1. Medieval
The farce in the Middle Ages was a short comic play without moralizing or satirical intentions (as opposed to the morality and the sotie). It derived its humour from amusing situations, tricks, verbal dexterity, and sudden reversals of the action; a classic plot is one in which a would-be deceiver is finally himself deceived. About 150 farces have survived, mostly in four main collections dating from the late 15th and 16th c.; the period of the farce's popularity extends from the end of the Middle Ages well into the Renaissance, and its influence is still apparent in Molière. The word farce is usually interpreted as meaning ‘stuffing’, thus implying that farces were originally comic interpolations in serious mystery plays; but only one example of this has survived, in the 15th-c. Vie de saint Fiacre. Separate farces were sometimes performed after a mystery play to amuse or retain the audience. Another interpretation links farce to fart, meaning deceit, a notion which is present in nearly all the plays.
The origins of the farce are uncertain; there appears to be a gap in the surviving comic drama between the 13th-c. Arras plays and the farces. Some critics suggest that the fabliaux of the 13th and 14th c. fill this gap, in that they are the narrative reflections of a lost dramatic tradition. Undoubtedly the themes, settings, and structure of the fabliaux are similar to those of the farces.
Farce performances were of two main types: those organized by the Basoches, usually farces in a legal setting; and those performed by semi-professional troupes of four or five actors (men played women's roles), who would set up their stage in an open space or a market-place or a large hall. Stages were small and simple: planks supported by barrels or trestles at head-height, divided in two by a curtain behind which the actors changed. These physical limitations restrict the dimensions of most farces, which are rarely more than 500 lines long and require only two, three, or four actors. Although aimed primarily at the general public, farces were much appreciated by the upper classes; nobles and kings (e.g. René d'Anjou) employed farceurs on a permanent or occasional basis.
The characters in the farces were not abstractions, as in the soties and moralities; they were apparently real people, with names, jobs, and problems. The most frequent settings for farce plots are the home or the market square, and the recurrent themes are petty dishonesty, illicit love, stupidity, and stubbornness; but these human failings are a source of laughter, not satire. A typical farce will show (a) a ménage à trois in which the lover, often the local priest, attempts to seduce the willing wife of a jealous but foolish husband (L'Amoureux, Martin de Cambrai); or (b) a simple dispute and exchange of insults between husband and wife (L'Obstination des femmes); or (c) a series of attempts at dishonesty (Le Pasté et la tarte). Though the action is set in the real world, the farces are not realistic. The main characters are stereotypes—jealous husband, lecherous priest, unfaithful wife, dishonest merchant, adoring father, semi-educated teacher, etc. They do not develop in the course of the action, which springs from the conflict between several of these stereotypes in a particular situation. The outcome of a farce is usually a predictable surprise. The stereotypical woman of the farces—she is deceitful, stubborn, crafty, foul-mouthed, and over-sexed beyond her husband's capacity—has caused some critics to claim the genre is anti-feminist; but the stereotypical men are no more admirable, and are often stupider.
The sources of humour in the farce are not only the characters and the situations, but also the language. The best farces, e.g. Pathelin, Martin de Cambrai, use language not merely as a supplementary means of provoking laughter (verbal jokes, puns, insults), but as central to the misunderstandings and arguments. The importance of language, together with the restrictions of versification (octosyllabic couplets with mnemonic rhymes, and frequent rondeaux-triolets) and the need to create a tightly structured denouement, meant that, even if the public of the farces was ill-educated and illiterate, this was certainly not true of the authors.
[Graham Runnalls]
Bibliography
- B. Bowen, Les Caractéristiques essentielles de la farce (1964)
- J.-C. Aubailly, Le Théâtre médiéval profane et comique (1975)
- A. Tissier (ed.), Recueil de farces, 6 vols. (1986-90)
2. 1550 to the Present
There are many affinities and common elements linking the medieval farces which flourished c.1450-1550 with the Comédie-Italienne of the 17th c., the noisy pantomime at the Théâtre des Funambules in the 1830s, the topical verve of the vaudevilles popular around 1815-45, and the more literary farces of Labiche and Feydeau. Although the use of verse is now the exception rather than the rule, all these dramatic forms draw on stock characters and are, in varying degrees, irreverent, boisterous, and subversive of authority. With the exception of the mimes, they all revel in word-play, some of it, especially in the 17th and 18th c., indecent or scatological. They also share a fondness for practical jokes and elaborate comic business.
The native French farce of the early 17th-c. Hôtel de Bourgogne was associated with former mountebanks like Tabarin, Turlupin, Gaultier-Garguille, and fat Gros-Guillaume. It originated in the fairground booths where travelling quacks used parades, crude dramatic sketches, to attract customers. During the 17th c. this broad native farce, elements of which find their way into Molière's Les Fourberies de Scapin (1671), was rivalled, though not displaced, by the greater virtuosity of the Comédie-Italienne, itself a naturalized version of the Italian commedia dell'arte with its stock characters, masks, colourful costumes, acrobatic skills, and improvised ensemble playing based on an outline sketch (scenario). Borrowing some of the characters of the Comédie-Italienne, the native parade evolved in the course of the 18th c. into a racy entertainment with topical allusions and scatological word-play. Its appeal went beyond popular audiences and it was taken up c.1730 by the gentry in a vogue which lasted until the Revolution of 1789.
The ideological pressures of the Revolution and the censorship and cultural pretensions of the Napoleonic regime militated against the gross levity of traditional farce, but the reforms of 1806-7 eventually made it possible for licensed theatres like the Variétés and the Vaudeville to continue the disrespectful and scabrous traditions of old farce without the coarseness and horseplay of the original. Advances in public education and aspirations to gentility among the rising commercial and manufacturing classes in the mid-19th c. diminished the appeal of broad and indecent farce, but the power of farce to shock and challenge conventional society is confirmed in the second half of the century by the fast, witty, and inventive plays of Labiche and Feydeau, which dispense with scatology and crude knockabout routines, and by Jarry's violent and aggressive parody, Ubu roi, which does not. A revolutionary development of farce in the 20th c. is Beckett's En attendant Godot, where the routines and patter of the music-hall are used to metaphysical ends.
[S. Beynon John]
