Saint Nicholas (patron saint of the student clercs) play and a Saint Stephen play. An early French dramatic play is Le Jeu d'Adam (c. 1150) written in octosyllabic rhymed couplets with Latin stage directions (implying that it was written by Latin-speaking clerics for a lay public). A large body of fables survive in Old French; these include (mostly anonymous) literature dealing with the recurring trickster character of Reynard the Fox. Marie de France was also active in this genre, producing the Ysopet (Little Aesop) series of fables in verse. Related to the fable was the more bawdy fabliau, which covered topics such as cuckolding and corrupt clergy. These fabliaux would be an important source for Chaucer and for the Renaissance short story (conte or nouvelle). Among the earliest works of rhetoric and logic to appear in Old French were the translations of Rhetorica ad Herennium and Boethius' De topicis differentiis by John of Antioch in 1282. Phonology Old French was constantly changing and evolving; however, the form in the late 12th century, as attested in a great deal of mostly poetic writings, can be considered standard. The writing system at this time was more phonetic than that used in most subsequent centuries. In particular, all written consonants (including final ones) were pronounced, except for s preceding non-stop consonants and t in et, and final e was pronounced . The phonological system can be summarised as follows: Consonants Notes: All obstruents (plosives, fricatives and affricates) were subject to word-final devoicing, which was usually indicated in the orthography. The affricates , , , became fricatives (, , , ) in Middle French. had three spellings – c before e or i, ç before other vowels, or z at the end of a word – as seen in cent, chançon, priz ("a hundred, song, price"). was written as z, as in doze "twelve", and only occurred in the middle of the word. (l mouillé), as in conseil, travaillier ("advice, to work"), became in Modern French. appeared not only in the middle of a word, but also at the end, as in poing "fist". At the end of a word, was later lost, leaving a nasalized vowel. was found only in Germanic loanwords or words influenced by Germanic (cf. haut, hurler). It was later lost as a consonant, though it was transphonologized as the so-called aspirated h that blocks liaison. In native Latin words,