xxxxxThe Italian author Gianfrancesco Straparola wrote one of the earliest collections of traditional folk tales, completing it in 1553. Called The Pleasant Nights, it included "Beauty and the Beast" and "Puss in Boots". Dramatists like Molière and Shakespeare, and story tellers like Giambattista Basile and the famous French writer Charles Perrault (1697 W3) used some of his material.
GIANFRANCESCO STRAPAROLA c1480 -
xxxxxBorn at Caravaggio in the duchy of Milan,
Gianfrancesco Straparola was the author of one of the earliest
collections of traditional fairy tales. Compiled under the title The Pleasant Nights (Piacevoli
notti) and drawn from a variety of sources, these short
prose stories, 75 in all, soon became well-
xxxxxIn writing
these tales Straparola used a technique employed by the Italian
poet Boccaccio in his Decameron,
and by the English writer Chaucer
in his famous Canterbury
Tales. Like them, he provided a framework whereby a number of people,
brought together for some reason or other, each has a story to
tell. In Straparola's case, it is a group of youngsters relaxing
in a quiet spot just outside Venice. Every night, each party
member takes it in turn to tell a fairytale, hence the title of
the work (though it is sometimes known as The
Nights of Straparola!). The result was a collection of
varied folktales, many of them passed down by word of mouth and
produced in a variety of dialects. Begunxin
1550 and completed in 1553, these
tales, together with The Story of Stories
by the Neapolitan writer Giambattista Basile
(c1575-
E6-