Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.
The Power of Love
The overall theme of The Decameron is the power of love to survive changes in fortune and to override human intelligence. By love, Boccaccio usually means romantic passion, including lust. He portrays love as a natural force that overcomes individual will. When Boccaccio personifies this force, Love is always a male. A quarter of the stories in The Decameron have adultery in the plot, usually because the women are too weak to resist Love’s power. However, familial love also makes many appearances. In several stories, such as Elissa’s tale about the Count of Antwerp, parents seek out their long-lost children and restore family prosperity and harmony. In other stories, such as the final story about Griselda, married men show their love by treating their wives tenderly and honoring them in public. In both stories, love gives the protagonists the willpower to endure unexpected and unfair changes in fortune.
The Decameron also includes several conventional romances, in which young lovers meet, fall in love, and marry. Some of these romances, such as the amusing tale of how Ricciardo ascends to Caterina’s balcony to listen to the nightingale, end happily ever after. Others, such as the tale of two young lovers who lie down beside each other and die, have tragic endings. (Both stories are sources for Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy Romeo and Juliet.) Every evening ends with a poem, a tribute to the power of romantic love.
The Duality of Fortune
Fortune, an impersonal force that humans cannot control, changes constantly from good to bad and back, driving many plots in The Decameron. All the stories on the second day are about Fortune’s changes. Boccaccio, like other medieval writers, personifies Fortune as female, possessing the feminized qualities of unpredictability and mutability. In addition to change, the concept of Fortune includes chance, fate, and divine providence.
Because people’s fortunes can change at any time due to circ*mstances beyond their control, Fortune reveals the moral character of the people who get caught up in her wheel. In the first story of the book, Fortune brings death to the evil, greedy Ciappelletto. He acts in death just as he acts in life, by grabbing as much for himself as he can. In Elissa’s story, the Count of Antwerp responds to his misfortunes by taking care of his children and doing humble work to survive, proving his noble nature.
Wealth, another meaning of fortune, is also an important element in many stories. The stories portray the upper-class world of nobility and international commerce; the middle-class world of doctors, lawyers, and storekeepers; and the working-class world of bricklayers and peddlers. At all levels of society, people strive to gain wealth and to hold on to it against the whims of Fortune.
The Virtue of Intelligence
Human intelligence, a force that allows people to shape their own lives, determines the outcome of most stories in The Decameron. On the third day, Neifile specifically requests stories in which people succeed through their own efforts, and her story of Gilette, the doctor’s daughter, demonstrates why intelligence is a virtue, or saving grace. Gilette, forbidden by accident of birth from marrying her true love, uses her medical skills to cure the king, with her desired marriage as a reward. The stories of the fifth through eighth days, which are about witty comebacks, jokes, and tricks, all depend on intelligence for their resolution.
Intelligence is a virtue because it empowers people to oppose the impersonal forces of love and fortune. Failure to use intelligence or the loss of intelligence through insanity leads to having to surrender to fate. The stories of adultery and trickery contain dozens of characters whose failure to think is the cause of their problems. By exercising or not exercising the virtue of intelligence, people also control the fate of others. In the book’s last story, the nobleman Gualtieri wisely chooses an intelligent wife but then is seized with an irrational desire to test her. In the end, her intelligent reasoning returns Gualtieri to his rightful mind.
The Hypocrisy of Holiness
People who pretend to be holy while surrendering to vice are favorite targets for most of the storytellers in The Decameron. Four of the stories on the first day deal with this theme. Panfilo offers a prime example in the first story, in which one of the worst men in the world convinces a priest he is worthy of sainthood. A hypocritical cleric, a bishop, comes on to a beautiful woman in Lauretta’s story about Monna Nonna de’ Pulci. A lewd priest tricks a peasant couple in Dioneo’s story about a mare. In other stories, priests, nuns, and monks sneak lovers into their rooms, sleep with their parishioners’ wives, and make false claims to defraud innocent Christians.
The stories pay far more attention to the hypocrisy, corruption, and power of the Church than they do to Christian theology or morality. This emphasis is partly because Christianity is taken for granted. The storytellers meet in a church, plan their week around religious services, and otherwise follow the conventions of a Christian society. But the focus on clerical failings shows that secularism is the everyday reality of the storytellers and their stories.
The Folly of Vice
Characters in The Decameron stories display a wide range of human vices, and they usually end up looking like fools. The storytellers strongly disapprove of some vices, such as greed, and are more lenient about other vices, such as lust. The storytellers especially condemn the vices of clerics and others who pretend to virtue. In Neifile’s story about a man who fakes a miracle cure, the villain is beaten, arrested, and nearly hanged. Although he escapes punishment, his deception becomes public knowledge, which is considered fair retribution for committing the sin of deception in the first place.
Some characters manage to hide their vices, especially the vice of lust, which the storytellers tend to confuse with love and passion. In Filostrato’s tale of the nightingale, Caterina’s father covers up the scandal of premarital sex by the traditional method of forcing a marriage, preserving everyone’s honor and happiness. In Pampinea’s story, Isabella uses her quick wits to protect her young lover, get rid of the powerful gentleman, and keep her husband ignorant. Her brilliant improvisation has an additional advantage: The gentleman cannot reveal his part in the affair without looking like a fool.
