James Shirley

English poet and playwright

• Born: September 1, 1596
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: October 29, 1666
• Place of death: London, England

A poet and author of grammar texts, Shirley is primarily remembered as a prolific dramatist whose works dominated the London stage between 1625 and 1642. When the theaters reopened in 1660, after the Interregnum, many of his plays were revived and served as templates for the new generation of Restoration dramatists.

Early Life

James Shirley was born in London, probably on September 3, 1596, and baptized four days later at Saint Mary Woolchurch. On October 4, 1608, he enrolled in London’s Merchant Taylors’ School, where he studied the standard classical curriculum for four years. During the next three years, he may have attended Saint John’s College, Oxford, while also apprenticed to Thomas Firth, a scrivener. More certain is his 1715 matriculation at Saint Catherine’s College, Cambridge, which awarded him a bachelor of arts degree two years later. Soon after, he was ordained in the Church of England. In the next seven years, Shirley studied for the master of arts degree at Cambridge, married Elizabeth Gilmet, had several children, and accepted a curacy in Hertfordshire. At some time prior to his thirtieth year, he probably converted to Catholicism, resigned his church position, and became headmaster of a Saint Albans grammar school.

Shirley’s first published work was Eccho: Or, The Infortunate Lovers (1618), a long narrative poem that has not survived, though it could be the same work as Narcissus: Or, The Self-Lover (1646). The latter poem, published in Poems &c. by James Shirley (1646), is similar in form to William Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593). Shirley continued to write poetry, gaining some renown as a Cavalier poet, one of the so-called Sons of Ben (Royalist acolytes of the poet-dramatist Ben Jonson ), but in 1624, he went to London to become a playwright. His first play, The School of Compliment (pr. 1625, pb. 1631; also known as Love Tricks: Or, The School of Compliments), was presented in 1625 at the Phoenix, in Drury Lane; it is a satiric comedy whose pastoral element recalls Shakespeare’s As You Like It (pr. c. 1599-1600), and it was revived in the 1660’s.

Life’s Work

From 1625 to 1635, more than twenty Shirley plays were produced in London, mainly at the Phoenix, whose company enjoyed the patronage of Queen Henrietta Maria . When the plague hit the city in 1636, however, the theaters were closed, so Shirley went to Ireland, where he wrote for John Ogilby’s Saint Werburgh Street playhouse, in Dublin. Shirley’s comedy The Royal Master (pr. 1637, pb. 1638) may have been the first play performed when the new theater, the first outside London, opened in 1637.

Upon returning to London in the spring of 1640, Shirley succeeded Philip Massinger as chief dramatist of the King’s Men at the Blackfriars Theatre, but his tenure there was brief: In September of 1642, Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan forces closed the theaters. Before the closure, the King’s Men had performed three of Shirley’s plays; a fourth, The Court Secret (wr. 1642, pb. 1653, pr. after 1660), remained in manuscript, though it may have been revised and staged in 1664 as The Secret.

With Cromwell’s rebellion and the outbreak of the English Civil War, Shirley’s career as a playwright came to an end, though he lived to see productions of his works in the early 1660’s. During the rebellion, Shirley fought on the Royalist side outside London, and when the Civil War ended in 1645, he returned to the city and resumed his teaching career. He apparently married a second time, and over the next two decades, he published Latin grammars, poetry, and a collection of his plays. When the Great Fire hit London in October, 1666, Shirley and his second wife, Frances, fled to the parish of Saint Giles-in-the-Fields, in Middlesex, where they died—perhaps from effects of the blaze—on October 29, 1666.

The most popular playwright of his time, Shirley wrote in more different dramatic genres than any of his contemporaries. His revenge tragedies recall those of such predecessors as Thomas Kyd and John Webster ; his city comedies are in the Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton tradition; his humors comedies are indebted to Ben Jonson; and his tragicomedies are in the manner of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher . In other words, his plays are derivative, for Shirley was not an innovator. Notwithstanding the similarities between his plays and others’, however, he was more original than most of his peers, who often borrowed from each other with impunity, and there rarely is a single, direct source for any of his plays. Among the many he wrote, three are most noteworthy: the comedies Hyde Park (pr. 1632, pb. 1637) and The Lady of Pleasure (pr. 1635, pb. 1637), and the tragedy The Cardinal (pr. 1641, pb. 1652); The Wedding (pr. 1626?, pb. 1629), an early work, also is of special interest.

An initial success in 1626, occasionally revived and reprinted several times before the closing of the theaters, and popular during the Restoration period, The Wedding is a Fletcherian tragicomedy. Typical of its genre, it has multiple plots, serious and comic, that progress relatively independently, albeit with a common focus upon marriage. One subplot functions as a comic contrast to the serious (and potentially tragic) love story of the main plot. In the play are rival suitors, disguise, apparent death, madness, and the bed switch trick—all familiar elements from earlier drama. Tragicomedy is a hybrid form that lacks death but brings people to the brink of it, so it evokes a contradictory mix of responses and lacks the realism and sophistication of comedies of manners; The Wedding is a lesser work partly because of its genre.

A much better play, Hyde Park is an urbane comedy of manners in which Shirley presents a realistic picture of Cavalier London during the reign of King Charles I . Initially popular, it also was revived in the Restoration. The action—which spans just one day—has three plots that concern a love triangle involving a woman and two men who compete for her affection, and each plot illustrates in turn different types of comedy, including intellectual, sentimental, and situation comedy. Dealing as it does with London’s upper classes and their milieu, Hyde Park differs from the middle-class city comedies of Dekker and Middleton, and although its love chase intrigues anticipate Restoration comedies of manners, Shirley’s rake reforms and Caroline standards of sexual propriety are observed.

Of the same genre is The Lady of Pleasure, which presents variations on the honor theme and also may be a commentary upon the Platonic love cult in Queen Henrietta Maria’s court. Shirley depicts his characters’ movement from folly and libertinism to repentance and reformation, and he celebrates honor, innocence, and moderation, while at the same time presenting the shallowness of upper-class lives. Though less popular than his other comedies, The Lady of Pleasure is historically significant, because Richard Brinsley Sheridan borrowed from it the characters and scandal school conceit for his comedy The School for Scandal (pr. 1777, pb. 1780).

Only four of Shirley’s extant plays are tragedies, of which the best is The Cardinal. A direct literary descendant of Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (pr. c. 1585-1589, pb. 1594?), the prototypical Elizabethan revenge tragedy, The Cardinal includes all of the elements that became hallmarks of the genre: murder of a rival by a jealous lover, assistance for the murderer by a Machiavellian villain whose goal is to gain advancement and/or wealth, feigned (or actual) madness presumably caused by grief, a play within a play, and revenge as a controlling motive.

Shirley’s prologue to The Cardinal is somewhat satiric and teases the audience by speculating whether the play is a comedy or tragedy and suggesting they are about to see the former, which may reflect his uneasiness at offering the sophisticated Blackfriars crowd a new work in the old-fashioned revenge tragedy mode. Popular through the 1630’s and revived with considerable success during the Restoration period, the play is one of Shirley’s few successes that simply recalls past stage practices and does not concurrently anticipate those of the next age.

Significance

The length, variety, and productivity of Shirley’s career as a dramatist only partly account for his historical significance. Arguably his most important achievement was to demonstrate the adaptability and enduring timeliness of the devices, character types, and themes that his predecessors had introduced. Whether writing for public or private theaters, for varied or aristocratic audiences, Shirley fashioned appropriately his themes, plots, and characters—no mean accomplishment for someone who had neither the talent nor the inclination to innovate. Equally important, this major playwright at the end of one era became a leading figure in the next, after an eighteen-year interregnum. Therefore, to Shirley must go a modicum of credit for the continuing vitality of the Caroline stage and the ease with which drama was restored in the 1660’s.

Bibliography

Clark, Ira Granville. Professional Playwrights: Massinger, Ford, Shirley, and Brome. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992. An analysis of how four early seventeenth century playwrights, working within constraints society imposed, produced dramas rife with social criticism.

Forsythe, Robert Stanley. The Relation of Shirley’s Plays to the Elizabethan Drama. New York: Columbia University Press, 1914. An authoritative study of Shirley’s place in the Renaissance drama and of his indebtedness to predecessors.

Lucow, Ben. James Shirley. Boston: Twayne, 1981. A concise overview of Shirley’s life followed by detailed analyses of the individual works that take into account the range of previous scholarship.

Nason, Arthur Huntington. James Shirley: Dramatist. New York: Nason, 1915. The passage of time has not lessened the importance of this comprehensive study of Shirley’s life and work, which has not been superseded.

Sanders, Julie. Caroline Drama: The Plays of Massinger, Ford, Shirley, and Brome. Plymouth, Mass.: Northcote House, 1999. A brief study of how the plays of four major dramatists reflect the social and political milieu of Caroline London.

Zimmer, Ruth K. James Shirley: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980. This comprehensive annotated bibliography of Shirley’s works and writings about him also has a useful sketch of his life.