Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio (review)

The title of Carol Falvo Heffernan's addition to Brewer's Chaucer Studies series is admirably straightforward. Yet, as Heffernan shows, the nature of comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio is not so straightforward, but spans a multiplicity of subgenres. This multiplicity reinforces the complexity of late medieval comedy, which incorporates both the exalted cosmological vision of Dante's Commedia and the low plotting of the French fabliaux. Both Chaucer and Boccaccio immerse themselves in this variety, and Heffernan reminds us of their shared comic inheritance and the various parallels between the two authors' works.

An unavoidable question, which this study attempts to answer, concerns Chaucer's knowledge of the Decameron. The answer to this question has changed in recent decades, shifting from J. E. Severs's resounding "no," through Donald McGrady's "perhaps," to Heffernan's "very likely." Indeed, Heffernan builds upon recent commentary in this area by N. S. Thompson, John Finlayson, Helen Cooper, Leonard Michael Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen, among others, all of whom in some form or another have recommended that we reconsider the long-established view that Chaucer did not know Boccaccio's mercantile epic directly. Heffernan states that in an earlier study she "also was burdened by caution" (67), but apparently is so no longer. While Heffernan is right to argue that "the accumulation of so many parallel details cannot be explained away as the result of coincidence" (67), in order to state definitively that Chaucer knew the Decameron firsthand some new concrete evidence is needed. This is not forthcoming, yet one would be unwise to disregard Heffernan's accumulation of intertextual parallels. Consequently, Heffernan, like many others who have addressed this question, is forced to adopt a subjunctive tone; the caveat "might have" or variants thereupon necessarily recur often. We need not be "burdened by caution," although this is not to say that we should ignore caution either—Heffernan manages to maintain a careful balance in this respect.

The opening chapter lays the historical groundwork for those that follow. It revisits the possibility that "Chaucer could have met Petrarch at Padua or nearby Arqua and Boccaccio at Florence or Certaldo" (10) during his first recorded ambassadorial visit to the peninsula in 1372-73. However, neither Petrarch nor Boccaccio mentions a meeting with a young English poet in their correspondence of this period, which leads one toward the view that such a meeting did not take place. Nevertheless, these possibilities remain tantalizing, as Heffernan notes: "One would like to think there was a meeting between Chaucer and Petrarch at which Chaucer received the Latin version of the Clerk's Tale, Petrarch's translation of the last tale of the Decameron" (10). Heffernan also examines the critical reception of Chaucer's works in Italy in the late medieval and early modern periods, as a counterpoint to the customary accounts of the presence of Italian texts in England. This is very interesting, especially the discussion of Gerolamo Ghilini's seventeenth-century essay on Chaucer and Stefano Surigone's fifteenth-century eulogy. Heffernan suggests moreover that there "is reason to think Chaucer's writing might have been known to Italians even earlier" (7) due to wider Anglo-Italian cultural and mercantile connections, and argues that the "absence of manuscripts and early printed texts of Chaucer from Italian libraries is not necessarily evidence that he was not known in Italy" (9). It is not entirely clear, however, how the discussion of Italian knowledge of Chaucer reinforces the overall argument for Chaucer's reading of Boccaccio and their mutual comic inheritance. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the links and distinctions between Chaucer's London, and Boccaccio's Florence and Naples (13-19), providing interesting and necessary accounts of each city's culture(s) and how these cultures inform the biographies of the two authors.

Chapter 2 details Chaucer and Boccaccio's shared comic inheritance, which stretched from antiquity to the late medieval fabliaux. This continuum begins with Aristotle's theory of comedy as detailed...