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
... earlier English drama (that is, Caroline drama before 1642) and Robert Hume's study of Restoration drama (that is, drama after 1660). To attempt placing it in a different way, one might relate the book to some of the work that has been ...
... earlier years (William Prynne complained in 1633 of “This play-adoring age” [**1v1), continued to interest many and to provide English writers, readers, and sometimes audiences with many forms of expression, whether for persuasion or ...
... earlier put the rhetorical case quite directly: “Phant'sie, I tell you, has dreams that have wings, / And dreams that have honey, and dreams that have stings” (Vision of Delight [1617], ll. 61-62). Sometimes, obviously, the stings might ...
... 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 performances and school study of Schiller's William Tell ...
... earlier times, they may serve as aids to either praise (Charles I as Christ) or blame (Charles I as Richard II). Narrative “similizing” or “exampling” even had reassuringly firm authorization from the ancients. According to Quintilian ...
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 |