Before the Knight’s Tale: Imitation of Classical Epic in Boccaccio’s Teseida by David Anderson (review)

REVIEWS DAVID ANDERSON. Before the Knight's Tale: Imitation of ClassicalEpic in Boccaccios Teseida. Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988. Pp. xiii, 269. $29.95. The title and subtitle give some clue to the book's perspective. It reaches The Knights Tale in the fourth, and last, chapter. Before that the focus has been chiefly on Boccaccio's "creative" and "allusive" transformation of Statius's Thebaidin his Tesetda. Such transformation, Anderson argues, is what Boccaccio was aiming for-not the "faithful reconstruction of the epic genre" which nineteenth-century (and later) critics thought he had failed to achieve. The core of the work, chapters 1-3, seeks to dismantle the "failed epic" argument by attending closely to Boccaccio's "imitative strategy" with regard to Statius. His dealings with formal simile, the theme ofrivalry, and the main action ofbooks 3-6 ofthe Teseida inrelationto thefirstfour ofthe Thebatdare the main subject of the first chapter. The second argues for a very different pattern of borrowing in the Teseida's "books of war" (6-11). The perspective widens in chapter 3, to take account of the epic "model" that Boccaccio was imitating-and suggests, for instance, what the fourteenth-century Thebaidhad in the way of verse argument, summaries, etc., and what the late-classical and medieval commentators on Statius and Virgil can contribute to our understanding of Boccaccio's "transformative" design. The focus on questions of genre is sustained in the final chapter, where Anderson argues stronglyagainstthe still influential view of the Teseida as a "ragbag of narrative motifs and rhetorical topoi awaiting the will of a master tailor" and The Knights Tale as "an exercise in taking the romance out of its epic clothing." Chaucer's tale is thus seen as epic rather than romance-retaining parts of the Teseida that relate closely to the Thebaid and further developing some of the links with Statius. There is a good deal of productive thinking about the medieval epictradition in this account of Chaucer's "collegial and respectful collaboration" with Boccaccio. The end of the discussion, though, disappointingly drifts away from The Knights Tale into a rather ponderous meditation on love, history, and "divisioun." And the end ofthe whole chapter seems breathless and overcrowded. Like the bearers and seekers of "tydynges" in the Domus Dedaly, references to 177 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER seven of Chaucer's works and three of Boccaccio's trample on each other's heels during the last two pages, and it looks rather as if the whole work is being cut short before the man of great authority can have his say. I do not want, however, to give the impression that the structure of Anderson's book is one of whirling wicker. The main discussion, as out­ lined, is buttressed by a good deal ofsolidand useful apparatus. There is no separate bibliography, but full notes and references follow each chapter, and three substantial appendices provide further illustration of the argu­ ment. The first two appendices enable readers to judge medieval attitudes toward epic for themselves, through two accessus to the Thebaid(one of the twelfth, the other of the fourteenth or fifteenth century), while the third appendix shows Boccaccio coming to grips with the text of the Thebaidin what is probably his own commentary in his own copy of the poem. The book also shows a thorough and discriminating command of the secondary literature, including the long tradition of commentary and scholarship on the Teseida in Italian. This makes it all the more surprising that the author's grasp of the language of the primary text is not so secure. He rightly points out(p. 84 n. 10) that the only complete English transla­ tion of Teseida, B. M. McCoy's The Book of Theseus, "contains many errors" -and he could well have here referred the novice reader to A. K. Cassell's list of corrections in MLN 91(1976):164-67. It has to be said, though, that there are frequent occasions when Anderson's own renderings of Boccaccio's Italian are inaccurate. A very basic mistake is "buffeted" for cosse in Tes. 9.31(p. 106, presumably mistaking cuocere for scuotere)-as...