Boccaccio’s story of Griselda launched a veritable international industry of retellings: in prose and in verse, in narrative, ballad, and drama. Already by around 1400, Petrarch had reworked it into Latin in his Seniles 17.3, Christine de Pizan had retold it in French in her Book of the City of Ladies (Part 2, chap.50), and Chaucer had turned it into the “Clerk’s Tale” in his Canterbury Tales. When Thomas Dekker, Henry Chettle, and William Haughton wrote their Pleasant Comedie of Patient Grissill in 1599 (performed 1600, published 1603), their source was clearly Chaucer and not Boccaccio, making their play a grandchild of the Decameron.
Scholars continue to debate whether Chaucer, whose Clerk names Petrarch as his source, knew the Decameron. Yet Willard Farnham argued nearly a century ago: “certain phrases of Chaucer's are closer to the Italian than to the Latin. Sometimes the English is so near the Italian and so different from the Latin that the resemblance is striking. In a few cases more or less important details are not in the Latin, and are in both Italian and English.” Another argument on behalf of Chaucer’s knowledge of the Decameron story points to both narrators’ oddly undermining ironies at the tale’s end. But the feature I most want to highlight, that—wittingly or unwittingly—brings Chaucer’s tale closer to Boccaccio’s than to Petrarch’s, is the fact that the story does not stand alone and self-sufficient as an isolated saintly account, but rather is presented as part of and in relationship to a series of other tales within a framework.
Boccaccio’s Griselda story comes at the end of a day devoted to tales of magnanimous behavior, with the narrators seeking expressly to outdo one another by their examples. The final one-up-manship is the magnanimity of a poor peasant girl surpassing that of wealthy kings. Beyond the tenth day, the tale takes up a recurring theme of cross-class marriages. Such marriages are seldom happy, although some of them eventually find harmony. Day 3 tale 9, made famous by Shakespeare, gives us a male aristocrat outraged by the order to marry “a she-doctor” despite the king’s insistence. Conversely, day 7, tale 8 gives us the scorn of an aristocratic wife for her mercantile husband, and the wonderful rant by her mother against “this small-time trader in horse manure” who has had the nerve to speak ill of her daughter. Readers familiar with the Decameron will find other cases of cross-class marriage. Again, the Griselda story comes as the final and most extreme example.
Was Chaucer aware of these thematic connections when he used the tale as part of what has been called the “marriage debate”? Or when he linked it with another story from the Decameron’s tenth day (though admittedly available also from the Filocolo) that asks explicitly which of its characters was the most generous? Most directly and famously, Chaucer’s story of Griselda is set in opposition to the “Wife of Bath’s Tale.” Not only do widow and clerk combat each other’s attitudes, the clerk referring explicitly to the Wife of Bath “and al hire secte” (IV E 171), but each stages within his or her narrative (in the Wife’s case, her prologue as well as her tale) the competition for mastery between husband and wife. The example of Griselda is simply too extreme to be left on its own without some counterweight. As the Clerk responded to the Wife of Bath, so the Merchant, speaking next, laments “There is a long and large difference/ Betwix Grisildis grete pacience/ And of my wif the passyg crueltee” (IV (E) 1223-25).
Dekker, Chettle and Haughton inherited via Chaucer the idea of setting Griselda’s situation against an opposite marriage as part of a marriage debate. The marquis’s cousin, Gwenthian, marries a mere gentleman, named Owen, whom she repeatedly humiliates; this shrewish wife and hapless husband reverse the power relations of Griselda’s marriage. That reversal, however, can only be comic—a tone enhanced by making the couple Welsh. In addition, the Marquis has a sister, named Julia, who, although courted by several gallants, refuses to marry at all after witnessing the play’s two couples.
A few years later, this time collaborating with Thomas Middleton, Dekker again tried making a male Griselda, in The Honest Whore, Part 1 (written perhaps in 1603, published 1604). As Dekker is the only playwright involved in both plays, I am assuming that he was interested in reworking this problem. Candido, the “monstrous patient man” (1.4.7-8) retains his calm despite a series of attempts by his wife and others to provoke him. Indeed, one of the events is exactly the same in both plays, though enacted in Patient Grissil and merely narrated in The Honest Whore: the wife shames her husband in front of important guests by appearing ill-dressed and refusing to prepare a meal for them. Candido’s story, I suggest, needs to be seen not only in its relation to the two other plots within that play (which I will not say much about here) but also in relation to the attempt in Patient Grissil to examine the gendered nature of patience.
(excerpted from chapter 12)
