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. |
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... political contexts will likely think the political reading inevitable” (186). and contextual approach, I have come to see it as Preface.
... each play, I have had to select certain plays for emphasis. Generally speaking, I give fuller attention to some because the specificity of their historical or political pertinence can be ascertained and xii P R E F A C E.
English Drama, 1642-1660 Dale B.J. Randall. of their historical or political pertinence can be ascertained and the context of their writing documented. For my purposes here, part of the value of such works is that they help to illuminate ...
... political critique. Furthermore, some of the boldest may be forever beyond our retrieval because they were the product of the actors' extemporizing and because, as Shakespeare writes in another context, “There was ... language in their ...
... political parallels in its original form. In the earlier twentieth century John Millington Synge's Playboy of the Western World (1907) occasioned riots on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1941 Hitler's Reich Chancellery banned ...
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 |