And today we're gonna be moving from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, a time of discovery, innovation, beauty, sophistication and comedy.

In this episode, we're gonna take a trip to Italy exploring the elegance of the neoclassical revival and the invention of one of theirs.

Best loved popular forms.

Commedia dell'arte.

A.

That's right.

The golden age of the poop joke has done.

The renaissance in Italy lasts from roughly 1300 to 1600.

That earlier date overlaps pretty significantly with the late Middle Ages because no one really puts out press releases, letting everyone know when a historical era has ended.

Plus, cultural change takes time.

A lot of the forms will talk about today were in vogue at the same time as those cycle plays and their pageant wagons.

But mystery plays and passion plays never really caught on in Italy, which may explain why other genres flourished if the Middle Ages were about God.

And yes, I am generalizing because they were also about feudalism and crusades, itchy clothing and the plague.

Then the renaissance was about people and also still the plague.

The Renaissance introduced humanism, the idea that earthly life isn't just a veil of tears that might lead to heaven if you're good but is maybe worthy in and of itself.

This encouraged an upsurge in human achievement, music and medicine and visual arts and physics and theater to pay.

That's US Theatre starts moving forward by looking backward.

We know from our episode on Rosita that Roman drama never disappeared The place of Terrance and Plowed.

Us and Seneca were red throughout the Middle Ages, but they weren't performed.

They were enjoyed for their style.

In the case of the comedies and their moral lessons in the case of the Senate in Tragedies in the 13 hundreds, Italian writers started trying to make thes plays their own, but it took a while for them to come up with anything as distinctive as Ross vetoes work.

Most early attempts were based on Roman tragedies, but by the late 13 nineties, Italians were writing Roman style comedies, too, with twins and mix ups, and you know all the good stuff you come to expect for a while.

These plays were written in Latin and they weren't intended for performance.

But in 14 29 a bunch of plow displays were found, and when Constantinople fell, a bunch of Greek manuscript returned to Italy.

By the late 14 hundreds.

Some nobles wondered.

Hey, what if we turn to the banquet hall into a theater and put on plowed ISS?

And then, a few years after that, they wondered, Hey, would it be more fun if plays were written in the vernacular rather than in Latin and spoke to how we live now and then?

Presto!

Neoclassical plays so called because they are classical and also knew.

At first, writers churned out plow dislike comedies with young lovers mean parents and cheating wives.

Even Niccolo Machiavelli got in on the action with the Mandrake.

Thes comedies were called Commedia Judita or erudite comedies because they were based on classical models that you had to be well read to know.

But were they all that classical?

Yes and no.

By 14 98 Aristotle's Poetics was back in circulation, and people were actually reading it by 15 50.

But they're takeaway was pretty different from Aristotle's.

Italian writers got rid of choruses.

They moved towards greater realism and often wrote tragedies with happy endings, which we now call tragic comedies.

Italians decided that tragedy had to teach useful moral lessons, an idea borrowed from the Roman critic Horace, and they really ran with it.

Almost all of these plays were privately produced by courts or schools.

They were staged to honor some person or event nobles made up the audiences, and nobles usually made up the actors, too.

If you were a lower class person, your chances of seeing Commedia Aditya and performance were slim.

But luckily, commedia Aditya wasn't the only theater game in town.

A lot of Italian Renaissance theaters innovation didn't have much to do with the play's themselves.

Italians were wizards of stagecraft.

They were like, I'll see your trap door and your medieval Hellmouth now raise you crazy.

Advances in perspective and also raking always got somewhere to go.

That guy.

The staging Renaissance, gets started when 15th century Italians discovered the true Venus is treacherous.

Day Architectural, which was written around 15 BC and is basically the poetics of architecture chockablock with set design, pro tips, the discovery of single point perspective painting transformed theater sets to helping them look three dimensional, though it helps if you're the emperor or the Duke or the counter.

Whatever, because single point perspective really only works if you're sitting smack in the center, which is where the nobility were placed typical in the 17th century, we get shifting scenery, which is accomplished with wing panels that slide in and out on grooves in the floor, among other methods.

When a scene changed, wing panels slid out.

Each set of painted wings that disappeared revealed Maur just behind.

In the late 15 hundreds, gardens and banquet halls give way to permanent purpose built theaters, possibly the first in Europe since Roman times.

In Vincennes, up, the Olympic Academy built the Teatro Olimpico, which opened in 15 85 and was designed by rock star architect Andrea Palladio.

It's very busy and looks a lot like a Roman theater got shrunk and enclosed.

It wasn't used very much, but it influenced later theaters.

It's widened.

Arch may have contributed to the Proscenium arch, which you'll recognize in most Broadway theaters today.

Arches or rectangles that frame the stage from the audience's perspective in Renaissance Italy.

How to books also circulated detail ING effects to make gods and clouds rise above the stage or rocks and trees sink below it.

Ocean scenes were common, as were fire effects and contraptions that mimicked the sound of wind and thunder.

No electricity for a while, still so candles and oil lamps with the action, which typically made the theater hot and hazy.

All this was pretty cool, but not as cool as the commedia dell'arte day, which means artful comedy or the comedy of players.

It's the earthier lust year counterpart to the commedia Judita, and it has an even more dramatic special effect.

Women that's right.

From 15 60 on women were finally allowed on stage in Italy.

They won't show up on stage in England for another century.

More on that later.

Scholars can't really agree on the origins of the commedia dell'arte A.

But the most popular theory traces its lineage from our old lewd friend.

The Talon farces thes have been preserved by strolling minstrels and gestures during the Middle Ages.

Like the ortolan forces, commedia dell'arte relies on stock characters and improvised situations that allowed the actors to string together conveniently memorized lines in an array of prearranged comedic bits called Lhotse.

Basically, Ah Lotso is a gag.

There are books listing hundreds of Lhotse like hat, Lhotse and Food, Lhotse and P.

Lhotse and just countless Lassie involving butts.

The mix of Lhotse and improvisation meant that while most stories progressed along the usual plow, Tous Terrence Maninder like lines on audience, never knew exactly which Lhotse a stock character, would throw into the mix or how other stock characters would react.

That was a lots of fear.

It was hilarious.

Stock characters were based on regional types, so each had a specific style dress, a specific accent and even a specific food associated with them.

Each traveling troupe of 8 to 12 actors had a slightly different mix of types.

But here are some of the main ones.

Master's servants and lovers.

Let's see some more in the probable.

There are usually three masters, the captain or capitano.

He's a Spanish military guy with a mask and a cape and a sword and a mustache.

He swaggering and brag e until he actually gets near a fight.

And then he's a coward.

Pant alone is a miserly merchant type from Venice who wears a red vest and a long coat, plus a mask with a big nose and a gray beard.

even though he's old, he lusts after young women, and the young women are not psyched about the doctor or ill dot aura is surprise.

A doctor from Bologna, masked and dressed like an academic, the doctor is a friend of pantaloons, and he needs everyone to know how smart he is.

So he uses a lot of Latin words and phrases.

Some of the grocer urine Lhotse involved him, and his life is often cheating on him.

Between the Latin urine.

Can you blame her?

And now the servants, who are often called Johnny.

They're mostly men, though some troops had women who played Maze Harlequin or are lucky.

No wears a green mask and a diamond suit.

He carries a wooden sword that he hits people with.

He's wily and acrobatic, but also kind of simple boys.

He hungry.

He speaks gibberish.

Cuccinello was a less defying type, but he's from Naples and dressed in a hunchback and a pointy hat.

There was another servant rig, Ella, who was mean kind of a letch, But he's really more of an 18th century figure.

Finally, the lovers, they are nice and fresh faced and clean cut.

Sometimes they were a little stupid.

They don't wear masks.

They're kind of boring.

Still, it's their love often thwarted, that gets the plot going.

Thank you, Thought Bubble.

We still have books of Lhotse and even some commedia dell'arte.

A script, though they're not that great.

Later, dramatists like 18th century writer Carlo Goldoni wrote plays based on commedia dell'arte day so you can check out a work like the servant of two masters.

If you're curious, what we do know is these plays follow conventional narrative lines.

But what happens in the middle is fast and gross and apparently really, really funny because the genre lasts for centuries into today.

Ever heard of slapstick?

Yeah, that was a term for our Latinos.

Wooden sword.

A slap stick, huh?

Right slap.

Oh, come on, you're no fun.

So the next time you see some rude physical comedy amaze and delight your friends by telling them that the wedgie they just saw derives from an Italian Renaissance form and then hope that your friends still talk to you.

Don't avoid eye contact with me where you're going.

Next time we'll get serious.

Sort of.

When we set sail for England and explore Elizabethan Theatre before some bloke named Shakespeare shows up and hugs all the candle powered spotlights.

Until then, curtain Crash Course Theater is produced in association with PBS.

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