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James Shirley: Decadent or Realist?

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SOURCE: Spinrad, Phoebe S. “James Shirley: Decadent or Realist?” English Language Notes 25, no. 4 (June 1988): 24-32.

[In the following essay, Spinrad argues that Shirley was not merely an imitator of well-established Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic conventions.]

The scholar attempting to do a critical examination of James Shirley's tragedies will find the preliminary research both frustrating and unusually easy. Almost nothing has been written. Biographic and bibliographic speculation abounds, to be sure, and attention has been paid to the comedies,1 but the tragedies are usually relegated to final chapters in book-length surveys of Renaissance drama—chapters whose titles or introductions generally include the word “decline” or “decadence.” Indeed, most critics seem content to view Shirley as a derivative slave to the plots and stage conventions of Shakespeare, Fletcher, Tourneur, and Massinger—and a poor one at that.

What I would like to suggest is that Shirley's use of convention in his tragedies is not so much an imitation as an inversion and sometimes a deliberate parody, that there is a new cynicism in his plays which denies the efficacy of facile conversions and solutions, and that the apparent futility of the characters' actions is itself a comment on the nature of a decadent society that has forgotten the difference between dramatic gestures and practical realities.

The famous last scene of The Cardinal, for example, is not merely the Alfred Hitchcock type of double-bluff that it is often held to be; it is also a final commentary on instant repentance. Both Rosaura and the Cardinal have staged false repentances earlier in the play; now, as the Cardinal lies dying (he thinks) from stab wounds, he apparently repents in earnest, tells Rosaura that he has poisoned her, and offers her an antidote, taking a sip of it himself to demonstrate its bona fides. But consider realities: do evil hypocrites generally repent this quickly? If we have just seen King Lear or one of Fletcher's or Massinger's plays, we may say yes; or we may refuse to believe that a playwright would expect us to believe in a false repentance of a previous false repentance. In either case, we would be wrong; and Rosaura, who has seen the same plays that we have, is also wrong. In fact, she has not been poisoned before, and the “antidote” itself is the poison. Furthermore, it turns out that the Cardinal's wounds are not fatal after all, so that his grand, dramatic, evil gesture becomes only a stupid mistake. There is no Shakespearean nobility involved—or intended—in these last deaths of the play.

Again, in The Maid's Revenge, we are given the good-sister/bad-sister conflict that may remind us at first of Cordelia and her two evil sisters, or of the equivalent folkloric tradition. But consider realities: how long can a person be subjected to attempted rape, abduction, and murder, to watching her beloved being killed, to being cast out of her family as though she were the perpetrator instead of the victim of these evils; how can she suffer so, without eventually losing her passive trust in the goodness of all things? Even in Shirley's source, Berinthia's mind snaps under the strain, and she kills her beloved's killer; but in the source, Berinthia repents and is executed by the law, and she never harms her sister Catalina, who is providentially struck by lightening.2 In Shirley's play, Berinthia not only commits both murders but exults in them, indeed laughs heartily while Catalina writhes in agony, and finally kills herself to escape the law (5.3: pp. 64-66).3 Meanwhile, Castabella, sister to Berinthia's dead lover, shows up as another stage convention: the young woman disguised as a page in order to follow her beloved. Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Massinger had wrung oceans of tears from their audiences with pathetic figures such as these; but Castabella arrives just in time to see Sebastiano killed—by Berinthia, of course. Not only does this tear down still further the original image of innocent Berinthia, but it makes Castabella's disguise seem rather like an exercise in futility. As in The Cardinal, we have seen some of the innocent corrupted and the rest either mowed down in the carnage or left standing around wondering what the point of it all was.

A pattern may be emerging here. To examine it more closely, let us turn to The Traitor, a play in which Shirley wields his axe especially against Shakespeare, but also against all the other playwrights whom he is supposed to be imitating.4

In the main plot of The Traitor, Lorenzo is plotting to overthrow his cousin, the Duke, and hopes to enlist the noble Sciarrha in his schemes. The Duke himself lusts after Sciarrha's sister Amidea, and, playing into Lorenzo's hands, sends him to arrange matters. Lorenzo, of course, is delighted; we all know from The Revenger's Tragedy how brothers react to such threats against their sisters' virtue. How Amidea herself reacts, I shall discuss in a moment when we come to the convention of the chastity test; but first let us look at the espionage convention.

One of the commonest ways of indicating corruption at court is to have a full complement of spies behind the arras. Usually, the villain is behind the arras and the hero in front, but in The Traitor the situation is reversed, and the suspense is nullified before the scene begins. In the confrontation scene between Amidea and the Duke, for example (3.3), Amidea's other brother, Florio, escorts her into the room and hides behind the arras to watch. Then Sciarrha escorts the Duke in and hides behind the same arras, which by now is becoming a bit crowded. In fact, lest we forget how crowded it is, Sciarrha reminds us in an aside: “Here I'll obscure myself. Florio? 'Tis well” (3.3.9). A brief bit of byplay before the serious business of the scene begins—but it is so reminiscent of bedroom comedy that it casts a faint air of absurdity over the ensuing heroics, especially since the Duke shows little surprise when both Sciarrha and Florio emerge from behind the arras afterward to shake his hand and congratulate him on his repentence.

Shortly afterward, when the Duke and Sciarrha have repented of their evil intentions—although neither repentance will survive the next act—Sciarrha urges the Duke to hide behind the arras while Lorenzo is led into a discussion of his evil intentions. Unfortunately, Lorenzo enters just as Sciarrha is finishing his instructions to the lump behind the arras; and disregarding the convention that all such whispered conversations must go unheard by the other characters, Lorenzo turns to the audience and asks, “Whom talk'd he to?” (3.3.164). We now know that Lorenzo will be putting on an act of virtue for the Duke-behind-the-arras, and when the scene is over, the Duke and Lorenzo are fast friends again, while Sciarrha is left looking like a fool.

Both these travesties, of course, might indicate only a bungling attempt on Shirley's part to use the convention seriously—except that on two other occasions he uses a comic character to ridicule the convention itself. Depazzi, one of Lorenzo's henchmen, is a coward, a bumbler, a court version of the country clown totally overwhelmed by court intrigue. Even as the play opens, all he wants to do is go back to his safe home in the country before he is killed. But during his stay in the court, he has obviously seen several performances of Hamlet. Before he will begin any conversations indoors, he insists on examining every arras in the room, and even though there never is anyone behind the arras, his paranoia remains unabated. In case the audience has missed the point, Depazzi makes a direct reference to the closet scene in Hamlet: “Sirrah, sirrah, sirrah, I smell a rat behind the hangings” (3.1.27). So even before the double arras-trick in Amidea's chamber, we are led to regard the convention as comic.

Furthermore, between Depazzi's investigation of the arras and Sciarrha's own arras-trick, Shirley gives us yet another parody of Hamlet: a play that Sciarrha puts on to “catch the conscience” of the Duke. It is a banquet masque, in which Lust capers with the Pleasures until Death and the Furies come in and carry him off. Up to a point, the Duke seems moderately interested in the play, asking questions about the characters much as Claudius and Gertrude ask questions at Hamlet's play. Even Lorenzo becomes mildly alarmed at one point, remarking in an aside, “This is too plain” (3.2.34). But he need not worry. After the entrance of Death, the Duke loses interest and begins to flirt with Amidea; so at the end of the masque, when Sciarrha asks, “How does your highness like this dance?” (45), the Duke replies, “My eyes so feasted here I did not mark it / But I presume 'twas handsome” (46-47). What a letdown. The message, of course, is that in old-fashioned plays, where nobility is inherent in human nature and every man has a conscience, it is all very well for Claudius to jump up, call symbolically for lights, and run off to grapple with his sense of right and wrong; but in real life, villains rarely take alarm so easily—or recognize themselves in amateur theatricals. So if the arras tricks and warning play are meant to be copies of Shakespeare, Shirley has certainly gone about his copying in a strange way.

The traditional critic may here point out that perhaps Shirley might have parodied Shakespeare, who by now was old-fashioned, but he certainly did not play such tricks with the more recent playwrights such as Fletcher and Massinger. Therefore, let us look at one of the favorite devices of these recent playwrights: the chastity test.

The test may work in several ways but, essentially, a woman is offered an illicit bedding, either with a promise of reward or under a threat of death. She responds with indignation, an appeal to the tempter's fear of hell, a counterthreat to kill herself, or, in a few cases, a pretended acquiescence so bawdy that she disgusts the tempter. If the offer is a test, she is praised and rewarded; if it is a serious proposition, the tempter is so impressed that he repents of his lust—and his repentance usually lasts for the rest of the play.5

Poor Amidea has to take the test three times, twice from her brother and once from the Duke: a multiplicity that annoys some critics. But all the tests are different, and, alas, all of them seem futile. In the first test, Sciarrha really wants to find out whether she is chaste, and announces his intention to the audience before he begins. Amidea seems at first not to understand what he is saying, answering him only with puzzled questions until her final apprehension of his words leads her to a more direct question: “What, for heaven, be the duke's whore?” (2.1.19). The very fact that her answers are all questions shows that the two are speaking different languages; notably, Schiarrha does not understand her any more than she understands him until she replies with the standard dramatic threat to take her own life (2.1.255-59), at which point he allows her to have passed the test. But Amidea is more practical than dramatic in this scene. Once she has established her purity, she tells Sciarrha to send the Duke to her, adding that she will take care of the problem in her own way.

The scene is somewhat lacking in high poetry, as critics who prefer Measure for Measure or The Revenger's Tragedy point out.6 But there are reasons for this, too. First, Amidea must save the major portion of her theatrics for the confrontation scene; second, we must know that Sciarrha has no reason for thinking Amidea impure, and that in fact he trusts her enough to agree to her request; and third, we must trust Amidea enough to believe that what she does is usually based on common sense and a concern for the right, rather than on hysteria. This will be important in the third test.

The second test is the bedroom confrontation that Florio and Sciarrha watch from behind the arras. Here, as the Duke approaches, Amidea first pleads to the better side of his nature (which we suspect does not exist), and then threatens to kill herself, stabbing herself in the arm to show that she is in earnest. We see the high poetry here—but we also see the practical situation of a man watching his intended bed partner apparently bleeding to death all over the bed. The Duke's ardor is naturally cooled; Amidea has averted rape, murder, and even the necessity of her own suicide; and when Florio and Sciarrha come rushing out from behind the arras with congratulations for both actors, everyone—including the Duke—assumes that the chastity test has worked as it should in a play, and that the Duke has really repented. As we shall see in the next act, he has not; he has just been carried away by the theatricality of the scene.

The third test is a mass of reversals and double-bluffs. By now, the Duke has decided that he still wants Amidea. Meanwhile, Sciarrha has killed Amidea's unfaithful lover of the subplot and is therefore under sentence of death, so Lorenzo suggests that Sciarrha may save his life by playing pander again. Besides, Lorenzo adds, once Sciarrha is dead, the Duke will rape Amidea anyway. So although everyone should know better by now, Sciarrha goes off to tempt his sister once again. This time, he threatens to kill her if she will not save his life.

Now, we have already seen that Amidea is no coward, so when she pleads with Sciarrha not to commit another sin, we know that she is more concerned with his soul than with her own life; and we also know that she will immediately look for a practical solution to the problem. Furthermore, we can understand why a woman who has already passed two chastity tests with flying colors might expect not to be tested a third time. Thinking that Sciarrha is serious this time (and indeed, since Sciarrha has not confided in the audience as he did the first time, we may think him serious as well), Amidea pretends to agree in order to save her brother's soul while she thinks of a way to save his life. Sciarrha immediately flies into a rage and kills her anyway. As she dies, he explains querulously that what he had meant to do was give her the opportunity to reject the Duke's proposition, at which point he would have killed her at the peak of her virtue and so sent her directly to heaven. In other words, Amidea would have died no matter how she responded, so this long series of chastity tests to which she has been subjected, and the virtue that she has displayed in all of them, have had no results whatsoever.

Again, I suggest that the sense of futility that this scene provokes is caused not by Shirley's bungling of a convention, but by his deliberate multiple use of the convention when it is most inappropriate. Virtue, we find, must be its own reward, since no other rewards are forthcoming. And as with the arras-trick, the chastity test has its counterpart in a subplot. Cosmo, in a burst of heroic friendship, has agreed to hand over his beloved Oriana to his best friend, Pisano. (Note, by the way, that yet another favorite theme of Shirley's predecessors is being questioned here; the nobility of the friends is offset by the damage that their “heroic” gestures do to the women.) In a long interview with Oriana, Cosmo urges her to love Pisano, and Oriana obviously thinks that she is being put through a chastity test. First she goes along with what she calls a “jest”; but, finally, she responds in hurt indignation: “Unkind / And cruel Cosmo, dost thou think it possible / I can love any but thyself?” (2.2.105-07). Having passed the test, she can now expect to be welcomed into Cosmo's arms—but instead, he pushes her toward Pisano, and even has the effrontery to tell her, “Go cheerfully … to him” (111). Poor Oriana, like Amidea, simply cannot win; she goes off in a state of almost catatonic despair, somehow having been forced into an unwelcome bed even though she has passed the test. Such tests themselves, Shirley seems to imply, may be good theater, but in real life, they usually turn out to be senseless at best and immoral at worst.

Trick after trick is undercut this way in The Traitor. But even such undercutting of convention is itself a convention; Shakespeare himself uses it in Hamlet, one of Shirley's chief targets in The Traitor. Throughout the play, Hamlet is tempted, both by external forces and by his own impulsive nature, to act like a revenge-play hero, and each time he draws back, until the audience becomes impatient with him and almost prefers the stilted and artificial players of the play-within-the-play. But then Shakespeare shows us a proper revenge-play hero: a man ready to avenge his father's murder without question, delay, or proof; a man ready to kill an unarmed person by trickery and to “cut his throat in the church” if necessary; a man who rants in true revenge fashion and never notices that he is ranting; a man, in short, who is everything that we want Hamlet to be, given the conventions of a revenge play. Of course I am referring to Laertes. But we do not applaud Laertes; only Claudius applauds Laertes; and if we have been following the play carefully, we may suddenly discover that we have become a bit uncomfortable with the assumptions of the revenge tradition. In real life, we may have more moral decisions to make than we normally see portrayed on the stage. Do we really want Hamlet to be Laertes?

Fletcher, as we might suspect, in turn rebelled against Shakespeare's conventions. Fletcher's isolated heroes become what modern literature might call “schlemiels”—victims of rather than fighters against a corrupt society, as if all the power had shifted into the hands of the corrupt. And Shirley seems to have continued this tradition in some ways, making his innocent characters either helpless victims or potential criminals themselves. But Fletcher, Massinger, and others of the so-called cynical Jacobean generation apparently did not go far enough for Shirley; they still trusted at least in the power of female virtue to reform, and expected the reformation to last.7 To Shirley, living in the midst of the beautiful people at Queen Henrietta Maria's court, such innocent faith may have seemed not only innocent but dangerous if applied to real life. Just as revolution is too serious a matter for tricks behind the arras; just as crooked politicians will hardly take fright at a play about the fall of princes; so the chastity test is a cruel bit of subterfuge used more to torture than to test, and, when repeated, indicates an assumption that no one can pass the test if she takes it often enough. Furthermore, since the test is thus reduced to a parlor trick, it can have no more effect on a corrupt man than a warning play can. In fact, any repentance achieved by threats lasts only until the threat is removed. And in real life, no one—not even a woman—can stay unaffected by corruption.

It would be interesting, then, to see more critical attention paid to Shirley, not as a decline from the tradition of Shakespeare or Fletcher, but as a voice in his own right. The plots alone are as full of surprises as the Hitchcock films that I referred to earlier, but the plays are hardly escapist. Rather, the cynicism of Shirley's questions about the expectations of Caroline society may give us some insights into our own. After all, we demand the same “realism” that Shirley demanded; we no longer believe in good guys and bad guys, or the triumph of virtue, or the reform of crooked politicians—do we? Is it because we know better? Or is it only a matter of fashion? Will we someday appear in a last chapter called “Decline” or “Decadence”? Or was Shirley right after all? Studying James Shirley may, in the long run, help us study ourselves.

Notes

  1. See, for example, Richard Morton, “Deception and Dislocation: An Aspect of James Shirley's Drama,” Renaissance Drama 9 (1966): 227-45; and Juliet McGrath, “James Shirley's use of ‘Language,’” SEL 6 (1966): 323-39. For typical condemnations of Shirley's “imitativeness,” see esp. Alfred Harbage, Cavalier Drama (New York, 1936); Robert S. Forsythe, The Relations of Shirley's Plays to the Elizabethan Drama (New York, 1914); M. C. Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy (1935; rpt. Cambridge, 1960).

  2. John Reynolds, “Antonio and Berinthia,” in the second book of The Triumph of God's Revenge Against … Murder (London, 1622), STC 20942. Albert Howard Carter reproduces this story, and gives a good analysis of Shirley's changes from the original, in his Garland edition of the play (New York, 1980). See especially pp. xxxii-xxxiii.

  3. Carter's edition does not number the lines consecutively through a scene.

  4. Regents Renaissance Drama Series edition, ed. John Stewart Carter (Lincoln, 1965).

  5. Nancy Cotton Pearse discusses the history of and variations on this convention in her John Fletcher's Chastity Plays: Mirrors of Modesty (Lewisburg, 1973).

  6. See, for example, Bradbrook, pp. 264-665; and Joseph W. Donohue, Jr., Dramatic Character in the English Romantic Age (Princeton, 1970), ch. 5.

  7. Middleton may be excepted from this group of rejected predecessors, and in fact may have given Shirley a precedent to follow. In The Changeling, Beatrice-Joanna makes a mockery of Alsemero's chemical chastity test, and in the midst of her Shamela-like protestations about her “vartue” has to be reminded by DeFlores that she is a murderer. However, Middleton's women tend to be rotten from the beginning when they are bad (cf. Women Beware Women); they seldom begin as victims and end as culprits like Shirley's Berinthia and Rosaura.

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