One of ARCHAS’s originalities, since its inception, is to exclusively interpret plays performed in the 15th and 16th centuries, mostly in the French-speaking regions of the present-day Swiss Confederation. This choice is less motivated by a return to the origins of ‘Swiss’ theater than by practical reasons: facilitating access to archival funds located near the university of Lausanne, visits to which generally open the workshop. It also aims to introduce participants to plays rooted in familiar regional realities but whose style and worldview appear strange in the 21st century. Indeed, ARCHAS’s main aim is to offer an alternative approach to the history of French theater, different from the historiographical narrative forged in the last century and partially obscured by the heritage canons established by the school and by the repertoire performed in our theaters. To achieve this, the workshop encourages reflection on what I call « zombie » sources: deceased works endowed with a certain capacity for resurgence through the questions they raise.
Questioning the ‘zombie’ dimension of a theatrical language
One of the interests of Romand theater from the years 1450-1550, in my view, is to illustrate several possible dimensions of the undead.
These works, which belong to a space located outside the borders of the former kingdom of France, have generally been overlooked in a Francocentric theatrical historiography. The obsolescence of their dramaturgies makes their revival problematic a priori. As for their material remains, they are ghostly. Their performances were given in an urban fabric that one can still traverse but which has not retained any trace of them; the relationships that the plays forged with their audiences are sometimes documented, but by rare and delicately interpreted testimonies; their scripts have been transmitted on fragile media, akin to roles, rehearsal texts used by the players, and of which Swiss archives hold the most significant collection in Europe.
Finally, the questions crystallized by these sources are often unresolved problems that haunt the history of theater. In a time when performances were not given in dedicated venues, how did the performance spaces interact with the ways of playing and understanding the plays? How does one interpret a character to make it persuasive? How do you stimulate emotional responses – laughter, compassion, disgust – from audiences? Year after year, such questions, still relevant today, fuel research on specific corpora.
An approach through rhetoric
Because theatrical language is inherently a codified discourse intended for an audience, the Workshop immediately directs the table readings towards understanding the communicative functioning, here rhetoric, of dramatic writings in Middle French.
The specific construction of plots and the development of arguments fuel reflections on what the principles of inventio might have been in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Identifying the images, proverbs, and commonplaces that punctuate the dialogues, facilitated by consulting some popular sententious collections of the time, helps gauge the importance of dispositio and elocutio. Tasking students without specific training to reconstruct the ways French was spoken around 1500 in various regions of present-day western Switzerland is too delicate to attempt a restored pronuntiatio, as has been done elsewhere; therefore, the work in this area primarily focuses on understanding how verse recitation works and what purpose it serves.
In ARCHAS writing workshops:
In ARCHAS writing workshop. Option1: working on original language
The readings, supported by translation notes provided by the instructors, prompt reflection on the relevance of a rewriting, fueled as much as possible by available documentation. In 2021, the versification of « La Présentation des joyaux, » a farce likely performed in the region of Vaud around 1500, was analyzed by comparing the complete version of this play, printed at the beginning of the 16th century, and the handwritten roles used by actors who, at the same time, portrayed the two protagonists, preserved at the State Archives of Fribourg.
The comparison allowed, among other things, to identify the rhythmic and dramaturgical interest of the triolet rondels, a fixed form that punctuates the farce, but also to observe potential changes in the attribution of the verses to be recited, as suggested by the erasures in the role of the Fool / Sot:
LE SOT
Sus, devant, torches allumez.
LE MESSAGER
Prenez en gré cet entremets
De vostre amy, qui vous l’envoye.
LE SOT
Or, puisqu’à vous je le remets,
Prenez en gré cet entremets.
LE MESSAGER
D’autres n’aurez, je vous promets.
A Dieu tant que je vous revoye.
LE SOT
Prenez en gré cet entremets
De vostre amy, qui vous l’envoye. (texte de l’imprimé).
LE FOL
Sus devant torches alumez.
l’envoye
Or puis qu’à vous je le remetz,
Prenez en gré cest entremetz
De vostre amy qui vous l’envoye.
Renvoye. (rôlet du Fou)[1].
Drawing on these variants to work from a research-creation perspective, some groups then chose to graft new verses onto the rondeau composed in Middle French and placed in the mouth of a character absent from the original text:
LA MARIÉE se lève et s’adresse au public
Prenez en gré cet entremets
De mon amy qui nous l’envoye
Et oyez ma parole vraie :
Bien malin qui des fiancés
Se moque avant prime nuitée,
Se sent hardy sur son fumier.
Mais remerciez les fiancés,
Car grace à eux faisons vesprée.
Prenez en gré cet entremets
Du bon amy qui vous l’envoye.
(Italics, rewriting by Les Connines enfarineuses, ARCHAS, 2021).
Indeed, careful reading of « La Présentation des joyaux » has uncovered a comedic dynamic deemed problematic by several participants. As understood, the wedding farce depicts a duo between a messenger, who brings a bridal gift to a bride present in the audience, and a fool, who disrupts this gift with supposed obscenities intended to embarrass the bride and amuse the assembly. However, the laughter that effectively excludes the addressed female character is perceived as sexist in the 21st century, thus undercutting the genuine humor of the dialogues. To recapture this humor, it was imagined to bring the bride on stage and, as shown in the previous quotation, to give her a voice. An anachronistic voice since absent from the original, but conceivable insofar as the writing device of the roles – where the lines of a single actor are transcribed, punctuated by the truncated lines of their interlocutors – allows us to imagine that an additional character could have spoken, transforming this two-character farce into a three-character farce.
In ARCHAS writing workshops. Option 2: modern transposition
Middle French plays are thus rich in textual and fictional potentialities, as demonstrated by « La Fontaine de Jouvence, » another play studied in the « possibilities of farce » program in 2021. Its framework pits a couple against each other, with the husband, an aging and naive peasant, seeking to rejuvenate himself to win back his wife but falling victim to a trickster.
While the printed version of the farce in the early 16th century presents a text in standard Middle French, the roles preserved in Fribourg portray the Villain with lines in a local dialect, the Franco-Provençal, in contrast to the refined French affected by the wife and the deceiver. By anchoring the plot in a local reality and choosing to comically confront sociolects, the players of the 1500s undoubtedly aimed to amuse the audiences of the Romand cities, which were largely diglossic but likely identified with the most legitimate language.
However, this humorous strategy loses effectiveness when replayed as is, as Middle French now seems as outdated and strange to us as Franco-Provençal. It was therefore decided to retain the plot, characters, common discursive and argumentative tropes, as well as the octosyllabic verse of « La Fontaine de Jouvence, » but to transpose the former diglossia into current sociolects, standard French of the 21st century for the wife, ‘youthful’ language for the cunning character, and Vaudois expressions for the Villain.
Le Vilain se lamente
Mais j’me suis pris une d’ses brossées,
Et l’autre folle, elle gueule une chiiée.
Ma femme me prend pour un niobet,
Elle niousse, elle beugle, ça va l’chalet ?
Tout ça pour que ch’parle comme un frouze
Parce qu’elle est trop bien pour la bouse.
Elle veut l’divorce et m’mettre dehors…
Mais elle me laisse une chance d’abord[2.
In ARCHAS, the reading and writing workshops have a dual objective: to facilitate the understanding of the creation process of an ancient theatrical language and to enable participants to engage with it in order to develop a reflective stance on the question « what next? » In other words, these exercises guide each group in choosing an interpretation along a continuum that can range, depending on the program’s questions and the students’ interests, from historical reenactment to modernization. A middle path, often preferred, is what I refer to as « evocation« : it involves drawing inspiration both from archaeological approaches (starting from the past to observe its echoes up to the present) and reflections on the notion of contemporaneity (starting from the present to see how it resonates with what was once topical in the past). The productions developed in ARCHAS ultimately speak to twenty-first-century perspectives and sensibilities. However, the working process avoids immediately focusing attention solely on contemporary expectations.
[1] The printed version of ‘La Présentation des joyaux’ was edited in É. Picot and Ch. Nyrop (eds.), Nouveau recueil de farces françaises des xve et xvie siècles, Paris, Morgand & Fatout, 1880, pp. 181-189. The manuscript is held in the State Archives of Fribourg, Aebischer Literature collection, 7.2v; a new transcription will soon be available online on the AEF website.
[2] La Tainefon de Jouvence, rewriting by Nicolas Hurni, Amanda Ferroli & Damien Geoffroy, ARCHAS, 2021.