In Hamlet, a rat is famously behind an arras. The arras screen (tapestry) was named for the town of Arras, in northern France, so far north that it was once part of the Netherlands. During the 12th and 13th centuries, the town had an unusually active theater scene. There were two drama clubs (to use an anachronistic term for it). One was called the Puy d’Arras, “the podium of Arras,” the other was the Confrérie des Jongleurs et Bourgeois d’Arras.
The Confrérie des Jongleurs begins with a legend that two jongleurs—traveling players and acrobats—had a dispute, and the Virgin Mary told them to go to Arras Cathedral, where the bishop would settle it. But Mary also appeared to them at the church and gave them a holy candle, whose wax could be used as medicine for the current epidemic. The Confrérie was founded around 1175 to safeguard and honor the Sainte Chandelle; its members were both townsmen and jongleurs. The Confrérie also took care of burial rites for its members and kept a death record in which we find the only recorded names of various playwrights. The Puy d’Arras probably formed later, since it was especially dedicated to the courtly poetry that came north from Provence. In France, troubadours were called “trouvères.”
The two best-known names of early jongleur-playwrights from Arras are Jean Bodel and Adam de la Halle. Adam will get his own entry, next. Jean Bodel worked as a municipal clerk in Arras, but he was clearly central to the poetry community of his time (circa 1200). When he legally died of leprosy, he wrote a farewell poem to his friends. Bodel’s two plays were inventive, stepping farther away from the strict saint or Bible story.
In the Jeu de Saint Nicolas, we see a miracle done by St. Nicholas. The setting is a Crusade in North Africa (Bodel’s time was still high tide for crusading, just after the 3rd), with several co-existing “places” on the stage. Here’s a link to an French literary archive, which sums up the play for us: “Set in the middle of an epic battle between Christians and Muslims, the play tells the story of a good Christian who escapes the battle and is found praying to a statue of Saint Nicolas by the Muslim forces. The Muslim leader decides to test the saint by unlocking the doors to his treasury and leaving the statue as a guardian, stipulating that if anything were stolen the Christian would forfeit his life. Three thieves attempt to steal the treasure, but Saint Nicolas stops them. As a result, the Muslim ruler and his entire army convert to Christianity.” That’s kicking the drama up a notch or two!
His other play is about the Prodigal Son, whose name here turns out to be Courtois/Curtois (both spellings) d’Artois/Arras. It’s 650 lines, broken into eleven scenes. At the start, Curtois asks his father for his inheritance, and leaves. Most of the play takes place at a tavern, where Curtois interacts with other characters as he foolishly spends away his money. I have the text, but it’s hard to read, so I am not able to follow the dialogue. Both this play and the St. Nicholas show realistic taverns, where people joke and play games that were popular in Arras at the time. The scenes display people at their worldliest: sinful, greedy, secular. But the tavern scenes act as a foil to the devout parts, the saintly miracle and the parable’s closing scene of the father’s forgiveness.