Word: griselda
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...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...
...waiting for him, while a neglected teen-age son keeps hoping for more from papa than a quick pat on the back, and a sophisticated elderly actress drops by to deliver a few verbal lefts to the chin. In time the wife becomes a sufficiently aware and impatient Griselda to force a showdown with the mistress, only for the two women to find confederacy more sensible than civil...
Supported on such lofty principles, Ty Ty sometimes simply cannot understand how the rest of his family can be so beastly. His daughter Dahlin' Jill (Fay Spain) is the sort of Georgia peach that any man can pluck-and several do. His daughter-in-law Griselda (played by Tina Louise, the Appassionata von Climax of Broadway's Li'l Abner) plays her most important role in the hay with her brother-in-law (Aldo Ray), an event that, for one quaint reason or another, gives the fellow's wife almost as much satisfaction as it gives...