We have something like four hundred examples of 15th century comic theater from France. We usually call these comedies “Farce,” from Latin “farcire,” to stuff. But at the time, they called the plays farce, sottie, or even moralité. A “sot” was a fool who made witty, satirical commentary throughout the play. Some farces gave sharp social satire, so it was important to disguise the most pointed barbs by putting them in the mouth of the “sot.”
The earliest French farce is “Le Garçon et l’aveugle,” which may have been performed during the 13th century. A blind man is begging in the city of Tournai, and a boy tells him that he’s about to fall into a cellar. The blind man asks the boy to be his guide as he begs in the city, putting himself in the power of rogue who likes to play tricks. Neither the blind man nor the boy was supposed to be a virtuous man, so it was fair game to laugh at their vices and follies.
The medieval French farce was not devotional or instructive, as English interludes tended to be. Rather, the plays poked fun at everyday life situations. They may have been consciously modeled on the Latin plays of Terence, whose plays were used to teach fluent Latin. They seem to have drawn also from the same cultural roots as The Decameron, whose stories are rife with slapstick and sexual humor. In this world, priests were lecherous, wives were unfaithful, and husbands were routinely fooled. Children are insolent, wives are domineering, husbands are henpecked, and fathers are tyrants. In “The Washtub,” a henpecked husband is forced to do housework until he falls into the washtub, from which his wife will only extricate him if he agrees that she is master of the house. Further, soldiers are cowards, students are stupid, and lawyers cheat everyone. In Maître Pathelin, a lawyer cheats a cloth merchant, but he is then cheated in turn by a clever shepherd.
In Italy, those same roots produced the “farsa rusticale,” a play set in the rural area around Naples and other cities. We have fewer examples of Italian farces than of the French ones, but we know some of the important writers. Pietro Antonio Caracciolo wrote in Neapolitan dialect during the late 1400s, but my source says he also wrote “in Italian” which probably means “in the dialect of Rome.” In both France and Italy, language was far from standardized, and into the 19th century it was often difficult for peasants to understand each other across a distance of ten miles. These plays tended to be made for local production, using the local speech of Siena, Padua, or Asti. Culture and language around the Mediterranean was not sharply delineated; Italy, southern France (Provence), and northern Spain were similar, and ideas and trends flowed among them. Spain, too, had late medieval farces in the Italian and French manner.
Farces in medieval France were sometimes staged as part of a series of plays, with the other productions being serious or devout. In Northern France, they used pageant wagons for staging, as we saw across the Channel. But stages were most often trestle platforms set up in the marketplace or public square, or even in a great house’s courtyard. Production was by amateur but dedicated theater groups called confréries. A society of law clerks called the Basoche wrote and performed farces in Paris, and other cities had similar clubs: the Cornards of Rouen, the Infanterie of Dijon, and the Suppôts de la Coquille of Lyon. These confréries wrote, planned and produced plays for feast days and other special occasions.
As the late medieval period merged into early modern (parallel to Tudor times in England), the plays became more secular. We have the most examples from France, but in Germany and the Lowlands, there were also guilds and societies producing similar plays. They probably raised money ahead of time and collected money during the performance, much like amateur theater companies in our time.
with thanks to The Medieval French Drama. Grace Frank. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960.