[In the following excerpt, Weld accounts for the disjunction between the written tales in the Gesta Romanorum and their oral versions.]

The Gesta Romanorum, a collection of allegorized stories compiled in the early fourteenth century, was one of the greatest—and longest enduring—popular successes of all time. “No other production of the middle ages, the Golden Legend excepted,” wrote Professor J-.Th. Welter, “enjoyed a parallel success” (L'Exemplum, Paris, 1927, pp. 373-74). In its various versions, Latin, English, German, French, Dutch, Polish, and Russian, it is extant in nearly two hundred manuscripts—the exact number is unknown—and in scores—again uncounted—of printed editions. It began as a preacher's manual in Latin, became a vernacular best-seller among the laity, a source-book for playwrights and men of letters, and in England ended, in the eighteenth century, as a chapbook, hawked about the countryside.

Its origin is uncertain. A reasonable guess assigns it to England in the fourteenth century, but an origin in the region of Lake Constance is quite as, or almost as, probable. The origins of the component stories, however, are diverse and widespread. Apparent sources and close analogues include material from Herodotus, Aesop, Aristotle, Plutarch, Cicero, Ovid, Seneca, Lucan, the Bible, Josephus, Ambrose, Augustine, the Vitae Patrum, and Bede. The immediate sources, however, were usually similar collections of moralized exempla of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, such as Alexander Neckham's De Natura Rerum, Bartholomaeus Anglicus' De Proprietatibus Rerum, Petrus Berchorius' Reductorii Moralis, Nicole Bozon's Les Contes Moralisés, Robert Holcot's Moralitates, and Odo de Cheriton's Parabolae. Holcot, indeed, has been plausibly suggested as the original compiler of the book.

Once compiled, in any case, it became a loose portfolio which copyists felt free to alter, expanding, contracting, adding, rearranging stories, or subtracting them at will. Except in a few abbreviated copies, there is a large enough common core of stories to give the collection a reasonable identity, and it has a kind of loose unity through their common beginning (“There dwelt in Rome a mighty emperor”) and their common pattern of narrative followed by allegory. But unity was not the compilers' aim. The book was not designed to be read through; rather an appropriate story was to be selected from it. Different versions include from ten to 223 stories (there are 283 different stories in all). According to Hermann Oesterley, whose edition of the Latin text (Berlin, 1872) is basic, there are three main families of the Latin manuscripts, two stemming from the continent, and one, containing fewer stories, from England.

There are four English versions in manuscript, all translated from Anglo-Latin versions. The manuscripts date from the mid-to-late fifteenth century, and the translations (three of which are independent) do not seem much earlier. Wynkyn de Worde published (c. 1510) still another version comprising forty-three stories, and this was probably reprinted six or eight times in the next 50 years (although only four editions are extant). The last extant edition of this version is dated 1557, and this may have indeed been the last edition, since by the Protestant standards which became official doctrine in the next year it frequently furthers Papist errors.

In 1577, however, Richard Robinson, an extremely minor man of letters, revised and reformed it. It was this version that Shakespeare and his contemporaries most probably knew and, if they read it, Burton and Browne and Thaherne and Bunyan and Defoe. It is not improbable. In Shakespeare's time it was a steady best-seller, going through seven editions, according to Robinson's own account, from 1577 to 1602. Seventeen more are extant from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a number that probably implies, at a conservative estimate, some twenty to twenty-five editions actually published. In 1703, furthermore, a new version (containing forty-five stories) was published, and this was enlarged (to fifty-eight) in 1710 and published in chapbook form. The last extant edition I have seen listed is an edition of Robinson's version, published at Glasgow in 1753. But by this time it was acquiring antiquarian interest. Thomas Warton included a patronizing essay upon it in his History of English Poetry, and the antiquarian and scholarly editions followed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The nature of the long popular career, from the early fourteenth century to the early eighteenth, is difficult to judge. Three points, however, stand out. Firstly, it served its designed function, as a preacher's manual, for nearly two hundred years, and it was used by preachers of the eminence of Mirk and Robert Fenton, professor of theology at Oxford, among others. Secondly, from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century on, preachers gradually ceased to use it (or exempla in general) but laymen continued to read it, as before they had listened to it from the preachers. Thirdly, its later career roughly parallels that of a number of other pieces of fiction, such as The Gentle Craft by Thomas Deloney, The Seven Champions of Christendom by Richard Jonson, The History of Doctor John Faustus, or Caxton's Recuyell of the histories of Troy, or Valentine and Orson as well as, it should be noted, such works of piety as Arthur Dent's The Plain Man's Pathway, or Thomas Sorocold's Supplications of Saints. These popular works of romance or piety of the late middle ages or the English Renaissance lived on through the drums and tramplings of revolutions and faded slowly in the eighteenth century. The longest-lived of them span the great shifts of taste from late Gothic to Georgian or from Piers Plowman to Swift and Pope. The similar life-span of the Gesta, its dual nature—romantic adventure and piety—and its end as chapbook, suggest a similar appeal to similar audiences.

From the beginning it apparently furnished secular authors as well as preachers with stories for the retelling, although, since all its stories are also found elsewhere, one can seldom be certain that it was the Gesta rather than, say, Seneca or Berchorius that provided the story in question.

A very few statements about borrowings from it can be made with assurance. Hans Sachs, Pierre Gringore, and Thomas Hoccleve certainly drew upon the Gesta itself. Shakespeare probably did (for The Merchant of Venice); William Browne of Tavistock drew upon Hoccleve. A few other debts to the Gesta can be traced with a high probability. But for the most part it offers only one of several versions of a story to which an author probably had access. But the same must usually be said of the other potential “sources” of most Renaissance works. And it is not unlikely, of course, that in the course of his life an author might have heard or read two or three versions of a story.

While the importance of the Gesta as transmitting the stories for further literary development must be acknowledged, therefore, it must be stated in general terms. Equally or more important, however, is the evidence that the popularity of the Gesta gives us, of the widespread appetite for the kind of literature it offered. Men writing in the four centuries of the Gesta's popularity were often writing for audiences many members of which had heard these stories, had heard their allegories, and responded to this kind of story and this kind of allegorical interpretation of it. Their response is not universal. It was not characteristic of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and it is not common, apparently, today. (There was a curious flurry of popular editions in English—mostly Swan's translation—in the mid-nineteenth century, but these lack the allegorization.) And the difference between the two kinds of audiences can force a marked difference in the understanding of a work written for one or the other.

The Merchant of Venice may illustrate the point. That Shakespeare may have drawn upon the English Gesta for the tale of the three caskets (as well as, less probably, a Latin version for the pound of flesh story) is a matter of interest to the literary historian and the biographer. But that he wrote for an audience many members of which had read the Gesta is a matter of interest to the interpretive critic. Such an audience had been trained to expect of this kind of story—the fabulous tale—a significance in addition to the simple generalization abstracted from the instance. The story was the vehicle of a running metaphor of which the tenor was the human soul and its destination.

The fourth story of the version reprinted here, for instance—of the poor man who marries the emperor's daughter and achieves high honor after saving her life with medicinal herbs—is not a Horatio Alger success story, urging knowledge of the pharmacopeia and the virtue rewarded of marrying the boss's daughter. The emperor is Christ; the poor man is everyman, the princess his own soul, and the herbs are repentance and newness of life. So in tale after tale the emperor is explained as the Father of Heaven; it is under His rule that events run their course, and somewhere in the cast of characters the other main figures—man, Christ, the Devil, and often the flesh, the good preacher, and the Church, are represented.

The Gesta, of course, was only one of many works which trained men of the late middle ages and the Renaissance to read in this way. Scriptural exegesis, mythography, emblem literature, such allegories as Piers Plowman and The Faerie Queene tended to the same end. The lesson was widely taught.

Now to someone so trained, the choice of caskets in The Merchant is not simply the fairy tale motif which Granville-Barker recognized, nor is Bassanio simply a wholesome, clean-cut, lucky, All-Venetian boy. His choosing is potentially significant of man's choosing his soul's destiny. That, indeed, is the interpretation given to the similar choice in tale number 32, which Shakespeare probably read.

The stories in the Gesta of course exhibit the other characteristics of late medieval popular art which we have come to expect: emphasis upon incident and intrigue rather than characterization or motivation, the free use of fantasy, occasional inconsistency, especially in the allegory, and a total absence of realistic detail. The characters move in a timeless, placeless, but significant world, like the figures in a danse macabre or a morality play. The language is loosely wrought and has the feel of the half-impromptu speech of the story teller. It is often redundant, both in details and in the larger units of narrative, and le mot juste—except where it reflected doctrinal distinction—was obviously unimportant. The point is proved by the wide variants even among the four extant English manuscripts and in successive printed editions. What mattered was the narrative; it could be cast in various verbal forms.

Robinson, before revising de Worde's version, versified at least seven stories (the unique copy of the work is fragmentary), probably translating them from a Latin version (Certain Select Histories for Christian Recreation with their severall Moralizations, 1576). His versifying is painful. In his prose revision of de Worde, he apparently worked from the 1557 edition or a later one, and he modernized only a few phrases. He prefixed a short “argument” summarizing the allegory, to each story, and, most importantly he “reformed” the allegory itself by making it conform with Protestant teaching. Usually these doctrinal changes are minimal, and often there are none at all. Certain changes are standard. Thus “contrition, penance, and satisfaction” are always changed to “acknowledging of sins, hearty repentance, and amendment or newness of life”; “alms deeds” becomes “well doing,” and “meritorious works” becomes “firm faith in Christ's merits and the fruits of Gods word proceeding from the same.” “Preachers and confessors” becomes “ministers of the gospel.” Other changes are more elaborate and some of them suggest a desperate effort to make better sense of the tale as well as or rather than to reform it. Thus, Robinson has simplified greatly de Worde's rather confused allegory of the second story and in so doing has clarified it. The slight shift toward Protestant doctrine seems incidental. His attempts at clarification are not always so successful however. In de Worde's version the emperor of tale number 30 establishes his palace as a sanctuary where any misdoer can take refuge if he escapes from prison, and a knight who has trespassed does so, after escaping from prison with the help of a miraculous bird. The palace is of course the Church or Heaven, the Prison is the prison of deadly sin or the Limbo Patrum; the sinner is freed by Christ. Robinson, however, apparently puzzled by the emperor's odd decree, changes it. It is only those who are innocent but wrongfully accused who can flee the prison (of oppression) and take refuge in the palace. His allegory is cruder, more secular, and it is not quite self-consistent, since the innocent escapee, though wrongfully accused, must nevertheless use sincere and unfeigned repentance to make good his flight.

Inconsistencies are fairly common, however, in all versions of the Gesta. Aside from the characteristic inconsistencies of oral narrative in characterization or motivation, there are, more puzzling to the modern reader, inconsistencies in the allegory and discrepancies between the implications of the narrative and its allegorical meaning. The twelfth tale, of Focus the smith, exemplifies both kinds. Focus himself who threatens the magic image if it reveals his trespass, is first equated with evil men who threaten preachers if they speak the truth, but when he is brought before the emperor and explains his actions, he is identified as every good Christian. The emperor, furthermore, is clearly established as a fallible human being who is ignorant of hidden crimes in his kingdom and changes his mind after hearing Focus's excuse, yet he is explained to be Christ, and Focus, though he has been brought to judgment for a failure to worship, has, in the allegory, been worshipping Father and Son as every good Christian should.

It is tempting to dismiss such work as bad art, and perhaps that is a just verdict. But it is important art. Its principles were commonly accepted and utilized for some sixteen centuries, and they were supported by an impressive body of theory. These can be only briefly indicated here; they are discussed at length in the works of [Bernard F.] Huppé, [D. W.] Robertson, and [Rosemond] Tuve listed below. But the reader may recall, as analogous instances, that Samson trapped in the harlot's bed was explained by patristic commentators as a type of Christ in Hell and that the lustful embrace of Salamacis and Hermaphroditus, merging the two into one person, was explained in the Ovide Moralisée as an allegory of the dual nature of Christ. Nor, in the English Chester play of Abraham does the fact that Abraham, representing the Father of Heaven, receives a gift of bread and wine from Melchisadech prevent him from offering tithes to Melchisadech. The theory that poetry, as well as scripture, was like a rind concealing a kernel allowed for very wide “discrepancies” of this sort. Indeed, Augustine's rule that scripture which did not obviously promote charity or faith (such as the incident of Samson in the harlot's bed) must be made to do so by means of a figurative interpretation, tended to justify and increase such inconsistencies.

The modern reader must in any case accept them as a fact of medieval and Renaissance literary life, and once the outrage has passed, he may begin to anticipate the puzzles set by the narrative texts and to guess at their solution with some pleasure.