Dante's Heart
A frame story is different from anthology works like Apuleius’ Golden
Ass, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or Franco Sacchetti’s Trecentonovelle
which do not have a framing narrative. The genre was originally oral,
although the extant examples are of course written; it can be traced back
3,000 years to India, where it is thought to have originated. It depicts
storytelling events in a variety of ways, and in the process it carries many
clues to the nature of oral performance onto the written page because the
stories (however composed) depict public storytelling events. Like most
medieval works, the frame stories were recited publicly even when they
existed in manuscript (consider the frontispiece of a fifteenth-century
manuscript that is believed to depict Chaucer reading Troilus and
Criseyde to the court). In Hungary, orally-composed frame stories existed
as late as 1944, linking stories told over a number of days just as written
frame stories like the Canterbury Tales do. As a result, the genre
occupies a unique place between the purely oral and the purely literate and
is a valuable subject for folklore studies.
The stories within the frame command more space and attention than the
framing narrative, and most frame stories have a rather loose narrative
structure. The frame story always has considerable interplay of
perspectives and genres not just to maintain the audience’s interest but to
enhance the plot of the frame itself. The flexibility of the frame story
enables works of the genre to contain stories of many themes, lengths, and
styles from both literate and oral tradition. Each frame tale draws upon a
variety of sources, which makes it more exciting but somewhat hard to
analyze. The individual stories of The Seven Sages have analogues in
other frame stories that circulated orally and in manuscript, and a number
of them were used by Boccaccio in the Decameron. The oldest known
frame story is the Sanskrit Panchatantra (compiled more than 2,000 years
ago) about a king who worries that his sons are uneducated and foolish and
five Brahmins who tell didactic fables for the edification of the Princes; the
tales of the Panchatantra are still told by Indian parents to their children.
By the ninth century, the form had spread to the Near East, and versions
exist in Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, and Greek. A famous frame story is the
Arabian Nights, whose narrator is Shahrazad, who tells tales to save
herself from her husband’s cruelty.
Medieval European examples of other frame stories date from the twelfth
century, like Petrus de Alfonsi’s Disciplina clericalis, a collection of tales
of advice told by a father to his son. The frame tale was most popular in
Europe in the fourteenth century when works like Giovanni Boccaccio’s
Decameron (c. 1350) were composed. The Decameron consists of
romantic and comic tales told by ten young men and women who have gone
to the countryside to escape the plague in Florence. The first known frame
story in Middle English is The Seven Sages of Rome, found in the
Auchincleck manuscript (c. 1331-40), and the work may have been known in
Middle English as early as 1275. It is a collection of fifteen stories in which
the seven sages attempt to refute the accusation of attempted rape brought
by the Empress against her stepson.
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Ass, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or Franco Sacchetti’s Trecentonovelle
which do not have a framing narrative. The genre was originally oral,
although the extant examples are of course written; it can be traced back
3,000 years to India, where it is thought to have originated. It depicts
storytelling events in a variety of ways, and in the process it carries many
clues to the nature of oral performance onto the written page because the
stories (however composed) depict public storytelling events. Like most
medieval works, the frame stories were recited publicly even when they
existed in manuscript (consider the frontispiece of a fifteenth-century
manuscript that is believed to depict Chaucer reading Troilus and
Criseyde to the court). In Hungary, orally-composed frame stories existed
as late as 1944, linking stories told over a number of days just as written
frame stories like the Canterbury Tales do. As a result, the genre
occupies a unique place between the purely oral and the purely literate and
is a valuable subject for folklore studies.
The stories within the frame command more space and attention than the
framing narrative, and most frame stories have a rather loose narrative
structure. The frame story always has considerable interplay of
perspectives and genres not just to maintain the audience’s interest but to
enhance the plot of the frame itself. The flexibility of the frame story
enables works of the genre to contain stories of many themes, lengths, and
styles from both literate and oral tradition. Each frame tale draws upon a
variety of sources, which makes it more exciting but somewhat hard to
analyze. The individual stories of The Seven Sages have analogues in
other frame stories that circulated orally and in manuscript, and a number
of them were used by Boccaccio in the Decameron. The oldest known
frame story is the Sanskrit Panchatantra (compiled more than 2,000 years
ago) about a king who worries that his sons are uneducated and foolish and
five Brahmins who tell didactic fables for the edification of the Princes; the
tales of the Panchatantra are still told by Indian parents to their children.
By the ninth century, the form had spread to the Near East, and versions
exist in Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, and Greek. A famous frame story is the
Arabian Nights, whose narrator is Shahrazad, who tells tales to save
herself from her husband’s cruelty.
Medieval European examples of other frame stories date from the twelfth
century, like Petrus de Alfonsi’s Disciplina clericalis, a collection of tales
of advice told by a father to his son. The frame tale was most popular in
Europe in the fourteenth century when works like Giovanni Boccaccio’s
Decameron (c. 1350) were composed. The Decameron consists of
romantic and comic tales told by ten young men and women who have gone
to the countryside to escape the plague in Florence. The first known frame
story in Middle English is The Seven Sages of Rome, found in the
Auchincleck manuscript (c. 1331-40), and the work may have been known in
Middle English as early as 1275. It is a collection of fifteen stories in which
the seven sages attempt to refute the accusation of attempted rape brought
by the Empress against her stepson.
Back Next
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