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
... Actor, what before Did make the Red Bull laugh, now makes him roar. —Thomas Jordan, prologue to Walks of Islington and Hogsdon (1657) Is it unlawfull since the stage is down To make the press act: where no ladies swoune At the red ...
... actors' extemporizing and because, as Shakespeare writes in another context, “There was ... language in their very gesture” (Winter's Tale Vii.13-14). Certainly the critical rhubarb could be served with flattering sugar. In The Gypsies ...
... 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 major revamping intended to blur the political parallels in its original form ...
... 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, the Cameri Theater in Tel Aviv caused a furor by presenting a Shylock who first came onstage in a ...
... 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 confronted 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 |