Shirley has been called "the last of the Elizabethans"
partly because he was actually the last of the dramatists of
his age to be born (in 1596, in London) and the last to die (in
1666, from exposure to the Great Fire), but even more because
his work bears an extremely close and interesting relationship
to that of his fellows while at the same time, especially in
comedy, it anticipates much of the material and characters of
the Restoration,
if not its spirit. After attending the Merchant Tailor's School,
Oxford, and Cambridge as an Anglican, he was converted to Roman
Catholicism and abandoned what might have been a career in the
church for school-teaching at St. Albans Grammer School, in Hertfordshire.
In 1624, however, he gave up his head-mastership, and took up
his residence at Gray's Inn, London, although there is no evidence
that he ever actually became a lawyer. But in the following year
his first play, Love's Tricks, was licensed, and he continued
to write voluminously for the stage, first for the Queen's Men
and later for the King's. Not one of the least significant phases
of his life was his four-year sojourn in Ireland, where the production
of several of his plays in his friend John Obilby's new Dublin
theater marks one of the earliest signs of dramatic activity
in that country. During the first days of the Civil War Shirley
attended his patron, the Duke of Newcastle, on some of the Royalist
campaigns, but after the defeat at Marston Moor he returned to
his former profession of school-teaching, the closing of the
theaters in 1642 precluding his earning a living in the manner
he would have preferred. Nevertheless, he continued to write
for the reading public, and saw that his plays as well as his
poems and some pot-boiling works were put into print. He also
edited the first collected edition of Beaumont and Fletcher,
and according to tradition essayed to write for the stage once
more after the Restoration, but if so none of his attempts struck
the popular taste sufficiently to be known today as his.
It was both an advantage and a handicap to Shirley to have
had before him the examples of his great predecessors; in fact,
the playwright was so steeped in his study of these men that
scarcely one of his scenes but has its parallels which have gone
before. At the same time, however, so great was Shirley's ingenuity
and dramatic sense that out of this material he was able to construct
plays of considerable effectiveness and even originality--plays
which in general read with naturalness and ease even though they
fall sadly short in the usual Elizabethan poetry. He can claim
to have written successfully in four different fields: masques,
such as the lavishly produced The Triumph of Peace (1634);
comedies of manners, such as Hyde Park (1632) and The
Lady of Pleasure (1635), all dealing with the lower levels
of fashionable society in the time of Charles I; tragi-comedies,
such as The Young Admiral (1633) and The Politician
(1639); and pure tragedies, the best of which are clearly The
Traitor (1631) and The Cardinal (1641), decadent as
these are in their excessive ingenuity, their reminiscences of
other plays, their horrors, and their use of the old motives
of lust, madness, and revenge.
This article was originally published
in Elizabethan and Stuart Plays Ed. Charles Read Baskervill.
New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1934. p. 1577.
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