Word: fabliau
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...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...
...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...
Such success at the track sharpened Butcher Auteroche's appetite for live horseflesh. Last month he spotted another likely winner: a neurotic chestnut trotter named Fabliau, given to temper tantrums and the quaint habit of kicking his racing rig to pieces. After paying 80,000 francs for the horse, Auteroche spared him from the butcher's pistol, had him gelded instead. "The operation," he says proudly, "was a complete success. Fabliau is now so gentle he's a household pet. For company we've let him have a cow as a stable mate. I think...
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