Metaphorical Obscenity in French Farce, 1460-1560 Barbara C. Bowen The plays usually referred to by French critics as “l’ancienne farce” are at last being thoroughly studied.1 There are about 150 of them (definitions differ), but the only one well known to most students of literature is Maistre Pierre Pathelin, probably written about 1464. They are all in verse, most usually in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, and most of them are anonymous. Unlike the contemporary softies, which use personification and allegory, often for satirical purposes, the farces are about real people: husbands and wives, cobblers, policemen and fishmongers. Though quite short (between 10 and 40 minutes’ acting time), farces have plots, often very similar to the plots of fabliau and conte, which show human folly in action in specific circum stances. And there is plenty of action—farce characters engage in trade and chicanery, disguise themselves, chase and beat each other, eat, drink and urinate, hide in cages and privies, seduce each others’ wives, confess to priests and go to law. These plays have attracted a good deal of critical attention in recent years, but two aspects of them have never been thoroughly examined. The first is the scatological, which will not be dealt with here but which is undoubtedly worth study,2 and the second is the sexual. European critics, in an interesting survival of nineteenth century attitudes, remain profoundly shocked by sexual expressions, and particularly by the farces in which sexual intercourse apparently takes place on stage. Their assumption, often openly stated,3 is that plays which deal with sex are crude, primitive, unsophisticated, and unfunny. It is odd that this prejudice, highly understandable in the 1920’s, should persist into the 1970’s. My intention in this paper is to examine some uses of sexual terminology in the farces, to see whether or not this prejudice is justified. 331 332 Comparative Drama We can tell, from our general knowledge of Renaissance literature, that both social and theatrical taboos operated then very much as they do today. In good society, it was perfectly acceptable to make jokes and insinuations about sex; it was not acceptable to use anatomical terms. On the comic stage any kind of language was acceptable, but copulation certainly was not. If the farceurs wanted deliberately to transgress these taboos, we should expect them to do so brutally, especially if, in Bakhtine’s terms, the authors were lower-class men seeking revenge against the social hierarchy which had imposed the taboos. But this is not what we find. Crudity and brutality in the farces occur, not in the talk about sex, but in the insults, gibes and swear-words exchanged by characters quarrelling or fighting. If a cobbler shouts at his wife: “Bren pour toy!” she will reply: “Merde emmy tes joues!” He will retort: “Mais vieux ort cul, cabas breneux!”4 and so on indefinitely. These grotesquely descriptive insults are violent, and substitute for the wished-for physical violence which would be both condemned by society and hard to manage on stage. But when we look for a similar violence in the longer obscene passages, or for anything like the cynical bru tality of some French Renaissance poetry, we do not find it. What we do find is a remarkable fascination with metaphor. A penis may be referred to as an instrument, a stick, a sword, a candle, a syringe, a hoe, a spade, a spit, a chimney-brush, a spur, a needle, a horse, a musical instrument, or a billiard cue. A vagina may be a lantern, a basket, a shoe, a basin, a packsaddle, a vineyard, a cooking-pot, a shell, or a cupboard. What the man does to (with) the woman can be explained as planting, digging, bending a bow, doing the laundry, mending a pot, polishing armor, sifting flour, chimney-sweeping, firing an arrow, playing at feu de paume, bearing a lance, singing, sewing, hitting the mark, measuring cloth, weaving, dancing, playing music, riding a horse, fencing, playing billiards, climbing a tree, or declining nouns. Is this crude? Surely it is rather highly imaginative, poetic, and comic. Many of these metaphors can be found in other literary genres, but...
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Jun 1, 1985
Madeline L Simpson + 3
