‘Like Love Island but back in the day’

The Decameron is Netflix’s raunchy, raucous re-imagining of a medieval plague masterpiece writes University of Hull PhD student Lucyl Harrison. (Image credit: Netflix.)

Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron (1353) is a classic plague book. It follows ten noble people quarantining together in a beautiful villa in the Italian countryside. They have fled Florence where in 1348, when the story is set, a deadly Black Death outbreak is raging. While the sick are abandoned and the lower classes suffer, this group feast, play, laugh, sing and dance, entertaining each other with stories – 100 stories, to be exact.

It’s a tale that became painfully familiar in the COVID era – in fact, sales of The Decameron soared by 288% during our own lockdowns.

This renewed relevance and increase in interest made it ripe for adaptation and Netflix have just released a dark and soapy comedy that is loosely inspired by Boccaccio’s masterpiece. This re-imagining is powered by love, desire, death and infatuation as Firenze’s most prominent families enter the villa.

In 1348, it seems God has abandoned humanity and pestilence is punishment. As bodies are piled in the streets, strewn across fields and tipped into rivers, the poor are stealing boots off cadavers while bandits and brigands plunder. The rich, however, can retreat from the collapse of society – lucky them.

In a house where the quarantine rules are to eat, drink wine and have no talk of the pestilence, it’s not long until the frolicking in sumptuous, silk and satin-clad bedchambers begins. However, as Netflix puts it: “What starts as a wine-soaked sex romp descends into a race for survival.”

Netflix’s The Decameron deviates in many ways from Boccaccio’s original and is an absorbing, standalone adaptation that is “like Love Island, but back in the day”. One thing it does share, however, is Boccaccio’s sharp social critique of those who fled the sick to protect their own health, which he stresses in the book’s introduction. However, in this version, there is much more blood and comedy.

Like in Boccaccio’s original, the nobles take their surviving servants with them. Pampinea (Zosia Mamet) is joined by her servant Misia (Saoirse-Monica Jackson) and Filomena (Jessica Plummer) by Licisca (Tanya Reynolds). Tindaro (Douggie McMeekin) is accompanied by Dioneo (Amar Chadha-Patel) and waiting to meet the new residents at the villa are the Visconte’s servants, Sirisco (Tony Hale) and Stratilia (Leila Farzhad). The ten is rounded out by husband and wife Panfilo (Karan Gill) and Neifile (Lou Gala), who arrive sans servants.

While in Boccaccio’s book Tindaro is a manservant, here he is a rich noble from a wealthy family and an eligible bachelor – although he’s a foolish clown with a blunt disdain for women. Dioneo, one of the three gentlemen in Boccacio’s story, is instead a companion, manservant and physician to Tindaro. He is the epitome of a medieval “red flag”, peacocking with abs bursting out of his doublet and a bulging codpiece.

The author’s original tale portrays Pampinea as the oldest, sagest and natural leader of the group, who proposes their move to the countryside. But in this modern take she is a tyrannical, soon to be “lady of the villa” whose despotism and obnoxious personality grates on her housemates.

In The Decameron, the inhabitants return to Florence after 14 days, but the show deviates from this cyclical integration back into society after a period of idyllic isolation. Instead in Netflix’s shimmering pandemic-flecked pastoral, where regal peacocks roam next to venomous snakes, the social rules wear thin and a scramble for survival ensues.

Though the spectre of the Black Death hangs over them, this new narrative is laden with gallows humour and plays on the brilliantly bawdy workings of a tragicomedy. Driven to mad love, jealousy and indecent proposals, housemates are forced to save themselves from exile at any cost. Murder, poisoning and accusations of witchcraft abound in the show’s unstoppable acceleration towards its cataclysmic conclusion.

Expect dangerous ulterior motives, secret passages, a ‘hideaway’ with an alarming amount of phallus statues and disastrous consequences from intermingling with unexpected visitors.

Over eight frisk-and-risk filled episodes, queer and inter-class romances unfold as noblemen bed messenger boys in the stables and gentlewomen enjoy handmaids in the servants quarters. Raucous laughter and romps aside, the show explores the all too real dangers of being a woman at the end of the world and makes comments on servant-noble class dynamics.

In one particular scene, a deeply disgruntled Sirisco returns to the Eden-like chateau with a group of starving peasants to share the villa’s bounty of resources and vividly sows the seeds of socialism in order to usurp Pampinea’s wretched reign.

Servants disobediently speak truths on social injustices. Licisca attacks the restrictive and abusive codes of servitude, delivering nihilistic reflections on life at the bottom at the food chain and protests against the moral bankruptcy of the noble class.

The show weaves in the rich tapestry of themes, allegories and mischievous and macabre messages which can be found in Boccaccio’s comprehensive collection of stories. All in all, Netflix’s The Decameron is a fatally funny reworking of the classic pandemic tome.

This article by Lucyl Harrison was originally published by The Conversation. The views or opinions expressed by individuals do not necessarily reflect those of the University.