Category Archives: Farces

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.

This Marriage Is a Farce! Or Is It The Other Way Around?

Posted on by under Drama, Farces, Historic

It’s #FarcesFriday and our farces’ director is taking a look at the marriages that shape our two plays- how they they reflect medieval relationship tensions, and how they both reach beyond the stereotypes of this genre’s approach to marriages.

It’s easy to take it as a given that marriage in the Middle Ages was radically different from the partnerships of today. For starters, while we prioritise affection, companionability, and attraction, medieval marriage was far more about establishing the most advantageous ties in terms of power and property. In the western world of the 21st century, we expect that the choice of partners is ours; while arranged marriages were by no means universal in the Middle Ages, they also weren’t rare. And medieval gender roles were far less flexible than today. We benefit from the knowledge that if it really doesn’t work out, divorce exists as a feasible option, a safety hatch that people didn’t have five hundred years ago.

But at heart, the same basic premise must have been true: two people from different families are expected to spend a lifetime working together for mutual support and survival. Marriage doesn’t (with apologies to West Side Story) actually “make of our hearts one heart”- it’s still two individuals, with different histories, experiences, backgrounds, needs, wishes, and perspectives, trying to find a way to work together across those differences to make “one life” together, shared. Medieval women legally ceased to exist upon marriage, subsumed into their husbands’ identity, but both  remained individuals in the daily reality of life. 

These challenges and negotiations between partners have always been ripe for comedic uses. Mother-in-law jokes, marital misunderstandings, the fine line between fighting and flirting- these staples of modern sitcoms were well in place in the Middle Ages, including in our two farces. The Washtub is fully “marital comedy”. Pierre Pathelin is not built around marriage as a theme, but a Pathelin without a Guillemette is a very different storyline.

One of the things that made The Washtub appealing, when we were looking at different farces and trying to choose two, is the fact that it’s highly representative of a popular farce genre. A lot of farces are about marriages that aren’t harmonious. There are themes within the genre: the infidelity of a wife (men’s infidelity isn’t seen as funny, perhaps because it was somewhat permissible), or the extreme stupidity of a husband, are two common sub-genres. The Washtub leans towards the latter, but… is Jaquinot stupid? Or is he more clever than he initially lets on? This is one of the interesting questions an actor can ask; playing stupid and being stupid are wildly different things, and Jaquinot could do either, or both in turn. 

What definitely isn’t in the play, somewhat unusually, is extreme violence. Domestic abuse- and it comes from both parties in most plays- is rife in medieval farce; they’re often like a Punch & Judy show enacted with actual bodies, with an emphasis on the “punch” part. I do think there are ways of staging those plays that would take the violence into a comic place rather than an alarming one, but I like that The Washtub is a battle of wits rather than one of fists. Jaquinot and Jaquinette like to get the better of one another, and they both want to assert their own primacy within the relationship, but they don’t raise a hand against one another. (Indeed, if one does believe that Jaquinette is in danger within the washtub, not offering a hand is the entire joke!)

We don’t know what brought Jaquinot and Jaquinette together. As peasants, it’s just as possible that they made a marriage of their own desiring, as that it was arranged by their parents. (Certainly Jaquinette’s mother isn’t terribly impressed with her son-in-law! But if it was an arranged marriage, she may have had little say in the matter, with her husband conducting all negotiations.) This question might change how an actor approaches either of these characters- a marriage begun in romance that has soured as reality set in, is a very different situation from a permanent attachment than two people didn’t choose but are still stuck to work out. We do know that, as far as Jaquinette is concerned, Jaquinot isn’t pulling his own weight. “You’re leaving me to do everything, and we don’t even have good sex!” feels like a fairly modern complaint, but it’s Jaquinette’s as well, half a millennium ago. 

I think one of the things that makes the play interesting is not just its familiar feeling- these problems could be any couple’s problems, albeit they take it to an absurd place- but the fact that, for modern audiences, at least, our sympathies can be shared between both parties. Jaquinette’s complaints may be resonant with the reality of so many women’s lives! But we also enjoy seeing Jaquinot get his own back. And how you choose to end the play, in terms of staging, may give the opportunity to further balance the scales. (Medieval productions would not do this- they’d end with a man winning the day, “order” in the form of female subservience being restored. But we’re not medieval, and we can choose to nudge and wink while thumbing our noses at this ideal.)

Master Pierre Pathelin‘s take on marriage is completely different, and is a true rarity among medieval farces. They are, uniquely, partners. Guillemette isn’t fooled by her husband, as so many others are, and she’s happy to put him in his place. But one of the interesting things about her is that even when doing so, it feels almost affectionate. “Don’t try to kid me, mate, I know you. You’re a charlatan but you’re my charlatan,” seems to be Guillemette’s relationship with her husband. And when he needs her help in conniving Guillaume the Clothier that he, Pathelin, is ill and out of his wits, Guillemette jumps in and proves herself just as convincing a conniver as her husband. Moreover, and again unusually in the marital dynamic common of farce, Pierre asks her to help him. He includes his wife in his plans and knows he can’t succeed without her aid. It’s a shame we don’t get to see Guillemette with him in the courtroom scene; it’s not difficult to imagine that she would continue to find clever ways to assist in his machinations. 

We don’t get to know much about the dynamic shared between Pierre and Guillemette when they aren’t scheming. But, while it’s fair to note that Pierre’s success directly benefits his wife (he’s getting cloth for her dress, as well as his own clothing), it feel safe to assume that most women wouldn’t go along with their husband’s shenanigans if they didn’t, fundamentally, feel a degree of partnership. If theirs is not a marriage of equals, it is at least a marriage of equally clever, scheming, and unscrupulous individuals, well-matched in their talents for duping others. They’ll lie to anyone but eachother. And that, in the grand tradition of villainous couples, is kind of romantic in its own strange way!

Both of our plays give a relatively more benign spin on marriage than the average farce; I won’t pretend they’re truly representative. But I’d like to hope that they’re more representative of medieval marriage than the more typical farces. Pathelin and Guillemette genuinely seem to like one another- they’ve figured out how to get along and work together for the common cause of their life together. Jaquinot and Jaquinette are likely much younger, and they’re still negotiating what the rest of their marriage will look like. Let us hope that they can arrive at a similar place in time, and share a life of real partnership, whether it is shared chores or chicanery!

Pathelin: The Franchise?

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, Farces, Musings

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. 

A Different Trinity: History, Law & Drama

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

#FridayFarces is back, this time with a consideration of how history, drama, and legal proceedings can interact to instruct as well as entertain us.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a person who doesn’t enjoy drama in some form or another. For most people these days, it’s television and cinema; whether you love television or going to the opera, the point is that the very idea of drama is something that virtually everyone finds appealing. (Tell anyone that you work in theatre or television and watch their reaction.) Law seems to come in for a similar, probably equally misplaced, aura of glamour: scroll through your television menu and I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any hour of the day when some legally-based show isn’t airing- in some places there are entire channels dedicated to airing legal cases. Law is drama, in most people’s eyes. 

History sadly comes in for a different response. Only yesterday, a young family friend still in university was saying how much she “can’t get into” history. I understand where she’s coming from: in school, we teach historically abominably, a list of tedious facts purged entirely of humanity and intrigue. But history is all about drama, people, and law; and the drama of law can be a gateway drug when it comes to learning to love history.

I was fortunate to discover this young, entirely unintentionally. A favourite book from my high school years (still on my shelf!), Mary S. Hartman’s Victorian Murderesses, uses famous, well-documented trials to shine light on the often hidden realities of women’s lives, and public responses to them. My brilliant freshman year university course “The Historian as Detective”, gave me books like Natalie Zemon Davis’s enjoyable (and short!) The Return of Martin Guerre* and Words and Deeds in Renaissance Rome, by Thoms V. and Elizabeth S. Cohen, both of which rely heavily on trial records to illuminate rural French and urban Italian society, respectively. What I learned then is that the law leaves a detailed record, in a way that very few other historical records can, showing ordinary people caught unexpectedly, made suddenly visible, their everyday lives in captured in metaphorical amber, and set down on paper. Moreover, while trials may be representative more of the “outliers” than their more “ordinary” contemporaries, by showing what was unusual, or not permissible, or in debate, we can understand what was normal, permitted, and accepted by society.

This is one reason why the history-drama-law triad is so important to both the casually curious and serious scholarship. Our farces aren’t quite in this category- there is of course much very erudite research about them!- but primarily they are, to an audience, merely fun. But they reveal other ways that this trio present themselves and talk between themselves.

Both Master Pierre Pathelin and Le Cuvier (to give The Washtub its French title) may have been written and performed by lawyers: The Society of the Basoche, the company of law clerks in medieval Paris. The Basoche are a fascinating group, and I hope to dedicate a day to talking about this most unusual medieval guild at a later date, but for now it’s enough to say that their evolution was an entirely logical phenomenon. The law is full of emotional highs and lows, triumphs and tragedies, justice and injustice- literally the things that define drama, even if there is no stage in sight. Moreover, the Basoche had its own internal jurisdiction, which allowed its students to practice some form of “real” law, the way a mock trial team at a university may do today. If there weren’t any cases on the go, they wrote their own, including causes grasses, mocking lawsuits for Carnival, which allowed them to create “cases” that were particularly absurd or scandalous. Writing true farce, then, without the necessity of a legal framework, may have been an entirely foreseeable next step. By the mid-fifteenth century, the time at which both of our plays were likely composed, the Basoche were working with the company that staged fully religious plays, to contribute to a full day of every sort of drama: morality, mystery, sottie and farce all going on a shared playbill for the public’s day of entertainment. Indeed, the Basoche is today remembered more vividly as a comedy-dramatic enterprise than its actual purpose within the legal-education system. (Thus, to further our theme of interconnectivity between our three themes: the law gave us drama, and today the drama has preserved for us something of the history of law.)

In addition to this very real tie to actual attorneys and clerks, both Pathelin and The Washtub contain aspects of law within the narrative of the drama. The Washtub deals with a contract between a man and his wife, one they draw up in full view of the audience, who functionally serve as “witnesses”, creating what would, in effect, have thus been considered a legally binding document. (One could imagine a sequel in which both husband and wife seek out attorneys to argue about the validity, or amendment, to the contract they have somewhat carelessly drawn up!) In Pathelin the connection to law is still greater: Pierre Pathelin claims to be a lawyer, and the final scene of the play is a trial in a courtroom before a judge. It’s unclear if Pathelin is any sort of attorney at all: Howard Graham Harvey, whose book Theatre of the Basoche is enormously helpful in making sense of the legal aspects of Pathelin, says that “Pathelin’s lack of education raises the strongest presumption that he is nothing more than an unlicensed village practitioner.” In cities, legal training and licensing was becoming more rigorous, as the very existence of the Basoche shows, but in rural areas, the bar to setting oneself up at the bar of law was low; as with Pathelin, cleverness could substitute for a real education. If the play was indeed created by members of the Basoche, perhaps they were making a crack at untrained people who claimed the same mantle of “lawyer” that they so painstakingly studied to achieve. That said, the play also leaves us rather liking and admiring Pathelin, his trickery and audacity, so perhaps it’s less a critical dig and more a nudge and wink- lawyers appreciating that their profession often rewards finding ways to be clever that are just barely, but technically, within the bounds of the law. The play thus gives us a window, however distorted through comedic exaggeration, into village legal practice of the times, while also using it as a source for commentary and comedy. 

One need not, of course, be a student of all three disciplines. But the lawyer needs to understand precedent, or what happened in the past. The historian benefits from understanding the legal framework that shaped and was shaped by the society he or she studies. And those who appreciate the drama of both have a unique opportunity towards making material that might otherwise seem dull as fascinating, alive, and vibrant. We get to take the idea of drama and make it literal drama. Ours must surely be the best of all three worlds.

*Martin Guerre has been dramatised for the stage in multiple versions. The musical version, written by the same people who created Les Misérables, is an extremely interesting study in creating drama by marrying up different aspects of history, effectively destroying much strict historical veracity in pursuit of revealing a completely different aspect of history. I belive some of the women from Victorian Murderesses have also been turned into at least television drama, although I haven’t seen them and cannot say how closely they hewed to the historical record. Still, the fact that these stories were intriguing enough to become drama in the literal sense proves the point that legal history is ripe pickings for history-via-performance!

Two Medieval French Farces: A Reading – the Details

Posted on by under Drama, Farces, French Farces, Historic, News, Production

We’ve talked a lot about what’s in our farces, their history, and similar things, but it’s time to reveal the actual details of what we have planned to present Master Pierre Pathelin and The Washtub.

This will be a laid-back, fun, and free, event for anyone with an interest in comedy, medieval drama, theatre, or even none of the above!

Anyone who is interested in taking part should sign up and, nearer the date, we’ll send scripts along for you to read, so you can get familiar with the plays. We won’t be auditioning. We won’t be pre-casting. We’ll gather for a couple of hours before the performance to read together, to assign parts, and hopefully have a good laugh. We’ll also be taking drop-ins on the day, for both participants and audience- if you can’t get in touch with us ahead of time, we’ll still be happy to hand you a script so you can take part! (Please note that, while we believe this event is suitable for most ages, anyone under 16 wishing to participate will need to be accompanied by an adult, and material may not be appropriate for young children.)

Then, when an audience has gathered at the set time, we’ll perform the reading, with our scripts, for their entertainment as well as our own! Hopefully it’ll be a good laugh for everyone, and a chance to get to know some very funny plays that aren’t especially familiar to an English speaking audience. (In case you are worried, we will be reading English translations so you won’t be expected to tackle Medieval French!)

Tickets- did we mention it’s FREE, by the way!- are available via Eventbrite. Please sign up there to be either a participant or an audience member, and get in touch with us if you have any questions.

Participants should join us at the Black Swan Inn, 23 Peasholme Green, York, YO1 7DE at 17.00 on Saturday 9th May; we’ll be meeting upstairs. Scripts will be emailed to those who sign up in advance; we encourage you to bring along a tablet to read from digitally, or you can print a copy in your preferred format. We will have a few printed copies available on the day for walk-ups and anyone unable to make their own arrangements.

Audience are invited to arrive for a 20.00 start at the same location.

Drinks will be available at the bar.

A Taxonomy of Farces (Maybe)

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, Farces, French Farces

Think you know what a farce is? Maybe nobody really knows! This week’s #FarcesFriday looks at scholarly debate about what medieval farces are, aren’t, and how to tell them from other styles- or not!

As humans, we like to label, define, and classify. It’s part of how we make sense of our world. This can be problematic, like when we assume people fall into stereotypes rather than seeing them as nuanced individuals, but it can also be extremely useful in making sure that, when we’re communicating, we have the same understanding of what we’re talking about. It’s all towards making sense and being understood.

For several weeks we’ve been talking about “medieval French farces”, and the fact that we didn’t lead with this particular essay tells you that we- like you, mostly likely!- didn’t feel like the word “farce” required a definition or explanation. After all, it’s not a rare word; in fact, when I was doing some initial reading with an eye towards proposing this project, I felt like I was seeing the word farce in the news almost daily. (Interestingly, when I checked Newspapers.com for use of the term “farce”, I expected the political section to be where it was found. But, while not infrequent there, it wasn’t where farce shows up most often. It’s most frequently used in the sports section!) If we can use it so readily, if the news can bandy that word about, then… surely we all know what a farce is, whether theatrical or otherwise. Right?

Well… not exactly. We’re probably okay on the “otherwise”, news-usage category, but scholarship debating the question “what is a farce”, particularly a medieval farce, has a lengthy history, and it does not seem to have ever become a settled answer. Moreover, there is not a linear direction of travel (“we used to think this but now we believe that”). You can’t pinpoint a specific understanding to a particular time; the ideas come and go and multiple arguments exist simultaneously to debate amongst one another. Any of these people can or could probably claim far more knowledge of this specific genre than I, so my goal here isn’t to take sides. Rather, it’s to illustrate for you just how messy this question is, so that when you next see a medieval farce (hopefully ours! this summer!) you can make up your own mind about how you’d define it.

On the surface it seems easy to posit that if drama is split between tragedy and comedy*, then farce is clearly a subgenre of the latter. However, some scholars have posited that farce is actually a third type that sits between them, particularly because so much of farce humour comes at the expense and discomfort of someone else. If one person’s laughter is directly at the result of another’s degradement, how can it be assigned either category? It’s tragedy for one character, comedy for another. At least one scholar suggests that comedy is probable while farce is so exaggerated as to be impossible in real life. This is just one example of how different opinions align farces within the dramatic tradition.

If we assume that farce is indeed a subfield of comedy, then defining farce often means separating it from other forms of comedy, particularly types unique to medieval France, such as the sottie and the morality. Some models suggest that they exist on a spectrum: farce is pure comedy, a sottie is meant to be funny but probably has a more moralistic subtext, and a morality uses humour solely to teach a moral lesson, often using what is funny to say “this is what you shouldn’tdo”. Other scholarship spins morality off completely, seeing it as something totally removed from farce and humour. As morality is the genre most distant to farce in any model (though still within sighting distance!), I won’t dwell on its definition overmuch; I just want to point out that if you’ve seen any of our Mankind iterations, or are otherwise familiar with the play, it will be readily apparent that much of what is often taken to define a farce is present in a play that, in the English classification, is usually called a morality play. (It’s worth noting that defining any medieval drama can be slippery- are they mystery plays? cycle drama? biblical drama?; you can find all of these terms used for the same plays!)

So, sotties and farces. They’re the two types most closely linked and fought over, in terms of taxonomy. It seems to be a minority position, and perhaps an earlier one rather than current, but some scholars have felt that the title determined this, since there are plays clearly titled with one term or the other. Particularly in early scholarship, it was posited that where a play sat on the afternoon’s playbill could be considered in trying to name the type. (“Farce” originally meant “stuffing”, as in “stuffed into a programme of other entertainment”.) More commonly, the argument is that some internal component is what separates them. Some believe it’s the characters: named characters are more indicative of farce, while allegorical or “type” names might suggest a sottie. One school of thinking is that the determining factor is who is performing them; a “company of sots (or fools)” would perform the eponymous sotties, while other similar fare performed by an acting troop out of fool costumes would perform farces. 

Content is one of the most complex aspects that many farce scholars believe make the difference. I won’t go as further in depth as this issue really deserves, but suffice to say that the contradictions in theory are plentiful! “Farce is more like a slice of real life, sotties are more stylised, exaggerated, or absurd” might be the summation of one argument, while another writer will tell you that what defines a farce is how “stylised, exaggerated, and absurd” it is. Indeed, the “ordinariness” of characters and story is frequently mentioned in defining farce, but the “clowning” and slapstick or improbability is mentioned equally often- can it encompass these together? Do sotties contain more or less slapstick than farces? If sotties are indeed played by “fool” characters, does that make a difference on the slapstick question? And does verbal humour versus visual humour place them in one category or the other? 

The intention of a play is no less debated, and may or may not factor into defining farce from sottie from morality. Is a farce’s sole purpose to invoke laughter? Some argue that the answer is yes, and that is one of the defining features of a farce. Others, however, that none of these forms- or perhaps any drama!- is intended solely for amusement, without any potential subtextual lessons or food for thought. Is a sottie inherently more satirical than a farce- or is satire something entirely different altogether? Where is the place of allegory, particularly between moralities and sotties? It is probably also fair to question whether intent can actually be divorced from content, or whether the two aspects are inherently in service to one another.

And there’s the vexing caveat inherent in all of this. Almost everyone agrees that, however one chooses to define farce, sottie, morality, or comedy, there are always going to be outliers, plays in the medieval French repertoire that just don’t fit any model particularly well, or fit very well… except that one little detail… That detail may be so unique that it doesn’t argue for throwing out one’s entire framework, but it will always be a weak point, a place for someone else to begin developing a different argument that will fit most plays very well… except that one little detail….

So much of the previous paragraphs have been laid out as questions rather than answers, because these are the heart of academic disagreement and complexity of thinking, which means they’re also some of the most interesting places to ponder if one is seeking to create a Taxonomy of Farce. I would love to tell you that I had the answers, but if scholars far more versed in this niche specialism haven’t managed it over the past four centuries, I cannot pretend to be their better. With regard to our own pair of plays, The Washtub seems to fit fairly neatly into various taxonomical models, maybe not always under the same headings, but it doesn’t itself seem to be a freak. Pathelin, on the other hand- and this may be why it’s held in such high esteem- almost never seems to fit easily into any model; it seems so much an outlier, though it’s historically been labelled as the pinnacle of medieval French farce, that I almost wonder if it isn’t the dramatic equivalent of a missing link, fitting neatly into no easy category because it represents the bridge between them.

In the end, I am left with the famous words of the late US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who, charged with coming up with a legal definition for smut, replied, “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.” I daresay most of us would feel exactly the same way about farce. Whether or not we’d be correct remains for debate in the halls of academia.

*In the modern usage, which I intend throughout this article, “comedy” and “tragedy” are usually understood to be defined by a generally happy or unhappy outcome at drama’s end. Ancient Greek drama used these terms to mean the characters were high status or low status; the emotional output didn’t matter.

Wondering where all this comes from? Closer to the performance we’ll be sharing the bibliography of the sources that inform our work on farces, so stay tuned!

Another Announcement: French Farces!

Posted on by under Farces, News

This summer, it’s not just Mystery Plays. Just like medieval people, we appreciate the emotion of a drama like The War in Heaven, but we also sometimes just want a really good giggle (and maybe a beer). And so we’ve decided to bring you both!

We’re kicking the season off with a fun, casual event (in a pub!) for both actors and audiences! On 9 May, we’ll be holding a dramatic reading of two medieval French farces. These plays are clever and comic, secular and silly… a nice balance to the drama of the magisterial Mysteries. We’ve chosen the witty legal comedy Master Pierre Pathelin and the marital slapstick The Washtub to showcase the variety of humour that was so much a part of the late medieval world. 

We’ll have more details later, but mark your calendar now for an opportunity to see just how varied medieval theatre can be!