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. |
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D'amboys is routed, Hotspur quits the field, Falstaff's out-filch'd, all in Confusion yield, Even Auditor and Actor, what before Did make the Red Bull laugh, now makes him roar. —Thomas Jordan, prologue to Walks of Islington and Hogsdon ...
Whether comic or otherwise, the topical allusions so acknowledged were largely a form of political critique. Furthermore, some of the boldest may be forever beyond our retrieval because they were the product of the actors' extemporizing ...
In 1754 an audience wrecked Thomas Sheridan's theater because he forbade an actor to repeat a politically topical speech in James Miller's tragedy Mahomet the Impostor. And Verdi's Masked Ball (1859) as we know it was the result of a ...
In the summer of 1993 Susan Sontag was reported to be in war-ravaged Sarajevo rehearsing actors in a Serbo-Croat translation of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. In the summer of 1994, while the present book was in press, ...
... of the Actors” (A3r). Whatever reasons they may have had, the fact is that some midcentury playwrights did begin to include more stage directions than had been customary in earlier years. It is a fact also that when we are ...
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Contents
| 1 | |
| 16 | |
| 37 | |
| 51 | |
| 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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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 |