good afternoon and welcome to module four we are going to leap into the english renaissance um this module will be handling the renaissance for both england and italy which is a major major major time for theater and the world in general uh renaissance meaning rebirth and uh both in italy and in england there was a rebirth in culture and coming out of the middle ages and an interest in classical art and architecture uh from ancient greece and rome and we're going to see how that affects both english drama and um italian theater but we're gonna start in england and um this is probably you've probably heard of the guy most famous from this period that has still performed today william shakespeare but we're gonna see right now what led to william shakespeare what what made him the playwright he is and why his works are so successful and what really was the foundation there so there's a lot of information in this unit um there's a lot of history also and i just want to stress the dates or the actual historical facts are not as important as the concepts that we're going for and i'll try to remind you as we go through this lecture where it's really necessary to take notes um versus where it's just important to understand the context of what was going on in society at the time all right so uh here we are elizabeth in england and of course we start um with a conversation about religion in the renaissance all right and really the story the main story throughout this entire period is the roman catholic church versus protestantism and specifically what's called the anglican church in 1534 henry viii of england wants to divorce catherine of aragon his wife she can't produce a son for him and he wants to get divorced and marry someone else well the catholic church doesn't allow divorces so henry says fine forget you i'm gonna break away from the catholic church and i'm gonna create my own church and it's called the anglican church or the church of england well the pope doesn't really like that and what's really problematic here is that spain italy and france or the um the city-states that made up those places are still very very firmly catholic and this launches continental europe into a war with england that lasts for centuries um based on religious differences um i made a little fun graphic there saying you know there was no love lost between um england and the continent so in 1547 henry dies and for six years his only surviving son edward vi rules england he's a child when he's crowned he's nine years old and he is the first king to be crowned as a protestant as an anglican king um he changes the masses in england to be spoken in english they shall no longer be recited in latin he also abolishes the policy of celibacy for priests so he's starting to change the way that the commoners the people practice the religion in all other intents and purposes anglicanism wasn't that different than catholicism at the time other than who was in charge of the church king henry viii for the pope uh so edward starts making some changes in the way that the practice or the rituals happen unfortunately edward doesn't last very long he was um not not a very popular king being only nine years old and so in 1553 queen jane rules britain for a grand total of nine days she was also protestant and that didn't work out very well either and so after queen jane she was deposed by queen mary the first and queen mary was of catholic did not convert to anglicanism and she reverts england back to catholicism so this is only about 20 years after henry first decided no we're going to go to um the church of england she goes back to catholicism and in fact she's very harsh about this and from 1553 to 1558 we have what's called the marian persecutions where mary burnt over 250 protestants at the stake if they did not convert back to catholicism and this gave her the nickname of bloody mary which we obviously um that name has survived to today for various reasons well you can imagine that the marian persecutions did not make her very popular in england and so the um british people decided to do something about it and once mary dies elizabeth the first ascends the throne elizabeth was a um she was a daughter of henry viii but through perhaps a legitimate or perhaps an illegitimate claim to the throne and elizabeth restores the church of england anglicanism protestantism she makes sunday service attendance mandatory but she is well aware that maybe she should not be as harsh as mary was in terms of enforcing this new um this uh religious worship so she still allows catholics to be to be remain catholic however she keeps very close watch on and and spies on and makes sure to keep track of where the catholics are and what they're doing because there are many attempts on her life um and to overthrow her and bring back catholicism many of which are funded by uh the other countries that i said were warring with england as well as the pope the vatican was saying get rid of that heretic that that protestant and we want to put catholicism back in england so she's very cautious about religion and in 1587 one of the important moments of her reign is she actually orders the beheading of her cousin mary queen of scots not to be confused with mary the first bloody mary um but mary queen of scots was the queen of scotland who was catholic and who supposedly had been plotting um some assassination attempts against elizabeth but this was a very big sort of moment of you know can i public support and what will happen if i execute this very prominent catholic who's acting very innocent and like she had nothing to do with it and it's a very dramatic moment in um elizabeth's reign but she it really solidified solidifies her power and the stability of the anglican church the protestantism in england also worth noting in 1588 um elizabeth's forces under the um elizabeth's uh navy under the admiralty of sir francis drake defeat the spanish armada making and it was a very significant naval defeat making england the preeminent naval power in the world and this is what sparks later the british empire um this all happens during elizabeth's reign and really makes this era when elizabeth from 1558 to her death almost 40 years later 45 years later um a very very powerful time for england and for centralizing a lot of wealth and culture in england when elizabeth dies in 1603 she is known as the virgin queen she never had a child so interestingly enough they bring down her nephew james who's actually mary's son from scotland mary the one she executed and james comes down from scotland and he knows better than to switch everyone back to catholicism he wants to keep everything nice and cool um interestingly though uh james unites england scotland and ireland under one monarch for the first time ever creating the united kingdom he's also famous for the king james bible as well as um a book on demonology and witchcraft which is going to be very important when we get to learning about shape one of shakespeare's plays um macbeth there was an assassination plot against um king james called the gunpowder plot many of you may have heard of guy fawkes day uh which is november 5th beware beware the 5th of november uh remember remember the 5th of november um and that gunpowder plot is also referenced in the scottish play macbeth so why is all this important well think about this in 1548 the council of trent and henri of france bans all religious drama in france and in 1559 elizabeth follows suit she bans all religious and political drama why well the country's in turmoil people can't tell if they're catholic protestant they don't know who the queen is who the king is who should we follow who should we support and there's assassination temps everywhere so all these kings are tri and queens are trying very hard to minimize public out uh unrest they don't want rebellion they don't want anyone sort of talking against what's going on and so they figure it's safer to ban dramas that were religious or political and theme well the problem is what was the main kind of theater at this time where the mystery and miracle and morality plays which are very religious so suddenly the population is without all of its um theater that it that it loved at the same time one of elizabeth's reforms is she introduced public schooling for young boys around england and um this public schooling they didn't really have a lot of literature to read literature to read other than classical texts works of claudius terence seneca the greeks etc and so these young boys are growing up learning about all of the greek and roman mythology the heroes the kings and queens as well as reading the plays and comedies of these writers that we learned about in our ancient roman module the population is hungry for entertainment now that they don't have their mystery morality plays and there you can see an image of one of those public schools with young boys learning and so the rise of professional theater companies and please take a note okay there's no public religious drama we have urban centers like london birmingham manchester starting to rise uh there's a new interest in shipping so they need places that are on the water to be building shipyards there's a rising middle class that has money exploration and mercantilism especially once the spanish armada is defeated are bringing wealth into england um the people are getting wealthier and need things to spend money on mercantilism by the way is the precursor to colonialism it's where a country goes and spends money to get natural resources from other places using exploration and basically colonialism um to bring in manufactured goods or to bring in natural resources and wealth from other places foreign places and bring them into a central banking or industrial place this is not yet the industrial revolution but we're relaying the seeds for these big urban centers and they need entertainment there's also an expansion of schooling for children as i said with public schooling so children now need a little bit more intelligent um entertainment they they won't be satisfied with just the dancing and the the animal acts and the circus stuff they actually want plays because they they know the stories they read about them and also remember that actors existed um outside of normal trade guilds we talked about the trade guilds in the medieval times the the shoe cobblers or the the leather tanners the actors they don't necessarily until this time they don't necessarily have a theater that they're based at they were traveling they need patronage they need someone to protect them and pay for them and sponsor them so they sort of cater to rich noblemen or even royalty queens and kings the king's players the admirable the admirals men etc for security and sponsorship they need their own theater space um where they can house all their costumes and their set pieces and their props um they especially now with these big urban centers they don't need to be traveling around so much on those wagons um and they can't do the mystery place so now they need a central location and they start building theaters they also need a large amount of plays to perform in repertory which means that every night there might be a different play and then they repeat the cycle maybe every two weeks or so um reason being if you're suddenly not traveling anymore if you're not on tour and you're in one location how many times is this is the same audience gonna come see the same play not more than once or twice so they need to keep refreshing the plays and give the audiences in the cities new material to see and so you see these are some of what's called the university wits these were very uh well educated at eaton and oxford um playwrights thomas kidd kit christopher marlowe ben johnson john fletcher john webster these were all contemporaries of shakespeare and in fact several of them helped shakespeare on um several of his last plays once he was sort of not really in the world anymore and uh there are many who speculate whether shakespeare was real or whether he stole some plays from um any of these uh any of these playwrights as well um and don't forget about william shakespeare who interestingly never went to college he was not one of the university wits he did go to these public schools um thanks to elizabeth but he was not one of these well super educated um playwrights he was an actor in an acting troupe who just began writing his own place and this is the globe theater which is the theater building most associated with william shakespeare his company performed most of their plays here this is a modern rebuilding of the original and what it would have looked like um the original globe theater was actually burnt down in during a production of henry viii a fake cannon a cannon went off in the middle of the show and um actually set fire to the building so they rebuilt this in the 1600s burned down in the 1600s and then they have rebuilt it and they still perform shows there which is very nice for contemporary audiences so this is what the interior of the globe would look like it was a round building a round structure and you can see that it is a three-quarter thrust stage so it it's it comes out into the yard which is where the audience would stand um there's your stage there's your yard around the um behind excuse me behind the stage was called the tearing house or the tiring house and this is like the scheme in our ancient greek theaters or roman theaters this is where um you could have entrances and exits there were balconies for example for romeo and juliet also you could store costumes do costume changes etc we had the musicians gallery up on top this is a famous tower in the globe theater and there the musicians actually played up here and interestingly this little canopy that stood over the stage was painted on the inside with stars and a night sky to look and they called it the heavens often times in shakespeare plays shakespearean plays characters will refer up to the heavens and they were literally looking at a starry sky remember this is all an open-air theater so the audience is standing or sitting standing underneath the heavens as well but the actors were protected and what's so fascinating is that filling that yard were what were called the groundlings groundlings were audience members the common folk who paid money to come in and watch the shows standing there the whole time and sometimes that was two or three hours and they loved every minute of it um the lord's boxes were in the rest of the building the rest of the circle and that's where obviously the nobility and the wealthy patrons as well as royalty could sit to watch you can see a little bit of those heavens i was talking about this is from one of a contemporary production in that globe theater that we were just talking about but uh it's very important that the the groundlings they supported this and they loved it shakespeare's theater was for common people just as much as it was for the wealthy and nobility and this demonstrates really clearly why it's a three-quarter thrust stage right the groundlings are surrounding that stage on three sides so that is why it counts as a three-quarter thrust the last thing i want to leave you with for shakespeare before we go into our play this week othello is a brief discussion of shakespearean genres depending on whom you talk to shakespeare wrote in three or four genres i like to say that he wrote in four and those being comedy tragedy history and romance and don't be confused romance is not the same as our contemporary conception of romance being love or romantic okay comedies focused on love marriage mistaken identities similar to many sitcoms or rom-coms you could think about as a rom-com today they often include cross-dressing female characters uh remember at the time all actors were male so anyone playing a female character would have been a man playing a woman and then many of the comedies have female characters having to dress up as men in order to go on a journey to go find their true love to take part you know to um porsha dresses up as a male to be the lawyer in the courtroom etc maybe um and so there's an added level of humor because it's a man playing a woman playing a man um and the comedy should have happy endings i will add that there are three or four what's called problem plays where they are technically comedies but we're not really sure if the ending is happy or not uh and it depends on the hero you're talking the um character you're talking about we then move on to the tragedies just like greek tragedy they focus on a tragic hero who had a tragic flaw that led to a tragic fall etc there's catharsis for the audience the difference being in shakespeare the tragic fall is definitely death there's no blinding of oedipus in shakespeare the tragic hero dies and or is murdered um and they just like in greek theater they are noble or wealthy characters um the tragic hero is consumed by a dominant emotion or thought which leads us to get the theme of the play and leads to their death so for example in the scottish play macbeth both macbeth and lady macbeth are consumed by ambition by political ambition i will be the king and i will get rid of everyone in my way and we see what happens to them as a result of that romeo and juliet they are consumed by passion or lust and you know the everything that happens happens as a result of their passion for one another um othello will talk about uh in in the next lecture and um king lear pride or um even um dominance over his daughters etc so uh we can see those very very very easily the histories are semi-factual stories based on the british kings and i stress british john the richards the henry's they often involve heroic battle speeches um similar to lord of the rings when uh you know every character has to stir the stir the armies before the battle um just remember the history genre only applies to british kings there are many historical dramas that shakespeare wrote for example julius caesar anthony and cleopatra corey elenas titus andronicus that might be based off of real rulers or based off of actual historical figures but they count as tragedies because they're not the british kings they're based in antiquity um ancient times technically king lear and macbeth even though they were scottish and british are also tragedies because they are not the factual they're not the semi-factual stories they're not the documentary stories of the kings and lastly we have the romances these are easy it's the last four plays that shakespeare wrote on his own they involve some kind of magical or miraculous redemption at the ending um and they are these four plays pericles cymbeline winter's tale and the tempest um just remember that and they usually involve a foreign locale um that's a travel to a foreign locale those are the four genres and that's what you need to know we will be discussing othello which is a tragedy and next lecture we'll talk here here we go with othello