Winter Fruit: English Drama, 1642-1660

Front Cover
University 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.

From inside the book

 

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Page 204
... later , Duchess of Cleveland ( 1670 ) . Before wearing out her welcome , this lady would bear some five or so children for her King . Indeed , as Antonia Fraser puts the case , " she was already in the months before the Restoration ...
Page 238
... Later in the play , for good measure , Octavian's brother Dauphine also plays ghost for a while . Even with its notable put - down of Philarchus , however , and even with a bawd named Erotia and her helper Cunicula tossed in , The Ghost ...
Page 243
... later , on 18 August , all such problems were suddenly solved when the Duke was murdered . Thirty years later Carlell's Deserving Favorite was printed for Humphrey Moseley , and with it a cavalier demurral from the author : though ...

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Contents

A Case of Cultural Poetics
1
The Sun Declining
16
Kinds of Closure
37
Copyright

32 other sections not shown

Other editions - View all

Winter Fruit: English Drama, 1642-1660
Dale B. J. Randall
Limited preview
Winter Fruit: English Drama, 1642-1660
Dale B.J. Randall
Limited preview - 2014

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References to this book

About the author (1995)

Dale B.J. Randall is a professor of English and professor of the practice of drama at Duke University and author of several books on early modern English literature.

Bibliographic information

TitleWinter Fruit: English Drama, 1642-1660
AuthorDale B.J. Randall
Editionillustrated
PublisherUniversity Press of Kentucky, 1995
Original fromthe University of Michigan
Digitized4 Mar 2008
ISBN0813119251, 9780813119250
Length472 pages
  
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