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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... fact , Compton's play is one of the best examples we have of a comedy so well adapted to its new cultural setting as to spark fresh meanings . Though unfortunately it appears to be undateable , the play certainly alludes to the 1650s ...
... fact , Jews in the 1650s were much in men's minds because of Cromwell's personal inclination toward a policy of tolera- tion . Thanks partly to the indefatigable Rabbi Manasseh ben Israel , Jews in the 1650s were permitted to live in ...
... fact is that the comic mythologizing of the highwayman Hind is finally combined with the romantic mythologizing of Prince Charles . The victory of Cromwell over Charles at Worcester took place on 3 September 1651 , and it may be that an ...
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 |