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  • Hey there, I'm Mike Rugnetta, this is Crash Course Theater, and today we're going to

  • circle up our pageant wagons and talk about the theater of the late Middle Ages: mainly

  • mystery plays and morality plays.

  • Judged by contemporary standards, these plays areawkward.

  • They're episodic, kind of basic, and pretty chaotic in their mix of comedy, drama, and

  • scripture.

  • But some of the jokes are good.

  • Like the ones about baby-eating [PAUSE] That's more Yorick's speed than mine - you love

  • a morose groaner, dontcha, Bonehead?

  • Mystery plays and morality plays were the first European plays to unite religious life

  • and secular life in more than a thousand years.

  • Whole towns pitched in to create them; whole towns arrived to see them.

  • Those wagon wheels paved the way for the Renaissance's theatrical explosion.

  • Today, we're going to look today at The Second Shepherd's Play, written by the Wakefield

  • Master.

  • It may seem a little hum-drum, but no Wakefield Master, no Shakespeare.

  • And no Shakespeare: NO YORICK!

  • Actually maybe that's ok ... INTRO

  • A couple of episodes ago, we looked at liturgical drama: those moments, first in the Easter

  • mass and then all year, when priests and monks acted out some of the liturgy.

  • This form took off, and spread all throughout Europe.

  • And by the 11th and 12th centuries, got pretty elaborate.

  • It expanded out from the altar and spread all over the church, occupying small spaces

  • usually known as mansions, which were decorated to suggest different scenes.

  • One personal favorite: The Hell Mouth.

  • Intense!

  • For a while, liturgical drama works.

  • You have the liturgy, you have the drama, you have the mansionsreligious fun for

  • the whole family.

  • But eventually it's just not enough.

  • Because here's the thing: Medieval Gothic churches are big.

  • They're really big.

  • They are trying to stretch all the way up to heaven and capture something of God's

  • majesty in glass and stone.

  • If you've ever stood in Notre Dame, or York Minster, you're like, yup, that there's

  • some world class majesty.

  • And yet, even these colossal churches become too small to contain the awesomeness that

  • is THEE-AH-TAH!.

  • So liturgical drama moves to the only other place with enough square footage to accommodate

  • all that dang majesty: outside.

  • Now you're thinking, yay, fun, liturgical drama al fresco!

  • Not so fast.

  • In 1210, Pope Innocent III issues an edict saying that the clergy can't perform plays

  • in public.

  • The clergy are like, “Oh well.”

  • But the people are like, “No!

  • You can't walk it back.

  • We want hellmouths!

  • Bigger!

  • Better!

  • More!”

  • So in the early 13th century a radical thing happens: Drama moves from being a clerical

  • phenomenon to being a secular one.

  • We back, baby!

  • Since Roman timesfor more than a thousand years!—Christians have haaaated theater.

  • But Christians also loved theater, or the liturgical drama wouldn't have caught on

  • the way it did.

  • Performing plays inside the church, basing them exclusively on the Christian liturgy,

  • and having members of the clergy act in them were the strategies Christians used to make

  • it less sinfulbut that's all gone now.

  • Drama has left the building and by building I mean basilica; priests are no longer the

  • actors.

  • Bring on the incest plots and the dancing girls!

  • Ok, it doesn't escalate THAT quickly, It's going to take theater a few decades to get

  • truly decadent.

  • Theater sticks pretty closely to the Bible and associated religious texts as the liturgical

  • dramas transform into the cycle plays.

  • Cycle plays are an ambitious genre of medieval drama that depicts the whole history of the

  • Christian universe, starting with the creation of the world, and ending with the death and

  • resurrection of Christ, and skimming most of the Old and New Testaments in between.

  • Some of them go all the way up to the Last Judgment.

  • In England, the performing of cycles began sometime in the late 1300s and continued until

  • into the late 1500s, when they were banned because of the English Reformation.

  • The Protestants weren't so keen on graven images, even fun theatrical ones, and cycle

  • plays were seen as too Catholic.

  • The same thing happened throughout Europe.

  • In the age of religious disputes and wars, religious drama was seen as too controversial

  • (even if it was very popular).

  • In some cities cycle plays were organized by religious guilds, but in many places, especially

  • England, they were produced by trade and craft guilds.

  • This is why they are sometimes known as mystery plays, because a “mysterywas another

  • word for a trade.

  • So carpentry, that's a mystery.

  • As are ship-building, blacksmithing, and baking.

  • Listen, have you ever tried to make croissants?

  • Or a schooner?

  • Very Mysterious!

  • The plays themselves are not mysteries like Murder She Wrote or Serial.

  • They're more about mystery in the religious sense.

  • Whodunnit?

  • God, pretty much always.

  • Or sometimes Judas.

  • Cycle plays are also known as passion plays if the particular cycle focuses on the passion

  • of the Christ.

  • In most cases, each guild would be responsible for staging a biblical story, usually one

  • overlapping with their work.

  • So the shipwrights might take on Noah and the Ark, and the bakers the Last Supper.

  • Each guild would supply the costumes, actors, and setand pile it all into a big cart,

  • known as a pageant wagonbasically, a theatremobile.

  • The carts were trundled through the town, stopping often at fixed points to perform.

  • Or maybe they stayed put and audiences moved?

  • Scholars aren't sure.

  • And by the way, the move from cart to cart mirrors the way dramatic action would move

  • from mansion to mansion in liturgical dramas.

  • Each play lasted half an hour, and there were upwards of forty plays!

  • If you thought Les Miz was long, get ready.

  • The cycle dramas were often performed over several days, thoughyou weren't expected

  • to sit for twenty hours straight.

  • You could relieve yourself, grab a beer or a lard-based pie.

  • Most actors weren't professionals, either: they were men and boys, drawn from the working

  • class.

  • In some towns, women participated.

  • Amateur actors were expected to take their work very seriously, though: you got fined

  • if you didn't know your lines.

  • The cycle plays were a big draw for tourists and a chance for towns to show off their civic

  • pride, and their skills as craftspeople.

  • OOOooooOOOOoooo - mysteriiioooouuussss!

  • Most plays restated the basic action of a Bible story, though guilds would dress stories

  • up with anachronistic jokes and the occasional bit of troubling anti-Semitism.

  • Plays were typically a mix of highly stylized action and contemporary realism.

  • And authors were mostly anonymous, although a couple of Frenchmen signed their plays about

  • the lives of saints, also known as miracle plays.

  • Medieval stagecraft wasn't the most sophisticatedwhen your stage is a wagon, there are limitsbut

  • guilds wanted to put on a good show, so there were plenty of special effects, like trap

  • doors, fake corpses, fake blood and some fire effects.

  • I know, right?

  • Don't tell the fire marshall guild!

  • One of the best preserved and best loved of the cycle plays isThe Second Shepherd's

  • Play.”

  • This English work is part of the Wakefield Cycle.

  • It was composed by an anonymous writer sometime in the 15th century, known only as the Wakefield

  • Master.

  • It's calledThe Second Shepherd's Play,” because there's an earlier shepherd's

  • play in the same manuscript trove.

  • Let's take it to the, Thoughtbubble: It's freezing cold in a meadow somewhere

  • in the Middle East (that looks a lot like the north of England).

  • Coll, the first shepherd, entersand complains about the weather.

  • Then a second shepherd, Gib, arrives.

  • He complains about the weather, too, and also about his wife, who he says is fat.

  • A third shepherd, Daw, shows up, saying, “Christ's cross me speed,” which is odd because Christ

  • hasn't been born yet.

  • Oh!

  • And he also complains about the weather.

  • HASHTAG RELATABLE Northern England content right here, huh?

  • Then Mak enters.

  • Mak is a sheep stealer.

  • Conflict!

  • He tries to trick the shepherds, but they're onto him.

  • eventually they bond about how terrible Mak's drunk, baby-having wife is, and everyone goes

  • to sleep.

  • Except Mak!

  • He puts a spell on the rest, and runs off with a sheep, bringing it home to his wife

  • Gill, who's like, “Way to go.

  • Now you're going to be hanged.”

  • But Mak is like, “Come on!

  • It's meat!”

  • So Gill comes up with a plan to put the sheep in the cradle and say it's a baby.

  • Good thinking, Gill.

  • Back in the meadow, Mak pretends to wake up alongside the shepherds, but they realize

  • a sheep is missing, and go to search his house.

  • Gill fends them off, joking about eating the baby, which is maybe about the Eucharist?

  • but also about cannibalism?

  • The shepherds take off, but then they're like, “Oh wait, we forgot to bring gifts

  • for the baby.”

  • So they come back and find the sheep!

  • Instead of hanging Mak, they decide to roll him up in a cloth and beat him black and blue.

  • Hooray!

  • Another one of those famous happy Christian endings!

  • Thanks, Thoughtbubble.

  • Waitwasn't that supposed to be a Bible story?

  • Well, after the shepherd's leave, an angel comes down and tells them to go to Bethlehem

  • and see the Christ child.

  • Bethlehem is conveniently very nearby.

  • They go visit Mary and the little baby Jesus, bringing him cherries, a bird, and a tennis

  • ball.

  • Not a joke.

  • An actual tennis ball.

  • In this play, we can see the Bible story, mostly borrowed from the gospel of Luke, intersect

  • pretty comfortably with the English vernacular: entertaining an audience while also celebrating

  • Jesus.

  • It's comic and dramatic, serious and silly, high and low, religious and folkloric.

  • It reminds the audience that Christ was born to save northern English shepherds, as well

  • as biblical types.

  • And there's just a little cannibalismfor fun.

  • Cycle plays weren't the only fun in town, though.

  • Pretty soon another form of medieval drama made its debut: the secular play!

  • Which first appeared in France in the late 13th century.

  • These plays were often based on folklore, henceThe Play of the Greenwood,” includes

  • both fairies and townspeople, andThe Play of Robin and Marion,” which is the first

  • dramatization of the Robin Hood stories.

  • We're still dramatizing this one seven hundred years later, though now with Kevin Costner

  • and the soothing pipes of Bryan Adams.

  • The other important medieval genre is the morality play, which Hildegarde of Bingen

  • started.

  • The most famous morality play isEveryman,” which is still performed annually and often

  • updated.

  • Morality plays have one simple message: YOU GONNA DIE.

  • So you'd better get your act together, because all that love and wealth and fun aren't

  • gonna follow you six feet under.

  • Right, Yorick?

  • But you know what will follow you?

  • Good deeds.

  • So go help some old ladies cross a cattle path.

  • Morality plays have a huge influence on the plays of the English Renaissance.

  • Mystery, folk, and morality plays had a good run.

  • They remained the dominant forms of theater for more than 300 years.

  • And as I mentioned, “Everymanis still being performed today.

  • Take that, “Cats!”

  • But things get tricky at the beginning of the Renaissance when Protestant reformers

  • look around and decide that drama and religion shouldn't mix, and they ban cycle dramas.

  • Happy trails, pageant wagons.

  • Until next timecurtain!

Hey there, I'm Mike Rugnetta, this is Crash Course Theater, and today we're going to

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到外面去,來一場(神祕的)戲劇。戲劇速成班#10 (Get Outside and Have a (Mystery) Play: Crash Course Theater #10)

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    Pei-Yi Lin 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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