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.

Troubadours and minstrels

Fiction set in the Middle Ages often features troubadours and minstrels, fairly low-born men who wandered around from castle to castle, singing songs and eyeing the ladies.  This image is true at least in part, but as anyone who has been paying attention to this blog probably expects, it was more complicated.

For starters, troubadours were not all low-born.  Indeed, the person usually considered the first troubadour was William IX, duke of Aquitaine, Eleanor of Aquitaine's grandfather.  He was credited with writing all sorts of songs and poems in Occitan, the local French dialect.  Troubadours and minstrels became common in the twelfth century, some of them wealthy lords, others the wandering singers of popular imagination.

Troubadours, those who composed elegant love songs (as opposed to people who just sang others' songs), were especially common in southern France, where they began.  A lot of their songs were addressed to powerful ladies, but often written in code, so that a lady whom the troubadour admired might be addressed as "She who says No."  In practice, people might well guess who was meant, but the lady could either deny it or claim it as she preferred.

Although scholars once wondered why so many noble women were addressed by the troubadours as powerful people who could order around those under them, including their would-be lovers,  the answer is simple.  A whole lot of noble women were powerful people who ordered around those under them.  As soon as one stops thinking of medieval women as weak, the question "Why would songs show them as in charge?" is answered.  It's because they were in charge.

Some of these songs were yearning songs of love for ladies too far away or too socially elevated ever to be romantically interested in the troubadour.  Others were fairly explicit about what he expected—and it was not admiration from afar.  Although scholars once credited the troubadours with creating "courtly love" (on which see more here), perhaps even (in a burst of desperate scholarly enthusiasm) influenced by Arabic songs, there was never a recognizable male-female form of interactions that medieval people would have called courtly love.

For one thing, modern scholars can't even decide what "courtly love" supposedly entailed, whether it was rank adultery or chaste admiration from a distance.  Let's get real.  It can't be both.    Courtly love isn't even a medieval term.  Back to the troubadours.

Although the elegant love songs began in southern French, they were soon imitated and sung all over Europe.  Northern French trouvères translated them into their own version of French, as well as writing their own.  In Germany Minnesingers, those who composed elegant songs of love in German, became common in the thirteenth century.  Spain,  England, and Italy developed their own love songs.  Women sometimes wrote songs in the tradition, often about unfaithful lovers—some who made their beloved woman expire in sorrow, some who were rightly punished.  Knights who spent most of their time in fighting or training to fight still felt it appropriate to try to write such songs, some sad and thoughtful, some downright bawdy.  Everybody plagiarized everybody.

The minstrels, those who made a living wandering around singing songs they picked up everywhere, were essentially indistinguishable from jongleurs, wandering entertainers who were welcomed to town or court with both keen enjoyment and sharp suspicion.  Women often were part of a jongleur troupe.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more on troubadours and minstrels,  see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.