{"id":12790,"date":"2026-03-11T14:00:33","date_gmt":"2026-03-11T14:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=12790"},"modified":"2026-05-08T01:35:46","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T01:35:46","slug":"the-death-of-rabelais","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/11\/the-death-of-rabelais\/","title":{"rendered":"The Death of Rabelais"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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“Death, Thou Shalt Die”<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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In her new verse drama, J.C. Scharl takes on profound theological questions to remind us that their importance goes beyond abstract, academic musing.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Benjamin Myers<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Published in 2025, The Death of Rabelais <\/em>is Jane Clark Scharl\u2019s sequel to her Sonnez Les Matines<\/em><\/a>, 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,<\/em> is out to change that. Through witty dialogue, Sonnez Les Matines<\/em> explored the mysterious union of body and soul. Scharl\u2019s new play is as entertaining and thought-provoking as the first. Although Sonnez Les Matines <\/em>featured characters no less illustrious than John Calvin and Ignatius Loyola, Scharl\u2019s Francois Rabelais stole the show, and in this sequel he takes center stage in his own play.<\/p>

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>

The Rabelais of Sonnez Les Matines <\/em>captured this irreverence, while still giving a sense of something more behind the humor. The Rabelais of The Death of Rabelais, <\/em>however, seems a little more sober and steady. Indeed, early in the play, he exchanges his jester\u2019s hat for Death\u2019s 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.<\/p>

The Death of Rabelais<\/em> 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\u2014and inverting\u2014the testing of Job. Eventually, as always, Death makes herself known.<\/p>

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\u2019s characters spend much of their time tossing views of life at each other. Echoing Macbeth, the Friar proposes that<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The World\u2019s no awesome tale, my friend. Rather,
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 it is jumbled up chatter in a bar,
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 punctuated by a tale or two,
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 sad and splendid tales, sure, but made up
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 mostly of the disconnected ramblings
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 of an ever-shifting crowd[.]<\/p>

This bit of existentialism seems bleak enough, but it is answered by Martine, the mistress of the house, in an even more despairing register:<\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Life\u2019s no
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 game, no tale, no tragedy. It ends
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 in neither death nor marriage, but in a dreary
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 lessening drip of days in which we feed
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 and water these, our stupid bodies[.]<\/p>

Martine\u2019s burst of despair gets at the central question of the play: Is life a comedy, a tragedy, or something in between?<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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That God pronounces creation \u201cgood\u201d 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\u2019s play suggests, accordingly, that our biggest questions are not merely academic.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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In addressing this question, Scharl\u2019s play shares more than the liturgical calendar with Shakespeare\u2019s Twelfth Night<\/em>. Though first staged in 1602, Twelfth Night <\/em>prefigures the great romances at the end of Shakespeare\u2019s career\u2014Cymbeline, The Winter\u2019s Tale, The Tempest<\/em>\u2014in 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\u2019s wise fools, sums up the play\u2019s view of life with a song bearing the refrain, \u201cFor the rain it raineth every day.\u201d 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\u2019s Tale<\/em>, Shakespeare\u2019s final assessment is that we live neither in a comedy nor in a tragedy, but rather in both.<\/p>

Scharl\u2019s play doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s denial of it. At the end of the play, he asks, \u201cDo all things end in laughter or in tears?\u201d and answers his own question with \u201cI do not know. I do not know.\u201d Yet, he can say this:<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 But this I know: that I have looked on Death
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 and laughed, and when I come to my last breath
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 I\u2019ll greet her there[.]<\/p>

Like Scharl\u2019s previous play, The Death of Rabelais<\/em> is a mystery. It is not a regular \u201cwhodunnit,\u201d however, but rather a cosmic mystery. The play\u2019s dramatic force comes from its great ambition, its willingness to pose a question no smaller than this: What is life, and what is death?<\/p>

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, <\/em>even the play within a play\u2014the comic inversion of Job\u2019s story\u2014breaks 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 \u201cHow does it end?\u201d When Martine clarifies, \u201cThe play, you mean?\u201d he responds, \u201cThe man.\u201d 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 \u201cgood\u201d 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\u2019s play suggests, accordingly, that our biggest questions are not merely academic. When a poet like Milton seeks to \u201cjustify the ways of God to men,\u201d 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\u2019s worth of musing.<\/p>

Death having made her macabre errand among the Twelfth Night revelers known, The Death of Rabelais<\/em> 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\u2014an incarnate\u2014way. The play ends, then, with the mystery of death\u2019s 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.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Benjamin Myers<\/strong>\u00a0was the 2015-2016 Poet Laureate of the State of Oklahoma and is the author of four books of poetry:\u00a0The Family Book of Martyrs<\/em>\u00a0(Lamar University Press, 2022), Black Sunday<\/em> (Lamar University Press, 2018),\u00a0Lapse Americana\u00a0<\/em>(New York Quarterly Books, 2013) and\u00a0Elegy for Trains<\/em> (Village Books Press, 2010). His poems may be read in\u00a0Image<\/em>, The Yale Review<\/em>,\u00a0Rattle<\/em>,\u00a032 Poems<\/em>,\u00a0The Cimarron Review<\/em>\u00a0and many other literary journals. He has written essays and reviews for many prominent publications, including\u00a0First Things<\/em>,\u00a0World Literature Today<\/em>, and\u00a0The American Conservative<\/em>. 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,\u00a0A Poetics of Orthodoxy<\/em>, was published by Cascade Books in 2020.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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The Death of Rabelais <\/strong>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<\/a>.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In her new verse drama, J.C. Scharl takes on profound theological questions to remind us that their importance goes beyond abstract, academic musing. 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