Griselda, or GRISELDIS, the heroine of one of the most famous medieval tales, which the genius of Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Chaucer has made a permanent literary possession of the world. She was the daughter of a poor Piedmontese peasant, and for her beauty was taken to wife by the Marquis Walter of Saluzzo. To prove her truth and humility, he put her to several cruel tests—tore both her children in succession from her, and at last commanded her to return to her humble hut, as he was about to take to himself another wife. To all her husband's harsh commands she submitted with such unquestioning submissiveness and humility as to make herself for all time 'the flour of wyfly patience.' The marquis, overjoyed to see her complete devotedness and self-renunciation, took her again to his arms, gave her back the children she had seen carried off to death, and henceforth they lived together in uninterrupted happiness.
The first literary version of the story occurs as the last tale of Boccaccio's Decameron—the tenth tale of the tenth day, written doubtless about 1348. Petrarch wrote a Latin version of it, De Obedientia et Fide uxoris mythologia, written apparently about 1373. It is accompanied by a letter to Boccaccio, in which Petrarch says that the story had always pleased him when he heard it many years before.
The stuff of the story is undoubtedly much older than Boccaccio, and certainly we soon find it widely diffused and highly popular. Reinhold Köhler enumerates as many as sixteen Volksbuch versions in German from the end of the 15th to the middle of the 17th century, all based upon Heinrich Steinhöwel's translation of Petrarch (1471). As a chap-book the story was almost as common in France in the version Le Miroir de Dames, ou la Patience de Griseldis, &c., to be found in Ch. Nisard's Histoire de Livres Populaires (2d ed. 1864). In England editions of such were entered on the Stationers' Registers in the years 1565 and 1568, and another of 1619 is still extant, under the title, The ancient, true, and admirable History of Patient Grisel, &c., reprinted for the Percy Society in 1842. Substantially the same story also appears in Danish, Russian, and Icelandic folk-tales.
The chief poetical version of the story of patient Griselda is that in Chaucer's Clerkes Tale, one of the noblest poems in its series, and recited by perhaps the most attractive figure in the group of pilgrims. Chaucer makes the Clerk say that he had learned the tale at Padua from the lips of Petrarch himself, and in all probability he identifies himself here with the Clerk, and speaks out his own personal experience, as he was absent in Italy on the king's business from the December of 1372 to the November of 1373. The poem is distinctly founded on Petrarch's moralised Latin version, but the poetical treatment of the story is so individual that it all comes afresh from the mind of Chaucer. We have a ballad of 'Pacent Grissel' in Bishop Percy's Folio MS. (vol. iii. 1868); and we find her painted among the celebrated lovers on the walls of the temple in Lydgate's poem, The Temple of Glass. Indeed the beauty of the story, and its allegorical value as a lesson teaching the duty of submission to the will of God, quickly touched the popular imagination, and the patience of Griselda passed into a proverb, as we see in Shakespeare and Hudibras. Perrault's poem of 932 irregular rhymed verses is the chief poetic elaboration of the theme in French.
The earliest dramatic representation was an old French Mystery on the subject, composed about 1395. Of more modern plays, it is enough to mention Dekker, Chettle, and Haughton's Pleasant Comedy of Patient Grissel (1599; ed. by J. P. Collier for the Shakespeare Society, 1841); El exemplo de Casadas y prueba de la Paciencia, by Lope de Vega; Hans Sachs' Gedultig und gehorsam Markgräfin Griselda (1546); Goldoni's La Griselda; and Friedrich Halm's Griseldis (1834).
See Reinhold Köhler's article in Ersch and Gruber's Encyklopädie, and Dr Friedrich von Westenholz, Die Griseldis-Sage in der Literaturgeschichte (Heidelberg, 1888). Petrarch's Latin tale of Griseldis, with Boccaccio's tale from which it was retold, is reprinted in the Chaucer Society's Originals and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, part ii. (1875).