J. C. Scharl. The Death of Rabelais. Wiseblood Books, 2025. $16.00. 179 pp.
For Hamlet, the play was the thing—specifically, a play in verse form. Yet while a trip down Broadway or through London’s West End today reveals numerous plays and even more sung verses, you’ll be hard pressed to find a new verse play. Shakespeare managed to pull off four hours’ worth of iambic pentameter, but English playwrights mostly ceased using verse in the nineteenth century. Mike Bartlett’s 2014 drama King Charles III, winner of the Olivier Award for Best New Play, may be the exception that proves the rule. To the modern English speaker, verse plays sound Shakespearean, because Shakespeare is the only historic playwright familiar to most of us.
For a poet or playwright today to engage in theatrical versification is, therefore, a decided risk. First, there is the difficulty of telling a story through verse in a way that appeals to contemporary readers or listeners. Second, there is the matter of finding someone to publish it. I speak from experience when I say that niche subjects and styles are not exactly catnip to literary agents and publishing houses. One must pursue these projects purely for the joy of art, for there is no guarantee of support from the industry.
I am, therefore, delighted that Wiseblood Books has embraced the verse plays of author J. C. Scharl: Sonnez Les Matines (2023) and The Death of Rabelais, newly published this fall. Both follow the story of the historic figure François Rabelais, a humanist scholar in sixteenth-century France. In Sonnez Les Matines, Rabelais walks around Paris in the closing hours of Carnival, seeking to unravel a deadly mystery with his companions John Calvin and Ignatius of Loyola, both of whom really attended the Collège de Montaigu. In The Death of Rabelais, the titular character flees Paris and ends up at a Twelfth Night celebration in the home of a wealthy woman and her kin. However, he does not come alone—Death itself accompanies him over the threshold. A third volume in this trilogy is yet to come.
The choice of Rabelais as the central character—a man known to history for his satirical and bawdy tales more than his skills as a priest, scholar, or physician—ensures that these plays maintain a humorous and light-hearted feel, even as they contemplate dark mysteries. Rabelais earned the ire of both Catholics and Protestants in his day, and it is not hard to see why. In Scharl’s depiction, he never ceases talking until he has thoroughly shocked those around him with his discussion of all things carnal. (The first play reminds me a bit of the tavern scenes in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, while the second has much in common with Ingmar Bergman’s renowned film The Seventh Seal.)
Embodiment is one of two related themes Scharl features in her work. In the preface to Sonnez Les Matines, she writes of human beings: “We are something entirely new: a physical spirit, an embodied soul. And to complicate matters, it is through our bodies that we both sin and are saved. What kind of salvation would it be that touched our souls but did not affect how we live in our bodies?” These words will sound familiar to those who have been observing the Christian zeitgeist in the United States for the past few years. The blossoming of the digital age, secularization, the transgender movement, and the Covid pandemic have led many Christians to reemphasize the significance of the body for our spiritual existence. The popular desire for “re-enchantment” involves a union between the carnal and the spiritual, the temporal and the eternal.
Scharl notes in her preface to Sonnez Les Matines, “Too often we think of these things—body and soul, feast and fast, sin and grace, death and life—as juxtaposed, existing at cross purposes, undoing and undermining each other, but that is all wrong.” Indeed, the paradox at the heart of Christianity is a God who takes on human flesh, an immortal one who tastes mortality, and the exchange of our death for his life. In The Death of Rabelais, this leads to a union between death and humor. Paradoxes of this sort are the second major theme of this yet-to-be-completed trilogy.
Early in The Death of Rabelais, the titular character observes,
“Jeering
jibes are simple; any man can, sneering,
smear this goodly world God’s made, and use
his holy gift of words to do so! But true
comedy—now that too few can do!”
The comedy Rabelais foists upon his fellows is a highly embodied variety, finding cause for laughter in the same flesh that must one day expire.
“Humor is no chaos, but the very
drip and flow of everything, the sticky
fluid carrying life up from stodgy
soil to all these many moistening bodies
…
To nimbly wriggle
past the facts of life to breathe its farts
and still to hug it close—now that is art!”
Upon Rabelais’ arrival at the Twelfth Night revels, accompanied by the figure of Death and a wandering friar, it will take everything in his power to nimbly wriggle out of the traps that lie in wait, if indeed he can do so. The festive gathering engages in a series of games, all of which draw not only humor, but secrets to the surface. As they take on different roles for a mystery play, Death and Rabelais swap attire, leading to a darkening of humor and lightening of mortality. The interplay between laughter and death is central as the characters embark on their passage from Christmastide to Epiphany.
Death laments that “since I am made Comedy, I must / drag laughter down into the grave with me.” This she does, though in the full knowledge that Death will one day be destroyed. For his part, Rabelais believes that their revels are
made to reveal the dancing bones of this,
our too too heavy age that, left unspanked,
would only sit and think on its demise.
Here is something our ancestors understood better than us. They could not hide from death as we attempt to do. They responded to the passing of loved ones not with sentimentality, but a fierce combination of lamentation and humor. The Dance of Death was a popular subject for art. The practice of memento mori—remembering one’s death—was a universal aspect of the Christian life. Perhaps it should be again, for there is no true humor that does not take place in the shadow of death.
By the end of the play, each character is forced to confront the paradoxes of life and the reality of death. For in the Incarnation that the characters celebrate on Twelfth Night, we find cause for hope in the union of spirit and flesh, laughter and death. As Rabelais observes,
but maybe after all there’s room for hope
that as Christ, the Laughter of the Father,
took laughter down to death, he made them brothers,
and raising one, he equal raised the other,
so even as he bears to God the marks
of death, he leaves in death the very sparks
of merriment!
Sonnez Les Matines and The Death of Rabelais are beautifully written and unique. Scharl makes use of the historic form and setting to convey ancient truths to the modern world. I was heartily impressed by the level of research, the attention to detail, the mastery of both substance and form. While it is a pity I could not see these plays performed, they can be readily enjoyed in print form. Readers may also follow the suggestion of Tara Isabella Burton, who recommends a group reading in her foreword to The Death of Rabelais.
Scharl’s verse has an antique feel but is more accessible for twenty-first century readers than the works of Shakespeare or Marlowe. So, do not be afraid to give these plays a try. We could benefit from more works like this, which convey spiritual truths using creative literary methods. I highly recommend both The Death of Rabelais and its predecessor, Sonnez Les Matines, and I await the arrival of volume three with great anticipation.
