Immaculate Deception and Further Ribaldries: Yet Another Dozen Medieval French Farces in Modern English by Jody Enders

Author:Jody Enders [Enders, Jody]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Drama, European, French, Medieval, Performing Arts, Theater, History & Criticism
ISBN: 9780812254006
Google: dkrszgEACAAJ
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2022-09-15T20:37:35+00:00

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Linguistically and ideologically macaronic, Johnny Palmer is all about taverns and nightclubs, courts and Councils, food and drink, dancing and partying, boating and piracy, wine casks and bungholes, digestion and excretion, and, at its potty-mouthed worst, thrones and toilets. It is all the more logical that, during a struggle with a recalcitrant bunghole, wordplay gets so explosive that it recalls this modern contrepèterie: pour trouver le trou du fût, il faut écarter les caisses (“to find the hole of the cask, you must move the barrels out of the way”). When you turn the spoonerism on its ass, you get: pour trouver le trou du cul, il faut écarter les fesses (“to find the asshole, you must move the butt cheeks aside”). Elsewhere, our play conducts an intertextual discussion with Cooch E. Whippet (FF, 364–65) or The Shithouse (HD, 97) about the inhabitants of hell. It tips its fool’s cap to a gorrière’s fashion sense (#4, Drama Queens) and to the Chaucerian gelding of Brother Fillerup’s prescription (#6). There’s also a concrete reference to a troupe of brotherly actors or student performers, as in #10, The Pardoners’ Tales and #11, Slick Brother Willy. But, mostly, it’s tennis take all, with rackets, paddles, volleys, backhand, balls in the air, and onomatopoeia up the wazoo. You’ll find some of the original Middle French noise—or music—in italics: the jubilant tarara, tararirene, hy! hy! (v. 100), the magical ababou, tanfarara, tanfarara (v. 92), the hoisting touet, touet (v. 177), the giggling hon, hon, hon, hen, hen! (MFST, 190; 222; 230; 232; 263). I even intuit a couple of Ubu-Roy-like moments where it seems that we’re hearing an obscenity until a final consonant resolves the meaning in favor of something else: maire > merde (“Mayor” vs. “shit”); faire chière [lye] > faire chier (“to party” vs. “to make someone shit”) (notes 16 and 22). It’s what you might call a trompe-l’oreille.

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