The king and the beast: Political and poetic shifts in Boccaccio's Alcestus

Abstract

Alcestus is the sixth among fifteen eclogues in Giovanni Boccaccio's Buccolicum carmen (c. 1362–63). Like most poems in this book, Alcestus presents an allegorical narrative based upon a specific historical episode. More particularly, Alcestus takes the form of a political panegyric in honour of Louis of Taranto (the husband of Queen Johanna), who returned to Naples in 1348, after a long conflict involving a vendetta for the murder of Andrew of Hungary (Johanna's first husband), in 1345. This article aims to offer, first, an overview of Boccaccio's Alcestus; and then, provide a closer examination of this work. Taking into consideration its historical background, as well as its literary strategies, I will focus on the different kinds of shifts that emerge in the text – from winter to spring, absence to return, sorrow to happiness, and peace to fear. As I will try to demonstrate, these shifts, besides reflecting the political instability that marked the Neapolitan Trecento, also reveal Boccaccio's literary models for this eclogue – mainly Virgil's Eclogues 5 and 8.