More bawdy plays

In an earlier post I discussed some bawdy plays put on in the late Middle Ages.  There's been enough interest in the topic that I thought I'd share a couple more.

As I noted earlier, the same band of traveling players might put on religious ("mystery") plays and bawdy plays.  Whatever the audience wanted!  Both men and women appeared in these plays, and the women were uniformly agreed to be loose women and harlots--all the more reason to go see them.  (By Shakespeare's time, women's roles were played by boys, to try to decrease the harlot factor.)

In one play with a strong heroine, three friends all desire the same married lady, who has no interest in any of them.  When each one comes to her house in turn to beg to become her lover, she concocts a cunning plan.  She tells each that, because her husband is so jealous, they will have to come to an assignation with her in disguise--but don't tell your friends about the disguise!  She dresses one as a priest, one as a dead man (we'd say zombie), and one as the devil.  She tells them all to meet her one hour after sunset in the graveyard.  Each makes her a generous gift in anticipation of what they hope will happen.  Now of course she doesn't show up, but they all do, each makes out the other two through the dimness and is terrified.  Hilarity ensues, and they all race off, never to proposition her again.

What I'm calling bawdy plays did not always involve sex (though a lot of them did).  Some just mocked people, both the powerful and the weak.  These plays were definitely not concerned that they might appear insensitive.

In one play that mocked the uneducated, a country boy who has been a servant to a priest decides he wants to be a priest himself.  He travels to the University, presents his letter of introduction (which he is incapable of reading himself), and announces he is ready for the entrance exam.  But he falls down on the first question, which is supposed to show knowledge of French literature. "In the epic, The Four Sons of Aymo, what is the name of the father?"  (This is a twelfth-century epic about Aymo's sons having an extended conflict with Charlemagne.)  The answer should be as obvious as "Who is buried in Grant's tomb?" but our poor hero just can't answer it.

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.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

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

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.