Winter Fruit: English Drama, 1642-1660

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University Press of Kentucky, 2014 M10 17 - 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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Contents

1 A Case of Cultural Poetics
1
2 The Sun Declining
16
3 Kinds of Closure
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
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About the author (2014)

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.

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