Winter Fruit: English Drama, 1642-1660University 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. 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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... concerned with the transformative power, good and bad, of civil strife. Since this book has now had an unusually prolonged gestation—many classes, duties, and projects have intervened—its position with regard to the work of other ...
... concerned from the beginning with apportionment. Considering that none of the dramatic works treated here is frequently studied or even read, and that it would be undesirable (even if possible) to give equal space to each play, I have ...
... concern us, the chronological proximity of William Prynne's Histrio-mastix (1633) and Walter Montagu's Shepheard's Paradise (1633), in which Queen Henrietta Maria performed, was a factor in the now-famous clipping of Prynne's ears. No ...
... concern. Analogous thinking is and was ubiquitous. In the seventeenth century it undergirded coats of arms, sermons, songs, tapestries, and even penny pamphlets. Though we should bear in mind that some playwrights were less interested ...
... concerned, the creator of the work is sometimes creating also some comfortable personal leeway. The mid-seventeenth century, then, had a particular concern for what is obviously a universal phenomenon: the impulse to compare. As the ...
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 |