Farce

Jessica Milner Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351520232
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

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

1 What is Farce?

“I have not yet seen any Definition of Farce, and dare not to be the first that ventures to define it. I know not by what Fate it happens (in common Notion) to be the most contemptible sort of the Drama.”

—Nahum Tate, preface to A Duke and No Duke, 1684, edition of 1693

When the newly created Poet Laureate, Nahum Tate, set out to defend farce in 1693, his literary colleagues were accustomed to employ the word as a term of contempt. Thomas Rhymer, for example, savagely damned Shakespeare’s Othello as ‘a Bloody Farce, without salt or savour.” For many people today farce is still a pejorative term, implying that something is “as ridiculous as a theatrical farce;...a hollow pretense, a mockery” (O.E.D., s.v. Farce, 2). But in the language of criticism, the word is now generally used in a more constructive sense to identify a particular form of comedy. This the O.E.D. succinctly defines as “A dramatic work (usually short) which has for its sole object to excite laughter” (s.v. Farce, 1). It is this genre with which this study is concerned: broad, physical, visual comedy, whose effects are pre-eminently theatrical and intended solely to entertain; comedy which is slapstick, if you like, in a more or less coherently funny narrative; or, as Eric Bentley puts it “practical joking turned theatrical” (The Life of the Drama, N.Y., 1964, p.234).

Farce came late to the canon of dramatic terminology. Unlike the terms comedy, tragedy, and even satire, its usage was not sanctioned by classical authority. In fact, both the Greek and Roman stages seem to have distinguished between various forms of comedy according to their subject-matter, rather than their appropriate comic styles. Thus, Old Comedy was equated with ridicule of individuals,

New Comedy with tales of domestic intrigue and adventure, comoedia palliata with Greek stories and characters adapted for the Roman stage, comoedia togata indicated native Roman characters, and fabula (comoedia) atellana described farces with characters and subjects drawn from the rustic town of Atella. What little is known about the antecedents of classical Greek drama, however, suggests that Athenian dramatists of the fifth century B.C. drew upon an earlier tradition of comic village performances, which were popular among the Dorian Greeks, particularly those in the neighboring province of Megara. Perhaps these were amateur farcical playlets which provided source-material for the more literary drama in the way in which folk-drama informs the work of dramatists the world over. Certainly, to the Athenians Megaran jokes were somewhat low-class and Aristophanes prides himself in his plays on not using “laughter stolen from Megara.” This did not prevent him, like many other great dramatists, from doing precisely what he denied. In Wasps, Xanthias the slave warns the audience:

• Don’t expect anything profound,
• Or any slapstick à la Megara.
• And we got no slaves to dish out baskets Of free nuts—or the old ham scene Of Heracles cheated of his dinner;
• ... Our little story
• Has meat in it and a meaning not
• Too far above your heads, but more Worth your attention than low comedy. (Plays, Vol. I, trans. P. Dickinson, Oxford U.P., 1970, p.171)

Like Athenian Old Comedy itself, Dorian farce may well have had its roots in Dionysian festivities. Quite possibly, the ritual invocation of the wine-god and his spirit of fertility called for burlesque impersonation of gods, heroes and even local characters. The act of mimicry often instinctively takes on a comic shape; perhaps by virtue of its licensed status as play, perhaps in acknowledgement of the gap between playful image and serious reality. Protected by the anonymity of costume and mask, mimicry can readily turn to the impersonation of recognizable individuals. In this case, the laughter becomes corrective—an excoriation of social misfits. Aristotle regarded the custom of lampooning in this way as an evolutionary stage in the development of comedy (Poetics. V. 1449b). Roman society possessed a parallel in the abusive “Fescennine verses,” which were improvised at festivals and weddings. Mediaeval Europe too had its charivari, or communal procession which mocked in effigy—and sometimes in person—cuckolds, husbands who were beaten by their wives and similar undesirables.

The dangerous tendency towards personal satire is ever present in the history of farce. Even where mimicry of that kind takes place as part of a licensed festival—during the Feast of Fools, for example, or Carnival, or Twelfth Night—the possibility of giving offence remains. Lampoons, Fescennine verses and charivari alike, all exceeded their license and were actively suppressed by the societies that produced them.

For the primitive comedian seeking to elaborate a fixed, ritual text, more promising ground is offered by exploitation of the illusory nature of his performance itself. His playful mimicry naturally invites the introduction of associate actors who are more (or less) deceived by his act than is his audience. It is no accident that the traditional characters and subjects of the folk-drama—even where it retains a fixed and ritual pattern—have to do with stealing, deception, trickery, magical transformations and practical jokes of all kinds. The English Mummers’ Play, or the plots of Punch-and-Judy shows, or the exploits of Till Eulenspiegel recorded in the German Carnival-plays, all illustrate this preoccupation. Out of such performances come buffoons who are skilful enough to be worthy of hire and who, in the right economic climate, will create a band of professional entertainers. Inventing their own jokes and patter, they ring the changes upon stock characters and familiar situations, while absorbing new material from literary and political movements of the time. Whenever innovation becomes too controversial for the economic well-being of the troupe, the traditional material can offer a safety-net for their survival.

Such sub-literary, popular entertainment leaves few traces for the historian or sociologist, but it has surfaced repeatedly through the history of the European theatre. The pattern outlined above can be traced, if dimly, in the evolution of the commedia dell’arte in sixteenth-century Italy; in the growth of the first professional companies in Spain; in the history of the Elizabethan stage-jig and the hand-to-mouth existence of actors during the Commonwealth period; in the banding together of Parisian farceurs at the turn of the sixteenth century; in the early history of the Viennese Volkstheater; in the wanderings of the Russian cabotins; in the art of the clowns in pantomime and harlequinade and in the varying fortunes of puppeteers and itinerant actors at fairgrounds and street-corners throughout Europe. For the great Russian director, Vsevolod Meyerhold, mime and farce represented the life-springs of the professional theatre from which, even in modern times, it could seek to regenerate itself:

The idea of the actor’s art, based on a worship of mask, gesture and movement, is indissolubly linked with the idea of the farce. The farce is eternal. If its principles are for a time expelled from the walls of the theatre, we nevertheless know that they are firmly engraved in the lines of the manuscripts left by the theatre’s greatest writers. (“Farce,” in Theater in the Twentieth Century, ed. R.W. Corrigan, N.Y., 1963, pp.205-206)

Farce has certainly always found a ready home in other dramatic forms, whether in between the acts of the literary drama, or as “comic relief,” or merely as one festive element among others within the scope of an all-embracing comedy. The French scholar, Paul Mazon, pointed out the role of Dorian farce in the comedies of Aristophanes as early as 1904 (in his Essai sur la composition des comédies d’Aristophane, Paris, 1904). Earlier, another French scholar, Gustave Lanson, published an important essay evaluating the contribution of farce and its acting techniques in the comedies of Molière (“Molière et la Farce,” Révue de Paris, Vol. III, May, 1901, pp.129-153). He dissented from the traditional view that Molière’s achievement is cheapened by the influences he absorbed from both the French and the Italian farce traditions. On the contrary, Lanson argued:

the true Molière is seen in a picture of the Comédie-Française, where he stands amid other illustrious actors of farce, both Italian and French.... These are his masters, these are his origins. And he is great enough not to blush at them.

He is the best farceur, and for this reason he is the best creator of comedy. (Trans. Ruby Cohen, Tulane Drama Review, Vol. VIII, 1963, p.154)

Similar reappraisals have taken place of other major comic dramatists, including both Plautus in the classical world and Shakespeare in the Renaissance. Allardyce Nicoll, whose pioneering work, Masks, Mimes and Miracles (N.Y., 1963), attempted to trace the sub-literary traditions from the classical world through the Dark Ages into mediaeval Europe, reflects this re-evaluation in his treatment of dramatic theory. In the second of his two theoretical studies, farce is regarded as an essential component of a good comedy. He explains:

When we say that every comedy should be based upon farce, we mean simply that the rough physical framework provides an excellent skeleton for comedy’s richer qualities and that without this it is in danger of becoming too delicate and too refined for theatre’s daily food. (The Theatre and Dramatic Theory, London, 1962, p.88)

This kind of approach is of little use, however, in the attempt to come to grips with farce as a genre. As long as it is viewed as existing in symbiosis with “richer” forms of comedy, farce can only be characterized by negatives—the more exaggerated characterizations, the cruder coincidences and the grosser pieces of joking belong to the farce, while the more sophisticated elements of plot, character and theme are those of comedy proper. Throughout its history, critics have tended to see farce in this negative light and to dismiss it as a genre with brief descriptions such as Nicoll’s “rough physical framework,” or “gross and improbable characterization,” “horse-play and slap-stick.” For L.J. Potts, farce is “comedy with the meaning left out; which is as much as to say, with the comedy left out” (Comedy, London, 1949, p.37). Many critical works on types of the drama do not even bother to define what is meant by farce; and those that do, rarely do so with objectivity. In “A Note on Farce” (Quarterly Journal of Speech, XLVI, 1960), J. D. Hurrell observes that “farce, having once been relegated to the lowest level of the series headed by tragedy, has continually been taken for granted as something if not actually beneath criticism, at least beneath the need for critical discussion” (p.426). Examining the entry on farce in the authoritative Oxford Companion to the Theatre (ed. Phyllis Hartnoll, Oxford, 1951), Eric Bentley concludes that “the whole article is based on the assumption ... that farce consists of defects without qualities” (“The Psychology of Farce,” in, E. Bentley, ed., “Let’s Get a Divorce!” and Other Plays, N.Y., 1958, p.viii).

When farce is examined for its own sake in the context of plays which make no claim to be anything other than farce, its formal parameters can more easily be grasped. In France during the late Middle Ages, farce actually achieved this structural independence and was both named and recognized as a distinct dramatic type. In the ensuing centuries, however, farce has so often played an adjunct role in the theatrical bill that confusion over its characteristics has continued to reign.

Being short and often episodic in structure, farce is by nature suited to this role of “filling.” Indeed, its name is probably derived from the Latin farcire, “to stuff, and the word “farce” remains in both French and English a rather old-fashioned name for a stuffing for meat and other foods. Its first connection with the drama seems to have come by absorption of the verb-form into ecclesiastical usage. In the period between the ninth and twelfth centuries, the Latin liturgy of the Church underwent a process of musical and verbal enrichment by the addition of tropes, or embellishing phrases. Those phrases and their musical accompaniment which were inserted into parts of the Mass, such as the Kyrie and the Sanctus, were often called farsae or farsurae. The term was also used for the reading of Lessons and Epistles which had been “farced” in this way. In French and Italian cathedrals by the beginning of the twelfth century these farsurae were often composed in the vernacular, as a gloss on the meaning of the Latin passages being chanted to the congregation from the scriptures set for a particular day. Épitres farcies (“farced epistles”) were used, for example, on the Feast of St Stephen and on Christmas Day, presumably with the aim of helping the people to understand the events lying behind the story of the first Christian martyr and the birth of the Saviour.

This “farced” material was not, of course, farcical. But, interestingly, at this same period, the process of “troping” was also taking on dramatic form. Tropes representing the visit of the shepherds and the Magi to the Christmas crib and that of the Marys to the empty tomb at Easter were enacted as a regular part of the liturgy for the appropriate feasts as early as the tenth century in monasteries such as Winchester, Fleury, St Gall, Benediktbeuern and Limoges. By the twelfth century, these liturgical dramas were also making use of the vernacular, as well as Latin, for their chanted dialogue and some plays had either outgrown their place in the liturgy or were composed specially for performance in their own right.

There is no evidence that the term farsa was used in reference to these plays. The usual term for those which remained part of the liturgy was Ordo (service), or Officium (office). Where a play had independent status, it might be called ludus (play), or spiel, jeu, or auto, for those in German, French or Spanish vernacular languages. Some critics have thought that “farcing” may have related to the introduction of comic business in the form of vernacular dialogue interpolated into the sober, Latin plays. This theory is not borne out by the historical development of the plays, however. The earliest passages in the vernacular are by no means characteristically comic. They serve rather to introduce “human interest” in the central story— Mary’s lament at the foot of the cross, for example, or Mary Magdalene’s dancing-song as she attracts the attention of her admirers, or the chant of the soldiers on watch outside the Tomb. Dramas composed entirely in the vernacular are contemporaneous with Latin dramas, moreover, and comic scenes such as the raging of Herod, or the exploits of devils garnering the damned souls for Hell, were not necessarily marked by use of the vernacular.

It seems likely, nevertheless, that the process of “farcing” acquired some connection with entertainment. Among other feasts at which épitres farcies (“farced epistles”) were prescribed was the “Feast of Fools” (also known as the “Feast of the Ass”). In France, this developed into a riotous celebration which required reform by the end of the twelfth century. Records from the cathedral-schools of Beauvais and Sens give some idea of the extraordinary nature of this Saturnalian feast, which took place as the culmination of Christmas revels on the Feast of the Circumcision (1 January). From the Feast of St Stephen (26 December) onwards, in ecclesiastical communities, various ranks of the clergy were permitted their special day of indulgence; on the Feast of the Holy Innocents (28 December) for example, a Boy Bishop from the choristers might be elected to rule over the festivities. The Feast of the Circumcision was the day of the despised sub-deacons, who contributed the greatest disruption to the established order. At Beauvais, an ass was escorted in procession up the nave of the cathedral by canons bearing wine while the burlesque “Prose of the Ass” was sung; the censing at Mass was done with black puddings and sausages; the celebrant was instructed to bray three times to conclude the service, while the congregation responded similarly. Sir E. K. Chambers described the ruling idea of the Feast as “the inversion of status, and the performance, inevitably burlesque, by the inferior clergy of functions properly belonging to their betters” (The Mediaeval Stage, Vol. 1, Oxford, 1903, p.325). More widely, it was an opportunity to celebrate freedom from normal discipline and to mock those sober souls who resisted this topsy-turvy reign by the “fools,” or devotees of the ass. And it undoubtedly involved masking and mimicry.

The whole Christmas period, covering the winter solstice and corresponding roughly with the Roman Saturnalia (which in pagan times had been celebrated on 17 December) and the Kalends (1–3 January), was of course one of merrymaking and misrule. Both the institution of the Rex Saturnalis and the temporary exchanges of roles between master and man, which characterized the Kalends, can clearly be traced in Christmas festivities, even today (see Do...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• 1 What is Farce?
• 2 The World of Rebellion
• 3 Tit-for-Tat, the World of Revenge
• 4 The World of Coincidence
• 5 On the Borderline
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Additional Readings