Short answers, pulled from the story.
William Forrest was an English Catholic priest and poet active in the Tudor period, noted as flourishing in 1581. He was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, served as a chaplain to Queen Mary, and produced verse dedicated to figures including the Duke of Somerset and Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk.
The Second Gresyld, finished on the 25th of June 1558, is a narrative poem in verse retelling the divorce of Queen Catherine of Aragon from Henry VIII, casting Catherine in the role of the patient, wronged Griselda of medieval legend. Forrest presented it to Queen Mary. The complete poem was published in 1875 by the Roxburghe Club, edited by William Dunn Macray.
Forrest's manuscripts are held across several institutions. The first part of his History of Joseph is at University College, Oxford; the second part is in the Royal manuscripts at the British Library. A devotional poem on the Virgin Mary appears in British Library Harley MS 1703, and his musical manuscripts are preserved in the archives at Oxford, having passed through the hands of William Heather.
Forrest remained a Catholic throughout his life, even during the Protestant reigns that followed the death of Queen Mary in 1558. He was not, however, papalist; in one of his poems he argued that each national branch of the church had the right to self-government.
The History of Joseph the Chaiste is a poem written in ballade royall, largely derived from the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. Forrest dated its completion to the 11th of April 1569, but stated it had originally been written twenty-four years earlier. He dedicated it to Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk, not long before Howard's execution in 1572.
Forrest was present at the discussions held at Oxford in 1530, when Henry VIII sought the university's opinion on his divorce from Catherine of Aragon. He also attended Catherine's funeral at Peterborough in 1536, and later devoted his major poem The Second Gresyld to retelling her story in verse.