Fabliau, the

The term denotes a medieval literary genre: a short, ribald tale in verse with stock characters, realistic details, sexual transgressions, obscenity, scatology, and a clever plot mocking human weaknesses and making cynical fun of conventional notions of morality, authority, and poetic justice. Deriving from the medieval French dialect word flabel or fablel , the fabliau forms an original generic combination of the farce and the dirty story. In the fabliau the “givens” are infidelity, opportunism, trickery, and gullibility. Considering their shocking and subversive content, fabliaux were surprisingly popular in medieval France, especially between the mid-twelfth and mid-fourteenth centuries. Most were anonymous, probably composed by wandering minstrels, usually termed jongleurs . Of the great number originally current, only about 150 survive. Although the content is obviously low, there is still academic dispute about whether the intended audience was bourgeois (according to Joseph Bedier 1895) or aristocratic (according to Per Nykrog 1957) or popular.

Their influence was naturally strongest in France, but there is an anonymous Middle English fabliau, Dame Sirith , written in the late thirteenth century. Furthermore, elements of the fabliau are powerfully apparent in certain works of Chaucer, Boccaccio, Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson. Chaucer’s remarkable narrative compendium, the Canterbury Tales (1386–1400), contains at least six examples of modified fabliaux, namely the tales of the Miller, Reve, Merchant, Shipman, and Manciple, all showing ingenuity and originality in the use of fabliau elements. Most concern adulterous triangles, usually arising out of doting old husbands who have foolishly acquired sly, materialistic, and sexually adventurous young wives. The specifics of sexual congress and bodily functions are crudely and vigorously described with the whole range of “four-letter” words in their Middle English forms: ferte, erse, pisse, shiten, queynte (cunt), coillons (testicles), and swyve , which thrived in the medieval period prior to the arrival of fuck around 1500. In the comic bedroom confusion of the Reve’s Tale , John the clerk winds up in bed with the carpenter’s wife:

So myrie a fit ne hadde she nat ful yoore
[She hadn’t had such an orgasm for years]
He priketh harde and deepe as he were mad.
(ll. 4230-31)

The denouement of the Merchant’s Tale contains, even more improbably, an adulterous coupling up a tree. When January, the blind husband, has his sight miraculously restored and expresses his outrage, his cunning wife explains that according to folk medicine, it was necessary for her to “struggle with a man upon a tree” to cure his blindness. January protests:

“Strugle!” quod he, “ye algates in it wente”
         [“Struggle!” said he, “it was going in all the time”]
(l. 2376)

In the Miller’s Tale , the most developed and amusing, Nicholas the lodger, dispensing with the refinements of foreplay, makes a direct, passionate approach to Alison, the “wylde and yong” wife of John the carpenter:

And prively he caughte her by the queynte [cunt] …
And helde hire harde by the haunchbones,
And seyde, "Lemman, love me al atones,
[And said, “Darling, love me straight away]
Or I wol dyen, also God me save!”
[Or I shall die, so help me God!"]
(ll. 3276-81)

Furthermore, the tale is cynical on a more disturbing scale, being full of prayers, oaths, religious ejaculations, and even blasphemous machinations. Thus Nicholas persuades John the cuckold that the world will be destroyed by a catastrophic flood, for which he, as the new Noah, should prepare by waiting in a wooden tub up into the roof timbers. The lovers then go to bed “there as the carpenter is wont to lye” (“where the carpenter usually lay,” ll. 3651). Typical of farce, there follows crude cartoon violence. Nicholas repulses his improbable rival Absolom with “a fart / As greet as it had been a thonder-dent” (“a fart as big as a thunder clap,” l. 3806-7), but is branded on his “toute” (backside) with a red-hot iron so that “off goth the skyn an hande breed aboute.” When Nicholas screams out “Water! help, for Goddes herte!,” the nexus of the plot is ingeniously fulfilled, since John imagines that the flood has come, cuts the ropes, tumbles down and breaks his arm, becoming an object of ridicule for the curious and unsympathetic neighbors. In the end rough justice is handed to the men, but Alison gets away scot-free.

In virtually all respects the fabliau is the polar opposite or obverse of the romance, which is traditionally long, idealistic, courtly, elevated in language, and morally uplifting. In the context of the Canterbury Tales , the Knight’s Tale (which opens the series) is a typical romance, to which the Miller’s Tale is a mocking response, emphasizing the animal side of human nature and the physical facts of life in direct and crude language. The fabliau has died out, the bedroom farce being its stylized and euphemized descendant.