SOURCE: Marino Lucia. “Audience and Narrators.” In The “Decameron” “Cornice”: Allusion, Allegory, and Iconology, pp. 25-36. Ravennba: Longo Editore, 1979.

In the following excerpt, Marino examines how Boccaccio's depiction of the various narrators in his cornice or frame-text, amplifies and enriches the Decameron.

The options not chosen by a writer can offer significant hints of what moves him towards the path he finally does elect. Boccaccio could very well have kept his fictive author an abstract voice with no explicit role within the Decameron text and, moreover, he could have had only one member of his brigata act as narrator to the rest. Instead, he decided on a panoply of viewpoints for his frame-text and represented eleven of them in the act of narrating. He could not have done so without some awareness of the extraordinary potential for complexity and flexibility such a fiction afforded him; he probably set...