Randall by Dale B. J. Randall (review)

Reviews333 Touchstone and Feste are of particular interest. As artificial clowns, they are employed for the purpose of dispensing wit but still serve, however, as commentators, mirrors, and educators of the audience. This section is followed by a discussion of the clown as "Bitter Fool," focusing on Thersites and Lear's Fool, which explores the notion of the clown character as critic. This type thus provides the best example of Videbaek 's thesis. These fools, emerging from a tragic, unsympathetic world, dispense darker, more ominous commentary. Falstaff as Clown, as we would expect, receives major treatment (Part V). Here the author principally seems to debate whether or not Falstaff is indeed a clown character. Unusually, the author tends here to rely on secondary sources, and hence this section may be regarded as a less original section of the book. The final section of the book takes up "Clown Characteristics in Nonclown Characters"—e.g., Philip the Bastard , and Hamlet. This part is disappointing, particularly in the discussion of the character of Hamlet. A useful aspect of the book is the presentation of background information about the actors assumed to have originated each role, mainly Will Kempe and Robert Armin. An Appendix also examines Elizabethan clowns outside of Shakespeare's work, and there is an index of acts and scenes listing clowns in all of Shakespeare's plays. DANIEL-RAYMOND NADON Kent State University-Trumbull Dale B. J. Randall. Winter Fruit: English Drama, 1642-1660. Lexington : University Press of Kentucky, 1995. Pp. xiv + 454. $39.95. This is a book which, Professor Randall writes, he has been researching since the 1960s. And given its thoroughness of detail, bibliographical precision, and descriptive completeness, it is easy to see that this is the fruit of more than one winter for its author. Like Robert Hume's The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century, to which Randall refers, Winter Fruit must inevitably become the basic source book for any future work on what will become, I am sure, an increasingly rich field of endeavor. The early seventeenth century needs little description or apology at this point, especially in the drama; and the late seventeenth century has developed its own canon of excellent apologists even for some of its more recalcitrant dramatic modes—e.g., the heroic plays. But apart from the non-poetic Milton and Marvell, there are few extensive historiographies that can bridge the period from the outbreak of the Civil War to the Restoration proper. And while Christopher Hill no longer dominates the Civil War landscape as once he did, his ardent belief that the decline of godliness in the course of the Interregnum signalled the collapse of the true left as 334Comparative Drama well as the death of literature (Milton and Bunyan excepted), he nevertheless helped to confirm an Eliotic prejudice against the mid seventeenth century and after—and thereby assisted in keeping serious scholars away from the very period and the very literature Randall sets out to describe. For these reasons alone, Randall is to be thanked. I also feel grateful to a scholar of this thoroughness for having stuck to a book which can only be described as a work of conventional literary history in an age when that mode of scholarship, one feels, does not receive the credit it deserves. Nevertheless, for the more critical, Randall's book reveals some of the very real methodological challenges raised by such a project—challenges he does not always entirely resolve. To stress the point, there is a great deal of real scholarship here, not least for the reason that although, after the banning of the theaters in 1642, many plays were written, many fewer were published. The result is that the responsible scholar must trace and read many plays and related dramatic and semi-dramatic works in manuscript. In this Randall has triumphantly succeeded; and he also tries to account for the effects or implications of a literature which circulated in manuscript when the print explosion triggered by the abolition of Star Chamber so revolutionized political debate. Here Randall in his way confirms the importance of a type of publication—or at least publicity—that does not...