The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1

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In the primary text, possible errors are noted but not changed.
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* * * * *
* * * *
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The

*PALACE OF PLEASURE*

_Elizabethan Versions of Italian and French Novels_
_from Boccaccio, Bandello, Cinthio, Straparola,_
_Queen Margaret of Navarre,_
_and Others_

Done Into English

By WILLIAM PAINTER

_Now Again Edited For The Fourth Time_

By JOSEPH JACOBS

VOL. I.

[Illustration: Publisher's Device]

_London: Published by David Nutt in the Strand_

MDCCCXC

Ballantyne Press
Ballantyne, Hanson and Co.
Edinburgh and London

To
_EDWARD BURNE-JONES_

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

VOLUME I.
Page
Preface ix
Introduction xi
Preliminary Matter (From Haslewood) xxxvii
Appendix of Documents Relating to Painter liii
Analytical Table of Contents of the Whole Work lxiii
Index of Novels xcii

TOME I.

Title (Facsimile of First Edition) 1
Dedication to Earl of Warwick 3
List of Authors 9
To the Reader 10
Novel
I. Horatii and Curiatii 15
II. Rape of Lucrece 22
III. Mucius Scaevola 26
IV. Coriolanus 29
V. Appius and Virginia 35
VI. Candaules and Gyges 46
VII. Cr[oe]sus and Solon 49
VIII. Rhacon and Cartomes 53
IX. Artaxerxes and Sinetas 54
X. Chariton and Menalippus 56
XI. Cyrus and Panthea 58
XII. Abdolominus King of Scythia 69
XIII. Alexander and the Scythian Ambassadors 71
XIV. Metellus on Marriage 74
XV. Lais and Demosthenes 77
XVI. Fabricius and Pyrrhus 78
XVII. Camillus and Schoolmaster 80
XVIII. Papyrius Praetextatus 83
XIX. Plutarch's Anger 85
XX. Aesop's Fable of the Lark 86
XXI. Hannibal and Antiochus 88
XXII. Androdus (_Androcles_) 89
XXIII. Favorinus 91
XXIV. Sertorius 95
XXV. Sibylline Leaves 98
XXVI. Master and Scholar 99
XXVII. Seleucus and Antiochus 102
XXVIII. Timon of Athens 112
XXIX. Marriage of Widow and Widower 114
XXX. The Three Rings 116
XXXI. Borsieri and Grimaldi 119
XXXII. Alberto of Bologna 122
XXXIII. Rinaldo of Este 125
XXXIV. King of England's Daughter 130
XXXV. Randolpho Ruffolo 138
XXXVI. Andruccio 143
XXXVII. Earl of Angiers 156
XXXVIII. Giletta of Narbonne 171
XXXIX. Tancred and Gismonda 180
XL. Mahomet and Irene 190
XLI. Lady Falsely Accused 198
XLII. Didaco and Violenta 218
XLIII. Lady of Turin 240
XLIV. Aleran and Adelasia 249
XLV. Duchess of Savoy 285
XLVI. Countess of Salisbury 334
Advertisement to Reader 364

[Transcriber's Note on editors' introductions:

Bracketed text [ ] is in the original. Brackets are also used to
demarcate footnotes.
In citations of older texts, letters originally printed as
superscripts are shown in braces { }.

For complete notes and errata, see the end of the text.]

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 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'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 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]

[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 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?

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 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.

[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_ passed 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 (_Beitraege
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 associate 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 passions of men that occurred in Italy, the land of
passion, 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 fictitious 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 "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 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 Grasse.
His _novelle_ are nothing less than episcopal in tone and he had the
grace to omit his dignity from his title-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 unblushing vice. The very interest in
individuality, the spectator-attitude 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 nobles 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 association 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
class on the present occasion. Very few of the _novelle_ selected by
Painter for translation depend for their attraction on mere naughtiness.
In matters of sex 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 classics. 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.

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