The World at Play in Boccaccio's Decameron.

Webster defines "Pollyanna," from the name of the heroine in a novel by the American writer Eleanor H. Porter (1868-1920), as "an excessively or persistently optimistic person." What is its antonym? Apparently sunshine is simpler than gloom, since for the latter outlook Roget's Thesaurus can propose a whole string of options, including "pessimist," "malist," "killjoy," "calamity howler," "worrywart," "prophet of doom," "Cassandra," "Eeyore," and "one who is always building dungeons in the air." Just such "dungeons" of the imagination, surprisingly, seem to have housed Giuseppe Mazzotta during his provocative dialogue with Boccaccio's masterpiece.

For the key term of his title, Mazzotta capitalizes on Schiller's notion that "man is wholly man when he is at play." Chief player in the Decameron is of course Boccaccio, whose opening pages engage him in a cultural debate with the Chartrian naturalists, Galenic medical theory, and Boethian metaphysics. The iconoclastic author's offer of "logotherapy" to women of leisure is, as we learn from chapter 2, "an admission of estheticism and futility." Chapter 3 explores how transgressive imaginative power collides with economic exigencies. The "complicity" between allegory and pornography (each needs a veil, or cover) occupies chapter 4, which touches the tales of Masetto and Griselda. Chapter 5 sustains an admirable, close reading of the Ghismonda story to "probe the relationship between the laws of passion and power of political authority." Chapter 6 carries us into Dioneo's reign. While for Dante laughter had been disembodied, in "angelici ludi," Boccaccio exploits anti-platonic strains and makes the locus of humor the body. Chapter 7 dissects several beffe, notably the tale of Calandrino and the heliotrope. During chapter 8, Mazzotta reconnoiters little studied relationships between the Decameron and legal thought: natural law as context for sexuality (II,10); marriage as a centerpiece of the ethics of natural law (III,7; VI,7); the brigata as legislators; Dioneo as a figure who both "encompasses the law and its subversion." A closing chapter finds the "ethical lexicon" for an ars bene vivendi in. the Decameron (e.g., the lesson on friendship in X,8).

This volume is admirable for its first-class medievalism and interpretative vitality. As background to the plague, we are refreshed not only on the philosophy of Bernard Silvester, but we also benefit from a mini-catalogue of medical authorities: John of Salisbury, Tommaso del Garbo, Guy de Chauliac, Dondoli da Oriolo, Gentile da Foligno. Iconography comes forward to comment on narrative: the Griselda story is a battle between mansuetudo and bestialitas. How nouns, proper and common, can reverberate in the tales is etymologically documented: friar Rinaldo of VII,3 has a "relative" in Reynard the Fox; Natan of X,3 means "dans vel dantis," and his "fama" comes from the Latin "fari," literally "that which is spoken of," while Mitridanes gets "an eye-opener" for "invidia." Mazzotta's impeccable medievalism, however, is marred by an inconsistent style. Alternately uplifting and frustrating, it clips along clearly to a point and then may rise to a swirl of real eloquence, or just at a climactic moment, snarl into opacity. Rhetoric verges on poetry when it "conjures up" Tancredi's palace as "a |Gothic' world of covert passions, hidden passageways, secret messages, deceptions and private revenges, of which the night is the epitome and Ghismunda the heroine" (139-40). But it dulls to puzzling verbal density when we are hit with: "metaphors ... focus on the radical contingency of every experience in the Decameron, by which the absolute truth of philosophy and its body of thought are not necessary; they are not even so important when compared to the involuntary insights of the disguised strumpet Muse into the ruptures of time and the shifty surface values of worldliness" (45).

Hardest for me to accept is Mazzotta's disturbingly negative vision of humanity, as from a "dungeon" with a view. He makes the world seem such a dangerous place - unpredictable and misleading in its false appearances, populated by liars and cheats, constantly menaced by violence, a slippery and flimsy platform trembling beneath our feet. Thus the contest between Natan and Mitridanes has a "sinister underside" that "slides into a selfish, all-consuming desire for fame" (253); Tito and Gisippo's supreme friendship masks "self-delusion," and "violence" (260). Over and again, we encounter a vocabulary that makes the quaking world of Montaigne's "branloire perenne" seem gentlemanly and tranquil by comparison: meretricious, complicity, illusory, transgression, mask, treachery, dissimulation, madness, subversion, unstable, precarious, unreliable, shiftiness, mirage, simulation, deceptions, sinister, violence, radical ambiguity, radical instability, radical contingency, radical crisis.

Is this really Boccaccio? Did we read the same book? What about the central Day V, where stories have socially acceptable, happy endings? Or the broader movement of the Decameron as a whole, from plague to survival, from anarchy to civility? They do not have a place in Mazzotta's analysis. Upbeat situations, where folk are honest and culture triumphs, do not square well with his pessimistic roach. From a dark aerial perspective, Mazzotta transfers his cynical brilliance to Boccaccio, whose "world at play" turns out to be an arena of endless, dizzying, violent collisions between fantasy and necessity - a place that sounds to me much less comic than tragic.