The Frisky, Fabulous; Fabliaux

The Frisky, Fabulous; Fabliaux

(Research Blog)

By: Vanessa Valerie Giedosh 

Who, What, Where, When?

What exactly is a Fabliau and why is it so fascinating? In a nutshell, a Fabliau is a delightfully dirty comic or satire. They were short narratives that told a perverted story depicting both a mix erotic and violent scenes. Who started it? Well, that would be the French sometime ca. 1150. The Fabliau was the most popular in France during the 12^th and 13^th centuries. Then in the 14^th century it became popular in England.

Elements of a Fabliau

• “Most fabliaux are short, focus on plot at the expense of characterization, and rely on town or country settings, usually domestic. The humor of the fabliau normally derives from a bizarre but logical chain of cause and effect, the more elaborate the better, engineered through act or acts of deception” (Wright, Glenn. "The Fabliau Ethos in the French and English Octavian Romances." Modern Philology 102.4 (2005): 483 Web.)

• There is often a quest to obtain or defend one’s money or property.

• They tend to be in an octosyllabic verse (a line of verse with eight syllables) and about 300 to 400 lines long.

• There is a lot of focus on wordplay and puns.

Performance of a Fabliau

In the early days of the Fabliau, minstrels would write them anonymously and perform them. However, in today’s society, people only tend to think of literature in the textual sense. Therefore when one reads a Fabliau, they only see the tale playing out inside their mind. But it is far more likely that a Fabliau would have been performed live in front of an audience much like a play would have been. The performer would have told the story by changing their tone of voice, delivering just the right facial expression, or shocking the crowd with a surprising hand gesture. Perhaps the story tellers could have even had the crowd of onlookers get involved and asked for volunteers – imagine the possibilities! The performer would have fed off the energy of the observers and their reactions may have dictated how they chose to tell the Fabliau.

The First Fabliau

The very first recorded Fabliau dates back to 1159 and was known as Richeut by Anonymous. It is unique in the fact that it does not use octosyllables, but instead a tailrhyme strophe. The story is about a prostitute Richeut and her son Samson, who boasts that no woman could ever make a fool out of him. Over a time span of twelve years, Samson goes off on his own where he gambles and treats women like dirt. When he returns home, his mother decides to teach him a lesson by setting him up with her servant, Herselot. Samson believes the servant to be a virgin, but she is not. His mother has a bunch of men go in while her son is with Herselot to beat him up, but goes in to stop them to look like the hero. Therefore, in the end she has proven Samson’s claim from twelve years ago wrong since he has been duped by his own mother.

However, the very first known writer of the Fabliau is a man named Rutebeuf who lived in the 13^th century.

Famous Fabliaux

I’m working on how these three Fabliaux are all connected and share the same roots. Jean Bodel ( c. 1165 – c. 1210 ) appears to have inspired both Giovanni Boccaccio ( 1313 -1375 ) and Geoffrey Chaucer ( c. 1343 – 1400 ). These are often referred to as “cradle-trick” tales because they involve a wife getting into the wrong bed with another man because the cradle has been moved. Aside from these three Fabliaux, there are a few more similar tales as well. Which makes this type of Fabliaux a popular one. There must be something entertaining or interesting about a woman who is easily duped by a baby’s cradle being moved in front of another bed. This is something that is likely worth digging into given the amount of stories about the subject with so many versions by famous authors of Fabliaux.

• Gombert et les deus Clers by Jean Bodel
• Canterbury Tales/The Reeve’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer
• Decameron/ Sixth Story of the Ninth Day by Giovanni Boccaccio

Women in Fabliaux

I’ve decided to include a full section on women in Fabliaux after reading the feedback on my bibliography; seems silly not to given how they are treated in a majority of the tales. With that being said, they are often given positions of power in Fabliaux. This may have been because so many of the early stories were written anonymously and people were allowed to create whatever characters they wanted in whatever situations they desired. That’s just my educated guess, but I still have plenty of research to sift through. Nonetheless, women were a major part of the Fabliau. They were depicted as the foolish housewives that needed to be tamed, the intelligent prostitutes, and the property that needed to be claimed. Women are so interwoven in what makes a Fabliau a Fabliau that I’m surprised I even considered not including this section in my paper.