In some instances the treatment of the husband is perhaps what may be called of a less objectionable character, as in the fabliau of La Vilain Mire (the clown doctor), printed in Barbazan (iii.
The plot of the fabliau of Barat and Haimet, by Jean de Boves (Barbazan, iv.
In the fabliau Du Bouchier d'Abbeville, in Barbazan (iv.
A fabliau by a poet who gives himself the name of Cortebarbe, printed also by Barbazan (iii.
It is a contention between the new jouglerie of the middle ages and the old jouglerie of the schools, somewhat in the same style as the fabliau of "Les deux Troveors Ribauz," described in a former chapter.
The fabliau takes every phase of life for its subject; the folk-song acquires elegance and does not lose raciness and truth.
The fabliauhas been sufficiently dealt with already.
There is, however, in the fabliauproper not so very much of direct satire, this being indeed excluded by the definition given above, and by the thoroughly artistic spirit in which that definition is observed.
The special period of fabliau composition appears to have been the 12th and 13th centuries.
This poem, half fabliau and half romance, is not so much an instance of the heroi-comic poems which afterwards found so much favour in Italy and elsewhere, as a direct and ferocious parody of the Carlovingian epic.
The dramatic germ contained in the fabliau and quickened by the mystery produces the profane drama.
Reeve's tale, imitated from the French fabliau of Gombert and the two clerks (above, p.
It appears however from the Fabliau of Du Prestre et des deuz Ribaus, to have been certainly a species of Tables, or Backgammon, and to have been played with dice, on a board called Minete.
Yet that the whale was caught for that purpose, appears not only from the present passage, but also from the Fabliau intitled Bataille de Charnage et de Caresme, written probably about the same period, and printed by Barbazan.
The only essential difference is that the opening of the Serbian tale is the well-known fabliau of the "Meadow that was mowed.
It is curious that the Fabliau alone agrees with the Hindu original in putting the lovers out of the way and disrobing them by the plea of the bath.
This interferes with a comprehension of the remarkably characteristic and clearly marked peculiarities of the Fabliau indicated in the definition given above.
The former chiefly composed sentimental work; the latter, with the proverbial or professional gaiety of his class, drew nearer to the satirical tone of the Fabliau writers.
This chapter would be incomplete without a reference to the Ysopet of Marie de France[65], which may be said to be a link of juncture between the Fabliau and the Roman du Renart.
As according to this the Fabliau is a short comic verse tale of ordinary life, it will be evident that the attempts which have been made to classify Fabliaux according to their subjects were not very happy.
Both the French fabliau and the English ballad give to the mantle the power of detecting the woman that has once done amiss, a de rien messerr['e].
Three versions of thefabliau testify that Carados and his amie deposited the mantle in a Welsh abbey.
There is another German imitation of the fabliau of the mantle, in the form (1) of a farce of the fifteenth century and (2) of a meistergesang printed in the sixteenth.
A rendering of the fabliau in prose, existing in a single manuscript, was several times printed in the sixteenth century: given in Legrand, ed.
The fastnachtspiel has points in common with the fabliau, and the assumption of a source which combined features of both lai and fabliau is warrantable: Warnatsch, pp 66-68.
Rabelaisian anecdote finds a place; in fact the fabliau or novella.
From one point of view, this condemnation of the fabliau is hardly too severe.
A fabliau always related an event; it was usually brief, containing not more than 400 lines; it was neither sentimental, religious nor supernatural, but comic and gay.
It appears from a phrase in the writings of the trouvere, Henri d'Andeli, that the fabliau was not thought worthy of being copied out on parchment.
An instance of the pathetic fabliau is Housse Partie, a kind of primitive version of the story of King Lear.
In the opinion of the best scholars, the earliest surviving fabliau is that of Richeut, which dates from 1159.
FN#597] Strikingly similar to this story is the trick of the first lady on her husband in the "Fabliau des Trois Dames qui trouverent un Anel.
FN#598] The second lady's trick in the fabliau is a very close parallel to the story in The Nights, vol.
Le Grand mentions that this fabliau is told at great length in the tales of the Sieur d'Ouville, tome iv.
As to the connexion between Chaucer's Tale and the French Fabliau in the Berne MS.
Varnhagen reprints the French Fabliau given in Wright's Anecdota Litteraria, but from another MS.
In theFabliau of the order of knighthood the exhortation is somewhat different, and necessarily so, for the candidate was a Saracen.
And in a similar strain of courtesy is the beginning of the Fabliau of Constant du Hamel, as translated by M.
There is a rather delightful and merry little German poem called Daz Maere von dem Sperwaere, which is a version of the popular French fabliau of The Crane[1791].
