This is crash course Theater, and I hope you're wearing your stockings.

Cross guarded because today is all about forests, twin's bed tricks, cross dressing and a wrestling match.

That's right.

Shakespearean comedies, Because when Shakespeare wasn't killing off all of his characters, he wrote some pretty sparkling humor.

Comedy is maybe the most complicated of all the Shakespearean genres, because along with A Midsummer Night's Dream and as you Like it, it also includes works now refer to as problem plays and romances.

Today we'll look at what constitutes a comedy, Shakespeare's Kick Ass Heroines and the unfunny kinds of comedies with a closer exploration of symbol ing.

No fooling.

Well, Some Food, a Shakespearean comedy, is a play that's not based on a recent historical figure, and that ends happily now.

Happy is a relative term, even for Shakespeare, but it's a safe bet that if the floor isn't littered with dead bodies, it's probably a comedy.

And if it ends with a marriage, it's definitely a comedy.

There's more variety in this genre than Shakespeare's others.

Comedy spans everything from the Comedy of Errors, a straight up loudest rip off and a knockabout farce to the bittersweet melancholy of the Winter's tale.

Uncomfortable but nonetheless funny ish plays like Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice sit somewhere in between.

Comedies like Midsummer and 12th Night usually revolve around themes of separation and reunion of guys and disguise and mistaken identity.

There's often a retreat away from civil society into Ah Forest, a place where some social niceties fall away and Maur authentic behavior emerges.

There are usually songs so often they're weirdly sad, like Come Away, Come Away, Death and in Sad Cypress, Let Me Be Laid, Mom or not, Little Shakespeare often works with stock characters who you'll remember from Roman comedy, and it's inheritors the disapproving dad, the headstrong lover, the wily servant.

But part of the genius of Shakespeare is that these characters don't feel like stock characters.

They feel like real people with real fears and real desires.

In a lot of the place by Shakespeare's contemporaries, we laugh at the characters, but in Shakespeare we laugh with them.

They demand our sympathy.

In 12th Night, we laugh at the arrogant servant Malvolio, but when we see Malvo, Leo's hurt.

Suddenly we don't feel so great about giggling.

Shakespeare's comedy always comes with a hefty dose of empathy.

And if the tragedies are about men and yes, Cleopatra, I am generalizing.

The comedies are very much about women.

Sometimes they're about women trying to protect themselves.

Sometimes they're about women trying to marry the men off their choice.

Usually they're about both, and in most of these plays the women have to step away from their ordinary lives in order to succeed.

They're gonna run away into the forest.

They're gonna put on pants if they're Rosalind and imagine they're going to run into the forest in pants.

Just just sensible, really.

It's how people should be running into the forest, if you ask me.

Unlike the heroines of tragedies who are trapped in terrible circumstances, the heroines of comedy find ways to escape those circumstances.

I'm not trying victim blame, but if Desdemona or Juliet or Ophelia happened upon a forest and some pants, maybe things could've been different.

Perhaps this is a commentary on how limited the opportunities for most women were and how few choices they had when they're at home wearing a corset.

But it's also important to recognize that if Shakespeare's heroines defy social norms.

It's only for a bit.

None of them wears pants forever.

Their defiance is limited and always correctable.

Nothing they do is ever that unladylike, and at the end of the play, men order them to leave the forest and put their dresses back on so that they can get hitched.

Plus, remember that all those spunky heroines were played by boy actors during Shakespeare time.

So the cross dressing is really double cross dressing boys dressed as girls dressed as boys.

It is heck and meta.

Shakespeare also emphasizes how great and swoony love marriages are at a time when marriage was typically an economic undertaking.

And not only are these love marriages there also marriages of equals or almost equals, the women are almost always a little braver, more clever and more sensible than the dudes.

As per usual for our final thoughts about Shakespeare's women, let's turn to Sir Walter Raleigh, Cordillera, Spy Explorer and all around Elizabethan badass who made his own love marriage and went to the tower for it, Sir Walter wrote of Shakespeare's ladies.

They are almost all practical, impatient of mere words, clear sighted as two ends and means they do not accept.

The premise is to deny the conclusion or decorate the inevitable with imaginative lendings.

But okay, the consolation prize for the dudes In the comedies men tell most of the jokes.

How funny are the jokes?

It really varies.

Some of the funniest jokers are in the tragedies like Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet or the Grave Diggers in Hamlet or Hamlet himself, when he's dragging Polonius and some of the jokes.

And the comedies are kind of sad, like the full fest is bittersweet cracks in 12th Night.

While some of Shakespeare's jokes are sophisticated, the most memorable ones are not.

Macbeth basically invents the knock, knock joke.

All of the play's contain puns, some of which are great and some of which are tragic, like the way dog Berry mixes up Suspect and respect and bottom says odious when he means odorous.

What are you laughing your IQ?

Well, it tickled my funny bone tragic And you know what?

L Shakespeare loved dirty jokes.

Comedy of errors has a fart joke, and many of his plays are lousy, with bits about naughty bits.

And Shakespeare pretty much invented the your mom joke when around, Son says to air in them, or thou hast undone our mother and Aaron says Villain.

I have to run my mother Dang, insert super hot fire here.

But just because the play has jokes doesn't make it a comedy that your mom joke is from Titus Andronicus, which is not a knee slapper.

And the flip is also true.

Just because the play is a comedy doesn't mean it's full of jokes.

Shakespeare's comedies also include plays We now call the Problem Plays, and the romance is There isn't universal agreement on which plays belong in which category, But let's start with Problem Play, a term invented in the late 19th century and inspired by the works of Heinrich Ibsen.

Problem plays take on a social problem and are sort of stuck between comedy and tragedy.

Plays like Measure for Measure, All's well that ends well, and The Merchant of Venice, our problem place.

They have happy endings, at least on paper, and often end with a marriage just like a classic comedy.

But the resolution's aren't satisfying, and the conclusions can feel sour, like how measure for measure ends with a marriage proposal that goes unanswered.

The romance is also mix tragedy and comedy.

But the melding of genres is softer.

The approach to time and space is looser.

The play's usually begin as tragedies along the lines of a fellow or King Lear, but they don't end that way.

In tragedies, people act hastily, thoughtlessly selfishly in the romances.

People exercise patience and forgiveness, so the conclusions air happier in the winter's tale and The Tempest, What's Lost Returns, What's Broken is mended mostly in the problem plays the happy endings fuel wrong in the romances.

They feel right.

The endings are unlikely, sure, but they're also deeply satisfying.

Characters have changed and matured in a way that they just aren't able to in the tragedies.

But there's a greater sense of weight and of disaster narrowly averted than in the comedies to explore the romances.

Let's look at one of the wilder wounds.

Symbol E.

First produced in 16 11 symbol in concludes with one of the all time great recognition scenes.

Help us out, Bob.

Symbol.

Lien is king of ancient Britain.

His two sons were stolen a long time ago, and his only daughter, Imogen, has just eloped with posthumous, which is not good because posthumous is of a lower social status.

Also, he's named posthumous.

Posthumous is banished to Italy and the Queen, a plus to have imagined.

Married to her blockhead son, Klatten.

She also tries to murder image in just to cover All the batty basis.

While Posthumous is in Italy, he meets this guy Jacomo, and he makes a bet that Jacomo can't seduce Imogen, which is not what you do if you love and trust your wife.

Jacomo fails, but he hides out in her room and does enough spying and stealing to make it seem like he succeeds Posthumous again.

Not the greatest now plans to kill Imogen.

But a servant warns Imogen, and because she's brave and awesome, she escapes dressed as a boy named D'Leh.

Klatten finds out where Imogen is going.

He figures he'll head there, rape Imogen and then marry her because Clinton is even worse than posture missed.

Somehow, Clinton puts on posthumous, is close and heads off, but then gets his head off, literally by a mountain man that he insults.

And this is where it starts to get complicated.

Turns out that the mountain man Polly Door is actually images long lost brother good areas.

He and cod Wall, actually of a Regas and also another long lost brother have already, by chance, taken in a disguised Imogen who has accidentally taken a sleeping potion.

Imogen wakes up, sees what looks like a dead posthumous and flips out.

She done somehow joins the invading Roman army as a page boy.

Why not?

Meanwhile, the Roman hordes have invaded and Simba Lien is about to execute Posthumous and Fidel E.

But then posthumous reveals himself, and Imogen reveals herself, and the kidnapper reveals himself and the long lost sons discover their real parentage.

And Simba Lean agrees to pay tribute to Rome.

Also, the queen is dead.

The and thank you thought bubble.

Okay, so that recognition scene is a little extra.

But in symbol ing, you can see how beautifully Shakespeare combines tragedy and comedy.

We have the jealousy plot borrowed from a fellow, the cross dressing borrowed from the comedies and enough time and care to make sure that everything works out all right in the end, even for the Romans.

And we have a woman who is way more ingenious than her husband girl, you could do a lot better at least get you a man who looks at you the way Paris looks at Juliet.

When he doesn't think Romeo is looking at him, it's time to say goodbye to Shakespeare and continue on to Jack A B and Drama and Caroline Court masks by way of farewell.

I'm gonna leave you with Ben Johnson's words on Shakespeare.

I loved the man.

He was honest and oven open and free.

Nature had an excellent fancy, brave notions and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that sometimes it was necessary.

He should be stopped.

But there was evermore in him to be praised than to be pardoned.

So pardon gentles all and until next time.

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