English Theater After Shakespeare: Crash Course Theater #17

Summary

The episode traces English theater after Shakespeare, focusing on Ben Jonson, revenge tragedy, and the court masque. It closes by noting that extravagant and often violent theater would soon face a Puritan crackdown.

Ben Jonson and comedy

• Jonson was a major English Renaissance playwright alongside Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. His writing is witty and carefully plotted, though the host describes it as wordier and less psychologically expansive than Shakespeare’s.
• He often wrote city comedies filled with contemporary references, drawing—as Shakespeare did—on the Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence.
• Jonson’s “comedies of humours” draw on the period’s theory that people’s personalities were shaped by the balance of four bodily humours: black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm.
• Volpone, first performed by Shakespeare’s company, satirizes greed and opportunism. Volpone pretends to be dying so wealthy visitors will bring him gifts in hopes of inheriting his fortune. With help from his servant Mosca, he manipulates them, but the scheme ultimately brings punishment on both the visitors and Volpone.
• The play’s characters are associated with animal names and traits, and its moral outlook is more direct and cynical than Shakespeare’s. The episode also criticizes the limited role of women in Jonson’s comedies, pointing to Celia in Volpone, whose wishes are largely disregarded.

Revenge tragedy

• Revenge tragedy drew on the Roman playwright Seneca and favored spectacular violence, murder, disguise, madness, and plays within plays.
• The episode describes Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1587) as an early example. Jonson reportedly acted in it after returning from the Netherlands.
• Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus is presented as a strongly Senecan revenge tragedy, while Hamlet complicates the genre: Hamlet questions whether revenge is morally justified, and the audience remains sympathetic to him despite the deaths he causes.
• Later examples push violence and transgression further:
  • John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore centers on a brother and sister in an incestuous relationship and ends with a graphic murder.
  • The Duchess of Malfi features a woman’s brothers tormenting her after she marries below her station.
  • The Revenger’s Tragedy, probably by Thomas Middleton, includes a poisoned skull and a revenge plot against a corrupt duke.
• Critics offer different explanations for the genre’s extremity: it may expose underlying conflicts around sex and class, challenge restrictive social norms, or primarily aim to shock and thrill audiences.

Court masques

• Court masques were elaborate performances staged for and by nobles, with professional performers often taking comic roles. They combined allegory, music, lavish costumes, and elaborate scenery, and helped affirm existing royal and social hierarchies.
• They developed from medieval pageants, processions, and tableaux created for royal events. A masque might be preceded by an “anti-masque,” showing disorder that was then overcome by the king’s representatives. Sometimes the men of the court performed a masque and the women answered with another.
• Ben Jonson was the leading masque writer. His collaborator, designer Inigo Jones, introduced perspectival staging to England and developed theatrical machinery, including devices that lowered performers onto the stage.
• Jonson and Jones eventually disagreed about whether the words or the visual spectacle mattered more.

Overall

The episode presents English theater as moving from formal simplicity toward increasingly elaborate spectacle and violent excess. It suggests that the expense and extravagance of masques, along with the theater’s broader development, helped provoke Puritan opposition that would soon shut theaters down for a time.

Speakers and sources featured

• Speaker: Mike Rugnetta, host.
• Playwrights, writers, and figures discussed: Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Plautus, Terence, Thomas Kyd, Seneca, Thomas Middleton (identified as the probable author of The Revenger’s Tragedy), John Ford, and Inigo Jones.
• Works discussed or referenced: Volpone, The Spanish Tragedy, The Revenger’s Tragedy, Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, The Duchess of Malfi, and Cymbeline.
• Production and animation sources named: CrashCourse, PBS Digital Studios, and Thought Cafe.
• Sponsor named: CuriosityStream.