Basile, Giambattista (1575–1632), Italian writer, poet, and courtier. He was born outside Naples to a middle‐class family of courtiers and artists. He spent his life in military and intellectual service at courts in Italy and abroad, was active in several academies, held administrative positions in the Neapolitan provinces, and by the end of his life had received the title of count. During his lifetime he was fairly wellknown for his poetic works in Italian, written in the style of the baroque poet Giambattista Marino. Today, however, Basile is remembered principally for his literary corpus in Neapolitan dialect, radically different in its popular content and playful style from his more orthodox Italian works. This corpus consists principally of Le Muse napolitane, a series of nine satiric eclogues depicting popular culture in Naples; and the fairy‐tale collection Lo cunto de li cunti overo lo trattenemiento de peccerille (The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones, 1634–6), also known as the Pentamerone. Although there is no trace of a manuscript nor reference to the elaboration of Lo cunto, the tales were probably intended to be read aloud in the ‘courtly conversations’ that were an élite pastime of this period.
Lo cunto constituted a culmination of the interest in popular culture and folk traditions that permeated the Renaissance, when isolated fairy tales had started to be included in novella collections, most notably in Straparola's Le piacevoli notti (The Pleasant Nights, 1550–3). Indeed, Basile did not merely transcribe the oral materials that he heard around Naples and in his travels, but transformed them into original tales distinguished by vertiginous rhetorical play, abundant references to the everyday life and popular culture of the time, and a subtext of playful critique of courtly culture and the canonical literary tradition. Besides being one of the most suggestive expressions of the search for new artistic forms and content theorized by the baroque poetics of the marvellous, Lo cunto is the first integral collection consisting entirely of fairy tales to appear in Europe, and thus marks the passage from the oral tradition of folk tales to the artful and sophisticated ‘authored’ fairy tale. As such, it exerted a notable influence on later fairy‐tale writers such as Perrault and the Grimms.
Lo cunto comprises 49 fairy tales contained within a 50th frame story, also a fairy tale, that opens and closes the collection. In the frame tale, a slave girl deceitfully cheats Princess Zoza out of her predestined prince Tadeo (the ‘false‐bride’ motif), and the princess reacts by using a magic doll to instil in the slave the need to hear tales. The prince summons the ten best tale‐tellers of his kingdom, a motley group of hags, and they each tell one tale apiece for five days, at the end of which Zoza tells her own tale, reveals the slave's deceit, and wins back Tadeo. In many ways the structure of Basile's work mirrors, in parodic fashion, that of earlier novella collections, in particular Boccaccio's Decameron: there are five days of telling that contain ten tales each; the tales are told by ten grotesque and lower‐class women; the tale‐telling activity of each day is preceded by a banquet, games, and other entertainment; and verse eclogues that satirize the social ills of Basile's time follow each day's tales.
Lo cunto contains the earliest literary versions of many celebrated fairy‐tale types—‘Cinderella’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Rapunzel’, and others—that later appeared in Perrault's and the Grimms' collections. But Basile's tales are often bawdier and crueller than their more canonical counterparts. In ‘La gatta Cennerentola’ (‘The Cinderella Cat’), for example, the heroine is far from the epitome of feminine passivity for which she has come to be known, since she first kills off her stepmother and then astutely intervenes in the events of the story in order to attain her final triumph; she is even described during one of her outings as a whore parading her wares. Or in ‘Cagliuso’, Basile's version of ‘Puss‐in‐Boots’, the cat who has helped her master rise from rags to riches is thrown out of the window when he no longer needs her, to which she responds with a long‐winded speech on ingratitude and an indignant departure. Indeed, the final outcome of these tales often does not quite fit into the ‘happily ever after’ mould. In ‘La vecchia scortecata’ (‘The Old Woman who was Skinned’), two ancient sisters have, for purely arbitrary reasons, radically different fates: one is transformed into a beautiful young woman and marries a king, while the other, in an attempt to achieve the same, meets death when she orders a barber to shave her skin off. Other tales are explicitly autobiographical in tone, such as ‘Corvetto’, the story of a virtuous courtier who is forced to overcome a series of obstacles devised by his envious colleagues, but whose worth is finally recognized by his patron. Finally, Basile's tales feature a surprising number of ingenious heroines, such as the protagonist of ‘La Sapia’ (‘The Wise Woman’), who is hired as a tutor for a hopelessly ignorant prince, finally manages to slap—quite literally—some sense into him, and then manipulates his plans for fierce revenge into a final recognition of her worth in the form of a loving marriage.
Basile does not offer easy answers to the problem of how an archaic, oral narrative genre can, or should, be re‐proposed in literary form; in Lo cunto ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures intersect to create a ‘carnivalesque’ text in which linguistic and cultural hierarchies, as well as the conventional fairy‐tale hierarchies, are rearranged or made to show their weak spots. The new narrative model that emerges is one of the most complex tributes to the power of the fairy tale not only to entertain, but also to interpret the world.
Bibliography
- Canepa, Nancy L., From Court to Forest: Giambattista Basile's ‘Lo cunto de li cunti’ and the Birth of the Literary Fairy Tale (1999).
- Croce, Benedetto, Intro. to Giambattista Basile, Il pentamerone (1982).
- Guaragnella, Pasquale, Le maschere di Democrito e Eraclito: scritture e malinconie tra Cinque e Seicento (1990).
- Penzer, Norman (ed.), The Pentamerone of Giambattista Basile (2 vols., 1932).
- Petrini, Mario, Il gran Basile (1989).
- Rak, Michele, Intro. to Giambattista Basile, Lo cunto de li cunti (1986).
— Nancy Canepa
