La Farce de maître Pierre Pathelin
The greatest French medieval farce, in which a trickster lawyer is out-tricked by a shepherd. Written around 1460 by an unknown playwright.
- Original byline
- Anonymous
- Published
- Date not recorded
- Form
- Plays
- Authorship
- Still unknown
- Reason for anonymity
- Unrecorded
- Copyright
- Public domain
- Reference
- Wikipedia · Wikidata
The authorship story
La Farce de Maitre Pierre Pathelin, from around 1460, is the masterpiece of French medieval comic theater: the lawyer Pathelin swindles a draper out of cloth, coaches a shepherd to answer every question with a sheep's bleat, and is finally beaten at his own game when the shepherd bleats at him too. It gave French the proverb about returning to one's sheep. The farce survives with no author's name, and though candidates from Triboulet to Guillaume Alecis have been proposed, none has been established. French comedy's founding text is the work of an unknown hand.
Questions readers ask
Who wrote La Farce de maître Pierre Pathelin?
Nobody knows. No author for La Farce de maître Pierre Pathelin has been identified in the documented record.
Can I read La Farce de maître Pierre Pathelin for free?
Yes. La Farce de maître Pierre Pathelin is in the public domain and the full text is free to read at the Internet Archive.
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