Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • Thanks to CuriosityStream for supporting PBS Digital Studios.

  • Hey there, I'm Mike Rugnetta. This is Crash Course Theater

  • and believe it or not, theater in England doesn't end with Shakespeare.

  • Nope, it's going to take some buzzkill Protestants to shut down that iambic-pentama-party.

  • But, we're going to meet them next time.

  • Today we're going to look at English drama after Shakespeare,

  • explore the work of Shakespeare's contemporary, Ben Jonson,

  • and check out some disturbingly violent Jacobean and Caroline revenge tragedies.

  • We'll end with a visit to the Caroline Court Masques, which were created because nobles

  • were like, "theater is amazing! We want to act too!" Ugh, amateurs.

  • You're making me look bad!

  • We ended our last episode with Ben Jonson's tribute to his old pal Shakespeare.

  • Jonson belongs with Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe as one of the big-deal playwrights of the English Renaissance.

  • But his plays are harder to love.

  • They're very witty, but also very wordy,

  • which is funny because that's pretty much what he said about Will.

  • Elizabethan burn.

  • Jonson was born in 1572. His father died before his birth and his mother married a bricklayer.

  • So when it came time to go to university, Jonson had to become an apprentice bricklayer instead.

  • He was not psyched.

  • Eventually he went off to the Netherlands to become a soldier

  • but then got tired of windmills and killing people, so he came back to London to work as an actor and a playwright,

  • though apparently he wasn't much of an actor.

  • He wrote some tragedies and some comedies and his plays got him into trouble a lot

  • as he tended to fill them with racy political passages and personal attacks.

  • Unlike Shakespeare, Jonson specialized in city comedies with plenty of contemporary references.

  • Like Shakespeare, and everyone it seems, his work is deeply indebted to Ploutus and Terence.

  • Jonson is best known for his Comedies of the Humours.

  • The theory of the four humours said that bodies were composed of black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm

  • and that illness resulted when the humours were out of balance.

  • Bring on the leeches and the purgatives.

  • But even in a healthy body, it was thought one or two humours predominated

  • and these determined someone's personality

  • which could be bilious, choleric, sanguine or phlegmatic.

  • Yorick is a phlegmat through and through, well, except for the parts of him that are hollow.

  • Anyway, if you read Jonson, you'll find that his vision of humanity is a lot less expansive than Shakespeare's

  • but he's still a lot of fun.

  • Let's look at one of Jonson's greatest plays: Volpone,

  • first performed at the Globe by Shakespeare's company, The King's Men.

  • It's a comedy that takes an intensely skeptical view of human nature.

  • Volpone is about humans behaving like animals if animals behaved really poorly

  • and then lawyered up. You can think of it as the crass menagerie.

  • Volpone, whose name means fox, comes up with a hilarious prank

  • He's going to fool a bunch of his friends

  • into thinking he's on his death bed.

  • LOL. So with the help of his servant Mosca, which means fly, he pretends to be violently ill.

  • Voltore, vulture, Corbaccio, raven, and Corvino, crow, all come to his house in Venice,

  • bringing lavish gifts because they're hoping Volpone will bequeath them all his stuff.

  • Corbaccio disinherits his son just to impress Volpone.

  • Corvino agrees to let Volpone sleep with his young beautiful wife.

  • The beautiful wife resists, and Corbaccio's disinherited son rescues her.

  • They accuse Volpone of attempted rape, but Voltore, a lawyer, has the wife and the son imprisoned instead.

  • What a fowl move.

  • Thinking like a fox, Volpone then decides it will be even more hilarious if he pretends to be dead,

  • and makes everyone believe he's left his fortune to Mosca.

  • The bird dudes go to court to contest Volpone's will.

  • Mosca tries to keep Volpone's money.

  • Volpone shows up in court and tells everyone what jerks the bird guys are.

  • I mean, he's not wrong?

  • The judge punishes them, but because it's finally time for a little moral authority,

  • he also punishes Volpone and Mosca and I mean, he's not wrong either.

  • By the end, Volpone has lost his money and his health, and he's going to prison, maybe forever.

  • I'm never going to look at a fox the same way again.

  • Thank you Thought Bubble!

  • I guess that was funny?

  • As you can see, this is a comedy that feels very different from the comedies of Shakespeare.

  • It's compact and elegantly plotted, but the psychology is a lot less nuanced.

  • The morality is a lot less ambiguous, and characters are more stereotypical

  • and thin stand-ins for animals.

  • We laugh with Shakespeare's characters, but we laugh at Jonson's characters

  • as they basically try to out-terrible one another.

  • And whereas women are the center of Shakespeare's comedies, in Jonson's comedies,

  • they hardly matter at all.

  • In Volpone, Corvino's wife Celia is only present as a potential rape victim.

  • Her own thoughts and desires don't matter, which is ugly.

  • And where Shakespeare's tone is fairly hopeful in the comedies, Jonson's is not.

  • Does Jonson seem dark? Well, theater is actually about to get a lot darker

  • with incest, werewolves, poisoned incense, poisoned pictures, poisoned swords,

  • poisoned everything, basically, including poisoned skulls.

  • I wonder if there's something Yorick is keeping from me.

  • Anyways, yes, it's revenge tragedy, one of the most decadent forms of English renaissance drama.

  • When our boy Ben Jonson was just back from the Netherlands, he played the lead role

  • in one of the first examples, Thomas Kyd's "The Spanish Tragedy" from 1587.

  • Revenge tragedy borrows its form from Seneca, but where Seneca is extremely interested in moral choice,

  • these plays are much more interested in lurid forms of murder.

  • Though to be honest, Seneca was interested in that, too.

  • As Vindici says in the 1606 play "The Revenger's Tragedy," which was probably written by Thomas Middleton,

  • "When the bad bleed, then is the tragedy good."

  • So yeah, there's a lot of blood.

  • Many tragedies also have meta-theatrical elements like plays inside plays or

  • scenes of intentional disguise, or characters performing madness.

  • Shakespeare writes an on-the-nose revenge tragedy in "Titus Andronicus," which owes a huge debt to Seneca,

  • then elevates the genre with "Hamlet" by making us feel very deeply for the revenger and

  • having Hamlet constantly question the morality of his actions.

  • Until the play's final scenes, he's still debating the righteousness of revenge

  • and wondering if there's a way to escape the tragic cycle.

  • He kills a lot of people but he never becomes a complete villain

  • and even in the end, we still side with him.

  • Most playwrights weren't that high-minded.

  • John Ford's "Tis Pity She's a Whore" is a Romeo and Juliet story except Romeo and Juliet

  • are brother and sister.

  • There's a lot of random murder and lewd dancing and in the climactic scene

  • the brother kills his pregnant sister and comes back into the banquet hall with her heart on the end of his sword.

  • Remember when you thought "Cymbeline" was intense?

  • Seems a little quaint now, don't it?

  • There's also "The Duchess of Malfi," in which a woman's brothers drive her mad by making wax statues

  • of her dead children because she marries below her station.

  • And "The Revenger's Tragedy," in which a duke makes out with a poisoned skull and then

  • gets stabbed while he watches his wife betray him with another man.

  • But here's a surprise.

  • though God doesn't tend to go for anything as fancy as lunatics performing dance numbers.

  • Other critics, though, insist that Jacobean tragedies are so extreme because they are a radical form

  • that is deliberately flouting restrictive social codes and accepted norms of behavior.

  • They show the stark problems of sex and class underlying Jacobean complacency.

  • Still others think they're mostly interested in acting out sadistic fantasies

  • and delivering just shocks, thrills.

  • The last genre we'll discuss today is the court masque, a very fancy kind of theater

  • that was performed by and for nobles with professional actors taking on the comic roles

  • because as everyone knows, nobles are not funny.

  • Why were the court masques so popular?

  • Well, they affirmed existing power structures and they put the royals in some really mind-blowing doublets.

  • Work it nobles.

  • Masques have their roots in the Middle Ages,

  • and derive from the pageants, processionals and tableau vivants that were created to celebrate royal occasions

  • like births, marriages. In court masques, a mix of professional performers and nobles,

  • or if you were unlucky, just nobles would act out some allegorical scene backed by sumptuous scenery and

  • attired in knockout garb.

  • Most of the action was set to music.

  • Often, the men of the court would present a masque and then the women of the court

  • would answer it with another.

  • The masques themselves were often preceded by comic or grotesque anti-masques,

  • showing a disruption of the social order, like say, a couple of rogue satyrs up to no good.

  • Maybe making trouble in the neighborhood,

  • which would be magically fixed by the arrival of the kings' representatives onstage.

  • Most Jacobean and Caroline playwrights wrote a masque or two

  • but the foremost masque maker was, fanfare please, Mr. Ben Jonson,

  • who managed to put those badly behaved animals aside long enough to dream up

  • confections about nymphs and goddesses and constellations.

  • What a job.

  • Jonson's partner was Inigo Jones, the absolute genius of renaissance set design

  • and one of the crucial figures in the transition of theater construction toward the proscenium arch

  • that we know and sometimes love today.

  • Jones had spent some time in Italy and absorbed the innovations in Italian stagecraft.

  • He introduced perspectival staging to England and invented all sorts of awesome stage machinery

  • like clouds that would carry nobles to the stage floor.

  • The court masque bromance of Jonson and Jones eventually broke up, though, because

  • Jonson thought the words were more important and Jones thought the pictures were more important

  • and well, I suppose the tragedy is that they were both right and wrong.

  • Maybe they'd exhausted the nymph genre anyway.

  • So, do all of these revenge tragedies seem excessive? They are.

  • Do all these court masques sound really expensive? They were.

  • And that's going to make some Puritans very unhappy.

  • So enjoy your poisoned incense and majestic scenery while you can because pretty soon the Puritans

  • are going to make like those goths and visigoths and tank theater for a while

  • We've seen this cycle before in Western theater, from simplicity to virtuosity to decadence to bye-bye theater.

  • Maybe we'll see it again.

  • It's almost like history does this thing where it repeats itself?

  • Anyway, thanks for watching. It's been sanguine. Curtain.

  • Thank you to CuriosityStream for supporting PBS Digital Studios.

  • CuriosityStream is a subscription streaming service that offers documentaries and non-fiction titles

  • from a variety of filmmakers, including CuriosityStream originals.

  • For instance, CuriosityStream has Ancient Earth, a three part series chronicling the extraordinary

  • lifeforms that evolved during three of Earth's most significant geologic periods.

  • You can learn more at CuriosityStream.com/CrashCourse

  • and use the code CrashCourse during the sign-up process.

  • CrashCourse Theater is produced in association with PBS Digital Studios.

  • Head over to their channel to check out some of their shows like the Art Assignment, Eons and It's OK to be Smart.

  • CrashCourse Theater is filmed in the Chad & Stacey Emigholz Studio in Indianapolis, Indiana.

  • It is produced with the help of all of these very nice people.

  • Our animation team is Thought Cafe.

  • CrashCourse exists thanks to the generous support of our patrons on Patreon.

  • Patreon is a voluntary subscription service where you can support the content you love

  • with a monthly donation and help keep CrashCourse free for everyone, forever.

  • Thanks for watching.

Thanks to CuriosityStream for supporting PBS Digital Studios.

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it