The Decameron Frame Story: How Boccaccio Built It

The setup: a villa and a plague

The Decameron is a work by the Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio, written in the middle of the fourteenth century, roughly between 1349 and 1353. Its opening describes the plague that struck Florence in 1348. Against that background, a group of ten young people, seven women and three men, leave the city for a country villa. To pass the time and keep their spirits up, they agree to tell stories to each other. The title comes from Greek and points to the ten days over which the telling is spread.

Ten tellers, ten days

The structure is part of the pleasure. Each of the ten tellers speaks once per day, so every day yields ten tales and the book reaches one hundred. Each day one member of the group is chosen to lead, sets the rules for the day and usually picks a theme. Two of the days leave the theme free. The group also sings, walks and eats between the tales, so the frame is a social world as well as a device. That is the heart of the Decameron frame story: tales sit inside a shared situation that shapes how they are told and heard.

What a frame narrative does

A frame narrative, also called a frame story, is a story that holds other stories. Several things follow from the arrangement:

• Variety with unity. Very different tales can sit together because the frame supplies a common context.
• Voices. Each teller has a manner and sometimes responds to the previous tale, so the tales talk to each other.
• Distance and commentary. The frame lets the author comment on storytelling itself.
• A reason to listen. The audience inside the book models how a real audience might listen.

Frame narratives in other traditions include collections of tales told by travellers, and later novels and films have used the same device in many ways. If you search for frame narrative examples, you will find a long list, from classics to modern screen work.

Why performers keep returning to the form

For a festival or a performing arts project, the frame story is a ready made structure. A group of artists who live and work together for a few days can present short pieces as chapters of one larger evening. Dance, circus, music, poetry and installation can share a single situation, and the telling order itself becomes part of the dramaturgy. The idea suits a festival particularly well: many voices, a shared place, a limited time and an audience that moves from one piece to another. Contemporary makers use it with different aims, from warmth and community to irony about the isolation the original characters sought.

Notes on accuracy: this page describes the Decameron in general terms. For details of individual tales, rely on a reputable edition or a scholarly summary. The question of why the book was banned or censored at various times has a long and varied answer, since attitudes to its frankness changed with place and period.

Reading the Decameron today

What is the main point of the Decameron? Readers and critics give different answers. Many stress human cleverness and resourcefulness, love and desire in many forms, social satire, fortune and chance, and the power of storytelling to hold people together in a crisis. You can read a full modern translation or start with a selection. Reading a handful of tales from different days, together with the frame passages, gives a good sense of how the whole is built. For the programming side of mixing voices, see how festivals are programmed, and for one of the live forms that suits a shared frame, read about contemporary circus.