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Boccaccio's Criseida and her Narrator, Filostrato.
Giovanni Boccaccio is perhaps best known for the earthy, often ribald tales of the Decameron which exemplify a distinctively Ovidian fascination with layered narration. The technique of enveloping stories within stories allows the poet to control multiple perspectives and thus to broaden the frames of reference from which the reader interprets any given story. The way in which Boccaccio uses a narrative frame in the Filostrato has been little explored. In fact, many scholars have resisted the interpretive challenges which the Filostrato's narrative sophistication poses. They have preferred to offer autobiographical interpretations which seek to explain the poem in terms of the author's life. This paper proposes that in the Filostrato Boccaccio employs narrative frames and creates a narrative persona for ironic effect, the result of reshaping the writings of his auctores. In the poem the author acts as an incompetent, "stupid" narrator of literary and philosophical materials that exceed his interpretive abilities. The poem consists of a "framing story," detailing the narrator's misfortunes in his love for his lady, Filomena, and a "framed story," that of the tragic love between Troilus and Criseida. Until Boccaccio wrote the Filostrato, the Troilus and Criseida story, first told in Benoît's Roman de Troie (1155), existed only as part of more extensive historical accounts of the Trojan War of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, such as Guida delle Colonne's Historia destructionis Troae. The literary transmission of the story, translated into many languages and widely circulated throughout Western Europe, would have made his readers familiar with Troilus and Criseida by the time Boccaccio wrote. In particular, they would have recognized Criseida as the legendary embodiment of a specifically feminine brand of treachery: fickleness and inconstancy.
It is the narrator's treatment of Criseida which illustrates how Boccaccio transforms his sources. Indeed, the most interesting aspects of this transformation of sources are manifest not only because the narrator's story frames Criseida's story but also because Criseida's story is a model for its frame, namely, the narrator's story. Boccaccio's manipulation of the literary tradition from which Criseida's legend derives can be traced through a close analysis of the narrator's distinctive version of the story. By constructing a "stupid" narrator, Boccaccio can exploit for ironic effect...