Fabliau

Fabliaux are short comic verse tales composed for listening audiences in France during the 12th, 13th, and early 14th centuries. The date of Watriquet de Couvins's “The Three Ladies of Paris” (1321) marks the approximate end of the genre.

The rapidly recurring rhymes of their octosyllabic couplets reinforce the swift action that characterizes the fabliaux. The shortest is 18 lines: “The Priest and the Sheep,” which tells of a sheep butting an adulterous priest. The longest is 1,364 lines: “The Priest and the Knight,” a revenge comedy that grows longer and funnier with each term of a poor knight's revenge against a wealthy priest's inhospitality.

The comic plots of the fabliaux can be domestic or courtly, scatological or bawdy, crammed with double entendres or taboo words. In crudeness, they range from “The Knight Who Could Make Cunts Speak” and “The Maiden Who Couldn't Hear Fuck Without Having Heartburn” to Henri d’Andeli's humorously courtly “The Lai of Aristotle” and the humorously theological “St. Peter and the Jongleur.” The fabliau can be considered a parallel genre to the verse fable (such as those of Marie de France), not only because the words fable and fabliau are similar, but also because, like fables, they are short and begin or end with morals. Fabliau protagonists, however, are human rather than animal, and while fables are instructive, the addition of a moral to a scatological or bawdy or plain silly fabliau only adds to the comedy. In one of the versions of “The Young Man

With Twelve Wives,” for instance, a bachelor who has bragged that he will need 12 wives to satisfy him sexually learns soon after marrying one that he lacks the endurance to satisfy even her alone; this comical tale ends with two morals, one of them relevant (a man should not brag) and one amusingly, irrelevantly anti-feminist (a man should not trust his wife).

Fabliau plots frequently involve a pretty young wife, an older husband, and a lecherous student or priest. The genre is considered to be anti-clerical because of its many lecherous, greedy, and gluttonous priests. It is also often considered anti-feminist because of the many tacked-on anti-feminist morals and because most of the married women cheat on their husbands. However, because the adulterous women usually act with more energy and intelligence than their husbands and lovers and because their adultery often partially frees them from the stifling strictures of man-dominated marriage, many fabliaux may be interpreted as feminist rather than anti-feminist. In addition to women's pervasive intellectual superiority, some fabliaux even grant physical superiority to women—superior sexual stamina in fabliaux such as “The Young Man With Twelve Wives,” or even anatomical superiority in “Berenger of the Long Ass,” where a wife, disguised as the knight errant Berenger of the Long Ass, cows her braggart husband and forces him to kiss her bare behind. The husband, still believing Sir Berenger is a man, observes with mistaken amazement the long line of her vagina and anus and by kissing it implicitly acknowledges the superiority of a woman's “long ass” to a man's penis.

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