SOURCE: "Structure and Comedy in Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas," in Studies in Philology, Vol. LXIV, No. 4, July, 1976, pp. 551-63.

In the essay below, Robertson refutes earlier interpretations of Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas, contending that the focus of the play is its comic scenes, not religion or the crusades.

This paper will present some obtrusive aspects of the structure of the Jeu de Saint Nicolas determined from a detailed analysis of the play. The distribution of the alternating serious and comic scenes (according to their subject matter and setting) reveals that comedy is the central interest of the play, while the so-called serious epic and religious materials—or, to put it more broadly, the Iconia features—are simply part of the frame-work in which the comedy operates. A distinction will be drawn between the principal human and comic interest of the play (hitherto referred to as "r...