When we use the theatrical term ‘farce’ today we usually understand it to mean ‘French farce’, or ‘sex comedy’: plays set in bedrooms or drawing-rooms with lots of doors and hiding spaces for adults attempting to engage in illicit sex. This type of drama works via a frenetic pace and split-second comic timing. The Oxford Dictionary of English (2nd edn, 2005) defines farce as ‘a comic dramatic work using buffoonery and horseplay and typically including crude characterisation and ludicrously improbable situations’. From the French cooking term, farcir, to stuff, in the early sixteenth century the word ‘became used metaphorically for comic interludes “stuffed” into the texts of religious plays … “suche as writte farcis and contrefait [counterfeit] the vulgare speche”’ (as translator Jehan Palsgrave wrote in 1530). If there is sexual activity, that is, it's not necessarily the most important driver of the play, and it certainly doesn't represent the behaviour of upper-class people.

Horseplay, buffoonery, vulgarity (including really crude sex jokes, often visual, involving oversize phalluses) – all are important defining aspects of comedy pre-Shakespeare. Words are often less important than actions, and because of this physicality there's always a possibility of violence in this type of theatre. It's intriguing to speculate why this is so: might there be a clue in that early concept of farce? If the reality of life in this world is, as Thomas Hobbes said in 1651, ‘poor, nasty, brutish, and short’, and we live in ‘continual fear and danger of violent death’ (Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 13), the church-going members of the medieval community might have welcomed the ‘stuffing’ of this perception into a pious religious play that exhorts us to behave ourselves and look to our heavenly reward – or punishment.