Name: 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)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T08:13:34.000Z
Duration: 12 min 4 s
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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.

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.

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 closed—look at you,

bubonic plague—they 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.

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

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

They also had to sing and dance and sword fight.

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.

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.

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."

"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

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.

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

Reversal and recognition? They're here, too.

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.

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."

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,