The Decameron Revisited – Pandemic as Farce

One of the sleeper hits for Netflix UK this summer has been a reimagining of Bocaccio’s Decameron as a commentary on pandemic behavior. In one sense, it is an obvious thing to do. The original was probably written in response to the Black Death, the plague pandemic that ripped through Europe in the middle of the 14th century. Boccacio imagines a group of young people who take refuge in a villa outside Florence. To pass the time, they take turns telling each other stories of love – courtly, tragic, comic, and erotic.

The work circulated widely and had a considerable influence on other writers, whose debts varied from imitation to outright plagiarism. The Netflix version takes the scenario of young, affluent 14th-century refugees invited to assemble in a country villa and reframes it as an increasingly dark farce.

The narrative arc is fundamentally an investigation of class and character in times of peril. As the series begins, we see the villa’s steward burying the owner, who has died from the plague before any of his invited guests arrive. The steward, and the female housekeeper, sustain the story that the owner is away shopping in the Venice area, first for wine and later for glass. All the other villa servants have fled. The guests then start to arrive: the owner’s betrothed, with her maidservant – who has brought her dying lesbian lover hidden in a barrel; a spoiled, intellectual aristocrat with his personal physician; a former maidservant who has pushed her mistress off a bridge and assumed her identity – the real aristocrat turns up later and is forced to play the role of a servant; and a celibate couple – he is gay and she is erotically obsessed with religion.

Over the course of eight episodes, each of the characters follows their own arc to death or redemption or both. Locking themselves away in the countryside does not insulate them from the plague, which still claims its victims. Religious fervor does not save them. Nor does medicine, with the doctor ready to tailor his prescriptions to any real or imagined ill. The intellectual bores everyone with his lectures on history and philosophy but is ultimately inspired to heroism by his learning. The betrothed’s obsession with status and property as protection against the fate of the 28-year-old spinster is her undoing. None of the laptop class can survive without the maturity, goodwill and practical skills of the servants.

The lower classes are the real heroes. The steward just about keeps the villa functioning, burying the dead and organizing the living. The housekeeper ensures everyone is fed and delivers effective home remedies for their ailments. The postman brings news. Three of them seduce their social superiors and liberate their hidden sexual identities as submissive, gay or lesbian. As order disintegrates, they introduce alternative models. A bunch of brigands are invited into the villa, much like a narco-capitalist gang. There is an experiment with primitive communism. Another attempts the recognition of the rightful heir and the creation of a kinder, gentler approach to the class order. Meanwhile, the plague continues to rage and a mercenary army is at the gates.

Boccacio’s characters amuse themselves and return to a world that has been devastated by plague but where social order remains intact. In the 21st-century imagination, there is no such comfort. The experience of lockdown has changed lives, and eliminated some, but there is little hope amid the chaos.

For all that they might long for a reformed social order, a ‘new normal,’ the world outside that breaks into the villa is one of violence and madness. Paradoxically, the decision of the upper classes to protect themselves has also destroyed the institutions that produced order for everyone. Law, medicine, learning, religion have all been called into question – so what is left? The program makers do not seek to answer this question, except, perhaps, by pointing to the personal growth of the survivors. However, it is certainly a question worth asking. What is the legacy of the ‘noble lies’ that were promoted during the Covid pandemic, offering false reassurance that ‘something was being done’? What is the legacy of the corruption in public procurement? What is the legacy, above all, of those who could lock themselves away by shifting risk to those who served them? In the end, the program suggests that none of this counts for very much at all. In the great scheme of things, the plague is a blip to be erased from memory.