A History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art

by Thomas Wright

Hrotsvitha is the earliest example we have of mediæval writers in this particular class of literature. We find no other until the twelfth century, when two writers flourished named Vital of Blois (Vitalis Blesensis) and Matthew of Vendôme (Matthæus Vindocinensis), the authors of several of the mediæval poems distinguished by the title of comœdiæ, which give us a clearer and more distinct idea of what was meant by the word. They are written in Latin Elegiac verse, a form of composition which was very popular among the mediæval scholars, and consist of stories told in dialogue. Hence Professor Osann, of Giessen, who edited two of those of Vital of Blois, gives them the title of eclogues (eclogæ). The name comedy is, however, given to them in manuscripts, and it may perhaps admit of the following explanation. These pieces seem to have been first mere abridgments of the plots of the Roman comedies, especially those of Plautus, and the authors appear to have taken the Latin title of the original as applied to the plot, in the sense of a narrative, and not to its dramatic form. Of the two “comedies” by Vital of Blois, one is entitled “Geta,” and is taken from the “Amphytrio” of Plautus, and the other, which in the manuscripts bears the title of “Querulus,” represents the “Aulularia” of the same writer. Independent of the form of composition, the scholastic writer has given a strangely mediæval turn to the incidents of the classic story of Jupiter and Alcmena. Another similar “comedy,” that of Babio, which I first printed from the manuscripts, is still more mediæval in character. Its plot, perhaps taken from a fabliau, for the mediæval writers rarely invented stories, is as follows, although it must be confessed that it comes out rather obscurely in the dialogue itself. Babio, the hero of the piece, is a priest, who, as was still common at that time (the twelfth century), has a wife, or, as the strict religionists would then say, a concubine, named Pecula. She has a daughter named Viola, with whom Babio is in love, and he pursues his design upon her, of course unknown to his wife. Babio has also a man-servant named Fodius, who is engaged in a secret intrigue with his mistress, Pecula, and also seeks to seduce her daughter, Viola. To crown the whole, the lord of the manor, a knight named Croceus, is also in love with Viola, though with more honourable designs. Here is surely intrigue enough and a sufficient absence of morality to satisfy a modern French novelist of the first water. At the opening of the piece, amid some by-play between the four individuals who form the household of Babio, it is suddenly announced that Croceus is on his way to visit him, and a feast is hastily prepared for his reception. It ends in the knight carrying away Viola by force. Babio, after a little vain bluster, consoles himself for the loss of the damsel with reflections on the virtue of his wife, Pecula, and the faithfulness of his man, Fodius, when, at this moment, Fame carries to his ear reports which excite his suspicions against them. He adopts a stratagem very frequently introduced in the mediæval stories, surprises the two lovers under circumstances which leave no room for doubting their guilt, and then forgives them, enters a monastery, and leaves them to themselves. In form, these “comedies” are little more than scholastic exercises; but, at a later period, we shall see the same stories adopted as the subjects of farces.[82]

Already, however, by the side of these dramatic poems, a real drama—the drama of the middle ages—was gradually developing itself. As stated before, it arose, like the drama of the Greeks, out of the religious ceremonies. We know nothing of the existence of anything approaching to dramatic forms which may have existed among the religious rites of the peoples of the Teutonic race before their conversion to Christianity, but the Christian clergy felt the necessity of keeping up festive religious ceremonies in some form or other, and also of impressing upon people’s imagination and memory by means of rude scenical representations some of the broader facts of scriptural and ecclesiastical history. These performances at first consisted probably in mere dumb show, or at the most the performers may have chanted the scriptural account of the transaction they were representing. In this manner the choral boys, or the younger clergy, would, on some special Saint’s day, perform some striking act in the life of the saint commemorated, or, on particular festivals of the church, those incidents of gospel history to which the festival especially related. By degrees, a rather more imposing character was given to these performances by the addition of a continuous dialogue, which, however, was written in Latin verse, and was no doubt chanted. This incipient drama in Latin, as far as we know it, belongs to the twelfth century, and is represented by a tolerably large number of examples still preserved in mediæval manuscripts. Some of the earliest of these have for their author a pupil of the celebrated Abelard, named Hilarius, who lived in the first half of the twelfth century, and is understood to have been by birth an Englishman. Hilarius appears before us as a playful Latin poet, and among a number of short pieces, which may be almost called lyric, he has left us three of these religious plays. The subject of the first of these is the raising of Lazarus from the dead, the chief peculiarity of which consists of the songs of lamentation placed in the mouths of the two sisters of Lazarus, Mary and Martha. The second represents one of the miracles attributed to St. Nicholas; and the third, the history of Daniel. The latter is longer and more elaborate than the others, and at its conclusion, the stage direction tells us that, if it were performed at matins, Darius, king of the Medes and Persians, was to chant Te Deum Laudamus, but if it were at vespers, the great king was to chant Magnificat anima mea Dominum.[83]

That this mediæval drama was not derived from that of the Roman is evident from the circumstance that entirely new terms were applied to it. The western people in the middle ages had no words exactly equivalent with the Latin comœdia, tragœdia, theatrum, &c; and even the Latinists, to designate the dramatic pieces performed at the church festivals, employed the word ludus, a play. The French called them by a word having exactly the same meaning, jeu (from jocus). Similarly in English they were termed plays. The Anglo-Saxon glossaries present as the representative of the Latin theatrum, the compounded words plege-stow, or pleg-stow, a play-place, and pleg-hus, a play-house. It is curious that we Englishmen have preferred to the present time the Anglo-Saxon words in play, player, and play-house. Another Anglo-Saxon word with exactly the same signification, lac, or gelac, play, appears to have been more in use in the dialect of the Northumbrians, and a Yorkshireman still calls a play a lake, and a player a laker. So also the Germans called a dramatic performance a spil, i.e. a play, the modern spiel, and a theatre, a spil-hus. One of the pieces of Hilarius is thus entitled “Ludus super iconia sancti Nicolai,” and the French jeu and the English play are constantly used in the same sense. But besides this general term, words gradually came into use to characterise different sorts of plays. The church plays consisted of two descriptions of subjects, they either represented the miraculous acts of certain saints, which had a plain meaning, or some incident taken from the Holy Scriptures, which was supposed to have a hidden mysterious signification as well as an apparent one, and hence the one class of subject was usually spoken of simply as miraculum, a miracle, and the other as mysterium, a mystery. Mysteries and miracle-plays are still the names usually given to the old religious plays by writers on the history of the stage.

We have a proof that the Latin religious plays, and the festivities in which they were employed, had become greatly developed in the twelfth century, in the notice taken of them in the ecclesiastical councils of that period, for they were disapproved by the stricter church disciplinarians. So early as the papacy of Gregory VIII., the pope urged the clergy to “extirpate” from their churches theatrical plays, and other festive practices which were not quite in harmony with the sacred character of these buildings.[84] Such performances are forbidden by a council held at Treves in 1227.[85] We learn from the annals of the abbey of Corbei, published by Leibnitz, that the younger monks at Heresburg performed on one occasion a “sacred comedy” (sacram comœdiam) of the selling into captivity and the exaltation of Joseph, which was disapproved by the other heads of the order.[86] Such performances are included in a proclamation of the bishop of Worms, in 1316, against the various abuses which had crept into the festivities observed in his diocese at Easter and St. John’s tide.[87] Similar prohibitions of the acting of such plays in churches are met with at subsequent periods.

While these performances were thus falling under the censure of the church authorities, they were taken up by the laity, and under their management both the plays and the machinery for acting them underwent considerable extension. The municipal guilds contained in their constitution a considerable amount of religious spirit. They were great benefactors of the churches in cities and municipal towns, and had usually some parts of the sacred edifice appropriated to them, and they may, perhaps, have taken a part in these performances, while they were still confined to the church. These guilds, and subsequently the municipal corporations, took them entirely into their own hands. Certain annual religious festivals, and especially the feast of Corpus Christi, were still the occasions on which the plays were acted, but they were taken entirely from the churches, and the performances took place in the open streets. Each guild had its particular play, and they acted on movable stages, which were dragged along the streets in the procession of the guild. These stages appear to have been rather complicated. They were divided into three floors, that in the middle, which was the principal stage, representing this world, while the upper division represented heaven, and that at the bottom hell. The mediæval writers in Latin called this machinery a pegma, from the Greek word πῆγμα, a scaffold; and they also applied to it, for a reason which is not is easily seen, unless the one word arose out of a corruption of the other, that of pagina, and from a further corruption of these came into the French and English languages the word pageant, which originally signified one of these movable stages, though it has since received secondary meanings which have a much wider application. Each guild in a town had its pageant and its own actors, who performed in masks and costumes, and each had one of a series of plays, which were performed at places where they halted in the procession. The subjects of these plays were taken from Scripture, and they usually formed a regular series of the principal histories of the Old and New Testaments. For this reason they were generally termed mysteries, a title already explained; and among the few series of these plays still preserved, we have the “Coventry Mysteries,” which were performed by the guilds of that town, the “Chester Mysteries,” belonging to the guilds in the city of Chester, and the “Towneley Mysteries,” so called from the name of the possessor of the manuscript, but which probably belonged to the guilds of Wakefield in Yorkshire.

During these changes in the method of performance, the plays themselves had also been considerably modified. The simple Latin phrases, even when in rhyme, which formed the dialogue of the earlier ludi—as in the four miracles of St. Nicholas, and the six Latin mysteries taken from the New Testament, printed in my volume of “Early Mysteries and other Latin Poems”—must have been very uninteresting to the mass of the spectators, and an attempt was made to enliven them by introducing among the Latin phrases popular proverbs, or even sometimes a song in the vulgar tongue. Thus in the play of “Lazarus” by Hilarius, the Latin of the lamentations of his two sisters is intermixed with French verses. Such is the case also with the play of “St. Nicholas” by the same writer, as well as with the curious mystery of the Foolish Virgins, printed in my “Early Mysteries” just alluded to, in which latter the Latin is intermingled with Provençal verse. A much greater advance was made when these performances were transferred to the guilds. The Latin was then discarded altogether, and the whole play was written in French, or English, or German, as the case might be, the plot was made more elaborate, and the dialogue greatly extended. But now that the whole institution had become secularised, the want of something to amuse people—to make them laugh, as people liked to laugh in the middle ages—was felt more than ever, and this want was supplied by the introduction of droll and ludicrous scenes, which are often very slightly, if at all, connected with the subject of the play. In one of the earliest of the French plays, that of “St. Nicholas,” by Jean Bodel, the characters who form the burlesque scene are a party of gamblers in a tavern. In others, robbers, or peasants, or beggars form the comic scene, or vulgar women, or any personages who could be introduced acting vulgarly and using coarse language, for these were great incitements to mirth among the populace.

In the English plays now remaining, these scenes are, on the whole, less frequent, and they are usually more closely connected with the general subject. The earliest English collection that has been published is that known as the “Towneley Mysteries,” the manuscript of which belongs to the fifteenth century, and the plays themselves may have been composed in the latter part of the fourteenth. It contains thirty-two plays, beginning with the Creation, and ending with the Ascension and the Day of Judgment, with two supplementary plays, the “Raising of Lazarus” and the “Hanging of Judas.” The play of “Cain and Abel ” is throughout a vulgar drollery, in which Cain, who exhibits the character of a blustering ruffian, is accompanied by a garcio, or lad, who is the very type of a vulgar and insolent horse-boy, and the conversation of these two worthies reminds us a little of that between the clown and his master in the open-air performances of the old wandering mountebanks. Even the death of Abel by the hand of his brother is performed in a manner calculated to provoke great laughter. In the old mirthful spirit, to hear two persons load each other with vulgar abuse, was as good as seeing them grin through a horse-collar, if not better. Hence the droll scene in the play of “Noah” is a domestic quarrel between Noah and his wife, who was proverbially a shrew, and here gives a tolerable example of abusive language, as it might then come from a woman’s tongue. The quarrel arises out of her obstinate refusal to go into the ark. In the New Testament series the play of “The Shepherds” was one of those most susceptible of this sort of embellishment. There are two plays of the Shepherds in the “Towneley Mysteries,” the first of which is amusing enough, as it represents, in clever burlesque, the acts and conversation of a party of mediæval shepherds guarding their flocks at night; but the second play of the Shepherds is a much more remarkable example of a comic drama. The shepherds are introduced at the opening of the piece conversing very satirically on the corruptions of the time, and complaining how the people were impoverished by over-taxation, to support the pride and vanity of the aristocracy. After a good deal of very amusing talk, the shepherds, who, as usual, are three in number, agree to sing a song, and it is this song, it appears, which brings to them a fourth, named Mak, who proves to be a sheep-stealer; and, in fact, no sooner have the shepherds resigned themselves to sleep for the night, than Mak chooses one of the best sheep in their flocks, and carries it home to his hut. Knowing that he will be suspected of the theft, and that he will soon be pursued, he is anxious to conceal the plunder, and is only helped out of his difficulty by his wife, who suggests that the carcase shall be laid at the bottom of her cradle, and that she shall lie upon it and groan, pretending to be in labour. Meanwhile the shepherds awake, discover the loss of a sheep, and perceiving that Mak has disappeared also, they naturally suspect him to be the depredator, and pursue him. They find everything very cunningly prepared in the cottage to deceive them, but, after a large amount of roundabout inquiry and research, and much drollery, they discover that the boy of which Mak’s wife pretends to have been just delivered, is nothing else but the sheep which had been stolen from their flocks. The wife still asserts that it is her child, and Mak sets up as his defence that the baby had been “forspoken,” or enchanted, by an elf at midnight, and that it had thus been changed into the appearance of a sheep; but the shepherds refuse to be satisfied with this explanation. The whole of this little comedy is carried out with great skill, and with infinite drollery. The shepherds, while still wrangling with Mak and his wife, are seized with drowsiness, and lie down to sleep; but they are aroused by the voice of the angel, who proclaims the birth of the Saviour. The next play in which the drollery is introduced, is that of “Herod and the Slaughter of the Innocents.” Herod’s bluster and bombast, and the vulgar abuse which passes between the Hebrew mothers and the soldiers who are murdering their children, are wonderfully laughable. The plays which represented the arrest, trial, and execution of Jesus, are all full of drollery, for the grotesque character which had been given to the demons in the earlier middle ages, appears to have been transferred to the executioners, or, as they were called, the “tormentors,” and the language and manner in which they executed their duties, must have kept the audience in a continual roar of laughter. In the play of “Doomsday,” the fiends retained their old character, and the manner in which they joke over the distress of the sinful souls, and the details they give of their sinfulness, are equally mirth-provoking. The “Coventry Mysteries” are also printed from a manuscript of the middle of the fifteenth century, and are, perhaps, as old as the “Towneley Mysteries.” They consist of forty-two plays, but they contain, on the whole, fewer droll scenes than those of the Towneley collection. But a very remarkable example is furnished in the play of the “Trial of Joseph and Mary,” which is a very grotesque picture of the proceedings in a mediæval consistory court. The sompnour, a character so well known by Chaucer’s picture of him, opens the piece by reading from his book a long list of offenders against chastity. At its conclusion, two “detractors” make their appearance, who repeat various scandalous stories against the Virgin Mary and her husband Joseph, which are overheard by some of the high officers of the court, and Mary and Joseph are formally accused and placed upon their trial. The trial itself is a scene of low ribaldry, which can only have afforded amusement to a very vulgar audience. There is a certain amount of the same kind of indelicate drollery in the play of “The Woman taken in Adultery,” in this collection. The “Chester Mysteries” are still more sparing of such scenes, but they are printed from manuscripts written after the Reformation, which had, perhaps, gone through the process of expurgation, in which such excrescences had been lopped off. However, in the play of “Noah’s Flood,” we have the old quarrel between Noah and his wife, which is carried so far that the latter actually beats her husband in the presence of the audience. There is a little drollery in the play of “The Shepherds,” a considerable amount of what may be called “Billingsgate” language in the play of the “Slaughter of the Innocents,” but less than the usual amount of insolence in the tormentors and demons.[88] It is probable, however, that these droll scenes were not always considered an integral part of the play in which they were introduced, but that they were kept as separate subjects, to be introduced at will, and not always in the same play, and therefore that they were not copied with the play in the manuscripts.

In the Coventry play of “Noah’s Flood,” when Noah has received the directions from an angel for the building of the ark, he leaves the stage to proceed to this important work. On his departure, Lamech comes forward, blind and led by a youth, who directs his hand to shoot at a beast concealed in a bush. Lamech shoots, and kills Cain, upon which, in his anger, he beats the youth to death, and laments the misfortune into which the latter has led him. This was the legendary explanation of the passage in the fourth chapter of Genesis: “And Lamech said ... I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt; if Cain shall be avenged seven-fold, truly Lamech seventy and seven-fold.” It is evident that this is a piece of scriptural story which has nothing to do with Noah’s flood, and accordingly, in the Coventry play, we are told in the stage directions, that it was introduced in the place of the “interlude,”[89] as if there were a place in the machinery of the pageant where the episode, which was not an integral part of the subject, was performed, and that this part of the performance was called an interlude, or play introduced in the interval of the action of the main subject. The word interlude remained long in our language as applied to such short and simple dramatic pieces as we may suppose to have formed the drolleries of the mysteries. But they had another name in France which has had a greater and more lulling celebrity. In one of the early French miracle-plays, that of “St. Fiacre,” an interlude of this kind is introduced, containing five personages—a brigand or robber, a peasant, a sergeant, and the wives of the two latter. The brigand, meeting the peasant on the highway, asks the way to St. Omer, and receives a clownish answer, which is followed by one equally rude on a second question. The brigand, in revenge, steals the peasant’s capon, but the sergeant comes up at this moment and, attempting to arrest the thief, receives a blow from the latter which is supposed to break his right arm. The brigand thus escapes, and the peasant and the sergeant quit the scene, which is immediately occupied by their wives. The sergeant’s wife is informed by the other of the injury sustained by her husband, and she exults over it because it will deprive him of the power of beating her. They then proceed to a tavern, call for wine, and make merry, the conversation turning upon the faults of their respective husbands, who are not spared. In the midst of their enjoyments, the two husbands return, and show, by beating their wives, that they are not very greatly disabled. In the manuscript of the miracle-play of “St. Fiacre,” in which this amusing episode is introduced, a marginal stage direction is expressed in the following words, “cy est interposé une farsse” (here a farce is introduced). This is one of the earliest instances of the application of the term farce to these short dramatic facetiæ. Different opinions have been expressed as to the origin of the word, but it seems most probable that it is derived from an old French verb, farcer, to jest, to make merry, whence the modern word farceur for a joker, and that it thus means merely a drollery or merriment.

I have just suggested as a reason for the absence of these interludes, or farces, in the mysteries as they are found in the manuscripts, that they were probably not looked upon as parts of the mysteries themselves, but as separate pieces which might be used at pleasure. When we reach a certain period in their history, we find that not only was this the case, but that these farces were performed separately and altogether independently of the religious plays. It is in France that we find information which enables us to trace the gradual revolution in the mediæval drama. A society was formed towards the close of the fourteenth century under the title of Confrères de la Passion, who, in 1398, established a regular theatre at St. Maur-des-Fossés, and subsequently obtained from Charles VI. a privilege to transport their theatre into Paris, and to perform in it mysteries and miracle-plays. They now rented of the monks of Hermières a hall in the hospital of the Trinity, outside of the Porte St. Denis, performing there regularly on Sundays and saints’ days, and probably making a good thing of it, for, during a long period, they enjoyed great popularity. Gradually, however, this popularity was so much diminished, that the confrères were obliged to have recourse to expedients for reviving it. Meanwhile other similar societies had arisen into importance. The clerks of the Bazoche, or lawyers’ clerks of the Palais de Justice, had thus associated together, it is said, as early as the beginning of the fourteenth century, and they distinguished themselves by composing and performing farces, for which they appear to have obtained a privilege. Towards the close of the fourteenth century, there arose in Paris another society, which took the name of Enfans sans souci, or Careless Boys, who elected a president or chief with the title of Prince des Sots, or King of the Fools, and who composed a sort of dramatic satires which they called Sotties. Jealousies soon arose between these two societies, either because the sotties were made sometimes to resemble too closely the farces, or because each trespassed too often on the territories of the other. Their differences were finally arranged by a compromise, whereby the Bazochians yielded to their rivals the privilege of performing farces, and received in return the permission to perform sotties. The Bazochians, too, had invented a new class of dramatic pieces which they called Moralities, and in which allegorical personages were introduced. Thus three dramatic societies continued to exist in France through the fifteenth century, and until the middle of the sixteenth.

These various pieces, under the titles of farces, sotties, moralities, or whatever other names might be given to them, had become exceedingly popular at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and a very considerable number of them were printed, and many of them are still preserved, but they are books of great rarity, and often unique.[90] Of these the farces form the most numerous class. They consist simply of the tales of the older jougleurs or story-tellers represented in a dramatic form, but they often display great skill in conducting the plot, and a considerable amount of wit. The story of the sheep-stealer in the Towneley play of “The Shepherds,” is a veritable farce. As in the fabliaux, the most common subjects of these farces are love intrigues, carried on in a manner which speaks little for the morality of the age in which they were written. Family quarrels frequently form the subject of a farce, and the weaknesses and vices of women. The priests, as usual, are not spared, but are introduced as the seducers of wives and daughters. In one the wives have found a means of re-modelling their husbands and making them young again, which they put in practice with various ludicrous circumstances. Tricks of servants are also common subjects for these farces. One is the story of a boy who does not know his own father, and some of the subjects are of a still more trivial character, as that of the boy who steals a tart from the pastrycook’s shop. Two hungry boys, prowling about the streets, come to the shop door just as the pastrycook is giving directions for sending an eel-pie after him. By an ingenious deception the boys gain possession of the pie and eat it, and they are both caught and severely chastised. This is the whole plot of the farce. A dull schoolboy examined by his master in the presence of his parents, and the mirth produced by his blunders and their ignorance, formed also a favourite subject among these farces. One or two examples are preserved, and, from a companion of them, we might be led to suspect that Shakespeare took the idea of the opening scene in the fourth act of the “Merry Wives of Windsor” from one of these old farces.