In a nunnery will I shroud me,
Far from other company:
But ere my prayers have end, be sure of this,
[To pray] for thee and for thy love I will not miss.90
"Thus farewell, most gentle captain,
And farewell my heart's content!
Count not Spanish ladies wanton,
Though to thee my love was bent:
Joy and true prosperity goe still with thee!"95
"The like fall ever to thy share, most fair lady."
PATIENT GRISSEL.
The story of Griselda was first told in the Decameron. Boccaccio derived the incidents from Petrarch, and Petrarch seems to have communicated them also to Chaucer, who (in his Clerk of Oxenford's Tale) first made known the tale to English readers. The theme was subsequently treated in a great variety of ways.[2] Two plays upon the subject are known to have been written, one of which (by Dekker, Chettle and Haughton) has been printed by the Shakespeare Society, while the other, an older production of the close of Henry VIII.'s reign, is lost. About the middle of the sixteenth century, (1565,) a Song of Patient Grissell is entered in the Stationers' Registers, and a prose history the same year. The earliest edition of the popular prose history as yet recovered, dated 1619, has been reprinted in the third volume of the Percy Society's Publications.
The ballad here given is taken from Thomas Deloney's Garland of Good Will, a collection which was printed some time before 1596. It was circulated after that time, and probably even before the compilation of the Garland, as a broadside, in black-letter, and also, with the addition of a prose introduction and conclu
sion, as a tract or chap-book. In this last form it is printed in the above-mentioned volume of the Percy Society. The ballad in its proper simplicity is inserted in A Collection of Old Ballads, i. 252.
Percy's Patient Countess (Reliques, i. 310) is extracted from Albion's England.
The title in The Garland of Good Will is, Of Patient Grissel and a Noble Marquess. To the tune of the Bride's Good Morrow. Percy Society, vol. XXX. p. 82.