Excerpt from Some Authors: A Collection of Literary Essays, 1896 1916
We know hardly anything of the intimate life of Boccaccio except what he has told us, and almost all that he has told us is presented to us under the guise of fiction. Was he speaking of himself? Here enter the two eternal schools of literary criticism with their tedious controversy. The early romances and poems of Boccaccio - the Filocolo, the Filostrato, the Teseide, the Ameto, the Amorosa Visione, the Fiammetta, the Ninfale Fiesolano - are all romances, poems, and allegories dealing with love; all point to a loveaffair which reaches the summit of happiness and is then broken by desertion and separation. There was only one love-story, it seems, which interested Boccaccio; what wonder if it was his own? And his own, so far as we have independent knowledge of it, corresponds with the love-story of the romances and poems. The Filostrato, in its dedication to Fiammetta, asserts the identity:
'You are gone suddenly to Samnium, and ... I have sought in the old histories what personage I might choose as messenger of my secret and unhappy love, and have found Troilus, son of Priam, who loved Cressida. His miseries are my history. I have sung them in light rhymes and in my own Tuscan, and so when you read the lamentations of Troilus and his sorrow at the departure of his love, you shall know my tears, my sighs, my agonies; and if I vaunt the beauties and the charms of Cressida, you will know that I dream of yours.'
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