by Tim Rayborn
and springing from his mouth and cheek
attenuated pricks and burly,
large pricks, stubby pricks, pricks curly,
bent pricks, sharp pricks, pricks immense;
on every bone, however dense,
pricks sprouted up with startling ease
a prick leaped up on both his knees …
Needless to say, the man is not at all happy with this, and so uses one of his wishes to have his revenge, asking that his wife be covered with the female equivalent:
She found, within a moment’s space,
two cunts were now upon her face,
and on her brow, four, side by side.
in front, in back, cunts multiplied
and there were cunts of every kind
and cunts before and cunts behind
cunts sinuous and straight, cunts brushy
hairless cunts, cunts piled and plushy …
Needless to say, the wife is not at all happy about this, either, and immediately demands that he use the third wish to remove all of these genitalia; at least they’ll still have one wish left and can make themselves rich. He does as she asks, but lo and behold, this wish takes away all of their bits, so they have none. They have no choice but to use the final wish to bring back one each. Ultimately, their greed and foolishness leave them no better off than they were before.
You can imagine how these kinds of stories could have been acted out, with different comical voices and hilarious miming of the action. The fabliaux were a sharp contrast to the morality plays and liturgical dramas that permeated medieval theater, but in their own way, they offered moralizing teachings, which is probably why religious officials more or less tolerated them. Through the use of vulgarity and hilarity, the fabliaux entertained, amused, shocked, and warned about the consequences of one’s actions.
Elaborate and ridiculous medieval stage sets (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries)
Burning men and Death in a onesie
Medieval plays were not just performed in churches and outside for commoners. The upper classes took an increasing interest in drama of all kinds as the years and centuries rolled by, and they began to devise new and over-the-top ways of presenting stories in dramatic form, while adding extra bells and whistles to flesh them out. By the fourteenth century, the props and sets for plays, banquet entertainments, and other diversions were becoming ever more elaborate and, at times, almost ludicrously complicated.
An example of the crazy extravagance can be seen in the Twelfth Night celebrations of December 1378 for King Charles V of France, held in Paris. The spectacle was a dramatic recreation of the taking of Jerusalem by crusaders in the year 1099, because nothing says Christmas cheer like a good, wholesale slaughter of infidels! Props included a ship with a mast and sails, presumably pulled in on wheels, and a miniature of Jerusalem itself (!), complete with towers and even a makeshift mosque minaret, from which a hapless actor dressed as an Arab made a pitiful attempt at mimicking the Islamic call to prayer. Actors dressed as crusaders disembarked from their “ship” and made an assault on Jerusalem, climbing ladders and eventually “taking” the city and killing its inhabitants. ’Tis the season, Fa la la la la, la la, la, la.
In 1389, a similar production was mounted, this time retelling the story of the fall of Troy—who knows, maybe they even recycled some of the sets? Apparently, this ship could hold up to one hundred “Greek” soldiers, but after the battle began, the fighting had to be called off, because the heat and the commotion were upsetting many of the guests.
At a coronation party for Ferdinand I of Aragon (1380–1416), the banquet included a fire-breathing gryphon that preceded the dishes as they were carried in—maybe more modern restaurants should try this?—and a multilevel structure representing heaven. Musicians dressed as angels and wearing wings sat on these levels and played music as they rotated, while a child representing the Virgin Mary sat in majesty at the top. Best of all, however, was the actor portraying Death. He wore a tight yellow leather outfit that made him look thin and gaunt. The mask had no eyes, which added to his frightening visage. He would gesture to the guests and beckon them, an ugly reminder of the final fate that awaited them all. At another performance, the court jester was a victim of a noble prank, when they bound him with rope and had Death descend and then haul him back up the structure. The poor fellow was terrified and accidentally urinated on the heads of certain guests, which apparently amused the young king greatly.
Chaucer seems to have been aware of these extravagances, which he notes in his “Franklin’s Tale”:
For often at feasts have heard it said
That magicians within a large hall
Have made water and a boat come in,
And row up and down in the hall.
Sometimes a terrible lion has seemed to appear;
And sometimes flowers grow as in a field;
Sometimes a vine, and white and red grapes;
Sometimes a castle of mortar and stone …
The most outrageous example of entertainment taken too far was the infamous Bal des Ardents, or “Ball of the Burning Men,” an unfortunate performance that went horribly wrong. On January 28, 1393, a masquerade ball with lavish entertainments was held at the court of King Charles VI to celebrate the wedding of the queen’s lady-in-waiting. Charles had become king at the age of twelve but suffered from mental illness and psychotic episodes, which meant that the affairs of state were mostly run by his advisors.
Despite his troubles and the fact that he was mostly a king in name only, this celebration was meant to be lavish. All manner of entertainments, disguises, loud music, and shenanigans ensued, but one nobleman, Huguet de Guisay, concocted the idea of having several courtiers—including himself and the mentally unstable king—dress up as “wild men,” a popular mythic image common in medieval art used to represent the wildness of nature, in contrast to the order of a civilization devoted to God.
They donned masks and costumes made of linen and coated in resin, to which they attached flax to give them a wild and shaggy look. At the festivities, they proceeded to dance in and put on quite the show, improvising dialogue, howling obscenities, and challenging the amused attendees to guess their identities. It was just the kind of thing that young hotheads in any age would revel in doing. But things soon went wrong. Charles’s brother, the Duc d’Orléans, entered late to the goings-on, and he was already drunk and carrying a torch. You can see where this is going. In an effort to guess the wild men’s identities, he held the flame too near (or maybe even tossed it at one of the wild men), a spark fell onto one of them, and the costume flared up like a matchstick. The fire quickly spread to the others, and the king was only saved by the quick thinking of Joan, Duchess of Berry, who threw her large skirt about him and saw to it that he was ushered to safety.
For the others, the outcome was grim indeed. Some in the audience tried to save the burning men, but they too were injured. The Monk of Saint-Denis (ca. 1350–ca. 1421) wrote, “Four men were burned alive, their flaming genitals dropping to the floor … releasing a stream of blood.” Actually, only one wild man died immediately, while three others, including the instigator Huguet, lingered for a few days in agony before perishing. The remaining performer, the Sieur de Nantouille, had the good sense to jump into a vat of wine to extinguish the flames and so survived.
The fallout from this sordid affair was a bit surprising, in that the common people of Paris were roused to great anger over nearly losing their king in such a stupid way. They threatened to depose and murder his advisors if nothing was done in response, and the court took this warning seriously. The nobles made a penitential walk through Paris, and the duke, who was blamed for the whole affair, made a large donation to build a new chapel at a monastery. He had a bad reputation already, and his deadly mishap only made it worse. Chroniclers accused him of practicing sorcery and cited this incident as a plot to murder the king. He was eventually assassinated in 1407 on these same charges, but h
is death only led to a civil war, which lasted for decades. And all because some courtly performers got a bit hot under the collar.
Arnoul Gréban (ca. 1420–1473/86) and Simon Gréban (mid-fifteenth century)
Plays for days
Arnoul was a canon at the church of Le Mans, and at one point seems to have been organist at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris; he may have lived his last years in Florence. Simon was a monk of St. Riquier and secretary of Charles of Anjou, Count of Maine (Arnoul may have served him, as well). The Gréban brothers were no doubt very serious in their faith, as can be seen from their devotion to writing mystery plays. But they weren’t concerned with writing dozens of them—oh no. They wanted each one to have the maximum impact, so they focused very intently on a small select few—one each, in fact.
In the early 1450s, Arnoul wrote his play, Mystère de la Passion (“The Mystery of the Passion”), which, as the title suggests, was a passion play, with all of the usual events and theological instructions that such dramas were meant to provide. But Arnoul wanted extensive detail and extra material, probably just to be sure that the message was clear. His play ran for almost thirty-five thousand lines and featured something like two hundred and forty characters. It was intended to portray everything from the fall of humanity and lectures by allegorical figures to the complete life of Christ, culminating in his passion, death, and resurrection. It was designed to run over at least four days, and presumably the audience was expected to return for each day, if they knew what was good for them.
Simon did his brother one better in the 1470s, when he penned Le Mystère des Actes des Apôtres (“The Mystery of the Acts of the Apostles”), a dramatization of Acts. Acting under the patronage of King René of Anjou, Simon may have been assisted by Arnoul, who already had experience in creating a butt-numbing biblical epic. His play ran for over sixty thousand lines and contained an astonishing cast of some five hundred roles, covering the events of Pentecost up until the suicide of Nero. Nothing like it has ever been attempted since in Western theater. Take that, Cecil B. DeMille! The play was performed over the course of at least nine days and was staged several times in the later fifteenth century and into the sixteenth; one source claims that it was shown at least once in 1539 and lasted for thirty days!
It undoubtedly tested the audience’s patience to the breaking point, and if its intent was to make suffering for the faith a genuine experience shared by all, it did a magnificent job.
Onstage agony: accidents and otherwise (fourteenth to sixteenth centuries)
Burning the devil’s butt, a real execution, and almost killing Christ
With these elaborate mystery plays getting ever lengthier and more involved, it was only natural that sometimes things would go badly wrong, and a few splendid examples from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries illustrate this clearly.
In Paris in March 1380, one Jehan Hemont attended a passion play and offered to help his friend in preparing a truly special effect for the day, a set of cannons that fired and simulated claps of thunder at the death of Christ. But the drama became all too real for Jehan when one of the cannons misfired, striking him in the leg and causing a serious wound that ultimately killed him. Four years later, a certain Perrin le Roux was assisting in another passion play, with similar “cannonical” effects, when one misfired, hitting him in the eye and killing him as well. Was there a passion play curse?
Well, in Metz in 1437, one Father Nicholas de Neufchâtel was playing the role of Christ and was left hanging for so long that he passed out and was near death; he had to be taken down hastily and revived. In the same play, Father Jehan de Nissey took on the unenviable but necessary role of Judas. The scene where he hangs himself in shame and guilt apparently went on for far too long, as one account records: “But because he was hanging too long … he lost consciousness and was almost dead, because his heart failed. For that reason, he was taken down in great haste and taken to a nearby place so that he could be rubbed with vinegar and other things to ease his pain.”
Satan fared no better during a performance of the Mystère de Saint Martin (“The Mystery of St. Martin”) in Seurre (south of Dijon) in 1496. Old Nick was up to his usual tricks, but the hellfire and brimstone were a little too real for comfort: “Fire broke out on his clothes near his buttocks, so much so that he was seriously burned. But he was rescued quickly, undressed and redressed, that, as if nothing had happened, he came back to play his role; and later went back home.”
A few years earlier in 1485, another devilish legend had circulated, again in Metz. What was up with that place? The story said that a player who took the role of a devil had a desire to know his wife while still wearing his diabolical costume—some early role-playing sexy-time, apparently. She wasn’t thrilled with the idea, but eventually gave in and as a result, became pregnant. The problem was that the child was born looking half human and half demon, though curiously, it was the upper half that apparently resembled the devil. They were not allowed to baptize the baby, “until a trip had been made to Rome in order to determine what was to be done with it.”
This little fable was obviously a reflection of the medieval fear that taking on a demonic role could accidentally invite real demons into one’s life, with all the resulting misfortune they would bring. Some legends spoke of such actors going mad after playing devils and then behaving like them in their real lives. And fear of onstage appearances by Old Nick persisted from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, and flared up in relation to Marlowe’s play about Faust (see the next chapter). As recently as 1824, there were reports that in an English pantomime called The Sorcerer, twelve devils dancing onstage were joined by a mysterious thirteenth, though it seems that this extra demon was quite human, being a producer’s joke rather than an incursion from the infernal regions.
Something more bloody than a burned butt, baptism dilemmas, and demonic possession was on the minds of two play producers in Tournai in Belgium. According to legend, in 1549, they concocted a grisly theatrical entertainment for Prince Philip II of Spain, who was touring the area. The play included a scene where the biblical Judith decapitates the Assyrian general Holofernes as he sleeps in a drunken stupor, thus saving her city. The producers allegedly decided that it would be hugely entertaining to have a real execution onstage, substituting a condemned murderer and heretic for the actor portraying Holofernes; another condemned man would be substituted for Judith and would strike the blow. Something similar occasionally happened during old Roman plays (see chapter 3 in act II), so this was just an update for the Renaissance! According to the story, the execution went off without a hitch, said heretic was beheaded, the crowd went wild, and Philip arrived just in time to see the moment of death. Apparently he was mostly unmoved, but remarked to his entourage: “Nice blow.”
Of course, the skeptical reader might already be thinking that this story sounds a bit off. Would a condemned man really go along with this, pretending to be asleep so that he could willingly have his head cut off? Would another condemned man be able to swing the sword so well on the first try that the head would fall off perfectly in one blow? Well, the source insists that the heretic accepted the execution instead of terrible torture and the would-be executioner accepted the task when offered a pardon. But other sources make no mention of this event at all, which leads many to suspect that it was invented for political purposes—a warning to heretics or a way of showing the young Philip’s power, for example. We’ll probably never know, but it’s nothing to lose our heads over.
Pietro Aretino (1492–1556)
Porn and laughing too much
Aretino was a writer of plays, poetry, and satire, much revered and feared in his day for the power of his words. He had a stormy beginning, being born an illegitimate child in Arezzo and later being banished from the city. He took up residence in Perugia before finding his way to Rome, but even there, he was quite prepared to mock the establishment. When Pope Leo X’s pet elephant, Hanno, died in 1516, Aretino wrote �
�The Last Will and Testament of the Elephant Hanno,” a scathing satire of the upper classes and the pope himself. He soon gained a reputation for this kind of work, and it seems that wealthy nobles and even kings gave him money to escape the worst of his vicious words.
Indeed, he overstepped and went too far in his mockery, probably more than once. While in Rome, he was the target of an attempted assassination by Bishop Giovanni Giberti in July 1525. Giberti had been the subject of one of his satires and wanted revenge. Further, Aretino had already been in trouble before when he provided Sonetti Lussuriosi (“Lust Sonnets”) to I Modi (“The Ways” or “The Positions”), a collection of drawings depicting sixteen sexual positions that were completely explicit and potentially pornographic, even by modern standards. The collection caused outrage, and the Catholic Church managed to destroy most copies of the first printing. English translators have ever since been embarrassed about rendering Aretino’s sonnets literally from Italian, and often give less earthy approximations, such as this one, but the meaning should still be fairly clear:
My fingers are but stragglers at the rear,
Who go a-foraging for what they find;
And they are not ashamed to lag behind,
Since there’s no foe in front they need to fear.
They’ve wandered through a tufted valley near.
And you yourself have said they were most kind.
As a result of these not-insignificant infractions, Aretino fled Rome and settled in Venice in 1527, a place that he proudly declared was the “seat of all vices.” Venice was profoundly antipapal and far more tolerant of outcasts than anywhere else in Italy.
This was good news for Aretino. He was bisexual and proud in an age when such a declaration was extremely dangerous. One of his comedies, Il marescalco (“The Equerry”), contains a scene where the leading character learns that the woman he is engaged to is actually a page in disguise, and he is delighted. This was bold storytelling at a time when such thoughts (never mind actions) could land one in jail or worse. In Venice, however, he was sought out by other men who wanted advice in pursuing their own desires, and he was happy to provide such information and assistance, for a price, of course. This price included his promise to keep quiet about their activities—he was quite a skilled blackmailer.