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The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio is a masterpiece of world literature and the source of much of our popular culture. The book has one hundred plots with hundreds of characters, narrated by ten storytellers, plus ten songs that are exquisite examples of romantic poetry. The story plots include fantasy adventures, sweet romances, macabre horror tales, morality stories, bawdy jokes, and innumerable examples of human passion and folly.

Boccaccio creates an intricate structure to support these diverse stories and fix them in the mind of the reader. There is a framing story, set in 1348 when a great plague sweeps through Florence. Ten young people escape from the horrors of the city, retreat to an idyllic rural paradise, and amuse themselves by dancing and telling stories. Afterward, they return to Florence. Boccaccio organizes this framing story according to an elaborate system based on numbers. On ten different days, ten people take turns telling stories, and one person performs a song to close the day. Because numbers have special meanings in medieval literature, Boccaccio’s numerical structure is also thematic. For example, 4 is an unlucky number, and the king of the fourth day calls for stories about people whose love ended unhappily.

The frame story does not have much of a plot; it’s more of a progression of ideas than actions, and the characters are more like allegorical figures than real people. Boccaccio provides only hints about their appearance or their relationships with each other. The hints keep the reader guessing (and imagining romantic subplots), and they sustain the illusion of an idyllic pastoral paradise, a world of artifice and imagination. It is a shimmering, magical, natural world of flowers, singing birds, and cool streams (plus palatial sleeping quarters, elegant meals, and fine wine), which appears all the brighter against the dark background of the city, with its death, disease, destruction, and disorder.

Just as the plague provides the backdrop for pastoral paradise, so the illusory paradise provides a light backdrop for the one hundred stories, where the real plots and characters come to life. The story's characters are human beings, with human faults, follies, and passions. Even the characters who undergo fantastic adventures do so as people, not as superheroes. The people in the stories are mostly stock characters, such as young lovers, young wives of older husbands, and conniving priests, but Boccaccio puts twists on their personalities and on conventional plot devices and makes his people come to life and his stories express his themes.

The three major themes of The Decameron involve love, fortune, and intelligence, with the overriding theme being the power of love. In the Preface, Boccaccio describes how love motivates him to write and explains why women need his love stories (for entertainment and useful advice). He identifies his audience as women who are in love. Most of the stories involve some form of love, with romantic passion the most frequent form. Boccaccio regards passionate love as a powerful force outside the lover’s control. He frequently plays love off against the other two major themes, as when young lovers are separated by Fortune, or when shrewd women use their intelligence to secure love. Other themes involve clerical hypocrisy, vice, and folly, with hypocrisy being a common strategy for securing love and fortune.

The characters in the one hundred stories are people of Boccaccio’s time, the fourteenth century, when the Italian city-states are rising in power and wealthy merchants and bankers are joining the landed aristocrats in the upper strata of society. Quite a few stories feature such powerful gentlemen and their well-connected spouses. Other stories feature prosperous merchants, doctors, scholars, and small business owners. Members of the clergy, from the Pope down through bishops, abbots, abbesses, and poor friars, make frequent appearances. Retainers, servants, store clerks, and bricklayers add to the hum of prosperous activity.

Boccaccio’s plots range from fantastic adventure tales to short bawdy jokes, with most known genres of popular fiction in between. In fact, Boccaccio is a pioneer of several genres. After more than 650 years, some of his stories have become as familiar as folklore. For example, there’s one tale of a gallant young man who climbs up on a balcony to visit the girl he loves and another tale of two young lovers who die by mistake and are buried in the same tomb. Tales from The Decameron have inspired literary masterpieces like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare’s plays, and Poe’s horror stories. They also live on in the plots of countless stage plays, movies, television sitcoms and romcoms, and all genres of fantasy fiction.

Although each story stands on its own, the stories as a whole change over the ten days of the retreat. Changes in location by the storytellers, as well as changes in daily topics, affect the stories’ tones, plot lines, structures, and themes. The two days at the first villa produce fantasy tales with complicated plots based on the turns of Fortune. On the third day, the company moves to a more remote paradise, the palace with the walled garden. In this setting, the stories move from fantasy to real life, featuring the antics and follies of human types from back in Florence. On the sixth and seventh days, the companions visit the Valley of the Ladies, an even more remote natural paradise. The stories told these days, about tricksters, display everyday sins committed by humans. The stories of the last three days feature well-drawn characters and situations from everyday life, a sign that the storytellers are ready to end their illusory paradise and engage again with the real world. It’s as if Boccaccio is teaching a master class in fiction writing, with the ten storytellers as his students.

In his Epilogue, Boccaccio offers tongue-in-cheek apologies to anyone who might be offended by his writing, but he reports with false modesty that a lady has told him that his words are fine and sweet. The elegant prose, vivid characterizations, and earthy everyday dialogue of The Decameron justify that honor.

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