Are sequels ever as good as the original? Even medieval people kept hoping so! Today’s #FarcesFriday explores the two sequels to Pierre Pathelin and what they tell us about humanity’s insatiable desire to see more of characters they love.

“But is it as good as the original?” That expression, heard every time a new film in a series, or a remake of some older property, comes out, is so familiar as to be a cliche. But it’s a fair question to ask. When an original work is so brilliant, its characters or world so compelling, that people want more of it, they invest in their own ideas of what that next chapter should be. Sometimes it lives up to their hopes; often it feels more like someone is cashing in on their affection for the material without understanding or honoring it. It’s easy for series, sequels, prequels, “origin storys”, remakes, and “reimaginings” to feel so divorced from made you fall in love with the first story that it’s almost unrecognisable. You can only wring so much out of a concept before it becomes something else that you may not love as much.

It feels like a very modern complaint- one I would cite as the reason I never go to the cinema, for example. But let us be fair. Plays get revived constantly. You could spend a lifetime just watching new iterations of Shakespeare and probably die without seeing them all. We, the theatre-folk, aren’t really above artistic recycling. And not only are we not, we also weren’t. Medieval people did it too. Now, we may recognise that Dante was writing Book of Revelation fan-fic, but we probably don’t think medieval plays did that. And yet, Master Pierre Pathelin would beg to disagree. Along with the brilliant original, two other plays survive in which he is one of the central characters. And the Pathelin canon, if one can call it that, doesn’t seem so very different from the modern tendency to wring as much material as one can out of a character that people dearly loved.

The New Pathelin is in parts a moderately close copycat to the “Old” Master Pierre Pathelin. Instead of trying to cheat a cloth merchant out of a bolt of fabric, he’s fleecing the furrier out of his furs, and doing so in exactly the same way: be convincing him of family familiarity that doesn’t actually exist, praising him and his later father to the skies, until the furrier trusts the wily Pathelin more than he should. Pathelin convinces him that he is actually buying the furs for the village priest, who will be responsible for handing over the money to pay for them. Upon arriving at the church, Pathelin then explains to the priest that the furrier has come to take confession, while the furrier thinks he is there to collect payment. Pathelin plays them off one another, sneaks away with his stolen furs, and it is the priest and the furrier to whom the final scene belongs. 

Guillemette is missing- although Pathelin directly reference his swindles of Guillaume Joceaulme, he doesn’t dwell upon his wife- which is shame because their partnership in deception is one of the delightful aspects of the original farce. More importantly from a dramatic standpoint, the brilliant reverse of fortune which is heaped upon Pathelin at the close of the original play, the method of which is one of the glories of its humour, is entirely gone. The priest and the furrier aren’t unfunny, it’s just that the depth of cleverness in crafting the scene isn’t there, and because so much of the opening scene hews so closely to the earlier script, the humour doesn’t feel as fresh. 

The Testament of Pathelin departs from the framework of the previous two plays. Not everyone even considers it a farce: all the way back in 1882, P.L. Jacob, who published the three plays together, considered it a “moral epilogue”, and “a framework imagined to bring out Pathelin’s character and to gather a host of witty remarks, popular proverbs, and foolishness.” The essence of the story is that Pathelin realises he is very near the end of his life, and he needs both an apothecary and a priest. His wife Guillemette is back, and willing to go find them. But there isn’t much the apothecary can do, so the priest instead gets a chance to argue that Pathelin should make his final confession as well as making his will. Pathelin’s joking bequests make the priest think he is delirious; unlike the original Pathelin play, this isn’t deliberate deception, it’s just Pathelin having a facetious list of bequests, and we can either infer that he means them sincerely, even if they are silly, or that he’s just enjoying one last burst of witticism. And then, his affairs complete, Pathelin dies. The play ends with expressions of faith by his wife, the apothecary, and the priest as they stand around him. 

You can’t exactly call it a morality play, but it’s hard to call it a true farce. The unavoidable undercurrent of mortality undercuts what thin humour it possesses. And its humour is one-line moments, rather than a story about a uniquely clever villain-hero. In truth, the main character of the story doesn’t really need to be Pathelin; any slightly unserious man might conceivably end his life on the same note. (If his imminent death had itself been a scheme, that might have been more comically successful, but it would have deprived the writer of its serious, religious finale.)

Though Jacob, for one, seems uncertain of which is the better of these two “continuation” plays, my person opinion is that New beats out Testament (and neither one competes with the original). Its first scene is just too close to the original to be funny a second time, and the priest/furrier scene suffers because it leaves Pathelin behind as a character- presumably audience fondness for that specific character is why there was demand for a second play at all. By the time of Testament, the distance in time and separation from the brilliance of the first writer mean that you kind of wonder why anyone even tried. So many of the things that I would criticise about a modern sequel are present all the way back in the second half of the fifteenth century.

What intrigues me, though, in terms of the sequel/franchise problem of overusing material, no matter how solid its origins, is an almost throwaway line by Jacob in his edition of the three plays: that there were at one time not merely two sequels but “a great number of farces in which the character of Pathelin… appeared” [italics mine]. I don’t know what evidence he had to assert this, but it’s a fascinating question: was there once what amounts to a Pathelin series? Were those plays just copies- medieval drama fan fiction? (In a pre-copyright society this doesn’t seem completely absurd.) It feels safe to assume that they would not be the product of the same author- there is no suggestion that the two known sequels share an author, either with one another or with the first Pathelin play- and so how closely they might have stayed to his particular authorial voice, or his concept of Pathelin as a character, can’t be known. Were the plays connected at all? In both New Pathelin and Testament, Pathelin references his cheating of Guillaume the clothier directly, tying the plays to their source material. But neither play uses the comic value unique to Pathelin’s (claimed) calling as a lawyer, and that lack of reference does change him from being a very specific type of swindler (with a societal commentary about lawyers inherently attached) to a more garden-variety rogue. Did any of the lost plays, if indeed they did exist, hew more closely to the character as we first meet him?

Without that information, it’s hard to say whether we can consider the idea that “Pathelin: the Series!” actually existed in the sense that we’d know it, as opposed to being closer to an internet fan page where enthusiastic writers with no technical connection to the material nonetheless feel comfortable riffing on the the source material. But the fact that we have three surviving plays that make use of the character Pierre Pathelin does show us how beloved the first play, and its scheming lead character, were by medieval French audiences. Perhaps that is an immutable human characteristic, unchanged across the centuries: we love certain characters too much to leave them alone, even if perhaps we’d be better off simply being satisfied with what their original creator offered us, and not trying to make their lightnight strike twice.