An Exciting Announcement: York Mystery Plays 2026!

Posted on by under Drama, Historic, History, Mystery Plays, News, Production, York Mystery Plays 2026

We are still seeking expressions of interest for our backstage & offstage teams for The War in Heaven – please see our Jobs & Opportunities page.
We are particularly interested in hearing from potential Waggon Masters and Stage Managers.

We’re back!

It’s been a challenging series of years for us, as it has been for many small theatre groups across the UK, but we are thrilled to tell you that we don’t just have news to tease, we have exciting news right now.

This summer, the Mystery Plays are returning to the city centre of York, and HIDden will be with them!

The Mystery Plays is, effectively, the parent stem of HIDden Theatre. We exist because our founders were involved with a performance in the 2010 plays, and we decided we wanted to keep exploring and presenting historic drama from the past. So we came back in 2014, when the current team started working together. 

We all have incredibly happy memories of that experience, and have hoped circumstances would allow us to return. This year, after all the difficulties of the past years- through a pandemic and many changes of personal circumstance- we’re thrilled beyond measure to be working on The War in Heaven (traditionally The Fall of the Angels). It’s the first play in the cycle, so we’ll be leading the parade! It’s quite an exciting play, depicting both Heaven and Hell, and sets up the struggle between good and evil.

Along the way to production, we’re looking forward to sharing not just our journey, but also some history of the plays and the medieval world with you, and we’ll also be pointing out what else is going on, because this year it’s not just two days of performance, it’s an entire festival. So there’ll be lots of ways to discover the Mystery Plays… and lots of ways to get involved.

On that note… we are going to be acting as the “guild of waifs and strays”. That means that if you’re someone who has an interest in participating in the Plays, but you’re not a member of a group that’s already involved, we’re here! Whether you love to perform or you’re interested in backstage projects like building or costuming, or you’d like to be part of our waggon crew, there are going to be lots of opportunities. Get in touch!

The full cycle of plays will be performed on 28 June and 5 July, with the full festival arranged around those dates. We hope to see you there!

Introducing the Gild of Freemen of the City of York

Posted on by under History, Mystery Plays, News, York Mystery Plays 2026

This #MysteryPlayMonday we’re excited to talk about our partnership with the Gild of Freemen of the City of York, a local civic organisation build on medieval foundations with more than three decades of involvement with the modern Mystery Plays.

As we’ve previously mentioned, the play “The Fall of the Angels”, which this year has been rename “The War in Heaven”, was owned, in the Middle Ages, by the Tanners’ Guild. This organisation, made up of those men who worked in the creation of leather, has ceased to exist in the city (as indeed has the industry itself), and so we “represent” them only in the theatrical and historical sense.

Modern York does, however, continue to have guilds- largely industry-based fraternal organisations today- as do several other cities around the UK. In York, there are seven: the Merchant Taylors, the Merchant Adventurers, the Guild of Building, the Cordwainers, the Butcher, the Scriveners, and the Gild of the Freemen of the City of York. This last is unique among them, in that it is not based on a particular industry in which its members work; rather, its origins lie in the citizens who occupied a unique niche in the social and governmental hierarchy of England. 

Medieval freemen were a sort of proto-middle class, men who were not among the nobility but were not tied to land or lords as serfs, nor under indenture to a trade master. They were, literally, free: to move around, to establish a career, to farm land that they might rent or own, but to which they were not permanently tied. In order to join any guild, or to trade within the city, one first had to have the status of freeman. And those who had such status also had privileges like being allowed to graze their animals on the common land, which in York we know as the Strays. They had responsibilities, too: freemen had to pay taxes, maintain the city’s infrastructure, defend it if needed, and help manage the city and its trade. In time, freemen became the only residents eligible to vote. This menu of privilege and responsibility meant that freemen were often the officeholders of the city, and the ones in charge of its various functions, both civic and economic. 

In the Middle Ages, “freeman” was a status, but it wasn’t a group, or organisation, or guild unto itself. Their precise role changed over the centuries, but they were never a coherent, unified body. In 1953, however, the freemen of York came together and decided that their shared status would have greater meaning and usefulness to the city if they formed a formal organisation. The Gild of Freemen was thus established: a modern society built on ancient roots. 

In 1994, the Mystery Plays, having been revived on a quadrennial basis since 1951 as large, staged productions, were shifted back to their historic performance method: processional waggons performing in open air throughout the city of York. The city guilds once again became involved in the event, which had been a key part of their civic responsibility during the Middle Ages. The Gild of Freemen, however, did not “own” a play from the medieval period, as all members of all the guilds were simply “free men”. But, civic-minded as the members were, the Gild got involved anyway, pairing, as the other guilds did, with organisations and dramatic groups keen to be part of this special, very York event. In 1998 and 2006 they were responsible for  “The Temptation of Christ”, in 2002 the Gild partnered to stage “The Conspiracy Against Jesus”, and from 2010-2022 they settled into working on “The Fall of Man”, the story of Adam & Eve, with “Cain & Abel” as well in 2010. 

With the Gild’s mission being focused on the “enhancement of the City of York and the furtherance of the interest of its citizens”, they couldn’t choose a better project than supporting the Mystery Plays! Although seemingly small in scale (none of the plays are longer than half an hour, and waggons are obviously quite petite as stages) they are an enormous undertaking, and there is nothing else in the world quite like them. Hundreds of York residents, York-born and those who have adopted the city as home, take part, reflecting the rich tapestry of a city that punches far above its weight in terms of theatre and performance. Even those who don’t participate or even watch the Mystery Plays on their quadrennial outing seem to be aware, and proud, of this event. Moreover, as one had first to hold the status of freeman in medieval York before one was permitted to join a guild or trade in the city, in a sense the Freemen may feel a special connection to the plays, since they were, if not as a formal entity but as an idea, the foundation for all of the plays and those involved with them. 

We’re so pleased to be working with the Gild this year! Their history as something new built upon the shoulders of something deeply historic feels very close to our own story, and we share their deep affection for the beautiful city of York, which is certainly the home of our hearts if not always our bodies. It really does add an extra layer of connection to our production! We look forward to having members of the Gild process with us and our waggon during the performance days, and to working with them to add another proud chapter to the history of York.

If you’d like to know more about the Gild of Freemen of the City of York, please visit their website at freemenofyork.co.uk

First Rehearsals! and the Questions They Bring Up

Posted on by under Drama, Musings, Mystery Plays, York Mystery Plays 2026

A report from the wilds of Mystery Plays! It’s #MysteryPlaysMonday and our director for “The War in Heaven” has finished the first in-person rehearsal with some of our cast….

When does a production begin? It’s not like sports, where there’s a buzzer or a whistle or a bell, something to tell you, “They’re off!” Maybe it’s the moment the first idea arrives in someone’s head, or the first meeting where two people planning it sit down to swop ideas. Is it the first creative team meeting? The first call for auditions? There are many metrics you could use to help define it, and in almost all cases the beginning isn’t really when the work starts- certainly, by the time the actors walk through the door the first time, scripts in hand, ready to rehearse, a hell of a lot of work has already gone happened.

But emotionally, the first rehearsal still feels like a starting point. I won’t say it’s true of all productions, but in most cases the performers are the centre of the event. There’s that old line about drama, that all it takes is two planks and a passion, but you don’t even really need the planks: the passionate people who make up a performance are what you can’t do without.

Our Mystery Plays journey with “The War in Heaven” thus began with our reading, online, with everyone involved, just to get a sense of the text and the characters, just to dip our toes in the water. Online wouldn’t normally be the ideal way to do things, but it made it possible for several people to be “there” who couldn’t have been otherwise, and ideally everyone is involved from the very beginning and given a chance to feel welcome and a part of things. The truth is that not all parts of the Mystery Plays are equally involved- waggon crew comes in quite near the end, for example, and costume or prop makers may toil behind the scenes and rarely get to spend time with the cast, and yet we absolutely could not do this project without them. There may be small parts, but there are no expendable parts; even the smallest role in terms of time and effort is crucial. That’s the upside to starting online and easily accessible, it gives more people a chance to start from the same place.

The down side is that it is inevitably less dynamic, and getting to a rehearsal room is… well, there’s just nothing else like it! As we finally got to do today, when our Heavenly cast arrived (we’ll get to meet our Hellish denizens next week). We started off by talking a bit about our characters, brainstorming some different questions to ask of them, so that our angels in particular can start seeing their characters as individual, rather than generic.

If the angels have to work to create unique personalities in relatively few lines, Lucifer is almost too well-known, because it’s hard for us to forget what we know about him: that he winds up as God’s greatest adversary. He can’t start out that way, though, he has to begin virtuous and holy, like his brethren. We have to start by liking Lucifer, as we might any other angel; while the pace of the play means that the rot sets in quickly, we have to remember that it wasn’t always there, and that’s difficult when, culturally, we have the baggage of foreknowledge. Lucifer therefore has to really seduce the audience- not in the “sexy daemon” trope that I know exists, that’s not the choice we’ve made in this case- but convince them against their knowledge that he’s a normal angel, until he isn’t.

God’s character is, I think, quite clear in the text, and obvious in who he needs to be. His challenge is more about theology. I don’t want our play to become about theology, for although the story is Biblical the goal is not to preach but simply to tell a story about some characters, but it’s hard to avoid some of those thorny questions in imagining God. Why doesn’t he smite Lucifer down the very second he gets out of hand? Why does God pick Lucifer in the first place? (“God made a bad call” was one  brilliantly blunt answer that came out of rehearsal today.) If God is all-seeing, all-knowing, how does he miss the obvious point that Lucifer is going to go off the rails? There’s no way to answer these questions for our  character, without also acknowledging that these are questions that scholarly theologians have struggled with for centuries. If they haven’t been able to agree upon the answers to our questions, we’re unlike to do so in the short course of our rehearsals! And yet answers which make sense within the context of our play have to be found.

I’m sure everyone had been thinking about these things, but they really surface at early rehearsals, because they can make a difference in material ways. One of the things we toyed with was the question of where God is, while Lucifer is growing in arrogance. Surely, if God is sitting right there, next to him, he might tap Lucifer on the shoulder with a swift, “Hey, knock it off! Too far!” But he doesn’t… so at least from the standpoint of visual narration, God can’t directly see what’s going on, or else his inaction makes no sense. So where is God? When does he leave, and where does he go? This is a real, physical issue we have to solve because the audience has to understand what’s going, but the core of the question- why does God let Lucifer fall?- is also a pretty deep matter of theology and faith.

All these questions are swirling around in my brain after our first rehearsal- and we’ve only worked on half the play! The Hell cast will be in next, which will make for an interesting contrast; Hell is less of a theological thicket and more of a pure staging challenge for us. But, as just shown, that’s what I’m saying now. I may have many different thoughts and questions about Hell and its inhabitants once they’ve leaped off of the page! And those questions are how I know: we’ve officially, really and truly, begun.

Farces, Finale

Posted on by under Farces, Musings

It’s our final #FarcesFriday because the event is this Saturday night! (You can still get tickets, or get them at the door!) So today our farces’ director sums up the experience of preparing for them.

It’s so hard to believe we’ve arrived at the time when the farces will be performed, and put to bed, at least for now. They’ve been quite a journey, from an idea just being thrown around, through an incredible amount of preparation, to tomorrow evening!

The farces started even more embryonic than most of our productions, because I had no real familiarity with either French medieval drama or comedy in general in a historic context. We knew we wanted to start moving outside of the English medieval niche, but not going too far: something with a small cast, at a small scale, seemed a good way to get back on the metaphorical horse. Going through my bookshelves and pulling one of Jody Enders’ volumes off the shelf, I realised what a treasure-trove existed in French farces, and they ticked all the boxes: small casts, short skits, comedy, and not a deity in sight. 

Once we had settled on farces in general, and chosen our pair in particular, the academic excavation began. I liked these plays, but what did we know about them that might change how we approached them? There’s an irony in there somewhere, because these are not deep, intellectual plays that require a heavy academic hand; they’re pieces of fun and fluff, largely, pure entertainment for its own sake.

And yet working on these plays, I have learned so much, which I have hopefully distilled into smaller bites to share with you in these weekly posts! French medieval theatre is so remarkably different from English, more than I would have expected. I have still not ascertained why there doesn’t seem to be any visible exchange across the Atlantic, at a time when the two countries were interacting quite a lot (albeit not necessarily very pleasantly), or why culturally the French valued humour, and secular humour at that, in a way that doesn’t quite seem to have been the case in England.

It was dismaying to read through many farces, only to discover how violent they were. Perhaps it shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did- it was so prevalent that I rather struggled to find plays where that wasn’t a dominant feature. Violence often features in English plays, as well, but not so relentlessly. I think it’s still possible to perform those plays if they’re handled very delicately, but it isn’t something I personally wanted to do, so we moved on and kept digging to find the plays that we have, which are also, in my opinion, two of the best anyway. And that’s another thing worth noting about medieval French farces: with so many of them surviving, their quality is uneven, and not all of them are necessarily worth performing today. (Just because it’s old doesn’t always mean it’s good is sometimes a hard thing for a history lover to say! But it remains true.)

Women came off as poorly as you might expect from something written in the 14th century, and yet we have Guillemette, who accurately points out her husband Pierre Pathelin’s flaws, but who seems to have a marriage largely based on mutual aims and a degree of respect. Jacquinot and Jacquinette, our Washtub couple, could learn some lessons from them. And it could be argued that for them, as well as marriages in other farces, nobody comes out ahead- the women may be stereotyped as cranky nags or adulteresses, but the men are often stereotyped as lumpen idiots, who deserve what they get. It’s a negative egalitarianism, but it’s arguably present.

Indeed, one of the hallmarks of the farces writ large is that very nearly everyone is a bit scandalous- the moral universe of the farces is indeed a perverse one, where everyone is cheating, failing, or flailing. True success and decency just don’t exist here; moral ambiguity is as good as it gets. But perhaps that’s one of the attractive things about them: even as stereotypical, stock characters, the better among the farces know that their characters can’t simply be hateful or saintly, we have to sympathise with their plights even when they handle them badly, because they’re only funny if there is just enough humanity in them to be recognisable. In its way, this comes closer to modern characters, with motivations and nuances, than some of the more reverent religious dramas.

One of things we haven’t learned yet, but hope to this weekend, is how well they stand up as text. Many of the farces really do need a lot of zany, antic staging to make sense. We suspect, and hope, that the two we’ve chosen have enough narrative heft within the dialogue to prove entertaining. I don’t think you need to lard lots of extra sight gags on to them, and in fact I think you may detract from the core of these plays and their characters if you go overboard on staging jokes. We’ll see if this is the right approach or not when we get the plays in the mouths of actors this weekend!

I’m so excited to see what people will do with these wonderful characters! They may not be as deeply written a something out of a modern drama, but they’re fun and they’re funny and they’re sympathetic in their own strange way. While I don’t believe that all stories or characters need to be “relatable” there is something quite charming about realising that some things don’t change. Spouses still bicker over petty things like laundry. Lawyers still have shady reputations- maybe sometimes with good reason! People still try to see what they can get away with on a regular basis, flattery can still be pretty successful in running a scheme and a cheat, in-laws can still stick their noses in and make things awkward. All of this could have been written last week and have been just as amusing.

I’ll miss the farces. I won’t miss wrestling through my limited, struggling French… but I can read a lot more of it than I could a year ago! I’ll miss working on plays that make me laugh more than, despite evidence to the contrary, they make me think. They have been a bit of a vacation into a celebration of laughter and the ridiculous, which is not a place where I spent much time, and it’s been a breath of fresh air. Maybe someday we’ll come back and revisit a more fully staged version, but until that happens, it is indeed a bit sad to say au revoir to the Pathelins and the Jacquinots. But I want to bring this in with a smile… so I think I’ll go read the plays again once more. Then I’ll be sure to end this with a laugh.

An Assembly of Angels

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, Musings, Mystery Plays, York Mystery Plays 2026

Continuing last week’s #MysteryPlayMonday theme of heavenly beings, this week our play’s director looks at the angels in “The War in Heaven”.

What is an angel?

I suspect most people have some quick answer on this one. A basic concept of something like an angel, even if it doesn’t go by that name, exists fairly cross-culturally, and you’d be especially hard-pressed in the Western world for “angels” as an idea to have escaped your notice. Yet when I thought about it, I realised that I had a couple conflicting answers within my own sphere of reference. Angels are, in general, God’s messengers, the intermediaries who communicate with humans on his behalf. Some may serve a guardian function, and some are reputed to escort the recently deceased into heaven. These angels, therefore, are a part of heaven that is and always has been supernatural. Contradictorily, however, the idea that people become angels upon their death is also in circulation, something children are told as a way of helping them make sense of their early experiences of personal loss. And then, to compound matters, some angels seem to get mixed up with saints.

Though the modern world is not immune to the lure of angels as a phenomenon, they rarely come in for the sort of in-depth study that was in vogue among theological circles in the Middle Ages, hitting a high point in the thirteenth century. “Angelology” was considered a genuine branch of science, a rigorous, academic study of the beings who are God’s attendants and helpers, and those who studied them went incredibly in depth in trying to make sense of what angels were and were not. 

Although there was much debate about it, for our purposes, angels are embodied beings, complete with wings (the evolution of angels, their wings, and ideas about what they look like could be an entire separate essay!). At the time-out-of-time of our play, they are only future emissaries to humanity, because humanity does not yet exist; for the same reason, they cannot be the heavenly incarnations of the earthly deceased. Our angels have two clear functions: they are to be companions for God, and to worship him.

This is, presumably, in addition to any specialised duties they might possess, for the same theologians who argued for or against angels possessing corporeal bodies also devised a system for organising varying species, if you will, of angelic beings. The Bible mentions ‘angels’ and ‘archangels’, ‘cherubim’ and ‘seraphim’ in both testaments; these are clearly angels that are different from one another in some way. Colossians 1:16 may add to their ranks: “For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers…” I confess that I struggle to see this as a listing of further supernatural beings and fail to see why this can’t reference earthly things (read in place of those words: ‘whether they be governments, or kingdoms, or states, or rulers’ to understand what I’m getting at), but medieval angelologists read that passage as listing more angelic types. And thus was born the Nine Order of Angels, a hierarchy of heavenly beings who served distinct functions for God. That seraphim and cherubim were in the “top tier” of this, while archangels and angels were at the bottom, is the one thing theologians more or less agreed on; the rest- thrones, powers, dominions, principalities, and virtues (the last of which seems to have been added outside of Biblical precedent, perhaps simply to make up the number nine)- are ranked differently by different theologians, in the middle. Most of them are depicted as feathered and winged human forms, but Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones (usually the highest trio) look least like humans, possessing multiple wings, faces, and hands. 

There are two implications for all of this with regard to our play. The first is that our angels do not need to- in fact, probably shouldn’t- be identical. We can represent different types of angels, including angels that don’t appear as humans. The second is that our angels can be not only distinct physically, we can look at the script and see how it might suggest different characters. This latter is especially important for actors, but also uniquely challenging: how can you be an individual when, by definition, you exist with the purpose of “praising God”? I would argue that it’s in how you choose to read the script, and what subtleties you can create out of it. One angel seems to praise God for the beauties and blessings of heaven, while another finds their own angelic existence awe-inspiring. A third simply feels grateful to be proximate to the deity. These are different focuses and can suggest different personalities. And let us not forget the fourth angel, at the start of the play: Lucifer begins as an angel (some angelic hierarchies consider him a tenth type; others suggest that he was either a cherub or a seraph), so there must be something different about him which makes him vulnerable to his own ego, while the angels who follow him must also possess, or be lacking, some essential quality that leads to their downfall.

In addition to their relationship with God, we may consider how the angels relate to one another, in trying to make sense of them as personalities. The good angels must be bewildered by the abandonment of their brethren, an abandonment which takes place both in presence and in ideology. If you are an angel whose greatest character note is “grateful to be near God”, how would you feel about a sibling angel who deliberately chose to turn away from God and worship someone else? Does heaven feel strangely empty without the angels who have fallen? What does the fact of their fall mean for you own angelic capacity to fail? Sorrow, anger, confusion… these are emotional options for the post-fall angels that actors can pick up and run with. I don’t buy these angels as mindless drones who can only praise God and nothing else; if that were the case, either the fall itself would be impossible (which it clearly isn’t) or it would be meaningless, for if the angels have no choice there is no virtue in their decision to follow God rather than Lucifer. The question of angelic free will is another favourite among those who study them and their biblical precedents, but in our play I think it has to be read as present.

For our angels, the answer to “what’s my motivation” may start with “to paise God”, but it doesn’t end there. And that’s what makes “The War in Heaven” a little bit different, and hopefully for those actors a whole lot more fun.

A Farce Bibliography, Part 2

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, Farces, French Farces, Musings

Continuing from our last #FridayFarces, here is the second installation of our farce director’s lengthy reading list!

If last week wasn’t enough book list for you, here is the second half, which includes most, though possibly not all, of the editions which I consulted in trying to carve out our translation. I don’t assume you’d want to read all of these, or possibly any, but I have once again put asterisks by those books that were especially helpful in getting my head around this project, and at the bottom you’ll find a list of editions that were consulted in preparing our translation. I sincerely hope that our plays will have a similar effect on you that they did on us: a kindling of curiosity, a window that beckons towards you and whispers, “I want to know more about this.”

Jacob, P.L. Recueil de Farces, Soties et Moralites du Quinzieme Siecle. (1859) Adolphe Delahays: Paris.

** Knight, Alan E. Aspects of Genre in the Late Medieval French Drama. (1983) Manchester University Press: Manchester. 

Knight, Alan E. “The Condemnation of Pleasure in Late Medieval French Morality Plays”, The French Review, Vol. 57 No. 1 (1983), pp. 1-9.

Knight, Alan E. “The Medieval Theatre of the Absurd”, PMLA, Vol. 86, No. 2 (1971), pp. 183-189.

Koopmans, Jelle & Darwin Smith. “Un Théâtre ‘Français’ du Moyen Âge?”, Mèdièvales, No. 59 (2010), pp. 5-16.

Koopmans, Jelle. “La farce, genre noble aux prises avec la facètie?”, Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes, Vol. 32 (2016), pp. 147-163.

Kramer, Femke. “How to Deal With Farces?” Medieval English Theatre, Vol. 21 (1999), pp. 66-78.

Langle, Paul Fleuriot de. Les sources du comique dan “Maître pathelin”. (1926), Librairie du Roi René: Angers, France.

Lejeune, Rita. “Pour Quel Public ‘La Farce de Maistre Pierre Pathelin’ A-T-Elle Été Rédigée?”, Romania Vol. 82 No. 328 (1961), pp. 482-521.

Lemercier, P. “Les Éléments Juridiques de ‘Pathelin’ et la Localisation de l’oeuvre”, Romania vol. 73 No. 290 (2) (1952), pp. 200-226.

Lewicka, H. “Pour la Localisation de la Farce de M e Pathelin”, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, T. 24 No. 2 (1962), pp. 273-281.

Maddox, Donald. “The Morphology of Mischief in ‘Maistre Pierre Pathelin'”, L’Esprit Créateur, Vol. 18 No. 3 (1978), pp. 55-68.

Maddox, Donald. The Semiotics of Deceit: the Pathelin Era. (1984) Associated University Presses: Lewisburg, PA and London.

Manzour, Charles. “Vingt ans de recherches sur le théâtre du xvie siècle: deuxième partie: le théâtre comique, les genres nouveaux, les spectacles de cour, le théâtre scolaire”, Nouvelle Revue du XVIe Siécle, Vol. 17 No. 2 (1999), pp. 301-318.

Maskett, David. “The Aesthetics of Farce: ‘La Jalousie du Barbouillé”, The Modern Language review, Vol. 29 No. 3 (1997), pp. 581-589.

Meyerhold, Vsevolod & Nora Beeson. “Farce”, The Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 4 No. 1 (1959), pp. 139-149.

Nitzie, William A. & Preston Dargan. A History of French Literature. (1938) Holt, Rinehart & Winston: New York.

Norland, Howard B. “Formalizing English Farce: Johan Johan & Its French Connection”, Comparative Drama (1983), pp. 141-152.

Oliver, Thomas Edward. “Some Analogues of Maistre Pierre Pathelin”, The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 22 No. 86 (1909), pp. 395-430.

Peters, Edward et al. “A Feast of Law: A Symposium on the Teaching of Medieval Legal History”, The History Teacher, Vol. 22 No. 1 (1988), pp. 7-31.

Philipot, Emmanuel. “Remarques et Conjectures sur le Texte de ‘Maistre Pierre Pathelin'”, Romania, Vol. 56 No. 224 (1930), pp. 558-584.

Picot, Émile. Recueil Général des Sotties (3 vols.). (1968) Librairie de Firmin Didot et Cie: Paris.

Pinet, Christopher. “French Farce: Printing, Dissemination and Readership from 1500-1560”, Renaissance and Reformation, Vol. 3 No. 2 (1979), pp. 111-132.

Redmond, James, ed. Farce. (1988) Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

Roques, Mario. “Notes sur ‘Maistre Pierre Pathelin’: I: Manger de l’Oie”, Romania, Vol. 57 No. 228 (1931), pp. 548-560.

Roy, Bruno. “Quand les Pathelin Achètent du Drap”, Médiévales, No. 29 (1995), pp. 9-22.

Schaumburg, K., et al. La Farce de Patelin et Ses Imitations. (1889) C. Klincksieck: Paris.

Schoell, Konrad. “Humour in Farce, Sotie and Fastnachtspiel“, European Medieval Drama, No. 4 (2000), pp. 9-22.

Schreiber, Cècile. “L’Univers compartimenté du théâtre médiéval”, The French Review, Vol. 41 No. 4 (1968), pp. 468-478.

Schumacher, Joseph. Studien Zur Farce Pathelin. (1911) C. Hinstorff: Rostock, Germany.

Segre, Cesare & John Meddemmen. “Maistre Pathelin: Manipulation of Topics and Epistemic Lability”, Poetics Today, Vol. 5 No. 3 (1984), pp. 563-583.

Small, Graeme. Late Medieval France. (2009) Palgrave Macmillan: New York.

Smith, Darwin. “About French Vernacular Traditions: Medieval Roots of Modern Theatre Practices”, Journal of Early Modern Studies, No. 8 (2019), pp. 33-67.

Smith, Darwin. Maistre Pierre Pathelin: Le Miroir d’Orgueil. (2002) Tarabuste: Saint-Benoit-du-Sault.

Stephenson, Robert C. “Farce as Method”, The Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 5 No. 2 (1960), pp. 85-93.

Symes, Carol. “The Appearance of Early Vernacular Plays: Forms, Functions, and the Future of Medieval Theatre”, Speculum Vol. 77 No. 3 (2002), pp. 778-831.

Urwin, Kenneth. “Pathelin ‘Pendable'”, The Modern Language Review, Vol. 42 No. 3 (1947), pp. 359-361.

Watkins, John H. “The Date of the ‘Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles'”, The Modern Language Review, Vol. 37, No. 4 (1942), pp. 485-487.

EDITIONS

Allen, John. Three Medieval Plays. (1953) Heinemann Educational Books: London.

Bowen, Barbara C. Four Farces. (1967) Basil Blackwell: Oxford.

Champion, Richard T. Maistre Pierre Pathelin. (1970) Librairie Honore Champion: Paris.

Coustelier, Antoine Urbain. La farce de maistre Pierre Pathelin. (1723) Antoine-Urbain Coustelier: Paris.

Dondo, Mathurin. Pathelin et Autres Pièces. (1924) D.C. Heath & Company: Boston.

Dufournet, Jean. La Farce de Maître Pierre. (1986) Flammarion: Paris.

Eliot, Samuel A. (ed.). Little Theatre Classics, Vol. 2. (1920) Little, Brown & Company: Boston.

Enders, Jody. Trial by Farce. (2023) University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor.

Faivre, Bernard. Les Farces Moyen Age et Renaissance, Vol. 1. (1997) Imprimerie Nationale: [unknown].

Fournier, Edouard. La Vraie Farce de Matire Pathelin. (1881) E. Dentu: Paris.

Frappier, Jean & A.M. Gossart. Le Theatre Comique au Moyen Age. (1935) Larousse: Paris.

Gassies, G. Anthologie du Théatre Français du Moyen Age. (1925) Librairie Delagrave: Paris.

Hankiss, János. Farce Nouvelle. (1925) JHE Heitz, GE Stechert & Co.: New York.

Harden, A. Robert. Trois Pièces Médiévales. (1967) Meredith Publishing Co.: New York.

Holbrook, Richard T. Master Pierre Pathelin. (1914) Walter H. Baker & Co: Boston.

Holbrook, Richard. The Farce of Master Pierre Patelin. (1905) Riverside Press: Cambridge, MA.

Jacob, P.L. La Farce de Maitre Pathelin. (1876) Librairie des Bibliophiles: Paris.

Jagendorf, Moritz. The Farce of the Worthy Master Pierre Patelin. (1949) Walter H. Baker Co.: Boston, MA. 

Jodogne, Omer. Maître Pierre Pathelin. (1983) Peeters: Louvain, Belgium.

Leteissier, Anne. La Farce de Maître Pierre Pathelin. (2001) Magnard: Paris.

Malaunoy, Marion de. Maistre Pierre Pathelin: Hystorie, Reproduction en Fac-smile. (1904) Librairie de Firmin Didot Etc.: Paris.

Marin, Fanny. La Farce de Maître Pathelin. (2000) Hachette Livre: Paris.

Pickford, C.E. La Farce de Maistre Pierre Pathelin. (1967) Bordas: Paris.

Picot, Guillaume. La Farce de Maistre Pathelin. (1972) Librairie Larousse: Paris.

Relonde, Maurice. The Farce of the Worthy Master Pierre Patelin, the Lawyer. (1917) R.G. Badger: Boston.

Robert-Busquet, L. Farces du Moyen Age. (1942) Lanore: Paris.

Snook, Lee Owen. The Fourth Yearbook of Short Plays. (1938) Row, Peterson & Co.: Evanston, IL.

Tissier, André. Farces du Moyen Age. (1984) Flammarion: Paris.

Unknown. The Village Lawyer. (1809) D. Longworth: New York. 

On Being God

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, Musings, Mystery Plays, York Mystery Plays 2026

As we get started with our rehearsals and our cast, we’ll be sharing some of our thoughts on who the characters in our play are. This #MysteryPlayMonday, we’re kicking this off with reflections on God- what makes ours unique, and what challenges the part offers for an actor, medieval or modern.

Playing God, in the dramatic sense, must always have come with challenges, maybe even more so in the Middle Ages when acting wasn’t a profession in the way we know it, and faith and religion were so woven into the fabric of everyday life that they almost didn’t exist as separate concepts. If you were a medieval tanner playing God, for one day in the middle of the British summer, what did that mean?

Well, what does it mean today? 

The theological implications of that question aren’t actually more readily apparent today than they are from six hundred years ago; the very concept of a deity will vary from person to person (and possibly from moment to moment within the same person!), and I suspect to at least a degree that was true even back then. The character of God, in a religious sense, even varies within the Biblical source text: the dichotomy between the vengeful, often condemnatory God of the Old Testament versus the “love thy neighbour” doctrines preached in the New, and that frustrating issue of making sense of a trinitarian God who is both the same entity as Jesus, and separate.

But the God of the Mystery Plays, or rather the Gods in them, can be pinned down somewhat more readily because we can simply choose to read them as characters in a script, without the bigger implications coming into the conversation. It’s unlikely that medieval guildsmen would have taken this approach But for us, it’s far more useful. And because each group presents its own play, in somewhat atomised circumstances (we don’t get together to agree on using identical costumes, for example) we can see the Gods who appear in different plays as different versions, as well. 

Medieval drama can be difficult for modern actors, used to looking for more rounded characters who have imagined histories and subtexts; medieval plays weren’t written that way, their characters are designed to fulfil a “type” rather than be seen as specific individuals. But the God in “The War in Heaven” is one of the more complex iterations of the deity. He begins by way of introduction: “I am gracious and great… /All might is in me…/ I am life, the way unto wealth winning/ I am foremost and first. As I bid, shall it be.” This may, in the story, be entirely true, but it’s not exactly humble. God doesn’t need to be humble, of course, simply by virtue of being God. But as the play moves on, we have Lucifer saying, “All wealth do I wield. So wise is my wit.” These… aren’t terribly different words from God’s. And yet Lucifer can’t be holy and God can’t be arrogant. What makes them different, for a viewer, beyond “God is right because he’s God, Lucifer is wrong because he’s Lucifer”? To say that the audience has to like God feels absurd, because the idea that “God = good” and “good = something I should like, maybe without question” is so baked in to our culture. But from a theatrical standpoint, we can’t ever assume that audiences will just do something, we have to give them a reason and make our case for it, dramatically. Our audiences have to like God enough to empathise with him.

One thing which sets apart God from Lucifer is that God is a creator. He’s making Heaven, creating a world and the beings in it, contributing. Lucifer isn’t; all he does is boast. He may say that “above all shall I be building” but he doesn’t actually do it (and presumably he can’t). Put another way, God’s putting his money where his mouth is; he can back up his words. Lucifer has nothing to put behind his bragging. To quote from the musical Rent, “the opposite of war isn’t peace, it’s creation”: Lucifer simply isn’t adding anything to the sum total of the world, and that automatically makes God’s claims to being “foremost and first”, borne out through his actions, superior.

God’s reaction after Lucifer’s fall (our play does not show him explicitly “cast down to hell” by God) can be read several ways, giving actors lots of choices to make. Is he angry, or sorrowful? Does he feel betrayed, or disappointed? How do Lucifer’s choices make him view what he has created- is everything now marred by what has happened, because Paradise was not, in fact, perfect? Are we looking at an Old Testament God of fury and punishment, or a New Testament deity who actually wants to be forgiving, if Lucifer would only humble himself enough to ask? Maybe it’s a mixture of some or all of these!

I personally think the simple fact that these choices are available at all suggests that, rather than a majestic, magisterial God On High, the God of “The War in Heaven” is quite a human God, capable and willing to have complex emotional responses to events and to himself. And that’s what helps the audience see that, even in moments when his words may seem similar to Lucifer’s, God’s are reaching out, to them, the mortals watching the play, effectively saying ‘I am creating all of this for you’. This is not the wildly white-maned, aged, authoritative deity of, say, the Sistine Chapel painting. This God is, subtly, a reminder that in Christian theology he is also the same entity as Jesus; the seeds of his incarnation in mortality are planted from the very beginning, from within himself.

Unless a miraculous personal diary surfaces someday, telling us about the inner thoughts of a medieval tanner in York who held this role, we will never know if he might have thought about any of this, and given the distance in theology from a pre-Reformation world to ours, it seems unlikely. But medieval Catholicism did encourage people to think on the humanity of Jesus and his followers, rather than viewing them as almost too holy to have been real. (We probably wouldn’t have the Mystery Plays if a more Victorian touch-me-not religion had been dominant at the time!) So it’s not so difficult, really, to imagine a tanner, faced with the daunting task of playing God one warm summer day, contemplating how he’d feel in God’s place. After all, for that one Corpus Christi Day, on the waggon, God’s place was, for a moment, his.

A Farce Bibliography, Part 1

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, Farces, French Farces

If you’re wondering what we’ve read behind the scenes for the French farces and for our #FarcesFriday writings, here’s the first part of the director’s bibliography.

I went into this project knowing extremely little about farce from any era, so this is a longer reading list than usual (and it actually isn’t totally comprehensive; many other things were read as well). I don’t assume you’d ever want to read quite this much about them- though I hope you’ll find something that intrigues you!- so I’ve put asterisks by those titles which were particularly helpful. I’d especially like to highlight the wonderful anthologies by Jody Enders, which even the most casual reader will find entertaining rather than academic, though they have a deeply erudite foundation. They were the inspiration for this project, and while we have taken a different approach to adapting and translating the plays, they show a unique approach to bringing plays which were very much a reflection of their own time, into our own era. On to the books…..

Arden, Heather. Fools’ Plays. (1980) Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

Badawi, Abdurrahman. “Influences Islamiques sur la littérature française a l’époque classique”, Studia Islamica, No. 45 (1977), pp. 5-25.

Bazin, François Emmanuel Joseph. Matire Pathelin, opéra comique en un acte. (1879) Léon Escudier: Paris.

Beam, Sara. Laughing Matters. (2007) Cornell University Press: Ithaca & London.

Beck, Jonathan. Théatre et propagande aux débuts de la Réforme. (1986) Editions Slatkine: Geneva, Paris. 

Bentley, Eric. The Life of The Drama. (1964) Applause Theatre Books: NY.

Bermel, Albert. Farce: a History from Aristophanes to Woody Allen. (1990) Southern Illinois University Press: Carbondale & Edwardsville.

Bloch, Marc. French Rural History. (1966) University of California Press: Berkeley & Los Angeles.

Bloch, R. Howard. “Medieval Misogyny”, Representations, No. 20 (1987), pp. 1-24

Bowen, Barbara C. “Metaphorical Obscenity in French Farce, 1460-1560”, Comparative Drama, 1977, pp. 331-344.

Brown, Arthur. “Folklore Elements in the Medieval Drama”, Folklore, Vol. 63 No. 2, (1952), pp. 65-78.

Brun, Laurent. “French Studies: Late Medieval Literature”, The Year’s Work in Modern Language Studies, Vol. 76 (2016), pp. 14-34.

Campbell, Josie P. “Farce as Function in the Wakefield Shepherds’ Plays”, The Chaucer Review Vol. 14 No. 4 (1980), pp. 336-343.

Cannings, Barbara. “Towards a Definition of Farces as a Literary ‘Genre’”, The Modern Language Review, Vol. 56 No. 4 (1961), pp. 558-560.

Caputi, Anthony. Buffo: the Genius of Vulgar Comedy. (1978) Wayne State Detroit Press: Detroit.

Cazalas, E. “Où et Quand se Passe l’Action de ‘Maistre Pierre Pathelin’?”, Romania Vol. 57 No. 228 (1931), pp. 573-577.

Chase, Carol J. & Marie-Sol Ortolá. “The Ideology of Deception in ‘La Farce de Maistre Pathelin'”, Modern Language Studies, Vol. 16 No. 3 (1986), pp. 134-148.

Chevaldin, L.E. Les jargons de la farce de Pathelin. (1903) A. Fontemoing: Paris.

Conroy, Peter. “Old and New in French Medieval Farce”, Romance Notes, Vol. 13 No. 2 (1971), pp. 336-343.

Cons, Louis. “L’Auteur de la Farce de Maistre Pathelin”, Revue du Seizième siècle, (1913), pp. 473-476.

Cons, Louis. “L’ L’Auteur de la Farce de Maistre Pathelin”. (1926) Princeton University Press: Princeton, New Jersey.

Crist, Larry S. “Pathelinian Semiotics: Elements for an Analysis of ‘Maistre Pierre Pathelin'”, L’Esprit Créaeur, Vol. 18 No. 3, (1978), pp. 69-81.

Cunningham, W.R. “The Date of the ‘Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles'”, Modern Language Review, Vol. 38 No. 3 (p. 250).

Dane, Joseph. Res/Verba. (1985) Brill: Leiden.

Davidson, Clifford, ed. Fools and Folly. (1996) medieval Institute Publications: Kalamazoo, MI.

*** Davis, Jessica Milner. Farce. 2003) Transaction: New Brunswick, NJ.

Davis, Natalie Zemon. Society & Culture in Early Modern France. (1975) Stanford University Press: Stanford, CA.

Dean, Joan F. “Joe Orton and the Redefinition of Farce”, Theatre Journal, Vol. 34 No. 4 (1982), pp. 481-492.

Devereux, George. “Ethnopsychological Aspects of the Terms ‘Deaf’ or ‘Dumb'”, Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 37 No. 2 (1964).

Diller, Hans-Jurgen. “Laughter in Medieval English Drama: a Critique of Modernizing & Historical Analyses”, Comparative Drama, Vol. 36 No. 1/2 (2002), pp. 1-19.

Droz, E. “L’Illustration des Premières Éditions Parisiennes de la Farce de Pathelin”, Humanisme et Renaissance, 1 No. 1/4 (1934), pp. 145-150.

Dunn, E. Catherine. “The Farced Epistle as Dramatic Form in the Twelfth Century Renaissance”, Comparative Drama(1995), pp. 363-381.

Dutton, Kenneth R. “Farce/Farts: Divergent Styles of Comedy in Medieval France.” Stylistyka, Vol. 10 (2005), pp. 351-361.

Enders, Jody. “Allegory Plays”, Studies in English Literature Vol. 55 No. 2 (2015), pp. 447-464.

*** Enders, Jody. The Farce of the Fart & Other Ribaldries. (2011) University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia.

*** Enders, Jody. Holy Deadlock. (2017) University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia.

*** Enders, Jody. Immaculate Deception. (2022) University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia.

*** Enders, Jody. Trial by Farce. (2023) University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor.

Evans, Joan. Life in Medieval France. (1989) Lonsdale & Bartholomew Ltd: Leicester.

Famiglietti, R.C. Tales of the Marriage Bed from Medieval France (1300-1500). (1992) Picardy Press: Providence, RI.

Field, W.H.F. “The Picard Origin of the Name ‘Pathelin'”, Modern Philology, Vol. 65, No. 4 (1968), pp. 362-365.

Frank, Grace. The Medieval French Drama. (1954) Clarendon Press: Oxford.

Frank, Grace. “Pathelin”, Modern Language Notes, Vol. 56 No. 1 (1941), pp. 42-47.

Frappier, Jean & A.M. Gossart. Le Theatre Comique au Moyen Age. (1935) Larousse: Paris.

Ganderax, Louis. “Revue Dramatique”, Revue des Deux Mondes (1829-1971), Vol. 46 No. 3 (1881), pp. 694-704.

Guynn, Noah D. “A Justice to Come: The Role of Ethics in la Farce de Maistre Pierre Pathelin”, Theatre Survey, pp. 13-31.

Guynn, Noah D. Pure Filth: Ethics, Politics, & Religion in Early French Farce. (2020) University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia.

Haug, Hélène. “‘Maistre Pierre de Hurion, Agille Imitateur’: Bilan sur les Auteurs Actifs á la Cour de René d’Anjou (1434-1480)”, Romania, Vol. 131 No. 521 (2013), pp. 130-151.

*** Harvey, Howard Graham. The Theatre of the Basoche. (1969) Harvard University Press: NY

Holbrook, Richard. Etude sur Pathelin. (1965), Elliott Monographs, reprint by Kraus Reprint Corporation: NY.

Holbrook, Richard. “Exorcism with a Stole”, Modern Language Notes, Vol. 19 No. 8 (1904), pp. 235-237.

Holbrook, Richard. “The Harvard Manuscript of the Farce of Maistre Pierre Pathelin and Pathelin’s Jargons”, Modern Language Notes, Vol. 20 No. 1 (1905), pp. 5-9.

Holbrook, Richard. “Le Plus Ancien Manuscrit Connu de ‘Pathelin'”, Romania, Vol. 46 No. 181 (1920), pp. 84-108.

Holbrook, Richard. “Pour le Commentaire de ‘Maistre Pierre Pathelin'”, Romania, Vol. 54, No. 213 (1928), pp. 66-98.

Holmes, Urban T. Jr. “Pathelin, 1519-1522”, Modern Language Notes, Vol. 55 No. 2 (1940), pp. 106-108.

Howe, Irving. “Farce and Fiction”, The Threepenny Review, No. 43 (1990), pp. 5-6.

Hue, Denis & Darwin Smith. Maistre Pierre Pathelin, Lectures et contextes. (2000) Presses Universitaires de Rennes: Rennes, France.

Hughes, Leo. A Century of English Farce. (1956) Princeton University Press.

Hughes, Leo. “The Early Career of ‘Farce’ in the Theatrical Vocabulary”, Studies in English, Vol. 20 (1940), pp. 82-95.

On the Joys of Auditions

Posted on by under Musings, Mystery Plays, York Mystery Plays 2026

After a busy week of auditions, it’s #MysteryPlayMonday! Our show’s director looks back on what made this such an enjoyable process.

It was auditions week here at HIDden, a time of equal parts stress and delight. This week, it’s been more the delight than the stress.

I’ve written previously about the fact that auditions are one of my least favourite parts of directing, because it’s such an imperfect process, but one where a casting mistake can lead to real problems for a production, not to mention distress to all involved. But auditions can also be really brilliant, and I thought today would be a good chance to talk about what’s been so amazing about them.

First of all, new people! Despite being a very shy person by nature, I actually really love getting to know new people, and actors are some of the most delightful folks in the world. They bring such diverse backgrounds and interests to a project, gifts which shape a production in large and small ways that you can’t imagine until they’re there in front of you. No two people will approach a character in the same way. Actors’ interests tend to be wide-ranging, maybe because you never know what aspect you’ll need to portray a character somewhere down the road; this also tends to make them natural psychologists or sociologists, interested in people and their quirks, the way their minds work, the way that small and large decisions can impact a character. That makes them fascinating people to talk to, and I come away from auditions feeling unusually positive about humanity in general, that if everyone is like the actors I’ve spent the week meeting, then people are more intelligent and insightful than I generally admit. 

I learn from them in a way that can change the shape of how I see the characters and the play. I’m not saying even the most brilliant audition would make me radically overturn the basic concept of the show, but in almost every individual audition, there was a moment where a lightbulb went off in my head. Maybe it was “oh, that line, that emphasis really gives God an extra nuance that’s fascinating!” or a particular small gesture that makes a demon seem particularly creepy and menacing that would be worth incorporating into their choreography. Not all ideas will make it into the final production, and not all interpretations will fit into the overall vision for the play, but the ideas that come to the table get considered and played with and that process refines it as a whole. My auditions notes have lots of scribbling in the margins about ideas that have been generated by the way audition pieces were presented.

The actors are the engine that drives the play in a very literal sense, but this is also true in a more subtle way. Actors at auditions give the process an injection of enthusiasm and excitement. This is even more pronounced with something like the Mystery Plays, which is a passion project for everyone involved. With all that goes on behind the scenes from a production end, it’s easy to get exhausted- endless rounds of design and re-design, meeting after meeting after meeting, hiring things and sourcing material and filling out paperwork and policy and and and… Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy 99% of the whole theatrical process, but even what you love can be exhausting. Meeting the actors in auditions is like a delightful caffeine injection, a much-needed influx of pure joy, and a reminder of how fortunate we are to be involved in a production that is almost entirely unique in the world. 

Enthusiasm and delight are emotional factors that auditions reintroduce at a much-needed juncture, but there is also an intellectual component to this. They appreciate the historicity of the Mystery Plays just as much as we do, and that in turn reminds me: this is their moment of immortality, of being a part of a tradition that started more than six hundred years ago. I owe it to them to give them the best circumstances for performing, to help them creature a performance worthy of that place in history. I often ponder- many of them will have heard me pose the question- what people will write about ourmystery plays in five hundred years, just the way I spend time thinking about the experience for our fifteenth-century forebearers. (“They won’t be able to say much, everything will have been digital and lost,” is a response I hear quite often, which is a conversation my friends in academia often entertain as well.) I am never unaware that we are, as the title of Margaret Rogerson’s book about the modern York plays says, “playing a part in history”, but at auditions I become extra conscious that what I owe to history comes through the actors, so those actors need the very best work that I can give, so that they in turn can do theirs.

In writing this and reflecting on the week, and what comes next, I realise that it’s not actually auditions I dislike at all, it’s casting. Making decisions about who will play what, knowing that I have more good people than big roles, and that some people will inevitably not get the part they would have preferred. That’s the part that’s stressful, both because it doesn’t feel great to disappoint anyone, and because it’s where mistakes are costly. But the auditions themselves? They were pretty damn fun! And now we have a whole team of new people to get to know, work with, and share in the process of creating something exciting for our contribution to the history of York. Yeah, that’s a pretty good week in the office, by any measure.

Pathelin on the Web

Posted on by under Drama, Farces, Historic, Musings

It’s #FarcesFriday! This week our Farces’ director searches the internet for productions of Pathelin, to see how widely it has travelled and how many different ways the play has been performed.

I have a very strict rule about not watching productions of a play I’m working on- I don’t want my own ideas about it, and that of my collaborators, to get hung up by someone else’s concepts. Sometimes, once you’ve seen something, as the saying goes you can’t unsee it. But I’m still curious, and being so far down our farces rabbit hole, I decided it was okay to be at least a little bit nosy, so I started looking up Master Pierre Pathelin online. What kind of online presence did the play have?

In terms of images, book covers from various editions are what come up the most frequently, but a dive into Wikimedia Commons, of all places, yielded rather more interesting fruit. (I’m pinning these to a new Pinterest board, if you’re curious to see them.) The woodcut prints which accompany some editions of the text are the most frequent images that aren’t a volume cover. They portray moments such as Pierre talking to his wife Guillemette, “buying” cloth from Guillaume, and the trial scene before the Judge- in short, the major scenes from the play. There are a couple sketches of Victorian actors portraying some of the characters, which look as if they may have been intended for publication, perhaps in a magazine or newspaper devoted to the theatre, as well as an advertising cartoon for the same production. There are photos from a late Victorian production which remind one that the lines between melodrama, pantomime, and farce are blurry. Available for perusal, too, is the music and libretto for an operatic version of the play (as well as photographs which suggest it was translated and staged in other languages, outside of France). Pathelin, this tells us, didn’t just spawn sequels, but adaptation into other art forms as well.

As a beloved- and easy-to-stage- piece of French dramatic history, it’s not surprising to find Pathelin well represented on YouTube. You can watch primary school-aged children enacting scenes, which surprised me as I would have thought the comedy was a little bit more sophisticated than the average nine- or ten-year old would enjoy. High school drama groups also perform it, as do the more expected university students and professional companies. There’s one version where a family decided to have some fun with their video camera and record themselves doing scenes from the play in their own home! The majority of the online videos show performances in French, including performances from classes who are learning French as a second language. And not all those which are linguistically French are nationally French: the National Theatre of Senegal has performed Pathelin and put it online. I found at least one iteration in Portuguese, as well as a black-and-white film version, professionally made in 1961, translated into Danish, and another iteration which, while possibly still performed in French, was presented in what was then known as Yugoslavia. 

What is the takeaway from this online Pathelin blitz? Well, first, it’s simply evidence that those who know the play have always found it entirely entertaining and worth staging; it’s not simply a medieval relic known only to footnote-grubbing academics, it’s a play that has been performed, at least occasionally, across many centuries and in many countries. It’s also far better known to the French than the English, which is fair- the original is in their language- but also a bit of a shame, because there is nothing about the play that is so specific, culturally or linguistically, that it can’t be enjoyed equally in translation. (This is why it still felt right for us at HIDden- it’s a historic drama that in our wider culture isn’t especially well known, though it has every right to be!) And, indeed, the variety of countries where it appears in even these limited records indicate that its basic ideas and humour transcend borders and cultural differences.

Another interesting observation is that, if we may go by the costumes, it’s almost always staged very clearly as medieval. (The interesting exception is one illustration that places the characters in Georgian dress. Dating from the mid nineteenth century, their choice is unusual in terms of choosing to present a historical version of Pathelin, but one set in a different time than its origins.) What I find curious about this adherence to medieval dress is that the play isn’t socompletely grounded in medieval circumstances that it must be medieval to make sense. YouTube is, of course, a limited sample, and I feel very confident in assuming that there have been “modern dress” Pathelins, with the lawyers in suits and carrying briefcases. But it doesn’t seem to be a particularly common choice. Contrast this with productions of Shakespeare’s plays, which have probably spent more time out of their own period than in. Why do some plays get locked into a particular time period while others, with no more or less internal requirement for being period-specific, don’t? I don’t actually know! But I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Even the limited data set which is this brief internet search speaks to the durability of the play. Across centuries, languages, and borders, the tale of a trickster lawyer and the people who try to cheat him in turn is universally appealing. Do other cultures have lawyer jokes? Pathelin’s popularity says yes! The next question is why, when it’s made it to such diverse places as Denmark and Yugoslavia, it’s still relatively unknown in the UK. This is indeed a mystery. At least we can hope that, by the middle of May, at least a few more people in York will have “met” this delightful text (along with its far more obscure but equally funny farce sibling, The Washtub) and joined the many who, around the world and across the years, have found delight in the antics of Pierre and his fellows!

Pathelin & Jaquinot’s World

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, Farces, French Farces, History

For another #FarcesFriday, we’re looking at the context for our plays: what was happening in France in the latter half of the 15th century?

It’s an unfortunate fact of academia that the further along you go, the narrower your world gets. If you compress time, one minute you’re deciding you want to study history, maybe European history, for example, and the next minute your entire world is “mystery plays- summer of 1951- England outside of London”. Now, having a specialism is great! You really fall in love with the specific event that you’re working on. But you miss out on so much else. 

Working on the French farces really brings this home, because they’re still within “medieval drama”, already a very niche field, yet they were totally new ground for me. In fact, I realised that my knowledge of French history altogether is tragically limited, and only surfaces when it bumps up against English history. And I found that sometimes, when you’re looking at a different country or culture from within an academic space, it can be challenging to find the broader events and themes. Thus, I suspect someone who studies French history in depth may take issue with the moments I’m highlighting here, and feel that I’ve missed out on a much wider narrative! If that’s you- let’s talk! I know I have a lot more to learn. But for now, a highlight (or lowlight) reel of what was happening before and during the time our plays were being staged for the first time:

First, let me start by saying that France as you and I know it, isn’t the France that they knew. Calais, the northern port city, had been captured by the English in 1347, and they wouldn’t give it back until the mid-16th century; thus the English had a solid economic toehold on a major trading point. The area surrounding it, as well as an area around Dijon, were considered the Duchy of Burgundy, which was technically part of the kingdom of France, but was ruled by its own wealthy and powerful ducal family. Confusingly, next to that was Burgundy, a part of the Holy Roman Empire rather than part of the French Kingdom. Southeastern France was also part of the HRE, or some of the small states affiliated with Italy. 

France today is known for being fiercely defensive of its language. But in the late medieval period, more people spoke dialects than “proper” French. This puts Pathelin’s scene of feigning madness by speaking in several different dialects into an interesting light: though one ordinary peasant probably wouldn’t have been so multilingual, the country taken as a whole was. 

Without a common language, one thing which may have bound the French together was the turmoil of the previous century. The plague, which had depleted Europe’s population by a quarter to fifty percent, was as far in the past to Pathelin’s time as Queen Victoria’s death is to ours; inevitably its legacy must have lingered, particularly in an ongoing, depleted population. Additionally, as Europe headed into the Little Ice Age, more years saw crop failures that resulted in food scarcity as a semi-regular occurrence.

But, apart from the plague, the thing that probably shaped the era the most was war. The English and French royal families had been connected by marriage and descent ever since William the Conqueror, with lands throughout the geographic body of France actually under English rule. This was always a source of tension, but it came to a head in  1328, when Charles IV of France died without a (male) heir: his closest male relative was Edward III, King of England. The French nobles couldn’t stomach the idea of an English monarch, and instead they gave their crown to Philip VI, a cousin outside of the inheritance patterns but with the required French identity. But the dispute between monarchs, one with the legal right to inherit and the other with the nationality to do so, touched off a disagreement between the two countries that would carry on, in phases and waves, for just over a century, with various parts of France changing hands along the way. Many of the battles celebrated in English history- Crecy, Agincourt- date from this prolonged conflict. The Hundred Years’ War is also famous for the brief but dramatic career of Joan of Arc, an ordinary peasant girl who claimed that visions from God demanded that she help liberate French lands from the English. Joan was executed for heresy in 1431, less than half a century before our plays. And though the final “official” battle of this long was, at Castillon, was in 1453, the Treaty of Picquigny, which formally ended it, wasn’t until 1475- right at the date suggested for Pathelin‘s writing. 

That wasn’t the only significant national crisis of the time, either. Charles VI, who became King of France at age 11, didn’t just offer the country instability because of his young age: he also suffered from periodic mental illness, including the bizarre belief that he was made of glass and could shatter at any moment. Although he died in 1422, well before our plays, his delusions must have contributed to a general sense that the world was a chaotic place. Nor was the war with England the only dispute of the times- the Armagnac-Burgundian Civil War, in which two of the French noble families fought with one another from 1407-1435- added one more dispute to the pile. In 1477, the Duke of Burgundy died and the division of his lands between the king of France and the Hapsburgs of the Holy Roman Empire made for even more minor but unsettling wars. 

Even religion couldn’t be counted on to be a wholly stabilising thing. From 1378 to 1417, there was a dispute between the Roman papacy and a succession of rival popes in Avignon.

Altogether, this “crisis of the late Middle Ages”, as it’s been termed, must have had some impact on ordinary people. I find it fascinating that this was also the period when the practice of law in France was becoming such a prominent career- and that it was also when the writing of farces, particularly by those law students, became so widespread. Did people seek out legal stability where their world felt out of control? Did law students, who may have been especially well informed about political matters, find solace from that world by writing comedy that was in some cases absurd, and in other cases subtle commentary? With so much discord, maybe Jaquinot and his wife’s bickering is just a smaller scale event among larger ones, and perhaps Pierre’s chicanery reflects the feeling that the rules of society were being violated all over the place. I don’t know any of this with any certainty, and it’s fair to add that life was no easier or more stable in England, where conflict with the French sat alongside what we now call the Wars of the Roses (1455-1487), yet we have no tradition of farce in England.

How would this tumultuous century and its predecessor have been perceived by our characters? Jaquinot and his wife are fairly young, so they wouldn’t have the deep memories of all that had transpired, but as we see in our own times, growing up when chaos is the norm can make life very difficult to navigate and one might argue that their squabbling owe something to mental health that’s taken many hits. Jaquinot’s mother-in-law is probably the oldest character in either of our plays, so she’s lived through some things; is part of her egging on her daughter, against her son-in-law, her way of saying, “You have to fight for things in this world if you want to survive”? Most of the characters in Pathelinhave a carefree quality- they’re cynical, jaded cheats, but one gets the sense that they cheat one another almost as a form of entertainment for themselves, with even Guillemette’s pleas about their poverty not truly coming across as desperate. Aignelet, the shepherd-cum-sheep-thief, is the most exposed to desperation, his sheep-eating an act of necessity, but his glee in putting one over on Pierre Pathelin gives him a joyful quality as well. Once again, the characters of our farces are ourselves: we all react differently to living in a world that seems to be falling apart, and how an actor chooses to read their character may or may not reflect the historical moment in which they were created, or the one in which they are being performed.