| Boccaccio: The Ultimate Survivor |
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Part 1: Il Decamerone—Precursor to Reality-Based TV Shows?
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"How much has the Italian language changed since Boccaccio wrote 'The Decameron'?"
GZTHOMPSON
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Gather ten young, attractive men and women who are seeking to escape the ravages of the Black Death and put them in a beautiful Tuscany villa outside the city of Firenze. Then, to while away the time and to escape the epidemic let each of them take turns telling bawdy stories. Each day ends with one of the storytellers singing a song accompanied by lusty, vibrant dancing.
At first blush it's not much different than: "16 Americans stranded in the rugged Australian outback of Queensland. Will they be able to survive the vast arid lands and fierce crocodiles of the Outback? And perhaps more importantly, will they be able to survive each other?" the premise for Survivor II: The Australian Outback.
But the tale of ten Florentines is not the latest reality-based TV show screenplay. In fact, it's the framework for Il Decamerone, written by the Italian humanist writer Giovanni Boccaccio almost 650 years ago. Regarded as his masterpiece and a model for Italian classical prose, its influence on Renaissance literature was enormous.
The storytelling takes up 10 days of the fortnight (the other days were reserved for religious devotions and personal adornment) and provides the title of the book, Il Decamerone, or "Ten Days' Work." The stories total 100 in all and explore a wide range of moral, social, and political issues, with a candor and wit that may astound the modern reader. The problems of corruption in high office, sexual jealousy, and the differences between the rich and the poor figure directly prominently in a substantial number of the Decameron's tales.
Better Than Temptation Island!
Fox Television's latest entry in the lowest-common-denominator genre, Temptation Island, is a short-order unscripted series in which four unmarried couples travel to the Caribbean to test and explore the strength of their relationship. The program, lambasted by media critics as a televised orchestration of infidelity for the sake of ratings, pales in comparison to Boccaccio's lascivious Story of Patient Griselda. This tale, told on the tenth day, is one of trust, of betrayal and mistaken identity, when a marquis has two children by his wife Griselda, stages their deaths and an act of infidelity (with one of his daughters, no less) before finally accepting his wife again and bestowing the title of marchesa upon her.
Boccaccio's gift for humor and wit are also evident in The Beds Confused, a precursor to the modern-day bedroom farce. Two young men lodge at an inn, and before the evening is over a hilarious round of musical beds ensues that includes the host, his wife and daughter, and the two guests.
The titles alone of some of Boccaccio's tales would be enough to send TV producers, religious fundamentalists, and media critics scrambling. These include: "Masetto da Lamporecchio Pretends to be Deaf and Dumb in Order to Become a Gardener to a Convent of Nuns, Where All the Women Eagerly Lie With Him," and "Two Men are Close Friends, and One Lies With the Other's Wife. The Husband Finds it Out and Makes the Wife Shut Her Lover in a Chest, and While He is Inside, the Husband Lies With the Lover's Own Wife on the Chest." Much more imaginative and exciting then Destination MIR and Combat Missions, two new additions to reality-TV programming.
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