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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... concerned with dramatic writing . Whether they were destined to be performed or merely read , masques were a source ... concerns the relationship between masquers and audience . We might revalidate some such observations if we could ...
... concerned , it is no giant step from Honoria and Mammon to the topical comedies of Samuel Sheppard and John Tatham - or , indeed , to Brathwaite's Mercurius Britani- cus . Shirley's work invariably shows the surer hand , the greater ...
... concerned about setting aside the rude satirist's mask . In retrospect he would have us think that through the years he had been motivated more by Plutus than by politics . For our present purposes , Sheppard may be coupled with John ...
Contents
A Case of Cultural Poetics | 1 |
The Sun Declining | 16 |
Kinds of Closure | 37 |
Copyright | |
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A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle Stephen Clucas No preview available - 2003 |
Subordinate Subjects: Gender, the Political Nation, and Literary Form in ... Mihoko Suzuki No preview available - 2003 |