The story of Griselda has been familiar to English readers since Chaucer’s Clerk told her tale to the Canterbury pilgrims. In a concentrated and seemingly simple narrative, it portrays the rise, fall and recovery of the fortunes of a woman whose story begins where Cinderella’s leaves off, when she marries the prince. The story exploits the emotions and tension surrounding motherhood: the nature of a mother’s love for her child and the potential threat this love holds for the father. By the sixteenth century, the story had considerable currency, and at least four significant Griselda texts appeared in England within forty years, each one interpreting the central figure and her dilemma in different ways. Included here are The Comedy of Patient and Meek Grissill by John Phillip, the anonymous “Most Pleasant Ballad of Patient Grissell” and the chapbook version of The History of Patient Grisel. In all three, Griselda’s story reflects the instabilities of passionate relationships in a particularly moving manner.

The Editor

Faith Gildenhuys has written on the literary representation of women
in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literature.

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