Name: Get Outside and Have a (Mystery) Play: Crash Course Theater #10
Uploaded: 2019-05-06T05:02:54.000Z
Duration: 11 min 45 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hey there, I'm Mike Rugnetta, this is Crash
Course Theater, and today we're going to

circle up our pageant wagons and talk about
the theater of the late Middle Ages: mainly

Judged by contemporary standards, these plays
are… awkward.

They're episodic, kind of basic, and pretty
chaotic in their mix of comedy, drama, and

Like the ones about baby-eating [PAUSE] That's
more Yorick's speed than mine - you love

Mystery plays and morality plays were the
first European plays to unite religious life

and secular life in more than a thousand years.

Whole towns pitched in to create them; whole
towns arrived to see them.

Those wagon wheels paved the way for the Renaissance's
theatrical explosion.

Today, we're going to look today at The
Second Shepherd's Play, written by the Wakefield

It may seem a little hum-drum, but no Wakefield
Master, no Shakespeare.

A couple of episodes ago, we looked at liturgical
drama: those moments, first in the Easter

mass and then all year, when priests and monks
acted out some of the liturgy.

This form took off, and spread all throughout
Europe.

And by the 11th and 12th centuries, got pretty
elaborate.

It expanded out from the altar and spread
all over the church, occupying small spaces

usually known as mansions, which were decorated
to suggest different scenes.

You have the liturgy, you have the drama,
you have the mansions—religious fun for

Because here's the thing: Medieval Gothic
churches are big.

They are trying to stretch all the way up
to heaven and capture something of God's

If you've ever stood in Notre Dame, or York
Minster, you're like, yup, that there's

And yet, even these colossal churches become
too small to contain the awesomeness that

So liturgical drama moves to the only other
place with enough square footage to accommodate

Now you're thinking, yay, fun, liturgical
drama al fresco!

In 1210, Pope Innocent III issues an edict
saying that the clergy can't perform plays

So in the early 13th century a radical thing
happens: Drama moves from being a clerical

Since Roman times—for more than a thousand
years!—Christians have haaaated theater.

But Christians also loved theater, or the
liturgical drama wouldn't have caught on

Performing plays inside the church, basing
them exclusively on the Christian liturgy,

and having members of the clergy act in them
were the strategies Christians used to make

it less sinful… but that's all gone now.

Drama has left the building and by building
I mean basilica; priests are no longer the

Bring on the incest plots and the dancing
girls!

Ok, it doesn't escalate THAT quickly, It's
going to take theater a few decades to get

Theater sticks pretty closely to the Bible
and associated religious texts as the liturgical

Cycle plays are an ambitious genre of medieval
drama that depicts the whole history of the

Christian universe, starting with the creation
of the world, and ending with the death and

resurrection of Christ, and skimming most
of the Old and New Testaments in between.

Some of them go all the way up to the Last
Judgment.

In England, the performing of cycles began
sometime in the late 1300s and continued until

into the late 1500s, when they were banned
because of the English Reformation.

The Protestants weren't so keen on graven
images, even fun theatrical ones, and cycle

The same thing happened throughout Europe.

In the age of religious disputes and wars,
religious drama was seen as too controversial

In some cities cycle plays were organized
by religious guilds, but in many places, especially

England, they were produced by trade and craft
guilds.

This is why they are sometimes known as mystery
plays, because a “mystery” was another

As are ship-building, blacksmithing, and baking.

Listen, have you ever tried to make croissants?

The plays themselves are not mysteries like
Murder She Wrote or Serial.

They're more about mystery in the religious
sense.

Cycle plays are also known as passion plays
if the particular cycle focuses on the passion

In most cases, each guild would be responsible
for staging a biblical story, usually one

So the shipwrights might take on Noah and
the Ark, and the bakers the Last Supper.

Each guild would supply the costumes, actors,
and set – and pile it all into a big cart,

known as a pageant wagon—basically, a theatremobile.

The carts were trundled through the town,
stopping often at fixed points to perform.

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Get Outside and Have a (Mystery) Play: Crash Course Theater #10

audience

expect

spread

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