Shirley's The Cardinal occupies a secure place in dramatic history as the last of a long line of Elizabethan tragedies of revenge. The genre which began with Kyd's Spanish Tragedy had its limitations as an art form, not the least of which were the moral confusions which the pagan theme was sure to encounter in a Christian context. Yet many fine plays emerged from the tradition and, among them, one masterpiece—Shakespeare's most popular tragedy. It is reassuring to notice that the movement ended, as it had begun, with an impressive play and the work of a true poet. In The Cardinal some of the earlier heat has gone, to be sure, but with it much of the crudity; and Shirley's greatest tragedy reveals a dramatist of sure technique, firmly in control of his material, writing with both élan and polish, yet stimulating a subtler but not less vivid response from his audience.

In some respects The Cardinal is to Shirley's other plays what Perkin Warbeck is to Ford's—the conscious revival of an old-fashioned form. Shirley had used similar themes and materials in earlier plays such as The Maid's Revenge, Love's Cruelty, and The Traitor; but in The Cardinal he returned to the pristine structure of Kyd, and we therefore find a clarity of outline, a directness and economy of plot that are refreshing in a period when minor contemporaries such as Samuel Harding were obscuring any sense for line and proportion under a decadent encrustation of horrors and complexities. Fredson Bowers, having made the point that in motive and design “Shirley's Cardinal … is as strict a revenge tragedy as The Spanish Tragedy,”¹ goes on to comment:

An outline of The Cardinal fits almost point for point into the outline of Kyd's play. In both there is much preliminary action leading up to the murder which is to be revenged. In both this murder is committed by a jealous lover to rid himself of his rival who has won the heroine's heart. Both murderers are backed by intriguing villains who are anxious for the marriage to raise the fortunes of their houses. The murder calls forth the counter-revenge, which is ordered with extreme deceit and dissimulation including a feigned reconciliation. While Rosaura, like Hieronimo, goes mad from excessive grief, the portrayal of her madness is more closely allied to Hamlet, since she resolves to pretend insanity in order to deceive her enemies but from time to time lapses into actual distraction. Like Hamlet is the emphasis put upon her melancholy. A masque is used to commit a murder, a body is exhibited, ingenious deaths are contrived with great irony. An effect somewhat similar to Bel-Imperia's self-immolation after her revenge is secured in Hernando's suicide.²

The perspicuous brilliance of Shirley's plotting in the play has been more generally admired by critics than almost any other of its features, even his detractors conceding him the laurel for constructive power. Swinburne's intemperate essay castigating Shirley's “irritating inanity of impotent invention”³ often contains more alliteration than good sense; but he remitted his enthusiasm long enough to commend The Cardinal, that “vigorous and well-built tragedy,” for its “development of interest” and “management of the story”:

… it is indeed a model of composition, simple and lucid and thoroughly well sustained in its progress towards a catastrophe remarkable for tragic originality and power of invention; with no confusion or encumbrance of episodes, no change or fluctuation of interest, no breach or defect of symmetry.⁴

Typical of the phrases used to characterize Shirley's expert conduct of the narrative are “unobtrusively adroit,”⁵ and “mechanically perfect,”⁶ while a standard survey of Elizabethan drama, drawing the inevitable comparison to The Duchess of Malfi, asserts that The Cardinal “is as superior to Webster's play in craftsmanship as it falls below it in tragic intensity.”⁷

The recurring technical problem for dramatists writing in the genre of blood-revenge was, of course, how to manage the interim between the crime to be punished and the actual execution of vengeance that would bring both hero and victim down together in a last-act holocaust. In the later plays especially, dramatists usually took refuge in the multiplication of plots (not always skillfully fused), the manufacture of labyrinthine intrigue, or simply the importation of extraneous matter, usually comic. Shirley was able to avoid this diffusion of interest by delaying the murder of Alvarez until Act III, nevertheless incorporating it in a single chain of episodes, carefully spaced but logically concatenated, which build steadily by a series of dramatic reversals to an ingenious climax. The entire movement of the action in The Cardinal is thus a continuous crescendo toward the final scene. What might have been inserted by a lesser artist simply for its appeal as light entertainment—such as the low comedy of Rosaura's servants before the wedding or the wit arising out of Celinda's sexual intrigues—is subordinate but functional to the main action of Shirley's play. The comic relief of the making-up scene (III.ii), which Schelling admired,⁸ is introduced as an ironic prelude to the masque in which the corpse of the Duchess's lover is without warning laid bleeding at her feet; thus it contributes to one of the most effective volte-faces of the tragedy. The shady intrigues of Celinda are equally organic, for they result directly from Columbo's attentions to her (in pointed slight of the Duchess); and since Celinda ends by allying herself, for selfish reasons, with both the Cardinal and Antonio, she serves as a foil to dramatize the comparative virtue and loneliness of her mistress struggling on against her wily opponent.

In the first half of the action Shirley carefully lays the groundwork for that struggle; all the major characters are presented and we are plunged into the basic problem—that of a beautiful, wealthy, sensitive, and highly placed widow too weak to resist openly but foolish enough to oppose by deception a match with a brutal man whom she cannot love. By her errors in judgment Rosaura ensnares herself, as Hamlet is ensnared, in a gathering web of “purposes mistook” which can only end in “deaths put on by cunning and forc'd cause … Fall'n on th' inventors' heads.” Her shifty rejection of Columbo's suit leads directly to the first in a trio of interconnected revenges—the murder of Alvarez. Despite its reliance on a dramatic cliché, this scene produces a powerful effect which may be taken as a symbolic focus for Shirley's special achievement in The Cardinal—the juxtaposition of mannered civilization with savagery, the horror of the vendetta tripping in lace and velvet to the sophisticated measures of a Caroline masque.

From this point on the intrigue develops with a briskness which is the more frightening for its neatness and logic. Rosaura, through Hernando, carries out the counter-revenge upon Columbo, an action which Shirley has skillfully motivated by adding a personal animosity to the principal issue between the duelists. As the Cardinal and Rosaura scheme now to destroy each other, both are ironically caught in their own gins, victimized accidentally by a strategy too subtle for their control.

The brilliantly clever device of the last scene in which the wounded Cardinal falsely repents his wickedness, then proffers an antidote (really poison) to the Duchess, whom he claims already to have poisoned, illustrates the highly intellectual appeal of Shirley's play, and gives a clue to the sophisticated audience which it was designed to please. The treatment is very objective; the characters are maneuvered artfully through their actions, the surprises are ingeniously contrived, and the dramatist's concern for eliminating rough edges and loose ends is everywhere apparent.⁹ Very much to the point here is Bowers's remark that Shirley, “pursuing an entirely different course from that of Kyd … has his characters do their thinking behind the scenes. All the audience sees is the thinking which has turned into action.”¹⁰ This technique, which relates Shirley not to Webster but to Beaumont and Fletcher, is undeniably melodramatic; yet it has that fineness of manipulation, that intelligence of procedure that we admire in a good detective novel. Since much is withheld from it, the audience is invited to adopt an attitude of critical detachment.

Moreover, Shirley's method shows restraint—a quality too little found in tragedies of revenge. In this respect The Cardinal gains some advances over its greater predecessors by Webster and Tourneur, for Shirley is not interested in the Senecan blood-bath nor in those later refinements of mortuary art—dismembered limbs, wax-works dummies, and poisoned skulls. Physical horror has been largely replaced by carefully planned psychological effects arranged through suspense, peripeteia, and the other staples of unfolding mystery. The deliberate mystification of the audience which Shirley practices is shown by the prologue, which announces the procedure almost in the spirit of a guessing game:¹¹

But keep your fancy active …
A Poets art is to lead on your thought
Through subtle paths and workings of a plot,
And where your expectation does not thrive,
If things fall better, yet you may forgive;
I will say nothing positive, you may
Think what you please, we call it but a Play.
Whether the comick Muse, or Ladies love,
Romance, or direfull Tragedy it prove,
The Bill determines not; and would you be
Perswaded, I would have't a Comedie. …

(Prologue, 5-16)

Though there is a touch of the dilettante in this equivocation, the stance is new in revenge tragedy. Its relation to the older drama approaches that of Agatha Christie to Poe; we observe a circumscription of emotional range but a more precise intelligence at work.

Shirley's interest in the artifice of plot in The Cardinal does not impair his grasp of character as is so frequently the result in the Fletcherian tragi-comedies of the period. It would be extravagant to claim very great depth for Shirley's personages—his detachment precludes this—yet they are strongly and, in the main, consistently individualized. It is easy enough to recognize their debt to earlier stock types,¹² but Shirley's portrayals are by no means without complexity or, in the heroine at least, development. Our initial meeting with the Duchess reveals a woman torn between love and the fear of directly owning it, but as the action proceeds we see not merely the deepening of her melancholy with its touching fantasies of frustrated affection, but also the developing courage and wit of a fighter. Rosaura combines some of the sweet sadness of Webster's Duchess of Malfi with a touch of Vittoria Corombona's stamina and fire. Her self-possessed anger in at least one scene with the Cardinal bears out his remark after her exit: “This woman has a spirit, that may rise / To tame the Devils” (II.iii.169-170). And under the pressure of circumstances, we see what began as a venial delusiveness turn to cunning, for after the death of her lover she is tainted by the harsher ethics of her enemies. She resolves to simulate madness only to experience the reality, and in the theatrical scene where the Cardinal attempts to ravish her, we hear the desperate but frighteningly quiet reaction of a mind hovering between the poles of that ambivalence: “How came you by that Cloven foot?” (V.iii.164). Hallucination and sarcasm merge.

Columbo, the single-minded man of action, is simpler, but just as vividly imagined, and his chivalrous generosity to Hernando in the duel is as winning as his obtuse brutality to the Duchess is repellent. Shirley assigns him some of the most forceful poetry in the play:

Live, but never presume again to marry,
I'l kill the next at th' Altar, and quench all
The smiling tapers with his blood; if after
You dare provoke the Priest, and heaven so much,
To take another, in thy bed I'l cut him from
Thy warm embrace, and throw his heart to Ravens.

(IV.ii.68-73)

Coming, as they do, after the spectacular murder of Alvarez these words are no hyperbole; this threat from a soldier who had earlier interrupted a messenger's fanciful description of his lady with an imperious “No Poetry” carries the deadly earnest of truth.

Hernando and Alvarez are less fully developed, but any undue emphasis upon them would have unbalanced Shirley's careful structure. They are both as heroic as may be within the limitation of their roles, and Hernando's willingness to die in vindication of Rosaura's honor is meant, by the conventional ethics of the genre, to elicit our approval. His stubborn refusal to exchange forgiveness with his dying enemy is merely another sign of the essential barbarism, here ironically turned upon Columbo, which the polished surface of the play throws into relief. Minor characters such as the King, Antonio, and Celinda show the vacillation and polite cynicism of a court that can accept evil with a rebuke to violated etiquette or a shrug of the shoulders and an off-color joke. In one or two places the undertone of wit provides a foretaste of Restoration comedy, which, in such a bloody context, serves strangely to heighten the irony.

The title character is in some respects the most interesting in the play, if only because he is the most mysterious. The Cardinal is first presented obliquely under a cloud of sinister hints and innuendoes but, like Caesar's ghost, the ubiquitous power of his presence is more felt than seen. He is all but silent for the first three episodes of the action, and when he first takes any active part in the fourth it is in a scene of feigned amity and politesse between him and the Duchess. This subdued but unremitting tension is gradually tightened, breaking out only occasionally into open irascibility, and since the churchman moves always obscurely in the shadow of his violent nephew we are never quite sure about the precise degree of his villainy. It is only when we see him planning to take personal revenge upon the Duchess toward the close of the play that his true character emerges in all its blackness. Most critics seem to have felt that this final development constitutes a blemishing inconsistency. Boas (p. 377) speaks disparagingly of the change from “a Richelieu” to “a Borgia,” Bowers of the metamorphosis “from a creation of humanly villainous grandeur to a bogey man to frighten children.”¹³ The criticism may be partly just—certainly there is no mitigating element in the fiendish form the Cardinal's revenge takes—but it fails to account for the deliberate obscurity in which his acts have all along been veiled. His character is not changed in the final episode so much as it is revealed. Moreover, it is not as though the audience were totally unprepared, for Shirley has adroitly planted some clues. We have heard earlier of the Cardinal's “Scarlet Sins,” have noted the diabolistic imagery that clings about his person in the speeches of other characters, and formed some impression of his skillful hypocrisy from his behavior in the trial scene. It is necessary too, since the Duchess's revenge involves craft, that the Cardinal's action be unambiguously vicious if we are to retain our sympathy for her.

Finally, one of the subtler ironies of the play is that the Cardinal, though splendidly contrasted with Columbo in most respects, resembles his nephew in the nearly Marlovian energy of his commitment to a purpose. This energy is, of course, rigorously disciplined to the requirements of policy and intrigue, but it shows itself at moments of crisis—in the Cardinal's aside, for instance, when the King promises that the Duchess shall have justice for the wanton murder of Alvarez: “Now to come off were brave” (III.ii.126). The response contains an element of Satanic dedication, of that evil stamina that can catch the thrill of danger and taste the challenge in a threat. This Iago-like psychology lends credibility to the Cardinal's dying machinations.

The element of mystery that pervades the atmosphere of the play is partly intensified by a poetic style that sometimes departs from Shirley's usual transparency. The same self-consciousness which apparently motivated his revival of a strict simplicity in plot seems to have had the contrary effect upon his verse. Taken at its worst it betrays some of the excesses of metaphysical wit with the logic gone soft. To take an example from one of Celinda's references to Antonio:

I do suspect this fellow would be nibling
Like some whose narrow fortunes will not rise
To wear things when the inventions rare, and new,
But treading on the heel of pride, they hunt
The fashion when tis crippled, like fell tyrants. …

(IV.ii.21-25)

Shirley cannot handle so much metaphorical complexity, and the abstractness of the language, together with the attempt at compression, merely creates the effect of fuzziness. There are moments, however, when the very opaqueness seems dramatically appropriate. In the opening scene two courtiers describe the fundamental situation of the play in an extended nautical conceit. The parts do not quite fit together if one scrutinizes their relationship, and yet the effect of indefiniteness and confusion is precisely what is wanted at the beginning of the tragedy:

1. Lord.
                                                                                                              … the Cardinal …
… sits at helm of State; Count D'Alvarez
Is wiser to obey the stream, than by
Insisting on his privilege to her love,
Put both their fates upon a storm.
2. Lord.
If Wisdom, not inborn Fear make him compose,
I like it; how does the Dutchess bear herself?
1. Lord.
She moves by the rapture of another wheel
That must be obey'd, like some sad passenger,
That looks upon the coast his wishes fly to,
But is transported by an adverse wind,
Sometimes a churlish Pilot.

(I.i.39-50)

It is fitting here to quote one longer passage from The Cardinal in illustration of both the dramatic power and emotional pressure which Shirley can sustain in a soliloquy and the fertility of his verbal invention. Its metaphorical richness might well have commended this excerpt to Lamb, who in his Specimens omitted a sample from the present tragedy, but George Saintsbury remarked its extraordinary quality.¹⁴ The opposing forces of revenge are about to lock in a death grip as Hernando waits nervously for the moment to execute his bloody design upon the Cardinal:

Ha? If the Dutchess in her stragled wits,
Let fall words to betray me to the Cardinal,
The Panther will not leap more fierce to meet
His prey, when a long want of food hath parch'd
His starved maw, than he to print his rage
And tear my heart-strings; every thing is fatall,
And yet she talk'd sometimes with chain of sense,
And said she lov'd me; ha, they come not yet;
I have a sword about me, and I left
My own security to visit death.
Yet I may pause a little, and consider
Which way does lead me to't most honorably;
Does not the Chamber that I walk in tremble?
What will become of her, and me, and all
The world in one small hour? I do not think
Ever to see the day agen, the wings
Of night spread o'r me like a sable Herse-cloath,
The Stars are all close mourners too; but I
Must not alone to the cold silent grave,
I must not; If thou canst Alvarez, open
That Ebon curtain, and behold the man,
When the worlds justice fails shall right thy ashes,
And feed their thirst with blood; thy Dutchess is
Almost a Ghost already; and doth wear
Her body like a useless upper garment,
The trim and fashion of it lost.

(V.iii.57-82)

Such a passage gives the lie to Dryden's mock in “MacFlecknoe,”¹⁵ and illustrates the importance of the qualifying phrase in Dibdin's perverse comment, about a century later, that “in spight of some good writing” The Cardinal is “a very dull thing.”¹⁶ Not only are these verses wonderfully appropriate in their dramatic context; they also betray a splendid flamboyancy of composition. The texture is denser and the rhythm more regularly iambic than Shirley's characteristic mode, an effect achieved at no expense to concreteness and definition. Clearly in The Cardinal, his favorite play among his own works,¹⁷ the poet was striving to recapture some of the weight and dignity of the older school.

But this self-conscious return to what had already been done, however conspicuous its advantages for clarity and directness, implies an obvious and fundamental weakness. Indeed, the very surface excellences of The Cardinal as theater suggest its limitations as tragedy. However brightly it might be made to flower in the Caroline period, revenge tragedy was dying at the root, and its reappearance, even in the hands of the decade's greatest dramatist, reveals hothouse nurture. Paradoxically, nothing illustrates the decadence so well as one of the play's major strengths—the revival of the straightforward Kydian ethic of blood revenge carried out not solely by a Machiavellian monster but by a character of whom we can fundamentally approve; for Rosaura, unlike Vendice or Barabas, shares those conventional sanctions which give a measure of dignity to Hieronimo and Hamlet. Shirley gains a certain force by this conservatism, but it is too dearly purchased, for his predecessors, by their increasingly self-conscious scrutiny of the old ethic, had already subjected it to an irreversible process of qualification and erosion. Shirley's failure to take account of this historical complexity inevitably leads him to philosophical and emotional shallowness, for his facile academicism implies coldness and a failure of involvement. Hamlet moves the passions profoundly because Shakespeare was able to use the revenge form as a vehicle for probing deeply into human suffering and man's relation to the universe; even at their most extravagant Webster and Tourneur had endowed the form with a moral enthusiasm, an ethical intensity which raised it above mere theatricality. Shirley is bound by the conventional ethic of his plot, an ethic never seriously penetrated; his decadence in The Cardinal lies not in the perversion of traditional morality, for he is here more wholesome than contemporaries such as Ford, but in a lack of commitment to the problems which his play raises, a diluting of sincere concern about good and evil. This superficiality reveals itself in our inability to sympathize deeply with the characters and in the insufficiency of their own grasp upon reality. Shirley engages the mind but not the heart.

Again the analogy to detective fiction offers an insight. A “slick” writer substitutes sensationalism for tragedy, because he is more interested in what happens than why. This was Shirley's case, even in his finest play, and he admits as much himself in the prologue: “A Poets art is to lead on your thought / Through subtle paths and workings of a plot. …” The limitation is critical, and one returns to Langbaine's estimate of Shirley as “the Chief of the Second-rate Poets”¹⁸ convinced of its justice. But lest faint praise should damn an excellent play, it is well to remember that splendid second-rateness is not the least of literary achievements. The Cardinal remains not merely the last of the revenge plays but (except for the anomalous case of Samson Agonistes) the last important tragedy of the English Renaissance. It is not altogether unworthy of its illustrious ancestors.

Notes

1. Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy [Princeton, 1940], p. 63.

2. Ibid., p. 228.

3. “James Shirley,” Fortnightly Review (new series), XLVII (April, 1890), 463.

4. Ibid., p. 476.

5. Gosse [Gosse, Edmund. The Cardinal in The Best Plays of James Shirley. The Mermaid Series (London 1888)], p. viii. Gosse, however, is generalizing about all of Shirley's plays.

6. A. S. Downer, The British Drama, A Handbook and Brief Chronicle (New York, 1950), p. 178.

7. T. M. Parrott and R. H. Ball, A Short View of Elizabethan Drama (New York, 1943), pp. 276-277.

8. F. E. Schelling, Elizabethan Drama, 1558-1642 (Boston, 1908), II, 325; and see also Boas [Boas, F. S. An Introduction to Stuart Drama, London, 1946.], p. 376.

9. An exception might be urged against this generalization in Rosaura's promise, never fulfilled, to marry Hernando if he is successful in the revenge against Columbo (see Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, pp. 232-233); but she is very tentative in this scene (IV.ii) and confused by grief. Even if her behavior here be read as a petty deception, it is of a piece with her earlier fault.

10. Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, p. 229.

11. The topical function of this ambiguity is noticed in Section II of this Introduction.

12. See Section III above.

13. Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, p. 234.

14. A History of English Prosody (London, 1908), II, 308.

15. Shadwell is transfixed in a brilliant but untrue couplet:

    Heywood and Shirley were but types of thee,
    Thou last great prophet of tautology.

    (29-30)

    Though the coupling of Shirley's name with Heywood's suggests that Dryden had the drama in mind, it is barely possible that he was referring to John Ogilby's dreary translation of Homer published during the Restoration (see line 102 of the same satire); Shirley is supposed to have helped him with it (see Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, III, 739).

16. Charles Dibdin, A Complete History of the Stage (London, n.d.), IV, 45.

17. See the dedicatory epistle to “G. B. Esq.”

18. Gerard Langbaine, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (Oxford, 1691), p. 474.