Storytellers by the Sea
The literary fairytale was born in kingdoms by the sea...
...at least in the West, but elsewhere too.
Two men, almost a hundred years apart, put pen to paper - the first, in Venice on the Adriatic Sea and the second, in Naples on the Tyrrhenian Sea. These were busy, important cities where merchants made fortunes and wealthy and noble families jostled for power both in this life and beyond. The very richest and poorest jostled side by side as traders and artisans worked within crowded streets. The cities were open to the world, to the oceans that carried away ships for fishing, for trade, for war. The clatter and creak of wooden vessels upon the waves filled the harbours. Venice, in particular, dominated trade with the Middle East, monopolising trade routes for silk, spice, and opium. It's easy to believe that the tales of the Thousand and One Nights, already coalescing from various nations in the East, were carried into Europe upon this route, the scent of spice still clinging to the spoken Arabic as they influenced the formation of the Western fairy-tale tradition.* And it is aptly in these cities that two men set down the Western tradition of fairytale in print.
Giovanni Francesco Straparola was born around 1485 in Caravaggio and found his way to Venice, where he published The Pleasant Nights in 1551 and 53. The collection of stories, set within a frame tale, followed in the tradition of the Thousand and One Nights and European authors like Boccaccio and Chaucer. In fact, tales from the Nights already appear present in Boccaccio's fourteenth-century The Decameron. These traditions mimic a popular entertainment of the time where storytellers competed with each other. And they told all kinds of stories - myths, legends, ballads, folklore, bawdy tales and more. There was no neat categorisation and in some of these stories, we can even see the seed evolving into fairytale before Straparola penned the tale of a young peasant inheriting a fairy-cat from his mother.
Straparola's collection is striking for containing a number of recognised fairytales, like "Costantino Fortunato" (better known as "Puss in Boots"), appearing in print for the first time. When the French conteuses in the 1690s penned their tales, Henriette-Julie de Murat notes they were retelling Straparola's tales, confirming their reference to previous fairy-tale literature.
Straparola's fairytales appear among a variety of other story types over the thirteen nights. It is Giambattista Basile's The Pentamerone that takes things a step further. Born by the sea in Posillipo, likely in 1575, he was a soldier and courtier. His sister, Adriana, herself a famed musician, poet, singer, and composer, credibly had the work published after his death in 1634/36. The Pentamerone is also a collection of stories within a frame tale, but in this case, the frame tale is itself a fairytale and the stories in the collection, interspersed with occasional eclogue, are all fairytales told over five days.
The tales of these kingdoms by the sea reflect the richness of cosmopolitan culture, the flow of travellers, the access to all kinds of ideas, innovations, materials, and produce. The literary fairytale comes to be where the sea meets the land, acting as a gateway between the world and provinces.
While I have heard the odd snicker about literary fairytales, with a perception that they are less 'authentic,' they are true reflections of these gateways at this time - a little salty, a little earthy. So often we set the literary against the oral, as though it were a competition like those old storytelling affairs. But both do have claims to authenticity and, where we have no earlier collection of a fairytale, these tales, existing at a nexus of nations, classes, religions, and genres, show us the vitality at the emergence of Western fairytale.
Moreover, these are fairytales that do not chiefly look inwards. They have their eyes on the wide ocean and the wonders beyond the harbour. Indeed, they reveal marvels that trade encourages. These are tales about society, expansion, drama, violence, inequality. These are tales in which the 'other,' the strange, lives next door. They are materialistic and political.
And so Straparola's Doralice flees the unnatural affections of her father, hidden in a casket that sails to England and is bought by a foreign king, while Basile's Viola goes to retrieve a thread and tumbles into the garden of the affluent (even effluent) ogre next door, and the father of his Cat Cinderella takes a ship to Sardinia on affairs of state, returning with a magical date tree for his neglected daughter.
The horizons are grander in these worldly tales. These are not only tales that pass the lips of old crones and courtly ladies, but tales that flow with ink and the echo of the clash of printing presses.
Next time you think about the origin of fairytale, think too of these tales, whose printed words preserve the earliest versions we have for certain, and meditate upon sunny Italy. Maybe even indulge in the sensual delights of pasta, wine, and gelato, the thick folds of rich fabrics in couture designs, patent leather Ferragamo shoes, the simple floral cotton of a nonna's shift dress, and sandals that slap along cobbles, the grand architecture of cathedrals and palaces, and the apartment balconies from which the washing hangs, and the clear blue seas now filled with yachts and fishing boats and tourists. The spirit of these first tales is still there to be found. It is darker and more profane than perhaps we expect. Yet more rude and rowdy, too.
*The first European translation of the tales was Galland's French translation in the early eighteenth century, following right on the tail of the French vogue for fairytale. It appears as a French fairytale incorporating Orientalism. Yet, there is evidence the tales had an earlier influence on Europe, likely through trade and even the Crusades of the Medieval period.
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