The Renaissance Griselda: A Woman for All Seasons

Abstract

"The Renaissance Griselda: A Woman for All Seasons." After briefly surveying the fourteenth-century sources of the Griselda story, this essay examines the Elizabethan response to this fundamentally feudal, aristocratic, patriarchal tale. While some sixteenth-century versions are quite straightforward, others update the narrative with contemporary commentary. By variously suppressing or heightening the inherited tale's social: political, and religious implications, the boldest Elizabethan reworkings, both dramatizations, put Griselda to wholly new uses. Early in Elizabeth's reign, John Phillip's militantly Protestant interlude transforms romance narrative into a primer on godly Christian living that in places seems to contradict or subvert the story it purports to retell. The 1599 public-theater comedy by Chettle, Dekker, and Haughton so radically recontextualizes her tale that most of its traditional assumptions are brought into question. Finally, I bring together both fourteenth- and sixteenth-century texts to try to uncover the potential disjunctions and contradictions in Boccaccio's original that allowed, even invited, later writers' intervention and reinterpretation.

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