A selection of Cox's drolls, including Simpleton, Oenone, and Acteon and Diana, was published by the bookseller Edward Archer in 1656. Francis Kirkman printed some of Cox's drolls in his famous collections The Wits, or Sport upon Sport (1662, 1672).
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Volume VI Humphrey's output also included mezzotint portraits (he reissued a number of plates originally published by John Raphael Smith) as well as mezzotint drolls.
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Even during this time, however, playlets known as drolls were often performed illegally, including one called The Grave-Makers based on Act 5, Scene 1 of Hamlet.
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National Library of Wales, 1993. Tethe,Hunt, Robert. Popular Romances of the West of England: The Drolls, Traditions, and Superstitions of Old Cornwall, 3d ed.: "Saint Keyne".
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This was quite a success, so in 2018 Drolls and the University Choir presented their second joint music project called "Codex Buranus". In the beginning of 2019 appeared another joint project, but this time together with "Onego" folk instruments orchestra, in which two ensembles presented new remastered versions of pieces from the Skomorokhs program. In the end of 2019, for the ensemble's 20th birthday, Drolls and Petrozavodsk State Glazunov Conservatoire orchestra presented a project called Danza della Morte Nera.
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For musicians playing European music this was a move back to their roots, as main characters here are Slavic street performers, playing music very characteristic for those kind of performers and using more than 20 authentic music instruments of XIV—XVII centuries Russia. In 2009 Drolls released their last studio album to the date, called "Decimus" (The Tenth). In the following years Drolls devoted themselves more to an artistic collaboration. In 2014 together with the Petrozavodsk State University Choir they presented a new program called "Cantigas".
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Frontispiece to The Wits (1662), showing theatrical drolls, with Falstaff in the lower left corner. Shakespeare's plays continued to be staged after his death until the Interregnum (1642–1660), when most public stage performances were banned by the Puritan rulers. While denied the use of the stage, costumes and scenery, actors still managed to ply their trade by performing "drolls" or short pieces of larger plays that usually ended with some type of jig. Shakespeare was among the many playwrights whose works were plundered for these scenes.
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Drolls is a Russian early music ensemble formed in 1999 and playing its own interpretation of Medieval and Renaissance music, using authentic instruments. The name of the ensemble refers to a droll - a short comical sketch of a type that originated during the Puritan Interregnum in England. Although their main repertoire consists of music and songs from across the Europe, they also sing and play music of skomorokchs. The first album simply named "Drolls" was released in 2000, and shortly after that, in the beginning of 2001, was released the second album named "Kalenda Maya".
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In 2006 Drolls together with the Belarusian ethno-band Guda recorded the album called "Zara", in which kupala and harvest songs are mixed with French estampie, Macedonian dances and much more. The result can be described as a world music in a way. The same year Drolls were engaged in another project, and tried themselves both as both musicians and actors in the medieval play, which is based on poems of the famous manuscript Carmina Burana. The play is set in a medieval tavern, where its main characters discuss quite serious matters over a pint.
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Borrowing scenes from well-known plays of the Elizabethan theatre, they added dancing and other entertainments and performed these, sometimes illegally, to make money. Along with the popularity of the source play, material for drolls was generally chosen for physical humor or for wit. Francis Kirkman's The Wits, or Sport Upon Sport, 1662, is a collection of twenty-seven drolls. Three are adapted from Shakespeare: Bottom the Weaver from A Midsummer Night's Dream, the gravedigger's scene from Hamlet, and a collection of scenes involving Falstaff called The Bouncing Knight.
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A typical droll presented a subplot from John Marston's The Dutch Courtesan; the piece runs together all the scenes in which a greedy vintner is gulled and robbed by a deranged gallant. Just under half of the drolls in Kirkman's book are adapted from the work of Beaumont and Fletcher. Among the drolls taken from those authors are Forc'd Valour (the title plot from The Humorous Lieutenant), The Stallion (the scenes in the male brothel from The Custom of the Country), and the taunting of Pharamond from Philaster. The prominence of Beaumont and Fletcher in this collection prefigures their dominance on the early Restoration stage.
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Mitra was also a promoter of outdoor natural history education in schools. Among the topics that Mitra explored where folk rhymes, drolls, tales, riddles, and beliefs. He took a particular interest in myth and lore around plants and animals and recorded a range of didactic and aetiological myths.
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Cox created at least eleven drolls, with titles like Simpleton the Smith, Bumpkin, Hobbinat, Simpkin, and John Swabber the Seaman. As a performer, Cox was said to have been "irresistible" in his role of Young Simpleton.Adolphus William Ward, A History of English Dramatic Literature to the Death of Queen Anne, Vol. 3, London, Macmillan, 1899; p. 280.
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William Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. London, Routledge, 1974; p. 417. By his own testimony (in A New Catalogue), Langbaine collected printed editions of 980 plays and masques, not counting drolls and interludes. (Langbaine's Catalogue was first published in November 1687 under a false title, Momus Triumphans: or The Plagiaries of the English Stage, which mocked what others considered Langbaine's obsessive concern with plagiarism.
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After Le Mesurier's death fellow comedian Eric Sykes commented: "I never heard a bad word said against him. He was one of the great drolls of our time". Le Mesurier's fellow Dad's Army actor Bill Pertwee mourned the loss of his friend, saying, "It's a shattering loss. He was a great professional, very quiet but with a lovely sense of humour".
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Cox performed most often at the Red Bull Theatre, long a center of popular entertainment. By some reports he bribed local officials into looking the other way when his drolls grew too much like plays. If so, he was not entirely successful in his corruption: Puritan authorities raided the Red Bull in June 1653 looking for unauthorized drama, and found Cox, playing Swabber.Jane Milling and Peter Thomson, eds.
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The giant of St. Michael's Mount also appears in the drolls about Tom the Tinkeard, a local Cornish variant of "Tom Hickathrift". William Bottrell recorded a tale of the giant's last raid: here, the giant is not killed, but lives to grow old and frail. Becoming hungry, he makes one last incursion to steal a bullock from an enchanter on the mainland. However, the enchanter strikes him immobile as the sea rises around him.
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In his book Popular Romances of the West of England; or, The drolls, traditions, and superstitions of old Cornwall, a collection of Cornish traditions, Robert Hunt explains that the Devil crossed the River Tamar to Torpoint. The chapter, entitled "The Devil's Coits, etc", reasons that the Devil discovered the Cornish would put anything in a pie and decided to leave before they took a fancy to a "devilly" pie, returning to Devon.
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For example, short comical plays called Drolls were allowed by the authorities, while full-length plays were banned. The theatre buildings were not closed but rather were used for purposes other than staging plays. The performance of plays remained banned for most of the next eighteen years, becoming allowed again after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. The theatres began performing many of the plays of the previous era, though often in adapted forms.
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The bailiff informs the sexton that Ophelia's death was suicide, but the sexton argues the point. Later, the sexton unearths Yorick's skull, which leads to Hamlet's famous "Alas, poor Yorick" speech. During the Interregnum, all theatres were closed down by the puritan government.Marsden (2002, 21) However, even during this time playlets known as drolls were often performed illegally, including one based on the two clowns, called The Grave-Makers, based on Act 5, Scene 1 of Hamlet.
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The Red Bull is the only theatre incontestably associated with drolls, brief farces taken from the most popular older plays. In 1653, Robert Cox was arrested at the Red Bull for a performance which crossed the line and was deemed a play. Sir William Davenant and Sir George Fletcher reportedly watched a play at the Red Bull in February or March 1655.Deborah C. Payne, "Patronage and the Dramatic Marketplace under Charles I and II," in Brown; p. 167.
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Among the drolls taken from Shakespeare were Bottom the Weaver (Bottom's scenes from A Midsummer Night's Dream)Nettleton, 16. and The Grave-makers (the gravedigger's scene from Hamlet).Arrowsmith, 72. At the Restoration in 1660, Shakespeare's plays were divided between the two newly licensed companies: the King's Company of Thomas Killigrew and the Duke's Men of William Davenant. The licensing system prevailed for two centuries; from 1660 to 1843, only two main companies regularly presented Shakespeare in London.
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After the closure of the London theatres in 1642, at the start of the English Civil War, a droll known as The Lame Commonwealth was formed from material extracted from Beggars' Bush. The droll features additional dialogue strongly suggesting it was taken from a performance text. The Lame Commonwealth was printed in Francis Kirkman's The Wits, or Sport Upon Sport (1662), a collection of twenty-seven drolls. Beggars' Bush was revived and adapted during the Restoration era.
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During the Interregnum (1642–1660), all public stage performances were banned by the Puritan rulers. Though denied the use of the stage, costumes and scenery, actors still managed to ply their trade by performing "drolls" or short pieces of larger plays that usually ended with some type of jig. Shakespeare was among the many playwrights whose works were plundered for these scenes. Among the most common scenes were Bottom's scenes from A Midsummer Night's Dream and the gravedigger's scene from Hamlet.
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Two huge pillars of sandstone are found to have appeared on the shoreline though, with one topped with a rock formation resembling a cauliflower wig. In the version published in "Popular romances of the west of England; or, The drolls, traditions, and superstitions of old Cornwall" the guests at the feast turn into demons. The horses are found alive the next day and the bodies of the Parson and clerk are found clinging to two rocks which have the appearance of horses.
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In 2007 the ensemble members appeared as actors yet again, but this time as medieval Slavic performers - skomorokhs in the historical movie "Alexander. Nevskaya Bitva" dedicated to Alexander Nevsky (1221-1263). The short performance musicians made for the film laid the foundation of their new program which was quite different to what they did before. And in the end of 2007 Drolls presented their new concert program called "Люди Веселы" (Skomorokhs) in Moscow, which was followed by release of the new album in 2008.
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Robert Cox (died December 1655) was a seventeenth-century English actor, best known for creating and performing the "drolls" that were a permitted form of dramatic entertainment during the English Civil War and the Interregnum, when theatres were officially closed and standard plays were not allowed. Gerard Langbaine called Cox an "excellent comedian."Gerard Langbaine, An Account of the English Dramatic Poets, London, 1691; p. 89. His origins and early history are obscure; he was with Beeston's Boys in 1639, but nothing else is known about his early life.
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Cover of Funky Koval #2 from the 1980s, Poland. The plot resolves around the figure of former military pilot and now space detective, Funky Koval, who with his friends and colleagues forms a private detective agency "Universs" and solves various cases in the futuristic world of the 2080s. His investigations range from corruption in the police and government, through fighting cultists and terrorists, investigating missing spaceships and illegal slave camps, to the mystery of the Drolls aliens, who seem to have a much more advanced technology than the humans, and whose plans for the humanity - if any - remain a mystery.
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Another legend surrounding squab pie, along with the other unusual pies of Cornwall, is that they were the reason that the Devil never came to Cornwall. In his book Popular Romances of the West of England; or, The drolls, traditions, and superstitions of old Cornwall, a collection of Cornish traditions, Robert Hunt explains that the Devil crossed the River Tamar to Torpoint. The chapter, entitled "The Devil's Coits, etc.", reasons that the Devil discovered the Cornish would put anything in a pie and decided to leave before they took a fancy to a "devilly" pie, returning to Devon.
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By that time, he had produced or had been credited with, close to fifty plays. This body of work remained a big part of the King's Men's repertory until the closing of the theatres in 1642. During the Commonwealth, many of the playwright's best-known scenes were kept alive as drolls, the brief performances devised to satisfy the taste for plays while the theatres were suppressed. At the re-opening of the theatres in 1660, the plays in the Fletcher canon, in original form or revised, were by far the most common fare on the English stage.
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William Bottrell (1816–1881) was born at Rafta, St Levan in Cornwall on 7 March 1816. He contributed greatly to the preservation of Cornish mythology. Both he and Thomas Quiller Couch contributed folk stories of West Cornwall for Robert Hunt's Popular Romances of the West of England, published in 1865.Robert Hunt, F.R.S., Popular Romances of the West of England; or The Drolls, Traditions and Superstitions of Old Cornwall, First Series (John Camden Hotten, Piccadilly, London, 1865 Although Bottrell's contributions were acknowledged in Hunt's introduction to the book (his name given there as Botterell), there was no individual acknowledgement for each story, which was the case for Couch's contributions.
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He left over £25,000 in his will, listing Eliza as executrix. As their marriage had been bigamous, he described her as "my reputed wife Eliza Ann Booth, otherwise Eliza Ann Hoy". The obituarist for The Manchester Guardian wrote that Formby was one of the "great drolls" of the music hall whose humour "always seemed to take its rise in a sympathetic perception of human vanities and weaknesses". The Dundee Courier considered him a great comedian, made all the greater by his continuing to perform through his illness, while the drama critic J. T. Grein, writing in The Illustrated London News, thought that Formby, "along with [Harry] Lauder, Robey and [Albert] Chevalier, formed the leading quartette of the profession".
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It was used extensively in The Beggars' Bush, a play by Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, first performed in 1622, but possibly written c. 1614. The play remained popular for two centuries, and the canting section was extracted as The Beggars Commonwealth by Francis Kirkman as one of the drolls he published for performance at markets, fairs and camps. The influence of this work can be seen from the independent life taken on by the "Beggar King Clause", who appears as a real character in later literature. The ceremony for anointing the new king was taken from Thomas Harman and described as being used by Gypsies in the nineteenth century.
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"Cox probably was a strolling or country player..." through much of his career.Dale B. J. Randall, Winter Fruit: English Drama 1642-1660, Lexington, KY, University Press of Kentucky, 1995; pp. 150-1. Cox had one known connection with one of the theatre companies of the era: he was one of ten men who tried to re-organize the King's Men in December 1648, an attempt that, perhaps unsurprisingly, did not succeed. Cox won his personal fame in writing and performing drolls -- interludes or farces that usually consisted of comic scenes extracted and adapted from old dramas of English Renaissance theatre, by William Shakespeare (Bottom the Weaver was one droll), Ben Jonson, John Fletcher, and many others.
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During the years of the Puritan Interregnum when the theatres were closed (1642–1660), the comic subplot of Bottom and his compatriots was performed as a droll. Drolls were comical playlets, often adapted from the subplots of Shakespearean and other plays, that could be attached to the acts of acrobats and jugglers and other allowed performances, thus circumventing the ban against drama. When the theatres re-opened in 1660, A Midsummer Night's Dream was acted in adapted form, like many other Shakespearean plays. Samuel Pepys saw it on 29 September 1662 and thought it "the most insipid, ridiculous play that ever I saw ..." After the Jacobean / Caroline era, A Midsummer Night's Dream was never performed in its entirety until the 1840s.
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In September 1655, the Red Bull was raided again as part of the same sterner attitude that led Cromwell's soldiers to deface the Fortune and Blackfriars, and actors were arrested for performing there in 1659. A collection of drolls was published by Francis Kirkman, some attributed to "the incomparable Robert Cox", as The Wits (1662, and enlarged 1672–73). Kirkman said many had been performed at the Red Bull; however, the frontispiece to his volume does not necessarily represent a performance at the venue, as was once assumed—the drawing shows footlights and a candelabra, whereas the Red Bull mounted only open-air, daylight performances. The theatre was re-opened in 1660 upon the Restoration of the monarchy, as home for Michael Mohun's company and George Jolly's troupe.
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