Serious Elements in Medieval French Farces: A New Dimension

Summary

Farces are short comic plays usually involving a trick by which one or more characters deceives another for personal gain. Major popular entertainments mostly in urban areas during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, farces were often played on trestle stages that were quickly set up in streets or squares on holidays. The small number of roles required few actors and stage props, making the plays easily transportable. Farces were written and played by amateur groups, such as student organizations, municipal confraternities, trade guilds, and jongleurs. There are numerous references in fifteenth- c. documents to the staging of farces, but no plays have survived that antedate the Farce de maistre Pathelin, written in the 1460s. About 175 farces date from the hundred years following the appearance of Pathelin.

Modern research on French farces has concentrated on three aspects of the plays: their structure, themes, and possible genres. The results of this scholarly activity suggest that no unified construction exists, but instead many different comic “systems” hold sway, often based on an automatic formula, a “machine á rire” (Bernadette Rey-Flaud); the themes include all human activities (often domestic) and render the plays “mirrors of reality” (Barbara Bowen and Jean-Claude Aubailly); while genres seem recognizable, a farce may reflect more than one type of genre and be quite complex, deemed thusly by Alan E. Knight. As religious theater does not always remain serious (consider the comic diversions in mystery plays), the universe of farces cannot be reduced to grotesque distortions, to ridicule, satire, buffoonery, and obscenities.