Planificación de la propuesta

The divine imperative that in Teseida II.4-7 urges Theseus to abandon the pleasures of love in Scythia and look for further martial glory overtly echoes Aeneid IV, as we have seen above, with a twist worthy of note: while Aeneas must leave Dido, Theseus has already married Hippolyta and decided to take her to Greece with him. Comedy replaces tragedy.

247 To my knowledge, only in Sherberg, “Girl Outside the Window,” 99-100, can we find observations on the relevance of the question posed by incipit of the Thebaid to the poetics of the Teseida. Sherberg’s prospective differs from mine in that, while I consider Statius’ opening gesture as a pre-condition of the epic genre learned and written in practice by Boccaccio, he reads that very gesture as an indication of Boccaccio’s difficulty in providing the readers with the mythographic references that the verse narrative alone is incapable of supplying. Hence the glosses that expand on stories connected to the main narrative (for the benefit of sophisticated readers, more than for listeners).

248 In this respect, the implications of the allegorical apparatus in Boccaccio’s glosses are consistent with the in-between textuality typical of the epic tradition. Allegoresis posits a discourse that exists temporally and ontologically prior to the text as integumentum. As put in Copeland and Melville, “Allegory and Allegoresis,”178, allegoresis presents itself “in a position of rhetorical anteriority by refusing the direct or

‘proper’ character of the given text’s discourse.”

Such a divergence, already foregrounded in the double invocation to Mars and Venus (plus Cupid) in the proem (I.3),²⁴⁹ reveals that Boccaccio is aware of the historicity of his project of composing vernacular epic in a tradition newly-founded on the themes and genres of love and virtue, not so much of arms. This at least is what was authoritatively said by Dante in De vulgari eloquentia II.2 (“Arma vero nullum latium adhuc invenio poetasse”), an authoritative passage unmistakably echoed (and wittily misinterpreted) in the envoy of the Teseida, in an ottava that must be quoted once again:

Poi che le Muse nude cominciaro nel conspetto degli uomini ad andare, già fur di quelli i quai l’esercitaro con bello stilo in onesto parlare, e altri in amoroso l’operaro;

ma tu, o libro, primo a loro cantare di Marte fai gli affanni sostenuti,

nel volgar lazio più mai non veduti. (XII.84)

Much has been written on this ottava, possibly the most famous and quoted in the whole poem.²⁵⁰ My purpose here is to read it along with another ottava that hints at the poem’s program of literary history-making: a post-Dantean contribution toward a vernacular translatio that, as such, requires the capacity and scope of the epic, but at the same time originated from a form of subjectivity mainly shaped by the experience of love.

E m’è venuto in voglia con pietosa rima di scrivere una istoria antica, tanto negli anni riposta e nascosa che latino autor non par ne dica,

per quel ch’io senta, in libro alcuna cosa;

dunque sì fate che la mia fatica

249 “Siate presenti, o Marte rubicondo, / nelle tue armi rigido e feroce, / e tu, madre d’Amor, col tuo giocondo / e lieto aspetto, e ‘l tuo figliuol veloce / co’ dardi suoi possenti in ogni mondo ; / e sostenete e la mano e la voce / di me che ‘ntendo I vostri effetti dire / con poco bene e pin d’assai martire.”

250 Almost every critic has addressed it, in a more or less detailed way. See for instance Anderson, Before the Knight’s Tale, 14-17 and 20-21, Bruni, Boccaccio, 190, Martinez, “Before the Teseida,” 205-207, and Sherberg, “Girl Outside the Window,” 96, for important reflections on the passage.

sia graziosa a chi ne fia lettore o in altra maniera ascoltatore. (I.2)

Here, in the proem, Vita nuova XXV is directly referenced as the beginning of the discourse on Italian vernacular literature and its origins in love poetry. Associated in such a prominent position in the poem, key words like “rima,” “antica,” and “latino” do resonate with that foundational Dantean passage:

prima è da intendere che anticamente non erano dicitori d’amore in lingua volgare, anzi erano dicitori d’amore certi poete in lingua latina; tra noi, dico […] non volgari ma litterati poete queste cose trattavano. E non è molto numero d’anni passati, che appariro prima questi poete volgari; ché dire per rima in volgare tanto è quanto dire per versi in latino, secondo alcuna proporzione. […]. E lo primo che cominciò a dire sì come poeta volgare, si mosse però che volle fare intendere le sue parole a donna, a la quale era malagevole d’intendere li versi latini. E questo è contra coloro che rìmano sopra altra matera che amorosa, con ciò sia cosa che cotale modo di parlare fosse dal principio trovato per dire d’amore. (Vita nuova, XXV.3-6, emphasis added)

Love poetry is the only genre allowed here by Dante, as the one through which Italian vernacular literature first emerged (this orientation will not remain the same in the Commedia, though even there the history of vernacular literature is mainly reconstructed through the presence – direct or indirect – of love poets). Even if this might be meant as a critique of another vernacular poet like Guittone, and despite the range of genres, styles, and modes authorized by the Commedia, Boccaccio astutely seizes the opportunity to follow and twist the pre-Commedia dictum of Vita nuova XXV, so as to present the Teseida as a legitimate development of the poetics of both Vita nuova and Commedia. Dante’s alleged etiology of vernacular poetry (i.e., the necessity to be understood by a woman not familiar with Latin) is mirrored by Boccaccio in the framing device of an elegiac epistle from the author to his beloved: the motor of writing is love (similar erotic framings characterize two earlier works, the Filostrato and Filocolo).

While reenacting the primal scene of the origins of Italian literature in the frame and the proem of the Teseida (where the subject matter is accordingly introduced as more erotic than epic or martial), Boccaccio recast it within the new perspective given by the dominant generic affiliation of the poem: the epic, as a continuation or development of love. Such perspective is concurrent with the converse one (love as a continuation or development of the epic) authorized by the fact, manifest to moderately cultivated readers, that the Teseida derives and digresses from the Thebaid. In this post-Dantean discourse (at once pre- and post-Commedia), love constitutes the origin of the genres of Italian literature.

In the beginning is the matter of love, but that is not enough; hence the epic.

As recommended in De vulgari eloquentia II.6.7, the vernacular writer should profitably study the canon of antiquity’s regulate poetae, whose works are the core of the epic tradition: “Virgilium videlicet, Ovidium Metamorfoseos, Statium atque Lucanum.”

Following this advice, the Teseida illustrates how the vast scope of epic translatio originates from and returns to love as the primary force of translatio itself. If we consider again the ottava XII.84, where Boccaccio claims to have occupied the seat of the song of arms declared vacant by Dante in the field of Italian literature, it will become clearer why Boccaccio left for the envoy his most explicit authorial claim to epic authority. In terms of literary history, this newly-acquired status is made possible by the potentialities of eros as an agent of generic evolution; the epic stems from love poetry as a differentiation in the growing corpus of Italian vernacular poetry – a differentiation necessary to establish a new tradition.

Boccaccio significantly juxtaposes the triumph of courtly eros to the epic-minded envoy: when book XII is over, the poem comes to an end with the author’s sonnet to the Muses, who reply with another sonnet that embeds Fiammetta’s response to the poem, in a sort of double female voice. In proposing a hybrid epic/erotic title – Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia – Fiammetta echos Inferno V.113-114: “Ahi, quante d’amor forze in costor foro!,”

that brings us back to the very beginning of the prologue of the Teseida (“Come che ad memoria tornandomi le felicità trapassate, nella miseria vedendomi dov’io sono mi sieno di grave dolore manifesta cagione”), where echoed Inferno V.121-123 has been already echoed.²⁵¹ The narratives of the text and of its frame must be read through each other;²⁵² more importantly, epic and eros must be read through each other, in a dialogue set in motion by on love as a genre-builder and genre-shifter. A successor of Dante’s Commedia, Boccaccio includes the authorial persona in the text’s generic interplay. Yet he refrains from placing the poeta-personaggio at the center of the verse narrative: from beginning to end, the Teseida remains a poem of multiple generic perspectives, without a unifying perspective that could transcend all the differences and contradictions of the text.