Relationship Between Dante's Commedia And Boccaccio

The aim of this essay is to explain the relationship between Dante’s Commedia and Boccaccio’s Decameron. In order to understand this, it is therefore necessary to comprehend the connection between both their authors and characters. Also, the relation of the fictional worlds each author created. Furthermore, it is important to examine the textual structures and the intended purpose of both works.

Dante and Boccaccio both Florentine by origin were two of the founders of Modern literature. They both lived in a century when many were killed by the plague and they were inspired by their future works. Many of Dante’s characters are legendary or historical figures but many others were people who Dante knew. As a child he met Beatrice who was not only

Periphrasis, personification, repetition, apostrophes and rhetorical questions are all used to raise the level of the language. All these contributed to the epic structure of his work. Purgatory in the Commedia reflects the connection between God and man, and how this can be destroyed by the sins. On the contrary, the Decameron looks at human connections among people of different class race or religion. The Commedia is mostly about the Divine whereas the Decameron is about Earthly things. Furthermore, the purgatory is filled with examples of religious hymns and similarly in the Decameron a song is sung in each of the ten days.

On the other hand, the Decameron is both tragic and comic written in Italian prose. It begins with the fleeing of ten young people to the countryside over a fortnight. They each tell a story each day (hence the title of the book, the Decameron, meaning ten years work). Each of the days end with a song, which includes some of Boccaccio’s most lyrical

Like the Commedia, the Decameron is also in form of “comedy”. This refers to a composition beginning in sadness and ending in joy. On the other hand, Boccaccio’s prose tales are only loosely connected to each other in the structure of a story, very different from Dante’s epic and tightly structured poetry. Both works reflect common points but Boccaccio’s reflects a different tone than that of Dante’s. Boccaccio wants to entertain the reader whereas Dante wants to edify. Boccaccio’s tone is mockery but Dante’s is more serious. Dante was a genius isolated by his originality. The most obvious merit of the Commedia is that it had more poetic beauty than any poem written since.

Dante’s Divine Comedy shows what lies under appearances. He treated human nature in relation to God and life on this Earth in relation to life beyond the grave. On the other hand, Boccaccio deals with appearances. Dante saw the world as the mirror of his soul. Boccaccio looked at it with “naked eyes”. Dante writes his allegory to underline certain absolute truths. Boccaccio poses questions with no obvious answers, showing that the pleasure of literature is the pleasure of interpretation. Additionally, the Decameron is also an allegorical work and the characters in it each have an allegorical