Name: English Theater After Shakespeare: Crash Course Theater #17
Uploaded: 2019-05-05T14:27:25.000Z
Duration: 12 min 59 s
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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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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,

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."

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