Winter Fruit: English Drama, 1642-1660University Press of Kentucky, 1995 M11 9 - 472 pages Probably the most blighted period in the history of English drama was the time of the Civil Wars, Commonwealth, and Protectorate. With the theaters closed, the country at war, the throne in fatal decline, and the powers of Parliament and Cromwell growing greater, the received wisdom has been that drama in England largely withered and died.Not so, demonstrates Dale Randall in this magisterial study, the first book in nearly sixty years to attempt a comprehensive analysis of mid-seventeenth-century English drama. Throughout the official hiatus in playing, he shows, dramas continued to be composed, translated, transmuted, published, bought, read, and even covertly acted. Furthermore, the tendency of drama to become interestingly topical and political grew more pronounced. In illuminating one of the least understood periods in English literary history, Randall's study not only encompasses a large amount of dramatic and historical material but also takes into account much of the scholarship published in recent decades. Winter Fruit is a major interpretive work in literary and social history. |
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... Actors Remonstrance ( 1643 ) , which speaks of the actors as " friends , young Gentlemen , that used to feast and frolick ... at Tavernes " ( 6 ) . We find it in the words of Edmund Gayton , who recorded in 1654 how interested auditors ...
... actor's skill that may have been equally incendiary . When the playwright has a figure named Poetry protest about actors improvising " without premeditation " ( thus acknowledging a source of trouble noted in Hamlet half a century ...
... Actors of those Times to have such Poets as these to instruct them , and write for them ; and no less of those Poets to have such docile and excellent Actors to Act their Playes , as a Field and Burbidge ; of whom we may say , that he ...
Contents
A Case of Cultural Poetics | 1 |
The Sun Declining | 16 |
Kinds of Closure | 37 |
Copyright | |
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Subordinate Subjects: Gender, the Political Nation, and Literary Form in ... Mihoko Suzuki No preview available - 2003 |