Word: fabliaux
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Benson, a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, came to Harvard in 1959. He is an expert in medieval literature and is the author of Art and Tradition in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the co-author of The Literary Context of Chaucer's Fabliaux...
...most significant item in the canon, through being the only play the Bard ever wrote entirely about the ordinary citizenry of his own day and locale. Actually, it is a transferral to the stage of the comic medieval French verse-tale genre known as the fabliau. The fabliaux and the play depict contemporary society and diction, delight in practical jokes, revel in adultery and cuckoldry, and indulge in frank and often obscene language...
Here the dramatist, whether in two weeks or not turned out a masterful and hilarious cock-and-ball story. Like the fabliaux, the play is "mosts pour la gent faire rire"; it embodies the English version of l'esprit gaulois. Merry Wives certainly joins the company of the other classic representatives of the fabliau tradition--Boccaccio's Decameron, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and Balzac's Contes Drolatiques. So cease, ye carpers...
...readers, insists Professor Mortimer Jerome Adler, know How to Read a Book. Equally important fact: few writers know how to tell a story. Story-weaving is a craft old as flax-weaving, decorative as peasant embroidery, difficult as silversmithing. Thus old tales like The Thousand and One Nights, the fabliaux, The Canterbury Tales, the Grimms' folk stories have a magic rarely found in latter ages. That this magic is less a patina than the product of skill and feeling is shown by the occasional appearance of a real storyteller's story. Such is Franz Werfel's Embezzled...
Marshal Josef Pilsudski, having overthrown the Polish Government by violence (TIME, May 24) and then quixotically refused to accept a higher office than his beloved Ministry of War (TIME, May 31), became last week a living yet piquantly legendary hero about whom "human interest" fabliaux were woven without stint and printed beneath lavish headlines...