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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... printed were destroyed. (One wonders what dramas disappeared forever when the playbooks stored in the vaults of St. Paul's were burned in the Great Fire of 1666.) And manuscripts, of course, survive but spottily. That most of the extant ...
... printed and read. - Although some of the play-texts that concern us here were never meant to be performed (Robert Knightley, translator of Alfrede (1659], says as much [1v]7), others would take on a good deal more life if we could see ...
... printing in 1640, it revealed no animus against plays. Despite Milton's scorn for “what despicable creatures our common rimers and play-writes be” (Of Education 405), he knew well enough, when occasion suited, how to make use of the ...
... printed catalogue of Dr. Francis Bernard's collection eventually came to an amazing 450 octavo pages (Lawler 191). Another big buyer, Richard Smyth, secondary of the Poultry Compter, owned the first folios of Shakespeare, Jonson, and ...
... printed.” Compiled and printed for Richard Rogers and William Ley, this extraordinary document includes more than five hundred plays. In the same year, and apparently in competitive response, the bookseller Edward Archer came out with a ...
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 |