Bawdy plays

We think of medieval people as pious and refined in their entertainments.  In part this is because the medieval plays that are normally seen now are the so-called mystery plays, based on Bible stories and saints' lives.  But medieval people also enjoyed bawdy plays.

During the late Middle Ages, there were roving bands of jongleurs, players, who would come into town and put on entertainments.  There might be religious mystery plays, there might be songs and instrumental music, there might be bawdy plays.  The players were considered low class, dangerous people, practitioners of sexual immorality and potentially heretical--in spite of putting religious plays in their mix.  This attitude did not keep townspeople from flocking to see them.

Even though we now tend to think of Shakespeare and his plays as high-brow and very serious, in Elizabethan England there wasn't a big difference between what his troupe was doing and the activities of jongleurs a century or two earlier.  Probably the biggest difference is that his troupe had a lot better playwright.

Now that most of us can turn on the TV any time, or go to the movies or watch a video, we probably would not be nearly as impressed at a rather scruffy group of people putting on rough entertainments for pennies.  But without our plethora of entertainment, medieval people were eager to attend.

A number of the scripts for the bawdy plays survive.  They were both off-color and funny, if not exactly works of great literature.  There were several quite common plot lines, considered hilarious every time.  The reason they are not better known now tells us more about modern editors and translators, who tended to find them rather distasteful, than about what was actually performed in the late Middle Ages.

One popular plot line was about a young wife with a strong sex drive, married to a cold-fish husband.  She managed to persuade her husband that the man next door was a noted doctor, trained in Salerno.  So when she unexpectedly collapsed, showing all sorts of odd "symptoms," the husband hurried her over to spend a private afternoon receiving "treatments" from the "doctor," which worked so well that she was completely cured by evening.

In another play, equally "hilarious,"  a matron, fearing her husband has taken a mistress, gets her neighbor and best friend to dress up as a priest, and they trick the husband into confessing his sins by telling him he looks to be dying.  The plot thickens when the husband 'fesses up to "riding the pony" with the teenage girl next door--the pretend-priest's own daughter!  Now both women have to pound him.

A number of these plays have been translated into modern English, suitable for performance, by Jody Enders, in The Farce of the Fart and Other Ribaldries (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).  (Enders has done such things as substitute modern topical references and catch-phrases for Old French ones, to get the modern audience a similar experience to the original.)  Click here for details on a couple more of them.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more on medieval entertainment and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.