Winter Fruit: English Drama, 1642-1660Probably 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. 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
Results 1-5 of 61
It is often noted that Sidney's Arcadia figured in King Charles's final days because he thought Pamela's prayer there provided rhetoric suitable for addressing his own God, but a lesser-known and slightly earlier bit of ...
The future Charles II, of course, would have none of that. A number of the plays we shall be discussing turned up in his personal library.” At certain booksellers, fortunately, a reader's choice of plays was comfortably large.
Despite some interesting criticism integrated in their mix of ingredients, in other words, the masques as a whole present a basically true and potentially unsettling image of Charles's cultural and political views.
So far as Parliament was concerned, Charles really may have thought he had tidied up and essentially done away with a messy problem. Such thinking surely would have been encouraged by those at court who, in Sir Dudley North's words, ...
cold eye on Charles's moneymaking projects of the 1630s, saying that “many ridiculous, many scandalous, all very grievous were set on foot.” (1:85). The King who was being exalted in his masques at court could be—and sometimes ...
What people are saying - Write a review
Contents
| 1 | |
| 16 | |
| 37 | |
4 The Paper War | 51 |
5 Arms and the Men | 66 |
6 The Famous Tragedy of Charles I | 95 |
7 AngloTyrannus | 117 |
8 Shows Motions and Drolls | 140 |
12 Fruits of Seasons Gone | 229 |
13 Tragedies | 248 |
14 Comedies | 275 |
15 The Cavendish Phenomenon | 313 |
16 Tragicomedies | 337 |
17 The Rising Sun | 368 |
Appendixes | 381 |
Works Cited | 391 |
9 Mungrell Masques and Their Kin | 157 |
10 The Persistence of Pastoral | 184 |
11 The Craft of Translation | 208 |
Index | 421 |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
Bibliographic information
| Title | Winter Fruit: English Drama, 1642-1660 |
| Author | Dale B.J. Randall |
| Publisher | University Press of Kentucky, 2014 |
| ISBN | 0813157706, 9780813157702 |
| Length | 472 pages |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |