Where did our fairy tales come from? Nicholas Jubber set out to find the story behind the stories and found himself “bewitched” by one collector, a 17th-century poet and soldier who preserved the earliest-known versions of so many of our best-loved fables that he surely deserves the title of Fairy (tale) Godfather.
These are tales that everybody’s heard: the girl who has to skivvy for her step-sisters but isn’t allowed to go to the ball (until magic intervenes and she leaves a single shoe behind); the girl in a witch’s tower, hair spilling all the way to the ground; the princess who pricks her finger on a spinning wheel and falls into an everlasting sleep…
The tales are so timeless, so universally beloved, how could we attach them to specific storytellers? But delve into the history behind fairy tales, and we find there were individuals who shaped them, who wrote them down and sent them on their way to becoming the classics we know today.
Each of the stories mentioned above was written down in the 17th century by a Neapolitan poet and soldier-of-fortune called Giambattista Basile. His versions of Cinderella and Rapunzel are the earliest full versions of these tales in European literature. They were part of a collection of stories known as The Tale of Tales, which was published, in five volumes, in the 1630s.
Researching the story behind these stories, and digging into the lives of seven key tellers of tales, I was bewitched by Basile: a garrulous and often mischievous man, who served as a courtier, regional administrator, occasional soldier-of-fortune, and jobbing poet, spinning around the courts of the Italian Seicento.
A contemporary praised his “perpetual cheerfulness of spirit, for which he was deemed the life of conversations.”
That spirit comes across in his tales, where idiots (or ‘fart throats’) are given dressing-downs from worldly-wise ogres, overeating lords are humiliated by magical cockroaches, deals are made with the kingdom of mice, and the entire cycle of 50 tales is sparked by the laughter of a melancholy princess at the “woodsy scene” when an old woman flashes her crotch.
One of Basile’s critics described his tales as “monstrous and obscene”, insisting “it is impossible to read it without vomiting even on an empty stomach.” Depending on your taste, that’s likely to turn you off, or have you searching for the nearest copy.
As a non-fiction writer, I’m always on the lookout for the backstage view; I want to snap the proverbial watch open and investigate its workings. Intrigued by the storyteller behind so many of our most famous stories, I set off to Italy in his wake.
I met actors performing one of his stories. They compared his impact in Naples to that of Shakespeare, and in his tale about an old lady transformed into a beautiful youth they saw a comment on modern-day social media filters.
I dined with members of an Accademia that Basile joined in the 17th century, drank in the bar “where laughter abounds”, in Basile’s words, where he used to unwind and his contemporary Caravaggio was wounded in an ambush, and wandered amongst the woods and castles of his world.
As a courtier, Basile travelled widely, wherever he could find gainful employment – Avellino, Zungoli, Mantua, Giugliano. Seeking a patron, he found one in Venice, but was dragged to Crete, manning the batteries and setting off in galleons against the Ottoman Turks.
Military life, as he himself remarked, is liable to end in death, scabies, or “a pension plan in the hospital”, so he hot-footed it home, only to discover that in his absence, his sister Adriana had transformed into the most admired diva of her day (Claudio Monteverdi composed songs for her and wrote in his letters about his efforts to secure her services for his master, the Duke of Mantua).
But connections couldn’t smooth Basile’s rambunctious ways and, after a spell in Mantua, he was soon wandering off elsewhere.
Tricky as this made his life, it was ideal for a collector of tales. Amongst the rural petitioners who approached him in the courts, he picked up folk tales, scribbling them down in the native Neapolitan language.
This made his fairy tale collection surprisingly subversive: at the time, Naples was under the occupation of the Spanish empire, and writers like Basile and his friend Giulio Cortese, a fellow poet, used the native dialect to poke fun at the occupiers, knowing they wouldn’t be able to follow their references. In one of his tales, a Neapolitan character rids himself of a parasite, declaring: “You act like an occupying soldier who wants to scare us out of our possessions.”
Like many later collectors of fairy tales (the Brothers Grimm, for example), he understood that magical tales can be a useful cover for political intention.
The subversiveness of this project is suggested by the fact that he didn’t publish the tales. He was working as a regional governor in the small town of Gugliano when an eruption of Mount Vesuvius filled the sky with ash.
Basile wrote about this “harsh disaster of Vesuvius”, from which “nothing is spared… from the spreading of ash and the pouring of fire,/ but the limbs of death and hell.” This would prove prophetic, as he caught an infection of the lungs and died.
He left his stories behind and it was his sister, Adriana, in conjunction with a Neapolitan bookseller called Salvatore Scarrano, who arranged for the posthumous publication. With its rich, charming storytelling, The Tale of Tales would beguile the public. The tales were “received with great applause by the world,” according to the publisher, and in 1683, a Neapolitan bibliographer wrote that “this little book… is in everyone’s hands.”
Literary success can be hard to measure, especially when we’re diving back through history, but there were six new editions during the course of the 17th century, and the Tales influenced other prominent storytellers, such as the Venetian playwright Carlo Gozzi, who adapted Basile’s tales for his much-loved 18th-century series, Theatrical Fairy Tales.
Even more significant was the impact abroad: several of Basile’s tales were re-told by French fairy-tellers during a fairy tale boom in the 1690s (by writers such as Charles Perrault, who turned Basile’s Cenerentola into Cendrillon, and Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de la Force, who adapted Basile’s prototype of ‘Rapunzel’); and in the 19th century, the Brothers Grimm were so enamoured, they wrote about the Tales in the foreword to their Children’s and Household Tales, describing “Basile’s collection with its rich contents as the very basis by which to evaluate all others”.
But step inside any Italian children’s bookshop, and it is the Grimms’ stories, or Perrault’s, that you’re more likely to find. Basile has been sunk under the heap of history, which is why it’s worth revisiting him today. It’s why I wandered around Naples, talked to street artists, poets and academics, and sat with the audience watching one of his tales brought to life, relishing the strangeness and charm of his storytelling.
His is one of seven lives I’ve explored in my new book, The Fairy Tellers. In the process, I learned that the lives behind the stories are often just as beguiling, and in their own way as full of magic, as the stories these wonderful storytellers told.
The Fairy Tellers by Nicholas Jubber is published in paperback on 18 August, 2022.
He is the author of five books about travel and history and a winner of the Dolman Best Travel Book Award (now the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year).
Twitter: @jubberstravels
Instagram: @nickjubber
nickjubber.com
Images:
- Illustration by George Cruikshank for Basile’s Pentamerone: Wikimedia
- Giambattista Basile: Wikimedia
- See 1
- Adriana Basile: Folger Shakespeare Library Digital Image Collection via Wikimedia
- Vesuvius erupting in 1631: Wikimedia
- Commemorative stone to Giambattista Batiste, Chiesa Collegiata di Santa Sofia, Naples: Fiore Silvestro Barbato for Flickr
