Patient Grissil: A Comedy : With An Introduction And Notes...

by Thomas Dekker, Henry Chettle, William Haughton

A disturbing early modern "comedy."

118 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1603

About the author

Thomas Dekker (c.1572 - 1632) was an Elizabethan dramatist and pamphleteer, a versatile and prolific writer whose career spanned several decades and brought him into contact with many of the period's most famous dramatists.

Reviews

[Eliza · Rating 1 out of 5]

'pleasant' no.
'comedy' absolutely not.
i'd ask for my time back but it's part of my dissertation.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

This re-telling of Chaucer's tale sticks generally with that story, with a "comic" taming-of-the-shrew subplot. One of the central differences, minor as it is, is that the Marquis seems to be trying to prove a point as much about sycophants as about his wife's virtue: he's testing them to see if they keep condemning this virtuous woman when he does, which clearly shows how wrong-headed THEY are. Grissil gets a little more maternal pleading than Chaucer's does, but of course the overall effect is what you'd expect from a Renaissance retelling: men shouldn't be abusive to their wives, but they have the right to do whatever they want; in order to make a good wife, you've got to mold them while they're still young; and through patiently enduring a husband's wrongs, a wife can, in effect, tame her husband. It's pretty hard to read in parts as a result.

As you can tell from the comments above, lots of the material here feels recycled from other sources, and its main value, I think, is for people collecting variants on those stories to see how other people treat the same material. "Golden slumbers" (lyrics familiar to Beatles fans) appears here as well.

[Michael P. · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is hard for me to get the joke in this early modern "comedy" of a King putting his wife through a series of trials that would make many people take their lives to escape. It is a look into what entertained people of the past and does have some bits of very nice writing, but this play can be a bit hard to take.

[Ann Hein]

I didn't read this book. I don't know how it got on my list.