Download or read book Six Medieval French Farces written by Thierry Boucquey and published by Edwin Mellen Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers English translations of six French farces dating from the beginning to the mid-16th century. Each play portrays particular features of French farce. The author has illustrated these aspects, allowing the reader to appreciate the distinctions between works within the genre. The introduction provides a profile of the corpus of plays as well as a brief but enlightening history of farce itself. Each chapter/play includes its own introduction and set of notes, providing historical, cultural and staging information
Download or read book A Dozen French Farces written by Albert Bermel and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 1997 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of hilarious plays from the 15th - 20th centuries is brimming with all the venerable ingredients of French farce. Distinguished drama scholar Bermel has gathered some of the best in the genre, and the merriment, ribaldry, and wit of the works dance through his translations brilliantly.
Download or read book The Farce of the Fart and Other Ribaldries written by Jody Enders and published by Middle Ages. This book was released on 2013-03-14 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theater historian Jody Enders brings a dozen of the funniest French farces to contemporary English speaking audiences for the first time. This performance-friendly collection includes background information about the plays for medievalists, theater practitioners, and classic comedy lovers alike.
Download or read book Five Comedies of Medieval France written by and published by . This book was released on 1970 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This collection of French medieval plays is the first of its kind in the English language. It presents genuine translations -- not adaptations -- of three secular farces, a humorous miracle play, and a musical pastoral. The translator, Oscar Mandel, himself a playwright, has provided a comprehensive introduction discussing the development of drama in the Middle Ages as well as individual introductions to each of the plays. Comedy of the Middle Ages has its own character, its own strong points, its own limitations. It can be very funny, it is rapid and peppery, but we had better not look to it for acute psychological insights, penetrating criticism of life, philosophical reverberations, or even witty repartee in our sense of the expression. The greatest writers of the time did not write for the stage, and even when serious, the drama was popular and it avoided subtleties. And yet, here and there, something very much like genius winks at us from both the serious and comic drama of these centuries" -- Back cover.
Download or read book The Farce of the Fart and Other Ribaldries written by Jody Enders and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-05-31 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Was there more to medieval and Renaissance comedy than Chaucer and Shakespeare? Bien sûr. For a real taste of saucy early European humor, one must cross the Channel to France. There, in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the sophisticated met the scatological in popular performances presented by roving troupes in public squares that skewered sex, politics, and religion. For centuries, the scripts for these outrageous, anonymously written shows were available only in French editions gathered from scattered print and manuscript sources. Now prize-winning theater historian Jody Enders brings twelve of the funniest of these farces to contemporary English-speaking audiences in "The Farce of the Fart" and Other Ribaldries. Enders's translation captures the full richness of the colorful characters, irreverent humor, and over-the-top plotlines, all in a refreshingly uncensored American vernacular. Those who have never heard the one about the Cobbler, the Monk, the Wife, and the Gatekeeper should prepare to be shocked and entertained. "The Farce of the Fart" and Other Ribaldries is populated by hilarious characters high and low. For medievalists, theater practitioners, and classic comedy lovers alike, Enders provides a wealth of information about the plays and their history. Helpful details abound for each play about plot, character development, sets, staging, costumes, and props. This performance-friendly collection offers in-depth guidance to actors, directors, dramaturges, teachers, and their students. "The Farce of the Fart" and Other Ribaldries puts fifteenth-century French farce in its rightful place alongside Chaucer, Shakespeare, commedia dell'arte, and Molière—not to mention Monty Python. Vive la Farce!
Download or read book The Farce of Master Pierre Pathelin written by and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 53 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Farce written by Jessica Milner Davis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Farce has always been relegated to the lowest rung of the ladder of dramatic genres. Distinctions between farce and more literary comic forms remain clouded, even in the light of contemporary efforts to rehabilitate this type of comedy. Is farce really nothing more than slapstick-the "putting out of candles, kicking down of tables, falling over joynt-stools," as Thomas Shadwell characterized it in the seventeenth century? Or was his contemporary, Nahum Tate correct when he declared triumphantly that "there are no rules to be prescribed for that sort of wit, no patterns to copy; and 'tis altogether the creature of imagination"? Davis shows farce to be an essential component in both the comedic and tragic traditions. Farce sets out to explore the territory of what makes farce distinct as a comic genre. Its lowly origins date back to the classic Graeco-Roman theatre; but when formal drama was reborn by the process of elaboration of ritual within the mediaeval Church, the French term "farce" became synonymous with a recognizable style of comic performance. Taking a wide range of farces from the briefest and most basic of fair-ground mountebank performances to fully-fledged five-act structures from the late nineteenth century, the book reveals the patterns of comic plot and counter-plot that are common to all. The result is a novel classification of farce-plots, which serves to clarify the differences between farce and more literary comic forms and to show how quickly farce can shade into other styles of humor. The key is a careful balance between a revolt against order and propriety, and a kind of Realpolitik which ultimately restores the social conventions under attack. A complex array of devices in such things as framing, plot, characterization, timing and acting style maintain the delicate balance. Contemporary examples from the London stage bring the discussion u
Download or read book Pure Filth written by Noah D. Guynn and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2019-10-11 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Four Domestic Farces of Medieval France written by Gerald Thomas Chambers and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of French Theater written by Edward Forman and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2010-04-27 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The term "French theater" evokes most immediately the glories of the classical period and the peculiarities of the Theater of the Absurd. It has given us the works of Corneille, Racine, and Moliere. In the Romantic era there was Alexander Dumas and surrealist works of Alfred Jarry, and then the Theater of the Absurd erupted in rationalistic France with Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The Historical Dictionary of French Theater relates the history of the French theater through a chronology, introduction, bibliography, and over 400 cross-referenced dictionary entries on authors, trends, genres, concepts, and literary and historical developments that played a central role in the evolution of French theater.
Download or read book Holy Deadlock and Further Ribaldries written by and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2017-01-18 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did you hear the one about the newlywed who rushes off for legal advice before the honeymoon is over? Or the husbands who arrange for an enormous tub in which to cure their sugary wives with a pinch of salt? How about a participatory processional toward marriage so sacrilegious that it puts Chaucer's pilgrimage to shame? And who could have imagined a medieval series of plays devoted to spouse-swapping? Jody Enders has heard and seen all this and more, and shares it in her second volume of performance-friendly translations of medieval French farces. Carefully culled from more than two hundred extant farces, and crafted with a wit and contemporary sensibility that make them playable half a millennium later, these dozen bawdy plays take on the hilariously depressing and depressingly hilarious state of holy wedlock. In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century comedy, love and marriage do not exactly go together like a horse and carriage. What with all the arranged matches of child brides to doddering geezers, the frustration, fear, anxiety, jealousy, disappointment, and despair are matched only by the eagerness with which everybody sings, dances, and cavorts in the pursuit of deception, trickery, and adultery. Easily recognizable stock characters come vividly to life, struggling to negotiate the limits of power, class, and gender, each embodying the distinctive blend of wit, social critique, and breathless boisterousness that is farce. Whether the antics play out on the fifteenth-century stage or the twenty-first-century screen, Enders notes, comedy revels in shining its brightest spotlight on the social and legal questions of what makes a family. Her volume defines and redefines love and marriage with a message that no passage of time can tear asunder: social change finds its start where comedy itself begins—at home.
Download or read book Trial by Farce written by Jody Enders and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2023-03-06 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 Molière, 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.
Download or read book Immaculate Deception and Further Ribaldries written by Jody Enders and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2022-06-24 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did you hear the one about the Mother Superior who was so busy casting the first stone that she got caught in flagrante delicto with her lover? What about the drunk with a Savior complex who was fool enough to believe himself to be the Second Coming? And that's nothing compared to what happens when comedy gets its grubby paws on the confessional. Enter fifteenth- and sixteenth-century French farce, the "bestseller" of a world that stands to tell us a lot about the enduring influence of a Shakespeare or a Molière. It's the sacrilegious world of Immaculate Deception, the third volume in a series of stage-friendly translations from the Middle French. Brought to you through the wonders of Open Access, these twelve engagingly funny satires target religious hypocrisy in that in-your-face way that only true slapstick can muster. There is literally nothing sacred. Why this repertoire and why now? The current political climate has had dire consequences for the pleasures of satire at a cultural moment when we have never needed it more. It turns out that the proverbial Dark Ages had a lighter side; and France's over 200 rollicking, frolicking, singing, and dancing comedies—more extant than in any other vernacular—have waited long enough for their moment in the spotlight. They are seriously funny: funny enough to reclaim their place in cultural history, and serious enough to participate in the larger conversation about what it means to be a social influencer, then and now. Rather than relegate medieval texts to the dustbin of history, an unabashedly feminist translation can reframe and reject the sexism of bygone days by doing what theater always invites us to do: interpret, inflect, and adapt.
Download or read book Women Laughter in Medieval Comic Literature written by Lisa Renée Perfetti and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Portrays a range of medieval heroines to ascertain how humor might have been used and enjoyed by medieval women
Download or read book A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Middle Ages written by Jody Enders and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-05-20 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time, a group of distinguished authors come together to provide an authoritative exploration of the cultural history of tragedy in the Middle Ages. Reports of the so-called death of medieval tragedy, they argue, have been greatly exaggerated; and, for the Middle Ages, the stakes couldn't be higher. Eight essays offer a blueprint for future study as they take up the extensive but much-neglected medieval engagement with tragic genres, modes, and performances from the vantage points of gender, politics, theology, history, social theory, anthropology, philosophy, economics, and media studies. The result? A recuperated medieval tragedy that is as much a branch of literature as it is of theology, politics, law, or ethics and which, at long last, rejoins the millennium-long conversation about one of the world's most enduring art forms. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.
Download or read book At Whom Are We Laughing written by Zenia Sacks DaSilva and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-07-24 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They say that laughter is a purely human phenomenon, so exclusively ours that we brook no intruders except, of course, for the laughing hyena, the laughing jackass (officially known as the kookaburra bird of Australia), laughing matters, laughing gas, or the perennial laughing stock. But what is humor, that funny thing so varied in its colors and tones, so encompassing in its themes, so different from time to time and place to place? And when we poke fun, at whom are we really laughing? At Whom Are We Laughing? Humor in Romance Language Literatures is the selective product of a multi-national gathering of scholars sponsored by Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, to explore humor across the centuries in the literatures of Italy, France, Romania, the Iberian Peninsula and its diaspora. The volume contains thirty-one scholarly and interpretative papers on diverse aspects of their wit, provocative aspects that are, for the most part, little known to the general reader. Precisely because of its scope and diversity, its appeal should extend beyond academia into the libraries of the intellectually curious, be they English speakers or not, be they specialists in humanities, psychology, society and culture, or merely interested amateurs who frequent the many new humor societies and clubs that abound in the world of today.
Download or read book Aspects of Genre in Late Medieval French Drama written by Alan E. Knight and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1983 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
