SOURCE: Yearling, E. M. Introduction to The Cardinal, by James Shirley, pp. 1-42. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986.

[In the following excerpt, Yearling emphasizes Shirley's simple style in The Cardinal, but cautions against reading the play as a stripped-down revenge tragedy. Though Yearling discounts a strong connection to Archbishop Laud in the character of the Cardinal, she asserts that the key themes of the play are political.]

The sources suggested bear out R. S. Forsythe's description of Shirley as unoriginal in his materials but original in his organisation of those materials (p. 149). No play appears to be the single source of The Cardinal's action. Plot-devices come from the obscurest and from the greatest of Shirley's predecessors. He was a literary playwright whose plays bulge with memories of other men's words and of his own, with incidents and characters drawn, like the masque properties of III.ii, from stock.¹ Yet it has been argued that for the name character of this play we should look to contemporary politics. Forker follows F. S. Boas in suspecting allusions to Archbishop Laud, and develops the comparison between Shirley's villain and Charles's unpopular adviser. He cites attacks on Laud which resemble Rosaura's tirade against the Cardinal (II.iii.139-68); he outlines Laud's character and activities, and explains why Shirley, a firm loyalist, might criticise the archbishop.² It is difficult not to see some reflection of Caroline politics in Shirley's portrayal of an absolutist king dependent on a powerful adviser. Not only was Laud regularly accused of popery but the prologue's allusion to Richelieu (ll. 2-3) could have turned men's thoughts, even in court circles, to Laud, who had already been compared with Richelieu. In 1635, Sir Thomas Roe wrote about the archbishop to Elizabeth of Bohemia: ‘Being now so great he cannot be eminent and show it to the world by treading in beaten paths and the exploded steps of others. But he must choose and make new ways, to show he knows and can do more than others; and this only hath made the Cardinal Richelieu so glorious.’ He then urges Elizabeth to show Laud ‘the way to make himself the Richelieu of England’, by helping her.³ The King of Navarre, threatened by an uprising in Aragon, can be roughly paralleled with Charles, menaced by the Scots in 1641, although Shirley's king, unlike Charles, easily defeats the invaders. And in the month before The Cardinal appeared on stage the Irish rebelled. Furthermore Rosaura's use of ‘the short-haired men’ as bogeymen enforces contemporary application, and Laud's presence would help to explain the play's lurking references to treason and to give contours to the Cardinal's rather nebulous aura of corruption.

The link should not be overstressed. The Cardinal is not primarily a political play. It would in any case have been too late to provide a warning against Laud, who was already imprisoned in the Tower—although earlier the suspicion of an attack on someone so influential could not have escaped the censure of the Master of the Revels. And besides the resemblance to Laud, this Cardinal has a good deal of the wicked adviser and unscrupulous favourite found in earlier plays, and repeatedly in Shirley's own.⁴ The mixture of topical reference and stock character suggests that Shirley again blends his sources, drawing on Laud for some of the Cardinal's characteristics but not focusing on the archbishop. Although The Cardinal is not without political theory,⁵ the play's ultimate emphasis is not on constitutional matters but on individuals engaged in a conflict which, despite their exalted status, is essentially domestic. The villain's crime is not the oppression and pillage of a nation but the murder and attempted rape of his ward.

Besides possible literary and historical sources, a strong influence on Shirley was his audience. Clifford Leech judges the theatre's patrons as partly responsible for drama's decline during Charles's reign. He characterises the Caroline audience as genteel, unreceptive of ideas, and disliking difficulty, especially in verse.⁶ Shirley's prologue to The Imposture, licensed a year before The Cardinal, glories in emasculation:

                                                                                                                        To the ladies, one
Address from the author, and the Prologue's done:—
In all his poems you have been his care,
Nor shall you need to wrinkle now that fair
Smooth alabaster of your brow; no fright
Shall strike chaste ears, or dye the harmless white
Of any cheek with blushes: by this pen,
No innocence shall bleed in any scene.

(V, 181)

The prospect is uninviting. Prologues of the period demonstrate that the Caroline audience was vociferous in its criticism, and only the most stubborn—or financially independent—dramatist would be likely to stand firm against its values. The Imposture's prologue begins by confessing Shirley's anxiety about the play's reception by its ‘judges’. Michael Neill thinks that the willingness to criticise indicates a rather different audience from Leech's collection of genteel dummies. He claims that its members were highly sophisticated, a leisured class which emulated courtiers and their accomplishments. They enjoyed and evaluated plays. In response, the dramatists became more self-conscious and tried to appeal to the mind.⁷ We know that Caroline theatre-goers were not all fools. Sir Humphrey Mildmay shows his discrimination in a liking for ‘that rare playe’, The Lady of Pleasure, and Abraham Wright combines his enjoyment of Shirley with brief critical analyses. He prefers an elaborate plot. The Grateful Servant is ‘well contrived’ whereas The Bird in a Cage is ‘indifferent’ because the plot, although new, is not intricate. Yet plot is not all. Hyde Park is let down by ‘ordinary’ lines, and The Lady of Pleasure is praised for its style despite a plot which fails to please. In play after play Wright adjudicates on plot and lines, criteria which show that his pleasure in the theatre was more intellectual than emotional.⁸

Leech implies that the language of Caroline dramatists is plain and straightforward because the audience was inattentive to complexities of sound. Neill explains things differently. He thinks that Caroline dramatists taught their audience to appreciate clear pure language.⁹ The plain style had long been extolled but not always adopted, especially in drama where high emotion was frequently accompanied by elaborately figurative language. Marston attacks verbal extravagance but himself resorts to rant; other Jacobeans, especially Webster and Tourneur, are far from plain. Shirley however writes without much decoration. His plays include occasional overblown speeches but his writing is notable for being, as he promises in the prologue to The Brothers, ‘clearly understood’ (I, 191).¹⁰ His style might well suit an audience which preferred not to think too hard, but his plainness could appeal equally to the cognoscenti for whom plainness was intellectually popular.

THE PLAY

Wright's stress on the plots and lines of plays tells us what a Caroline spectator might look for in The Cardinal. In his prologue, Shirley gives primacy to the action: ‘A poet's art is to lead on your thought / Through subtle paths and workings of a plot’ (ll. 7-8).¹¹ With a nice touch of self-conscious humour he shares his opinion with the comic servant who criticises the Duchess's wedding play: ‘Under the rose, and would this cloth of silver doublet might never come off again, if there be any more plot than you see in the back of my hand’ (III.ii.44-6). It is as a craftsman that Shirley is most likely to be praised by later critics: he is ‘competent and estimable’ in tragedy, excellent in exposition.¹² Swinburne, even in censorious mood, finds him achieving at worst ‘passable craftsmanship and humble merit’.¹³ Yet Bas, Shirley's most recent biographer, chooses to condemn the importance of plot: The Cardinal's formal economy is linked with superficiality (p. 188); ‘personnages et idées sont sacrifiés à l'action pure’ (p. 200); the interest is in what happens, rather than in why it happens (p. 426).¹⁴ We tend now to devalue—even to avoid—coherent and capable plotting and yet in a literary world which included Rawlins and Harding it is not to be sneered at. And ‘what happens’ is not in this play entirely a shallow matter.

Shirley's last tragedy is a revenge play shorn of many of the macabre accretions of the Jacobean imagination: no skulls, no poisoned helmets or pictures, no exulting in horrible deaths. With unJacobean simplicity, The Cardinal presents a series of events culminating in a murder which is followed by the execution of revenge on the murderer and his patron by their weaker opponents. For the action, Swinburne has undiluted praise: ‘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’.¹⁵ There is little digression but much commentary. Scenes in which the action progresses alternate with recapitulation of salient facts; characters freely discuss the past deeds of others and their own intentions. Two anonymous lords and the Duchess's secretary, Antonio, talk about the Duchess Rosaura and her relationship to Columbo and Count D'Alvarez, whose warlike and courtly natures they contrast. They mutter about the Cardinal's power and are interrupted by news of invasion. After this exposition the Duchess appears in the melancholy mood already described, and her ladies, Valeria and Celinda, repeat the distinction between Columbo and Alvarez. Again news comes of the impending war, and with it the first movement onwards—Columbo will be general in the war, and the Duchess hopes for his death. Columbo's farewell and departure to the front advance the action, but in the main his and Alvarez's interviews with the Duchess recall and expand their antithetical characters. In the act's last moments, the Duchess hints at a plan for persuading Columbo to release her.

Act I is largely talk. The Duchess's quandary is clear, the action minimal. Act II moves rapidly as Rosaura bestirs herself. She writes to Columbo. She receives a reply and when she takes this to the king we learn that Columbo has set her free. She then claims Alvarez, her more attractive suitor, for a husband. Some significant events prepare for later action. At a council of war, Columbo falls out with one of his colonels, Hernando, and dismisses him. The Cardinal is an unwelcome visitor to the Duchess. They round on each other and eventually the Cardinal, left alone, promises revenge. The play's main battle-lines are drawn up. Yet in the midst of this act's developments, two colonels and two captains repeat what we already know about the Duchess and Columbo (II.i.139-50). If the interest lies in what happens, there is still time to anticipate and recapitulate.

In Act III, the courtiers continue to gossip about recent events. We hear of Columbo's victory and while we wait for his return, the Duchess's servants talkatively prepare a play. Then, during the more formal masque which the Duchess has chosen, Alvarez is murdered by Columbo. Again narrative takes over while Columbo tells the court about the Duchess's letter which, as we must have guessed, requested freedom. With Columbo's arrest the action could be complete, but in the interval between Acts III and IV the king pardons Columbo. We are not told how this has come about, although the Cardinal is manifestly responsible. What matters is that Columbo is free and that honest men react with wonder and horror. Act IV resembles Act I in pattern.¹⁶ Hernando and two lords discuss the Duchess, the Cardinal, and Columbo. Shortly afterwards the Duchess again displays a grief which has already been reported, and again receives contrasting visitors, one unwelcome, one welcome. The wrathful Columbo is this time followed by Hernando, who offers pity and help and is, like Alvarez, promised the Duchess's love. Further action is anticipated: Rosaura and Hernando plot the deaths of their opponents, and the Duchess decides to disarm suspicion by feigning madness. Very soon Hernando kills Columbo.

The gossiping lords introduce the last act; they tell us what we know already and a little that we do not know. Now an earlier side-issue, Celinda's bawdy talk, becomes relevant. A series of scenes shows us Antonio and Antonelli stalking Celinda. In such an atmosphere the Cardinal's plan to rape the Duchess before murdering her seems less extraordinary. She has after all been linked with four men—Mendoza, Columbo, Alvarez and Hernando—although Shirley does not mention her sexual allure before the last scene. Hernando's return to court leads to the Cardinal's expected death. His repentance and confession that he has poisoned the Duchess are plausible, for Shirley's wicked characters often repent,¹⁷ and he had earlier planned to poison Rosaura (V.i.92). His offer to save her parallels—ominously—Edmund's dying reparation in King Lear. The antidote which he provides and drinks himself is one of intrigue drama's drugs of convenience. But in the end there is a sting. The remorse is feigned, the antidote a poison, the Duchess a dead woman. The Cardinal's wounds are pronounced ‘not fatal’ so that he can be hoist with his own petard. In truth, the audience cannot have been much surprised. The revenge tradition was by 1641 too familiar for Rosaura's death to come as a shock. Yet the delayed poisoning of the Duchess is still an effective final stroke.¹⁸ In Shirley's previous tragedy, The Imposture, the innocent had survived.

I have dwelt on the plot not simply because Shirley himself considered a play's action important but because it illustrates his customary lucidity and one source of that lucidity—the repeating and discussing of information. There are however some local defects. The major plot weakness is the Duchess's letter to Columbo. She gambles either on his death in battle or on his complaisance, and she is easily exposed. We are too aware that, as Columbo guesses, ‘'Tis a device’ (II.i.128).¹⁹ I am not so sure that the hiatus between Acts III and IV is a failing: Bas thinks we should witness how the Cardinal engineers Columbo's release (p. 206). Yet we know the Cardinal can sway the king. That he can sway him in such a serious matter is ‘wondrous’ but since the focus is on the king's failure of justice it is appropriate that we should share the courtiers' astonishment without hearing the debate which explains away the king's strange decision. We do see what happens without quite seeing why but the effect is not necessarily weak. A further objection comes from Boas. The plot demands a change in the Cardinal's character; at first merely a cunning intriguer, he becomes in the last act a monster who plans rape and murder.²⁰ But it is only when Columbo dies that the Cardinal is encumbered with the task of revenge, and his capacity for evil has been indicated by an almost universal mistrust and the Duchess's direct accusations. The flaw lies rather in his sketchily drawn revenge plot. Shirley does not make it clear whether the visit from the court coquette, Celinda, is what makes him think of rape. In his soliloquy after her departure (V.i.86-99) the Cardinal reveals what he has decided but not how he has come to his decision. And we do not learn whether Celinda is, as Bas assumes (p. 188), the Cardinal's accomplice. In V.ii she draws off Antonio, leaving the Duchess without her usual male protector, but Shirley does not suggest that the Cardinal has put her up to it. The ending too is marred, this time by careful morality. After the Cardinal has confessed to poisoning Rosaura and has produced his antidote, the Duchess unexpectedly confesses:

And must I owe my life to him whose death
Was my ambition? Take this free acknowledgement,
I had intent this night with my own hand
To be Alvarez' justicer.

(V.iii.243-6)

The only reason she owes her life to anyone is because the Cardinal has poisoned her—or so everyone believes. Hers is an oversensitive conscience, given to her so that she also can admit to a kind of guilt, and we can acquiesce more willingly in her death.²¹ Shirley provides the guilty avenger required by revenge tragedy, thereby stretching probability to accommodate what is expected. Yet whatever its deficiencies, the plot of The Cardinal moves clearly and directly to its end, without the convolutions of some of its predecessors.

Shirley, like Wright, felt strongly about ‘lines’. Apart from his remarks in the prologue of The Brothers, he frequently allows one character to tax another with obscurity: ‘your language / Is not so clear as it was wont’ (The Traitor, I.i; II, 100); ‘your language, / … is dark and mystical’ (The Gamester, II.iii; III, 221); ‘I know not how to interpret, sir, your language’ (The Opportunity, IV.i; III, 419). Plain language is often set against the rhetoric of a devious court:

                                                            you talk too fine a language
For me to understand; we are far from court,
Where, though you may speak truth, you clothe it with
Such trim and gay apparel, we, that only
Know her in plainness and simplicity,
Cannot tell how to trust our ears, or know
When men dissemble.

(The Sisters, II.ii; V, 377)

In liking plainness and clarity, Shirley was at one with his times. The sixteenth-century abuse of style with elaborate tropes and figures—which Gabriel Harvey had called ‘curls and curling-irons’—had been remedied by returning to the ‘perspicuitie’ advocated by Ben Jonson and many others.²² It was for simplicity, clarity and elegance that Shirley's contemporaries praised him.²³

Modern critics who, unlike Shirley's contemporaries, are not implicitly congratulating themselves on having struggled free of the previous century's stylistic tangles, are less impressed by a style whose major virtue is clarity.²⁴ Juliet McGrath thinks Shirley's distrust of verbal artifice explains why his plays lack ‘linguistic vitality and variety’. She finds in his ‘stress on clear, concrete language’ the cause of his alleged shallowness: ‘his emphasis on the limitations of language renders him unable either to define intellectual depth in character or to indicate consistently the conceptual motivation behind action’.²⁵ Bas, in a detailed account of Shirley's writing finds worse faults. He demolishes the dramatist's style, accusing it of ‘paresse et … pauvreté’ (p. 376), and singles out The Cardinal for its second-hand imagery (p. 383). If, like Bas, we pick phrases or sentences out of The Cardinal and assess the sprightliness of the English we may agree with him, but if we look at speeches in context, and the play in its social and linguistic setting, we understand some of the reasons for that ‘pauvreté’. And we begin to see that this play is not simply the last Jacobean revenge play: its style is part of a difference which sets it apart from its predecessors.

The basic style of The Cardinal is clear but stiff. Shirley is likely to use verb-noun phrases where an honest verb would be less stodgy. Alvarez fears that ‘'Tis not a name that makes / Our separation’ (I.ii.208-9), although ‘separates us’ would express his fear more vividly and reduce our impression that his lines have been written for him. Perhaps in contrast, the first colonel's ‘While we have tameness to expect’ (II.i.25) fits what it says, but shortly afterwards keenness is unforgivably blunted: ‘The men are forward in their arms, and take / The use with avarice of fame’ (II.i.34-5). The Duchess instead of seeming disturbed ‘expressed a trouble’ (II.i.126); the Cardinal will ‘perform a visit’ (II.ii.1). Often these phrases depend on a neutral verb—‘make’, ‘have’, ‘take’, ‘express’, ‘perform’, words which contribute nothing to the life of a passage and make the lines seem static. Even verbs of motion or anticipation, such as ‘advance’ or ‘expect’, lose their impetus through over-use in phrases. Sometimes the vocabulary is not only predictable but careless. Shirley's ear seems deaf to repetitions. During the play preparations both a servant and the scenery for a masque are troublesome (III.ii.13 and 36). The Duchess's ‘Expect me in the garden’ (I.ii.150) is awkwardly picked up in ‘This is above all expectation happy’ (I.ii.151).

The repetitions sound casual, as if Shirley has a particular word fixed in his head for a while. The stiff and formal language is a different matter. The language of a play, more than that of a novel or a poem, needs to be considered not just in the context of literary language, but in terms of the language used by its audience. At the beginning of the century Sir William Cornwallis complained about his countrymen's false eloquence, and fabricated as an instance, ‘O Signiour, the starre that governs my life in contentment give me leave to interre my selfe in your armes.’²⁶ And the complaints continued. Over fifty years later Dorothy Osborne told of a servant who believed ‘putting pen to paper was much better then plaine writeing’.²⁷ Jacobean and Caroline letter-writing preserves, amongst much that is refreshingly direct and colloquial, a more pretentious style. Dr John Bowle, seeking preferment from the Marquis of Buckingham, ‘could not by any level taken frome my poore indeavors have measured the favor which your Honor graced mee withall’. ‘I am embowldened to entreat yow to doe me soe much favour as to take some … oportunety’ wrote the Earl of Cork to Sir Edmund Verney. Edward Peyton offered up a letter to his sister, Mrs Anne Oxinden, ‘at the alter of your clemency’, and Sir Simonds D'Ewes wrote to Sir Henry Willoughby ‘to implore your favour in vouchsafing mee liberty’ to ‘addresse … affection’ to his daughter.²⁸

Several of these examples illustrate the fondness for replacing a verb with a weaker verb and noun. Yet the last few are from letters whereas Shirley's characters talk in stiff phrases. There is plenty of evidence that social climbers in seventeenth-century England were taught not just to write but to speak formally. The letter-writing textbooks of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were accompanied by conversation manuals. Benvenuto Italian's The Passenger was published in 1612. It provides model dialogues in parallel English and Italian texts. ‘Doe me the favour’, the courteous Alatheus asks his friend, ‘to accept of my intentive desire to serve you’ (p. 371). Eutrapelus is stricken with nouns: ‘the debility of my condition should indeede rather reverence you with a divote silence, then in an outward demonstration of words’ (p. 389). More nearly contemporary with The Cardinal is The Academy of Complements²⁹ which presents as suitable address to a great lord, ‘it will be an addition unto my felicity, if I may approve this present opportunity, to make tender of my service’ (p. 61); a lady is begged ‘to excuse my audacity, and to pardon my temerity’ (p. 77). Nouns proliferate.

Seventeenth-century comments about bombastic style; the more formal passages of upper-class letters; conversation manuals; these all suggest that a stodgy diction, overendowed with nouns, and with phrases instead of single-word verbs, was associated with courtly and polite society and aspired to by its imitators. Compliments were readily linked with the court.³⁰ As my examples show, this formal style was not unique to the Caroline period, but there does seem to be an upsurge of critical concentration on compliment in the 1620's, notably in Shirley's own first play, Love Tricks (1625), in Thomas Randolph's The Drinking Academy (?1626), and in some of Ford's plays. The trouble with The Cardinal is that it reflects, without criticising, the formal mode of genteel Englishmen of the time.³¹ Some of their favourite words are in the play—‘protestation’, ‘vouchsafe’, ‘oblige’, ‘commend’. What is worse, Bas argues that the play contains some of Shirley's most persistently stiff and flat writing. But if we turn to The Cardinal we shall have to modify the impression that Shirley wrote unthinkingly in the bland manner of cultivated Englishmen.

Extended wordy stretches occur in formal passages, such as the exchange between Alvarez and the king (II.iii.17-29), which the king ends with a promise, not to ‘recompense’ Alvarez but to ‘find / A compensation’. IV.i includes a stiff little conversation between king and Cardinal:

KING.
Commend us to the Duchess, and employ
What language you think fit and powerful,
To reconcile her to some peace. My lords.
CARDINAL.
Sir, I possess all for your sacred uses.

(ll. 51-4)

Here are three main features of the bland style: fashionable vocabulary—‘commend’; a phrase for a verb—‘employ / … language’; and meaningless compliment in the Cardinal's line. Such diction prevails in The Cardinal because there is so much courtly conversation. But the play is not uniformly written in this public mode.³² The formal language provides a base from which rise heightened passages. When the characters are disturbed or move into action, either the writing becomes livelier and more figurative or words are pared right down. The most vivid passages come in several of Hernando's speeches, in the Duchess's attack on the Cardinal where she accuses him of winding courtiers' tongues ‘Like clocks, to strike at the just hour you please’ (II.iii.151), and in Antonio's delight when the vengeful Hernando arrives:

I would this soldier had the Cardinal
Upon a promontory, with what a spring
The churchman would leap down; it were a spectacle
Most rare to see him topple from the precipice,
And souse in the salt water with a noise
To stun the fishes; and if he fell into
A net, what wonder would the simple sea-gulls
Have, to draw up the o'ergrown lobster,
So ready boiled! He shall have my good wishes.

(V.ii.105-13)

The formal base is still there—‘what wonder … / Have’—but it is overlaid with lively imagery and strong verbs: ‘leap’, ‘topple’, ‘souse’, ‘stun’.

At the other extreme, Shirley's narrative manner is an efficient vehicle for the action. Here his main aim is to subordinate words to facts, and so his style features compact grammatical devices. In Columbo's description of how he was deceived, zeugma, ellipsis and apposition all help to compress information:

                                                  Read there how you were cozened, sir,
Your power affronted, and my faith, her smiles
A juggling witchcraft.

(III.ii.133-5)

Parenthesis adds a vital detail in the following passage:

                                                                                                                        I sent
That paper, which her wickedness, not justice,
Applied, what I meant trial, her divorce.

(III.ii.163-65)

The Act I exposition is concise; only ‘Alas poor lady’ breaks into the initial parade of facts. Moreover, although the first lord's ignorance is artificial, the first scene of the play seems a model of normal conversation when set against the efforts of some of Shirley's contemporaries. There is none of the larding with ‘Thou knowest’ and ‘it is true’ which encumbers the opening lines of Carlell's The Deserving Favourite (between 1622 and 1629); and in nineteen lines Shirley summarises relationships more complex than his fellow professional Glapthorne describes in the sixty lines of bombast which open Argalus and Parthenia (between 1632 and 1638). At the very least Shirley's writing is a craft of which many Caroline dramatists, amateur and professional, knew little.

Shirley also cuts words away in a crisis. Alvarez's murderers act in silence. They enter as masquers and summon their victim; meanwhile a brief conversation among the watchers threatens danger.

KING.
Do you know the masquers, madam?
DUCHESS.
                                                                                                                                  Not I, sir.
CARDINAL.
[Aside] There's one, but that my nephew is abroad,
And has more soul than thus to jig upon
Their hymeneal night, I should suspect
'Twere he.

(III.ii.87-91)

‘Has … soul’, another grouping of neutral verb and noun, is countered by the jolliness of ‘jig’. The climax which follows is largely visual. Columbo and the masquers ‘bring in Alvarez dead’ and when the king asks where he is, ‘Columbo points to the body.’ The onlookers react at first with questions and exclamations, keeping words to a minimum. Language here is unobtrusive, so that the spectator concentrates on what he sees.

If the wordy style of which Bas complains is never far away, it is accompanied both by a simpler narrative manner and by a more vigorous, figurative diction. Occasionally however the heightened passages may seem overstated. In Act II, Rosaura receives Columbo's reply to her letter. Antonio's description of Columbo's angry response to the Duchess's message (II.ii.28-33) teases Rosaura, creating a spurious excitement. He motivates, but does not entirely justify the frisson of horror in her reaction:

My soul doth bathe itself in a cold dew;
Imagine I am opening of a tomb, [Opens the letter.]
Thus I throw off the marble to discover
What antic posture death presents in this
Pale monument to fright me—

(II.ii.39-43)

Columbo has released the Duchess. The extended imagery of death and the tomb creates an atmosphere of imminent and real disaster and seems gratuitously melodramatic, but with hindsight we may find it has prepared us for Columbo's menace and the death he brings. Similar imagery features in Hernando's soliloquy before the denouement (V.iii.56-83). Since Hernando, concealed in the Duchess's chamber, expects the Cardinal's entry and a chance for vengeance, images of death—hearse-cloth, mourners, ashes, ghost—are not inconsistent with events. The speech modulates successfully between Hernando's thoughts and his feelings and has a strong emotional unity which overcomes the stock diction.³³

In general, Bas is right about Shirley's style. His commitment to the noun and to inert verbs results in a rather static verse. But Bas's selective method gives a flatter impression of Shirley's style than the dramatist deserves. If we attend to speaker and occasion we meet a variety of modes appropriate to the events of the plot. We are also driven to consider larger issues of tone. In this play a remarkable amount of the dialogue is talk by courtiers and about courtiers. Whereas the Jacobeans—in particular Webster—presented abnormal events taking place in a diseased and abnormal society, Shirley depicts an ordered court peopled in the main by well-intentioned, morally sane, if rather passive characters. Forker accuses the court of ‘vacillation and polite cynicism’ (p. lxvii) but his judgement ignores the attitudes of the two lords and the loyalty of Placentia and of Antonio, whose questionable jokes are excused as a reaction to the depressing atmosphere of the Duchess's household and whose seduction by Celinda shows his lack of sophistication. The language reflects the difference between Shirley and most of the Jacobeans. Jonson believed that ‘Wheresoever, manners, and fashions are corrupted, Language is’ (Wks., VIII, 593). Webster developed a vein of rich, dark, obsessive imagery for his rich, dark, obsessive characters. Shirley's society is not on the moral alert but neither is it especially corrupt and its speech is fittingly undynamic but clear, neither perverse nor inspired. There is however one strong Jacobean connection—with Beaumont and Fletcher. They also use everyday language and Fletcher in particular has a ‘command of the courtier's conversation’.³⁴ Undoubtedly they anticipated and influenced Shirley's Caroline mode. Yet there is a difference of tone. Beaumont and Fletcher lay more stress than Shirley on evil and unnatural passions; they create with their ‘emotional rhetoric’ ‘a world apart’, a world of extremes.³⁵ Shirley's catastrophe erupts with unexpected horror into an ordinary world and it is because evil is not the norm that what happens is significant. It may not even be too rash to note that in contemporary England terrible and inconceivable events had begun to strike a comfortable and sophisticated court.

Shirley's skilful plotting has been generally acknowledged; his contemporaries praised his language and even his detractors admit its clarity. But his virtues in plot and style are closely related to his alleged defects. Character is at times a function of the plot; the plain style does not achieve the depth and complexity for which Shakespeare is admired. Shirley seems to be weak in just those areas where the great Elizabethans and Jacobeans are most powerful: characterisation, imagery and theme. The people are often types; the weak king, the villainous favourite, the blunt soldier, the courtier, the virtuous heroine—the latter frequently set against a lady of easier morals. The imagery is competently marshalled from the Jacobean store but does little to stir the mind or the emotions. Muriel Bradbrook complains that Shirley borrows ‘the whole of the Revenge convention except that living core which was its justification, the imagery, the peculiar tone, the poetry’.³⁶ And as a revenge play The Cardinal is little more than an action. Shirley does not make us think about the morality of revenge or about its effect on the avengers. One of the harshest comments on this play comes from Clifford Leech who, after praising Shirley's competence, cites The Cardinal as an example of ‘the nullity of Caroline tragedy’.³⁷

If we accept all these negatives we are bound to consider The Cardinal not worth reading or seeing twice. Yet if again we look at what happens in this play, instead of treating it as an anaemic Jacobean tragedy, we may find more to interest us. Bowers argues that The Cardinal does consider the ethics of revenge (p. 231), but it is rather late in the revenge tradition to expect much further illumination of the morality of vengeance, an ambiguous topic even in its heyday. Shirley deploys the plot-motifs of revenge, the masque of death, the lustful villain, the devious poisoning, but despite its four avengers his play's themes and ideas have little to do with vengeance. Instead, Shirley touches on political issues. Current political thought was inevitably much occupied with monarchs and their advisers. One of the most powerful scenes in The Cardinal tackles the Cardinal's misuse of his authority. In Act II, scene iii, the Cardinal in disappointed rage attacks the Duchess and is in turn anatomised. Rosaura's denunciation is sincere and purposeful. She directs the Cardinal to begin his correction ‘at home’ and lists his villainies. An enemy of the people, a corrupter of the king and his court, he even injures the church he was installed to defend:

                                                                                                    'tis your
Ambition and scarlet sins that rob
Her altar of the glory, and leave wounds
Upon her brow; which fetches grief and paleness
Into her cheeks; making her troubled bosom
Pant with her groans, and shroud her holy blushes
Within your reverend purples.

(ll. 157-63)

She begs him to reform ‘before the short-haired men / Do crowd and call for justice’ (ll. 167-8). The pressure of contemporary events reinforces the Duchess's pleading but her speeches already have a strength and eloquence which deepen the play's effect. For a moment her personal battle spreads to the world outside. Critics have found in Shirley a ‘serious attitude toward life and … severe morality’,³⁸ and these speeches reveal a man deeply and movingly affected by wrong. Even the Cardinal, who has come to domineer, stays to applaud the Duchess's spirit.

Elsewhere Shirley draws attention to the king's role. Catherine Belsey has argued that ‘in order to be a play about revenge, The Cardinal has to become a play about a crisis of justice’. The play is royalist, and presents the king as absolute, as the source of justice; he dominates in the key scenes (III.ii and the second half of V.iii) and cannot be considered a weak character since his behaviour is confident, his main speeches authoritative. The plot demands that his justice fail, since without Columbo's release there would be no need for revenge; Hernando undertakes a personal struggle for social justice in a world deserted by the divine justice which should have emanated from the king. Yet at the end of the play the king replaces Hernando as the dominant figure and blithely reminds us that kings must be on their guard. The action and the royalist theme are at odds.³⁹ I agree that the king is prominent in this play but I am not persuaded that plot confounds theme. The king's divine right is invoked in III.ii.108 and III.ii.196 although the second allusion is the Cardinal's and sounds like ironic flattery. If the king's power is absolute, his bent is conciliatory. The second lord's reaction to the Aragonian aggression is to wonder ‘What have they, but the sweetness of the king, / To make a crime?’ (I.i.62-3). When the king speaks to Hernando of the quarrel with Columbo he insists that ‘we must have / You reconciled’ (II.iii.1-2); he plans to compensate Alvarez for giving up Rosaura (II.iii.27-9); and he asks the Cardinal to forgive the Duchess: ‘I heard you had a controversy with / The Duchess, I will have you friends’ (III.i.49-50). Once Alvarez is dead, the king again sends the Cardinal to the Duchess ‘To reconcile her to some peace’ (IV.i.53). His initial reaction to the murderer is merciful:

We thought to have put your victory and merits
In balance with Alvarez' death, which while
Our mercy was to judge, had been your safety.

(III.ii.235-7)

He uses his authority, sensibly enough, to smooth over offences to others, but what he cannot ignore is an affront to himself. He may forgive Alvarez's murder but not ‘the offence, / That with such boldness struck at me’ (III.ii.207-8). Thus in his central speeches of judgement against Columbo, the king becomes syntactically both subject and object (III.ii.182-91, 200-205, 206-15, 235-40); he is both judge and victim. Forker accuses him of accepting evil ‘with a rebuke to violated etiquette’ (p. lxvii) but his reaction is not as morally frivolous as Forker's charge implies for, as Lawrence Stone explains (p. 232), physical attack at court was regarded as ‘an exceptionally grave offence’ since it could so easily put the monarch himself at risk. Columbo's imprisonment is for an assault on majesty, and thus his release is a defeat of the king's absolute authority, a defeat befitting a king whose favour is in his own words ‘indulgence’ (III.ii.209, V.iii.295). His final speech in the play once more centres on his own injury, not on the Duchess's death:

How much are kings abused by those they take
To royal grace! Whom, when they cherish most
By nice indulgence, they do often arm
Against themselves.

(V.iii.293-6)

Here there is an interesting pattern as kings move from the passive (‘are kings abused’) to the active mode (‘they take’, ‘they cherish’, ‘they … arm’) to suffering object (‘Against themselves’). In this context the banal last line, ‘None have more need of perspectives than kings’, becomes more relevant. Again the syntax makes its own point; the sentence is about kings but ‘kings’ is not unequivocally the grammatical subject. The absolutism is qualified, and for good reason. The king's misjudgements in enforcing the engagement to Columbo (III.ii.182-91), in freeing Columbo and in trusting the Cardinal as Rosaura's guardian precipitate the tragedy. He is indeed more important in this play than are the justicers in many earlier revenge plays, but his significance is not blurred by the plot. The central story is of the Duchess but she is destroyed because the king lacks ‘perspectives’. Her fate illustrates on the private, personal level the political theme which informs the play, that of all people an absolute monarch cannot afford to be wrong.⁴⁰

Such thematic material as The Cardinal contains has more to do with politics and justice than with revenge. Yet although the atmosphere is not that of the Jacobean revenge plays, there are some signs of a more disordered world which seem to belong to the darker settings of Shirley's predecessors. Not only does the play have a background of military strife but there are warnings of treason. Early in the play, the first lord remarks of the Aragonian offensive.

This flame has breath at home to cherish it;
There's treason in some hearts, whose faces are
Smooth to the state.

(I.i.70-2)

We expect the treachery in court to have some link with the smooth faces and plotting hearts of the main plot, but the hints are not taken up, although treason, treachery and betrayal lurk in the play. The Cardinal is believed to control spies (I.i.19-20). Columbo accuses Hernando of being either a coward or a traitor (II.i.36-7), and the accusation rankles. Hernando later tells the Duchess: ‘If you will call me coward, which is equal / To think I am a traitor, I forgive it’ (IV.ii.150-1). The Duchess suspects she may be betrayed (IV.ii.144-5), and Hernando fears betrayal (V.ii.77, V.iii.123), but both use the term in a weakened, personal sense. Treason is part of the metaphoric structure which supports Shirley's plot.

It is not misleading to speak of a metaphoric structure since, despite the plainness and lack of poetic richness, Shirley uses his imagery thematically to point up the play's main oppositions and connections. Appropriately in a play which begins with the topics of love and war, Shirley applies the standard comparison between them. Columbo is first characterised as ‘The darling of the war, whom victory / Hath often courted’ (I.i.23-4), Valeria remarks that ‘war and grim- / Faced honour are his mistresses’ (I.ii.55-6), and he himself thinks of kissing women as ‘court tactics’ (I.ii.107). Military imagery accompanies him through the play, whereas the Duchess is forced to play a passive role. Publicly she speaks of ‘A peace concluded 'twixt my grief and me’, while privately regretting that ‘I must counterfeit a peace, when all / Within me is at mutiny’ (I.ii.16 and 27-8). Even after planning revenge she pretends, to protect herself, that the Cardinal has given her ‘sorrow so much truce’ (IV.ii.304).

There are many allusions to the bleeding wounds of love and war; the strong characters actively inflict bloody wounds and their opponents bleed. For Alvarez, who protests that he ‘would not shrink to bleed / Out [his] warm stock of life’ (II.iii.25-6), hyperbole becomes fact. In contrast Columbo sheds blood, dealing out ‘bloody execution’ (III.ii.213); his soul ‘is purpled o'er, and reeks with innocent blood’ (IV.ii.45). Relationship is defined in terms of blood (II.iii.106) as too is rank (I.ii.201), and even the colour of blood is significant. In the Cardinal's red-robed presence is figured the blood which spills from his ambitious plans. There must be a strong temptation to any designer to exploit the play's dominant red and purple.⁴¹

The imagery enhances the play's emotional antitheses. The Duchess's side stands for love and peace. There are metaphors of growth: ‘Now the king / Hath planted us, methinks we grow already’ (II.iii.60-1). A comparison may derive from religion—the Duchess's fame ‘stands upon an innocence as clear / As the devotions you pay to heaven’ (II.iii.117-18); or from natural beauty—the Duchess is ‘Serene, as I / Have seen the morning rise upon the spring’ (II.i.117-18). Opposing the gentle vein are warfare and violence, the spilling of blood, disease, fire, storm and devilry. Yet despite their appeal to the feelings, the images ultimately have an intellectual rather than an imaginative effect. The allusions to the devil, for instance, lack resonance. This is because the Cardinal, to whom they usually apply (as at III.i.74 and V.iii.54), is a limited embodiment of evil. ‘Devil’ tells us what to think of him, but his ‘cloven foot’ (V.iii.165) does not chill us as does Iago's. The metaphorical world of The Cardinal does not stretch our imaginations, nor does it provoke a gut response to good and evil; it works as an aid to moral clarity, providing a coherent figurative background to the plot and characters.

The characters are, in many of Shirley's plays, his weakest point but in The Cardinal we come across some unexpected variation. Richard Gerber writes of a grand style being given to tiny people, of villains who are villains in a small way.⁴² Initially this criticism seems true of the Cardinal. His pride is repeatedly stressed; he is disliked and distrusted; but his prime aim in the early parts of the play is to advance his family by marrying his nephew to a fortune. The complaints about his pride and villainy are inadequately borne out by his actions, although his practice of lurking in the background when he enters a room may substantiate the accusations of spying. When he turns rapist and murderer, he is motivated by the straightforward desire to avenge his nephew. Yet as he moves from venial plotting to an intellectual pleasure in planning rape only to find himself sensually aroused by his own vengeance, we may detect once again this play's atmosphere of disturbance and evil rising out of the ordinary. The Cardinal's moment of lust contrasts with the mental control of a man whose reaction to his nephew's crime is ‘Now to come off were brave’ (III.ii.112), and who reacts in the same way to his own death:

                                                                      now it would be rare,
If you but waft me with a little prayer,
My wings that flag may catch the wind.

(V.iii.279-81)

His main opponent seems for much of the play a firm character. The Duchess is burdened with our memories of the Duchess of Malfi and of Bel-Imperia but she has a considerable presence. She stage-manages her release by Columbo; she confronts the Cardinal boldly, sending a nervous Alvarez to wait in the garden; she turns the Cardinal's attention from her own follies by denouncing his crimes. Although her feigned madness alternating with apparently genuine insanity derives from Hamlet, Shirley gives it his own gentle, rather pretty stamp. But the plot works against the Duchess's characterisation. She who was so positive becomes passive, dependent on Hernando's help. The change is highlighted by the structural similarity between I.ii and IV.ii: in I.ii, the Duchess is in control during her interviews with Columbo and Alvarez; in IV.ii, she is weak and defeated. Columbo hectors her and Hernando takes over her task of revenge. Although the Cardinal grows in villainy he is matched with no mighty opposite, for as he begins to show his ‘cloven foot’ the Duchess, who had earlier displayed a spirit ‘to tame the devil's’ (II.iii.170), crumples. Her collapse removes tension from the central conflict. Yet the combination of submission and insistence on choosing her own husband is interesting. Three years after The Cardinal, Lady Anne Halkett began a struggle to be matched with the man of her choice but eventually, Stone records, ‘made a practical prosaic match of the most traditional kind’. Stone regards her story as typical of the seventeenth century—a woman caught between the tradition of female submissiveness and new ideas of independence and personal decision.⁴³ The Duchess is not unlike Anne Halkett.

The Duchess's choice in marriage is puzzling. Alvarez is a courtier, a type often criticised by Shirley.⁴⁴ Columbo and the Cardinal make an issue of his courtliness. Columbo despises this ‘curlèd minion’ (III.ii.137), and the Cardinal compares the two suitors:

Because Alvarez has a softer cheek,
Can like a woman trim his wanton hair,
Spend half a day with looking in the glass
To find a posture to present himself,
And bring more effeminacy than man
Or honour to your bed; must he supplant him?

(II.iii.109-14)

Although prejudiced, these remarks must exaggerate the truth; they are unlikely to be a flat lie. Interestingly, the Restoration cast list preserved in the Leeds University copy of Octavo shows that in the early 1660s Alvarez was played by Kynaston shortly after that actor had given up the female roles for which he was famous. Less biased commentators also hint at Alvarez's weakness. The first lord praises his wisdom in not insisting on his prior claim to the Duchess, but the other lord is doubtful. Alvarez has ‘tamely’ renounced the Duchess (I.i.30): ‘If wisdom, not inborn fear, make him compose, / I like it’ (I.i.43-4). Alvarez confirms his suspicions. In his first interview with the Duchess, he outlines the dangers, from king, Cardinal, and Columbo, that confront himself and Rosaura. ‘Then you do look on these with fear’, she responds (I.ii.217). He protests that his concern is for her, but he does fear. In II.iii, he watches with trepidation the Cardinal's approach. ‘Take no notice of his presence’, advises the Duchess, ‘Leave me to meet and answer it’ (ll. 66-7). He obeys. She is the dominant partner in birth and personality. Here we are reminded of the Duchess of Malfi. Alvarez's submission and lack of eagerness to stand by her make us uneasy, especially when his offer to give her up to Columbo is preceded by thoughts of himself:

I am a man on whom but late the king
Has pleased to cast a beam, which was not meant
To make me proud, but wisely to direct
And light me to my safety.

(I.ii.188-91)

The Duchess is not thinking of safety, nor later is Hernando, who leaves his ‘own security’ to avenge Alvarez (V.iii.67). Even Valeria's no doubt politic praise of Alvarez's sweet composition, speaking eyes and natural black curls (I.ii.37 and 39-42), accords with the Cardinal's criticism. So does Alvarez's speech. His first appearance is marked by impersonal compliment (I.ii.161-3) and a balanced and antithetical syntax redolent of courtliness and cautious premeditation (I.ii.167-71 and 177-9). He is an unusual choice for one of Shirley's heroines. Does Shirley here couple courtliness with timidity, and hint that the Duchess loves unworthily?

Consider the man she rejects. Columbo is a blunt soldier, a type favoured by Shirley, and often set to his advantage against a courtly foil. Shirley breaks down the usual associations by setting Columbo against Hernando, another soldier, as well as against Alvarez. At first he seems stock. Valeria's remark that ‘His talk will fright a lady’ (I.ii.55) promises someone resembling Beaumont and Fletcher's Memnon in The Mad Lover, but when Columbo appears he breaks that mould:

Madam, he kisseth your white hand, that must
Not surfeit in this happiness—and ladies,
I take your smiles for my encouragement;
I have not long to practise these court tactics.

(I.ii.104-7)

This is polished enough, with a touch of old-fashioned formality in the inflected ending of ‘kisseth’. Celinda admires his expert embrace.⁴⁵ Columbo is not a villain. The first lord praises him, finding even his pride appropriate (I.i.23-7), and even after Alvarez's murder, the same lord is prepared to make excuses for Columbo (IV.i.38-9). He has the stage soldier's hasty temper, as one of his own colonels concedes (II.i.140), and yet he does not seem wholly unjustified in attacking Hernando as a coward since Hernando's strategy is to sit tight until the enemy eat and drink themselves into a stupor. His summoning of a council of war implies deviousness since he already knows of a plot to betray the city they are menacing and thus he needs no advice. But the council is less a test of Columbo's supporters than a device prompted by the plot's demand for a quarrel with Columbo which will give Hernando a personal motive for revenge. In the same scene Columbo's brusque ‘No poetry’ in response to Antonio's fanciful description of the Duchess (II.i.117-20) is the kind of reaction Shirley usually gives to favoured characters.

In the context of Shirley's attitudes to courtiers and soldiers, Columbo and Alvarez reward scrutiny; the courtier plays the juvenile lead, the uncourtly soldier is a ‘villain’. The contrast is not thoroughly worked out. Alvarez is too empty to interest us for long, Columbo is not a bad man. Yet there is just enough complexity, intended or not, to make us wonder about the Duchess's judgement in choosing Alvarez, and her justification for treating Columbo as she does. His revenge becomes vindictive when he threatens to destroy all future lovers but he has perhaps some grounds for his murderous reaction against Alvarez. We do begin to question our assumptions about avengers and their victims. Although Shirley does not concentrate our attention on the moral issues of revenge we are left with some thinking to do.

The play which Shirley reckoned ‘the best of my flock’ (Dedication, l. 11) has ever since had a mixed reception. In 1671, Edward Howard ranked it among ‘the highest of our English Tragedies’, but a century later Charles Dibdin found it ‘a very dull thing’. Praise of The Cardinal is, on the whole, qualified: the play ‘can hold its own with any but the greatest masterpieces of that age’ (Parrott and Ball); it is ‘a notable romantic tragedy’ (Nason); in ‘construction and actability’ it is one of the best of the Elizabethan revenge plays (Bowers). Schelling points to what may be the dramatist's main drawback when he comments that Shirley has ‘the shortcomings of the moderate man’.⁴⁶ For The Cardinal could be seen as the work of a man too much in control, perhaps even with too sane and untroubled a mind.⁴⁷ Shirley is an elegant craftsman; a swift, well-organised plot progresses with the help of a clear style, a competent varying of register and a simple but coherent structure of imagery. Theme, characterisation and images lack the imaginative excitement of the Jacobeans. Yet the ambiguous treatment of Rosaura's lovers and the embryonic political themes of the play invite an intellectual response, and our feelings as well as our minds are impressed by this representation of sudden disastrous events exploding in a relatively civilised and well-behaved court. For all its Jacobean ingredients, The Cardinal is a tragedy of its own times.

ORIGINAL STAGING AND THEATRE HISTORY

Although we have no contemporary drawing or description of the Blackfriars Theatre, enough detail of its location and dimensions is revealed in legal documents for several recent researchers to have evolved precise, if conflicting, ideas of the theatre's size and structure.⁴⁸ The plays known to have been performed at Blackfriars give us some evidence about the stage equipment.⁴⁹The Cardinal, like other Blackfriars plays, calls for relatively simple staging. The entrances at the beginning of Act I indicate two doors in the back of the stage; two lords enter ‘at one door’, Antonio ‘at the other’. The theatre could accommodate flights, and entrances through a trapdoor, but The Cardinal makes no use of such spectacle although the servants discuss whether a masque complete with descending throne would be preferable to their play. Hernando's eavesdropping in Act V needs hangings for concealment, and the theatre's bell rouses the court at the catastrophe. The play makes no special demands, though T. J. King considers a tree necessary for the garden (p. 77). John Freehafer argues that by 1635 the private theatres were occasionally using perspective scenery but none of his evidence comes from Shirley's plays.⁵⁰

The simple staging is not primitive staging. The King's Men were a sophisticated company, used to performing at court, and their dramatist was the author of The Triumph of Peace, the most spectacular masque of the Caroline period. The Cardinal shows some signs of spectacle deliberately avoided. Alvarez is killed during a masque, but by masquers whose entertainment is rudimentary, who lead their prey offstage, and who return bearing his body. Instead of focusing on the murder, Shirley shows reactions to the murder. He does include an onstage duel and Hernando's rescue of the Duchess from rape but he stages the final deaths unflamboyantly. Neither the Cardinal nor the Duchess seems to suffer much from taking poison. Their deaths are rapid and quiet. There is no stage direction to describe Hernando's death and so we can only speculate about whether his is a quick suicide or a more spectacular struggle. Suicide seems not to be in character, and Hernando's reference to ‘sport’ (V.iii.181) echoes his pleasure in the duel (IV.iii.16). His opponents are the foppish Antonelli and the Cardinal's servants, whom we may expect to overwhelm him with numbers rather than spirited sword-play. Shirley does not always seize opportunities for display. Disaster comes swiftly and suddenly. The stagecraft, as does the language, presents a fairly normal world with brief intrusions of violence. Indeed for a dramatist whose main output was Fletcherian tragicomedy the comparative calm of The Cardinal's moments of crisis is notable.

The play's later stage history is patchy. The existence of an alternative prologue which, with its allusion to the court's sojourn in York, could not have belonged to the original performance, suggests a revival in 1642.⁵¹ After the Restoration, The Cardinal seems to have been popular for a while, perhaps—G. E. Bentley suggests (V, 1087)—because of the actor Hart, who had earlier gained his reputation in the part of Rosaura. Sir Henry Herbert records a performance on 23 July 1662 by the King's Company.⁵² The cast for this revival—or for the performance on 2 October 1662—may well be that recorded in the copy of Octavo held in the Brotherton Library at Leeds University; the list includes Theophilus Bird (Second Lord) who was dead by 1663, and Walter Clun (Antonio) who was murdered in 1664. Several of the cast were boy actors before 1642. Charles Hart now played Hernando, one of a long series of major roles which included Mosca, Hotspur, Brutus, and Othello, a part which he took over from Nicholas Burt (the Cardinal). Columbo was given to Michael Mohun, who was later to play Volpone, Face, and Iago; Alvarez was Edward Kynaston, who had recently graduated from female roles. William Wintershall, noted as a comedian, took the minor part of First Lord, and the remaining roles attributed went to less well-known actors: Blagden (King), Marmaduke Watson (Alphonso), Bateman (Antonelli). Shortly afterwards we hear from Pepys, for whom the play seems to have improved on acquaintance. On 2 October 1662 he was cool about The Cardinal: ‘a tragedy I had never seen before, nor is there any great matter in it’. 24 August 1667 found him won over with the help of the acting: ‘After dinner, we to a play and there saw The Cardinall at the King's House, wherewith I am mightily pleased; but above all with Becke Marshall.’ And on 27 April 1668 his approval was unqualified: at the King's playhouse he ‘saw most of The Cardinall, a good play’.⁵³

The great gap that follows is interrupted by a play on which The Cardinal had a small influence, Sophia Lee's Almeyda, Queen of Granada, performed at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane on 20 April 1796.⁵⁴ The advertisement tells us: ‘The story of Almeyda is wholly a fiction; and the incident which produces the catastrophe the only one not my own.—The deep impression made on me, long since, by a similar denouement, in an old play of James Shirley's, determined me to apply it.’⁵⁵ There are hints of other ingredients from The Cardinal. The Moorish Almeyda, who has been hostage to the King of Castile and loves his son, is returned as heir to Granada on her father's death. She has to rejoin the Moors while her lover Alonzo is at war. Abdallah her uncle plans to force her to marry his son Orasmyn. Alonzo is captured while secretly visiting Almeyda and she, mistakenly believing him dead, runs mad. Abdallah tries to persuade her to abdicate but is led to confess his own crimes. When Almeyda then faints, Abdallah, pretending she is poisoned, sends for an antidote which he drinks first. Abdallah, unlike the Cardinal, has knowingly killed himself in destroying his victim.

There have been few twentieth-century productions. The New York Public Library holds a programme for a performance by senior students at the Feagin School of Drama and Radio, in November 1948. For four performances The Cardinal hit Fifth Avenue. More important is the 1970 production at Farnham's Castle Theatre, the predecessor of the Redgrave Theatre. Malcolm Griffiths's production of The Cardinal with Maev Alexander as the Duchess and Brendan Barry as the Cardinal roused conflicting reactions. At worst Shirley was described as a dramatist who wrote ‘at the fag end of a blood-and-thunder tradition’; at best came claims that the play had ‘the violence of Marlowe, the robustness of Jonson and the poetry of Shakespeare’.⁵⁶ What the critics pitched on was the very element of spectacle which I have argued is played down; the duel, attempted rape, suicide and most notably the murder of Alvarez.⁵⁷ There are two reasons for such an emphasis. In the context of other revenge tragedies Shirley's seems subdued but as one play in a season of calmer productions it is bound to seem typically bloodthirsty. Also stage effect was accentuated by one major peculiarity of the production. Alvarez's death did not occur offstage. Instead, during the wedding entertainment, he was invited to stand in a magician's vanishing box. He did not vanish but was apparently electrocuted. Presumably this coup de théâtre was added because the play was felt not to be startling enough in its first catastrophe, but inevitably its inclusion affects not just one scene but the tone of the whole play. My own memory of this production is of an honest revival which did not quite test the play's own merits. It would have been interesting to see whether Shirley's central scene, with the emphasis less on the murder than on its aftermath, was strong enough in its original form.

The most recent appearance of The Cardinal is also the most unexpected. In January 1979, the Magic Theatre of San Francisco staged The Red Snake by Michael McLure, who updated ‘a near-forgotten, unplayable late Renaissance play by James Shirley called The Cardinal.’⁵⁸ Michael McLure, John Lion the director, and Peter Coyote, who played the Cardinal, are all prominent in experimental and controversial theatre; the Magic Theatre Company specialises in new works, often by new dramatists. What did this group of modern talents do with The Cardinal? The play seems to have been pared to its plot. Cardinal, king, Duchess, Columbo and Alvarez (the last two shortened to Collum and Dalv)⁵⁹ are bound in the same basic relationships except that the play ‘begins and ends with’ the Cardinal's ‘erotic advances on the equally calculating Duchess’ who has ‘a will to power that equals any of the men's’ and ‘a healthy, well-indulged sexual appetite’.⁶⁰ Modern slang is substituted for Shirley's dialogue, not with entire success. Bernard Weiner complains about the uneasy blend of styles: ‘McLure's characters are often into spouting philosophy and poetic observations about love, death and everything in between, so that their constant descent into scatology seems forced, overworked and, on several occasions, ludicrous.’⁶¹ The theatre's press release of 20 December 1978 suggests a stronger political and social intent than emerges from Shirley's play: The Red Snake ‘examines the brutality and corruption of sex, religion, politics, money and war’. These themes were reinforced by the setting, described by Weiner as an ‘abstract icy cave’ which gradually became blood-stained, and the costumes, at first white, later black and red. Although McLure fundamentally altered The Cardinal it says much for Shirley's play that a modern dramatist could find himself so ‘greatly attracted to Shirley's play’ that it inspired a new direction in his own writing.⁶²

Notes

1. See Forsythe and the notes to the present edition. The other five of Shirley's Six New Playes are full of anticipations and memories of The Cardinal.

2. Boas, p. 376; Forker, pp. xxxvii-xlvii. Forker notes the possible influence of H8, II.iv and III.i, where Wolsey confronts Katherine.

3. C.S.P.D., 1635, pp. viii-ix. In the years preceding the writing of The Cardinal many cases are recorded of men arraigned for accusing Laud of popery, e.g. 's 1633-4, p. 207; 1634-5, p. 22; 1638-9, pp. 213-14. For a general study of Caroline drama's interest in politics see Frank Occhiogrosso, ‘Sovereign and Subject in Caroline Tragedy’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1969).

4. See Forsythe, pp. 96-7. Official reaction against The Cardinal's Conspiracy in 1639 (Bentley, Profession, pp. 180-1) indicates why Shirley could not earlier have risked this particular villain.

5. See pp. 19-20.

6. Shakespeare's Tragedies and Other Studies in Seventeenth Century Drama (London, 1950), pp. 161 and 178.

7. ‘“Wits most accomplished Senate”; The Audience of the Caroline Private Theaters’, S.E.L., XVIII (1978), 341-60.

8. G. E. Bentley, ‘The Diary of a Caroline Theatergoer’, M.P., XXXV (1937-8), 61-72 (p. 72); Arthur C. Kirsch, ‘A Caroline Commentary on the drama’, M.P., LXVI (1968-9), 256-61.

9. Leech, p. 178; Neill, p. 356.

10. See pp. 11-12.

11. For Shirley's comments on his plots, see prologues to The Brothers and The Doubtful Heir (I, 191; IV, 279).

12. Alfred Harbage, Cavalier Drama, (New York 1936), p. 165; Jakob Schipper, James Shirley. Sein Leben und Seine Werke (Vienna and Leipzig, 1911), p. 355. See also Bas, pp. 187-9, and Forker, pp. lxii-lxv.

13. The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, ed. Edmund Gosse and Thomas Wise, 20 vols. (London, 1925-7), XII, 340. In 1885, Swinburne discouraged A. C. Bullen from editing Shirley's plays (The Swinburne Letters, ed. Cecil Y. Lang, 6 vols., New Haven, 1959-62, V, 95, 96, and 118).

14. See also Love's Cruelty, ed. John F. Nims, Garland Renaissance Drama (New York and London, 1980), p. lxi.

15. Complete Works, XII, 363.

16. Emrys Jones (Scenic Form in Shakespeare, Oxford, 1971, p. 69) cites the argument that this kind of twofold structure was common in Elizabethan drama.

17. See Forsythe, p. 71.

18. Flaviano pretends conversion in The Imposture, II.i (Forsythe, p. 71), but in the earlier play the audience is alerted to falsehood. Cf. Dekker's Match Me in London, III.i (Forker): Don John eats grapes with Valasco, pretends to be poisoned and sends for an antidote. Valasco drinks and falls—but Don John has himself been deceived with a sleeping potion instead of poison.

19. A ‘disingenuous’ stratagem, review of Gifford, The American Quarterly Review, XVI (1834), 103-66, p. 163; see also Boas, p. 375.

20. Boas, p. 377; also Bas, p. 252.

21. Shirley liked to save the truly innocent—Albina in The Politician, Eubella in Love's Cruelty.

22. Harvey, Ciceronianus, introd. H. S. Wilson, trans. C. A. Forbes, Studies in the Humanities, 4 (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1945), p. 63. Jonson (Wks., VIII, 622) echoes John Hoskins's Directions for Speech and Style (1590), ed. H. H. Hudson (Princeton, 1935), p. xxvii.

23. See the verses by Edmund Colles, John Fox, Philip Massinger, and John Jackson (Gifford, I, lxix, lxxiii, lxxix, and lxxxviii-lxxxix). The Cardinal does however have some murky patches (Gifford, V, 300n.).

24. But see Felix E. Schelling, Elizabethan Drama 1558-1642, 2 vols. (Boston and New York, 1908), II, 326 (‘limpid and perspicuous’); W. H. Williams, Specimens of the Elizabethan Drama (Oxford, 1905), p. 418 (‘graceful, fluent, and perspicuous’).

25. ‘James Shirley's Uses of Language’, S.E.L., VI (1966), 323-39 (pp. 332 and 339). Cf. Nason's praise of The Cardinal's intellectual unity (p. 346).

26. ‘Of Complements’, Essayes (1600-1), ed. Don Cameron Allen (Baltimore, Md., 1946), pp. 90-1.

27. The Letters of Dorothy Osborne to William Temple, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Oxford, 1928), p. 91 (September 1653).

28. The Fortescue Papers, ed. Samuel R. Gardiner, Camden Society (London, 1871), p. 128 (May 1620); Letters and Papers of the Verney Family, ed. John Bruce, Camden Society (London, 1853), p. 125 (July 1626); The Oxinden Letters, 1607-1642, ed. Dorothy Gardiner (London, 1933), p. 105 (July 1635); The Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir Simonds D'Ewes, ed. James O. Halliwell, 2 vols. (London, 1845), II, 294 (July 1642).

29. Philomusus (John Gough), augmented 7th ed. (1646).

30. Ralph Verney's tutor wrote to his protégé in 1633: ‘what else the court may alter in others, it hath not made you soe little reall as to measure a friend by a compliment’, Memoirs of the Verney Family During the Civil War, ed. Frances P. Verney, 2 vols. (London, 1892), I, 124-5.

31. Shirley may himself have perpetrated a compliment book. Wits Labyrinth by ‘J. S.’ (1648) was tentatively attributed by Malone (in his copy, now in the Bodleian Library) to Shirley.

32. One counter to the formality is Shirley's characteristic colloquial contraction (wo', sho', 'em). See Cyrus Hoy, ‘The Shares of Fletcher and his Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon (IV)’, S.B., XII (1959), 91-116 (p. 109); Ronald M. Huebert, ‘On Detecting John Ford's Hand: A Fallacy’, The Library, XXVI (1971), 256-9.

33. Forker, p. lxix, and George Saintsbury (A History of English Prosody, 3 vols., London, 1906-10, II, 308) praise Hernando's speech.

34. Clifford Leech, The John Fletcher Plays (London, 1962), p. 137.

35. Eugene M. Waith, The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher (New Haven, 1952), pp. 24-5.

36. Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge, 1935), p. 266; see also Baskerville, p. 1577.

37. Shakespeare's Tragedies and Other Studies in Seventeenth Century Drama, p. 40.

38. Nason, writing of Shirley's London comedies, p. 287; see also S. J. Radtke, James Shirley: His Catholic Philosophy of Life (Washington, D.C., 1929).

39. ‘Tragedy, Justice and the Subject’, 1642: Literature and Power in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Francis Barker and others (Colchester, 1981), pp. 166-86.

40. See pp. 5-6 for some contemporary historical parallels.

41. See the account of The Red Snake on pp. 29-30.

42. James Shirley, Dramatiker der Decadenz, Swiss Studies in English, XXX (Berne, 1952), p. 58.

43. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (London, 1977), p. 307.

44. For instance in Honoria and Mammon.

45. But Columbo's revenge offends court etiquette (Richard Morton, ‘Deception and Social Dislocation: An Aspect of James Shirley's Drama’, Renaissance Drama, IX, 1966, 227-45, p. 233).

46. Howard, preface to The Womens Conquest, sig. A3v; Dibdin, A Complete History of the English Stage, 5 vols. (London, 1797-1800), IV, 45; Thomas M. Parrott and Robert H. Ball, A Short View of Elizabethan Drama (New York, 1943), p. 277; Nason, p. 361; Bowers, p. 230; Schelling, Elizabethan Drama, II, 428.

47. Bas, p. 341, thinks Shirley was too fundamentally optimistic and orthodox about man and his destiny to write tragedy.

48. Richard Hosley, ‘A Reconstruction of the Second Blackfriars’, The Elizabethan Theatre I, ed. David Galloway (Toronto, 1969), pp. 74-88, thinks the stage was relatively small. See the counter-argument in David Whitmarsh-Knight, ‘The Second Blackfriars: The Globe Indoors’, T.N., XXVII (1972-3), 94-8.

49. See T. J. King, Shakespearean Staging, 1599-1642 (Cambridge, Mass., 1971). King queries the methods and findings of Irwin Smith, Shakespeare's Blackfriars Playhouse (London, 1966).

50. ‘Perspective Scenery and the Caroline Playhouses’, T.N., XXVII (1972-3), 98-113.

51. The prologue is assigned to The Cardinal in Shirley's Poems, etc. (1646) but attached to The Sisters in Six New Playes. See Appendix II.

52. Herbert, p. 118. The details of the actors who may have played in this production are taken from E. Nungezer, A Dictionary of Actors (New Haven, 1929), and John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus, ed. Montague Summers (London, n.d.). The Leeds copy also names, in a different hand, eight Caroline actors, but since three of those named (John Rice, Nicholas Tooley and John Honyman) had either left the company or were dead by 1636 the list must simply be an uninformed guess. The other actors listed are Robert Benfield, Thomas Pollard, John Lowin, Joseph Taylor, and Richard Robinson. Oct. records that Thomas Pollard spoke the epilogue.

53. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. R. C. Latham and W. Matthews (London, 1970-83), III, 211-12; VIII, 399; IX, 177.

54. Genest, The English Stage, 1660-1830, 10 vols. (Bath, 1832), VII, 238-40.

55. London, 1796.

56. Eric Shorter, Daily Telegraph, February 1970; Farnham Herald, February 1970.

57. Daily Telegraph, Surrey and Hants. Newsletter, Farnham Herald, all February 1970.

58. Doug Shaffer, San Francisco Bay Guardian, 1 February 1979.

59. Valeria becomes Val, Celinda Seely, and Hernando Hern.

60. San Francisco Bay Guardian, 1 February 1979.

61. San Francisco Chronicle, 15 January 1979.

62. San Francisco Chronicle, 8 January 1979.

Abbreviations

Shirley: Editions Collated

Gifford: The Dramatic Works and Poems of James Shirley, ed. William Gifford and Alexander Dyce, 6 vols. (London, 1833).

Gosse: James Shirley, ed. Edmund Gosse, Mermaid Series (London, 1888).

Forker: The Cardinal, ed. Charles R. Forker (Bloomington, Ind., 1964).

Other

Bas: Georges Bas, James Shirley (1596-1666): Dramaturge Caroléen (Lille, 1973).

Beaumont and Fletcher, Wks.: The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, ed. A. Glover and A. R. Waller, 10 vols. (Cambridge, 1905-12).

Bentley: Gerald E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols. (Oxford, 1941-68).

Bentley, Profession: Gerald E. Bentley, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare's Time, 1590-1642 (Princeton, 1971).

Boas: F. S. Boas, An Introduction to Stuart Drama (London, 1946).

Bowers: Fredson Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 1587-1642 (Princeton, 1940).

C.S.P.D.: Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series.

Forsythe: Robert S. Forsythe, The Relations of Shirley's Plays to the Elizabethan Drama (New York, 1914).

Herbert: The Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert, ed. Joseph Q. Adams (New Haven, 1917).

Jonson, Wks.: Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1925-52).

Nason: Arthur H. Nason, James Shirley, Dramatist (New York, 1915).