I think the initial reason Griselda is being tested by her husband, the King, is because he finds the idea of testing her amusing and fun. However, later the reason becomes that he wanted to make see if she would stay loyal to him in any and every situation. In the beginning of the story when he is talking about marriage with his friends he says, ‘My friends, you are pressing me to do something that I had always set my mind firmly against…’ ( 1357) From this quote we can see that he was skeptical about getting married in the first place. I think that when people are skeptical they feel the need to test whatever or whomever they are skeptical about, and that is exactly what Griselda’s husband did. He tried to make it like a joke at first but it had more meaning to him than that. To his surprise Griselda “passed’ all his tests, I must say they were pretty horrific in my opinion, and for this he took her back so to speak.
Both the tales told in the Decameron and The Thousand and One Nights were meant to pass the time. In The Thousand and One Nights they were meant to pass time in order to keep the King from having time to kill someone. In the Decameron the people were telling tales to pass time in order to keep people from thinking about the black plague. I think that in both cases they sort of worked. The relationship between the tale and the teller is very important because I think it helps give meaning to the tale. When a tale has more meaning, more people listen and reflect on what the tale is trying to tell them.
I think that the nightingale represents joy. In the story the wife talks about how she loves the songs of the nightingale but what she is really talking about is staying up to look across to her neighbor. However, I think the nightingale was a representation of the joy she felt when she thought about being in love with the knight. Towards the end of the story it says, “The lady took the tiny corpse, wept profusely and cursed those who had betrayed the nightingale by constructing the traps and snares for they had taken so much joy from her’ (1204). When her husband killed the nightingale he killed the hope of a relationship with the knight that she had. The knight buried the bird in a gold casket because he wanted to preserve the joy that she brought to him even though he could not have her.
