[music playing] Hey, there.

I'm Mike Rugnetta.

This is "Crash Course Theater."

And that's right, pal, today, we're going to be discussing the golden age of Spanish drama.

And Spaniards are prolific, like tens of thousands of plays prolific.

And we have lots of them.

So, hey, that's fun.

We'll examine the origins and style of a Spanish drama, check out its unique theater design, and-- uh-- cucumber throwing.

We'll meet a couple of golden age literary heavyweights and take a closer look at Life is a Dream," a Pedro Calderon de la Barca's beautiful, allegorical, mind mash of a play.

Get your cloaks, your swords, and your pageant wagons ready.

Vamose a la Espana.

[music playing] The Spanish Renaissance it starts in the 15th century when Isabella of Castile marries Ferdinand II of Aragon, and humanism really comes into vogue.

You may remember humanism from our Italian Renaissance episode as the idea that earthly life isn't just some garbage that happens on the way to heaven, but maybe like kind to cool in its own right.

So make a few things and be good to each other.

Except, then, in this case, we immediately get the Spanish Inquisition.

So, yes, art and literature, but also the prosecution of 150,000 and execution of thousands of Jews and Moors in the name of Christian orthodoxy, which is the opposite of being good to each other.

What this meant for theater was that while England's stages saw a disconnect from religion with plays on spiritual themes explicitly outlawed in Spain, sacred and secular drama remained closely intertwined.

Most playwrights wrote in both genres.

The most active genre was a religious drama, called the Autos Sacramentales, or Sacramental Acts.

Autos originated in the late medieval period and have some serious overlap with English morality plays.

They're allegorical dramas concerned with virtue and vice.

Autos were supposed to focus on the mystery of the Eucharist or communion and how bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ.

But topics varied a lot.

Trade guilds staged plays at first, then cities took over, hiring professional troops and encouraging playwrights to create new scripts.

In Madrid, which became the capital of Spain in 1560, three or four autos were produced every year, usually a mix of new plays and revivals.

The plays were performed using elaborate two story pageant wagons, called carros.

These were paraded around the city, pulled by bulls with gilded horns and accompanied by musicians, jugglers, and giant paper puppets.

When the carros reached a playing site, they were joined by another wagon, which opened and became the stage.

The autos were performed in Spain until 1765 when, real shocker here, they were outlawed for being unholy.

Too much dancing.

Too many farcical interludes.

Too much fun.

While the autos were going strong though, secular drama began to crystallize.

The first important play was not actually a play.

It was "Calisto and Melibea," AKA la Celestina, a novel in dialogue written around 1500.

In it a bachelor enlists a procuress, AKA a madam, to woo a young sheltered woman.

The bachelor's servants kill the madam in a botched sort of double cross.

The bachelor then falls off a ladder and dies, while visiting his love.

And she commits suicide in despair.

This takes 16 acts, 21 in the revised edition.

So, yeah, no one's going to be staging that.

But it was widely read.

And other writers were inspired by its mix of high drama and low comedy.

Around the same time, a few Spanish dramatists who'd spent some time in Italy started writing comedies and pastorals.

These plays were about shepherds and shepherdesses and country life, though, were only ever presented at the court.

So their influence was limited.

But late in the 16th century, a professional theater emerged alongside countless new forms.

Spanish playwrights loved new forms.

We've got chivalric plays about knights and ladies.

We got plays about the minor nobility.

We got situation comedies and comedies of manners.

We got mythology plays and miracle plays and a whole genre of plays about corpses.

Yeah, I bet you could get apart.

I mean, you'd have to work on your range a little bit and, you know, like delivering lines.

Spain also had a pretty unusual theater design.

Some of the best seats in the house were actually in a house.

The first professional theaters were built in the 1570s.

And they're called corrales, or courtyards, because they were built in courtyards.

The houses on either side were the walls of the theater.

And the middle patio was for standing spectators.

And if you had a little bit more money, you could sit in the gradas, rows of seats with rooves-- or roofs-- roof, roof, roofs, whichever one you like, either way, covered, covers overhead.

In the back of the theater was a snack bar that sold fruit and drinks.

And above it a gallery where women sat and sometimes threw fruit, also cucumbers.

Sometimes there were police to keep the women from getting too rowdy.

The windows of the houses helped to form private boxes, or aposentos.

Usually grills were placed over the windows so that residents couldn't sneak in, though some homeowners made special arrangements for box seats.

The boxes were the only places where men and women could sit together.

And even then, they had to prove they were members of the same family.

And even then, the women still usually wore masks.

Audiences were lively and noisy.

And if they liked a performance, they would shout victor.

They brought whistles and rattles with them.

Plays were scheduled every day, except Saturday, beginning in the afternoon.

They usually featured a bunch of singing and dancing before the action.

There were 8 to 12 professional companies licensed by the court.

Most of them had about 20 actors and a few young apprentices.

Women acted, though sometimes there were laws against it.

And the church remained worried about immorality and cross-dressing.

Spain had a lot of playwrights.

And you're going to need a lot of playwrights if you're going to write 30,000 plays in 100 years.

Yeah, you heard right.

That's one estimate of the Spanish golden age, or Siglio de Oro.

And guess what?

We have most of them.

There are so many that scholars haven't even studied them all like.

It's Frank Zappa records or RL Stein novels.

Fans of the Spanish golden age are spoiled for choice.

Cervantes when he wasn't writing both parts of Don Quixote, wrote some great plays.

So did Tirso de Molina, who gave us our version of the Don Juan legend.

But today, we're going to take a brief look at two dramatists, Felix Lopez Vega and Pedro Calderon de la Barca.

Lopez was born in Madrid in 1562.

Cervantes called him the phoenix of wits for his unparalleled output.

He's one of the most prolific literary figures in all of history, having written nearly 1,000 plays, of which we have 450.

He also wrote 3,000 sonnets.

Shakespeare only wrote 154.

What a slacker.

Remember how I said that most Spanish plays were about love and honor?

Yeah, that was because of Lopez.

That's his bag.

He was into juicy female roles, funny low life characters, and suspenseful plots that magically end happily.

A few of his plays are still performed including "Fuenteove Juna," or "The Sheep Well," where some abused villagers come together to kill a rapey ruler.

Calderon, born in 1600, eventually became even more popular than Lopez.

We have hundreds of his plays.

And 80 of those were autos sacramentales.

For more than 30 years, his autos were the only ones performed in Madrid.

And they are beautiful.

In terms of secular plays, he specialized in cape and sword comedies and philosophical dramas.

His plays aren't as liked or eventful as Lopez's, but they are more thoughtful and often more elegant.

They have really beautiful poetry.

So we're going to look more closely at one of Calderon's plays, 1635's "Life is a Dream," or "La Vida es Seuno."

Let's bring it together thought bubble.

A woman, disguised as a man, is wandering through the hills of Poland, as you do, when she finds a man chained to a tower.

That beardy guy is Segismundo.

It turns out that he is the heir to the Polish throne.

Congrats.

Meanwhile, back at the palace, King Basilio is conveniently explaining why he had to chain a dude up.

When Segismundo was born, the king received a prophecy that Segismundo would kill him and destroy the country.

So he tried to prevent it.

Haven't we seen this in Greek tragedy somewhere?

King Basilio has decided to give Segismundo a chance.

He has a tutor drug Segismundo and carry him to the palace.

When Segismundo wakes up, he's told that he's a prince and should go and do some princely things.

And it doesn't go so well.

He gets lustful.

He gets angry.

He throws a servant off of a balcony.

He challenges a nobleman to a duel.

So the king has him sedated again and returned to his tower.

Segismundo wakes up believing that his time at the palace was just a dream.

He tells his tutor about the dream.

And the tutor tells him that even in dreams, we have to try to act nobly and not throw people off balconies.

The people find out about the king's experiment and that they have a prince.

They rebel, because succession is super important to them, I guess.

And Segismundo gets a chance for revenge and his royal right.

But Segismundo spares the king.

So the king realizing that Segismundo has changed acknowledges him as a son and heir.

And Segismundo promises to behave with goodness and virtue, asleep or awake.

Thanks thought bubble.

At the end, Segismundo says, what is life?

A frenzy.

What is life?

An illusion, a shadow, a fiction.

And the greatest good is small for all of life is a dream and dreams are only dreams.

It's nice, right?

This is a religious allegory based on the idea that life is a dream until death awakens us to a greater life with God.

It's also an invitation to us, the audience, to think about our own lives and how we should conduct them, whether we're directing our actions towards an eventual heaven or working towards making life better here on Earth.

Calderon died in 1681.

And the golden age of Spanish theater kind of died with him.

But don't start crying into your mantilla just yet, because next time we're going to drop in on France, where neoclassicism, based on some pretty weird readings of Aristotle, is going strong.

But until then, curtain.