encyclopedia and Vincent of Beauvais’
thirteenth-century Speculum Morale.
The comic plays of Terence (and Plautus as well) contained intrigue plots
with the manipulations of a character (or characters) shaping the action. In
Plautus’s Casina, a husband and wife plot against each other; in his Epidicus,
the intriguer is a wily slave. Madeleine Doran points out about the intrigue
plots of Roman comedy that those of Terence tend to be double plots: “Terence
built some of his plays by ‘contaminating’ one plot with another.”14 Marvin
Herrick notes that in the Prologue to Terence’s Self-Tormentor he speaks of
having turned the two single plots of his Greek sources into a duplex argu-
mentum, generally taken to refer to “two closely related actions involving
two sets of characters.”15 Both Doran and Herrick are concerned with the
likely influence the complicated plots of Roman comedy had on English
Renaissance drama, but quite possibly the comic Roman plots of intrigue
together with Terence’s penchant for double plots also had an influence on the
much admired double plot of Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale, the fabliau wherein the
lover-intriguer’s (that is, Nicholas’s) plotting to get the old husband (John)
out of the way with the preposterous story of the coming flood in order to
make love to his young wife (Alisoun) intersects with the counter-plotting
of the insulted, unsuccessful lover-intriguer (Absolon) and his attempt to
gain revenge for humiliation. As far as I know, the possible influence of
Terence has gone unnoticed in discussions of the Miller’s Tale’s double plot
– Chaucer, to be sure, could have imported the technique of doubling (if
he imported the technique at all) from romance where many plot lines are
complexly interlaced.
In his eminently readable study, Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus,
Erich Segal asserts that “Laughter is an affirmation of shared values. It is …
a social gesture. Comedy always needs a context …”16 Plautus, he argues,
gets his laughs by “Momentarily breaking … society’s rules.”17 Thus, in the
face of Roman pietas, which included loyalty owed family, many Plautine
comedies dealing with family life breach the responsibilities due it, as in a
scene from Plautus’s play, Trinummus, wherein the man of the house leaves
home after straightforwardly instructing his wife to worship their house-
13 Medieval Literary Criticism, ed. Hardison, 39.

14 Doran, 154.
15 Herrick, 112.
16 Erich Segal, Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1968), vii.
17 Segal, 9.
hold god – “Be sure a wreath adorns our household God, dear wife” – but
concludes his pious instructions with a “wish-she-were-dead joke” delivered
as an aside to the audience: “And may I see you dead as soon as possible.”18
The spartan, puritanical atmosphere of the Rome of Plautus’s day is to some
degree matched by the constraints placed on fourteenth-century medieval life
in Italy and England by the Church; indeed, Chaucerian comedy and that of
Boccaccio often enough elicit laughter through limited license. There is a
moment in the Miller’s Tale, for instance, where Chaucer playfully juxtaposes
obscene and sacred actions to comic effect in his description of the union
with Alisoun, the carpenter’s wife, for which Nicholas has schemed so long:
Withouten wordes mo they goon to bedde,
Ther as the carpenter is wont to lye.
Ther was the revel and the melodye;
And thus lith Alison and Nicholas,
In bisynesse of myrthe and of solas,
Til that the belle of laudes gan to rynge,
And freres in the chauncel goone synge. (I, 3650–56)
The contrast between the friars in church singing their hymns of praise to
God on waking at dawn and Nicholas and Alisoun concluding their night’s
labors in the carpenter’s bed calls attention to the existence of a world the
lovers ignore.
Kathleen Bishops’s concerns about the influence of Plautus on Chaucer’s
fabliaux center on “shared thematic features” and “the continuing pres-
ence of Roman comic stock figures” (i.e., the amans senex [old lover] and
servus callidus [wily slave]).19 In studying Chaucer’s fabliaux against the
background of the Roman comedies of Plautus and medieval Latin elegiac
comedy, Bishop observes, “when considering the Old French and Chaucerian
fabliaux in juxtaposition, it becomes clear that … the written Latin material
that Chaucer knew so well, both directly and indirectly, is vitally, inextri-
cably, and undeniably linked to his comic poems.”20 The earliest scholar to
call attention to the relationship of Old French fabliaux to classical drama and
medieval elegiac comedy was Edmond Faral.21 His observations were, for the
most part, dismissed by the scholars of his day.
18 Segal, 26.
19 Bishop, “The Influence of Plautus and Latin Elegiac Comedy,” 2.
20 Bishop, 1.
21 Edmond Faral, “Le Fabliau latin au moyen âge,” Romania 50 (1924): 321–85.
The Latin Grammarians
The grammarians of the late classical period (i.e., Diomedes, Evanthius,

Donatus) were important transmitters of ancient thinking about drama to the
Hellenistic and Imperial periods as well as to the Middle Ages. The essays
on ancient drama by Diomedes, Evanthius, and Donatus were the principal
conduits by which ideas about the drama of antiquity reached the Middle
Ages and early Renaissance. Diomedes concerned himself with tragedy;
Evanthius and Donatus, with comedy. The fourth-century grammarian and
commentator on the plays of Terence, Donatus, made the thinking of antiq-
uity on comedy well known to the fifteenth century.22
According to Evanthius’s De Fabula, Roman playwrights added new types
of plays to Greek New Comedy, among them plays from Campania, empha-
sizing debate (atellanae), representations of bawdy characters and subject
matter (mimi), and plays having humble plots and plain style (tabernariae).23
Evanthius also classified the various types of Terence’s comedies into three
categories: (1) motoriae (lively), (2) statariae (quiet), and (3) mixed (both
lively and quiet).24 Basing his observations on the plays of Terence, Evan-
thius said comedies contained four parts: the prologue, protasis, epitasis,
and catastrophe (which works itself out into a happy conclusion).25 Donatus’s
essay, De Comoedia, contained definitions of comedy from both the Greek
and the Latin; from the Greek is the definition of Diomedes, “Comoedia est
fabula diuersa instituta continens affectum ciuilium ac pruiatorum, quibus
discitur, quid sit in uita utile, quid contra euitandum” [“Comedy is a treat-
ment of private and civil station that is without danger to life”], and from
the Latin, that attributed to Cicero, who defined comedy as “imitationem
vitae, speculum consuetudinis, imaginem ueritatis” [“the imitation of life,
the mirror of custom, the image of truth.”]26 By the time of the Renaissance,
the most common view on comedy was the one attributed to Cicero that
appeared in the essay assumed to be written by the fourth-century gram-
marian.27
The essays by Evanthius and Donatus provided, either directly or indi-
rectly, most of the historical information and definitions of comedy incorpo-
22 Herrick, 1. See Terence, Comediae, ed. Nicolaus Camus. London, 1718. This edition
contains prolegomena by Donatus and Evanthius, among others.
23 See the new Italian-Latin edition: Evanzio, De fabula/Evanzio; introduzione, testo critico,
traduzione e nota di commento a cura di Giovanni Cupaiuolo in Studi latini, 7 (Napoli,
1992),171.
24 Evanzio, 172.
25 Evanzio, 173.
26 See the basic modern text for Donatus, Aeli Donati commentum Terenti, accedunt Eugraphi
commentum et Scholia Bembina. Recensuit Paulus Wessner, 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1962), 1: 22.
27 Donatus’s essay appears in Calphurnus’s edition of Terence (Venice, 1476, and Treviso,
1477) and in most subsequent editions of Terence’s comedies.
rated into the medieval tradition. Donatus emphasized the difference between
the social ranks found in comedies as opposed to tragedies; comic charac-
ters, he observed, “in uicis habitant ob mediocritatem fortunarum, non in
aulis regiis, ut sunt personae tragicae” [“live in villages because of moderate
circumstances, not in royal palaces as do tragic personages”].28 Even though
Donatus had nothing to say about the laughable in his essay on comedy, he
did comment on specific examples in Terence. For example, about Eunuch,
4.7.775, an episode in which a braggart soldier assembles household retainers
– cooks armed with pots and pans – to storm another household and abduct a
girl named Pamphilia, Donatus comments, “facetum autem est, cum a rebus
magnis res ridiculae deriuantur” [“It is humorous, moreover, since ridiculous
matters are derived from great matters”].29
Paul Ruggiers observed of the Hellenistic inheritance:
Such a complex of Hellenistic ideas, reaching back into a classical antiq-
uity long past and often little or totally unknown at first hand, survived in
one form or another as formulae in various writers of the Middle Ages, to
surface again with renewed vigor and enlarged commentary in the comic
theory of the Italian Renaissance.30
Between the Fall of Rome and the dawn of the Renaissance, narrative prose
and verse of the Middle Ages attached to themselves a sense of being either
serious or not, tragic or comic. Thus, when Chaucer takes leave of his long
narrative poem, Troilus and Criseyde, he refers to it as “myn tragedye”
(V, 1786); Dante calls his long poem of pilgrimage a commedia.
Twelfth-Century Latin Elegiac Comedy
Latin elegiac comedy provides a link between Roman comedy and fabliaux –
both Old French and Chaucer’s English fabliaux. These non-dramatic narra-
tives were written in France during the twelfth century in Ovidian elegiac verse,
smooth hexameter couplets that were an all-purpose meter which had no rela-
tion to laments; Ovid’s about Corinna are concerned with love. Speaking of
the Latin elegiac comedy, Babio, Malcolm Brennan comments that it reminds
“us of the exciting manipulations of situations by the quick-witted rogues
of Roman comedy or of the later fabliaux and comic interludes.”31 Babio is
one of about twenty extant Latin elegiac comedies. Fifteen were published
in 1931 by Gustave Cohen who rejected the earlier description of them by
28 Donatus, ed. Wessner, 1: 23.

29 Donatus, ed. Wessner, 1: 435.
30 Ruggiers, introductory essay in Versions of Medieval Comedy, 7.
31 Malcolm M. Brennan, Babio: A Twelfth-Century Profane Comedy, Citadel Monograph
Series 7 (Charleston: The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, 1968), 34.
Faral as “Latin fabliaux” in favor of “elegiac comedies.”32 Cohen and his own
collaborators did not agree about their form: in his Preface, Cohen refers to
them as plays; in the introduction to each of the individual texts, his collabo-
rators state that the elegiac comedies are not plays. That Faral was on the side
of Cohen’s team of collaborators is clearly represented by his term for Latin
elegiac comedies, “Latin fabliaux.” Their position took hold. F. J. E. Raby’s
Secular Latin Poetry places medieval Latin comedies under the heading “The
Comedia or Versified Tale.”33 Many of the narratives written in Latin elegiac
verse, like Lidia and Babio, contain a fair amount of dialogue. The presence
of some dialogue notwithstanding, the term “comedy” is appropriate only
in the sense that “comedy” in the Middle Ages referred to humorous narra-
tives written in a plain style, not to a play. Some Latin elegiac comedies
are directly indebted to classical drama: the source of Vital de Blois’s Geta
is a late Latin adaptation of Plautus’s Amphitryo and that of Alda by Guil-
laume de Blois is claimed by its author to be a Latin translation of a Greek
play of Menander. It is possible that those of the Latin elegiac comedies
containing dialogue could have been performed – complete with gestures and
differentiations of voices – as dramatic readings before academic audiences,
very likely those of the schools of the Loire valley (at Orléans, Blois, and
Vendôme). The difficulty of the Latin and high level of rhetorical wordplay in
these comic narratives indicate that they are the production of well-educated
clerics. The fascination with punning, for example, is especially apparent
in the triple pun (a polyptoton) in Lidia, 453–54: “Accedit Pirrumque suis
furatur ocellis,/ Et quo iam rapitur sidere rapta rapit.”34
Anyone who has read the ninth tale told on the seventh day of the Decam-
eron along with Matthew of Vendôme’s Comedia Lidie will recognize that the
twelfth-century Latin work written in France is Boccaccio’s source. The story
of Lidia, passionately in love with her husband’s retainer, Pirro, who refuses
to make love to her until she accomplishes three difficult tasks – to which she
adds her daring invention of a fourth (making love before her husband’s eyes
and convincing him that he did not see what he saw) – follows the version of
the tale by the French doctor grammaticus very closely. The plot is identical
and even the names of two of the three main characters are retained: Lidia
and Pirus are Italianized to Lidia and Pirro; Decius, the husband, becomes
Nicostrato. There is, in fact, credible evidence indicating that one of the two
extant manuscripts of the Comedia Lidie – Florence, Biblioteca Medicea
Laurenziana, MS Pluteus 33.31, 71v–73v – is written in Boccaccio’s own
32 La Comédie latine en France au XIIe siècle, ed. Gustave Cohen, 2 vols. (Paris: Les Belles
Lettres, 1931).
33 F. J. E. Raby, Secular Latin Poetry, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), II: 54.
34 “She comes and steals Pirrus with her eyes, and with the star by which she is taken, the
taken woman takes[him].” The Latin text of Lidia appears in La Comédie latine en France,
1: 226–46.
hand, so that the Italian author must have known the text as intimately as a
scribe naturally would.35 The relationship between Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale
and Matthew of Vendôme’s Comedia Lydie has, however, never been thought
to amount to more than the fact that the concluding pear tree scenes are
analogues of one another.36 As for possible links between the English tale and
Decameron 7, 9, they are equivocal.37 Chaucer, however, may have been more
influenced by Matthew of Vendôme’s Comedia Lidie than we have thus far
realized. There are at least three other likely ties between the Merchant’s Tale
and the Comedia Lidie besides the pear tree episode which seem to indicate
that Chaucer may have had first-hand knowledge of Vendôme’s text. These
will be explored fully in the chapter which follows.
Medieval Thinking on the Comic Mode
Derek Pearsall interestingly speculates that the source of Umberto Eco’s

murder plot, whereby the Church attempts to keep the survival of Aristotle’s
manuscript on comedy a secret in The Name of the Rose, is a passage on
the nature of laughter – specifically, its anti-authoritarian nature – found in
Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World:
True ambivalent and universal laughter does not deny seriousness but puri-
fies and completes it. Laughter purifies from dogmatism, from the intol-
erant and the petrified; it liberates from fanaticism and pedantry, from fear
and intimidation, from didacticism, naiveté and illusion, from the single
meaning, the single level, from sentimentality.38
35 I am indebted to Dottoressa Antonietta Morandini, Director of the Biblioteca Medicea

Laurenziana, for bibliographical assistance. See A. C. de la Mare, The Handwriting of
Italian Humanists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), I: 25–26; D. M. Robathon,
“Boccaccio’s Accuracy as a Scribe,” Speculum 13 (1938), 458–60; Vittore Branca and Pier
Giorgio Ricci, Un Autografo del Decameron (Padova: Università di Padova, 1962), 61.
36 Bryan and Dempster divided the analogues for the concluding scene of the Merchant’s
Tale, the deception of the old husband in his garden, into two categories: the blind husband
and the fruit tree, and the optical illusion (W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster, eds.,
Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales [Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1941], 333–56). Among the analogues for Chaucer’s pear tree scene are the Comedia
Lydie and Decameron 7, 9 (of the optical illusion type) and a late thirteenth-century or early
fourteenth-century Italian novellino (of the blind husband-fruit tree category).
37 Decameron 7, 9 is an analogue that tells the story differently; the husband is not actually
blind (though he is deceived).
38 M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1965), 122–23. Cited by Derek Pearsall, “Versions of Comedy in Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales,” in Chaucer’s Frame Tales: The Physical and Metaphysical, ed. Joerg O.
Fichte (Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 1987), 39.
Thus, a modern theory of laughter is said to be a source for a modern detec-

tive story by a medieval scholar. Near the end of Eco’s novel, the English
brother, William Baskerville, its main character, offers the following hypoth-
esis about what might be contained in the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics,
just as he finds the manuscript everyone believed to be lost:
“Gradually this second book took shape in my mind as it had to be. I
could tell you almost all of it, without reading the pages that were meant
to poison me. Comedy is born from the komai – that is, from the peasant
villages – as a joyous celebration after a meal or feast. Comedy does not
tell of famous and powerful men, but of base and ridiculous creatures,
though not wicked; and it does not end with the death of the protagonists.
It achieves the effect of the ridiculous by showing the defects and vices of
ordinary men. Here Aristotle sees the tendency to laughter as a force for
good, which can also have an instructive value: through witty riddles and
unexpected metaphors …”39
Brother Baskerville mostly summarizes what was transmitted to fourteenth-

century Europe about Aristotle’s theory of comedy.
Some of what Eco puts into his character’s mouth would have been
familiar to the Italian novelist and scholar of medieval literature from the
Italian Trecento view of comedy – especially the definition of comedy which
Dante included in his famous Epistle to Can Grande della Scala in which the
poet explained his intentions in the Divina Commedia:
Comoedia vero inchoat asperitatem alicuius rei, sed eius material prospere
terminatur … in modo loquendi … comoedia vero remisse et humiliter;
… si ad materiam respiciamus, a principio horribilis et foetida est … in
fine prospera, desiderabilis et grata …; Ad modum loquendi, remissus est
modus et humilis, quia locutio vulgaris in qua et mulierculae comunecant.
(Epistola, X)40
[Whereas comedy begins with sundry adverse conditions, but ends happily
… in style of language … comedy is unstudied and lowly … if we consider
the subject-matter, at the beginning it is horrible and foul … at the close it
is happy, desirable, and pleasing. … 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.]41
Dante’s explanation of the word comedy is based directly on the treatise

on comedy by Donatus.42 The highly logical distinctions and formal defini-
39 Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (New York: Warner Books, 1984), 574.
40 Dantis Alagherii Epistolae; The Letters of Dante, edited and translated by Paget Toynbee
(Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1920), 176–77.
41 Dantis Alagherii Epistolae, 200–1.
42 Medieval Literary Criticism, 147.
tions that typify the style of the epistle and distinguish it from other crit-
ical works by Dante (i.e., the Convivio and the De Vulgari Eloquentia) has
caused scholars to doubt its genuineness; nonetheless, the epistle, which is
not mentioned until 1390, long after Dante’s death, remains significant as a
statement of medieval thought on the genre of comedy.
Also familiar would have been Boccaccio’s writing about comedy which
appears in the prologue to his critical commentary on Dante’s Divine Comedy:
“comedies recount things which never chanced to happen, although they are
not so diverse from the habits of men that they may not have happened.”43
Familiar too would have been the echoes of Dante’s words found in Boccac-
cio’s declaration that the novellas of the Decameron “non solamente in
fiorentin volgare e in prosa scritte … sono e senza titolo, ma ancora in istilo
umilissimo e rimesso” (Giornata IV, introduzione, 331) [“I have written, not
only in the Florentine vernacular and in prose, but in the most homely and
unassuming style,” (Introduction to Fourth Day, 284)].44 Moreover, just as
Dante’s Divine Comedy eschews Latin for the sake of mulierculae, Boccac-
cio’s work must be written in the vernacular for the women in love to whom
the Decameron is dedicated: “… per ciò che né a Atene, né a Bologna, o a
Parigi alcuna di voi non va a studiare, più distesamente parlar vi si conviene
che a quegli che hanno negli studii gl’ingegni assottigliati” (Conclusione
Dell’Autore, 912) [“And besides, since none of you goes to study in Athens,
or Bologna, or Paris, you have need of a lengthier form of address than
those who have sharpened their wits with the aid of their studies,” (Author’s
Epilogue, 801)].
Dante, Boccaccio and Chaucer knew what medieval rhetoricians had to
say about the kind of language and the subject matter that was appropriate
to comedy. In his Poetria nova, written between 1200 and 1216, Geoffrey of
Vinsauf states that “Attamen est quandoque color vitare colores,/ Exceptis
quos sermo capit vulgaris usus/ Offert communis”45 [“It is sometimes a color
to avoid colors, except those that common speech knows or that common
usage affords.”]46 Geoffrey’s textbook was popular: fifty manuscripts of the
Poetria nova are extant, twenty of them in English. An Englishman who
43 The prologue to Esposizioni sopra La Comedia di Dante, translated by N. S. Thompson in

his Chaucer, Boccaccio, and the Debate of Love (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 180.
44 Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Vittore Branca (Milan: A. Mondadori, 1985). All cita-
tions to the Decameron in Italian refer to this edition. All references to the Decameron in
English refer to Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam, 2nd ed.
(New York: Penguin, 1995) unless otherwise indicated.
45 Geoffroi de Vinsauf, Poetria Nova in Les arts poètiques du XIIe au XIIIe siècle; recherches
et documents sur la technique littéraire du moyen âge, ed. Edmond Faral (Paris, 1924),
197–262.
46 Cited by Ian Thomson, “Latin ‘Elegiac comedy’ of the Twelfth Century,” in Versions of
Medieval Comedy, ed. Paul G. Ruggiers (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma
Press), 64 (from Poetria Nova, Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts, ed. James J. Murphy
studied at Paris, Geoffrey of Vinsauf taught in England and also traveled to

Rome. Chaucer refers somewhat ironically to Geoffrey and a lament on the
death of King Richard that appears in the work:
O Gaufred, deer maister soverayn,
That whan thy worthy kyng Richared was slayn
With shot, compleynedest his deeth so soore,
Why ne hadde I now thy sentence and thy lore
The Friday for to chide, as diden ye?
(Nun’s Priest’s Tale, VII, 527–31)
Plain language suited the low, humorous subject matter of comedy. As

John of Garland puts it:
A correct comedy has the following cast: a husband and wife, an adulterer
and the adulterer’s accomplice – or his critic – and the adulteress’s nurse,
or the husband’s servant. … A comedy is a humorous poem beginning in
sadness and ending in joy …47
John’s comic theory embraces the kind of comedy found in the movement
of Dante’s Commedia from the pains of the Inferno to the joy of Paradiso as
well as that in Roman comedy and medieval fabliaux.
Chaucer’s definition of comedy is given to the pilgrim Knight when he
breaks in on the Monk’s catalogue of men “that stood in greet prosperitee”
(VII, 1975) but fell to tragedy. The Knight’s definition brings the Monk’s Tale
to an end by displacing the tragic view with the comic:
“I seye for me, it is a greet disese,
Whereas men han been in greet welthe and ese,
To heeren of hire sodeyn fal, allas!
And the contrarie is joye and greet solas,
As whan a man hath been in povre estaat,
And clymbeth up and wexeth fortunate,
And there abideth in prosperitee
Swich thing is gladsome, as it thynketh me,
And of swich thing were goodly for to telle.” (VII, 2771–79)
The structure of the Decameron, which opens on its first day of storytelling
with a tale about Ser Ciappelletto, “il piggiore uomo … che mai nascesse”
(1, 1, 34) [“the worst man ever born,” (26)] and ends on the tenth day with
the story of Griselda, a portrait of ideal womanhood, shows that Boccaccio
[Berkeley, California, 1971], 32–108. The quotation appears on p. 10 in Jane Kopp’s trans-
lation in Murphy).
47 John of Garland, The Parisiana Poetria of John of Garland, ed. and trans. Traugott Lawler
(New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1974), ch. 4, p. 81.
shares the view of comedy as a movement from bad to good, negative to

positive.
When we think of the comedies of Chaucer and Boccaccio, however, we
are probably not thinking so much of the definition of comedy as we are of its
form or genre. The closest Chaucer comes to giving his comic tales a name
is in the prologue to the Miller’s Tale:
… this Millere
He nolde his wordes for no man forbere.
But tolde his cherles tale in his manere. (I, 3167–9)
A churl’s tale, he warns, will reflect his vulgar nature:

The Millere is a cherl; ye knowe wel this,
So was the Reeve eek and othere mo,
And harlotrie they tolden both two.
Avyseth yow, and put me out of blame,
And eek men shal not maken ernest of game. (I, 3182–86)
We can infer what Boccaccio thought about his comic novellas from what he
says in the Proemio (Prologue) to the Decameron:
Intendo di raccontare cento novelle, o favole o parabole o istorie che dire
le vogliamo (7)
[I shall narrate a hundred stories or fables or parables or histories or what-

ever you choose to call them. (McWilliam, 3)]
Favole can be translated as “fabliaux,” an appropriate enough term for

Boccaccio’s comic tales, but many of the novellas of the Decameron are not
comic and, therefore, more likely in the categories of parabole or istorie.
The only extant Middle English fabliau before Chaucer is Dame Sirith
whose unique appearance is in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 86, a
manuscript which contains another comic tale, The Fox and the Wolf, which
once was considered a fabliau, but has now been reclassified as a beast fable.
Likewise, the Auchinleck MS (National Library of Scotland), an early four-
teenth-century compilation, contains A Pennyworth of Wit, which once was
regarded as an early English fabliau, but is now thought to be too moral to
deserve that classification.48 It is a wonder that, as Rossell Hope Robbins
put it, “such a lively comic poem [Dame Sirith] bred no exemplars for the
48 Henry Seidel Canby argued that besides Chaucer’s Middle English fabliaux, there were
three earlier examples: Dame Sirith, The Fox and the Wolf, and A Pennyworth of Wit (“The
English Fabliaux,” Publications of the Modern Language Association (1906): 200–14). For
the contemporary assessment see Melissa Furrow, “Middle English Fabliaux and Modern
Myth,” English Literary History 56 (1989): 1–18.
next hundred years.”49 Piero Boitani offered a plausible explanation for the
absence of comic verse in thirteenth-century England:
Because of the oral character of its material, and because of the Church’s
domination over official culture, manuscripts were not widely produced
and circulated until the second half of the fourteenth century.50
Chaucer’s comic tales are typically referred to as English “fabliaux”; Boccac-

cio’s, as “novellas” (novelle, in Italian). The tales Chaucer wrote for churlish
Canterbury pilgrims like the Miller, Reeve, Cook, and Shipman are thus
likened to the versified thirteenth-century French tales R. Howard Bloch
writes about in terms of their scandal for “the excessiveness of their sexual
and scatological obscenity, their anti-clericalism, antifeminism, anti-courtli-
ness, the consistency with which they indulge the senses, whet the appetites
(erotic, gastronomic, economic).”51 More than 150 French fabliaux are extant
and many appear to have been composed by professional jongleurs for public
entertainments, some of them at court. The Danish scholar, Per Nykrog,
argued that their origins are courtly, not bourgeois, as Bédier proposed, and
that their characters come from the trades and that their tone reflects the
condescension of the upper class.52 N. S. Thompson has argued that novellas
and not fabliaux were the model for Chaucer’s comic tales. He points out
that both Boccaccio and Chaucer create narratives wherein “Stock types and
plots become miraculously transformed by local settings and particularized
individuals who occupy worlds of surprising moral ambiguity.”53 Though not
discounting the influence of French fabliaux on Chaucer nor stressing the
position of place and character in the novellas, I reach a similar conclusion
in a 2004 article on Chaucer, Boccaccio, and the French fabliaux: “The fact
that Chaucer wrote verse narratives like the French composers of fabliaux,
not novellas in prose like Boccaccio, did not keep Chaucer from borrowing
as much from one body of narrative as the other. If we can speak of prose
romances, we can probably consider a new term for Chaucer’s comic tales:
metrical novellas.”54
The Italian novella begins in the thirteenth-century vernacular collection
known as Il Libro di novelle e di bel parlar gentile (commonly called Il
49 Rossell Hope Robbins, “The English Fabliaux: Before and after Chaucer,” Modern Sprak
64 (1970): 236–37.
50 Piero Boitani, English Medieval Narrative in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, 28.
51 R. Howard Bloch, The Scandal of the Fabliaux (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago
Press, 1986), 11.
52 Per Nykrog, Les Fabliaux: Étude d’histoire littéraire et de stylistique médiévale (Copen-
hagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1957). His book refuted the views of J. Bédier, Les Fabliaux
(Paris: Champion, 1893).
53 N. S. Thompson, Chaucer, Boccaccio, and the Debate of Love, 220.
54 Carol Falvo Heffernan, “Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale and Reeve’s Tale, Boccaccio’s Decameron,
and the French Fabliaux,” Italica 81 (2004): 324.
Novellino). A short prose form, the novella developed from medieval Latin
exempla. Its roots are found in the anecdotes of popular sermons, parables,
and fabliaux. The term “novella” is etymologically related to the verb novel-
lare (to narrate, recount) and the noun which signifies “novelty” (novità).
The genre’s newness is embodied in the vernacular language of the flowering
cultural center that was medieval Tuscany – the Tuscan dialect of Italian.
The novella reaches its highpoint in Boccaccio’s Decameron, which uses
the new form and the Tuscan vernacular to reach a broad reading public
made up primarily of women whom Boccaccio wishes to console and delight
(Proemio, 7). Only a small fraction of the tales contained in the thirteenth-
century Novellino and one third of Boccaccio’s Decameron (composed in
1351; revised, 1370) contain fabliau plots. Like Chaucer, Boccaccio “is fully
medieval in his selection of stories, which are from the general international
fund”: his own native tradition, French fabliaux, and the writers of antiq-
uity.55 The “tradition of French fabliaux and the Italian poeti giocosi” – those
poets of wine, food, women, and gambling, among them Cecco Angiolieri
and Folgore da San Gimignano – has been called the heart of Boccaccio’s
comedy.56
The chapter which follows considers parallel comic tales found in Boccac-
cio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Some represent close
analogues like Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale and Boccaccio’s Decameron 8, 1,
built on the common novella motif of the beffa, “a prank by which a schemer
is unmasked and repaid in kind.”57 Others are related more loosely.
55 Medieval Comic Tales, ed. Derek Brewer, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer,
1996), xxviii.
56 Giuseppe Mazzotta, The World at Play in Boccaccio’s “Decameron” (Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986), 161.
57 Mazzotta, The World at Play in Boccaccio’s “Decameron”, 190.

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Chapter Title: The Comic Inheritance of Boccaccio and Chaucer

Book Title: Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

1 Paul G. Ruggiers, “A Vocabulary for Chaucerian Comedy: A Preliminary Sketch,” in Medi-

Aristotle’s Theory of Comedy

Although Chaucer names Averroes in the Physician pilgrim’s portrait in

Furthermore, Aristotle commended for comedy a happy ending such as is

Homer’s position, however, is peculiar: just as he was in the serious style

The Comedy of Antiquity

Although the performance of classical stage drama essentially disappeared

Notwithstanding such references to theaters, historians are generally inclined

fourteenth century classical drama began to be read and imitated.”13 At that

13 Medieval Literary Criticism, ed. Hardison, 39.

The Latin Grammarians

The grammarians of the late classical period (i.e., Diomedes, Evanthius,

Twelfth-Century Latin Elegiac Comedy

28 Donatus, ed. Wessner, 1: 23.

Medieval Thinking on the Comic Mode

Derek Pearsall interestingly speculates that the source of Umberto Eco’s

35 I am indebted to Dottoressa Antonietta Morandini, Director of the Biblioteca Medicea

Thus, a modern theory of laughter is said to be a source for a modern detec-

Brother Baskerville mostly summarizes what was transmitted to fourteenth-

Dante’s explanation of the word comedy is based directly on the treatise

43 The prologue to Esposizioni sopra La Comedia di Dante, translated by N. S. Thompson in

studied at Paris, Geoffrey of Vinsauf taught in England and also traveled to

Plain language suited the low, humorous subject matter of comedy. As

shares the view of comedy as a movement from bad to good, negative to

A churl’s tale, he warns, will reflect his vulgar nature:

[I shall narrate a hundred stories or fables or parables or histories or what-

Favole can be translated as “fabliaux,” an appropriate enough term for

Chaucer’s comic tales are typically referred to as English “fabliaux”; Boccac-

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