Did you hear the one about the newlywed who rushes off for legal advice before the honeymoon is over? Or the husbands who arrange for an enormous tub in which to cure their sugary wives with a pinch of salt? How about a participatory processional toward marriage so sacrilegious that it puts Chaucer’s pilgrimage to shame? And who could have imagined a medieval series of plays devoted to spouse-swapping? Jody Enders has heard and seen all this and more, and shares it in her second volume of performance-friendly translations of medieval French farces. Carefully culled from more than two hundred extant farces, and crafted with a wit and contemporary sensibility that make them playable half a millennium later, these dozen bawdy plays take on the hilariously depressing and depressingly hilarious state of holy wedlock.
In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century comedy, love and marriage do not exactly go together like a horse and carriage. What with all the arranged matches of child brides to doddering geezers, the frustration, fear, anxiety, jealousy, disappointment, and despair are matched only by the eagerness with which everybody sings, dances, and cavorts in the pursuit of deception, trickery, and adultery. Easily recognizable stock characters come vividly to life, struggling to negotiate the limits of power, class, and gender, each embodying the distinctive blend of wit, social critique, and breathless boisterousness that is farce. Whether the antics play out on the fifteenth-century stage or the twenty-first-century screen, Enders notes, comedy revels in shining its brightest spotlight on the social and legal questions of what makes a family. Her volume defines and redefines love and marriage with a message that no passage of time can tear asunder: social change finds its start where comedy itself begins—at home.
Cuprins
On Abbreviations, Short Titles, and Endnotes
Introduction, Part Deux: Seriously Funny
About This Translation
—Une Traduction engagée, a Feminist Appropriation
—On Anonymity, Naming, and Renaming
—Critical Apparatus
—Editions and Printed Sources
—Order of Presentation
—Stage Directions
—Money, Money, Money
—Grammar, Style, and ‘Foreign-Language’ Materials
—Prose, Verse, Music, and Choreography
Brief Plot Summaries
THE PLAYS
Actors’ Prologue
1. The Newlywed Game [Le Conseil au Nouveau Marié] (RBM, #1)
2. The Shithouse [Le Retraict] (RLV, #54)
3. Pots and Scams, or, The Farce of the Kettle-Maker [Un Chaudronnier] (RBM, #30)
4. For the Birds, or, Conjugal Birdplay [La Mauvaistié des femmes] (RC, #48)
5. The Jackass Conjecture, or, Animal Husbandry [Le Pont aux ânes] (RBM, #25)
6. Match, Point, Counterpoint, or, The Old Lover vs. the Young Lover [Le Viel Amoureulx et le Jeune Amoureulx] (RLV, #9)
7. Holy Deadlock, or, The Pilgrimage of Marriage [Le Pèlerinage de mariage] (RLV, #19)
8. Bitches and Pussycats, or, Peace of Ass [Les Deux Maris et leurs deux femmes dont l’une a male tête et l’autre est tendre du cul] (RBM, #10)
9. Wife Swap: A Musical Comedy, or, The Taming, Pas de Deux [Le Savatier, Marguet, Jacquet, Proserpine et l’Oste] (RLV, #74)
10. Husband Swap, or, Swap Meat [Le Trocheur de maris] (RLV, #60)
11. Extreme Husband Makeover, or, Lost and Foundry [Les Femmes qui font refondre leurs maris] (RBM, #6)
12. Marriage with a Grain of Salt [Les Hommes qui font saller leurs femmes] (published in Rouen, 1600)
Appendix: Scholarly References to Copyrighted Materials
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
* * * * *
Despre autor
Jody Enders is Distinguished Professor of French at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is editor and translator of ‘The Farce of the Fart’ and Other Ribaldries: Twelve Medieval French Plays in Modern English, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
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