"The Farce of the Fart" and Other Ribaldries: Twelve Medieval French Plays in Modern English by Jody Enders (review)

Abstract

Enders, Jody. Farce of and Other Ribaldries: Twelve Medieval French Plays in Modern English. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Pp. xv + 477. $49.95 cloth, $29.95 paper, $29.95 eBook. It is a little-known fact that medieval French farce played a major role in making of modern drama. In striving to break with neoclassical aesthetic canons, avant-garde playwrights often drew inspiration from medieval genres that their predecessors had considered crude, seditious, and immoral, with farce being most obvious offender against bienseance. Dario Fo's link to farceurs (and other jesters who defame and insult) is well established, largely because Fo himself has so often emphasized deep historical roots of the tricks of trade. But how many people will realize, or bother to recall, that J. M. Synge's The Well of Saints (1905) is loosely based on Andrieu de La Vigne's L'aveugle et le boiteux (1496); that delirious nonsense speech in Eugene Ionesco's La cantatrice chauve (1950) and La lemon (1951) is indebted to fantaisie verbale of medieval tricksters and fools; that in 1969 San Francisco Mime Troupe toured a production of mid-fifteenth-century farce Maistre Pierre Pathelin and, in one instance, was able to perform it only thanks to ACLU lawsuit and anticensorship demonstration; or that Zulu Sofola's The Wizard of Law (1975) rewrites Pathelin to depict corruption of contemporary Nigerian society and capacity of poor to resist economic inequality using farcical antics (wizardry)? Indeed, one has only to scratch surface to discover that many of aesthetic innovations and political strategies that characterize twentieth-century drama are either directly or indirectly tied to medieval French stage, and are therefore deeply beholden to scholars like Louis Petit de Julleville and Gustave Cohen, who brought to light hundreds of French plays that had been forgotten in archives, as well as to thespians like Cohen and his troupe Theophiliens, who performed some of those plays, usually for first time in centuries. Expressly written with stage and classroom in mind, and now available in affordable paperback and eBook formats, Jody Enders's The Farce of Fart and Other Ribaldries aims to make a similar contribution to modern theater practice and performance studies by offering access to twelve of most ingenious and spirited medieval farces to English-speaking scholars, students, playwrights, directors, actors, and spectators. With Jelle Koopmans's recent rediscovery and publication of Recueil de Florence, a collection of fifty-three medieval plays that mysteriously went missing in 1920s, French scholars can no longer complain of a lack of reliable critical editions. But, to quote Enders, What about all English speakers out there? We weren't going to leave all fun to French were we? (xi). With thirty years' experience in field and apparently irrepressible comic flair, Enders allows her readers to take [farce's] humor seriously but without for a second allowing intellectual concerns to suck humor right out of thing (xii, xiii). In her breezy but incisive prefatory material, production notes, and endnotes, she attends to many of vulgar, provocative, and gut-busting ways in which farce satirizes social life, with her twelve plays exploring themes ranging [f]rom politics and religion, to learning and litigiousness, to marriage and social class, to theology and sexuality (xii). Enders has wisely chosen route of adapted rather than literal (33) translations, preserving farce's characteristic exuberance by inserting, where appropriate, an extra line, extra term, extra mimed scene, extra nonspeaking character, extra possible musical number, or extra name (especially for many unnamed female characters) (35). …