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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... play was composed . It may be that the play's ending is rather odd and inconclusive because Burnell wrote at a time of uncertainty , when it was still possible to hope for political union and religious coexistence between England and ...
... play shows that during the reign of a bad king , when the crown sits but quaveringly and a " purple cloud " ( F4v ) shrouds England , men will talk of rebellion at home and intervention from abroad . That Pennycuicke meant no harm to ...
... play's most interesting elements , also conveyed to a reader with the aid of stage directions , is a pair of vaults , the entrances to which are situated on opposite sides of the stage . During the course of the play these vaults are ...
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 |