LET ME
Let me be the voice
thus calling to you only
Let me be the angry sunset
glowing for you only
Let me love you like Romeo
loved Juliet
Let me be the path by
Which I can speak to you only
Let me be the feeling conveyed
to you only
Let me be your sunshine in winter
Let me be your raindrops in summer
Let me be your night
Let me be your day
Let me be your tomorrow
Let me be your today
Winter Sunshine -- Karen Tarlton
Tommaso Guardati was born in Salerno or Sorrento in 1410 and became the poet Masuccio Salernitano. He is best known for "Il Novellino," a 1476 collection of 50 stories published a year after his death, each prefaced by a letter of dedication to a famous person and with an epilogue containing the "moral" of the story. Due to its anticlerical attitude, in 1557 the book was included on the 1st "Index librorum prohibitorum" (List of Prohibited Books), which was a list of publications Catholics were forbidden to read without permission. The 33rd of the stories was about Mariotto and Ganozza, who were secretly married. Mariotto was exiled after he killed a prominent citizen, and Gianozza was doomed to marry someone else forced marriage but tried to avoid it by feigning death by poison. Mariotto was beheaded and Gianozza starved herself to death. Luigi da Porto was born a decade after Salernitano's death, and in 1521, borrowing plot details from Publius Ovidius Naso's story pf Pyramus and Thisbe (AD 8) and from Giovanni Boccaccio's "Decamerone": Prencipe Galeotto" (ca. 1353), he adapted "Mariotto e Ganozza" as "Giulietta e Romeo" in his "Historia novellamente ritrovata di due nobili amanti" (Newly retrieved story of two noble lovers, published in 1531, 2 years after his death). He claimed that it was a true story that took place in the 14th century when Verona was ruled by Bartolomeo della Scala, known to William Shakespeare's readers as Prince Escalus. Matteo Bandello was born about a 1/2 century after da Porto's death, fled to France after Francoys I's disastrous loss at Pavia in 1525, became bishop of Agen in Aquitaine, and, between 1531 and 1545, adapted "Giuletta e Romeo;" his version appeared in 1573, 9 years after he died. This led to the "Histoire troisieme de deux Amants, don't l'un mourut de venin, l'autre de tristesse," the French "translation" by Pierre Boaistuau (Sieur de Launay) in his "Histoires tragiques," about Reomeo Titensus and Juliet Bibleotet. Arthur Brooke translated it into English in 1562 (a year before [!] his death) as "The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet." And thus to Shakespeare's famous version from the early 1590s. (It is hard to imagine Gianozza's enduring fame based on a rhetorical query:
ReplyDeleteO Mariotto, Mariotto, wherefore art thou Mariotto?
...
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Mariotto would, were he not Mariotto call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Mariotto, doff thy name,
And for that name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself.
(Or, even less likely, from the ommitted part of her speech:
Deny thy father and refuse thy name.
Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love
And I’ll no longer be a Bibleotet.
‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy:
Thou art thyself, though not a Titensus.
What’s Titensus? It is nor hand nor foot
Nor arm nor face nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O be some other name.)