If love came but withouten jealousy

“If love came but withouten jealousy” is the song Fiammetta performs on the last evening of the gathering, turning the company’s farewell entertainment into a compact meditation on love’s pleasure and insecurity. Its speaker imagines a happiness free of jealousy, but cannot attain it: the beloved’s virtues inspire devotion, while the possibility of rivals makes that devotion painful and vigilant.

The song in the gathering

At the close of the company’s stay, the king proposes that they return the following morning, and the young people and ladies accept his counsel. After supper they sing and make music; Lauretta leads a dance, and the king asks Fiammetta to sing. Her song therefore belongs to a communal evening of leisure, but its subject narrows the attention from the company’s shared concord to the private unease of a lover who fears losing her beloved.

The performance is followed immediately by Dioneo’s teasing response. He laughs that Fiammetta should tell the ladies who the man is, lest one of them unknowingly take him from her. The joke draws the song’s imagined danger into the room: its threat is not an abstract fear but the possibility of competition among women in the very company that has just praised its harmony. Other songs follow, and, when morning comes, the group returns together, leaving the song as one of the evening’s final exchanges before departure.

A conditional ideal of happiness

The opening makes its promise conditional. The speaker says, “If love came but withouten jealousy,” she knows no woman who would be as happy as she would be. The imagined happiness is not founded on uncertainty about the beloved’s worth: the speaker proceeds to enumerate qualities she already sees in him. Youth, virtue, worth, courage, gentleness, wit, sweet speech, and pleasing manners converge in the man she loves. The song’s praise is cumulative, presenting him as a rare combination of character and charm.

That abundance makes the speaker’s insecurity more pointed, not less. She declares that she sees all these qualities in the man who is her hope, yet she also recognizes that other women are as wise as she is. The beloved’s excellence thus carries a double force: it grounds her attachment and makes him attractive to others. The song does not resolve this contradiction by diminishing his virtues or claiming that the speaker is uniquely desirable. Instead, his appeal becomes the condition that intensifies her fear.

From devotion to suspicion

The second movement turns from praise to the speaker’s apprehension. Because other women may desire the beloved, she trembles and tends to believe the worst; the thought of a rival makes her feel forlorn and miserable. The lyric’s emotional movement is consequently not a change in the beloved, but a change in what his desirability means to the speaker. What first appeared as the source of her happiness now exposes her to imagined loss.

The next stanza makes the desired remedy explicit: if the speaker knew her lord’s faithfulness as surely as she knows his merit, she would not be jealous. Her problem is not that she lacks evidence of his good qualities; it is that his character and her confidence in his constancy are separate matters. She sees so many lovers tempted, however true they may be, that she holds all of them false. This sweeping judgment gives the lyric its tension: the speaker knows her beloved is admirable, but distrusts the wider world of lovers in which his fidelity must be tested.

A warning at the close

The song’s final turn converts private anxiety into a public appeal. The speaker asks each lady, for God’s sake, not to act against her in this matter. If any woman seeks her injury through words, gestures, or blandishments, and the speaker finds out, she threatens bitter retaliation. The threat does not establish that a rival has actually approached the beloved; it reveals the defensive posture produced by the possibility of rivalry. The lyric moves from a wish for love without jealousy, through fear and suspicion, to an attempt to control the danger by warning other women away.

Dioneo’s joke makes that ending especially pointed. By asking Fiammetta to identify the man, he treats the threatened competition as a practical problem for the assembled ladies, and lightly exposes the gap between the song’s ideal and its possessive conclusion. The piece does not claim that love’s joy is false: the speaker’s praise is sincere within the lyric, and her happiness would be complete if jealousy could be removed. But its structure shows how quickly devotion becomes apprehension when the beloved is desirable to others. The song leaves that contradiction unresolved, carrying its private fear into a roomful of listeners just before the company disperses.