A sotie is a short satirical play common in 15th- and 16th-century France. The word (compare modern sottise) comes from the sots, "fools", who appeared as characters in the play. In the plays, these fools would make observations and exchange thoughts on contemporary events and individuals. Shorter plays, sometimes referred to as parades, need not have any plot at all, but relied simply on a detached dialogue. The genre has its origin in the Feast of Fools

Feast of Fools

The Feast of Fools, known also as the festum fatuorum, festum stultorum, festum hypodiaconorum, or fête des fous, are the varying names given to popular medieval festivals regularly celebrated by the clergy and laity from the fifth century until the sixteenth century in several countries of Europe,...

 and other Carnival

Carnival

Carnaval is a festive season which occurs immediately before Lent; the main events are usually during February. Carnaval typically involves a public celebration or parade combining some elements of a circus, mask and public street party...

-related festivities. The purpose of these events was to present a world turned upside-down, in this case with the fools as fonts of wisdom. The fools were dressed in grey robes, and wore a hood with donkey ears.

There is some scholarly debate over whether the sotie should be considered a separate genre from the farce

Farce

In theatre, a farce is a comedy which aims at entertaining the audience by means of unlikely, extravagant, and improbable situations, disguise and mistaken identity, verbal humour of varying degrees of sophistication, which may include word play, and a fast-paced plot whose speed usually increases,...

 or the morality play

Morality play

The morality play is a genre of Medieval and early Tudor theatrical entertainment. In their own time, these plays were known as "interludes", a broader term given to dramas with or without a moral theme. Morality plays are a type of allegory in which the protagonist is met by personifications of...

, but it does have certain unique characteristics. Whereas the characters in a farce would be distinguished individuals with proper names, the characters in the soties were pure allegories. The characters had names such as "First Fool" and "Second Fool", or "Everyman", "Pilgrim" etc. Sometime there would be a leader of the fools, called "Mother Fool" (Mère Sotte). These allegorical protagonists were also common to morality plays, but unlike this genre, the sotie was primarily meant to entertain. The plays also had highly complex rhyme schemes, and sophisticated verse structures.

The best known soties playwright is Pierre Gringore

Pierre Gringore

Pierre Gringoire was a popular French poet and playwright. He was born in Normandy, at Thury-Harcourt, but the exact date and place of his death are unknown. His first work was Le Chasteau de Labour , an allegorical poem....

, and the best-known play his 1511 Jeu du prince des sots (Play of the Prince of Fools). In this play, "Mother Fool" represents the papacy, and for this reason the satire was tolerated by the French king. In the 16th century, soties were banned and went out of use. The term has, however, been used also for modern works. The 20th-century author André Gide

André Gide

André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide...

referred to his 1914 novel Les caves du Vatican as a sotie.