Word: griselda
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Under a grant from the Radcliffe Institute, Griselda W. Stoney, a dance therapist, works in the children's unit of the Metropolitan State Hospital in Boston...
...members and their projects are: Griselda White, dancing as therapy for psychological and physical rehabilitation; Judith K. Brown, a cross-cultural study of societies in which women dominate subsistence activities; Barbara Gelpi and Mary G. Mason, research on the Victorian critic and essayist Walter Pater; Barbara G. Rosenkrantz '44, a history of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health...
...clever notion to draw a play from Chaucer's Clerk's Tale, for there is a nice dramatic development in the Lord Walter's successive trials of his peasant wife's patience and constancy; he smuggles away Griselda's daughter, then her son, leading her to believe them killed; at last he exiles her nearly naked from his household and asks her to witness his marriage to another woman. Her response to all four tests is to protest her love and obedience to his wishes; and Walter, believing at last in what Chaucer took to be an unreasonable stock...
Clearly this story has its gruesome elements, and Thomas Babe has appropriated them in order, it appears, to account for the behavior of Walter and Griselda. "On his lust present was al his thoght," Chaucer writes of the Lord (meaning his immediate pleasure or wish), and speaks of his "merveillous desir his wyf t'assaye." Babe, ingeniously, has translated this "lust" or "desir" into Walter's elaborate obsession with a pageant he is composing. We do not learn much about the pageant except that it presumably celebrates some ideal of constancy and that it involves the character of Herod...
...that often drags. Unquestionably Babe has given most of his care to the role of Walter, and Richard Simons sees to it that his lines are not wasted; he knows how to be sufficiently kindly in his final derangement to make the switches of the pageant plausible, just as Griselda (Carol Schechtman) is sufficiently astute, generous, and conventional. The mystics, led by Kerr and Belle MacDonald, have nothing but ghosts of parts to feed on, which is a pity, for they are evidently capable players...