Was there more to comedy than Chaucer, the Second Shepherds' Play,
or Shakespeare? Of course! But, for a real taste of medieval and
Renaissance humor and in-your-face slapstick, one must cross the
Channel to France, where over two hundred extant farces regularly
dazzled crowds with blistering satires. Dwarfing all other
contemporaneous theatrical repertoires, the boisterous French
corpus is populated by lawyers, lawyers everywhere. No surprise
there. The lion's share of mostly anonymous farces was written by
barristers, law students, and legal apprentices. Famous for
skewering unjust judges and irreligious ecclesiastics, they
belonged to a 10,000-member legal society known as the Basoche,
which flourished between 1450 and 1550. What is more, their
dramatic send-ups of real and fictional court cases were still
going strong on the eve of MoliEre, resilient against those who
sought to censor and repress them. The suspenseful wait to see
justice done has always made for high drama or, in this case, low
drama. But, for centuries, the scripts for these outrageous shows
were available only in French editions gathered from scattered
print and manuscript sources. In Trial by Farce, prize-winning
theater historian Jody Enders brings twelve of the funniest legal
farces to English-speaking audiences in a refreshingly uncensored
but philologically faithful vernacular. Newly conceived as much for
scholars as for students and theater practitioners, this repertoire
and its familiar stock characters come vividly to life as they
struggle to negotiate the limits of power, politics, class, gender,
and, above all, justice. Through the distinctive blend of wit,
social critique, and breathless boisterousness that is farce, we
gain a new understanding of comedy itself as form of political
correction. In ways presciently modern and even postmodern, farce
paints a different cultural picture of the notoriously
authoritarian Middle Ages with its own vision of liberty and
justice for all. Theater eternally offers ways for new generations
to raise their voices and act.
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