The Palace of Pleasure Volume I Part 1

The Palace of Pleasure.

Volume 1.

by William Painter.

PREFACE.

The present edition of Painter's "Palace of Pleasure," the storehouse of Elizabethan plot, follows page for page and line for line the privately printed and very limited edition made by Joseph Haslewood in 1813. One of the 172 copies then printed by him has been used as "copy" for the printer, but this has been revised in proof from the British Museum examples of the second edition of 1575. The collation has for the most part only served to confirm Haslewood's reputation for careful editing.

Though the present edition can claim to come nearer the original in many thousands of pa.s.sages, it is chiefly in the mint and c.u.mmin of capitals and italics that we have been able to improve on Haslewood: in all the weightier matters of editing he shows only the minimum of fallibility.

We have however divided his two tomes, for greater convenience, into three volumes of as nearly as possible equal size. This arrangement has enabled us to give the t.i.tle pages of both editions of the two tomes, those of the first edition in facsimile, those of the second (at the beginning of vols. ii. and iii.) with as near an approach to the original as modern founts of type will permit.

I have also reprinted Haslewood's "Preliminary Matter," which give the Dryasdust details about the biography of Painter and the bibliography of his book in a manner not too Dryasdust. With regard to the literary apparatus of the book, I have perhaps been able to add something to Haslewood's work. From the Record Office and British Museum I have given a number of doc.u.ments about Painter, and have recovered the only extant letter of our author. I have also gone more thoroughly into the literary history of each of the stories in the "Palace of Pleasure" than Haslewood thought it necessary to do. I have found Oesterley's edition of Kirchhof and Landau's _Quellen des Dekameron_ useful for this purpose. I have to thank Dr. F. J. Furnivall for lending me his copies of Bandello and Belleforest.

I trust it will be found that the present issue is worthy of a work which, with North's "Plutarch" and Holinshed's "Chronicle," was the main source of Shakespeare's Plays. It had also, as early as 1580, been ransacked to furnish plots for the stage, and was used by almost all the great masters of the Elizabethan drama. Quite apart from this source of interest, the "Palace of Pleasure" contains the first English translations from the _Decameron_, the _Heptameron_, from Bandello, Cinthio and Straparola, and thus forms a link between Italy and England.

Indeed as the Italian _novelle_ form part of that continuous stream of literary tradition and influence which is common to all the great nations of Europe, Painter's book may be termed a link connecting England with European literature. Such a book as this is surely one of the landmarks of English literature.

INTRODUCTION.

A young man, trained in the strictest sect of the Pharisees, is awakened one morning, and told that he has come into the absolute possession of a very great fortune in lands and wealth. The time may come when he may know himself and his powers more thoroughly, but never again, as on that morn, will he feel such an exultant sense of mastery over the world and his fortunes. That image[1] seems to me to explain better than any other that remarkable outburst of literary activity which makes the Elizabethan Period unique in English literature, and only paralleled in the world's literature by the century after Marathon, when Athens first knew herself. With Elizabeth England came of age, and at the same time entered into possession of immense spiritual treasures, which were as novel as they were extensive. A New World promised adventures to the adventurous, untold wealth to the enterprising. The Orient had become newly known. The Old World of literature had been born anew. The Bible spoke for the first time in a tongue understanded of the people. Man faced his G.o.d and his fate without any intervention of Pope or priest.

Even the very earth beneath his feet began to move. Instead of a universe with dimensions known and circ.u.mscribed with Dantesque minuteness, the mystic glow of the unknown had settled down on the whole face of Nature, who offered her secrets to the first comer. No wonder the Elizabethans were filled with an exulting sense of man's capabilities, when they had all these realms of thought and action suddenly and at once thrown open before them. There is a confidence in the future and all it had to bring which can never recur, for while man may come into even greater treasures of wealth or thought than the Elizabethans dreamed of, they can never be as new to us as they were to them. The sublime confidence of Bacon in the future of science, of which he knew so little, and that little wrongly, is thus eminently and characteristically Elizabethan.[2]

[Footnote 1: It was suggested to me, if I remember right, by my friend Mr. R. G. Moulton.]

[Footnote 2: There was something Elizabethan in the tone of men of science in England during the "seventies," when Darwinism was to solve all the problems. The Marlowe of the movement, the late Professor Clifford, found no Shakespeare.]

The department of Elizabethan literature in which this exuberant energy found its most characteristic expression was the Drama, and that for a very simple though strange reason. To be truly great a literature must be addressed to the nation as a whole. The subtle influence of audience on author is shown equally though conversely in works written only for sections of a nation. Now in the sixteenth century any literature that should address the English nation as a whole--not necessarily all Englishmen, but all cla.s.ses of Englishmen--could not be in any literary form intended to be merely read. For the majority of Englishmen could not read. Hence they could only be approached by literature when read or recited to them in church or theatre. The latter form was already familiar to them in the Miracle Plays and Mysteries, which had been adopted by the Church as the best means of acquainting the populace with Sacred History. The audiences of the Miracle Plays were prepared for the representation of human action on the stage. Meanwhile, from translation and imitation, young scholars at the universities had become familiar with some of the masterpieces of Ancient Drama, and with the laws of dramatic form. But where were they to seek for matter to fill out these forms? Where were they, in short, to get their plots?

Plot, we know, is pattern as applied to human action. A story, whether told or acted, must tend in some definite direction if it is to be a story at all. And the directions in which stories can go are singularly few. Somebody in the _Athenaeum_--probably Mr. Theodore Watts, he has the habit of saying such things--has remarked that during the past century only two novelties in plot, _Undine_ and _Monte Christo_, have been produced in European literature. Be that as it may, nothing strikes the student of comparative literature so much as the paucity of plots throughout literature and the universal tendency to borrow plots rather than attempt the almost impossible task of inventing them. That tendency is shown at its highest in the Elizabethan Drama. Even Shakespeare is as much a plagiarist or as wise an artist, call it which you will, as the meanest of his fellows.

Not alone is it difficult to invent a plot; it is even difficult to see one in real life. When the _denouement_ comes, indeed--when the wife flees or commits suicide--when bosom friends part, or brothers speak no more--we may know that there has been the conflict of character or the clash of temperaments which go to make the tragedies of life. But to recognise these opposing forces before they come to the critical point requires somewhat rarer qualities. There must be a quasi-scientific interest in life _qua_ life, a dispa.s.sionate detachment from the events observed, and at the same time an artistic capacity for selecting the cardinal points in the action. Such an att.i.tude can only be attained in an older civilisation, when individuality has emerged out of nationalism. In Europe of the sixteenth century the only country which had reached this stage was Italy.

The literary and spiritual development of Italy has always been conditioned by its historic position as the heir of Rome. Great nations, as M. Renan has remarked, work themselves out in effecting their greatness. The reason is that their great products overshadow all later production, and prevent all compet.i.tion by their very greatness. When once a nation has worked up its mythic element into an epos, it contains in itself no further materials out of which an epos can be elaborated.

So Italian literature has always been overshadowed by Latin literature.

Italian writers, especially in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, were always conscious of their past, and dared not compete with the great names of Virgil, Ovid, Horace, and the rest. At the same time, with this consciousness of the past, they had evolved a special interest in the problems and arts of the present. The split-up of the peninsula into so many small states, many of them republics, had developed individual life just as the city-states of h.e.l.las had done in ancient times. The main interest s.h.i.+fted from the state and the nation to the life and development of the individual.[3] And with this interest arose in the literary sphere the dramatic narrative of human action--the Novella.

[Footnote 3: See Burckhardt, _Cultur der Renaisance in Italien_, Buch II., especially Kap. iii.]

The genealogy of the Novella is short but curious. The first known collection of tales in modern European literature dealing with the tragic and comic aspects of daily life was that made by Petrus Alphonsi, a baptized Spanish Jew, who knew some Arabic.[4] His book, the _Disciplina Clericalis_, was originally intended as seasoning for sermons, and very strong seasoning they must have been found. The stories were translated into French, and thus gave rise to the _Fabliau_, which allowed full expression to the _esprit Gaulois_. From France the _Fabliau_ pa.s.sed to Italy, and came ultimately into the hands of Boccaccio, under whose influence it became transformed into the _Novella_.[5]

[Footnote 4: On Peter Alphonsi see my edition of Caxton's _aesop_, which contains selections from him in Vol. II.]

[Footnote 5: Signor Bartoli has written on _I Precursori di Boccaccio_, 1874, Landau on his Life and Sources (_Leben_, 1880, _Quellen des Dekameron_, 1884), and on his successors (_Beitrage zur Geschichte der ital. Novelle_, 1874). Mr. Symonds has an admirable chapter on the _Novellieri_ in his _Renaissance_, vol. v.]

It is an elementary mistake to a.s.sociate Boccaccio's name with the tales of gayer tone traceable to the _Fabliaux_. He initiated the custom of mixing tragic with the comic tales. Nearly all the _novelle_ of the Fourth Day, for example, deal with tragic topics. And the example he set in this way was followed by the whole school of _Novellieri_. As Painter's book is so largely due to them, a few words on the _Novellieri_ used by him seem desirable, reserving for the present the question of his treatment of their text.

Of Giovanne Boccaccio himself it is difficult for any one with a love of letters to speak in few or measured words. He may have been a Philistine, as Mr. Symonds calls him, but he was surely a Philistine of genius. He has the supreme virtue of style. In fact, it may be roughly said that in Europe for nearly two centuries there is no such thing as a prose style but Boccaccio's. Even when dealing with his grosser topics--and these he derived from others--he half disarms disgust by the lightness of his touch. And he could tell a tale, one of the most difficult of literary tasks. When he deals with graver actions, if he does not always rise to the occasion, he never fails to give the due impression of seriousness and dignity. It is not for nothing that the _Decamerone_ has been the storehouse of poetic inspiration for nearly five centuries. In this country alone, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dryden, Keats, Tennyson, have each in turn gone to Boccaccio for material.

In his own country he is the fountainhead of a wide stream of literary influences that has ever broadened as it flowed. Between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries the Italian presses poured forth some four thousand _novelle_, all avowedly tracing from Boccaccio.[6] Many of these, it is true, were imitations of the gayer strains of Boccaccio's genius. But a considerable proportion of them have a sterner tone, and deal with the weightier matters of life, and in this they had none but the master for their model. The gloom of the Black Death settles down over the greater part of all this literature. Every memorable outburst of the fiercer pa.s.sions of men that occurred in Italy, the land of pa.s.sion, for all these years, found record in a _novella_ of Boccaccio's followers. The _Novelle_ answered in some respects to our newspaper reports of trials and the earlier _Last Speech and Confession_. But the example of Boccaccio raised these gruesome topics into the region of art. Often these tragedies are reported of the true actors; still more often under the disguise of fict.i.tious names, that enabled the narrator to have more of the artist's freedom in dealing with such topics.

[Footnote 6: Specimens of these in somewhat wooden English were given by Roscoe in his _Italian Novelists_.]

The other _Novellieri_ from whom Painter drew inspiration may be dismissed very shortly. Of Ser Giovanne Fiorentino, who wrote the fifty novels of his _Pecorone_ about 1378, little is known nor need be known; his merits of style or matter do not raise him above mediocrity.

Straparola's _Piacevole Notti_ were composed in Venice in the earlier half of the sixteenth century, and are chiefly interesting for the fact that some dozen or so of his seventy-four stories are folk-tales taken from the mouth of the people, and were the first thus collected: Straparola was the earliest Grimm. His contemporary Giraldi, known as Cinthio (or Cinzio), intended his _Ecatomithi_ to include one hundred _novelle_, but they never reached beyond seventy; he has the grace to cause the ladies to retire when the men relate their smoking-room anecdotes of _feminine impudiche_. Owing to Dryden's statement "Shakespeare's plots are in the one hundred novels of Cinthio" (Preface to _Astrologer_), his name has been generally fixed upon as the representative Italian novelist from whom the Elizabethans drew their plots. As a matter of fact only "Oth.e.l.lo" (_Ecat._ iii. 7), and "Measure for Measure" (_ib._ viii. 5), can be clearly traced to him, though "Twelfth Night" has some similarity with Cinthio's "Gravina" (v. 8): both come from a common source, Bandello.

Bandello is indeed the next greatest name among the _Novellieri_ after that of Boccaccio, and has perhaps had even a greater influence on dramatic literature than his master. Matteo Bandello was born at the end of the fifteenth century at Castelnuovo di Scrivia near Tortona. He lived mainly in Milan, at the Dominican monastery of Sta. Maria delle Grazie, where Leonardo painted his "Last Supper." As he belonged to the French party, he had to leave Milan when it was taken by the Spaniards in 1525, and after some wanderings settled in France near Agen. About 1550 he was appointed Bishop of Agen by Henri II., and he died some time after 1561. To do him justice, he only received the revenues of his see, the episcopal functions of which were performed by the Bishop of Gra.s.se.

His _novelle_ are nothing less than episcopal in tone and he had the grace to omit his dignity from his t.i.tle-pages.

Indeed Bandello's novels[7] reflect as in a mirror all the worst sides of Italian Renaissance life. The complete collapse of all the older sanctions of right conduct, the execrable example given by the petty courts, the heads of which were reckless because their position was so insecure, the great growth of wealth and luxury, all combined to make Italy one huge hot-bed of unblus.h.i.+ng vice. The very interest in individuality, the spectator-att.i.tude towards life, made men ready to treat life as one large experiment, and for such purposes vice is as important as right living even though it ultimately turns out to be as humdrum as virtue. The Italian n.o.bles treated life in this experimental way and the novels of Bandello and others give us the results of their experiments. The _Novellieri_ were thus the "realists" of their day and of them all Bandello was the most realistic. He claims to give only incidents that really happened and makes this his excuse for telling many incidents that should never have happened. It is but fair to add that his most vicious tales are his dullest.

[Footnote 7: The Villon Society is to publish this year a complete translation of Bandello by Mr. John Payne.]

That cannot be said of Queen Margaret of Navarre, who carries on the tradition of the _Novellieri_, and is represented in Painter by some of her best stories. She intended to give a Decameron of one hundred stories--the number comes from the _Cento novelle antichi_, before Boccaccio--but only got so far as the second novel of the eighth day. As she had finished seven days her collection is known as the Heptameron.

How much of it she wrote herself is a point on which the doctors dispute. She had in her court men like Clement Marot, and Bonaventure des Periers, who probably wrote some of the stories. Bonaventure des Periers in particular, had done much in the same line under his own name, notably the collection known as _Cymbalum Mundi_. Marguerite's other works hardly prepare us for the narrative skill, the easy grace of style and the knowledge of certain aspects of life shown in the _Heptameron_. On the other hand the framework, which is more elaborate than in Boccaccio or any of his school, is certainly from one hand, and the book does not seem one that could have been connected with the Queen's name unless she had really had much to do with it. Much of its piquancy comes from the thought of the a.s.sociation of one whose life was on the whole quite blameless with anecdotes of a most blameworthy style.

Unlike the lady in the French novel who liked to play at innocent games with persons who were not innocent, Margaret seems to have liked to talk and write of things not innocent while remaining unspotted herself. Her case is not a solitary one.

The whole literature of the _Novella_ has the attraction of graceful naughtiness in which vice, as Burke put it, loses half its evil by losing all its grossness. At all times, and for all time probably, similar tales, more broad than long, will form favourite talk or reading of adolescent males. They are, so to speak, pimples of the soul which synchronise with similar excrescences of the skin. Some men have the art of never growing old in this respect, but I cannot say I envy them their eternal youth. However, we are not much concerned with tales of this cla.s.s on the present occasion. Very few of the _novelle_ selected by Painter for translation depend for their attraction on mere naughtiness.

In matters of s.e.x the sublime and the ridiculous are more than usually close neighbours. It is the tragic side of such relations that attracted Painter, and it was this fact that gave his book its importance for the history of English literature, both in its connection with Italian letters and in its own internal development.

The relations of Italy and England in matters literary are due to the revivers of the New Learning. Italy was, and still is, the repository of all the chief MSS. of the Greek and Latin cla.s.sics. Thither, therefore, went all the young Englishmen, whom the influence of Erasmus had bitten with a desire for the New Learning which was the Old Learning born anew.

But in Italy itself, the New Learning had even by the early years of the sixteenth century produced its natural result of giving birth to a national literature (Ariosto, Trissino). Thus in their search for the New Learning, Englishmen of culture who went to Italy came back with a tincture of what may be called the Newest Learning, the revival of Italian Literature.

Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey "The Dioscuri of the Dawn" as they have been called, are the representatives of this new movement in English thought and literature, which came close on the heels of the New Learning represented by Colet, More, Henry VIII. himself and Roger Ascham. The adherents of the New Learning did not look with too favourable eyes on the favourers of the Newest Learning. They took their ground not only on literary lines, but with distinct reference to manners and morals. The corruption of the Papal Court which had been the chief motive cause of the Reformation--men judge creeds by the character they produce, not by the logical consistency of their tenets--had spread throughout Italian society. The Englishmen who came to know Italian society could not avoid being contaminated by the contact. The Italians themselves observed the effect and summed it up in their proverb, _Inglese italianato e un diabolo incarnato_. What struck the Italians must have been still more noticeable to Englishmen. We have a remarkable proof of this in an interpolation made by Roger Ascham at the end of the first part of his _Schoolmaster_, which from internal evidence must have been written about 1568, the year after the appearance of Painter's Second Tome.[8] The whole pa.s.sage is so significant of the relations of the chief living exponent of the New Learning to the appearance of what I have called the Newest Learning that it deserves to be quoted in full in any introduction to the book in which the Newest Learning found its most characteristic embodiment. I think too I shall be able to prove that there is a distinct and significant reference to Painter in the pa.s.sage (pp. 77-85 of Arber's edition, slightly abridged).

[Footnote 8: See Prof. Arber's reprint, p. 8.]

But I am affraide, that ouer many of our trauelers into _Italie_, do not exchewe the way to _Circes_ Court: but go, and ryde, and runne, and flie thether, they make great hast to c.u.m to her: they make great sute to serue her: yea, I could point out some with my finger, that neuer had gone out of England, but onelie to serue _Circes_, in _Italie_. Vanitie and vice, and any licence to ill liuyng in England was counted stale and rude vnto them. And so, beyng Mules and Horses before they went, returned verie Swyne and a.s.ses home agayne; yet euerie where verie Foxes with as suttle and busie heades; and where they may, verie Woolues, with cruell malicious hartes.

[Sidenote: A trewe Picture of a knight of Circes Court.]

A maruelous monster, which, for filthines of liuyng, for dulnes to learning him selfe, for wilinesse in dealing with others, for malice in hurting without cause, should carie at once in one bodie, the belie of a Swyne, the head of an a.s.se, the brayne of a Foxe, the wombe of a wolfe. If you thinke, we iudge amisse, and write to sore against you, heare,

[Sidenote: The Italians iudgement of Englishmen brought vp in Italie.]

what the _Italian_ sayth of the English Man, what the master reporteth of the scholer: who vttereth playnlie, what is taught by him, and what learned by you, saying _Englese Italianato, e vn diabolo incarnato_, that is to say, you remaine men in shape and facion, but bec.u.m deuils in life and condition. This is not, the opinion of one, for some priuate spite, but the iudgement of all, in a common Prouerbe, which riseth, of that learnyng, and those maners, which you gather in _Italie_:

[Sidenote: The Italian diffameth them selfe, to shame the Englishe man.]

a good Scholehouse of wholesome doctrine, and worthy Masters of commendable Scholers, where the Master had rather diffame hym selfe for hys teachyng, than not shame his Scholer for his learnyng.

A good nature of the maister, and faire conditions of the scholers.

And now chose you, you _Italian_ Englishe men, whether you will be angrie with vs, for calling you monsters, or with the _Italianes_, for callyng you deuils, or else with your owne selues, that take so much paines, and go so farre, to make your selues both. If some yet do not well vnderstand,

[Sidenote: An English man Italianated.]