“Death, Thou Shalt Die”
In her new verse drama, J.C. Scharl takes on profound theological questions to remind us that their importance goes beyond abstract, academic musing.
Review by Benjamin Myers
Published in 2025, The Death of Rabelais is Jane Clark Scharl’s sequel to her Sonnez Les Matines, a work which did much to revive interest in verse drama among regular readers of poetry. The last major poet to work extensively in dramatic verse was T.S. Eliot, and despite that precedent, and the long tradition of drama in verse from Aeschylus to Shakespeare, readers today associate poetry primarily with the short, personal lyric rather than with drama. Scharl, poetry editor for Plough Quarterly, is out to change that. Through witty dialogue, Sonnez Les Matines explored the mysterious union of body and soul. Scharl’s new play is as entertaining and thought-provoking as the first. Although Sonnez Les Matines featured characters no less illustrious than John Calvin and Ignatius Loyola, Scharl’s Francois Rabelais stole the show, and in this sequel he takes center stage in his own play.
The historical inspiration and namesake for the fictional Rabelais was a fascinating and eminently dramatizable figure. Despite being in holy orders, the real Rabelais is most remembered today as the author of a series of bawdy prose tales about two giants, Gargantua and Pantagruel. Rabelais’s tales mix philosophical reflection with scatological humor. He was variously a humanist scholar, an A.W.O.L monk, a practicing physician, a curate, and a bawdy satirist. He epitomized the Renaissance in his wide learning and in the worldly way he wielded it.
The Rabelais of Sonnez Les Matines captured this irreverence, while still giving a sense of something more behind the humor. The Rabelais of The Death of Rabelais, however, seems a little more sober and steady. Indeed, early in the play, he exchanges his jester’s hat for Death’s robes. Perhaps this new seriousness is merely because he is older, or perhaps it is because he is no longer serving as the comical ballast to far more grave men, like St. Ignatius and Calvin. Either way, the sequel offers an extended exploration of a depth in the character already hinted at in the earlier play.
The Death of Rabelais opens on the eve of Epiphany, with Rabelais trekking alone through a wintery landscape. At a crossroads he meets a Friar, who is an old friend, and a mysterious young woman who turns out to be Death in the flesh. The three take refuge from the winter weather in a country house, where they become entangled in the love lives of a group of young Twelfth Night celebrants. The revelers stage a play within a play, a comic dramatization mirroring—and inverting—the testing of Job. Eventually, as always, Death makes herself known.
The play unfolds in lively verse, mostly iambic and occasionally rhymed. The order and regularity of the verse make it a good container for the free play of ideas and perspectives. Scharl’s characters spend much of their time tossing views of life at each other. Echoing Macbeth, the Friar proposes that
The World’s no awesome tale, my friend. Rather,
it is jumbled up chatter in a bar,
punctuated by a tale or two,
sad and splendid tales, sure, but made up
mostly of the disconnected ramblings
of an ever-shifting crowd[.]
This bit of existentialism seems bleak enough, but it is answered by Martine, the mistress of the house, in an even more despairing register:
Life’s no
game, no tale, no tragedy. It ends
in neither death nor marriage, but in a dreary
lessening drip of days in which we feed
and water these, our stupid bodies[.]
Martine’s burst of despair gets at the central question of the play: Is life a comedy, a tragedy, or something in between?
That God pronounces creation “good” means that our faith must save a place for the value of the body, and the incarnation of Christ brings embodiment into the very center of the faith. Scharl’s play suggests, accordingly, that our biggest questions are not merely academic.
In addressing this question, Scharl’s play shares more than the liturgical calendar with Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Though first staged in 1602, Twelfth Night prefigures the great romances at the end of Shakespeare’s career—Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest—in its affecting mixture of the comic and the tragic. The play begins with a shipwreck and mourning but ends with a double wedding. Its tone is both festive and melancholic. Feste, one of Shakespeare’s wise fools, sums up the play’s view of life with a song bearing the refrain, “For the rain it raineth every day.” The suggestion is that we can expect some rain, some sorrow, as a part of human life. But rain is also a symbol of common grace, falling on the just and the unjust alike. As we see especially in The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare’s final assessment is that we live neither in a comedy nor in a tragedy, but rather in both.
Scharl’s play doesn’t reach an organized conclusion in quite the same way. Instead, its consideration of the question points readers back toward a lived theology. Shortly after Rabelais himself ponders whether life is a comedy or a tragedy he changes clothes with Death, giving her his jester cap and taking on her dark robes. Comedy and tragedy have become entangled in the messiness of life. Despite the dark mood in which he begins, and despite his new garb, Rabelais finds himself defending the doctrine of the resurrection in the face of the cynical and apostate Friar’s denial of it. At the end of the play, he asks, “Do all things end in laughter or in tears?” and answers his own question with “I do not know. I do not know.” Yet, he can say this:
But this I know: that I have looked on Death
and laughed, and when I come to my last breath
I’ll greet her there[.]
Like Scharl’s previous play, The Death of Rabelais is a mystery. It is not a regular “whodunnit,” however, but rather a cosmic mystery. The play’s dramatic force comes from its great ambition, its willingness to pose a question no smaller than this: What is life, and what is death?
It would be absurd to expect the play to answer such outsized questions. That is not what poetry, or verse drama, is for. The proper domain of the poet is the particular, the concrete, dealing in embodied experience rather than overarching theory. Accordingly, as in Hamlet, even the play within a play—the comic inversion of Job’s story—breaks down before a conclusion can be reached. The answer is not abstract but rather lived and, more importantly, embodied. As the internal Twelfth Night play falls apart, one of the characters, Robert, asks “How does it end?” When Martine clarifies, “The play, you mean?” he responds, “The man.” His response reminds us that answers even to theological questions have bearing on us as embodied beings. Our bodies are not, as some early heresies suggest, merely prisons for our souls, nor is matter irrelevant to theological questions. That God pronounces creation “good” means that our faith must save a place for the value of the body, and the incarnation of Christ brings embodiment into the very center of the faith. Scharl’s play suggests, accordingly, that our biggest questions are not merely academic. When a poet like Milton seeks to “justify the ways of God to men,” he does so as an aging, blind, physically weakened, widowed, and politically defeated survivor of a turbulent period, not as a professor posing questions for an hour’s worth of musing.
Death having made her macabre errand among the Twelfth Night revelers known, The Death of Rabelais ends with one of the party goers nobly offering himself as a sacrifice, a twist which points toward the greatest sacrifice and best example of a theological problem answered in an embodied—an incarnate—way. The play ends, then, with the mystery of death’s defeat. Scharl holds this mystery to the light and examines it from every angle, not so that it can be analyzed and solved, but, rather, so that it can shine.
Benjamin Myers was the 2015-2016 Poet Laureate of the State of Oklahoma and is the author of four books of poetry: The Family Book of Martyrs (Lamar University Press, 2022), Black Sunday (Lamar University Press, 2018), Lapse Americana (New York Quarterly Books, 2013) and Elegy for Trains (Village Books Press, 2010). His poems may be read in Image, The Yale Review, Rattle, 32 Poems, The Cimarron Review and many other literary journals. He has written essays and reviews for many prominent publications, including First Things, World Literature Today, and The American Conservative. Myers lives with his wife and three children in Chandler, Oklahoma, and is the Crouch-Mathis Professor of Literature at Oklahoma Baptist University, where he directs the great books honors program. His first book of non-fiction, A Poetics of Orthodoxy, was published by Cascade Books in 2020.
The Death of Rabelais was published by Wiseblood Books on October 28, 2025. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy here.
