A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard

Home › Glossary › Letter F

Farce

French
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A comic dramatic or narrative genre based on exaggerated physical humor, ridiculous situations, and stock characters. A popular medieval genre preceding and coexisting with more elevated dramatic forms.

Detailed Definition
The farce is the most robustly popular genre of French medieval theater, built on physical comedy, gross misunderstandings, cuckolded husbands, stupid peasants, and cunning servants in farcically improbable situations. The Farce de Maître Pathelin is its masterpiece. Though considered a lower genre than the morality play or mystery, the farce possesses an anarchic vitality and a subversive social insight that higher genres sometimes lack. Molière drew deeply on farcical traditions in constructing his comedies. In poetry, the farcical register introduces the body, vulgarity, and social inversion as counterweights to the idealized language of courtly and Petrarchan lyric.
Example
Example in poetry:
The Farce de Maître Pathelin, the masterpiece of the medieval French comic theater, deploys all the genre's essential mechanisms: the clever trickster outwitting the merchant, the farcical courtroom scene, and the final reversal in which the trickster is himself tricked; Molière's comedy inherits the farce tradition directly, as visible in the physical comedy of Le Médecin malgré lui, where the repeated beatings, disguises, and verbal confusions derive from centuries of farcical performance conventions; The farce's social critique is embedded in its inversions: when a peasant outwits a lawyer, when a wife humiliates a bullying husband, the temporary comic inversion voices social resentments that official culture suppresses; A student analyzing a farce should attend to its stock characters: the foolish husband, the clever wife, the greedy merchant, the pompous judge, and the witty servant represent social types whose comic interactions implicitly critique the social structures they embody; The linguistic comedy of the farce, with its wordplay, misunderstandings, and code-switching between social registers, requires an audience attuned to the multiple meanings of words: the farce's comedy is fundamentally linguistic as well as physical; Rabelais's prose fiction draws deeply on the farcical tradition, his giants Gargantua and Pantagruel participating in adventures that echo farcical plot structures while his language exploits farcical wordplay with encyclopedic enthusiasm.
Additional Notes
Farce represents a deliberately exaggerated comic mode centred on physicality, absurdity, and broad social caricature. Medieval and early French theatre made extensive use of farcical conventions that influenced later comic traditions. Students should distinguish farce from comédie, which often involves subtler social or psychological structures. Farce is especially useful for studying stock types, comic escalation, and performance energy. Though apparently simple, it can also carry sharp social criticism beneath the laughter.
Also Known As
Comic farce
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