The chatterbox’s legacy

By Nicole Findlay

For the better part of three years, Donald Beecher has been held captive by a sixteenth-century chatterbox.

Little is known about Straparola, or chatterbox in Italian, other than in 1550 he published the first volume of a two-part compendium of folk and fairy tales.

Beecher, a professor of English, presented the results of his research at the annual Marston La France Fellowship lecture earlier this month.

Straparola’s Pleasant Nights comprises a collection of 75 tales, several of which are notoriously bawdy and low-brow, yet which are surrounded by a framing device featuring the polite activities of the upper classes. The jests, fables and novellas are presented as having been told by a group of 10 damsels brought in to entertain a social elite during 13 nights of carnival.  The occasion pretends to have been a real one, the participants are all known, but it turns out to have been a fiction like the tales themselves.

Although the work within the first 60 years of publication went through many Italian, French, German and Spanish editions, by the early seventeenth century it’s moment had passed and by the nineteenth century had fallen into complete disfavour–a work derided by critics as a “trivial collection of dirty stories with no literary merit,” said Beecher.

Modern scholars debate Straparola’s contribution to the fairy tale genre. Some claim he wrote these tales himself, while others say he collected them from the popular oral traditions of the Veneto.

So, Beecher took up the challenge of tracing the illusive story-teller’s five hundred year old trail. Likely a native of Caravaggio, Straparola conducted his own fieldwork, writing down the tales old wives and raconteurs active in the region where he lived, traditionally held to be the Venetian mainland around Padua or Treviso. Beecher also discovered that scarcely 30 of the stories have known literary sources, while the remaining 45, many of them having well known sequels in the folk collections of the nineteenth century, are clearly derived from the oral culture. This latter group includes 17 tales of magic and fairies, mermaids and dragons, which Beecher refers to as “wonder tales.”

Beecher’s research has led him to conclude that Straparola was a pioneer of literary ethnography centuries before the Brothers Grimm began their collecting of folk tales.

“He merits his due as the founder of the modern “literary” fairy tale,” said Beecher.

The results of Beecher’s analysis will be published in a two-volume work later this year.