It was certain, at any rate in France, that from comic interludes in sacred plays to sheer profane comedy in ordinary life the step would not be far nor the interval of time long. The fabliaux more particularly were farces already in the state of scenario, and some of them actually contained dialogue. To break them up and shape them into actual plays required much less than the innate love for drama which characterises the French people, and the keen literary sense and craft which characterised the French trouvères of the thirteenth century.
Adam de la Halle.
The honour of producing the first examples known to us is assigned to Adam de la Halle, a trouvère of Arras, who must have been a pretty exact contemporary of Rutebœuf, and who besides some lyrical work has left us two plays, Li Jus de la Feuillie and Robin et Marion.[154] The latter, as its title almost sufficiently indicates, is a dramatised pastourelle; the former is less easy to classify, but it stands in something like the same relation to the personal poems, of which, as has just been mentioned in the case of Rutebœuf himself, the trouvères were so fond. For it introduces himself, his wife (at least she is referred to), his father, and divers of his Arras friends. And though rough in construction, it is by no means a very far-off ancestor of the comedy of manners in its most developed form.
Robin et Marion.
It may be more interesting to give some account here of these two productions, the parents of so numerous and famous a family, than to dwell on the early miracle plays, which reached their fullest development in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and then for the most part died away. The play (Jeu is the general term, and the exact, though now in French obsolete, equivalent of the English word) of Robin et Marion combines the general theme of the earlier lyric pastourelle, as explained above, with the more general pastoral theme of the love of shepherd and shepherdess. The scene opens on Marion singing to the burden "Robins m'a demandée, si m'ara." To her the Knight, who inquires the meaning of her song, whereupon she avows her love for Robin. Nevertheless he woos her, in a fashion rather clumsy than cavalier, but receives no encouragement. Robin comes up after the Knight's departure. He is, to use Steerforth's words in David Copperfield, "rather a chuckle-headed fellow for the girl," but is apparently welcome. They eat rustic fare together and then dance; but more company is desired, and Robin goes to fetch it. He tells the friends he asks that some one has been courting Marion, and they prudently resolve to bring, one his great pitchfork and another his good blackthorn. Meanwhile the Knight returns, and though Marion replies to his accost—
"Pour Dieu, sire, alez vo chemin,
Si ferès moult grant courtoisie,"
he renews his suit, but is again rejected. Returning in a bad temper he meets Robin and cuffs him soundly, a correction which Robin does not take in the heroic manner. Marion runs to rescue him, and the Knight threatens to carry her off—which Robin, even though his friends have come up, is too cowardly to prevent. She, however, is constant and escapes; the piece finishing by a long and rather tedious festival of the clowns. Its drawbacks are obvious, and are those natural to an experiment which has no patterns before it; but the figure of Marion is exceedingly graceful and pleasing, and the whole has promise. It is essentially a comic opera; but that a trouvère of the thirteenth century should by himself, so far as we can see, have founded comic opera is not a small thing.
The Jeu de la Feuillie.
The Jus de la Feuillie ("the booths"), otherwise Li Jus Adam, or Adam's play, is more ambitious and more complicated, but also more chaotic. It is, as has been said, an early sketch of a comedy of manners; but upon this is grafted in the most curious way a fairy interlude, or rather after-piece. Adam himself opens the piece and informs his friends with much coolness that he has tried married life, but intends to go back to "clergy" and then set out for Paris, leaving his father to take care of his wife. He even replies to the neighbours' remonstrances by enlarging in the most glowing terms on the passion he has felt for his wife and on her beauty, adding, with a crude brutality which has hardly a ghost of atoning fun in it, that this is all over—
"Car mes fains en est apaiés."