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
Results 6-10 of 68
... masque (Davenant's Britannia Triumphans) “for his own praise, upon that day, which by Divine Institution was set apart for the praise of our Redeemer” (13–14, 25). And after Charles was beheaded, at least one writer was moved to write ...
... masques of the 1630s may be viewed as emblems of the distancing of the King from his people. At the center of these shows, as Stephen Orgel has argued, there lies “a belief in the hierarchy and a faith in the power of idealization ...
... masques as a whole present a basically true and potentially unsettling image of Charles's cultural and political views." Students of the period have been assiduous in trying to gauge the distance between the monarchs and their people ...
... masques at court could be—and sometimes was—perceived as a threat to his own realm. He was, indeed, a “Hieroglyphic King” (Vaughan 370). When conflict over Charles's Laudian policies began to build toward the Second Bishops' War in ...
... masque-writer John Milton in his Reason of Church-Government (1642). In Milton's view, “it were happy for the Commonwealth if our magistrates would take into their care ... the managing of our public sports.” He continues, “Whether this ...
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 |