Netflix has massacred The Decameron

Unless you did English A-level and shoehorned a mention of it into your Chaucer paper to try to get extra marks, you probably haven’t even heard of Boccaccio’s The Decameron, let alone read it. Which no doubt partly explains Netflix’s decision to give it the Bridgerton treatment: no one, anywhere, is liable to complain about their most cherished classic being massacred.

But massacred it has been. Just as Bridgerton drives a coach and horses – or bulldozer with flashing rave lights and klaxons, more like – through anything that might remotely have resembled Jane Austen’s England, so this Netflix ‘adaptation’ does for 14th-century Florence. The costumes (generic late medieval) are wrong; the hairstyles are wrong; the sense of period and place is wrong. They could have called it the Mabinogian or the Mahabharata, for all the difference it makes, so vauntingly philistine and casual is its nod to the alleged source material.