Gualtieri’s test of Griselda’s patience

Gualtieri’s test of Griselda’s patience turns her obedience into the measure by which he judges her, escalating from accusations about her low birth to the apparent loss of both their children. He presents each cruelty as compelled by his subjects’ wishes, while the narrative reveals that the trials are his own design and that he knows Griselda loves her children. The result is a test whose outward language concerns public approval but whose private stakes are Griselda’s endurance and Gualtieri’s power over her life.

Context and Design

By the time the trials begin, Griselda’s standing has changed dramatically. Though born to Giannucolo and raised among sheep, she has become gracious, diligent, and well regarded by Gualtieri’s subjects. People who had once thought him foolish for marrying her now praise his judgment, believing that he alone had recognized the worth hidden beneath her poor clothes and rustic upbringing. Her conduct has already reversed public opinion; Gualtieri nevertheless makes the same social distinction between her origins and his rank the pretext for attacking her position.

The first stated reason for the pressure is that the vassals resent Griselda’s mean extraction, particularly now that she has borne children who might inherit. But the narrative identifies a different cause: Gualtieri has conceived the purpose of trying her patience through prolonged suffering and things difficult to endure. His appeal to the vassals therefore disguises a private experiment as public necessity. The separation between his explanation and his actual intention matters throughout: Griselda is asked to submit to what appears to be a demand of the community, while Gualtieri alone knows that the ordeal is contrived.

The Daughter’s Removal

After Griselda has been with Gualtieri for some time, she conceives and bears a daughter. Gualtieri rejoices at the birth, but later tells Griselda that his vassals are displeased, especially because she has borne a child despite her humble origins. He presents their murmuring as a consequence of her lineage and the child’s birth. Griselda replies without changing countenance, acknowledging that she is of less account than the vassals and that she was unworthy of the dignity he bestowed on her. Her answer pleases Gualtieri: he sees that the honour of her position has not made her proud.

Gualtieri then turns the accusation into an apparent sentence. He sends a servant whom he has instructed to speak with a woeful expression, beginning to say that his lord has ordered him to take the child. The servant stops short, but Griselda remembers Gualtieri’s earlier words and concludes that the command is to kill her daughter. She feels anguish, yet takes the infant from the cradle, kisses and blesses her, and places her in the servant’s arms. Her request is that the child not be left to beasts and birds unless Gualtieri has ordered that too. The qualification shows the extremity of her submission: even while believing her child is to die, she directs her plea toward the manner of the child’s treatment rather than challenging the command.

The servant reports her words to Gualtieri. Instead of carrying out the supposed killing, he sends the girl to a kinswoman in Bologna, asking her to bring the child up carefully without revealing whose daughter she is. The concealed rescue is known to Gualtieri but not to Griselda, who must endure what she understands as an irreversible loss. His admiration for her constancy follows not from any evidence that she does not care, but from the steadiness with which she bears what she believes he has demanded.

The Son and the Appearance of Indifference

In due course Griselda bears a son, to Gualtieri’s great joy. He then renews the trial with a more severe explanation: his people, he says, cannot live in peace at the prospect that a grandson of Giannucolo might succeed him as lord. He claims to fear that he will be driven from his domains unless he puts Griselda away and takes another wife. The appeal shifts from opposition to her birth to anxiety over succession, but again Gualtieri makes his own decision sound like a necessity imposed by his subjects.

Griselda answers that he should satisfy his own wishes and not trouble himself about her; nothing is dear to her except what pleases him. As before, Gualtieri sends for the child and makes it appear that the boy is to be put to death. He actually sends him to Bologna to be raised as he had sent the girl. Griselda neither changes her expression nor alters her response. That outward consistency risks being mistaken for a lack of maternal feeling, but the narrative explicitly rejects that inference: Gualtieri has seen her cherish the children with the utmost fondness and understands that she gives them up through discretion, not indifference.

The concealment extends beyond the couple. Gualtieri’s vassals believe that both children have been killed and condemn him as barbarous. They pity Griselda, while she offers no account of what she feels beyond saying that what pleases their father pleases her too. Thus the same performance has different meanings for each observer: Gualtieri recognizes deliberate endurance, the vassals see a suffering wife and a cruel lord, and Griselda bears a loss she believes to be real.

From Private Trial to Public Repudiation

Several years after the daughter’s birth, Gualtieri decides that it is time for the supreme trial of Griselda’s endurance. In the presence of his people, he declares that he can no longer bear to have her as his wife, claims he acted foolishly in marrying her, and says that he intends to seek papal permission to put her away and marry again. Men of worth rebuke him, but he will not explain himself. Griselda hears the announcement as a possible return to the life she had before marriage: she imagines going back to her father’s house and perhaps tending sheep again.

She suffers inwardly because she sees another woman about to take the place of the man whose happiness she desires. Yet she meets this new injury with the firm countenance she has shown in the earlier trials. Gualtieri later produces counterfeit letters of dispensation from Rome, giving his subjects to believe that the Pope has authorized the separation. He tells Griselda in their presence that she must cease to be his wife and return to Giannucolo’s house with the dowry she brought him, because his ancestors were great lords while hers were husbandmen. The false letters extend the deception from the family to the assembled community, and the dismissal makes the hierarchy of birth—previously invoked through the children—an explicit reason for stripping Griselda of her position.

Meaning and Limits of the Trial

The sequence is built on repeated acts of apparent surrender. First Griselda is told that her daughter is unwelcome; then the son’s birth is made grounds for a threat against her marriage; finally, she is publicly told that the marriage itself will end. Each escalation renews the same mechanism: Gualtieri attributes his actions to others, while Griselda is left to answer the apparent command rather than the concealed reality behind it. The children’s survival in Bologna underscores the divide between what the reader and Gualtieri know and what Griselda is made to believe.

Her patience is not presented simply as a lack of feeling. The narrative distinguishes her steady outward bearing from her anguish and emphasizes Gualtieri’s knowledge of her affection for the children. At the same time, the trials show how thoroughly he controls the circumstances in which her virtue is judged: he devises the test, supplies its false explanations, and decides what information she may have. In the supplied episode, the final scene reaches the announcement of repudiation and Griselda’s instruction to return to her father. Her response remains composed, but the account here does not yet show the resolution of the trial or what becomes of her afterward.