A Farce To Be Reckoned With

Chapter 2

Disguised as a merchant, Azzie walked into the nearby city of York. Crowds were streaming toward a central point in the city, and he allowed himself to be carried along through the narrow winding streets.

The people were in a holiday mood, but Azzie didn't know the cause of celebration.

A play was being enacted on a wooden platform in the middle of the city's central square; Azzie decided to watch. Stage plays for the general public were a fairly recent invention. Suddenly it had become a fad that was sweeping Europe.

It was all pretty simple and straightforward. Actors came out on a raised platform and pretended to be someone else. If you'd never seen it before it could be quite thrilling. Azzie had seen many plays in his tune—a long tune that stretched all the way back to the primitive goat dances of the ancient Hellenics —

and he considered himself something of an expert. After all, he had been in the opening nights' audiences for Sophocles' great dramas. But this production in York was something different from goat dances and from Sophocles. This was realistic drama, and these two actors were talking like man and wife.

"So, Noah, what's new?" said Noah's wife.

"Woman, I have just had a divine revelation."

"Call that news?" Mrs. Noah said scornfully. "All you ever do, Noah, is walk out into the desert and have revelations. Isn't that true, children?"

"Sure is, Mama," said Jepthah.

"Right on," said Ham.

"Too true," said Shem.

"The Lord God has spoken to me," Noah said. "He commands me to take the boat I just built and move everyone aboard, because He is about to send a rain that will drown all things."

"How do you know this?" Mrs. Noah asked.

"I heard the voice of God."

"You and your crazy voices!" said Mrs. Noah. "If you think I'm going to move into that crazy boat with you and the kids just because you've heard a voice, you've got another think coming."

"I know it'll be a little crowded," Noah said, "especially after we get all the animals aboard. But not to worry. The Lord will provide."

"Animals?" Mrs. Noah asked. "You didn't say anything about animals."

"I was just getting to that part. That's what the Lord wants me to do. Save the animals from the Flood He's about to send."

"What animals are we talking about? Like pets?"

"God wants us to take more than just pets," Noah said.

"Like what?"

"Well, like everything," Noah said.

"How many of everything?"

"A pair of each kind of animal."

"Each kind? All of them?"

"That's the idea."

"You mean, like rats?"

"Yes, two of them."

"And rhinoceroses?"

"I admit it'll be a squeeze. But yes, rhinoceroses."

"And elephants?"

"We'll get them aboard somehow."

"And walruses?"

"Yes, of course, walruses too! God's instructions were very clear! Two of every kind."

Mrs. Noah gave Noah a look that as good as said, Poor drunken old Noah is having his fantasies again.

The audience loved it. There were about a hundred of them in the improvised theater, lounging on benches. They howled at Mrs. Noah's lines, stamping their feet to show approval. They were poor townspeople and rustics mostly, this audience that had gathered to watch a soon-to-be-apocryphal miracle play called Noah.

Azzie sat in one of the box seats that had been set up on a special scaffolding above and to the right of the stage. These seats were for the use of the prosperous citizen. From here he could watch the actors who played Noah's sons' wives changing their costumes. He could lounge at his ease and remain above the unwashed fetor of the masses for whom these plays, with their morally correct attitudes and their simpering points of argument, were intended.

The play went on. Noah boarded his boat; the rains began. A yokel with a watering can stood on a ladder and simulated the beginning of forty days and forty nights of rain. Azzie remarked to the well-dressed man in the box seat behind him, "Do what God says and everything will come out right for you! What a trivial conclusion, and how untrue to everyday life, where things come out in the oddest fashion with no regard for cause and effect."

"Well, obviously, sir," Azzie said. "But it is all sheerest propaganda. Don't you ever wish you could see a play with more invention in it, instead of a concoction like this that links homilies together as a butcher links sausages? Wouldn't you like to see a play whose plot was not hitched to the simpering determinism of standard morality?"

"Such would be refreshing, I suppose," the man said. "But such a philosophically based work is unlikely to come from the clerics who pen this sort of thing. Perhaps you'd care to pursue the point further, sir, after the play, over a tankard of ale?"

"Delighted," said Azzie. "I am Azzie Elbub, and my profession is gentleman."

"And I am Peter Westfall," the stranger said. "I am a grain importer, and I have my shop near St.

Gregory's in the Field. But I see the players are beginning again."

The play got no better. After it was over, Azzie accompanied Westfall and several of his friends to the Sign of the Pied Cow, in Holbeck Lane near High Street. The landlord brought them flowing tankards, and Azzie ordered mutton and potatoes for all.

Westfall had received some education in a monastery in Burgundy. He was a large middle-aged man, sanguine of complexion, mostly bald, florid of gesture, and tending toward goutiness. From watching him refuse the meat, Azzie suspected him of vegetarianism, one of the deviant marks by which a Catharist heretic could be detected. It made no difference to Azzie, but he filed the information away for possible use some other time. Meanwhile there was the play to discuss with Westfall and the several other members of his party.

When Azzie complained about the play's lack of originality, Westfall said, "Indeed, sir, it is not supposed to be original. It is a story that tells a most edifying message."

"You call that an edifying message?" Azzie demanded. "Be patient and it'll all work out? You know perfectly well that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and that if you don't complain nothing ever changes. In the Noah story, God was a tyrant. He should have been opposed! Who says God is right every time? Is a man to have no judgment of his own? If I were a playwright, I'd come up with something better than that!"

Westfall thought that Azzie's words were provocative and unorthodox, and it was in his mind to chastise him. But he noticed that there was a strange and commanding presence about the young fellow, and it was well known that members of the Court often disguised themselves as ordinary gentlemen, the better to draw responses from the unwary. So Westfall eased up on his queries, finally pleading the late hour as an excuse to retire.

After Westfall and the others had departed, Azzie stayed on awhile at the tavern. He wasn't sure what to do next. Azzie considered following Ylith and again trying his seductive wiles, but he realized it would not be a good move. He decided instead to travel on to the Continent, as he had originally intended. He was thinking of staging a play of his own. A play that would run counter to these morality plays with their insipid messages. An immorality play!