Crash Course Theater

The French Neoclassical revival had a BUNCH of French playwrights following a bunch of rules. Unsurprisingly, some of the most interesting plays of the era broke those rules. Today, we'll talk about the rules, and we'll talk about Racine (who followed them), and Corneille (who was not so much a rules guy).

This week on Crash Course Theater, Mike and Yorick take us to beautiful Spain, and look at its Golden Age. Spain was having kind of a moment in the 16th and 17th centuries. They had this big empire, the culture was really flowering, and Humanism was popping up all over, but they also had the inquisition. Into this world came prolific writers like Felix Lope de Vega and Pedro Calderon de la Barca.

This week on Crash Course Theater, Shakespeare is dead. Long live Shakespeare. Well, long live English theater, anyway. Actually, it's about to get banned. Anyway, we're discussing where English theater went post-1616. We'll talk about Ben Jonson, revenge tragedies, and court masques.

This week we're continuing our discussion of William Shakespeare and looking at his comedies and romances. As well as something called problem plays. Some of his plays, they had problems. We'll also put on pants, escape to forest, and talk about Shakespeare's heroines, lots of whom had quite a bit more agency in these plays than the women in the tragedies had.

Shakespeare's tragedies...were tragic. But they had some jokes. They also changed the way tragedies were written. Characters like Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear had tragic outcomes, but they were sympathetic characters in a lot of ways. This was a big change from the way Seneca and the Greeks wrote tragedies, and it caught on.

This is the story of how a young Englishman named William Shakespeare stormed London's theater scene in the late 16th century, and wrote a bunch of plays and poems that have had pretty good staying power. We'll learn about Shakespeare's beginnings, his family, and how he broke into theater.

The Renaissance came to England late, thanks to a Hundred Years War that ran long and a civil war to decide who would be the royal family. BUT after that, there was a flowering of humanism, science, and culture. Theater was a big part of it. Today, we're talking about the London theater scene and the playwrights that set the stage...ahem...for the main man of English Theater, William Shakespeare.

This week, we're going to Italy for a Renaissance. The Middle Ages are over, and it's time to talk about the flourishing of art and humanism across Europe. Painting, sculpture, music, architecture, and plays with fart jokes were all thriving between from 1300 - 1500, and we're going to teach you about the theatrical aspects of that flourishing, as it happened in Italy.

Mike is taking you to Japan to look at Noh theater. Noh, and its counterpart Kyogen are some of the most revered theater forms in Japan, and are still performed today. Today you'll learn how Noh grew out of traditional Shinto dances, what a Noh theater looks like, and how audiences managed to sit through 8 hour performance in the days before memory foam theater seats. (hint: it was the Kyogen).

Not long after drama reappeared in the unlikely home of European churches, the church decided again it didn't like theater. And so, the budding dramatic scene was kicked out into the harsh elements of the outdoors. Today we'll learn about mystery plays, cycle plays, pageant wagons, and how medieval European theater moved from being a religious phenomenon to a secular one.

When last we saw Theater, it was just making its way back in the West, by sneaking a little drama into the Easter mass. In today's episode, we're talking about Hrotsvitha, the cool 10th century nun from Lower Saxony who was maybe the first playwright of the new era of theater. She wrote comedies with a moral message, and influenced future heavy hitters like Hildegard of Bingen.

As the Roman Empire fell, so did the theater. If there's anyone who hates theater and actors more than Romans, it's early Christians. As Christianity ascended in the west, theater declined. But, fear not. This isn't the end of the series. Theater would be back, and in the best subversive theater-y fashion, it would return via the Catholic mass!