Trial by Farce

Front matter

TRIAL by FARCG

A Dozen Medieval French Comedies in English for the Modern Stage wa TRL nyame eee nn | 14 | al | a | | sr vees ve)

Edited and Translated by Jody Enders

Preface

A SPECIAL NOTE TO ACTORS AND DIRECTORS ABBREVIATIONS AND SHORT TITLES

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Introduction: Judgment Calls Farce to Farce with the Law On the Boundaries of Humor

About This Translation: Le Mot Juste, l'Acte Juste Translational Politics and the Politics of Translation The Language of Farce Legal Players and Legalese Editions and Printed Sources Critical Apparatus, Stage Directions, and Composite Editions Money Math Prose, Verse, and Music

Brief Plot Summaries

THE PLAYS

1. Not Gettin’ Any [La Farce du Nouveau Marié qui ne peult fournir à lappoinctement de sa femme] (Le Nouveau Marié) (RBM, #2)

2. Default Judgment Day, or, In Arrears [Une Femme qui demande les arrérages à son mari] (RBM, #8; Rousset, #6)

3. The Washtub: A New Translation [La Farce du Cuvier] (RBM, #4)

4. Basket Case [La Farce de la Femme qui fut desrobée a son mari en sa hotte et mise une pierre en son lieu] (RC, #23)

x CONTENTS

5. Whos Your Daddy? [Jenin, Filz de Rien] (RBM, #20) 103

6. Interlude: Beauballs, a Charivari [L'Esbatement de Coillebaut] (Ms. 25, Bibliothèque de Berne) 125

7. Poor Bastards [Les Batars de Caulx] (RLV, #48) 131

[La Farce de Colin, filz de Thévot le maire, qui vient de Naples et

amaine ung Turc prisonnier] (RC, #5; RBM, #47; Rousset, #2) 143 9. Okay, Cupid

[Le Procès d'un jeune moyne et d'un viel gendarme]

10. Witless Protection [La Mere, la Fille, le Tesmoing, LAmoureulx, et l'Oficial]

(L'Official) (RLV, #22) 193 11. The Trial of Johnny Slowpoke

[Jehan de Lagny] (RLV, #31) 210 12. Runaway Groom: A Final Number

[Le Porteur d'eau] (Paris, 1632) 231 APPENDIX: SCHOLARLY REFERENCES TO

COPYRIGHTED MATERIALS 247 WORKS CITED 255

Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.12504948

PREFACE

If youre familiar with the Farce of the Fart, Holy Deadlock, or Immaculate Deception, you will notice some big changes. Keeping in mind the readers, teachers, and performers seeking to access these plays, I’ve forsaken those hundreds of professorial footnotes in favor of a dramatically streamlined presentation. In 1999, André Tissier did much the same thing when translating his sixty-five editions of Middle French farces (RF) into modern French (FFMA). Electing to present essentially the scripts alone, he reduced thirteen volumes to five and pointedly observed that “at the theater, the public sees not a single professor come forward to provide explanations or commentary: the audience is attending a show” (FFMA, 1: 337). He was right.

In Trial by Farce, “Brief Plot Summaries’—snapshots in teaser form— still guide your choice of what to read, teach, or perform. But my earlier Production-Note categories of “Plot, “Characters and Character Development; “Language, “ to a single, holistic quick-take. Only a newly titled composite section remains

Sets and Staging,” and “Costumes and Props” now yield as “Sets, Costumes, or Props,’ which serves to flag any dramaturgical specifications not addressed by each plays stage directions. Also preserved: the listing, “Scholarly References to Copyrighted Materials, paired with a new “Appendix, the better to suggest possible playlists for farce’s trademark songs while simultaneously respecting postmedieval copyright protections. So, sit back and enjoy easy access—open access—to the show.

A SPECIAL NOTE TO ACTORS AND DIRECTORS

Medieval farce, you might ask? That nadir of sexism, misogyny, and classism? For moi?

Mais oui, pour vous. Yes, it really is for you.

Even in contemporary times rife with contemporary concerns, farce fits in anytime, anywhere, and everywhere. Try it as comic relief during the entracte of a tragedy or of a raucous end-of-the-year law revue. Try it as a very-oldbut-new-again one-act for your BFA or MFA program, reconceived for the #MeToo era—and the French have one too, by the way: a #MeToo movement, that is, called #BalanceTonPorc or “Snitch on your pig” Try it as a freestanding outdoor event or a slate of such events. Try it as a monitory dystopia or a bona fide tragedy, dramaturgically redesigned to reassimilate and recast the ghastly politics of so many early oppressors. But do try it. Stuff it in—that’s one of the meanings of the French verb farcer, after all—and experiment with what can happen when we don't tell it to get stuffed.

No matter how you cut it—and farce always cuts both ways—it deserves a rightful, if not always righteous, place on today’s international stage. In anew world order and, with full artistic license, it can also be made to do what theater always does: adapt and readapt, inflect and reinflect, fashion and refashion, interpret and reinterpret (below, “ABT”). How all that comes to pass is entirely up to you.

Comedy, theater, and the comic theater are ever of the moment, and no cultural historical or contextual moment is ever quite the same. Like theater, humor must change with the times, even when seemingly finalized on a printed or virtual page like the one youre reading. The same holds true for the present offerings, which are not meant to be carved in stone. Consider them blueprints, full-fledged sketches of any number of performance scenarios in which there remain blanks to be filled in by you and you alone. Since these plays will come back to life only through the limitless imagination of the engaged performer, you have an active role to play in their resxiv A Special Note to Actors and Directors urrection. Perhaps it will be through updated slang, music, or jokes. My students wisely experiment with them regularly, regardless of how it affects the rhyme scheme or pacing (below; “ABT; $ “The Language of Farce”). Perhaps you find farces propensity for archaisms a tad too anachronistic and wish to rejuvenate them by a decade, a generation, or a century or two. Perhaps it will be through technologies that were unfathomable on the fifteenth- or sixteenth-century stage. Or perhaps it will be through a dramaturgy that visibly undercuts any original sexist or classist message. If anything, Id urge that the subversions possible through pantomime be permitted to work their magic. Indeed, the power of the nonverbal, one of theater's fortes, might well constitute our last best hope for the survival of a brand of medieval humor to which we can nonetheless give its due. Discipline and punish farce, if you so desire. Make it behave itself or allow it to misbehave like crazy. But do see and hear what it has to say. In so doing, you honor the theater writ large and performed large, in that you too have become a translator.

There's one more thing about these scripts. I’m not an actor; I just play one in these books and in the classroom. I recognize that actors have a unique way of reading. Many prefer, à la Stanislavski, to build their own characters or to imagine sets and staging with only scant dramaturgical guidance. But there is a delicate balance to be negotiated here between providing for you just enough, but not too much, dramaturgical information, at the same time that I provide more than enough for other readers with very different needs. Please do bear in mind that many will be students of all ages—not necessarily theater majors—who might have been assigned a farce or two in their large lecture courses in history, comparative literature, Shakespeare, or—who knows?—law school. They will not be as experienced as you are in envisioning the comic vibrancy of the move from page to stage. But, whoever you are and whatever you do, that’s why, in my farce series, I keep repeating my mantra: approach each play as if it were prefaced by a Magritte-like statement that ceci n'est pas un scénario. This is not a script. It is and it isn't. It must, it will, and it should change. And that change is you.

ABBREVIATIONS AND SHORT TITLES

Many medieval farces bore simple titles on the order of “The Farce for [Two, Three, Four, or Five] Characters, but I designate them throughout by the English titles (and occasional subtitles) that I’ve bestowed upon them. To facilitate research, I use parenthetical documentation whenever practical, referring to frequently cited works by the abbreviations below:

“ABT” “About This Translation” from this book.

AG Aspects of Genre. By Alan Knight.

ATF Ancien Théâtre françois. 10 vols. Edited by M. Viollet le Duc.

CFSM Choix de farces, soties et moralités. Edited by Emile Mabille.

Collection Collection de différents ouvrages anciens, poésies et facéties. Edited by Pierre Siméon Caron.

Copenhagen Nouveau Recueil de farces françaises des XVe et XVe siècles [du Recueil de Copenhague]. Edited by Emile Picot and Kristoffer

Nyrop.

CWFR The Complete Works of Francois Rabelais. Translated by Donald Frame.

DBD Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends. By Jody Enders.

DLU Description et analyse d'un livre unique qui se trouve au Musée britannique. By Octave Joseph Delepierre.

DSI Dictionnaire thématique et géographique des saints imaginaires, facétieux. By Jacques Merceron.

FCMF Five Comedies of Medieval France. Translated by Oscar Mandel.

FF “The Farce of the Fart” and Other Ribaldries. Edited and translated by Jody Enders.

FFMA Farces françaises de la fin du Moyen Âge. 4 vols. Translated into modern French by André Tissier.

FGS Farces du Grand Siècle de Tarabin à Molière. Edited by Charles Mazouer.

Répertoire RF RFlorence RFMS]

RLV ROMD Rousset

Abbreviations and Short Titles

Holy Deadlock and Further Ribaldries. Edited and translated by Jody Enders.

Immaculate Deception and Further Ribaldries. Edited and translated by Jody Enders.

Les Mystères. 2 vols. By L. Petit de Julleville.

Murder by Accident. By Jody Enders.

The Medieval European Stage, 500-1550. Edited by William Tydeman.

Music in the French Secular Theater. By Howard Mayer Brown. The Medieval Theater of Cruelty. By Jody Enders.

Pure Filth. By Noah Guynn.

Recueil du British Museum. Facsimile edition by Halina Lewicka. [Recueil Cohen] Recueil de farces françaises inédites du XV’ siècle. Edited by Gustave Cohen.

Répertoire des farces francaises. By Bernard Faivre.

Recueil de farces (1450-1550). 13 vols. Edited by André Tissier. Recueil de Florence. Edited by Jelle Koopmans.

Recueil de farces, moralités et sermons joyeux. Edited by Antoine Le Roux de Lincy and Francisque Michel.

Recueil La Vallière. Reprint entitled Manuscrit La Vallière. Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama. By Jody Enders. [Rousset, Nicolas.] Recueil de plusieurs farces, tant anciennes que modernes (1612).

Recueil de plusieurs farces, tant anciennes que modernes (1872- 73). Expanded reedition by Charles Brunet.

Répertoire du théâtre comique en France au Moyen-Âge.

By L. Petit de Julleville.

Le Recueil Trepperel: Les Farces. Edited by Eugénie Droz and Halina Lewicka.

Sotties et Farces du XVe et du XVT siècle. Edited by “Maître Antitus” [Thierry Martin].

The Theatre of the Basoche. By Howard Graham Harvey.

Le Théâtre des farces en France au Moyen Age. 5 vols. Edited by Michel Rousse.

Le Théâtre français avant la Renaissance. Edited by Édouard Fournier.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1. Title page, Jenin, Filz de Rien.

Figure 2. Title page, Colin, Filz de Thévot.

Figure 3. A free archer. Vinkhuijzen collection of military uniforms.

Figure 4. A traditionally garbed German pilgrim.

Figure 5. Cupid holding court in an illustration from Brunet, Recueil de plusieurs farces.

Figure 6. Guillaume Dufay (left) and Gilles Binchois (right). Figure 7. “Jay prins amour?

Figure 8. The hanging of Enguerrand de Marigny.

Figure 9. Frontispiece, Le Porteur d'Eau.

105 146 147 149

167 169 170 215

Introduction

Judgment Calls

“Objection, Your Honor, leading the witness.”

“Objection, Your Honor, browbeating”

“Objection, Your Honor, asked and answered.’

“Objection, Your Honor, calls for a conclusion”

It’s a little exercise that I do on Day One when teaching the interrelations of law and literature. I’m the Prosecution, the students play the Defense, and instruct them to object to anything improper. I proceed to grill an imaginary witness rudely, repeatedly, and unfairly, at which point the objections above typically come fast and furious. I then ask:

“Are any of you lawyers?”

No.

“Anybody been to law school?”

No.

“So, how did you know what to say?”

Sometimes, it’s from having appeared in court themselves; sometimes, mom or dad is an attorney; but, invariably, it’s this: from watching television.

“For edification?” I inquire.

No. For fun!

Of course, for fun!—even if we're edified in spite of ourselves.

I've yet to encounter a class that fails to object in due form or, in a companion exercise, to recite the Miranda warning verbatim: “You have the right to remain silent, you have the right to an attorney,’ and so on. Were not lawyers; we just play them—or see them—on TV. Or in the classroom. Or on stage. Or off. We speak legalese as fluently, albeit more cannily, as Moliére’s bourgeois gentilhomme spoke prose. And I doubt very much that fifteenth- or sixteenth-century French spectators were any more turned off by theater's deep dive into the intricacies of legal rhetoric than are twenty-first-century Americans by twenty-five years of Judge Judy.

Notwithstanding Adolphe Fabre’s formative objection of 1882 to medieval plays that were “stuffed . .. with legal terms, formulas, procedures, and juridical definitions” to the point of “repugnance” and “monstrosity” (Clercs du Palais, 55; 37-38), terms of art and specialized lexicons have never stopped us from enjoying procedural dramas, actual procedures, or comical proceedings. Long before social media aided and abetted the spread of true and false beliefs about the rule of law, fictional and nonfictional representations were shaping our perceptions of legal and illegal, right and wrong, fair and unfair, ethical and unethical, moral and immoral. Nowadays, we have gavel-to-gavel coverage of sensational trials, Congressional grillings of potential Supreme Court Justices, and umpteen iterations of Law and Order. Back then, they had the four daughters of God adjudicating the fall of humankind in the celestial court of Arnoul Gréban’s Passion play (ROMD, 169-204), saints disputing the Devil, and momentous judicial verdicts like that of The Farce of the Farts “he who smelt it dealt it” (FF, 71). From ancient Greek tragedy to Jean Racines Les Plaideurs to The Crucible to The Return of Martin Guerre to—yes—Judge Judy, the suspenseful wait for justice has always made for high drama or, in the dozen farces to come, low drama.

Consider now the stock phrase, that trial is a farce! Truer words were never spoken of the early theater or, for that matter, of contemporary culture. So say the plays here assembled as they hurtle gleefully toward that most crucial of forensic denouements: Judgment Day, be it Christian or secular. If, as another saying goes, “the law is an ass, the characters in this book are litigating—and laughing—their literal asses off.

Farce to Farce with the Law

Once upon a time in the mid-1400s, the jurist Thomas Basin leveled this complaint against the “contagiously influential” litigator who “gnaws at, stalks, and exhausts the very essence of... the people who, already somewhat and even too litigious by nature, are taken in and caught up in ever more numerous disputes and judicial actions that are almost infinite . . . ? (Apologie, 262-63). Sound familiar? But whatever was a community to do about him? (That’s right: it used to be a him.) Kill all the lawyers? Mais, non! Stage them. And, while you're at it, stage all that gallows humor too, wherever and whenever injustice and inequity reigned supreme. Give us a supremely comical kangaroo-court’s-eye view of the world.

Where medieval English drama bore the imprint of sponsoring guilds, its counterparts in France and the Low Countries drew inspiration from lawyers, lawyers everywhere.’ It sufficed to look around and there they were: pontificating in civil and ecclesiastical courts, holding forth in classrooms, arbitrating under trees, debating in public squares, and coaxing truth (or the appearance thereof) from arguments pro and contra. No surprise there. The French authors of over 200 comedies—more extant than in any other European vernacular—were, for the most part, lawyers, law students, and legal apprentices. They belonged to the Basoche, a society founded in 1303, which at one point boasted as many as 10,000 members in chapters throughout France. During their heyday (1450-1550), the Basochiens not only litigated real actions of the small-claims variety: they authored and performed the lion’s share of farces, fools’ plays (sotties), and mock trials (causes fictives or causes grasses)?

First and foremost, they were orators and rhetoricians; and their expertise in performance had been honed by centuries of codified wisdom about delivery, the fifth part or canon of classical rhetoric (actio or hypokrisis). In that capacity, they were linked to the very origins of drama in France, maximizing the effect of the genre’s key foundational components as identified by O. B. Hardison in the paradigm-shifting Christian Rite and Christian Drama (1-34). Like the Christian liturgy that was the subject of Hardison’s 1965 study, the law courts featured their own sort of theatrical space, costume, staging, ritual conflict, audience participation, spectacle, dialogue, action, and above all, impersonation (ROMD, 54-68). As dramatic rhetoric perennially morphed into rhetorical drama, the Basochiens blurred what few boundaries might have remained between law and entertainment (ROMD, 3-18). For all those reasons, they more than deserve to join the larger conversation about the transhistorical interrelations of law, literature, and popular culture. And that’s not all, folks.

The Basochial brand was still going strong in 1632, as evidenced by such comedies as Marriage with a Grain of Salt (HD, #12) or by our closing Runaway Groom (#12). And let's not forget the Basochiens starring role in the history of satire. Take this little piece of publicity that I’ve cited before and cannot resist citing again. It’s for one of their carnivalesque causes grasses—that's grasse, as in Mardi Gras—in which they promise to lay bare the folly of the law:

In this particular case, you will see eloquence in the flesh, stripped to the bone[r], totally naked: alive, male, and virile [On void dans ceste cause l'éloquence paroistre toute nue, en chair et en os, vive, masle et hardie]. . . . The intention of the litigators is always to stimulate the audience’ laughter, not their empathy [commisération]: indeed, who wouldn't laugh at the judges alone of this momentous trial, practically pissing themselves trying to hold back their laughter with all their might? Or at the lawyers who have the honor of litigating there, speaking gravely and seriously of the most ridiculous things in the world? (cited in translation by Harvey, 7B, 22; my emphasis)

French comedy did not spring fully formed from the head of Molière. Hardly. The Basochiens participated in a tradition as old as the mock encomium of Greco-Roman antiquity and as new as the moot courts that spring up in modern law schools, to say nothing of those rowdy, tension-releasing, end-of-the-year revues. Thanks, moreover, to feminism and feminist dramaturgy (“ABT”), we've come a long way from the nakedly misogynistic eloquence that was the standard medieval and Renaissance university fare. Those were the days when young men cut their teeth on the Senecan disputational exercises known as the Controversiae, which called for them to ponder such horrifying brainteasers as “Ihe Man Who Raped Two Girls on a Single Night.” Indeed, that selfsame premise undergirds our Witless Protection (#10) and Johnny Slowpoke (#11). After the Senecan character commits his crimes, one girl “demands his death, the other marriage” (Controversiae, 1: 5; Woods, “Rape; 67). And yet, whatever progress has been made by today’s broad-strokes refusal to sanction sexism, bigotry, or classism, the spectacular nature of the law itself has not waned. Nor has the massive cross-cultural outcry against the historic failures of judicial systems (ecclesiastical or civil) to police their own. Nor has the public thirst for the cathartic release provoked by one of the greatest plotlines of all time: seeing justice done.’

Such was the stuff of the Basochial theater, where casts of conventional characters also clamored for their due. If their counterparts in Passion plays focused on the theological transformation of Old Testament justice into New Testament mercy (ROMD, 173-80), the present noisy crew staged more everyday struggles with the legitimacy of religious and secular authority. Or with authority, period, as they now summon you to laugh the law courts out of court. In the immortal words of Law and Order, this is their story.

Make way, then, for them to traffic in tales of primogeniture, torts, canon law, adultery, bastardy, prenups, “postnups,’ rape, ravishment, and malpractice (legal or theatrical). Jointly and severally, our plays explore such keenly lived juridical experiences as these: the loss of marital consortium as grounds for annulment (#1); defaulting on one’s marital debt (devoir conjugal) when sexual payment to the spouse comes due (#2); the contractual distribution of domestic duties (#3); adultery (#4); paternity (#5); bigamy and remarriage (#6); inheritance (#7); customary law and hostage-taking (#8); clerical celibacy and concubinage (#9); the trustworthiness of eyewitness testimony (#10); pimping and proxenetism (#11); and the financial consequences of being left at the altar (#12). Brought to you by the Basochiens, this is Contracts 101 for popular consumption; and popular it was. It still can be if were willing to hop on a wild carnival ride through that quintessential legal sequence of investigation, trial, retribution, and reparation.

First up: meet the nubile young bride of Not Gettin’ Any (#1) who has yet to enjoy the consummation of her marriage ... after an entire month... and counting. She is flanked by her sister in arms of Default Judgment Day (#2), similarly frustrated by a husband who is majorly in arrears with the requisite marital deposits. As in “sex” Next, we make the acquaintance of another wife who is all too eager to take the law into her own hands. Too bad that, when she henpecks her spouse into a renegotiated division of marital labor in The Washtub (#3), she neglects to anticipate a gaping legal loophole. Meanwhile, the jealous idiot of Basket Case (#4) takes the law—and his wife—into his own hands by toting her around in a basket in order to forestall her illicit extramarital fornication. Seriously. What else was he supposed to do? Don't you remember what happened to Lot’s wife at Sodom and Gomorrah? Guess what? Neither does he. And neither does the friendly neighborhood priest.

Be that as it may, the ramifications of adultery remain as dire as they had been when King Arthur fell to the illegitimate Mordred. It was enough to leave a poor bastard feeling like a fatherless child. Certainly, the title character of Jenin, Filz de Rien—Johnny of Whos Your Daddy? (#5)—feels that way when his mom informs him that he was sired by... nobody at all. Make that nothing. His dad was a shirt, she affirms, or maybe it was a jacket. Or maybe papa was a rolling stone. Or two rolling stones. Or maybe, as in the quick surrealistic romp of a charivari that is Beauballs (#6), we don't rightly know who is birthing and who is getting birthed. At the midpoint of our farcical journey, Beauballs segues to the more metaphorically poor bastards of—you guessed it—Poor Bastards (#7). If you lived in Basins Normandy and were luckless enough not to be the firstborn son, you were, quite literally, a poor bastard: outranked, outinherited, and unappeased by an oldest brothers munificent proffer of a legacy of all the leeks you can eat (#7). Or what about when undistinguished traits were passed on legitimately from a cowardly mayor to his chicken-stealing kidnapper of a son? In Talking Turkey (#8), the latter cannot keep his story straight in a trial scene that rivals that of the famous Farce of Master Pierre Pathelin in which a matter of stolen sheep plays out in nonsensical counterpoint against stolen cloth. And, speaking of poetic justice. ...

What exactly was a single girl to do when she couldn't get any? Justice, that is. Or sex. Or a husband. Take it up with Cupid himself in Okay, Cupid (#9), a premodern version of The Dating Game in which the God of Love musically orchestrates a premarital conference. If, however, Cupid favors keeping marriage off the table, that is in no way the case in Witless Protection (#10), where a mother demands holy wedlock as the appropriate legal redress for her deflowered daughter. So too do three more women in a tragicomic spin on that Senecan debate topic of “Ihe Man Who Raped Two Girls” When the unrepentant serial fiancé of Johnny Slowpoke (#11) backs out of all three betrothals, the women lobby for the same ostensible remedy: marriage to their abuser. Last but not least, our grand finale saves us a ringside seat at the marital festivities of a union that does, in fact, take place. But watch out for the proto-catfish of Runaway Groom (#12). Published in 1632—two years prior to that Basochial cause grasse cited above and near-contemporaneous with Moliére’s first play, The Flying Doctor (1645)—Runaway Groom completes the picture of a very long Middle Ages that extends substantially beyond the classic chronological markers of 500 to 1500.

In a word, it is impossible to overstate the importance of the law to the French theatrical spirit and to history writ large. Far from it. It is often thanks to the law that we get wind of the medieval European theater in the first place." Its traces survive because something illegal, immoral, ill-advised, or irreligious caught the watchful eye of a local official, a king, a bishop, a chronicler, or, as with the unnamed individual who took a heavy hand to Witless Protection (#10), a censor (whether he be self-appointed or municipally appointed). As early as 1301, for instance, near London, the Prioress of Clerkenwell bade King Edward I to mitigate the environmental “damage which the people of London cause[d] with their frequent miracle plays and wrestling-matches, devastating and destroying her corn and grass... .’ She was successful in her plea for relief (MES, 166-67). Elsewhere, in one of the earliest recorded legal incidents in French theater history, we discover that two mortal accidents marred two separate mystery plays in 1380 and 1384, prompting jurists to weigh levying charges of murder (MBA, 29-66). Near Paris in 1395, a woman was gang-raped under some theatrical scaffolding (Enders, “Spectacle of the Scaffolding”); and, in 1485 in Bar-le-Duc (about 250 kilometers east of Paris), an actor in a Passion play reportedly raped his wife while wearing his devil costume (MBA, 67-87). By the same token, we know that a nativity play was staged in Amboise in 1496 because of the ensuing lawsuit filed by the tradesman Mathurin Prunelle. Prunelle had lost some two hundred of the beams that he had contributed for the associated theatrical scaffolding: “about a hundred of the beams were stolen and the others were split and spoilt by the nails used for the said scaffold[ing]” (MES, 311). And, in July 1511 in Dijon, the marriageable daughter of one Jacot Casotte was apparently so over-the-top in her takedown of an incompetent actor that she and the actor's wife served up a parallel spectacle of themselves when they came to blows (Rousse, “Une Représentation! 107; Gouvenain, 39).

Innumerable such episodes dot the legal landscape, some of which I'll take up again shortly under the rubric of freedom of speech. They are all fodder for farce, all fodder for our understanding of theater's leading role in the cultural reverberations of crime and punishment. We need not have waited for Michel de Certeaus Practice of Everyday Life or Alan Read's Theatre and Everyday Life to discern what the historian Jacques Le Goff characterized as the large-scale propensity of medieval culture to “play itself out” (Medieval Civilization, 357). Feigning, fakery, impersonation, deception, simulation, and dissimulation were as ubiquitous in law as in life. In 1474, a murderous conspiracy was outed owing to a widow's insufficiently convincing rendition of bereavement (Enders, “Foul Play”). In 1503, a rapist’s theatrical expertise in costume-making facilitated his flight from the jurisdiction of Metz when, according to the prolific chronicler Philippe de Vigneulles, the popular comic actor Jehan Mangin (grans fairceur) “procured women’s clothing with which he disguised himself [ce desguisait]” In a setup reminiscent of that of Bro Job (D, #7), “he pulled it off so well that, with a little basket full of sheets and a washing bat in the aforesaid basket, it was not possible to recognize him. And in that getup, pretending [faindant] to go do the washing at the river, he passed through the gate of the Thieffroy Bridge without being recognized and thus found a way to escape” (Chronique, 4: 27-29; Longtin, “Jehan Mangin’). Thirty years later in Grenoble, one Pierre Bucher, Esquire (docteur en droit), bowed out of his leading-man commitment to play Jesus Christ and was sued for damages. Notes Petit de Julleville in Les Mystères: “Bucher was none the worse for it. By 1539, he had become the replacement for the same Procurator who had prosecuted him in 1535; and afterward, he succeeded him” (2: 127-28). Law and theater would continue their collaboration for centuries to come, with new generations looking to them for the letter, spirit, and spiritedness of cathartically administered just deserts. Although Montesquieu was not to pen his landmark L'Esprit des Lois (The Spirit of the Laws) until 1748, let's recall that, in French l'esprit means not only “spirit” but “wit? Body and soul, farce ministers to the soul of wit and to the spirit of the laws.

Initially, our connection to this material might well strike you as tenuous: as tenuous as that of the laws so-called “laughing heir. Historically, he is laughing because, as the distant relative of a wealthy deceased person, he is inheriting a fortune, albeit with little or no personal connection to the dearly departed. (Downton Abbey anyone?) It is nevertheless conceivable that men—and women—can reclaim their status as the laughing heirs of farce. So, get ready to make a joyful noise unto . . . the law. The French call it just that—legal noise—and, as always, the cacophonous characters of farce want to make some. I invite you, therefore, to dismiss as null and void anything that you might have heard about farces retrograde and reactionary predispositions (HD, 14-18). Farce is fun. It’s edgy. It’s politically incorrect. But, with the right dramaturgy in place, it can also be activist and inclusive, creating new visions of the proverbial liberty and justice for all. We are unlikely to see that, however, if the specter of twenty-first-century judgmentalism forestalls laughter at early modern judgments. Instead, we might postulate with Sara Beam that “when common French men and women lost the freedom to joke about farts and to mock judges in public, their political freedoms were compromised as well” (Laughing Matters, 2). With a little bit of poetic license anda pinch of tolerance for the wide berth customarily granted to satire, I prefer to paraphrase the axiomatic wisdom of contract law by allowing that any ambiguity can be resolved in farce’s favor. Case closed. Or is it?