Abbreviations

Many medieval farces were untitled and “underdetermined.” On their first or final pages, they largely read something like “The Farce for [Two, Three, Four, or Five] Characters.” On the opposite end of the spectrum, one finds chatty titles on the order of The New Farce of the Chambermaids who Go to Mass at 5:00 A.M. to get their Holy Water (our #7, Bro Job). I refer throughout to the present twelve plays—as to those of Farce of the Fart and Holy Deadlock—by the English titles that I’ve bestowed upon them. Inspired, moreover, by the occasional medieval “to wit” (c’est assavoir), I too venture alternate titles or subtitles when warranted.

For ease of reading, I favor parenthetical documentation when practical, which works in concert with the Bibliography. To facilitate consultation, I refer to frequently mentioned primary and secondary sources by the following abbreviations:

“ABT”	“About This Translation” from this book.
AF	Against the Friars. By Tim Rayborn.
AG	Aspects of Genre. By Alan Knight.
APF	Art Poétique françoys (1548). By Thomas Sébillet.
ATF	Ancien Théâtre françois. 10 vols. Edited by M. Viollet le Duc.
CFSM	Choix de farces, soties et moralités. Edited by Émile Mabille.
CM	La Comédie et les moeurs. By L. Petit de Julleville.
CRCD	Christian Rite and Christian Drama. By O. B. Hardison Jr.
CWFR	The Complete Works of François 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.
DNC	Débat de la Nourrisse et de la Chamberière (RBM, #49).
DSI	Dictionnaire thématique et géographique des saints imaginaires, facétieux. By Jacques Merceron.
“ETCF”	“Etudes sur le Théâtre comique français du moyen âge.” By Pierre [Pietro] Toldo.
FCMF	Five Comedies of Medieval France. Translated into English 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.
HD	Holy Deadlock and Further Ribaldries. Edited and translated by Jody Enders.
HDTW	How to Do Things with Words. By J. L. Austin.
HTF	Histoire du théâtre françois depuis son origine jusqu’à présent. By François Parfaict and Claude Parfaict.
LM	Les Mystères. 2 vols. By L. Petit de Julleville.
MBA	Murder by Accident. By Jody Enders.
MD	Medieval Drama. Edited by David Bevington.
MES	The Medieval European Stage. Edited by William Tydeman.
MFP	Medieval French Plays. Translated by Richard Axton and John Stevens.
MFST	Music in the French Secular Theater. By Howard Mayer Brown.
MTA	Les Médecins au théâtre de l’antiquité au dix-septième siècle. By Gustave Joseph Witkowski.
MTOC	The Medieval Theater of Cruelty. By Jody Enders.
PF	Pure Filth. By Noah Guynn.
PP	Philosophical Papers. By J. L. Austin.
RBM	Recueil du British Museum. Facsimile edition by Halina Lewicka.
RC	Recueil de farces françaises inédites du XVe siècle. Edited by Gustave Cohen.
Répertoire	Répertoire des farces françaises. By Bernard Faivre.
RF	Recueil de farces (1450–1550). 13 vols. Edited by André Tissier.
RFlorence	Recueil de Florence. Edited by Jelle Koopmans.
RFMSJ	Recueil de farces, moralités et sermons joyeux. 4 vols. Edited by Antoine Le Roux de Lincy and Francisque Michel.
RGCF	Recueil général et complet des fabliaux des XIIIe et XIVe siècles. 6 vols. Edited by Anatole de Montaiglon and Gaston Raynaud.
RGS	Recueil Général des Sotties. 3 vols. Edited by Emile Picot.
RLV	Recueil La Vallière. Reprint entitled Manuscrit La Vallière.
ROMD	Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama. By Jody Enders.
RPF	Recueil de poésies françoises des XVe et XVIe siècles. Edited by Anatole de Montaiglon.
RSJ	Recueil de sermons joyeux. Edited by Jelle Koopmans.
RT	Recueil Trepperel.
RTC	Répertoire du théâtre comique en France au moyen-age. By L. Petit de Julleville.
RTLF	Le Recueil Trepperel: Les Farces. Edited by Eugénie Droz and Halina Lewicka.
RTLS	Le Recueil Trepperel: Les Sotties. Edited by Eugénie Droz.
SEF	La Sottie en France. By Emile Picot.
SFQS	Sotties et Farces du XVe et du XVIe siècle. By “Maître Antitus” [Thierry Martin].
SMFF	Six Medieval French Farces. Translated into English by Thierry Boucquey.
TB	The Theatre of the Basoche. By Howard Graham Harvey.
TFFMA	Le Théâtre des farces en France au Moyen Âge. 5 vols. Edited by Michel Rousse.
TFR	Le Théâtre français avant la Renaissance. Edited by Édouard Fournier.

Introduction: Nothing Sacred

Did you hear the one about the Mother Superior who was so busy casting the first stone that she got caught in flagrante delicto with her lover? What about the drunk with a Savior complex who was fool enough to believe himself to be the Second Coming? And that’s nothing compared to what happened once farce got its grubby paws on the confessional. Welcome to the world of what one might call the “long Middle Ages.” It’s a fifteenth- and sixteenth-century French comedic world that is as much a medieval as a Renaissance and Reformation phenomenon. It’s a world that stands to tell us a lot about where a Shakespeare or a Molière might have come from. It’s an obscene, over-the-top, sacrilegious, satirical world that targets religious hypocrisy in that in-your-face way that only true slapstick can muster. It’s the world of Immaculate Deception, where there was nothing sacred, especially the sacred.

Time and time again, the rowdy medium of farce gravitated toward a favorite target that proved one of the most formidable adversaries ever: the Catholic Church and, as the Reformation took hold throughout Europe, the Protestant churches.¹ As a descendant of sorts of the fabliau and a long-time companion to Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Marguerite de Navarre, farce asked: What will all those domineering, sexually rapacious priests, monks, friars, and the occasional nun do next? Can a titular Con-Man bluff his way through confession (#1)? Is that a sausage in those clerical hands or is the priest just happy to see Margot in Blue Confessions (#2)? Is the holiest of sacraments but a pretext for committing Highway Robbery (#3)? Are the Confessions of a Medieval Drama Queen merely one more way to keep a good—or a bad—woman down (#4)? Should a criminally erotic and socially subversive folie à deux be confessed in the first place (#5, Confession Follies)? Farce wants to know; and Brother Fillerup is only too happy to oblige with a handy demonstration (#6) or, like some of his colleagues, with a Bro Job (#7). Is that holy water spritzing out of the good Father’s aspergillum? Or is it just the farceur casting aspersions again? And just wait till farce takes on the Resurrection. Make that two Resurrections. Two random drunks, Johnny Glad-Hand Palmer (#8) and Johnny Slack-Jaw (#9), are anything but Christlike when they rise from the dead. They are followed here by two indulgence salesmen hawking quite the bill of goods in The Pardoners’ Tales (#10); while Slick Brother Willy (#11) prefers to indulge other passions with the ballsiest sermon ever. And don’t forget to get thee to the nunnery of our title cut, where most of the sisters avoid getting pregnant by engaging in sodomy (#12). Once you pierce through the outward appearances of faith, the dark underbelly of ecstasy suggests one hell of an immaculate deception. So, if you’re wondering WWJD (What would Jesus do?), probably not what’s about to transpire in this book.

In his Art Poétique françoys of 1548, Thomas Sébillet wrote that farce and its buddy, the sotie, were “designed to solicit pleasure and laughter” with all manner of phallic licentiousness, dissolution, nonsense, ridiculousness, and foolishness (badineries, nigauderies, et toutes sotties esmouvantes à ris et Plaisir [APF, 164–65; AG, 10]). But, this was more than just funny business. Comedy penetrates deep into matters of life, death, and the afterlife. The stakes were huge, as in the moral of our final story (#12): “it’s illogical that one man would accuse another of the very same sin with which he himself is stained, sullied, and besmirched. Now wipe that smirch off your face because both are to blame” (RFMSJ, 2: 30). Nobody was fooling around, least of all the Church. And who better to speak up, act up, and act out than that lawyerly band of thespian brothers known as the Basochiens?

As documented in previous volumes of this series, the lion’s share of medieval French farces were authored by members of the Basoche, a professional society of attorneys and legal apprentices founded in 1303 and that flourished between 1450 and 1550. At one time, it boasted as many as ten thousand members who, as theatrical practitioners of rhetorical delivery (hypokrisis or actio), litigated both real and fictional court cases (FF, 4–13).² And there was plenty to litigate too when speaking truth to ecclesiastical power. Performing a play could be dangerous. Early actors risked censorship, imprisonment, banishment, and even death, lest their humor fail to land. Already in 1398, a Parisian edict proscribed the production of any farces or saints’ lives that had not been preauthorized (LM, 1: 414–15). In 1476, another edict barred the Basochiens, “under pain of banishment from the kingdom and confiscation of all their goods,” from mounting farces, sotties, or morality plays not only at the Châtelet (their home court) but in any other public place (MES, 333). Francis I threw a few outspoken Basochiens, sots, and farceurs in jail in 1516 (MES, 336n); and, by 1542, a formal legal complaint was filed in an effort to prevent parishioners from forsaking the sacred offices for the theater. The procurator general of Paris bemoaned the situation as follows: “the common people, as early as eight or nine o’clock in the morning—on holy days—would leave off the parish mass, sermons, and vespers to go off to these plays in order to save their places and to be there until five o’clock in the evening. Preaching stopped, because there would only have been preachers to listen to them.” Worse yet, the shepherds themselves were abandoning their flocks, rushing through prayers, or moving up the recitation of Vespers so that they too could get to the show on time.³ The Town Council of Amiens took action against similar lapses on 19 March and 23 October 1550, when its échevins permitted performances of the Passion and the Acts of the Apostles on the condition that there were “no farces nor impediments to sermons or vespers.”⁴ In 1559, their colleagues in Mons were maligning audiences who, “instead of going to vespers or to a sermon, spent their time watching plays, comedies, and farces.”⁵ And let’s not omit an incident of 1562 that befell the Conards of Rouen, one of over a thousand sociétés joyeuses playing farces and soties all over France (RTC, 140).⁶ The irreverent troupe allegedly pushed the boundaries so far that they were stoned by the “little people” (TFFMA, 5: 86).

Such was the cultural landscape in which an embattled Church decidedly viewed theater as a force for social (or antisocial) change at the expense of spirituality. And such was the universe of the unholy Trinity of farce: seeing, believing, and laughing, which makes for as good a description as any of the comic theater.

True-ish Confessions

Now joining the ranks of Confession Lessons (FF, #3) and At Cross Purposes (FF, #7), our first five plays invite us into the confessional. A con-man talks his way out of penance (#1); a sinful woman commits so many sexual good works that she doesn’t merit an act of contrition (#2); a highwayman finds the sacrament a welcome means of getting his hands on a priest’s money bag (#3); a female theologian vaunts her newly acquired authority to absolve her sisters (#4); and an abusive husband may or may not be trying to get right with the Lord on what may or may not be his deathbed (#5). The motif was so prevalent that Alan Knight speculated that “confession” might have functioned as a veritable synonym for “dialogue” (AG, 95); Aron Gurevich devoted an entire chapter to “Popular Culture in the Mirror of the Penitentials” (Medieval Popular Culture, 78–103); and, in the tour de force that is Pure Filth, Noah Guynn argued that “just as penitential theologians use problematic cases to test the limits of rules and norms, so, too, do farceurs ridicule, disrupt, and distort penitential practices in order to ask audiences to think carefully—if also playfully and perversely—about the nature, function, and efficacy of rituals of forgiveness” (113).⁷

For his own part, André Tissier was intrigued enough by the farces wholly or partly consecrated to confession that he differentiated between true vs. false vs. pseudoconfessions as heard by true vs. false priests (RF, 6: 378–83). Some confessions, he found, were true, as in our Con-Man’s Confession (#1) and Highway Robbery (#3). Others were patently false, owing to the illegitimacy of both parties (#5, Confession Follies). And, then, there were the pseudoconfessions in which, say, a pretend priest hears a true confession (Confession Lessons, FF, #3). But what is farce to confession and confession to farce? Does a true confession to a false priest count? What about when it’s a Mother Confessor brandishing a papal dispensation that empowers her to do so (#4)? What if the confession is neither full nor sincere or if the ritual doesn’t proceed by the book? What if there is no remorse, no contrition, no absolution, no penance?⁸

My focus in this Introduction is less on the daunting theology than on the daunting theater phenomenology; but, mostly, it’s this: when the Fourth Lateran Council made confession obligatory in 1215, it publicly mandated that the private be made “public,” at least to the extent that a penitent would now give voice to normally unspoken truths. Mais quelle coincidence! The very act of making the private public is the business of theater and the funny business of farce. The question is how public? And, for that matter, how theological? As we shall see, the answers tend to be ambiguous; but they unfold uproariously in a medium that cannot abide secrecy. Farce will out. There are no “covert operations” (à la Karma Lochrie) and no “secret places” (à la Marie-Christine Pouchelle): not even for such intimate bodily functions as sex and excretion.⁹ This is, after all, the genre that relies on “scatological foolishness to conjure eschatological truths”: “more than demons and devils, … it is feces and defecation that are endowed with theologically destabilizing power” (PF, 5, 118). The farceur lets it all hang out: no “closet drama” allowed. Everything—and everyone—is out in the open, which, conveniently, was one of the historical settings for confession itself. Starting in the sixteenth century or so—a moment that coincides with the heyday of farcical performance—penitents could unburden themselves in the now familiar wooden booth (Lea, History, 395); but they could also confess in the open air, with about as much expectation of privacy as in the public square. Consider this fascinating piece of advice from Archbishop Walter Reynolds from across the Channel: “Let the priest choose for himself a common place for hearing confessions, where he may be seen generally by all in the church; and do not let him hear any one, and especially any woman, in a private place, except in great necessity.”¹⁰

#ThemToo? Talk about an open secret, all of it fodder for farce’s indecent exposure of clerical promiscuity, criminality, and abuse. (Confesser: con + fesser = “spank that cunt” or “bust that ass.”) And what could be more biting than a theatrical performance of the “performativity” of the sacraments (in the sense understood by the ordinary-language philosopher J. L. Austin)? That is to say that, under the proper ritual circumstances, a duly ordained priest could alter a repentant sinner’s reality when pronouncing absolution with absolvo te, thereby (per Austin’s title), doing things with words. His utterance was as “performative” as when the bride and groom say “I do” and are, thereafter, legally married, having met the requisite conditions (marriage license in due form, sanctioned officiator, etc.) (HDTW, 12–24). Typically, a stage play is not a venue in which true performatives occur insofar as it is bracketed by what Erving Goffman famously dubbed “the theatrical frame” (Frame Analysis, chap. 5). By that, I mean that theater customarily hosts imitations of performatives—pseudoperformatives—not the real thing.¹¹ But the Basochiens were on intimate terms with real performative verdicts in real courtrooms. Particularly when playing their mock trials in the juridical spaces of the Châtelet, they were notorious for blurring the lines between reality and representation. The same held true in Passion plays, where men of the cloth might be cast as men of the cloth. Could a real priest in a theatrical role redeem another actor onstage? And how in heaven’s name was one to distinguish between performative reality and theatrical representation (Enders, “Performing Miracles”; DBD, chap. 12)?

On the eve of the Reformation, those were the selfsame questions that saw Catholics and Protestants at each other’s throats about Transubstantiation, the ultimate bone of contention between more literal-minded Catholics and more symbolically minded Protestants. When the celebrant of Mass pronounced the sacred words, “this is my body, this is my blood,” there was intense disagreement as to what really—or allegorically—happened. Did the Eucharist and the sacramental wine metamorphose into the literal body and blood of Christ? Or was it, rather, a metaphorical reprise of what had transpired at the Last Supper? The need to come to grips with this theological and theatrical distinction between reality, reenactment, and representation informs, in different but effective ways, such scholarly works as Huston Diehl’s Staging Reform, Andrew Sofer’s Stage Life of Props, Michal Kobialka’s This Is My Body, Glenn Ehrstine’s Theater, Culture, and Community, John Romano’s “Priests and the Eucharist,” and Sarah Beckwith’s work with “sacramental theater” in Christ’s Body and Signifying God (90–91). And that very distinction, of course, had once given rise to O. B. Hardison’s paradigm-shifting theory about the so-called origins of the medieval theater in the liturgy.¹² In this anthology, it is farce that ponders true and false, literal and allegorical, both or neither, or, as the contemporaneous Humanist philosopher Nicolas of Cusa would have had it, both and neither.¹³ As it riffs on the theory and practice of what Stanislavski once dubbed “faith and a sense of truth” (An Actor Prepares, chap. 8), farce does what it does not just with words but with action.

Euphemism and “Comedification”

Centuries before Les Mots et les choses was a twinkle in Michel Foucault’s eye, the relationship between words and things was taken up in one of the most widely circulated texts of the European Middle Ages, the Roman de la Rose. Surviving in over two hundred manuscripts and later translated by none other than Chaucer, the Rose’s quest for love was to endure as the joint effort of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. Guillaume penned the first flowery, allegorical part in the 1230s; and, between 1276 and 1280, Jean picked up the thread in a markedly scholastic tone. It is the latter that interests us in that it explores a problem that has dogged language-users from the Rose’s Lover-Narrator to Lenny Bruce to George Carlin to Kathy Griffin. When debating Lady Reason, Jean de Meun’s protagonist blanches at her lexicon for the myth of Jupiter’s castration of Saturn. She has scandalously forsaken, he objects, the more polite “relics” (relicques) in favor of the unforgivably direct “testicles” (couilles): “Jupiter cut off his testicles as though they were sausages” (les coilles cum se fussent andoilles).¹⁴ Instead of resorting to “crazy, bawdy talk,” quoth the Lover, she ought to have euphemized (parler par glose). Indeed, these are the coilles, andoilles, and glose that will appear verbatim in Blue Confessions (#2).¹⁵ So, would a rose—or a roman de la rose—by any other name smell as sweet?

If Lady Reason is crazy, she’s crazy like a farce. Text and gloss, the practice of reading between the lines for hidden meaning, is very much the birthplace of literary criticism as we know it. In this book, it directs us toward farce’s own contribution to the history of thought by inquiring: Which is more obscene? The God-created body part responsible for insemination? Or the euphemism that sanitizes its true meaning? Which is worse? Lenny Bruce’s “getting your cock sucked” or “getting your blah blah-ed”? Which is more blatant? A censor’s blurring (fogging) or bleeping? Or the sights and sounds they so glaringly spotlight by covering them up? And which is more rife with meaning? Transcribing the word couilles? Or eliding it as “c.… …” in the nineteenth-century edition of Blue Confessions (ATF, 1: 375)?¹⁶ As Koopmans and Verhuyck cleverly query in “Les Mots et la chose,” do we opt for the words? Or do we go for la chose, as in “the thing:” “the penis” or le petit chose? I couldn’t agree more with Ned Dubin’s declaration that, in the fabliaux, euphemisms “usually serve to underscore obscenity, not attenuate it” (“Creative Choice,” 189; my emphasis). So too for farce. By Lady Reason’s logic, the euphemism is infinitely more obscene, transmuting a natural part of procreation into a prurient object of fornication. By farce’s logic, that key linguistic question can lead to a bona fide dramaturgical crisis.

Given the importance of body language to the comic medium, the question of to say or not to say becomes one of to stage or not to stage. It’s more than a matter of which word should denote which thing; it’s which gesture should stage which thingy. In farce’s grand meta-game of hide the sausage, the unsayable becomes sayable and the unstageable becomes stageable: all as it dares us to believe what we’re seeing (and not seeing) right in front of us.

Throughout premodern French literature, there has always been something jarring about the commodification of the body, especially the female body. From fabliau to the genre of the blason that flourished between 1530 and 1540, poets were wont to emblematize body parts. With “a nose, a belly, a nail or a cheek,” avers Bérénice Le Marchand, “the blasonneurs present a fragmented body, and a collage of all the pieces described would reconstitute a body in its entirety” (“Specular Dissection,” 23–24). Farce fits right in with its own proffer of the corporeal part for the animate whole. Take the theaters of anatomy of Shit for Brains (FF, #8) or Bitches and Pussycats (HD, #8). In the former, wife Harpee is essentialized as a giant head and husband Harpo, as a giant ass (FF, 260–61). In the latter, the whole of womankind is reduced to either a loose asshole to be kept wide open or a gaping maw of a piehole to kept wide shut (HD, 242–45). It’s all part and parcel of a distinctive dramatic technique to which I alluded briefly in Holy Deadlock: the quintessential melding of symbolic literalism with literal symbolism (HD, 11–12).¹⁷ While Le Marchand doesn’t hesitate to call the blason dehumanizing and fetishistic, she nonetheless adheres implicitly to its masculinist aesthetics when concluding that, “paradoxically, through fragmentation, poets are in search of unity and supreme beauty” (“Specular Dissection,” 26). Farce’s aesthetics lean more toward the toilet—nowhere more than in The Resurrection of Johnny Palmer (#8, sc. 3)—as it fixates on a clergy that is a literal pain in the ass. And—oh, holey holy!—a personified Church was to feel that pain in that very spot.

Sharing space with the forty-eight farces of the Recueil La Vallière is the mid-sixteenth-century Moralité a sys personnages (RLV, #57), a propaganda piece that “concretizes” the Church as the victim of anal rape. “Through one door or another,” her allegorical enemies want in;¹⁸ and, while wrong-way “furtive entry” might well be an abomination (laron et interdict), it is the same abomination that served, in The Farce of the Fart, as another literal butt of the joke about “accidental” honeymoon sodomy (FF, 82). Add a real case of accidental pregnancy by sodomy, and that sheds a nasty new light on the events of #12, Immaculate Deception.¹⁹ Meanwhile, editor Beck issues these cautionary if contradictory remarks about the Moralité. On one hand, the “violently and grotesquely anti-Protestant play” is a “morality play, not a farce [which] could not have been performed by the same troupe or for the same public.” On the other hand, there was “nothing obscene in and of itself about the [frequent] theme of the rape of the Church” (183–84). Seriously? Even the tamer assertion about genre is awkward when we recall that the moralité was often indicted in the same breath as farce.²⁰ Either way, the seminal message could definitely be that of the nuns of #12: “Take your theology and shove it up your ass!”

And yet, there’s a big difference between a poeticized body part and a flesh-and-blood person who takes to the stage as a steaming heap of filthy, leaky, explosive sexuality. Farce reframes literal, spiritual, and satirical incarnations of bodies of theological knowledge as knowledge of theological bodies. It’s a prickly, embodied literalism in which the gestural or corporeal (w)hole is quite a bit more than the sum of its yucky parts. This lands us squarely in the realm of synecdoche: the part for the whole or, as farce likes it, the part in the hole. Thierry Martin is even gracious enough to remind us in his edition of Blue Confessions that the infamous coille signifies both one testicle and the entire penis (SFQS, note 21). Feel free to groan audibly when I ask: Isn’t that just ducky? Synec-ducky.

In light, therefore, of the farcical obsession with the literally symbolic and the symbolically literal, I make this modest proposal about theological embodiment in the form of a neologism. For farce’s trademark sleight of hand and slight of bodies, for its fetishizing of a blason-like body, for its comical commodification: what do you say we call it comedification? If the Roman de la Rose tendered a philosophical investigation of euphemistic language, farce sticks us with a dramaturgical investigation of bodily practice. It wants to demonstrate that, in the hands of the medieval Church, sex is an act of violence and an abuse of power; whereas, in the hands of the powerless, sex is an act of pleasure (even if never fully devoid of violence). The real obscenity lies in how the Church—you should pardon the expression—fucks everybody over, which is the essence of the farcical show-and-tell. But how to show what you cannot tell and how to tell what you cannot show? Euphemize too much in farce, and you lose the comedic thrust; euphemize not at all and we’re talking about pornography.

Pornography by Accident?

With superb guidance from such scholars as Kimberly Benston (“Being There”) and Jonathan Walker (“Rhetorics of the Obscaene”), we are accustomed to thinking about obscenity and sacrilege. But, among the thornier questions posed by farce is whether there can be such a thing as a bodily euphemism. We needed one in Extreme Husband Makeover (HD, #11), where, in a post-Holocaust world, it seemed almost impossible to dramatize two husbands being forced into an oven (HD, 356–57). In this volume, various gestural euphemisms for the sex act are de rigueur. In Highway Robbery (#3), a thief’s pat-down is a masterpiece of homoerotic stimulation; in Slick Brother Willy (#11), a brother’s effort to shield his testicles moves Tissier to insert these two stunning stage directions: “he makes a sketchy sign of the cross that degenerates into a caress of his groin-area” and “he hides his organ with his hand” (FFMA, 2: 241, 249, 252). Oh, really? What do you suppose that looked like? At the very least, it’s at variance with his comment elsewhere that sexual activity could be insinuated offstage only (RF, 11: 248–49, 240n). Indeed, when preparing these translations, I frequently found myself hearing the voice of the title character of Educating Rita. When prompted to resolve the staging difficulties of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, she offered “Do it on t’radio.” By and large, it’s unimaginable that the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century theater could have been “pornographic” in today’s sense of depicting real sex acts in real time. But that doesn’t rule out the possibility of “protopornography” by accident.

More than in The Farce of the Fart or Holy Deadlock, the plays of Immaculate Deception gesture repeatedly toward graphic sex acts, real or virtual, public or private. The term pornographie, attested as early as the sixteenth century, derives from the late Greek pornographos, meaning to write (graphein) about prostitutes (pornē). But, in contemporary usage, the practice lies in that fifty-shades-of-gray area between eroticism, obscenity, and exploitation. In the American Heritage Dictionary, for example, pornography is “sexually explicit writing, images, video, or other material whose primary purpose is to cause sexual arousal.” In Webster’s, it’s “the depiction of erotic behavior (as in pictures or writing) intended to cause sexual excitement.” In Oxford, it’s “printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.” I’ve italicized what all three definitions have in common, namely, intentionality and causation, both notoriously difficult to access: even for the Supreme Court when, in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964), they relegated the perception thereof to a community standard. Porn is in the eye of the beholder. The Justices knew it when they saw it. Ditto for medieval spectators. If they saw it, that is. So, did they?

Drawing on the theater phenomenology that I developed in Murder by Accident, I submit that there is a very good reason why intentionality perpetually comes up in definitions of pornography. From the standpoint of the initiator, there is no such thing as unintentional sex. What I’m about to hypothesize, however, and which this set of farces intimates, is that there is, in point of fact, such a thing as unintentional pornography.

This is neither the time nor the place to rerehearse the full taxonomy of Murder by Accident (chap. 5); but, drawing on such theorists as Jean Baudrillard, Steven Knapp, Walter Benn Michaels, Umberto Eco, Bernard Williams, Michael Kirby, Erving Goffman, and Steven Sverdlik, I crafted there a taxonomy of theatrical intentionality and argued for the existence of a highly sociable if largely implicit theatrical contract between all the parties who make and attend theater (esp. 91–102, 123–41). That contract is dependent on the spectators’ ability to discern correctly the actual intentions of the multiple people mounting a play, regardless of how successfully or unsuccessfully those intentions are executed or bungled, attributed or misattributed, perceived or misperceived by audiences. Inspired by Austin’s brilliant “Plea for Excuses,” I contended that the theatrical contract would be breached by an intentional act like first-degree murder, but that not all breaches of social contracts are intentional. In Austin’s scenario, he has conceived an overwhelming dislike for his donkey, ergo: ready, aim, fire! He shoots to kill, but he fells his neighbor’s donkey instead. When wrestling with how to approach the neighbor, the shooter is unsure as to how to apologize: “ ‘I say, old sport, I’m awfully sorry … I’ve shot your donkey by accident’? Or ‘by mistake’? Then again, I go to shoot my donkey as before, draw a bead on it, fire—but as I do so, the beasts move, and to my horror yours falls. Again the scene on the doorstep—what do I say? ‘By mistake’? Or ‘by accident’?” (PP, 133n; his emphasis). And that is what farce asks as it plumbs the depths of performing sexuality: by mistake or by accident?

On the face of it, it seems appalling even to ask; and in no way is the subsequent discussion meant to be lighthearted. If anything, it underscores the seriousness with which a comic medium can engage. Can sex occur by accident? By mistake? The issue was much in the news as I was preparing this book. Outrage upon outrage rightly accompanied the lack of legal repercussions for men like Brock Turner or Bill Cosby who had raped women who were unconscious, otherwise impaired, or legally and morally unable to consent to sex. For the theater, we do well to extrapolate a similar breach of the theatrical contract for certain “representations” of sex acts onstage.

In the same way that there is no murder by accident, there can be no sex by accident. Sex is and must be an intentional act; but that has never stopped theater or popular culture from dabbling in permutations. What if a man were to engage in consensual sex with his partner’s identical twin unbeknownst to him? Even sex by mistake would not be “mistaken” by the improperly identified other party. Or, infinitely more dark and disturbing, what if a man premeditates the rape of one woman and assaults a different woman “by mistake”? The identity of the victim or, for that matter, of the participant does not negate the sexual assault. It is fair to posit that there can be no sex by accident; but the troubling sex by mistake? What I’m suggesting is that farce actually makes the case for pornography by accident.

Mea culpa—and keep this in mind when you read Blue Confessions—but what if, contrary to any preordained plan, a male actor were to become physically aroused during a given performance? Just because no record of it survives, thank God, that does not preclude the possibility. The spirit is willing; the flesh is weak. Farce enjoys all its slips of the tongue, to be sure; it has thoroughly mastered what we now call a Freudian slip or a lapsus linguae. I propose that, when assessing the extent to which medieval or modern farce is “pornographic” or “obscene,” it is helpful to make room not only for a linguistic slip but for a gestural slip. A lapsus gesti? The dirtier the play—and Blue Confessions, Bro Job, and Slick Brother Willy certainly qualify—the easier that is to imagine, especially if medieval props masters went to town, as they usually did, with the special effects. Recall, for instance, the technical wizardry of filling animal bladders with red liquid to simulate the blood of the Passion plays (Gatton, “ ‘There must be blood’ ”; MTOC, 192–202). As we shall see, those bladders could just as easily have been filled with milk for matters of not-so-religious ecstasy. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the ultimate Baudrillardian robbery scenario in which simulation is indistinguishable from reality but, this time, it’s a sexual scenario.²¹ And, lest you find my hypothesis far-fetched, I regret to relate that I myself have borne witness to such a thing at a vexed experimental performance piece.

As mounted by a graduate student in one of my theater seminars at UCSB, the work was presumably intended as dramatic metacommentary on arousal and catharsis in S-and-M sex. Quite unexpectedly, what some of us saw was a piece of pornography. As one of the actors was being whipped, he became visibly aroused. Farce would have invited us to laugh; but this was no farce and nobody did. In my own case, I did not laugh because, from my particular seat, my view of the events was obscured. Others, however, saw quite plainly a spectacle that, for them, constituted a violation of the theatrical contract. We had signed up for representation, not reality. Per the definitions cited above, the agents or actants of pornography must have the intent to arouse; and, while a play cannot be aroused, a performer very much can be. It makes little difference to an offended spectator whether the actor’s arousal was intended or not. Sometimes, of course, it’s a matter of degree. A “wardrobe malfunction” is of another order of magnitude than an unplanned erection. But one thing is clear: while the graphic UCSB performance was not meant to be funny, the graphic sexuality of some farces most definitely was. The corollary question is thus: accidental pornography notwithstanding, can farcical obscenity be funny? The present anthology tenders an unambiguous reply: yes. And its yes is relentlessly problematic.

Farce always overplays its hand and, consequently, it can become what Austin dubbed an “infelicitous” or an unhappy “misfire.”²² As the medium fires away, moreover, it justifiably rubs the feminist community the wrong way and causes deep unhappiness. But, where a Catherine MacKinnon emphasizes legal reality, others like Laura Kipnis, Wendy Steiner, and my colleague Constance Penley favor the metaphorical. For MacKinnon, pornography sounds a lot like medieval hagiography in its presentation of “the sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures or words that also includes women presented dehumanized as sexual objects who enjoy pain, humiliation, or rape; women bound, mutilated, dismembered, or tortured, women in postures of servility or submission or display; women being penetrated by objects or animals.”²³ Nevertheless, for the controversial Kipnis, “the world of pornography is mythological and hyperbolic, peopled by characters. It doesn’t and never will exist but it does—and this is part of its politics—insist on a sanctioned space for fantasy” (“How to Look at Pornography,” 119). Her observation, as germane to farce as to the morality play, holds true for any artist audacious enough to satirize a medieval ecclesiastical politics whose rules were meant to be broken. Some of those rules apply to the limits of not just sex but humor.

When writing on the reception of The Liquid Sky (1982), Steiner attributes to pornography many of the same potentially redeeming characteristics of farce: “the collapse of binary oppositions, as with the identical male and female models; the equation of art with assault; the inclusion of the audience in the action and therefore in the ethical responsibility for what is represented; and the outrageous cost of ecstasy” (The Scandal of Pleasure, 3). Farce is outrageous; but must it always be made to pay a price? And there’s something else. For Penley, pornography can be funny. That’s right. Whether it be projected on the screen of a playhouse, a television, a personal computer, or a handheld device, it can be as silly as men and women doing things with zucchinis. (As a resident of California, I hasten to assure you that we take vegetable abuse very seriously.) Porn is even funny in ways surprisingly evocative of medieval farce. Turning to the popular ditty “The Monk of Great Renown,” in which a clergyman engages in rape, anal intercourse, and necrophilia, Penley notes that “the somewhat tamer stag films that I have seen prefer to attack the hypocrisy of the clerical class by having the priests and the nuns get it on in all sorts of combinations.”²⁴ And just wait till you get a load of the eerie relevance of her work on the stag film Getting His Goat (1923) to Blue Confessions (below, #2, § “Sets and Staging”). Welcome to the farcical house of God.

Political Impieties

Centuries before Bill Maher, Jim Jefferies, Sarah Silverman, Colin Quinn, or Ricky Gervais ever launched joking indictments of religion, Tartuffery, and pedophile priests, farce was shining its harsh spotlight on them all. Even the taboo Holocaust as a matter for levity is the subject of the Netflix documentary The Last Laugh (2017). Is farcical humor offensive, disgusting, misogynistic, classist, elitist, ethnocentric, and irreligious? Totally. From Monk-ey Business (FF, #9) to Tartuffe to Diderot’s The Nun to such cinematic offerings as The Magdalen Sisters (2002), Philomena (2013), and Spotlight (2015), there is nothing remotely amusing about centuries of sexual abuse in ecclesiastical communities. Or anywhere else. But can farce be terribly funny anyway? In these humorless times? Or must it be dumped into the dustbin of history?

Obviously, with my ongoing commitment to making these texts available, I deem them resurrection-worthy. So does the classicist Shadi Bartsch in a 2021 op-ed for the Washington Post, “Don’t Yield Ancient Literature and History to the Alt-Right,” in which she urges that an unabashedly political translation reframe what is no longer tolerable. Reframing is precisely what theatrical performance always invites us to do. But that’s where the terrible fun begins. And the drama. And the politics of political incorrectness.

Impious and unorthodox, farce loves nothing better than to take on piety and orthodoxy of any ilk as it wages an extreme comical crusade against religious extremism. Of necessity, then, twenty-first-century humor will come face-to-face with a new fundamentalism about humor that is nowadays amplified by social media outrage. There’s a reason why we speak of political pieties. Indeed, when I lecture on these materials, audiences are routinely too uncomfortable to laugh, at which point, we retreat to the safer ground of the Reformation. Then as now, many might laugh at a farce about religion, but not at religion as farce. C’est la vie. C’est la farce. Maybe it’s not farce’s sexuality that is pornographic after all but its political humor, the ultimate sacrilege.

As Andrew Kay points out in “The Joke’s Over,” the current political climate has had dire consequences for the pleasures of satire at a cultural moment when we have never needed it more. Today’s satirist, he polemicizes, must reckon with a “cluster of menaces” that tend to “repel efforts at humor,” the sheer scale of which “can hector him into muteness.” To which I add: her too. It turns out that the Dark Ages had a lighter side; and France’s over two hundred rollicking, frolicking, singing, and dancing comedies—more extant than in any other vernacular—have waited long enough for their moment in the spotlight. Is their perilous work to become a latter-day casualty in the cultural battles about humor? Or might we call upon theater to allow us to laugh along with medieval people at religion and at ourselves? Might we join in the frivolity and release that can provoke new thinking? Or is the impolitic laughter itself beyond the pale? As we come face-to-face and farce to farce with the monitoring of humor, it behooves us to ponder the ways in which comedy pushes the envelope of the theological and pietistic alike. Medieval people had a sense of humor, and God only knows they needed one. Do we?

When deciding how to approach profanity and profanation, many scholars turn for insight to political theorists like Giorgio Agamben, and why not? Medieval theology is political, just as medieval politics is theological. Among the characters that you shall meet in the pages that follow: a fantastical female confessor who indicts French Cardinals in Rome as a bunch of asses (#4) and an ersatz resurrectee who tells tales of the Reformation Wars of Religion erupting in Heaven (#9). For myself, I prefer the rhetorical spin of a little-studied text by Kenneth Burke, one of the greatest political rhetoricians of all time. Burke was also a literary critic and a playwright of sorts when trying his hand at a forty-page morality play in his Rhetoric of Religion (1961), the nominal subject of which was logology or the linguistic politics of theology. His stated purpose was “simply to ask how theological principles can be shown to have usable secular analogues” (2; my emphasis); but there was nothing simple about it when he illustrated the phenomenon with an “Epilogue: Prologue in Heaven” (273–316). Burke’s epilogue is an imaginary dialogue between God and the Devil, complete with an expositor and stage directions. While I cannot do it justice here, perhaps readers will take it on faith that it owes less to Paradise Lost and more to ancient Greek mock encomia and medieval moralités. The “Prologue in Heaven” is a mise-en-scène, a riff on the “symbol-using animals” known as “Earth People,” who cannot do without their drama: “their words for morality, drama and action will all imply one another” (278). “You get drama,” he continues, “since drama is based on action.… That will be particularly important because of the large part that the arts of comedy and tragedy will play in their outlook, extending even to their ideas of ultimate salvation” (281). At one point in the dialogue, Satan goes so far as to demonstrate the new theology by analogizing it to a beautiful woman: “[the Earth People] will mean a seductive surface which perversely and reconditely alludes to the possibilities of motherhood, while underneath there lies a dying assemblage of bones, ooze, drip, slime and potential stench” (306). It’s hard to come closer to farce than that. A “usable secular analogue” on its own terms, farce might well appear to be inimical to religion; but, in turning everything inside out and outside in, it demands a closer look at the rhetorical and theatrical foundations of faith. For Burke, when you think through religion, you get drama. For the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, you also get farce, a medium that can nurture more nuanced thinking about theology, even if it does so in the most brazen manner. Rather than police or censor its vile language, we might choose instead to explore, reinterpret, reshape, subvert, and, in a word, translate a theatrical body of work for new bodies politic.

In challenging us to laugh at moral abuse, in its critique of flagrant antisocial behavior, farce is sociably funny enough to reclaim its place in literary history and serious enough to participate in the larger critical conversation about medieval and early modern culture. For better or for worse—for better and for worse—it has always intervened to expose and even to right the wrongs of the past. Each time readers and practitioners translate imaginatively or materially from the page to the stage, they take up theater’s call. In my own work, I’ve been profoundly influenced by Elaine Scarry’s paradigm-shifting The Body in Pain, where she theorized that “physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned” (4). What the farcical corpus helps us to discover is that, if pain defies language, maybe pleasure does too. We might, therefore, look at and listen to all those laughing bodies in pain, the better to access the sights and sounds of their pleasure. And ours.

About This Translation

It is no coincidence that one speaks of a translation that is faithful or unfaithful. Nowhere is that more true than in these farces devoted to theology, which I call, more emphatically than ever, adapted translations (HD, 20). Ever operating in good faith and committed to rendering each and every word of the Middle French, I’ve still sought to capture their overall mood through contemporary cultural touchstones while attending to many of the needs of the prickliest medievalist. This time, however, for plays that survive in more than one version, I’ve taken things a step further with two bona fide composite editions for Blue Confessions (#2) and Bro Job (#7) (below, § “Critical Apparatus”). Otherwise, the main advantage of a multivolume project like this one is that I’ve already shared the majority of my editorial theories and practices (FF, 33–54; HD, 20–33). I’ll confine myself to a few supplemental methods to the translational madness.

Feminist Dramaturgy: An Encore Performance

Farce is notorious for its violence, sexism, classism, and misogyny. But theater itself is always translation, always adaptation. Performance changes everything, especially when so much of theater’s beauty, magic, and verve lies in its virtuality and mutability. With or without an extant script, theater is a vision of and for action: a move from image to speech, idea to embodiment, piety to prayer, page to stage, thought to motion, sight to sound, vision to action. The unseen becomes seeable; the unimaginable, imaginable; the unstageable, stageable. In Immaculate Deception, moreover, if the move from idea to embodiment is the literal incarnation of a rhetorical and theological practice, it is also a translational practice. More intriguing still: in an act requiring imagination and fidelity, the translator must attend to all of that as she reimagines a given story for the living stage. She becomes a virtual director, producer, and dramaturge in a process that is less about an author’s (or authors’) meaning (or meanings) and more about multiple subjectivities multiplied exponentially.

Myriad individuals collaborate to make theater: authors, producers, directors, set- and costume designers, actors, and audiences, all of whom inflect interpretation(s) in different ways that vary from performance to performance, place to place, time to time, person to person, and within the same person. Theater has no voice per se: only voices. And that’s before we face the music—including the literal musicality—of the still more daunting challenge of what is unseen on the page, namely: all the pantomime, the dance, the melodies, the intonation. In a repertoire dominated by irrecuperable physical, visual, and auditory comedy, that is often what matters the most. Readers are probably familiar with the translator’s le mot juste: to wit, “just the right word” for terms and expressions that seem untranslatable. In this series, I must also locate l’acte juste: “just the right stage action” that will bring home the message at some five centuries’ remove. Verbal language is not the only conduit to the past. As art historians know full well, so too is nonverbal language and, in my own case, so too is the complex scenic use of silence, gesture, staging, tears, and laughter.

In the Middle Ages, silence doesn’t always mean what we think it does; quite to the contrary, it can be teeming with life and rebellion. Nor does it necessarily denote consent. In comedy, silence can speak volumes, such that a faithful, feminist translation of farce might readily speak to us today. Once we draw on the transformative power of performance to adapt, alter, interpret, and even subvert, theater invariably offers a way for new generations to raise their voices, to be heard, and to act. A deceptively silly farce can present to the modern world a strategic deployment of words and acts that do not divide but, rather, unite all those who dream of a common language.

An unabashedly political feminist translation can both reframe and reject the original sexism by doing the very thing that theater invites us to do: adapt and inflect (HD, 20–22). But one thing is clear: we are unlikely to find that out unless we listen to and hear the palpable silences of the comic theater and, with any luck, inaugurate a translational movement of #ThemToo.

High Art, Low Art

Three volumes and myriad conversations into this project, I’ve noticed something about artistic sensibility and, more and more, sensitivity. Independent of the delicate farcical balance that is perpetually struck between pleasure and pain, it is my distinct impression that there is an investment in and an expectation of comedy that is different from what we bring to other creative media. When I teach these materials, for instance, it is not uncommon to hear a student profess to feeling excluded from all the lawyerly in-jokes, the isolated phrases in Latin or Italian, the allusions to specific historical events, or the arcane and even not-so-arcane references. My usual response is to quote the immortal words of Jerry Seinfeld: not that there’s anything wrong with that. Be that as it may, the resentment to which satire can give rise frequently yields something like this: if the humor’s not for me, it’s not for us, and, therefore, not for anyone. To that, I say: jokes have eternally been made at somebody else’s expense, the jokers’ included. If, for Aristotle, comedy “sets out to represent people as worse than they are today” (Poetics, 1448a), I would venture to say that farce admits us into a world in which people are nastier than we are. While we have happily moved away from the excessive cruelty that perpetuates cultural stereotypes, not everyone is meant to get every joke. But does that mean that this is a repertoire that only the most dispassionate intellectual could love? I think not; but the reasons why not might fruitfully relax some of the strictures placed all too easily on comedy.

Take the sexism and elitism of farce’s notoriously frank vernacular. Its idiom, constantly evolving, is gleefully grounded in the learned and popular culture of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Current today, gone tomorrow: for us as for them. In the pages that follow, you will encounter a “Jesus H. Christ” here, a “Jeez Louise” or a “Crikey” there. You might even wince at the occasional archaism or anachronism, many of which, by the way, farce delights in deploying deliberately. And yet, I don’t recall too many scathing readerly indictments of a translator’s recourse to “alas” or “hark” in Homer or Shakespeare, nor of a director’s to period-piece music. Nor did archaisms seem to bother anybody in Nathaniel Dubin’s groundbreaking verse translations of the filthy fabliaux. But, somehow, when poetry is rendered as poetry, even the lowly fabliaux can be received as high art. No such luck for their farcical compère. Farce is relentlessly low art, the black sheep of the literary family, even though the translational situation is palpably the same. Its language, humor, and music must sound contemporary, regardless of all the changes with the times, and, interestingly enough, when my students stage these plays, that’s not a problem. They routinely update a given text in accordance with whatever is dictated verbally or nonverbally by their communities. No matter that their rescripted or improvisational moments affect the rhythm, rhyme, or reason of one moment or another. They’ve gotten it exactly right. They’ve done just what they’re supposed to do for a site-specific theater: adapt and readapt, inflect and reinflect, fashion and refashion, interpret and reinterpret. If anything, they have mirrored the premodern circumstances better than my books could possibly do in that we have, all of us, become translators.

Comedy, theater, and the comic theater are always of the moment and that moment always changes. Likewise for the present offerings, which are not meant to be carved in stone. Indeed, if I’ve managed to translate one highly local, humorously contextualized moment into another—that of my own American popular culture—then I do believe that I’ve been faithful. To anyone who complains that he or she wants a literal translation, this much, I can assure you: it doesn’t exist and, no, you don’t. Not if this repertoire is to live on. Read 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 who knows? Open Access might well turn out to be the best possible venue for the dynamism of a dynamic theater.

On Anonymity, Naming, and Renaming

As in the two previous volumes, I refer to the twelve plays here assembled by the titles that I have bestowed upon them and to their dramatis personae by the names with which I’ve baptized or rebaptized them. I also continue to assign textually justifiable names to the many unnamed female characters. As you’ve doubtless gleaned from the Table of Contents alone, this ensemble is not particularly friendly to religion. Lest you suspect that I’ve transmuted a “feminist appropriation” (HD, 20–22) into a secular one, I hasten to emphasize that any joyously irreverent hostility toward theology is that of the original farceurs.

Critical Apparatus, Stage Directions, Composite Editions

With a renewed effort to fashion a critical apparatus that is useful for the specialist but will not overwhelm others, I’ve endeavored to keep the endnotes in bounds. Future volumes will be streamlined more radically but, for the time being, only the most germane matters of philology, history, or transmission are explored in the endnotes (more extensively when there is a scant editorial tradition or, as for the RC plays, online availability is spotty). Their scope tends to be limited to an English-language source or two, the better to get new researchers started; but do be aware that the Bibliography doesn’t begin to cover all the scholars who have long inspired me. I employ parenthetical documentation whenever practicable, especially for the frequently cited works in the list of abbreviations. I also beg your indulgence for mentioning a great deal of my own work: its extensive bibliographies are easy to access. All translations of primary and secondary sources are mine unless otherwise indicated, as, for instance, for Donald Frame’s Rabelais (CWFR).

In accordance with my past practice, I italicize any original Middle French stage directions, which appear unbracketed, as opposed to my own bracketed interpolations that signal such situations as these: nonspeaking characters that I’ve added to the casts of characters; dramaturgical guidance for set design, action, or pantomime; scene breaks; my best guess at what might be missing for an orphaned rhyme; a clarification of an obscure historical reference; a translation of a Latin phrase unlikely to be understood; the setup for a joke, and so forth. Regarding the two composite editions of Blue Confessions and Bro Job, I’ve introduced new editorial conventions to accommodate three types of parenthetical: my habitual square brackets for marking my own interpolations or stage directions; curly brackets for stage directions within those textual interpolations; and, for the first time, angle brackets to flag my translations of a second (or third) base text.

The quick-takes of my “Brief Plot Summaries” again shepherd your choice of what to read; and each play’s “Production Notes” lay out the five categories of § “Plot,” § “Characters and Character Development,” § “Language,” § “Sets and Staging,” and § “Costumes and Props.” That said, those categories remain as fungible and arbitrary as ever. It regularly proves impossible to separate a play’s story line (§ “Plot”) from its overarching metaphors (§ “Language”) from its dramaturgical mise-en-scène (§ “Sets and Staging”) from a protagonist’s persona or speech patterns (§ “Characters and Character Development”). Unfortunately, one rare subsection is wholly absent in Immaculate Deception: “Performance History.” Although Petit de Julleville stressed that over a thousand sociétés joyeuses played farces and soties all over France (RTC, 140), no concrete information has come down to us about a single production of our twelve plays.¹ Instead, I give a shout-out, when appropriate, to any noteworthy modern one.

Editions and Printed Sources

Immaculate Deception features plays from all four of the key medieval-Renaissance collections: the Recueil du British Museum (RBM), the Recueil La Vallière (RLV), the Recueil Cohen (RC), or Recueil de Florence (RFlorence), and, making its debut in my series, the Recueil Trepperel (RT). There are six farces from the RBM: Blue Confessions (#2), Confession Follies (#5), Bro Job (#7), The Resurrection of Johnny Slack-Jaw (#9), The Pardoners’ Tales (#10), and Slick Brother Willy (#11); three from the RC: Highway Robbery (#3), Confessions of a Medieval Drama Queen (Drama Queens for short [#4]), and The Resurrection of Johnny Palmer (#8); two from the RLV: Brother Fillerup (#6) and Immaculate Deception (#12); and one from the RT: The Con-Man’s Confession (#1). All four Recueils preserve plays that are believed to predate considerably the sixteenth-century dates of their compilation; all four exist in accessible postmedieval editions and, for the RBM and RLV, in both digitized and facsimile editions. Rest assured that, if an edition could be located, I’ve consulted it, along with any translation thereof (the latter, only after completing my travails). To facilitate perusal of the Middle French, I’ve favored referring you to the convenient digitized editions. If there is a better edition—oftentimes, by the incomparable André Tissier, Jelle Koopmans, or Thierry Martin—I incorporate its teachings. Each set of “Production Notes” will remind you of a play’s provenance, but here are the basics.²

The Recueil du British Museum, discovered in 1840, contains sixty-four plays believed to date from 1540–50, of which forty-seven are farces. For our six RBM farces, I cite from Viollet le Duc’s Ancien Théâtre françois (ATF), a ten-volume series for which a young Anatole de Montaiglon prepared the actual editions (RF, 6: 252n). The first citation always specifies ATF, after which the designation is dropped, followed by volume and page number; there are no verse numbers in ATF. When an ancillary lesson is needed from the original RBM, I send you to Halina Lewicka’s facsimile edition, the legible Gothic typeface of which is decipherable even for the amateur. While each play therein is clearly demarcated by the large Roman numeral on its title page, its continuously paginated folio numbers can be difficult to see. Therefore, in lieu of directing you to something like fol. 367v, I cite a local folio number (i.e., fol. i or v for Slick Brother Willy).

In the Recueil La Vallière, dating from approximately 1535–45 and copied around 1575, we find seventy-four plays, forty-eight of them farces. It was copied in Rouen (Normandy) in the 1570s and sold in 1780 by its owner, the Duke of La Vallière, whence its name. For the RLV, I largely adopt the same procedure as for the ATF, citing by volume and local page number from the four-volume Recueil de farces, moralités et sermons joyeux edited by Antoine Le Roux de Lincy and Francisque Michel (RFMSJ). Pagination in that edition is complicated, however, in that it is not continuous within a given volume (let alone over the four volumes). For guidance from the original manuscript, I number the folios as I did for the RBM; and an excellent facsimile edition of the RLV was published by Slatkine in 1972. Additionally, the Bibliothèque Nationale has digitized the entire RLV (Ms. 24341) but, regrettably, the reproduction is of poor quality.³ I am happy to report that, at the time of this writing, Mario Longtin was hard at work on reeditions of all seventy-four plays, but under the revised name of the Recueil de Rouen.

The Recueil Cohen (RC), so named for its first editor, Gustave Cohen (1949), houses fifty-three plays, all called “farces,” for which I cite his verse numbers. The RC was discovered in Florence in 1928, only to be lost again for many years, precluding all scholarly comparison with Cohen’s Recueil de farces françaises inédites du XV^e siècle. That changed in 2011 when, in the denouement of an editorial cloak-and-dagger story (FF, 39–40), Jelle Koopmans managed to relocate, reedit, restore, and republish the compilation under a new name, the Recueil de Florence, to which I turn for important new clarifications and corrections. The plays, asserts Koopmans and in contrast to previous assumptions, were probably printed in two installments during the first quarter of the sixteenth century (ca. 1504–21 and 1512–21); and their overall cleanliness prompts him to wonder whether they were much used at all (RFlorence, 7, 15). Even so, the originals are as inaccessible as ever. To date, no one but Koopmans has seen them, such that signs of strain have emerged. In the “Préface” to his online edition of Sotties et Farces du XV^e et du XVI^e siècle (SFQS), we can hear Thierry Martin’s frustration: “In a private collection, Koopmans has found the Recueil believed to have been lost, but we are still waiting for him to give the proof of this rediscovery by showing the photographic reproduction that he purports to possess.”⁴

Finally, the Recueil Trepperel, comprised of thirty-five plays, of which five are farces, was edited in two volumes by another towering figure from medieval studies: Eugénie Droz, who published Les Sotties and, in collaboration with Lewicka, Les Farces. Also discovered in Florence in 1928, the RT was a major find, despite a number of incomprehensible passages, inverted speeches, omissions, inappropriate archaisms, errors, and inscrutable allusions to unidentifiable events (RTLS, xii–xiii). Printed in Paris, it likely dates from approximately 1504–25 and may have belonged to a Parisian theater troupe (Bouhaïk-Gironès, Les Clercs, 227, 322–23).

As far as modern editions and, more rarely, translations are concerned, it’s a pleasure to acknowledge the tour-de-force erudition of Tissier’s thirteen-volume Recueil de farces (1450–1550) (RF), as well as the modern French translations he provided for all sixty-five in the terrific four-volume Farces françaises de la fin du Moyen Âge (FFMA). Bernard Faivre crafted a bilingual edition of Slick Brother Willy (#11) in Les Farces (1: 199–268); and, more recently, a full 136 farces and soties have been posted online in the superb Sotties et Farces du XV^e et du XVI^e siècle (https://sottiesetfarces.wordpress.com/about/). And counting. These invaluable and heavily annotated editions come to us courtesy of the genius of Thierry Martin, whose verve is inflected by an ebullient queer theory and who publishes under the playful pseudonym of “Maître Antitus.” Just one caveat: Martin is so prolific that it is impossible to keep up. Since he updates his site regularly, its content will almost certainly have changed by the time you read this book. When citing his oeuvre, I refer to Martin’s brief prefatory notes to each play as “Introd.,” and to his verse numbers and endnote numbers, but with the same caveat: any note might have been renumbered or eliminated. (When not otherwise indicated, all dates of access are 25 January 2021.)

To my knowledge, none of the dozen plays of Immaculate Deception have ever been translated into English; but five have indeed been translated into modern French (details to come in their corresponding Production Notes): Blue Confessions, The Resurrection of Johnny Slack-Jaw, The Pardoners’ Tales, Slick Brother Willy, and Immaculate Deception. At one point, a number were published online in Portuguese too; but they were subsequently removed, including Slick Brother Willy (initially accessed on 21 December 2015). Consequently, the number of medieval French farces available in English remains quite low. Counting the present twelve—and in light of my previous calculations (FF, 37; HD, 25)—Anglophones can now enjoy forty-eight farces of the some two hundred extant. For plot summaries of all the rest, several French-language resources are at our disposal, notably Petit de Julleville’s Répertoire du théâtre comique (RTC) and Faivre’s deliciously tongue-in-cheek Répertoire (1993). Occasionally, one or the other excludes a farce from consideration, seemingly deeming it a morality play, a dialogue, or simply not funny enough. And do be advised that the RC plays were not within Petit de Julleville’s purview: his RTC was published in 1886, over fifty years before Cohen’s RC of 1949. Likewise for Faivre’s inability to cite all of Tissier’s RF editions (1986–2000): his Répertoire appeared in 1993. Every now and then, I also cite from the oft-scandalized Octave Joseph Delepierre, aka Tridace-Nafé-Théobrome (FF, 416n), who catalogued and recapped the RBM plays in his Description et analyse d’un livre unique qui se trouve au Musée britannique of 1849 (DLU).

As in the past, when I reproduce the Middle French, I resolve abbreviations, regularize the spelling of titles and characters’ names, and modernize such archaisms as “j” for “i” and “v” for “u.” When reader-friendly, I add the odd diacritical as well: the preposition à receives its accent grave or a naked e, its accent aigu (é) or accent grave (è). I also capitalize or italicize the generic names of the characters of the play, even if they are not capitalized consistently in the Middle French: “The Wife,” for example, for La femme or La Femme.

Order of Presentation: Intertextuality, “Intersexuality,” and Casting

The Farce of the Fart was an anthology of some of my favorites; Holy Deadlock was a comical chronology of marriage; Immaculate Deception now speaks to us of religion and—take it on faith—one volume doesn’t begin to cut it. We begin our journey with four—almost five—confession farces that frame the quintessential theatrical and theological questions of public vs. private, authentic vs. inauthentic, repentant vs. unrepentant. Confession Follies (#5) then serves as a transition to the various physical and spiritual remedies to be administered to the flock, primarily to women. After Brother Fillerup’s tawdry prescription (#6), Bro Job enacts a cure so graphic that it’s licentious even for farce (#7). Next, follow the pointing aspergillum and watch the dead rise in two respective (if hardly respectful) resurrections of two drunken John-Boys (the Fool-Badin’s typical moniker): Johnny Palmer (#8) and Johnny Slack-Jaw (#9). After all, miracles make for good business, stage business, and funny business as they do in the delightful Pardoners’ Tales (#10), which then sets the stage for the crème de la crème. The cream definitely rises to the top after Slick Brother Willy delivers a filthy sermon that foretells a lot more exposure than his naked butt (#11). Last, it’s a nun’s butt on the line in Immaculate Deception (#12), and not necessarily just the pregnant one’s. By the way, our final three plays—a potential triple bill—are united by underwear and headgear, enjoying what Andrew Sofer has shown to be the phenomenological richness of props (Stage Life of Props, 1–60).

In terms of casting and consistent with the genre’s reputation for etymological “stuffing,” these farces dialogue with one another intertextually and “intersexually” as one medium or genre penetrates another (miracle play, Passion play, moralité, song, fabliau, poetry, etc.). Most medieval plays were performed by men; so, by all means, cast men, if you so desire. But go big. Go camp. Go drag queen. And don’t hesitate to cross-cast or to bend the rules and play it “bent,” underscoring the prospects of latent or blatant homoeroticism. Premodern French theater history hosts plenty of male-male attraction. Remember when young Lyonard’s Saint Barbara of 1485 looked so much like a woman that he inadvertently seduced a priest (DBD, 29–42)? But medieval women correspondingly took to the stage: as early, we surmise, as Hrotsvitha’s tenth-century adaptations of Terence. Throughout a “long Middle Ages” that stretched well into the sixteenth century with, say, Antonia Pulci’s Italian convent dramas, we find such actresses as the unnamed young lady playing Saint Catherine in 1468 or one Françoise Buatier in 1535, whose Virgin Mary brought down the house in Grenoble (DBD, 17–43). Significantly, the first extant contract for an actress was issued in 1545 to a Marie Ferré, and it included farce work, authorizing her to play “histories, moralities, farces, and acrobatics [histoires, morales, farces et sobressaults] in exchange for 12 livres tournois per year.”⁵ What is more, all that gender-bending revelry can be amplified today. Why not cast actors who are not so much the twelfth-century hermaphrodites analyzed by Nederman and True (“Third Sex”) as they are trans, gender nonbinary, gender-ambiguous, or, for Bychowski, “intersex” (“Isle”). Especially in a play like Blue Confessions, replete with big reveals, the gender of the actors might prove the biggest shocker of all, conceivably during the supremely liminal moment of the curtain call (as theorized by Bert States in Great Reckonings [197–206]). Nowhere more so than with Birdie of Johnny Palmer (#8), where the pronouns they, them, their work best. It all depends on how secretly—or manifestly campily—an actor wishes to convey his, her, or their own gender throughout the performance. To my eye, the whole vibe is very much akin to that of a classic Dunkin Donuts ad in which a quite obviously mustachioed man plays a woman;⁶ or, in the converse phenomenon, where Melissa McCarthy parodies Sean Spicer or Kate McKinnon does Rudy Giuliani on Saturday Night Live. Or, wait! Also from SNL, “It’s Pat!” (gender unidentifiable). Or, from cinema, it’s Victor! It’s Victoria! No, it’s farce!

Oh, Brother! Costuming the Medieval Monastic Orders

So much monk-ey business, so little time. This book is a far cry from a primer on monasticism, which is why I bring this up under translation methodology rather than theology. But, if we are to understand our dramatis personae, something of the fundamentals of medieval religious life is in order. Dotting the farcical landscape of western Europe, as well as the pages of Boccaccio’s Decameron or Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron, were the omnipresent monks, friars, hermits, and brothers, fixtures one and all of daily life. Notwithstanding the proverbial wisdom that you can’t judge a book by its cover or a monk by his habit (l’habit ne fait pas le moine), it turns out that you can indeed judge a monk by his cover and by his umpteen cover stories. Faced with farce’s bands of Brothers Minor (Frères mineurs) and Brothers Preachers (Frères prescheurs), we too must be able to judge them instantaneously by their vestimentary and behavioral habits.

As recognized by the Second Council of Lyon (1274), those represented here belonged to the four medieval mendicant or “begging” orders, which came to prominence in the thirteenth century. The Order of Preachers, the Friars Minor, the Carmelites, and the Hermits of Saint Augustine renounced all worldly goods and property and were vowed to poverty. As “begging friars,” they traveled from town to town; and their communities sprung up around larger cities, where they cared for the sick and preached the word of God. There, they subsisted on the charitable kindness of strangers or, as farce would have it, did anything but subsist. (For myself, I keep hearing Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood to the portly Friar Tuck: “If this is poverty, I’ll gladly share it with you.”) Members of all four orders, for example, are named as the sex partners of the hyperactive penitent of Blue Confessions (#2): the Dominicans (Jacobins), the Franciscans (Cordeliers or frères de la Corde), and the less influential Augustinians (Augustins) and Carmelites (Carmes) (AF, 4; Andrews, The Other Friars). Who are they exactly? Thanks to such superb scholarship as that of Frances Andrews, Bernard McGinn, Jill Raitt, Keith Egan, Guy Geltner, Wayne Hellmann, Richard Kieckhefer, Tim Rayborn, Simon Tugwell, and Adolar Zumkeller, it is possible to find out.⁷

The challenge today—whence the thumbnail sketches below—is how best to make this tall order of monks legible to contemporary audiences who are, for the most part, unfamiliar with their ways. Problems of cultural literacy become problems of costuming; but their true colors can be revealed by just that: some color-coding. From medieval heraldry to Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (77–78) to Susan Crane’s Performance of Self (10–38), we are what we wear or, as Slick Brother Willy would have it (#11), what we don’t. The Dominicans (“Blackfriars” in Britain) donned a black cloak or cappa over their white habits; for the Franciscans, it was fifty shades of “Greyfriar”; while the Augustinian “all blacks”—no, that’s not a soccer team—sported two types of black woolen tunic. The outdoor version had “long, wide sleeves, a black leather girdle and a large shoulder cape to which is attached a long, pointed hood reaching to the girdle”; the indoor version featured a scapular or “short monastic cloak covering the shoulders over which the shoulder cape is worn” (Derwich, “Clothing”). And the chaste Carmelites were mostly dressed in white; but, in Blue Confessions, we’ll have some fun with their original, Elijah-black- or brown-and-white striped mantles.

Dominicans or Jacobins. Founded by Saint Dominic and recognized by the papacy in 1216, the Dominican Order of Friars Preachers (frères prescheurs or Prescheurs) dominated the medieval French religious scene. Since its brothers were sworn to preach, they were to be found near major urban centers, where their houses were called “convents” or couvents (a small lexical item that can aid in pinpointing the religious sensibility of any given farce). The Dominicans went by the name of “Jacobins” as well, owing to the location of their Parisian house on the rue Saint-Jacques (Jacques> Jacobins). Not only was that street a stone’s throw from the Sorbonne: their church was also one of the stages of the storied pilgrimage route of Saint Jacques de Compostelle or the Camino de Santiago (RF, 6: 395n). In contrast to their more or less unschooled Franciscan brethren, the highly educated Dominicans played an important role in medieval education. Thomas Aquinas was a Dominican; and so too were the “hounds of the Lord” (a pun in Latin on domini canes) associated with the atrocities of the Inquisition, the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars (AF, 21), and the prosecution of Joan of Arc. Like the Augustinians, the Dominicans followed the Rule of Saint Augustine, observing corporate and individual poverty (AF, 19–27). Interestingly, they took one vow only—that of obedience—with the vows of poverty and chastity implicit (Tugwell, “Spirituality of the Dominicans,” 20–23). And who better to look for a legal loophole than a Dominican or—what do you know!—a Basochien?

Franciscans or Cordeliers. With the Dominicans under our belts, we can proceed to the Brothers of the belt—les frères de la Corde or Cordeliers—better known as the Franciscans (“Greyfriars” across the Channel). They were not monks per se but “little brothers” of the order of Friars Minor (frères mineurs or fratres minor[e]s), which was established in 1209 by Saint Francis of Assisi (AF, 16). Notoriously corrupt and promiscuous, they could be found hanging around cities like Paris, their nickname deriving from something else that was hanging: their distinctive rope belt or cincture (corde) with its three knots that symbolized their three vows. Chief among those vows was that of “radical voluntary poverty,” which, as Rayborn explains, required that they “sell all of their possessions and give the money to the poor before they would be admitted” to the order. “With no permanent homes,” he continues, “no possessions, no wealth, and no food, they set out into the world, adopting a mendicant lifestyle and begging for their food, taking shelter where they could, and considering it a badge of honor if they were abused or turned away, living just as they believed the first apostles did.” Walking barefoot and subject to pain and humiliation, they were aiming at a true, papally sanctioned imitatio Christi (AF, 16). Needless to say, farce was at pains to up the humiliation by highlighting the deterioration of their lofty impulses into a quest for the fulfillment of material and earthly needs.

The Augustinians or Augustins. Other “Brothers Minor” to claim farce’s attention were the Augustinians, sometimes dubbed hermits of Saint Augustine, Augustinian hermits, Augustine Monks, or, in England, Austin Friars. And let’s not forget that hermits are popping up all over the place in medieval romance, say, any time a knight-errant seeks to have his dream interpreted. The Augustinians were dedicated, as their name implies, to the Rule of Saint Augustine (ca. 400), which had enormous impact in Italy, Switzerland, and Germany too, where Martin Luther was one such friar (from 1505 until his excommunication in 1520). The eight brief chapters of their doctrine give the essence of their spiritual father’s theology: the quest for God through prayer, the peace and harmony of communal monastic existence, and service to the Church. In farce, of course, ministry, spirituality, and fraternity readily morph into forerunners of libertinage, animalité, and a fraternité that could put any latter-day frat house to shame. In the place of Augustinian prayer, farce chose parody. For preaching, it substituted the sermon joyeux; for forgiveness, grudge fests; for chastity, promiscuity; for discipline, indulgence; for obedience, disobedience; and for pastoral care, a good pastoral poke.

Carmelites or Carmes. The so-called Brothers or Friars of Mount Carmel belonged to the “Order of the Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel” (Ordo Fratrum Beatissimae Virginis Mariae de Monte Carmelo). It was founded, we think, in the twelfth century and went on to flourish in Spain and England, with French houses springing up in Montpellier and Paris as early as the mid-thirteenth century. Its members, who resided in individual cells, took vows of obedience, chastity, and poverty, living solitary lives of prayer, penance, work, silence, fasting, abstinence from meat (except in cases of severe illness), and strict separation from the world.⁸ Presumed to be under the protection of the Virgin Mary and, thus, associated with the Marianic cult, their ranks included friars and cloistered nuns, plus uncloistered laypeople who had the right to marry (Egan, “Spirituality of the Carmelites,” 50–56). For now, let’s just say that the Carmelite nuns mentioned in Bro Job might dispute their adherence to those vows (below, #7, note 25).

Curses and Exclamations

Not up to speed with your Bible? Your liturgy? Your Latin? No problem. To a large extent, neither was the average spectator or, for that matter, the average clergyman. This was clearly a source of tremendous amusement for the Basochiens, who must have chafed at seeing illiterate priests in more lofty social positions than their learned, lawyerly selves. Out of the mouths of babes—and of the unruly clerics hitting on them—there issues mangled yet comprehensible Latin. The French call it “kitchen Latin” (latin de cuisine), for which I earlier coined the term “Flatin” (by analogy to “Franglais” or “Fritalian”).⁹ And their garbled language perfectly befits their garbled prayers, confessions, blessings, and the granting of absolution. As in Holy Deadlock (HD, #7, 216–22), no holy utterance is immune from “obscenic” mutation. A sacred prayer becomes a scatological drinking song; the Kyrie, Sanctus, or Agnus Dei of Mass is fodder for profane puns. And yet, blasphemous times call for translational piety. The theological stakes being what they are in this group of farces (and hereafter), I’ve sought a greater degree of specificity and consistency than before because of the sheer volume of curses, expletives, and even plain old exclamations. Yes, our characters are still swearing by every real and imaginary saint in the book—like Saints Muffie, Poontang, Meatstick, and Boozler—for which Jacques Merceron’s encyclopedic DSI remains a godsend. But so repeatedly do they take the name of the Lord in vain that I’ve formulated the handy glossary below, which I follow almost without exception. As one would expect, bieu mostly stands in for Dieu, as does “gosh” for “God”: the medieval equivalent of posting beotch online so that the censor doesn’t catch bitch. But that general tendency only makes the random Dieu or Jésus Christ all the more shocking. Unfortunately, this précis isn’t backward-compatible with Farce of the Fart or Holy Deadlock; but I’ll stick with it in future translations. Bottom line: when it’s Dieu, not bieu, you’ll always see an idiom with “God”; and, by all means, add some of your own when the spirit moves you, like “Christ on a bike,” “Jumpin’ Jesus,” and the like.

chair bieu = Jesus fucking Christ (literally, “Gosh’s flesh”)

corps bieu or corbieu = Jesus H. Christ on a cracker (the body of Christ is a wafer, after all)

croix bieu = Jesus H. Christ on the Cross

Dea or Ouy, dea = Jeez or good heavens or Lord, have mercy or for Chrissakes

Dieu le mauldie = God damn him

Dieu me/te doint joye = God give me/you great joy or peace or good day

Dieu mercy = Thank God or Praise the Lord

Je vous prometz! = I do solemnly swear or mark my words

ma foy or par ma foy = I swear or my goodness or goodness me or my, my, my or hello!

maulgré bieu de = what the fudge

midieulx, se m’aïst Dieu[x], or se mesdieux = God help me or Lord, have mercy

morbieu, mor bieu, or mort bieu = Jesus flippin’ Christ

par bieu = by golly or omigod or for goodness’ sake or for gosh sakes

par Dieu = by God or Good God Almighty or I swear to God or oh, for God’s sake

par la chair Dieu = Christ in the flesh

par la mort sans remission = damn it to hell

par le Dieu qui me fist = in the name of the God who gave me life

par les saints Dieu = saints alive

par mon ame = bless my soul

par Nostre Dame = Hail, Mary, full of grace or Mother Mary or Mary, Mother of God

pour Dieu/de par Dieu = for God’s sake or Good God

sang bieu = Jesus H. Christ (literally, the archaic “God’s blood” or “s’blood”)

ta foy, par ta foy = gimme a break

ventre bieu = Holy flippin’ Christ

vertu bieu = Jesus H. Christ Almighty

vertu Dieu = Jesus Christ Almighty

vierge Marie = Mary, Mother of God

That said, not all exclamations are blasphemous or obscene. You can swear by garlic and onions, for example, as in #1, Con-Man’s Confession (RTLF, v. 64), when you don’t give a fig. But I’ve sought relative consistency for those too, even as different expressions sound different on different lips. Thus, for helas or las, I usually go with “Lord have mercy!” rather than the old-hat “alas”; but “Jeez” works better in Confession Follies (#5) or Johnny Palmer (#8); while, in Slick Brother Willy (#11), helas runs the gamut from “alas,” “bummer,” “pity,” and “oh, well” to “it’s awful.” Keep an eye out as well for certes (alternatively “certainly” or “to be sure”) and the affirmative enda!, for which, depending on the personnage, you’ll read something on the order of “bless my soul,” “you betcha,” “damn straight,” “holy shit,” “amen to that,” “fuckin’ A,” or “what do you think?” Ditto for nenny, which might be “no way,” “no, no,” “nuh-uh,” or “not at all.” Even the seemingly simple c’est bien dit can resonate as “well said” vs. “you can say that again!” while or sus encompasses “hurry up,” “quick,” “step on it,” “pray,” or “please continue.” Any noteworthy linguistic idiosyncrasies are addressed under either § “Characters and Character Development” or § “Language.” And I’ve left onomatopoeia as is for laughter, snickering, and shouting: hon, hon, hon, hy, hy, hy, hen! Hen! Hen!

Money, Money, Money

As I’ve observed before, it is nearly impossible to find accurate contemporary monetary values for the diverse medieval currencies that are bound to farce’s dual propensity for exaggeration on one hand and understatement on the other (HD, 28, 351–52). Compared to Holy Deadlock, our characters obsess less about the denominations of the legal tender; but I adhere to the same currency calculator established there for écus, ducats, francs, livres, sous, and deniers (HD, 28–29). I refer you anew to the handy tables in Peter Spufford’s Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe (397–410) and Marie-Thérèse Boyer-Xambeu’s Private Money and Public Currencies (114–15). Also helpful is Tissier’s calculation that a denier was worth one-twelfth of a sou; a gold ducat, ten to twelve francs; an écu ordinaire, about three francs; and both the franc and the livre (or livre tournois), equal to twenty sous (RF, 6: 449, 150n). In Immaculate Deception, my historically proportional translation of farcical finance again amounts to this: a gold ducat will be worth about $200 USD, an écu, roughly $100, and a franc or a livre, about $20. For the coins of lesser value, a sou will equal about $1, and a denier, about a dime.¹⁰ In our first farce, we even encounter a poujoyse, worth only one-quarter of a denier (RTLF, 62n): literally, a currency you wouldn’t give two cents about.

Prose, Verse, Music, and Choreography

Encore! Encore! Farce adores giving the public a song and dance; so, I continue to spotlight anything that smacks of a musical intertext or a call-out for performance (and I’ve doubtless missed some of those original cues). Melodically, linguistically, nonlinguistically, and corporeally—with song, words, laughter, and farts—refrains are heard time and time again, almost as farcical koinoi topoi in a medium that is wont to repeat itself (FF, 48–49) and which redundancies I carefully preserve. Characters not only say the same things: they sing or bodily express the same things. That sent me back to my musical touchstones: French music hall à la Edith Piaf or the televised variety show Champs-Elysées (1982–90); rock ’n’ roll, country, rap, hip-hop, Broadway musicals, and so on. When venturing a rough translational equivalent for a medieval lyric, I return to my earlier system of signaling it with the copyright symbol (^©), a process complex enough to warrant another “Appendix: Scholarly References to Copyrighted Materials” (as it did in FF, 401–6; and HD, 30–33). You will not see that sign for lyrics mentioned in passing in the Production Notes, where they cannot be construed as call-outs for performance (unless, of course, you’re singing my commentary aloud for a price). You will see it, however, anywhere you might wish to incorporate a lyric or melody into a production. All such references should be considered unscripted; but, out of an abundance of caution, I attend dutifully and legalistically to all matters related to the staging of copyrighted materials.

In terms of versification, rhyming octosyllabic couplets are still the lingua franca and, occasionally, I retain them in rhymed or free verse, all the while renewing my caveat that I render doggerel as doggerel. Case in point: the slapstick sensibility of the rondeau triolet associated with such moments as a character’s entrance (FF, 48). Elsewhere, deviations from the octosyllabic standard deserve special care, especially when the three women of Drama Queens (#4) introduce themselves in three separate rhyme schemes. Sometimes, I offer both prose and verse translations—even for a magnum opus like Brother Willy’s sermon joyeux (#11). Feel free to choose one or the other or to edit as run-time allows. But, for now, it’s time to run—and romp—through the faithfully faithless farce as it takes on religion.

Brief Plot Summaries

1. The Con-Man’s Confession [La Confession Rifflart]

For four actors: Matilda (Mehault/Mahault); Connor (Rifflart); the Priest (Le Prestre); and Jolly Roger (Rogier)

Who’s running this confession anyway? The Priest or the Con-Man? Browbeaten by his wife, Matilda, into making a clean breast of things at Easter, Connor comes out ahead by leaving the bemused Priest behind. If this is penance, it’s quite the farce.

2. Blue Confessions, or, Sweet Margot Spills [La Confession de Margot]

For two or more actors: The Parish Priest (Le Curé); Margot (Margot); and possible extras: monks, penitents, a bishop, etc.

When Margot spills, she really spills. In making her X-rated confession to an excitable Parish Priest, she gets off easy. Him too. The Priest can but endorse her good works with brothers everywhere.

3. Highway Robbery, or, A Criminal Confession [La Confession du Brigant au Curé]

For two actors: the Highwayman (Le Brigant); and the Parish Priest (Le Curé)

On a dark, isolated path in the woods, a starving robber accosts his priestly target. Confession is the ruse by which one man makes off with all manner of booty and, the other, with his life.

4. Confessions of a Medieval Drama Queen, or, The Theologina Dialogues [La Farce de quatre femmes]

For four actors: Dolly, the Fashion Plate (La Bragarde); Jezebel, the Strumpet (La Gorrière); Tartuffie, the Hypocrite (La Bigotte); and Ms. Theologina, the Lady Theologian (La Théologienne)

Does a female theologian have the right to hear the confessions of her sinful female followers? Armed with a papal bull, Theologina says she does. But a Fashion Plate, a Strumpet, and a Hypocrite may not be getting all they’ve bargained for.

5. Confession Follies: Folie à Deux? [Le Badin, la Femme, et la Chambrière]

For four actors: The Fool, Fouquet (Le Badin); Gwynnie, the Wife (La Femme); Mandy, the Chambermaid (La Chambrière/Mannette); and [Bozo, the Valet, also a fool]

Everybody’s up to no good in an unhappy household dominated by violence and trickery. Revenge comes in the form of two masquerades, one of them, a confession. But who gets the better of whom? The miserable wife? The sassy chambermaid? The brutish fool? Most critics confess that they have no idea.

6. Brother Fillerup [Frère Fillebert]

For four actors: Brother Filbert (Frère Fillebert); Colette, the Neighbor Lady (La Voysine); Donna, the Mistress (La Mestresse); Perrette, the Chambermaid (La Povre Garce, Perrete Venés-tost)

Doctor? Lawyer? Pharmacist in chief? You name it, Brother Fillerup’s got it. In one of the most sexualized prescriptions ever, he’ll cure whatever ails you with fornication: especially the serving class.

7. Bro Job, or, Cum Hither [Les Chamberières qui vont à la messe de cinq heures]

For four or more actors: [The Narrator]; Saucy (Saupi[c]quet); Pricker-Upper (Troussetaqueue); Florence, the Nurse (La Nourrice); Father Johan (Domine Johannes)

First come, first served. As early as the 5:00 A.M. Mass, two chambermaids and a nurse are hot to trot for some holy water. The good father will not be delivering it from the church-sanctioned vessel.

8. The Resurrection of Johnny Palmer [La Resurrection Jenin à Paulme]

For five actors: Johnny Glad-Hand Palmer, a Monk (Jenyn à Paulme); Joanie, Johnny’s Sister (La Seur Jenyn); Joachim, a Brother (Joachin); Toni, Johnny’s Cousin (Thoynon); and Brother Birdie, a Drag Queen (Caillette)

Hold onto your hats—and your tennis rackets—because, in this fools’ play of a farce, heeere’s Johnny, resurrected from the dead! Has he really been to hell and back? Or has the drunken player, a member of the newly founded Order of Baboons, been sprung from somewhere else?

9. The Resurrection of Johnny Slack-Jaw, or, The Harrowing of Heaven [La Résurrection de Jenin Landore]

For four actors: Johnny Slack-Jaw (Jenin [Landore]); Alison, his Wife (Sa Femme); the Parish Priest (Le Curé); and Adso, Novice to the Parish Priest (Le Clerc)

In the Gospel according to the resurrected Johnny Slack-Jaw, heaven is one helluva partisan political scene that bears a striking resemblance to the Wars of Religion. What did Johnny learn in his voyage to the other world? Get ready for the ultimate April Fool and his magic.

10. The Pardoners’ Tales, or, Panderers’ Box [La Farce d’un Pardonneur, d’un Triacleur et d’une Tavernière]

For three actors: the Pardoner (Le Pardonneur); the Snake-Oil Salesman (Le Triacleur); and Frenchy, the Alewife (La Tavernière)

With hysterical hawking cries, dueling salesmen traffic in all manner of unholy relics, indulging their every sinful appetite until it’s time for gluttony. Uniting in trickery to get the better of the Alewife, the Pardoner and the Snake-Oil Salesman tender a mala fide “Panderers’ Box.”

11. Slick Brother Willy [Frère Guillebert]

For four actors: Brother Wilbur (Frère Guillebert); Marvin, the Old Man (L’Homme Vieil, Marin); Blanche, his Young Wife (Sa Femme Jeune, La Femme); Agnes, the Gossip (La Commère, Agnès)

Obsessed with the willy, Brother Willy delivers a sermon about it, an ode to it, and a bona fide Last Will and Testicle when he’s caught in flagrante with old Marvin’s nubile wife. Enter BFF Agnes to convince the cuckolded fool that a purloined purse is really the drawers of Saint Francis.

12. Immaculate Deception, or, Nuns Behaving Badly [Farce nouvelle à cinq parsonnages] (Soeur Fessue)

For five actors: Mother Superior, the Abbess (L’Abeesse); Sister Crybaby, the First Nun (Soeur Esplouree/La premiere Soeur); Sister Goody Two-Shoes, the Second Nun (Soeur de Bon Coeur/La deuxieme Soeur); Sister Frisky, the Third Nun (Soeur Safrete/La troisieme Soeur); and Sister Bunny (Seur/Soeur Fes[s]ue)

Poor knocked-up Sister Bunny! She was too much of a dummy to avoid pregnancy by engaging in the convent’s usual sodomy. But she can debate Scriptures with the best of them; and it turns out that Mother Superior is in no position to judge her or anybody else.