The Theme of Unhappy Love

The Theme of Unhappy Love organizes the Fourth Day of the Decameron around a stark reversal: stories told by a company seeking diversion turn repeatedly toward grief, separation, and death. Under Filostrato’s governance, love is not a promise of union but a powerful attachment exposed to jealousy, coercion, violence, and chance. The tales vary in social rank and circumstance, yet their endings return to the same question: what becomes of love when the forces surrounding it offer no safe way to endure?

Filostrato’s Theme and the Fourth Day

Filostrato chooses unhappy love as the subject for the following day because he sees it as a reflection of his own life. He says that he has remained subject to Love, only to be abandoned and to fare from bad to worse, and expects his own story to end unhappily. His choice gives the day a personal frame: the theme is not merely a category for the company’s tales, but the ruler’s declared expectation of his own future. The stories that follow can be heard against this forecast, though they do not all explain suffering in the same way.

The opening rubric for the Fourth Day makes the theme explicit, and Filostrato’s conduct helps determine its tone. After hearing Pampinea’s story, he objects that too much of it had given occasion for laughter; he wants a more fitting account of lovers’ misfortune. The day’s emphasis is thus shaped not only by its subject but by a demand about how that subject should be narrated. Compassion and sorrow are brought to the foreground, and the company’s responses—including the ladies’ compassion for the ill-fated lovers—make the telling itself part of the experience of unhappy love.

Love Confronted by Power and Jealousy

Several stories make private love answer to authority exercised by parents, rulers, or men who can use force. In the story of Ghismonda and Guiscardo, Tancred kills his daughter’s lover and sends her Guiscardo’s heart in a golden bowl. Ghismonda pours poisoned water over the heart and drinks it, turning her father’s violent act into the means of her own death. The sequence makes the token of love inseparable from the punishment imposed on it: the heart is both a bodily remnant and the message Tancred sends his daughter.

The three couples who flee to Crete encounter a succession of destructive reversals. The eldest sister, driven by jealousy, kills her lover. The second sister yields herself to the Duke of Crete to save her sister from death; afterward, her own lover kills her and escapes with the eldest sister. The youngest sister and her lover are accused of the new murder and confess, then bribe their keepers and flee to Rhodes for fear of execution. Their escape does not become a happy resolution: they die in poverty. The tale carries unhappy love through distinct outcomes—jealous killing, sacrifice, betrayal, flight, and impoverishment—without allowing survival alone to count as a fortunate ending.

Gerbino’s story begins with love formed through report rather than sight. Elisa introduces it as evidence that hearsay can bring two people to love each other even before they have met, and that the resulting attachment can end in misery. Gerbino attacks the ship carrying the daughter of the King of Tunis, in violation of the pledged faith of his grandfather, King Guglielmo II of Sicily. Those aboard kill the princess; Gerbino kills them, and he is later beheaded. Here the lovers’ attachment is caught between an attempted rescue and a political obligation: the princess dies before their union can be secured, and Gerbino’s response brings about his own execution.

Loss, Remembrance, and Repeated Gestures

Other stories trace unhappy love through the actions that follow a lover’s death. Lisabetta’s brothers murder Lorenzo. In a dream, Lorenzo shows her where he is buried; she secretly disinters his head and places it in a pot of basil. She mourns over it every day until her brothers take it away, and she dies shortly afterward from grief. The pot becomes the focus of a private attachment made visible through repeated mourning, until the family’s intervention removes even that fragile object of remembrance.

In the story of Simona and Pasquino, the lovers are together in a garden when Pasquino rubs a sage leaf against his teeth and dies. Taken before a judge, Simona tries to demonstrate how her lover died by rubbing a leaf of the same plant against her own teeth. She dies in the same way. Her effort to show what happened repeats the fatal gesture rather than explaining it safely. The lovers’ deaths are linked not by an act of deliberate violence between them but by the replication of an action whose danger becomes clear too late.

The story of Girolamo and Salvestra turns separation into a sequence of irreversible delays. At his mother’s urging, Girolamo goes to Paris; when he returns, Salvestra is married. He enters her house secretly and dies beside her. When his body is carried to a church, Salvestra dies beside him. The lovers are reunited only in death, and the movement from enforced departure to a return after marriage leaves no living future for their attachment.

The Heart, the Window, and the Ending

In the story of Guillaume de Roussillon and Guillaume de Guardestaing, friendship and love are brought into direct collision. The two knights are close companions, but Guillaume de Guardestaing becomes deeply enamoured of the other’s wife. Guillaume de Roussillon kills him and gives his heart to his wife to eat. When she learns whose heart she has eaten, she throws herself from a high window and dies. She is buried with her lover. The ending joins bodily violence, belated knowledge, and a final burial: the wife’s death rejects the life made possible by her husband’s deception, while burial with her lover grants the pair a union withheld in life.

Across these tales, deaths arise from different immediate causes: a father’s killing, jealousy, a shipboard attack, a poisoned gesture, family interference, or a husband’s revenge. The pattern does not reduce unhappy love to a single fault or a single kind of obstacle. Instead, the day places lovers in circumstances where their attachment cannot protect them from others’ power, from a consequential delay, or from the fatal consequences of an act repeated or discovered too late. Filostrato’s theme makes these varied endings resonate with his own expectation of disappointment, while the stories’ specific reversals show how many distinct routes lead from love to loss.