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
... genre for the day was tragedy, the Ypsilon Theater canceled its scheduled comedy and performed Macbeth “with inordinate pauses at the relevant points, and a full minute of silence after 'Yet who would have thought the old man to have ...
... genres borrow constantly from one another, that within a given genre one work may differ greatly from another, and that some works may fit conveniently in more than one genre. Leonard Willan's Astraea (1651), for example, yields ...
... genre, sometimes so much simpler as to remind one of the origins of masquing in costumed dance. Down in Derbyshire at the seat of Philip Stanhope, first Earl of Chesterfield, Sir Aston Cokayne's 1640 Twelfth Night Masque Presented at ...
... genre decorum, however, is the figura*Some of the complexities of Strafford's fall are intimated nicely in an anonymous “epitaph” reprinted by Saintsbury: “Here lies wise and valiant dust/ Huddled up 'twixt fit and just; / Strafford ...
... genre—the works they designate are not comedies or tragedies—than to mode. That is, they are capable of simulating or borrowing certain comic or tragic devices and of appealing, broadly speaking, to one's comic or tragic sense. Granted ...
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 |