Pure Filth: Ethics, Politics, and Religion in Early French Farce

By Noah D. Guynn

As Noah D. Guynn observes, early French farce has been summarily dismissed as filth for centuries. Renaissance humanists, classical moralists, and Enlightenment philosophes belittled it as an embarrassing reminder of the vulgarity of medieval popular culture. Modern literary critics and theater historians often view it as comedy's poor relation—trite, smutty pap that served to divert the masses and to inure them to lives of subservience. Yet, as Guynn demonstrates in his reexamination of the genre, the superficial crudeness and predictability of farce belie the complexities of its signifying and performance practices and the dynamic, contested nature of its field of reception. Pure Filth focuses on overlooked and occluded content in farce, arguing that apparently coarse jokes conceal finely drawn, and sometimes quite radical, perspectives on ethics, politics, and religion.

Engaging with cultural history, political anthropology, and critical, feminist, and queer theory, Guynn shows that farce does not pander to the rabble in order to cultivate acquiescence or curb dissent. Rather, it uses the tools of comic theater—parody and satire, imitation and exaggeration, cross-dressing and masquerade—to address the urgent issues its spectators faced in their everyday lives: economic inequality and authoritarian rule, social justice and ethical renewal, sacramental devotion and sacerdotal corruption, and heterosocial relations and household politics. Achieving its subtlest effects by employing the lewdest forms of humor, farce reveals that aspirations to purity, whether ethical, political, or religious, are inevitably mired in the very filth they repudiate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Oct 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9780812296495

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The Many Faces of Farce

Society is a very mysterious animal with many faces and hidden potentialities, and … it’s extremely shortsighted to believe that the face society happens to be presenting to you at a given moment is its only true face. None of us know all the potentialities that slumber in the spirit of the population.

—Václav Havel

In seeking to understand the culture of farce in late medieval and early modern France, we could do no better than to start with the guidon, or heraldic flag, of the festive and theatrical society known as the Infanterie Dijonnaise, or La Mère Folle de Dijon. On one side of the guidon (Figure 1), we find Mère Folle herself, wearing robes in the signature colors of folly (red, yellow, and green), a fool’s cowl (with eared hood, scalloped collar, and jingle bells), a crescent moon-shaped wimple (to evoke lunacy), a long flowing scarf, and a Carnival mask. She is surrounded by the four keepers of the winds, whose cherubic, disembodied faces peer out at her from dark, menacing clouds and whose exhalations appear to have caused her hood to blow off, her scarf to unfurl, and her mask to come undone. Seemingly unperturbed at being thus bombarded and exposed, her face retains the inscrutability of a mask, even as she dexterously uses three fols, or bellows, to direct her own blasts of wind at the cherubs. The fols are an apt symbol for her, as they suggest a verbalvisual pun on fol/folie. They may also refer to the folliculus, or scrotum, reminding viewers that all members of the Infanterie were men, even if their sovereign presented as a woman, with porcelain skin, narrow shoulders, and pendulous breasts.

FIGURE 1. Guidon de la Mère Folle (D86.1.8). Painted silk taffeta and paper, 78 × 74.5 cm. Dépôt du Musée archéologique de Dijon, Musée de la vie bourguignonne Perrin de Puycousin, Dijon. Photo by François Perrodin.

FIGURE 2. Guidon de la Mère Folle (D86.1.8). Painted silk taffeta and paper, 78 × 74.5 cm. Dépôt du Musée archéologique de Dijon, Musée de la vie bourguignonne Perrin de Puycousin, Dijon. Photo by François Perrodin.

On the reverse side of the guidon (Figure 2), we find two well-muscled acrobats, followers of Mère Folle who perform their own blustery, topsyturvy version of foolishness. Like their commander, they wear fool’s colors and eared hoods and are surrounded by the keepers of the winds. They have made no attempt to mask themselves, however, but have instead lowered their breeches to expose the lurid sight of their round, dimpled, shining ass cheeks. As if to prevent us from looking away, they contort themselves to ensure we will see as much of them as possible. The one fool holds the other upside down in his arms, and both men are twisted so that each may turn toward us while blowing a fart in his partner’s face. The pleasure they derive from their antics is evident, especially for the upended fool, who smiles beatifically as he inhales deeply through a pert, upturned nose. The flatus itself is rendered visible, using the same white brushstrokes that depict the squalls emanating from the mouths of the keepers of the winds. As if in imitation of the acrobats, the cherubs cock their heads and turn their faces toward us as they offer a gusty retort.

It would be tempting to read the guidon as an expression of senseless vulgarity and escapist humor: a thumbing of the nose at moral seriousness, a mooning of the buttocks at the dark clouds of adversity, or a tooting of the sphincter at the variable winds of fortune. Indeed, even the cherubs seem to be laughing at the acrobats’ absurd hijinks: their faces are lit up with simpering smiles, as if to indicate that they, too, can be lured in by fatuous (and flatulent) human games and that Mère Folle can make fools of both Lady Nature and Lady Fortune. We should not be too quick to dismiss the Infanterie as a band of rascals and wags, however, or as purveyors of vacuous jokes and gratuitous laughter. On the contrary, as Juliette Valcke has shown, their institutional mission was characterized by ethical, political, and religious depth, if not exactly gravity. Their aim was to use ludic ritual and comic theater to establish a true moral jurisdiction over their fellow citizens (15), to inveigh against misconduct of all sorts (55) and at all social levels, and to animate religious feasts by inspiring collective acts of devotion. The wind cherubs may themselves signal the spiritual inflection of the Infanterie’s activities, inserting reminders of messianic revelation into popular festivity: Daniel’s vision of the four winds of the heaven as the social agitations that herald the Apocalypse (Dan. 7:2); God’s promise that the spirit will come from the four winds and enable [the] slain to live again (Ezek. 37:9); Christ’s prophecy that the Son of man will send angels to gather together his elect from the four winds (Mark 13:27); and John’s prediction that the angels of doom will hold back the four winds of the earth for the faithful (Rev. 7:1), only to unleash them afterward against the wicked (Rev. 8:5).

While modern viewers may find it difficult to understand how the Infanterie could use scatological foolishness to conjure eschatological truths, the fact is that the two registers are not as distinct as they may seem and were not necessarily in conflict in medieval and early modern culture (Morrison). If Mère Folle blurs the relationship between face and mask, reality and illusion, spirit and wind, so, too, does the Messiah, whose identity is known only to the Father (Mark 13:32), who is difficult to distinguish from false prophets with their bogus signs and wonders (Matt. 24:24), and whose spirit takes the form of a mighty wind (Acts 2:2) that breatheth [or perhaps, breaketh] where he will (John 3:8). Likewise, if the acrobats turn one another and the world upside down, confounding faces with buttocks, mouths with assholes, breath with flatus, they also remind us that the devout are made a spectacle to the world and to angels and to men (1 Cor. 4:9)—indeed, that they make themselves fools for Christ’s sake (4:10) in order to show the world that its wisdom … is foolishness with God (3:19). Just as Christ may be confused with the Antichrist, miracles with make-believe, and the godly with the mad, so, too, may truth be found in bluff, faith in doubt, profundity in the fundament, and theological understanding in the most sordid and inane of spectacles.

These are essential insights for anyone wishing to understand the preposterous, unbridled, and scurrilous aesthetic of early French farce. Judged according to classical aesthetic standards, this would appear to be the most vulgar, primitive, and formulaic of theatrical genres. To begin with, farce characters are generally devoid of psychological complexity, are used to embody crude stereotypes, and often bear no other name than the social category to which they have been subsumed: wife, husband, priest, cobbler, miller, and so on. What’s more, farce plots, rarely more than an hour long, are typically vulgar and predictable in the extreme, crafting flimsy scenarios around sexual and scatological jokes, cynical and repetitive proverbs, and unlikely forms of social inversion: wives who best (or beat) their husbands, servants their masters, tenants their landlords, and so on. Finally, farces indulge in a great deal of vulgarity, buffoonery, and mischief, apparently without concern for, and sometimes openly ridiculing, the more obviously elevated and edifying content found in morality, miracle, and mystery plays. With nearly two hundred surviving scripts and countless others lost to history, farce was plainly the most favored genre of early French comic theater. And with audiences drawn from all social ranks and milieus (from the working poor to the haute bourgeoisie, from university students to petty aristocrats, from fraternal associations to royal courts), it was the most pervasive one as well. Yet to modern audiences familiar with the moral and sentimental comedies of Corneille and Molière, and neglectful of the latter’s indelible early training as a farceur (Rey-Flaud, Molière), the aesthetic and social impact of farce may seem rather limited: an hour of strutting upon the stage, a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing.

This book seeks to reclaim the aesthetic and social complexities of French farce by focusing on thematic content related to ethics, politics, and religion. I argue that farce’s repetitive and even obsessive focus on social clichés, moral depravity, le monde à l’envers, and le bas corporel does not make it a naïve, crude, or primitive theater or a mere diversion for the rabble. On the contrary, it is a highly intricate, deeply self-conscious cultural form that can accommodate, and indeed depends upon, multiple, conflicting modes of interpretation. In the ensuing pages, I argue that, even as farce illustrates the depravity of human behavior and constructs fictional worlds devoid of kindness, tolerance, and love, it also lends comic resonance to the most august sources of Christian moral wisdom: scripture, liturgy, theology, hagiography, and sacraments. As with other, traditional forms of religious humor—for instance, the medieval risus paschalis: burlesque homilies, lewd jokes, and theatrical entertainments that commemorated Christ’s Resurrection by filling the church with levity and laughter (O’Connell)—farce parodies and ridicules, even as it revitalizes and extends, sacred texts, themes, and rites. It also embraces contradictory modes of political engagement. If, on the one hand, it finds rowdy humor in the undermining of authority, the overturning of hierarchies, and the repudiation or transgression of social norms, on the other hand, it demonstrates that inverted hierarchies are hierarchies nonetheless and that anarchic wit depends upon the inevitability of political domination in the temporal world.

Problems of interpretation in turn yield problems of classification: contradictory readings are so densely intertwined in farce that it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to categorize individual works as either normative or subversive, conservative or radical, or to determine what ideological goals they would have aimed at or achieved in performance. Many farces appear simultaneously to stabilize and destabilize, affirm and oppose established values, traditions, and institutions. Even as they allow spectators to participate imaginatively in staged rebellion, they offer reminders that in real life, dissidence will provoke a coercive response unless it remains latent, silent, or invisible. The latency of resistance in farce can itself be read in contradictory ways—as an acknowledgment that the ruling classes are capable of imposing docility on subalterns, or alternatively as a reminder that subaltern resistance can never be fully eradicated and retains its power precisely because it can be so difficult to detect.

The cynicism of this political outlook (farce’s apparent belief in endless antagonism and injustice) is in turn counterbalanced by a tendency in many works—including Maistre Pierre Pathelin, the undisputed, and by some accounts the only, masterpiece of the genre—to focus implicitly or explicitly on ethical, religious, and messianic themes. This includes Jesus’s prophecy (in all three synoptic Gospels) that in the Kingdom of Heaven the first will be last and the last first (Matt. 19:30, 20:16; Mark 10:31; Luke 13:30), as well as Mary’s prophecy (in the Magnificat canticle) that at the end time her son will unseat the mighty and exalt the humble (Luke 1:52). Tellingly, even these themes can be classified in disparate ways—as licensed and innocuous forms of folk religion or as insidious and disguised forms of political agitation; as the opiate of the masses, fostering belief in a future justice that will remain perpetually on the horizon, or as the veiled expression of hidden struggles, nourishing the desire of subordinates to resist their subordination in remembrance of Christ himself. To echo Václav Havel (who knew a thing or two about creative, ludic, and veiled expressions of dissent), early French farce, like the societies that reveled in its foolish humor, is a mysterious animal with many faces (109), none of which can be said to be the real or authentic one, and each of which is in some sense a mask.

My goal in this book is to revalue farce and the urban popular cultures in which it flourished by scrutinizing these many faces, by probing the genre’s manifest and latent forms of social and cultural mediation, and by attempting to reconstruct its often contradictory ethical, political, and religious investments. Following Pamela Allen Brown, who in turn cites Stuart Hall, I take popular culture to encompass any text or performance that became familiar in part because it was either cheap, or free to be heard, seen, or performed oneself (18); that was, by dint of social and stylistic accessibility, likely to [circulate] through multiple trajectories (18); and that is misrepresented, therefore, by self-enclosed critical approaches that analyze cultural forms as if they contained within themselves, from their moment of origin, some fixed and unchanging meaning or value (Hall 237). Now, farces were sometimes staged for restrictive, elite audiences: French kings from Charles VI to Louis XIV are known to have been passionate admirers of the genre (Rousse, Pouvoir); and Pathelin itself may originally have been conceived for the court of René d’Anjou (Roy). Still, their usual ambit was considerably more expansive and diverse. Performances were regularly sponsored by urban institutions that were anything but static, monolithic, or acquiescent: colleges, universities, guilds, confraternities, youth associations, and the festive societies Natalie Zemon Davis has dubbed the Abbeys of Misrule (97–123). The occasion for a performance was often a religious festival—most famously, Carnival—that sanctioned, or at least tolerated, hierarchical inversion, social mobility, and political disruption.¹ Finally, farces would customarily, if not exclusively, have been staged in open-air or broadly accessible spaces that could not easily restrict attendance or control audience response. Even plays that were performed behind closed doors often circulated beyond them, as witnessed by the fact that Pathelin yielded at least two popular sequels and multiple print editions that may well have been hawked by vendors in the streets (Rousse, "Pathelin" 18–19).² Indeed, regardless of where they were put on (in a castle in Anjou, an assembly hall in Paris, a public square in Dijon, or a jury-rigged playing area in a small provincial town), farces were composed in an idiom that all could understand, appreciate, and share, and that was well suited to the heterogeneous, wayward, and often unruly popular audiences for which the period is known (Enders, Death 105–17; L. Muir, France 325–27). As we shall see, moreover, despite an apparent penchant for hackneyed themes and plots, the extant playscripts typically respond in creative, experimental, and largely untotalizable ways to the symbolic structures, subjective differences, and ideological fault lines that characterized French urban life on the threshold to modernity.

Unfortunately, farce’s aesthetic and social complexities have nearly always been lost on learned scholars. From Renaissance moralists to Enlightenment philosophes, from Romantic philologists to modern theater historians, intellectuals of all stripes have heaped reproaches upon farceurs, accusing them of pandering to the rabble, degenerating public morals, and violating norms of civility and taste (Rey-Flaud, Farce 1–10). True, attitudes toward farce (and late medieval theater generally) have shifted considerably over the past thirty years or so, thanks to rigorous historical research from scholars like Jelle Koopmans, Marie Bouhaïk-Gironès, Katell Lavéant, and Sara Beam; to Jody Enders’s pioneering explorations of rhetoric and law, memory and violence, imitation and enactment, performativity and ethics on the early French stage; to Koopmans’s rediscovery and reedition of the Recueil de Florence, a collection of fifty-three farces that went missing in the 1920s (see A Note on Sources, above); and to Enders’s deeply learned and deliciously irreverent modern English adaptations of two dozen of the best plays (the beginning of a much-anticipated series). And yet despite a profusion of scholarship that aims to bring neglected material to light and to disabuse us of centuries’ worth of prejudice and misconception, we have not entirely discarded the self-enclosed critical perspectives that tend to bridle, diminish, and distort popular culture.

Thus, E. Bruce Hayes argues in a recent monograph that the world of farce does not move beyond the quotidian and the domestic (15); that it exhibits a pervading pessimism that does not promote change, but instead scorns anything that could be construed as new or innovative (15); and that it took a figure like Rabelais to realize the subversive potential of farce, in part by narrativizing it and removing it from the stage. Invoking Peter Burke’s claim that popular culture was essentially conservative in nature (230), as if people believed that the system could not change (234), Hayes argues that traditional farce … offers little in terms of ‘new ways of thinking about the system’ (6, citing N. Davis 143). Farce was radicalized only when Rabelais and the elite group of reform-minded humanists with which he was associated (7) recognized [its] potential to be transformed into a political weapon to be used against entrenched institutions (6).

Of course, one might dismiss Hayes as a chauvinistic seiziémiste whose account of the conventionality and quietism of medieval farceurs enables him to exaggerate the achievements of Renaissance humanists, even as it requires him to minimize the extensive historical, cultural, and political overlap between the two. As he rightly notes, however, many card-carrying medievalists have made similar claims, arguing that if farce has an ethics and politics, they must be mechanical, instrumentalist, and conservative in nature, serving, on the one hand, to reinforce established norms through negative examples and, on the other, to attenuate, suppress, and purge disruptive impulses (Aubailly, Théâtre 181–89; Rousse, Scène 253–60; Knight, Aspects 41–67; Mazouer, Moyen Âge 347–58, Renaissance 130–44). This view is echoed, moreover, by Jessica Milner Davis in the most influential transhistorical study of the genre. For Davis, the style of humor in farce is essentially conservative, meaning it tends to restore conventional authority, or at least to save that authority’s face, at the end of its comic upheavals (3). If it disallows airs and pretences, and often ridicules the wealthy and powerful, it also precludes any preaching for a revolution (3), calling instead for a cheerful ending with no offence given or taken (46).

And yet tenacious as this reading of farce may be, it is predicated on a rather flimsy essentialism, by which I mean it endows a historically extensive, socially pervasive, and inherently ephemeral and interactive performance tradition with a predetermined, uniform set of intentions and outcomes. Or as Havel would put it, the reading claims to know all the potentialities that slumber in the spirit of the population (109) and denies to the supposedly benighted hoi polloi the capacity to imagine alternative social realities, or oppose existing ones, without a humanist intelligentsia to guide them. In reconsidering the aesthetic, intellectual, and social operations of the farce tradition, we would do well to abandon such an elitist and deterministic point of view and turn instead to materialist scholarship that problematizes the ways in which ideology acts through popular culture and is acted on by it.

A good place to begin might be Pierre Macherey’s reading of Jules Verne; for here we learn that a writer [or in our case, a playwright or performer] never reflects mechanically or rigorously the ideology which he represents, even if his sole intention is to represent it: perhaps because no ideology is sufficiently consistent to survive the test of figuration. And otherwise, his work would not be read [or, for that matter, performed] (195). We might turn as well to Fredric Jameson’s celebrated study of Jaws and the Godfather films; for Jameson (citing Macherey) shows us that the work of art does not so much express ideology as endow it with aesthetic representation and figuration and enact its virtual unmasking as a cultural construct liable to internal instability and interpretive difference (Reification 147). Even more useful for my purposes is John Fiske’s analysis of Anglo-American television series; for Fiske shows us how any attempt to produce a coherent set of meanings and social identities around an unarticulated consensus (320) inevitably runs afoul of the multiaccentuality of the [ideological] sign: a poly-semic potential that enables diverse social groups with diverse social interests to enjoy the same cultural objects even as they exercise "[the] power to construct meanings, pleasures, and social identities that differ from those proposed by the structures of domination" (320; citing Volosinov 23).

In this book, I propose a similarly materialist reading of late fifteenth-and early sixteenth-century French farces, which I take to be the expression of collective social and cultural experiences that could not be reduced to a collective or false consciousness—and would never have found an audience if they had been. As a vibrant and ubiquitous mass medium, farce could be used to shape and reshape subjective and communal awareness, civic involvement, and large-scale structures of thought and belief. It could not, however, impose passivity and consensus on spectators, nor (to quote Fiske) could it neutralize cultural and class struggle by reduc[ing] the multiaccentual to the uniaccentual (320). To be sure, censors and patrons often sought to restrict theatrical content, regulate performances, and condition audience response. But there is little reason to believe that they could ever master the unpredictability and evanescence of live theater long enough to create a truly stable set of representations—or that, even if they were able to do so, such representations could be used to suppress dissent or thwart change.

In fact, recent work in theater history has made quite the opposite claim. Drawing on archival evidence that has long been neglected or misconstrued, scholars have reinterpreted medieval popular theater as a uniquely privileged but also inherently volatile medium for social interaction, contestation, and transformation. As Carol Symes argues in a study of thirteenth-century Arras, the medieval common stage was a literally and figuratively open-ended vehicle for urban populations to gain access to publicity, to reflect on faith and morality, and to question prevailing distributions of wealth and power. Relatively unbounded and highly representative, it can usefully be compared to Jürgen Habermas’s public sphere, in that the German philosopher’s notion of Öffentlichkeit, the urban ‘open realm’ (Symes, Common 127), finds a rough analogue in notions the Arrageois applied to public meeting and performance spaces: ad phalam, which Symes glosses as out in the open or at the … display place (145), and en plaine hale, in the open air [literally, the marketplace] and in the presence of the assembled townspeople (207). If Habermas denies the very possibility of a medieval public sphere on the grounds that the printing press was a prerequisite for communicative rationality, Symes counters that it not only existed but was likely to have been larger and more buoyant than its modern counterpart (279).³ After all, as Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky have shown, modern mass media are subject to concentrated ownership, government sourcing, and profit imperatives, making it relatively easy for the public sphere to be hijacked by corporate and political interests. By contrast, Symes argues, Arras’s public sphere was shaped by media that could not be efficiently controlled—no matter how hard kings and canonists might try; media that, in their interactive and dialogical liveness, endowed the community with forms of meaningful exchange, social innovation, and political action that modern consumer culture may well lack (279).

This claim is certainly borne out by Symes’s speculative reconstruction of a performance of Le garçon et l’aveugle, a kind of proto-farce in which actors pretending to be con men pretending to be beggars—and who may initially have been taken by onlookers for beggars putting on a good show (the better to win alms), or con men whose begging and acting skills had been honed out of sheer necessity—must stake out space for a performance in a crowded and boisterous public square (132–33). While we lack the evidence to prove that the play was staged as Symes imagines, her conclusion is certainly an apt one: by posing as social undesirables who nonetheless manage to win and hold the attention of an urban audience, street performers would have effectively demonstrated how people without the power to assert themselves through more conventional means (violence, wealth) [could gain] other types of power through the use of public media (130).

If we turn to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (a period for which we have a far more robust, if still uneven, record of performance conditions and practices), we soon discover that the common stage retained, and perhaps enhanced, its mediatizing and democratizing functions. For Jelle Koopmans, the profane playwrights of this era, who invented a new tradition without knowing ancient models, can be considered radically experimental—indeed far more so than, say, the 1950s avant-garde, which differentiated itself from a known and documented tradition (Rire 210) even as it perpetuated many features of theatrical realism, including the proscenium stage, box sets, and a fixed system of perspective. To gain a fuller picture of the formal and ideological experimentalism of early farce—to glimpse what Koopmans calls its unlit face (210)—we must shift our own ossified perspectives, especially the still widely accepted safety valve theory, which holds that festive comedy depicts le monde à l’envers in order to confine social rebellion to the realm of make believe and to impose an aesthetics of closure that restores everything to its proper place at the end of the show (213; citing Mazouer, Renaissance 144).

Even a cursory examination of performance records reveals how misguided this theory is. Farceurs were regularly accused of sedition and lèsemajesté, and of performing polemical plays that sought to hinder rather than enable social integration. Those accusations seem, moreover, to have been well grounded: farce presentations led with some regularity to open confrontations with authority, eruptions of violence, and prison terms for those involved. If this, farce’s dark and menacing face, has seldom been visible to modern literary critics, there are, for Koopmans, three main reasons: first, the most disruptive plays were likely never published or were suppressed after publication; second, the plays that did survive were almost certainly subject to censorship and self-censorship; and third, in reading these plays, critics have adopted taxonomic and generic modes of analysis that have tended to generalize, neutralize, or obscure subversive content, much of which is already encoded or veiled (Rire 211, 219–21). Divorced from historical context, the corpus of surviving farces has thus lent itself to a nostalgic, reactionary, and totalizing vision of the harmless and childish antics of the lower classes at play. Koopmans exhorts us to resist such a groundless, sentimental caricature and to embrace instead neohistoricist and microhistoricist projects of recovery: we must delve into municipal and regional archives in order to resituate farce within its original communicative settings, thereby redefining its popular character. That character is just as likely to be targeted and oppositional as conventional and quiescent, and in many instances the latter tendencies would have served to conceal and enable the former. Farceurs may have smiled broadly, but evidence suggests that they often did so through clenched or gnashing teeth. Likewise, the laughter they elicited in audiences was not always playful and harmless; on the contrary, writes Koopmans, it could be a rire grinçant: ruminative and brooding, sometimes even threatening and cruel.

But what are we to do with the scores of published scripts that cannot be linked to a well-defined context and that have often given the impression of puerile mischief, genial resignation, and toothless wit? I believe we could read those scripts more deeply, and perceive farce’s many faces more clearly, if we were to start by conceding Jody Enders’s claim that early French playwrights rarely managed (or sought) to impose aesthetic coherence and fixed value systems on the common stage. Instead, they enacted a play of differences, shuttling freely between hegemonic and populist agendas, concession and rebellion, oral and written transmission, tradition and change, illusion and reality, to the point that one pole becomes difficult to distinguish from the other (Death 5). Even the most conventional farces exhibit elements of this dialectical oscillation, which is legible in the very thematic and structural properties of the genre. Thus, the proverbial basis for many plots—à trompeur, trompeur et demi, every deceiver will be deceived, or, more literally, for every deceiver, a deceiver and a half—suggests that in the hands of farceurs, reality is prone to increasingly artful forms of falsification and that the seemingly bland repetition of traditional formulas may itself constitute a tactic for pursuing social advantage, disruption, and change. After all, many farce characters use theatrical tricks to claim identities and privileges that are not their own by right, custom, or birth. Even if they are eventually exposed or unseated, moreover, it is usually by an even wilier deceiver pursuing not justice or truth but his or her own advancement. Together, then, trompeur and trompeur et demi reveal that social roles, ranks, and realities are not fixed and innate but contingent and transferable, and that the theatricality of everyday life can be used to undermine hegemonic forms of social determinism.

Naturally, we encounter more rigidly conceived characters in farce as well, characters whose truth to type seems to verify the power of social categories to absorb individuals and prescribe their destinies. And yet by giving ideology such a crude form, these characters must also have exposed it as a system of representation subject to demystification and appropriation. Many spectators would presumably have understood, whether consciously or unconsciously, that reductive stereotypes have little to do with real people but instead mark an attempt to impose ideological order through fictional means. Many others would likely have grasped the ways in which real people could in turn use typological masks—what were known in the period as faux visages (Koopmans, Et doit)—to achieve subversive goals or avoid pernicious outcomes. Indeed, theater archives lend credence to such a claim: forensic records reveal that farceurs were immensely skilled at exploiting the genre’s conventions, as well as the ambiguities of identity and intention inherent in theatrical performance, to surreptitiously convey seditious messages, to guarantee themselves plausible deniability in case of detection, and to undermine the efficiency of political domination by ruling elites (Bouhaïk-Gironès, Procès).

Evidence such as this surely confirms Paul Zumthor’s claim (which Enders is fond of citing) that of all the arts, theater is, without a doubt, the most receptive to changes in the social structure, and the most revelatory of those changes (Essai 447, qtd. in Enders, Death 5). As Enders rightly notes, however, it is not so easy to figure out just what theater was … revealing … in a given time and place (Death 5); nor can we readily discern all the manifest and latent meanings a play and its players would have communicated to an assembled audience and the various subgroups it encompassed. Much like the tricksters they played, farceurs were careful to hide their faces in a regression of masks, and seem to have been especially skilled at concealing acts of rebellion within gestures of concession. We must therefore train ourselves to think of all faces in farce as faux visages. By endowing social identities and relations with aesthetic form, these false faces illustrate the paradoxical power of concealment and latency. Or to quote a description of les Gens (the People) in Métier, Marchandise, le Berger, le Temps et les Gens, a fifteenth-century farce morale, Ilz vous montrent leur faulx visage / Car ilz parlent mal en deriere (They show you their false face because they speak ill behind it; qtd. in Koopmans, Et doit 280).

Taking my cue from characters like les Gens, Mère Folle, and her acrobatic fools, I argue in this book that much of the richness of the extant farce corpus lies in its use of familiar and shared, but also elusive and multiaccentual, cultural codes to mediate, negotiate, and reflect upon the