[La Farce de Maistre Pierre Pathelin] La Comédie des tromperies

12mo of 120 pages, 19th century red morocco, triple gilt fillet on covers, decorated spine, inner gilt, gilt edges (Lortic).

140 x 79 mm.

"A rare small volume" (Solar, Paris, 1860, no. 1628).

Extremely rare Rouen edition of the famous Farce de Maistre Pathelin, sometimes attributed to Guillaume Alexis, with a woodcut on the title page.

The noly 17th century edition described by Tchemerzine.

One of the brilliant works of the time, slightly earlier than Villon's, The Farce of Master Pierre Pathelin is undoubtedly the work of a cleric of the time. This oldest farce in French theater, and undoubtedly the longest at 1,600 lines, was performed as early as the mid-fifteenth century and first printed in Lyon in 1485. The work's biting wit, its psychology—curiously ahead of its time—and the skill of its dramatic structure have made it not only one of the forerunners of French theater but also an archetype of virtuoso uses of language, convoluted arguments, trickery, and cunning.

It is observed that the first editions of works that enjoyed great success and widespread circulation are now known only in a handful of copies, when they have not disappeared entirely. This is true for the works of Villon, Rabelais, and Shakespeare, as well as for Perrault's Fairy Tales. The same is true of Pathelin, whose success is attested by five or six fifteenth-century editions, each of which is now known only from a single, sometimes incomplete, copy. Only one or two copies of each of the approximately twenty-five editions that followed one another in the sixteenth century, from one publisher to another, reproduced or pirated, survive, not counting those whose trail has been lost. Tchémerzine describes only this seventeenth-century edition and cites no copies.

Far superior to all the farces and satires of the time, this play inspired Rabelais: Panurge tries out the most diverse languages ​​on Pantagruel before speaking to him simply in French. There was nothing like it in the theater before Molière. Everyone knows this famous play. A cunning lawyer who dupes a bumbling draper, a naive Guillemette who learns the art of scheming at her husband's school, a trial where it's unclear whether the case involves stolen cloth or slaughtered sheep, a judge who doesn't understand a word of this gibberish and wants everyone to get back to the point, a sly shepherd who bleats in response, Pathelin tricked by Thibaut the Lamb, etc. The language is rich and full-bodied, the verse easy and witty, the repartee sharp, the characters finely observed, the two plots intertwined and resolved with great skill. (J. Bédier and P. Hazard, Histoire de la littérature française illustrée, 1949, vol. I, p. 106).

A very fine copy bound by Lortic.