fabliaux

   Fabliaux were a kind of comic tale in verse that flourished in northern France beginning in the late 12th century. There are about 160 extant fabliaux, written typically in octosyllabic couplets and written in a plain, direct style appropriate to their contemporary realistic settings and lower or middle class characters. Fabliaux tend to use a good deal of dialogue, more than is common in other medieval poetic genres. Although the term means “little fable,” fabliaux are characterized by their general lack of moral purpose and their bawdy subject matter. Most fabliaux were about 300–400 lines or fewer, though there are some that exceed 1,000 lines. Though the names of a few writers have been associated with fabliaux, including Philippe de Beaumanoir, Gautier le Leu, Jean Bodel, and most significantly RUTEBEUF, fabliaux were almost always anonymous. Scholars once debated whether the fabliaux were of a courtly or bourgeois origin, but modern scholarship favors the assumption of a literate audience familiar with the conventional plots of the courtly ROMANCES that many fabliau plots parody. Thus it is likely that both the author and audience of the fabliaux were members of the aristocratic class and the literate upper middle class. Because the poor student or cleric is so often portrayed sympathetically in the tales, one conjecture is that many of the authors were members of that group.

   Fabliaux were chiefly satirical, and their main targets were the clergy (especially priests and monks), foolish husbands, and women in general, who are likely to be portrayed as scheming, unscrupulous, and promiscuous. Accordingly fabliaux have often been accused of being antifeminist, though it might be noted that the women in the tales are presented as clever and intellectually superior to their stupid, cuckolded husbands. It may be that the characterization of women in the fabliaux is a reaction against the elevation of women in the COURTLY LOVE tradition characteristic of the romances that the fabliaux were parodying. In the fabliau the chief virtues are ingenuity, toughness, practicality, and a willingness to take chances and to do whatever is necessary to take advantage of someone else for one’s own advancement. The main transgressions of the fabliau world are gullibility, softness, conceit (which is always going to be exploded), and idealism (which is always going to crash on the stones of reality). The action of the fabliau usually revolved around the sexual exploits of a woman bent on tricking and cuckolding her foolish husband, who may deserve his cuckolding because he was foolish enough to marry a woman far younger than he, or because he ignores or otherwise abuses his wife. Inevitably it is a priest, monk, or poor divinity student who helps the wife plan her husband’s cuckolding. In the end of a fabliau, there is often a kind of rough justice that is meted out to the characters— the foolish and gullible are penalized, and the trickster figure (usually the priest or monk) is also punished, often for carrying the joke too far. This is a motif called the trickster tricked, common to many fabliaux.

   The latest fabliau in French is found in a manuscript from 1346. But by the 14th century the interest in fabliaux had spread to Italy and England. BOCCACCIO includes a number of fabliau tales (in prose) in his DECAMERON. In England, CHAUCER included several fabliaux in his CANTERBURY TALES: Written in decasyllabic English couplets, Chaucer’s fabliaux include some of his most admired tales, written at the peak of his creative career. They differ from the Old French fabliaux in the complexity of their plots, their use of realistic descriptive detail, and their detailed development of character. Chaucer’s fabliaux include The MERCHANT’S TALE, The REEVES’ TALE, The SHIPMAN’S TALE, and the particularly widely admired MILLER’S TALE.

   Bibliography

   ■ Benson, Larry D., and Theodore M. Andersson. The Literary Context of Chaucer’s Fabliaux. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971.

   ■ Bloch, R. Howard. The Scandal of the Fabliaux. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

   ■ Hellman, Robert, and Richard O’Gorman, ed. Fabliaux: Ribald Tales from the Old French. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1965.

   ■ Muscatine, Charles. The Old French Fabliaux. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986.