Winter Fruit: English Drama, 1642-1660.

Dale B. J. Randall. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995. xiv + 454 pp. $39.95. ISBN: 0-8131-1925-1.

This study of drama during the period between the English Parliament's "Order for Stage-plays to cease" and Charles II's restoration offers a salutary corrective to the usual view that "when the theatrical companies were silenced . . . the many-splendored arc of Tudor and Stuart drama came at last to an end . . . with a dying fall" (1). Surveying a large number of manuscript sources as well as printed and reprinted plays, Randall demonstrates that, on the contrary, the period produced many fascinating dramatic texts, some of which may have actually played at the time, and many of which were written with the intention that they be staged at a later date. Winter Fruits secondary project is to trace topical references in these dramatic texts. The book succeeds in both of its aims although it is perhaps more convincing as a testament to dramatic activity in the period.

Randall frames his study with some historical material about Charles I's political difficulties and the closing of the theaters; the book proceeds to survey dramatic texts, looking at some surprising venues for evidence of dramatic activity. Along with play texts and masques written in the period, Randall examines pamphlets with dramatic touches, civic shows, puppet shows and drolls (nebulously defined short, comic entertainments), plays translated from classical and modern continental languages, and older plays reprinted in the period. The book has a slightly odd organization, with some chapters devoted to genres like tragedy and comedy, and some treating plays about particular subjects such as war and tyrants, as well as a chapter on drama produced by the Cavendish family. This arrangement occasionally forces Randall to revisit a text like John Thatham's The Rump, which is both a comedy and a play about the fall of Parliament. The range of materials covered in the book is impressive and brings to light many intriguing dramas and shows.

The real strength of the book, as well as its weakness, lies in the texts it covers. Much of this material has been neglected, although Randall scrupulously acknowledges the work of those scholars who have preceded him into his territory. From Randall's descriptions, these texts appear to offer enormous opportunities for critics interested in such topics as gender, representations of blackness, representations of native Americans, and English attitudes toward Jews, the Scots and the Irish. Although continually insisting on topical allusions in the material, the author fails to pursue these interesting angles, limiting his vision of topicality to commentary on Cromwell, Charles I, and the civil wars. He does find some references to these central figures and events of the time, but his narrow view of what is topical forces him to ignore the dramas obvious concern with such issues as England's emerging national and imperial identities, issues whose importance Stephen Greenblatt, Richard Helgerson and Kim Hall, among many others, have so powerfully demonstrated. Indeed, implicitly acknowledging Greenblatt's work, Randall calls his first chapter "A Case of Cultural Poetics," but seems to take that term to mean searching out a text's allusions to contemporary political events, which is not exactly what Greenblatt meant when he coined it.

Winter Fruit certainly demonstrates that students of seventeenth-century literature would benefit from attending to the drama produced between 1642 and 1660. The book suggests that phenomena such as English musical theater and the presence of women on the stage after the Restoration had their roots in a continuous dramatic tradition, rather than emerging from the silence of the interregnum. And Winter Fruit also suggests that there is much more work to be done on this piece of that dramatic tradition.

REBECCA ANN BACH University of Alabama, Birmingham