The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1

William Painter

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• Publié par: sibel
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 26
• Langue: English

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1, by William Painter This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 Author: William Painter Release Date: January 1, 2007 [EBook #20241] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PALACE OF PLEASURE ***

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The first seven pages of the printed book have been moved to theend of this section of the e-text. In the introduction, the spelling “Giovanne” (Boccaccio) is used more often than “Giovanni”. Unless otherwise noted, brackets [ ] and question marks (?) are in the original. Note that “Tome I” refers to the two-volume editions of Painter and Haslewood, while “Volume I” refers to Jacobs’s three-volume edition (the present text). Tome I goes up to NovelLXVI (i.66); Volume I ends at Novel XLVI (i.46).

   

Title Page Text

Ballantyne Press BALLANTYNE, HANSON AND CO. EDINBURGH AND LONDON

TO EDWARD BURNE-JONES

T A B L E

 

O

Indented or italicized items were added by the transcriber.Italicizedterms do not appear in the printed text. The “Tome I” link leads to a separate file containing novels I - XLVI.

VOLUME I.

PREFACE INTRODUCTION PRELIMINARY MATTER(FROM HASLEWOOD)

PAGE ix xi xxxvii

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xlv liii lxiii lxxxi xcii end

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Bibliographical Notices APPENDIX OF DOCUMENTS RELATING TO PAINTER ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS OF THE WHOLE WORK The Second Tome INDEX OF NOVELS Footnotes   TOME I. Novels 1.I - 1.XLVI

P R E F A C

T 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 passages, it is chiefly in the mint and cummin 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 title 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 documents 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’sQuellen des Dekameronuseful 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 thenoremaceD, the Heptameron, from Bandello, Cinthio and Straparola, and thus forms a link between Italy and England. Indeed as the Italianelnovelform part of that continuous stream of literar tradition and influence which is common to all the

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dition oresent eEHp aslee,ure ac Pof s’rlaP“aP fetni an pbethliza  of E uoesrohe ets ”ht  lnd agepar foe gap swollof ,tole inr fonelihe tirp etavyl

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I N T R O D U

A a ssion ofte posse ebaosuli tn ohts hamecoatthe  ht dn dloninra ,g arPhe th is,eeisnekawa s om eno deed iraine stn thse tirtco  festcNUOYam Gt ,n 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 to explain better than any other that remarkable outburst ofseems to me 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 God 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 circumscribed 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 . 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 classes 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?

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   g   erta            koob a hcuS .erelur siss hi tashtE  diwlgna gn nEratuliteean urop et edemrm kob yanncotiec l ak ino  fuEorn taoisnter’s bope, Pain it latere.ur y one of the landamkr sfoE gnilhs

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 Athenæum—probably Mr. Theodore Watts, he has the habit of saying such things—has remarked that during the past century only two novelties in plot, UndineandMonte 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 thenouedeemtncomes, 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 lifequâlife, a dispassionate detachment from the events observed, and at the same time an artistic capacity for selecting the cardinal points in the action. Such an attitude 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 competition 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 Hellas had done in ancient times. The main interest shifted 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. 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, theDisciplina 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 theesprit Gaulois. From France the Fabliauto Italy, and came ultimately into the hands of Boccaccio, underpassed whose influence it became transformed into theNovella. 5 It is an elementary mistake to associate Boccaccio’s name with the tales of gayer tone traceable to theFabliaux. He initiated the custom of mixing tragic with the comic tales. Nearly all theovelnleof the Fourth Day, for example, deal with tragic topics. And the example he set in this way was followed by the whole school ofleilNvoier to them, a few el due. As Painter’s book is so lar

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               words on thereileilNvohim seem desirable, reserving for the presentused by 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 theDcemarenoehas 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 thousandlleveon, 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 passions of men that occurred in Italy, the land of passion, for all these years, found record in alevonlaof Boccaccio’s followers. TheNovelle answered in some respects to our newspaper reports of trials and the earlier Last Speech and ConfessionBut 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 fictitious names, that enabled the narrator to have more of the artist’s freedom in dealing with such topics. The otherriiellveNofrom whom Painter drew inspiration may be dismissed very shortly. Of Ser Giovanne Fiorentino, who wrote the fifty novels of his Pecoroneabout 1378, little is known nor need be known; his merits of style or matter do not raise him above mediocrity. Straparola’sPiacevole Nottiwere 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 hisimotihtcaEto include one hundredvoleeln, but they never reached beyond seventy; he has the grace to cause the ladies to retire when the men relate their smoking-room anecdotes offeminine impudiche. Owing to Dryden’s statement “Shakespeare’s plots are in the one hundred novels of Cinthio” (Preface togertsAolor), 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 “Othello” (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 theNiilrevoleafter 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 Su er ” As he belon ed to the French art , he had to leave Milan when .

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pSnaaidr sni1 255, and after somaw erednsgnites edtln F  i ncranee             w ti      enak tase thy  b thy  is e Bp ho Gof erewrep mrofb de le are nothing larss.eH sin vole hif  oes te,ses  t deviec unever eh ns octioich f whipcsehe f nupola retf651 it ea emeddiom snd , ae  ho ln yeritec ,eh him jus1. To do ioppa saw eh 055 1utbo An.ge AarI .IneirybH eg nof Ahop  Bisnted noitcnasgir fo s ucndco ht  ehe tt,  eoclpteeso llpal thf alder e ol latI R nai ianenass lcee.ifhe Tom c  aimrrroa llt eh worst sides of lsvenos o’lldean ni sa tcelfer 7 titlhis rom ty f deB nIed eg.s-eapra g tcead e hhe td siingimo oh ti  episcopess thanena dnh lai  not dualdivi theity,eter yni nnitsi e.ic g v in er vhe T fo deb-thsulbnu taly one huge hobmnidet  oamekI lud ryxual, col  htwo w fo  tlaena h  trgrgaeht eer ,secuo inas son witisop rieht esucabes esklec rre w ihhc ew ehda sfots, the tty courht yep evig b nexa elempcrxeleab cootsrd  ci hht d ent on whis a poi truonem h nic ree Shd hapuis. te .nH emorpeatehH as t nownis kion   flesreh etorw esht  iofh uc mow stories. Bonavento eosemo  fht e  pintiarlacu hr, erut  sediréP sre  androt, ventBona  elCl ki taMmene ro pho wwry blba sed eru,sreiréP owknasn ctlen iouM m.idnmyC ulabite’s ot Marguer h s rald y eh rowkr n  ichmue on dadnu enil emas ehtnameown his der  c lot ehbayln , to k eht lwonegde fo rtcen aipeass ctfol fi ehswo nni the Heptameron.  eraperpt rof suraar nheki svetiht ell ,g araeysf stce oand yle   dna ,dnah eno mro flyintaer cislo ,csoh h si yfor anio ocacc Bocaht ni nobaletarmos  erehi w ichmawero,k dht erf other han  On the  h it wdochMu. it dah ylla  ot hcum s shnlesd ree haee’n euQemu  sanneonedctit wthh  luoc vah d eb ec ne t seem one that ht eobkod eo son  witlesslamete bfoa et sceod hnas wae if lseho wiuq elohw eht no of the athought noo  o f en sscoaiitqupicyanf  os it mor ehtmoc f se epsrti hhw ono s notwereocen inn ot dekilta yalp  ntcenoin wesam g ehl da ynit ehF rench novel who  som  alb t owemyhtrty s. leliUn tke otawdu eilefdr sctat spettitor-a taert otsa efil me dema,  y adren mine,ta dnf ros  one large expersi e i saropmtnat h ucrppuesosic v  it oughn th eveivgn tilirhga  shus  abeo  tut osnrut yletamitlu ian noblThe Italivtreu . dmur a m  speexmeri tins hil de efit setaeray walnthe tnd a o slevon  lednaB fnd olo as gither shtevu ustl eerofs he t eirerxpnemi .st ehTevoNllieri were thus ht er“aeilts”so  dna yad rieht fndBal alm he tofm sot ehw saleol He cic. list t reavig no emialot stsenha t ilyidnch paepen terlaylkes thisd and ma en d revevahpah ntdeths  satulholeilgnm na yniichis excuse for t  selat s sih eraos mis houcivit t  oafrihttada d d. Ipene butt is wh, cao av Nreareragfo tneeuraM aid of Qnot be shTtac na udllse.t  Pind teenesprre si dna ,ireille Nov the on of ditit art eh snorrei es. She intended otg vi e aeDacem ntai bersoy  omeeh feb rs tsirot r coumbefrommes  eCtnht eevll oon  oofn rodrun hneirots den eht—se s  oaf rnoylg toecond nov as the sb ,irofena ehcito—cit buBoe accc ev n dessiehf nilect col herdayshthgie eht fo lead hhe sAs. ay d

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ni nnretti nwo smeop.nt dalelevhtI atiltcoi niwrs and ian lette  ,erutaretil hsi neon s c itn  ithbot ehf ronaecoptrEngl of tory his s ep oot,es  yra Theles.t masceneloda fo gnidaerr  olktae iturvo rcseeccnimal rxe with sichronisehcihnys os ew lu s le th of, akmppi  andmes, all for ss .ssenll it tAa ll angsiro gts ive sti fol yb li ong, will form fa ro erbao dhtnal misir laleta ms,mit rp ebabo ,yl as hlaelov Nhe t noitcartta eht  who . The  onetary  efotarutireell  ur B pkecevias, sesolah i tul ,t ful naugof graceni hwci h thnise s a klat oetirw dninthf  o iot ngs raag,tM esmeer t havs to ed t e likeh dlesr eH .f ac r isenos a t liso nncone thwli eermaining unspotte ht s art e .sri tIigneouhbcly e os snt ah tr letaoi of suchgic sideht saw ti dna ,rteinPad teactrat  smi ktib ooh e si  gavthatact is f fod thr r eitratsnaritald nonepeaughtiness. In mcaitnoo  nemern  meliub e she tnd a o srettaht xes f  thamoreualln uscilur dira euo s are not ver, we ecnrdew umhcc noofs hi th itleta ht nrp ealc s o sson. casit ocesenht eo  ff weeVyredctlesee llveno t rof retniaP yb  seo  fht eksni .Some men have thetra  fo evenrg rinowolg ind hi tpsce sertuI ,tb not  canI ensay  t meht yv ete riehou yalrnweHo. th