ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the development of an intense scholarly investigation which has debated and variously explained the theatrical quality of Boccaccio’s novella, together with his widespread influence on the construction of Renaissance drama in both Italy and early modern England. In the Decameron’s contaminatio of different theatergrams of Plautine and Terentian derivation lies Boccaccio’s extraordinary capacity for imprinting a theatrical mode to his narrative, thus providing early modern dramatists with a pliable combination of tragic and comic, moral and indecent set-pieces, modules, and sequences, to be ingeniously taken from a mixed selection of different tales and adjusted for the main plots and subplots of both comedies and tragedies.
