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  • Hey there, I'm Mike Rugnetta, this is Crash Course Theater, and today the bodies hit the floor:

  • We're talking about Shakespearean tragedy.

  • Remember how the Greeks left all the violence offstage?

  • Well, Shakespeare goes another way, with poisoning, stabbing, strangling, and baking people into pies.

  • Get in line, Sweeney Todd.

  • There are already a couple of Crash Course Literature episodes about "Hamlet"

  • and that Scottish King, whose name I could totally say right now if I felt like it,

  • but I'm just not going to, so we're gonna be looking at "King Lear."

  • And to set it all up, we'll look at the staging conventions of Elizabethan drama,

  • and how all those soliloquies and storm scenes were acted.

  • Macbeth!

  • Okay, fine, I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

  • Because of changes in vagrancy laws, actors organized themselves into companies named after some royal patron.

  • They mostly performed at purpose-built playhouses, but when those were closedlook at you,

  • bubonic plaguethey would tour around the country.

  • A company would be made of 8 to 12 shareholders, 3 or 4 boys, a few hired players, some musicians, and a couple of stagehands,

  • who ran around with whatever the Renaissance equivalent of headsets and clipboards were.

  • Actors tended to specialize. There were king types, queen types, lover types,

  • and even a few different types of fool like slapstick fools and clever fools like Yorick.

  • Shakespeare was an actor.

  • We don't know the roles he played, though there's a rumor he played the ghost in "Hamlet."

  • Swearswearswear....

  • Who said that!?

  • But even specialized actors had to do more than just act.

  • They also had to sing and dance and sword fight.

  • And boy, did they have to memorize!

  • Actors would spend their mornings learning a new play and their afternoons performing an old one.

  • Because plays ran in repertory, there could be several plays on the go in any given week,

  • and many actors had several parts within them.

  • The boys in the company played the women's roles, and some of those women have a lot of lines.

  • With a schedule like that, actors didn't spend a lot of time sitting around speculating about themes and motivations.

  • Especially because actors didn't get copies of the full script, just pages of lines and cues.

  • The goal was to learn the lines and recite them without too much overacting.

  • We don't know if Shakespeare hated overacting, but Hamlet sure does.

  • Here's his speech to the traveling players:

  • Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue:

  • but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines.

  • Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently;

  • for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, the whirlwind of passion,

  • you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.

  • Hamlet is telling the actors, "Don't yell. Don't gesticulate wildly. Just get the words out."

  • And if you need to emote, do it with some elegance.

  • No mouthing!

  • No sawing!

  • Wait a minute ... am I an overactor?

  • As we mentioned last time, the outdoor Elizabethan playhouse was a smaller, chintzier version of the Greco-Roman amphitheater.

  • It had an acting area backed by a tiring house, the place where players got changed,

  • overlooked by tiers of semicircular seating and a pit,

  • the area where workingmen who'd paid a penny could stand and watch.

  • Plays were performed in the afternoon, to take advantage of natural light.

  • And since this was an era before wireless headset mics, actors had to project

  • so they could be heard above all the chit-chatting groundlings.

  • The stage was bare except for big-deal furniture like a throne or maybe a bed.

  • So to make things visually interesting, actors relied on sumptuous costumes and hand props.

  • But this isn't the Japanese theater.

  • If an actor held a fan, he was probably just using it to fan himself.

  • There were only a few special effects, but a couple of those were fire-based,

  • which is not the greatest idea in a theater made of wood.

  • On that flammable stage, though, actors performed some of the most fire tragedies ever written.

  • Many written by Shakespeare, who borrowed from Greek tragedy the medieval morality play,

  • and earlier Elizabethan forms to create a whole new genre.

  • Seneca, who we met in our episode on Roman drama, is also an influence,

  • especially on Shakespeare's first tragedy, "Titus Andronicus."

  • Still, let's remember that, in terms of genre, tragedy is a flexible term.

  • As we mentioned last time, it was the editors of the posthumous First Folio

  • who decided to group his plays into Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies.

  • In Shakespeare's lifetime, there was a lot more slippage.

  • A quarto of "Hamlet" was published as "The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet," which seems clear enough,

  • but the history play, "Richard III," was published in quarto as "The Tragedy of King Richard III."

  • So that's confusing.

  • More confusing?

  • "King Lear" appeared in quarto as the "True Chronicle Historie of the Life and Death of King Lear and His Three Daughters,"

  • which makes it sound like it's a history play, but it's not.

  • So we propose a shortcut: When it comes to Shakespeare, a tragedy is a play that ends unhappily

  • and is not about a recent king.

  • Like the other plays, the tragedies are mixtures of prose and verse, though they tend to go heavy on the verse,

  • and the language is typically more ornate than it is in the comedies.

  • As in Greek tragedies, they are action-packed.

  • What with all the prophecies and soothsayers and vengeful ghosts.

  • Shush it up!

  • I don't wanna hear it anymore!

  • Shakespeare sets up related conflicts between fate and free will, individual desire and public good.

  • Reversal and recognition? They're here, too.

  • Mostly.

  • So is the idea of hamartia, or mostly good characters missing the mark,

  • like when Hamlet gets caught up in his father's revenge story, or Brutus joins the conspirators,

  • or the Scottish characters in the play that I could totally name if I wanted to agree to kill the king.

  • But hey, there's new stuff, too.

  • For one thing, Shakespearean tragedies have a lot of funny bits.

  • The actors in Shakespeare's company who played fools were big crowd-pleasers,

  • so Shakespeare wrote parts for them even in the sad plays.

  • So if you like your tragedy extra-depressing, too bad!

  • As Samuel Johnson said, Shakespeare's work is defined by "an interchange of seriousness and merriment,

  • by which the mind is softened at one time, and exhilarated at another."

  • Another important difference: sin.

  • These plays inhabit a Christian moral landscape, at least in part.

  • It's not enough for characters to worry about what an action will mean on earth,

  • they have to wonder whether or not it will damn them in the afterlife.

  • His construction of tragic heroes, though, is where Shakespeare made his biggest innovation.

  • Greek tragic heroes are mostly good people who whiff it,

  • but Orestes, Oedipus, Pentheus aren't as complicated as Hamlet, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra.

  • The philosopher Hegel said that Shakespeare's big innovation was to put thesis and antithesis into a single character.

  • So it's not Orestes versus Clytemnestra, or Pentheus versus Dionysus.

  • It's Hamlet versus Hamlet. And that is just ... that's deep, yo.

  • Basically, no one does radical psychological interiority like tragic Shakespeare.

  • This sets him apart from, well, everyone but also his contemporaries.

  • In most Elizabethan revenge tragedies, the revenger becomes more evil,

  • the more evil they do, which, I mean, makes sense, right?

  • But Shakespeare never lets the heroes of his revenge tragedies become dehumanized.

  • They're thinking; they're questioning; they're trying to figure out if what they're doing is right

  • and if there are alternatives.

  • We never stop feeling for the heroes of Shakespeare's tragedies,

  • and this emotional engagement is a lot of what makes them so sad, and terrible, and great.

  • To see this in action, we're gonna explore one of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies, "King Lear,"

  • a play set in some fairy tale, hurricane-ravaged version of ancient England,

  • that was first performed at the Palace in 1606 and probably written the year before.

  • Adjust your screen brightness, ladies and gentlemen, because things are about to get dark.

  • I like the way, Thoughtbubble.

  • King Lear decides to retire, which is not something kings do.

  • But first he makes his daughters stand up before the court and praise him.

  • His older daughters, Goneril and Regan, make kissy faces.

  • This disgusts his youngest, Cordelia, who says nothing,

  • so her father takes away her inheritance and banishes her.

  • He also banishes the loyal courtier, Kent.

  • Meanwhile, Edmund, the bastard son of the Duke of Gloucester,

  • is hatching a plan to frame his half-brother Edgar.

  • It works.

  • Even though Lear is retired, he still wants to live like a king,

  • but his older daughters are like, what if you didn't, though?

  • They refuse to house his retinue of soldiers, so Lear walks out into a terrible storm,

  • followed by the disguised Kent and the fool, who soon goes missing.

  • They meet up with Edmund, who is pretending to be a crazy beggar called Tom o' Bedlam

  • till he can unframe himself.

  • The older daughters decide they'll have to fight Lear, and when they learn that

  • Gloucester is trying to help him, they have his eyes plucked out, saying, "Out vile jelly!"

  • They give Gloucester's land to Edmund, who they are both obsessed with.

  • Edgar, the non-hot, non-sociopathic one, finds his father and promises to help Gloucester commit suicide.

  • But it's a weird trick.

  • Gloucester lives.

  • Cordelia has come back from France to help her father, who has gone mad.

  • There's a fight.

  • Lear and Cordelia are taken prisoner, and Cordelia is strangled before Edmund,

  • suddenly overcome with remorse, can free her.

  • Edgar kills Edmund.

  • Goneril poisons Regan.

  • Goneril kills herself.

  • Lear dies of a broken heart.

  • Gloucester dies for no reason.

  • They try to make Kent king, but he says he's gonna die, too.

  • Everyone is sad, the fool is still missing, andscene!

  • Thanks, Thoughtbubble.

  • I may never feel happy again.

  • So, at the beginning, Lear makes a couple of wrong calls.

  • He's wrong to give up his kingship and expect to continue living like a king.

  • He's wrong to ask his daughters to perform their love rather than to honestly feel it.

  • But throughout the rest of the play, we see him wrestle with and regret his bad decisions.

  • He's never depicted as a monster or a sinner who can't be redeemed.

  • He's a sad and increasingly crazy old man who asks for our sympathy and probably gets it.

  • There are also a couple of exciting reversals: Lear's team is gonna win.

  • No, it isn't!

  • Oh wait, yeah it is! But, oh, everyone we care about is dead.

  • One of the really clever things Shakespeare does is withhold recognition.

  • There's some discrepancy between the quarto and folio versions, but in his last moments,

  • Lear seems to imagine that Cordelia might still be alive.

  • Shakespeare asks us to decide whether it's better to live with this comforting illusion

  • or to accept the harsh, unvarnished truth.

  • Huh, we made it.

  • And now, maybe we better understand what it is to be human and to fail and suffer and

  • be hunted by our bad decisions.

  • what is ... Stan, has that been you the whole time?

  • You're not my dad's ghost!

  • Alright. Next time, it's gonna be a little more cheerful as we look at Shakespeare's comedies

  • and a genre that critics went on to call the romances or the problem plays.

  • Becausespoiler alertthere are some problems.

  • Until thencurtain! And shush it, you!

  • Crash Course Theater is produced in association with PBS Digital Studios.

  • Head over to their channel to check out some of their shows like Art Assignment and Yawns and It's Okay To Be Smart.

  • Crash Course Theater is filmed in the Chad & Stacey Emigholz Studio in Indianapolis, Indiana,

  • and is produced with the help of all of these very nice people.

  • Our animation team is Thought Cafe.

  • Crash Course exists, thanks to the generous support of our patrons at Patreon.

  • Patreon is a voluntary subscription service, where you can support the content you love through a monthly donation

  • and help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever.

  • Thanks for watching!

Hey there, I'm Mike Rugnetta, this is Crash Course Theater, and today the bodies hit the floor:

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莎士比亞的悲劇和表演課:戲劇速成班#15。 (Shakespeare's Tragedies and an Acting Lesson: Crash Course Theater #15)

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    Pei-Yi Lin 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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