Chaucer's Clerk's Tale by Judith Bronfman;

Author:Judith Bronfman;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 1994-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

In 1841, the Shakespeare Society reprinted Dekker’s play,57 and the following year the Percy Society reprinted The pleasant and sweet history of patient Grissell,58 the tract with prose paragraphs flanking the ballad. In 1846, nine years after the Blackwood’s Magazine “remade” version of Chaucer and in the midst of productions of the Halm play, another “remade” rhyming couplet version appeared in Ballads and Metrical Tales Selected from Percy, Ritson, Evans, Jamieson, Scott, etc., etc.59 This version uses the French spellings of Griselidis and Gautier and almost certainly has a Continental source; like the Fraser’s joking version and Blackwood’s serious one, it seems to be an appeal for an older, more authentic version of the story.

Sir Edwin Arnold ignores the appeal. His Griselda, A Tragedy, a five-act verse play published in 1856,60 uses natural imagery symbolically to explore the story’s human and religious values. In Arnold’s work, an extended bird metaphor portrays the marquis (a devotee of hawking) as a falcon, Griselda as a dove, and the courtiers as daws. Griselda is associated with pearls and lilies, symbols of purity often associated with the Virgin, while the children are spoken of as grafted roses, possibly symbolic of martyrdom. Crown imagery is prominent, and the play ends with the marquis’s triumphant announcement that “Patience is crowned!”,61 a possible reference to the crowned Virgin.

In spite of the religious overtones in the play’s symbolism, Arnold realistically humanizes his Griselda into a teenage girl with a best friend in whom she can confide and reveal her human feelings: her romantic infatuation with the marquis, her grief at the loss of her children, her ambivalence about returning to prepare the marquis’s second wedding. Arnold’s play seems never to have been performed.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Griselda; or, The Patient Wife,62 on the other hand, was performed in November of 1873 with much fanfare but never published. Braddon’s play draws upon elements from her non-Chaucerian predecessors: Griselda is wooed by the marquis disguised as a poor scholar (Arnold disguised the marquis as a trader); a courtier is in love with Griselda #nd part of the motivation for the testing is to discredit her with her husband so that she will be available to him (as in Rolli’s opera libretto); Griselda is fond of clothes and giving to beggars (as was Dekker’s Welsh wife). But Braddon’s unique contribution is to stress the mother-child relationship. Griselda collapses with grief when her child disappears and returns to her own mother’s home. Her mother, equally strongly maternal, is firm in her disapproval of the marquis’s behavior and does not let him see Griselda until she is satisfied of his love and his repentance for Griselda’s suffering. Braddon has no interest in Griselda’s patience, which is the primary interest of the next version of the story.

When Fleeming Jenkin, a professor of engineering at the University of Edinburgh, died in 1885, he left, among numerous papers, a three-act prose play, Griselda,63 which had been performed in his Edinburgh home in January of 1882. Like some

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