Refashioning the Marriage Code: The Patient Grissil of Dekker, Chettle and Haughton

Abstract

COMENSOLI 1 he folktale of Patient Griselda was first recorded in European literature in 1353 in Boccaccio's Decameron.Inspired by the moral import of Boccaccio's tale, Petrarch expanded it in Latin in 1374 {delnsigni Obedientia et Fide Uxoris\ while in the same year Giovanni Sercambi retold Boccaccio's novella in condensed form.A number of medieval French versions are based on Petrarch's rendition, including the first secular dramatization in 1395 in the anonymous L'Ey/o/r^de la Marquise de Saluée mix par personnages et rigmé.Chaucer's "Clerk's Tale," which is based on Petrarch's and a French redaction, is the first of numerous English versions.^Thethree extant Elizabethan renditions are John Phillip's late morality The Play of Patient Grissel (c.1558-66), Thomas Deloney's ballad "Of Patient Grisseland a Noble Marquess" in The Garland of Good Will (c.1593), and Dekker, Chettle and Haughton's Pleasant Comedy of Patient Grissil (c.1599).In England the legend continued to be recorded in chapbooks and anonymous tales until the middle of the seventeenth centuiy, thus retaining its popularity among a variety of audiences.While the medieval versions have attracted a great deal of scholarly interest, their Elizabethan counterparts have been largely neglected.Hariy Kcyishian, who has written the only full-length essay on the Elizabethan dramatizations of the Griselda legend, largely ignores Phillip's and Deloney's adapations and condemns the 1599 play as a tiresome morality' that exalts the virtues of the patient and unassuming wife who faithfully and obediently performs her duties under great emotional strain.In accounting for the legend's appeal to the Elizabethan imagination, Keyishian writes: "Audiences of Shakespeare's day could deal with mighty truths, but they evidently also needed the sickly Renaisance and Reformation / Renaissance et Reforme, XXV, 2 (1989) 199

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