Chaucer and a film

The Canterbury Tales is a collection of twenty-four stories written in Middle English in the fourteenth century. It is obvious that Chaucer was influenced by older works and by works from the same time period. Like in Dante’s Divine Comedy, Chaucer uses a master to guide the pilgrim in his story.

But Dante was not Chaucer’s only inspiration for his collection of tales. He also seems to have taken some notes of Boccaccio’s work. Although the role of objects in the Decameron and The Canterbury Tales are radically distinct from each other, some parallels can be noted between these two works and the stories they contain. The first similarity is the structure. Both works use a group of narrators to tell the various novellas, and these narrators all have had to flee because of the plague, also known as the Black Death. There have been several studies about the similarities and differences between Boccaccio’s work and Chaucer’s work, but we will merely focus on The Pardoner’s Tale and the novella of Fra Cipolla. N.S. Thompson, Chaucer, Boccaccio, and the debate of love: a comparative study of the Decameron and the Canterbury tales. Oxford: Clarendon. 1996

The Pardoner’s Tale is about a chaplain in a church that wants to become rich at the expense of other parishioners. He hopes to achieve this by convincing people to ask forgiveness for mild sins. They have to pay a large fee to actually receive forgiveness. In this way, the pardoner profits from the ignorance of these people. This is already quite similar to the story of Fra Cipolla, in which he also takes advantage of the stupidity of the residents of Certaldo. Besides, just like in Boccaccio’s novella, the chaplain uses his ability to speak and his wit to convince the people of his deception.

However, a difference between the characters from these stories is that, while Fra Cipolla plays with his linguistic ability to speak and thus deceives others, he does not flaunt it. This is in contrast to the pardoner in The Canterbury Tales, who openly and shamelessly proclaims his bad intentions. He even refers to himself as a vicious one. Apart from this, he also claims that his only goal is to get money and that he does not care about absolving sins.

Other than poetry, filmmakers have once again taken a look at Boccaccio’s Decameron for inspiration. This is the case with the film from 1984: Bertoldo, Bertoldino e Cacasenno, directed by Mario Monicelli. It is similar to Boccaccio’s story of Fra Cipolla, but there are a few differences.

First of all, Fra Cipolla is not just presented as a friar, but more as a conman. Nevertheless, he uses his speaking ability and fake relics to con ignorant people, just like in the original novella.

Aside from this, in the film the friar tries to sell the feather to the public, which he claims originates from the angel Gabriel, when in fact he has a whole bunch of fake feathers to sell. In the original novella this is not the case, because he merely shows one and the same feather. The coals do not appear in the movie either. Rather than this, a farmer believes a certain donkey is a magical animal that defecates coins. At this point the film completely deviates from Boccaccio’s novella.