Return to Siân Echard's Home Page

The soldier takes Griselda's baby, from Charles Cowden-Clarke's Tales from  Chaucer (many dates: this is  probably an early 20th-century printing)

Retelling the Clerk's Tale

The story of Griselda was an enormously popular one, included in virtually all of the adaptations of Chaucer done for children and juveniles in the 19th and early 20th centuries (by contrast, the Wife of Bath's Prologue is usually omitted or drastically shortened, and her Tale features in far fewer of the adaptations; click here to go the the page on Rewriting the Wife of Bath). The tenor of the adaptations is usually to stress the morality of Chaucer's tales: here's what Charles Cowden-Clarke had to say about him, for example, along with two more illustrations to the Clerk's Tale from one of the many reprintings of his retelling: 

Address to My Young Readers

"I have endeavoured to put these Tales, written by one of the finest poets that ever lived, into modern language and as easy prose as I could.... My object in presenting them in this new form was, first, that you might become wise and good by the example of the sweet and kind creatures you will find described in them..."

Chaucer's morality is often tied to a nostalgic view of the Middle Ages; so, for example, Janet Harvey Kelman tells four of The Canterbury Tales-- as she calls them, "Dorigen," "Emelia," "Griselda," and "Constance"-- with the following preface:


"Very long ago, when children still walked softly through the Greenwood to surprise the fairies, and when big people were as fond of stories as little ones are now, a company of pilgrims went on horseback to Canterbury.

The way was long, and, in order to make it seem less tiresome, the pilgrims tried to find out which of them could tell the best story. A grave and gentle man rode with them. His name was Geoffrey Chaucer. He wrote down the stories in a book, in quaint old English words. You would not know in the least what some of these words meant, although you looked at them all day long.

But here, in simple words, are four of the most beautiful of all those stories that Chaucer tells us big people loved to hear, when the world was young."


At right is W. Heath Robinson's illustration of Walter first seeing Griselda, and below his second plate for the story, showing Walter demanding Griselda's child.

 








Not everyone let Walter's behaviour pass without comment, however. Mrs. H. R. Haweis did choose  to  retell the Clerk's Tale, but she made a point of drawing a contrast between the situation in medieval  Italy  and that in England  in 1878. Below are her own illustrations to the Griselda story, and the text of  her note.

 

"Resignation, so steadfast and so willing, was the virtue of an early time, when the husband was really a ‘lord and master'; and such submission in a woman of the present civilization would be rather mischievous than meritorious. If a modern wife cheerfully consented to the murder of her children by her spouse, she would probably be consigned to a maison de santé, while her husband expiated his sins on the scaffold; and if she endured other persecutions, such as Griselda did, it is to be hoped some benevolent outsider would step in, if only to prevent cruelty to animals."

Mrs. Haweis made a point of excusing Griselda's rough attire in the wedding illustration at left:

"Griselda's raggedness must not be construed into slovenliness. Needles were not as accessible to the mass of the poor as they are now; and moreover, the poor not being then compulsorily educated, an honest, industrious girl who could work in the fields and spin, was not always able to darn."

But her attention to historical accuracy was the exception, as the illustration below of Griselda for F.J. Harvey Darton's 1914 adaptation shows:

By the time Russell Flint came to provide the illustrations below to the Medici Society deluxe edition of the Canterbury Tales, the emphasis seems to have been placed entirely on Griselda's beauty and a suggested eroticism (common to most of Flint's illustrations of women)-- a real shift from suggestions of saints' portraits in work such as Haweis's.

Copyright notice: This material is intended primarily for the use of my English students at the University of British Columbia, and is drawn from my own ongoing research: please do not make use of it without permission. If you would like to contact me, you can e-mail me at sian@interchange.ubc.ca

 Return to Siân Echard's Home Page