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 pentamaparty.

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 Johnson, 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, right?

You are-- you're making me look bad.

[theme music] We ended our last episode with Ben Johnson's tribute to his old pal, Shakespeare.

Johnson 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.

"His wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had been so, too."

Elizabethan burn.

Johnson 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, Johnson 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, then 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, Johnson specialized in city comedies with plenty of contemporary references.

Like Shakespeare-- and everyone, it seems-- his work is deeply indebted to Plautus and Terence.

Johnson is best known for his comedies of the humors.

The theory of the four humors said that bodies were composed of black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm, and that illness resulted when the humors were out of balance.

Bring on the leeches and the purgatives.

But even in a healthy body, it was thought one or two humors predominated.

And these determined someone's personality, which could be bilious, choleric, sanguine, or phlegmatic.

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

Anyway, if you read Johnson, 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 Johnson'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.

Episodic bubble.

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 deathbed.

LOL.

So with the help of his servant, Mosca, which means fly, he pretends to be violently ill. Voltore, vulture, Carobaccio, 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.

And, 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 Johnson's characters as they basically try to out-terrible one another.

And whereas women are the center of Shakespeare's comedies, in Johnson'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, Johnson's is not.

Does Johnson 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.

Revenge tragedy, or as it's sometimes awesomely called the tragedy of blood, or the sex tragedy, is a genre that gets going pre-Shakespeare.

When our boy, Ben Johnson, was just back from the Netherlands, he played the lead role in one of the first examples, Thomas Kid'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 Vindice 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 metatheatrical 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 lude 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 Cymbaline 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.

The revenge tragedy is still considered a moral genre sometimes because of all the gore.

Some critics argue that the plays emphasize the destructiveness of revenge and warn about the consequences when men take on the kind of retributive justice that should be left to God, 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 and 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.

Masques were about themes like love and beauty and virtue and acted out with fairytale stories of nymphs and gods and cupids.

They had a little poetry and a little plot and a lot of music and dancing.

They provided spectacular visuals that emphasized the elegance of the court and the magnificence of the ruler, reasserting that kings and queens ruled because that's how God wants it.

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 king's representatives on stage.

Most Jacobean and Caroline playwrights wrote a masque or two, but the foremost masque maker was-- fanfare please-- [fanfare] Mr. Ben Johnson, who managed to put those badly behaved animals aside long enough to dream up confections about nymphs and goddesses and constellations.

What a job.

Johnson's partner was Inigo Jones, the absolute genius of Renaissance set design and one of the crucial figures in the transition of theater construction towards 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 prospectival 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 Johnson and Jones eventually broke up, though, because Johnson 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 the 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.