Excerpt from Stories of Boccaccio (the Decameron)
For the first time the great work which produced so marked an effect on the romantic literature of modern Europe, is laid before the reader in a garb which at least does not misrepresent its original features.
"There are few works," says Dunlop, in his history of Fiction, "which have had an equal influence on literature with the Decameron of Boccaccio. Even in England its effects were powerful. From it Chaucer adopted the notion of the frame in which he has enclosed his tales, and the general manner of his stories, while in some instances, as we have seen, he has merely versified the novels of the Italian. In 1566, William Paynter printed many of Boccaccio"s stories in English, in his work called the Palace of Pleasure. This first translation contained sixty novels, and it was soon followed by another volume, comprehending thirty-four additional tales. These are the pages of which Shakespeare made so much use. From Burton"s Anatomy of Melancholy we learn that one of the great amusements of our ancestors was reading Boccaccio aloud, an entertainment of which the effects were speedily visible in the literature of the country. The first English translation, however, of the whole Decameron, did not appear till 1620. In France, Boccaccio found early and illustrious imitators.
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