The Robert Shaa or Shaw here mentioned was, Mr. Collier tells us, one of the temporary managers of the company of the Earl of Nottingham’s players. The comedy was entered at Stationers’ Hall for publication on the 28th March, 1600, as “the Plaie of Patient Grissell,” but it did not appear until three years afterwards.
The Pleasant Comodie of Patient Grissill. As it hath beene sundrie times lately plaid by the right honorable the Earle of Nottingham (Lord high Admirall) his servants. London. Imprinted for Henry Rocket, and are to be solde at the long shop under S. Mildred’s Church in the Poultry. 1603. 4to. 42 leaves.
The play is anonymous, but the entry in Henslowe’s Diary informs us who the authors were.
Patient Grissil: a Comedy by Thomas Dekker, Henry Chettle, and William Haughton. Reprinted from the Black-Letter edition of 1603, with an Introduction and Notes [by J. Payne Collier]. London. Printed for the Shakespeare Society. 1841. The introduction contains an interesting account of the history of Griselda.
On August 30th, 1667, Pepys saw at Bartholomew Fair the puppet play of “Patient Grizill,” and Warton in a note to his History of English Poetry writes: “I need not mention that it is to this day represented in England on a stage of the lowest species and of the highest antiquity: I mean a puppet show.”
“The Patient Countess,” in Percy’s Reliques from Warner’s Albions England, is a totally different story from that of the patient wife of the Marquis Walter.
Warton mentions a MS. poem by William Forrest, and, as it has lately been printed, I give the title here, although it contains no notice of the original Grisild.
The History of Grisild the Second: a Narrative in Verse of the Divorce of Queen Katharine of Arragon. Written by William Forrest, sometime Chaplain to Queen Mary I., and now edited for the first time from the Author’s MS. in the Bodleian Library by the Rev. W. D. Macray, M.A., F.S.A. London. Printed by Whittingham and Wilkins at the Chiswick Press, 1875. 4to. Roxburghe Club.
The Griselda literature is a tolerably large one, and it is therefore scarcely necessary in this place to give more than the above general indication of an interesting subject. It may be noted that the titles of the works on the subject in the library of the British Museum occupy nine pages of the manuscript catalogue.
The patience of Griselda is almost as much a common-place of literature as that of Job, and writers are full of references to her cruel fate. In a Balade translated by Lydgate from the Latin “Grisilde’s humble patience” is recorded.