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Patient Grissel, or Patient Grissil, is a comedy
Background
Patient Grissel was first printed in 1603 and, A variation of the medieval tale of Griselda, it is one of three extant Elizabethan works to adapt the tale, the other two being John Phillip's morality play The Play of Patient Grissel () and Thomas Deloney's ballad "Of Patient Grissel and a Noble Marquess" (). The tale itself was first recorded in Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron in 1353; over 40 years later, Geoffrey Chaucer based his "Clerk's Tale" on an expanded version by Petrarch. Patient Grissel is mentioned in Henslowe's diary.
Critical analysis
Elizabethan adaptations of the tale of Griselda have generally been ignored in academia. Whereas Phillip's and Deloney's works feature the motif of the wife relieving marital turmoil by staying patient and modest, Comensoli adds that it "explores more fully than do its analogues the male-female/sovereign-subject hierarchies, relating marriage to a broader framework encompassing the individual's ambiguous relationship to social rank and authority." Collier writes, "The subject [of the play] cannot be said to be a very good one for the stage, however easily adapted, because the chief incidents are violent and improbable." He had found the sheet music for "Golden Slumbers" in a nursery rhymes collection in his father's house near Liverpool. McCartney added the lines, "Once there was a way to get back homeward," and, "Once there was a way to get back home."</poem></blockquote></div>
References
Sources
External links
- Full text, with an introduction by John Payne Collier (1841)
- Introduction to Patient Grissel by bradfilippone