HOLY DEADLOCK AND FURTHER RIBALDRIES

12 Medieval French plays rendered into modern English by the translator of 'The Farce of the Fart', scurrilous, sexy, stupid, satirical, scatological, side splitting.' Enders is unafraid to reference modern comedy in her translations as she assesses these comedies from half a millennium ago. Did you hear about the newlywed who rushes off for legal advice before the honeymoon is over? Or the husbands who arrange for an enormous tub in which to cure their sugary wives with a pinch of salt? How about a participatory processional toward marriage so sacrilegious that it puts Chaucer's pilgrimage to shame? And who could have imagined a medieval series of plays devoted to spouse-swapping? Jody Enders has heard and seen all this and more and shares it in her volume of performance-friendly translations of Medieval French farces. Carefully culled from more than 200 extant plays and crafted with a wit and contemporary sensibility to make them playable today, these dozen bawdy plays take on the hilariously depressing and depressingly hilarious state of holy wedlock. In 15th and 16th century comedy, love and marriage had everything to do with arranged marriages of child brides to doddering old men, frustration, fear, anxiety, jealousy, disappointment and despair matched only by the eagerness with which everybody sings, dances and cavorts in pursuit of deception, trickery and adultery. Easily recognisable stock characters come vividly to life, struggling to negotiate the limits of power, class and gender, each embodying the distinctive blend of wit, social critique and breathless boisterousness that is farce. There are notes on stage directions, grammar and style, music and choreography and brief plot summaries and the 12 plays include The Newlywed Game, The Shithouse, Holy Deadlock, Bitches and Pussycats, Wife Swap and Extreme Husband Makeover among them. There are four to six actors in The Shithouse - Wily Willy, the valet who manages to make out like a bandit assisting in the assignation between his mistress Kitty and her Lover, the dandyish Sir Allcock. Allcock arrives with a picnic but when the Husband arrives home at an inopportune moment, the poor Lover has nowhere to hide but the Latrine. He is forced to shove his head and more into the privy hole, literally shitfaced after an interrupted feast. 536pp.