Rabelais’s Radical Farce: Late Medieval Comic Theater and its Function in Rabelais (review)

Rabelais’s Radical Farce has two goals: ‘first to explore the specific genre of farce [. . .] and second to explain how and why this particular form of theater forms a crucial subtext for understanding [Rabelais’s] work’ (p. 1). It is more successful in achieving the latter goal than the former. For Hayes, the predictable nature of farce plots betrays the genre’s essential ‘conservatism’: deriding characters who step outside their social roles, farces seek to persuade spectators to avoid démesure and resign themselves to the political status quo. Rabelais radicalizes the genre by using it to target hegemonic institutions and abusive practices: adaptations of farce in Pantagruel and Gargantua satirize scholastic corruption, juridical practice, and religious hypocrisy; formally innovative farces in the Tiers and Quart Livres denounce superstition, militancy, and human cruelty. Hayes offers many subtle close readings, and he is to be applauded for producing a much-needed monograph on Rabelais’s theatrical intertexts. I do, however, have a number of objections to the thesis on farce. To begin with, Hayes is excessively reliant on outmoded, 1970s ‘literary’ studies of the genre, adopting from them rigid ‘guidelines’ that supposedly ‘governed’ performance. He either fails to engage or inadequately engages with recent historicist and theoretical scholarship on staging and reception. Although he touches on Sara Beam’s and Jelle Koopmans’s work, he does not fully address the conflicts between his approach and theirs. More seriously, he makes no mention of Marie Bouhaïk-Gironès, Jody Enders, Katell Lavéant, or Darwin Smith, scholars who have worked assiduously to recover ethical, political, and polemical subtexts in farce, often by attending closely to performance records and archival evidence. Hayes’s references on medieval festive culture are also outdated. He invokes, and basically endorses, the hoary, functionalist ‘safety-valve’ theory of festive misrule, but overlooks thinkers like James Scott and Max Harris, who have found evidence of covert dissent in carnival rituals and masquerade. Indeed, although Hayes describes farce as a theatre of inextricable artifice and trickery, he does not consider the possibility that theatrical illusion could also be used to thwart censors, dupe spectators, and camouflage dissent. The theatre scholars cited above have extensively studied multiple cases in which farce performances were subject to censorship, self-censorship, or interdiction, and others in which farceurs were prosecuted for sedition or libel. Hayes cites only one of these cases (Dijon, 1447), and in passing. Unaccountably, he views it as the exception that proves the rule: it attests a ‘satirical potential’ (p. 50 n. 44) in farce that was only fully realized by Rabelais. This analysis rings false to me and suggests an unfortunate (but hardly unusual) tendency to caricature medieval culture in order to exaggerate the achievements of Renaissance humanists. Early modernist bias does not entirely compromise Hayes’s readings of Rabelais, which are filled with insights. It does, however, slant his approach to core questions. Did Rabelais really radicalize farce? Or were the farceurs instead fellow travellers who taught him how to exploit artifice and disguise in order to reflect on, and intervene in, the political crises of his time?