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 off stage?

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 going to be looking at "King Lear."

And to set it all up, we'll look at the staging conventions of Elizabethan drama and how all of those soliloquies and storm scenes were acted.

(WHISPERING) Macbeth.

OK, fine.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

[theme music playing] Because of changes in vagrancy laws, actors organize themselves into companies named after some royal patron.

They mostly performed at purpose-built playhouses, but when those were closed-- looking at you, bubonic plague-- they would tour around the country.

A company would be made of eight to 12 shareholders, three or four 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 fools, 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 that he played the ghost in "Hamlet."

[ghostly whispering] 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 then 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 hands, 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 working men who 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 that they could be heard above all of the chitchatting groundlings.

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

And 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 Tragical History of Hamlet," which seems clear enough, but the history play "Richard III" was published in a 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, with all the prophecies and soothsayers and vengeful ghosts.

[ghostly whispering] Shush it up.

I don't want to hear it anymore.

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

Reversal and recognition, they are 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 the 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.

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 arrestees Oedipus, Pentheus, aren't as complicated as Hamlet, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra.

The philosopher Hegel said that Shakespeare's big innovation was to put a 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 going 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.

Light the way, thought bubble.

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's pretending to be a crazy beggar called Tom o' Bedlam, until 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 because Edmund is hot.

Edgar the not 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 going to die too.

Everyone is sad.

The fool is still missing, and scene.

Thanks, thought bubble.

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 going to 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.

[sighing] We made it.

And now, maybe we better understand what it is to be human and to fail and to suffer and be haunted by our bad decisions.

[ghostly whispering] What is-- Stan, has that been you the whole time?

You're not my dad's ghost.

All right.

Next time, it's going to be a little bit more cheerful as we look at Shakespeare's comedies and a genre that critics went on to call the romances or the problem plays, because spoiler alert, there are some problems.

Until then, curtain and shush it, you.