Medieval English Comedy

232 Pages·2007·15.558 MB·English

by  Paul Hardwick, Sandra Hordis

Medieval english CoMedy
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PROFANE ARTS 
OF THE MIDDLE AGES
Series editors:
Elaine C. BLOCK
Frédéric BILLIET
Paul HARDWICK
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Medieval
english
CoMedy
Edited by 
Sandra M. Hordis & Paul Hardwick
F
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© 2007, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the publisher.
D/2007/0095/74
ISBN 2-503-52427-6
Printed in the E.U. on acid-free paper
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Contents
INtroDUctIoN ........................................................................................ 7
1. Martha Bayless, ‘Humour and the comic in Anglo-Saxon England’ .... 13
2. christopher crane, ‘Superior Incongruity: Derisive and Sympathetic
comedy in Middle English Drama and Homiletic Exempla’ ................. 31
3. Paul Hardwick, ‘Making Light of Devotion: the Pilgrimage Window
in York Minster’ ....................................................................................... 61
4. Dana M. Symons, ‘comic Pleasures: chaucer and Popular romance’ . 83
5. christian Sheridan, ‘Funny Money: Puns and currency in the
Shipman’s Tale’ ....................................................................................... 111
6. Laurel Broughton, ‘Joan’s Drolleries: Humour in the Margins of
Fitzwilliam MS 242’ ............................................................................... 125
7. Sandra M. Hordis, ‘Gender Anxiety and Dialogic Laughter in
Malory’s Morte Darthur’ ........................................................................ 145
8. Miriamne Ara Krummel, ‘Getting Even: Social control and Uneasy
Laughter in The Play of the Sacrament’ .................................................. 171
9. Peter G. Beidler, ‘From Snickers to Laughter: Believable comedy in
chaucer’s Miller’s Tale’ .......................................................................... 195
10. Elaine c. Block with Frédéric Billiet,
‘Musical comedy in the Medieval choir: England’ ............................... 209
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Introduction
Sandra Hordis and Paul Hardwick
‘What thing is it, the less it is, the more it is dread?’
‘A bridge’
[ca. 1550]
‘A certain jealous husband followed his wife to confession, who when the priest
should lead behind the altar to be displied [disciplined by beating], the husband,
perceiving it, and doubting the worst, cried unto him, saying, “hear ye, master
parson, I pray you let me be displied for her.”
‘And kneeling down before the priest, “I pray you,” quod the wife to the priest,
“strike him hard, for I am a great sinner.”’
[ca. 1583]1
S
ave for some notable exceptions – namely chaucer, fabliaux and the Exeter
Book riddles – scholars often miss the pervasive presence of comedy in the
creative arts of the English Middle Ages. As is the case at all points of human
history, humour, jokes, laughter, and comic images appear in many types of medi-
eval English cultural artifacts, even though the concept of humour as an artistic goal
is relatively new.2 We certainly expect to find medieval humour in the jest books,
fabliaux, and riddles of old and Middle English literary history, as is evidenced by
1 Wardroper, John. Jest Upon Jest: A Selection from the Jestbooks and Collections of
Merry Tales published from the Reign of Richard III to George III (London: routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 69, 98.
2 See Jan Bremmer and Herman roodenburg’s Introduction in A Cultural History of
Humor (Malden, MA: Polity P, 1997) for a thorough summary of the history of humour
studies.
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8 Sandra Hordis and Paul Hardwick
the examples above, but we are surprised when we come upon comic scenes in the
otherwise serious Morte Darthur, sermons, and liturgical drama, and yet more
surprised at the comic images in intricate manuscript illuminations and sacred
stained glass windows. And as humour researchers would suggest, we laugh as a
result of our frustrated modern expectations, and are forced to reevaluate what we
know about medieval England.
At precisely this point is where this collection of essays developed. What is humour
in the English Middle Ages? Does the comic serve any function other than pleasure?
How might we reexamine ideas of identity and cultural complexity in terms of
humour in medieval England?
As a basis, the contributors to this volume work within a number of assumptions
about the humour of the period. comedy studies from such diverse fields as sociol-
ogy, psychology, history, philosophy, and literature, while at first appearing to be
a mixed bag of conflicting provinces, for the most part can agree on one thing – that
humour, in all its forms, is a social act.3 A performer crafts words and gestures in
such a way that a response is solicited from an audience, sometimes abandoned
laughter, and sometimes a groan of mild amusement. A good performer will then
use the reactions of the audience to elaborate and expand the humour, thus creating
a characteristic model of communication. At times, this performer/audience rela-
tionship is clear; the teller of the first joke above expects a response of the listener
in the middle of the joke which complies to the joke formula, creates a pause for
dramatic effect, and calls the audience into the close dialogue of humour.4 Indeed,
simply the act of writing down a funny story or turn of phrase, as in the second
example, expects an audience to react, and while not necessarily evoking a verbal
response, the writer expects (or at least hopes for) laughter.
But beyond this rather basic model of simple communication lies a complex picture
of cultural mores. First, in comedy there is always present a kind of testing, no
matter who performs the humour or who responds.5 on a personal level of com-
munication, tellers test their audience by presenting jokes which explore the pa-
rameters of what is acceptable in a particular environment (one wouldn’t get a
3 See A. rapp, The Origins of Wit and Humour (NY: E.P. Dutton, 1951), Kenneth White,
Savage Comedy: Structures of Humor (Amsterdam: rodopi, 1978), and Michael P. Wolf, ‘A
Grasshopper Walks into a Bar: the role of Humor in Normativity’, Journal for the Theory
of Social Behaviour 32:3 (September 2002), 331-44.
4 See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. by Michael Holquist and Vadim
Liapunov (Dallas: U of tX P, 1982).
5 See especially Michael P. Wolf, ‘A Grasshopper Walks into a Bar,’ where he argues that
jokes are evidence of the normalization by testing, and if necessary correcting, the thinking
of members of the dominant culture.
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Introduction 9
positive reception of an ethnic joke at a gathering of the UN, for example), and
likewise, what is acceptable to that particular audience (the ethnic joke may be
better received in the company of diplomats whose own culture has similar jokes
aimed at the target ethnicity). this may be attributed to the simple social desires of
the teller: wanting to ‘fit in,’ to be accepted by peers, and to avoid calling unfavour-
able attention to one’s self.
on a cultural scale, this works in the same way; jokes and humour poke and prod at
the parameters of acceptable thought by calling attention to cultural ideas and solic-
iting a response which either reinforces conservative views, or opens the way for
subtle shifts in cultural thinking. For example, the second joke cited above suggests
a number of things about the cultural opinions which created it: beatings were an
acceptable punishment for sin, relationships between priests and women carry an
implied sexuality, women can be clever manipulators, and jealous husbands will be
punished for their skewed perceptions. this joke is conservative in that it presents
a situation which appears in a number of comic and dramatic texts and therefore
reinforces cultural assumptions; but it also suggests a rethinking of the husband’s
role in disciplining the wife. Here, the husband assumes that the wife is wicked, that
the priest is intending to become her next lover, and therefore, the priest will not
punish her as much as he himself would. But the husband’s desire for appropriate
punishment is chastised by his final predicament. Perhaps the subtle cultural lesson
here is that husbands should not meddle in their wives’ affairs because doing so may
not resolve any problems, and may even lead to further marital dysfunction, in this
case, the beatings of the husband made parallel to the wife’s frustrated desires.
What this creates is what christine Davies terms the ‘center’ and the ‘outside’.6
Writing about ethnic jokes, she sees humour as a medium which defines and ex-
plores a dominant culture’s relationship with those on the fringes of or outside
conservative social positions, whether the center is looking at the outside contained
in another economic bracket, religion, or hometown. these groups need not be
distant or separated; Davies argues that ‘the two groups may be hostile or in a state
of conflict, [but] sometimes they may live as amicable neighbors and sometimes
they are indifferent to one another’.7 What jokes and humorous tales do here is to
help define ‘us’ and the other, but Davies suggests that the self-definition inherent
in jokes continually negotiates and redefines the border between center and out-
side.8 Humour, in effect, becomes a practical medium for the testing and manipula-
6 See christine Davies’ Introduction to Jokes and Their Relation to Society (NY: Mouton
de Gruyter, 1998), pp. 1-10, for a survey of her theoretical perspective.
7 Davies, Jokes, p. 1.
8 Davies’ entire book explores this relationship and redefinition; see especially chapters
2 and 5.
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10 Sandra Hordis and Paul Hardwick
tion of cultural thinking and identity, sometimes reinforcing public normativity and
sometimes helping to adapt the culture to the changes which occur in culturally
interactive times.
And certainly, England between the years AD 900 and AD 1500 saw not merely
interactive times, but culturally tumultuous times. Invasions, wars, conflicting po-
litical interests, a developing trade economy, the first stirrings of the Protestant
reformation, and countless other events exposed the English people to a variety of
new experiences which redefined their position in the world, and as a result, neces-
sitated their redefinition of themselves. We certainly might point to political, eco-
nomic, and religious reformations which attempted to accommodate each of these
sweeping changes in English culture, but humour reveals not only the general reac-
tion to such changes, but the individual, personal reactions of the English people,
who in the end are also the determiners of their culture.
the present volume seeks to contextualise humour within these parameters, ‘center’
and ‘outside’, public and private. contributors explore these sometimes elusive
complexities using a diversity of critical methods and approaches applied to such
diverse literary texts as Malory’s Morte Darthur and liturgical drama, and visual
art such as stained glass and manuscript illumination. the individual essays strive
to define clearly the functional breadth of humour in medieval England while de-
veloping critical perspectives that inform and develop scholarship concerning both
well-known and lesser-known cultural artifacts.
Martha Bayless opens the collection by assessing the evidence for entertainment
and merriment among the Anglo-Saxons. Although such activities get short shrift
in the surviving literature, evidence of Anglo-Saxon laughter does survive in other
forms: chronicles, letters, glosses, saints’ lives, and archaeology. By examining
these records, Bayless sheds light on such phenomena as dwarf jesters, tightrope
walkers, gambling, ale-houses, and entertainment in a variety of contexts, from
court to monastery.
Addressing the perhaps more problematic issue of the complex dialogue between
the serious and the comic, the sacred and the profane, christopher crane suggests
that – in contrast to earlier thought – far more than subversion and carnivalesque
impulses underlie the instances of humour in late medieval religious literature.
crane argues that understanding of the efficacy of laughter to make the heart more
receptive to serious exhortation, the need for a contrast between earthly and divine,
and the ultimately comic vision (hopefulness) of christianity all contribute to the
rhetorical employment of humour in these genres. Paul Hardwick’s study of the
early fourteenth-century Pilgrimage Window in York Minster addresses similar
questions concerning the earthly and the divine. Using literary sources, drama
records and sermon materials, along with comparisons with other decorative media,
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