The English Fabliau

Extract

One feels inclined, like Bédier in Les Fabliaux, to apologize, at the beginning of this discussion, for dealing heavily with a light subject. Andrew Lang, to be sure, has spun the fabric of primitive imagination out of story threads from our simplest fairy tales. But there are no remnants of primitive thought to be discovered in the fabliaux, and few vestiges of ancient myth discernible in their narratives. One's only justification for approaching these contes à rire with anything but laughter must be a desire to search into the qualities which make “lewed peple loven tales olde,” and especially the nature of the humor which preserves those called fabliaux from age to age. But a brief consideration of the nature and origin of the fabliau must precede an attempt to discover the characteristic quality of the English contribution to this literary form.