SOURCE: Clark, Ira. “Shirley's Social Comedy of Adaptation to Degree.” In Professional Playwrights: Massinger, Ford, Shirley, and Brome, pp. 112-54. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992.

SHIRLEY'S REVERENCE FOR DEGREE

“I never affected the ways of flattery: some say I have lost my preferment, by not practising that Court sin.”¹ So claimed Shirley in 1639, finally dedicating his second play and first tragedy, The Maid's Revenge (1626), “come late to the impression.” This oft-noted asseveration was made by a poet-playwright who could make some claim to privilege (far more than Brome, perhaps more than Massinger, distinctly less than Ford), enough to display a coat of arms. One wondrous season, 1633-34, he was identified as a gentleman, a member of Gray's Inn, and “one of the Valets of the Chamber of Queen Henrietta Maria”; he championed the court's interest in drama against William Prynne's diatribe, Histriomastix; he enjoyed the applause of the Master of the Revels when The Young Admiral was licensed and that of the king when the play was presented at the regal birthday celebration; with premier architect Inigo Jones and foremost composers William Lawes and Simon Ives he was commissioned by the inns of court to produce a lavish masque, The Triumph of Peace, in reconciliatory praise of and diplomatic advice to the monarch; and he based The Gamester on a plot supplied by the laudatory Charles I. He must have been considered a likely successor to aging laureate Ben Jonson. Instead it was William Davenant who was graced with “her majesty's servant” on title pages after The Temple of Love (1635), who produced the regal masques and the “state poem” Madagascar (1638) with its complement of commendations by courtiers, who maintained close relations with amateur courtly dramatists and was appointed theater manager by the crown, who was granted an annual pension of £100 and virtual laureateship by his royal master in December of 1638, and who was knighted. So it has been surmised that Shirley, by reflecting contemporary mores and personages in such amiably satiric plays as The Humourous Courtier (1631) and The Ball (1632) and by joining the Irish theater from 1636 until he came to the King's Men in 1640, parted ways with palace corruption and refused to seek court preferment.² This hypothesis fits neither some important dates nor the contour of Shirley's career. His career exhibits consistent veneration of degree and of court; it appears to have been a quest for courtly approval and support unmatched by any other Caroline professional playwright.

According to sketchy accounts, Shirley was prepared to pursue contacts among the courtly gentry and nobility. Born in 1596 to a middling London family, he was educated at the Merchant Taylors' School, perhaps a while at Oxford, and at St. Catherine's Cambridge. After his brief service as the pastor and schoolmaster at St. Alban's in Hertfordshire, in 1625 he began writing about two plays per year until the closing of the theaters in 1642. Then he served the royalist cause. Afterward he printed a volume of poetry (1646) and produced an occasional commendatory poem, preface, or school interlude; mainly, however, he resumed teaching (he wrote two elementary grammars) until he died in 1666.³

Many worthies to whom Shirley offered dedications or who commended him remain but tentatively identifiable beyond the status of esquire, knight, baronet, captain, barrister he assigned to them. At times initials, names, or abbreviations which duplicate those of identifiable social, poetic, or dramatic associates may conceal other people. Often those identified are barely characterized by their family heritages or their offices. Even so, enough is known to establish Shirley's pattern of esteeming and seeking preferment from those who were well placed. Indeed, in his 1652 dedication of The Sisters (1642) to one “Most Worthily Honoured” William Paulet, Esq., he laments that “COMPOSITIONS of this nature have heretofore been graced by the acceptance and protection of the greatest nobility, (I may say princes;) but in this age, when the scene of dramatic poetry is changed into a wilderness, it is hard to find a patron to a legitimate muse.” “[i]n this unequal condition of the time” the fortunes of many of his nation's betters have sunk beneath even the fortunes of poets. Fortunate worthies were more plentiful during Shirley's rise through the later 1620s and early 1630s. His elegies addressed the relatives and friends bereft by the deaths of Lord Abergavenny's eldest son, Sir John Beaumont's son, and the Viscount Savage; his verses praised the second Earl of Essex's daughter, portrayed the ideal beauty of the Countess of Ormonde, and blessed the marriage of the Earl of Thenot's daughter.

Shirley found noble dedicatees for many plays. One notable addressee was the wealthy, influential privy councillor Francis, the Earl of Rutland, a great grandson of Sir Philip Sidney; his protection Shirley begged in 1630 for The Grateful (or Faithful) Servant (1629). Another was George Lord Berkley, known for his learning as well as for his noble birth; to him Shirley offered the 1637 printing of The Young Admiral (1633). Abraham Wright, an Anglican divine who kept a notebook on Caroline productions, astutely observed more than the fact that The Grateful Servant has a “plot well contriued and smooth” and verses typically “full of complement”: “I beeleeue [it was] purposely so studied by him for to take ye court.”⁴ Whether or not The Young Admiral was also designed to woo the court, Wright considered it “A very good play, both for lines and plot, ye last beeing excellent,” and a modish one.

Shirley's efforts to win recognition from the elite were exceptionally well received. On licensing The Young Admiral for production, on 3 July 1633 the Master of the Revels, Sir Henry Herbert, praised the tragicomedy “for the improvement of the quality, which hath received some brushings of late. When Mr. Sherley hath read this approbation, I know it will encourage him to pursue this beneficial and cleanly way of poetry, and when other poetts heare and see his good success, I am confident they will imitate the original for their own credit, and make such copies in this harmless way, as shall speak them masters in their art, at the first sight, to all judicious spectators.” Helping to assure the play's success, Herbert arranged for its presentation as part of the birthday celebration for Charles I; both the king and the queen liked it.⁵ Later that season, on 6 February 1634, Charles found The Gamester “the best play he had seen for seven years.” His approbation is scarcely surprising since this comedy elaborated “a plot of the king's, given [Shirley] by mee” (Sir Henry Herbert).⁶ Shirley's works were also hearalded by amateur courtly poets and playwrights bonded by their pursuit of advancement. Besides earning Massinger's commendation, The Grateful Servant gained the praise of William Habington, the acclaimed author of the Castara volume and The Queen of Aragon, an accomplished tragedy sumptuously mounted at Whitehall; of Thomas Randolph, a son of Ben whose plays won success at his university, Cambridge, and at court; and of Robert Stapylton, a playwright later knighted for loyalty to his king. Among the many commenders of The Wedding (played and printed in 1629) were Habington, Ford, the “king's poet” and playwright Thomas May, and a host of lesser would-be courtiers.

The climax of Shirley's wondrous season was the lavish production of The Triumph of Peace. This masque was presented by all the inns of court at Whitehall Banqueting House on the Duke of York's birthday, 3 February 1634, and again on the king's command at the Merchant Taylors' Hall on 13 February.⁷ Its initial presentation was virtually mandated when Charles suggested that an “outward and splendid visible testimony of a Royal Masque” would demonstrate the legal establishment's loyal “affections” despite the infamous “Vtter-Barrester of Lincolnes Inne” who dedicated Histriomastix to the “4 famous Innes of Court.” William Prynne's polemic must have seemed to be directed against the offended royal couple as well as against the stage. At least the Star Chamber condemned the Puritan for defaming the queen and her ladies in waiting, who in 1632 had taken roles in Walter Montague's trend-setting The Shepherds' Paradise. Because of Shirley's popularity with the benchers he was a likely choice to invent the masque. And he had positioned himself well by attacking Prynne in a commendatory poem for Ford's Love's Sacrifice and by sarcastically dedicating The Bird in a Cage (1633) to the prisoner in the Tower, before the Star Chamber issued its savage sentence.

Probably because the London theaters were closed, Shirley next joined the Master of the Revels for Dublin, John Ogilby, in trying to establish an Irish stage. This post was conspicuously involved with noble patronage. The impresario and the playwright tried to place dramatic productions at the center of a court culture surrounding the Earl of Strafford and Lord Deputy of Ireland, Sir Thomas Wentworth. Shirley honored his putative elite audience with poems and offerings. In 1638, for example, he dedicated The Royal Master (1637) to the Earl of Kildare, the most highly esteemed lord of Ireland. A host of commenders, apparently Irish as well as English and including Ogilby, graced this play's opening pages. And Shirley's special New Year's epilogue extolled Charles, the royal master of the realm, and Charles's most powerful lord, the “never enough Honoured” Strafford, the patron for whom Shirley and Ogilby produced The Royal Master. It was Strafford whom Shirley commemorated for recovering from dysentery and gout in 1640, and it was Strafford's son whom Shirley chose for the dedication of the “Never Acted” The Court Secret when it was printed in 1653. Shirley courted and exhorted the Irish gentry and nobility in the prologues to eight plays by others (including Fletcher, Jonson, and Middleton) that were produced while he was there. Once again begging a larger audience of elite patrons, he vents his frustrations and proclaims his hopes in “A Prologue there to the Irish Gent,” addressing the gentry and nobility as well as naming the play. He opens frustrated about the failure of his hope that literature civilizes:

We know at first, what black and generall curse
Fell on the earth; but shall this Isle be worse?
While others are repair'd, and grow refin'd
By Arts, shall this onely to weeds be kinde?
Let it not prove a storie of your time,
And told abroad to staine this promising Clime,
That wit, and soule-enriching Poesie,
Transported hither must like Serpents dye.

Then he renews his hope of refining the manners of the isle through the small number of nobility who appreciate his stage:

But truce Poetic rage, and let not what
Concernes the Countrey, fall upon a spot
Of it, a few here met to see a Play:
All these are innocent; the better they
To tell this fault abroad, that there may be,
Some repaire done to injur'd Poesie.
          Then we may grow, and this place by your raies,
          Cherish'd, may turne into a Grove of Bayes.

In 1640, when Shirley returned to London as Massinger's successor with the King's Men he found theaters emptier than when he had left. Potential English audiences seemed as unappreciative as the Irish he had chastised in prologues to The Toy or The Generall for having “sickly … Palats” apter to pay for hobby horses than “Wits sacrifice.” His puns on the dread “vacation” of the theaters and his esteem for the vanishing appreciative nobility were noted by at least two patrons, particularly after the closing of the theaters. In 1635 Shirley had dedicated The Traitor (1631) to William Cavendish, the Earl of Newcastle, whose “general knowledge and excellent nature, both an ornament to your blood … [made him] the rare and justified example to our age.” This exemplary patron of Jonson, of Ford, and of Brome as well as of Shirley was apparently seen by these different playwrights with different eyes. For Shirley, as well perhaps as for Ford, Cavendish appeared as the nostalgic model of Elizabethan knighthood.⁸ During the early 1640s Shirley served in the royal forces under the command of this “great Preserver of the King / And your owne honour.” Shirley's brief ode eulogizes Newcastle for literary creation as well as for patriotism. According to Anthony à Wood, “Our author Shirley did also much assist his generous patron William duke of Newcastle in the composure of certain plays, which the duke afterwards published.”⁹ Shirley's patron in the mid-1640s was young Thomas Stanley, who apparently supported a coterie of budding poet/scholars around Shirley.¹⁰ Besides the epithalamion for Stanley's wedding in 1648, Shirley contributed an appreciative verse commendation to Stanley's edition of “elegant” poems in 1647. In 1652 he dedicated The Brothers (1641) to Stanley in “memory and contemplation of good offices received … [and] the greatness and number [of] favours” which obliged his service. In “On a black Ribband” Shirley took the risk of commending Stanley's flaunted loyalty to the recaptured Charles; so Stanley's favors must have included uncommon moral and political as well as financial support.¹¹

Through and beyond his dramatic career Shirley sought recognition and patronage from the gentry and the nobility. He did not seek them in vain, but won an elite audience. This fact has been accentuated by frequent quotation of the prologue to his public theater production in London of a play written for the private theater in Dublin under the title Rosania, or Loves Victory (1638?). “A Prologue at the Globe to his Comedy call'd The Doubtfull Heire, which should have been presented at the Black-Friers” opens,

Gentlemen, I am onely sent to say
Our Author did not calculate his Play,
For this Meridian; The Bank-side he knowes
Is far more skilful at the ebbes and flowes
Of Water then of Wit.

It goes on to ask this public house audience o elevate their expectations above slapstick and bawdry and to conduct themselves with the decorum of the elite, “As you were now in the Black-Friers pit.” More pointed than comments in previous years, these lines represent a late, dark mood.

Though Shirley's audience disappointed him from time to time, it had been drawn from the privileged caste ever since his first play. Before he moved to Ireland, all but one of his plays were produced at the Cock-pit or Phoenix, a “private House in Drury Lane,” by Queen Henrietta's Men. Such a production was second in prestige only to the King's Men at Blackfriars. Moreover, the single exception, The Changes, or Love in a Maze (1632), “was presented at the Private House in Salisbury Court, by the Company of His Majesties Revels,” the third among the elite theaters. In Ireland James Shirley “Gent.” tried to help create a courtly theater modeled on the elite companies in London; this goal accounts for much of his didactic approach to that audience. And on his return to London he assumed the post of playwright to the King's Men. There he designed his plays, according to their title pages, exclusively for Blackfriars.

Perhaps tinged bitter, Shirley's late assessment of the genteel, noble, even royal audience he wooed and won seems accurate. He, of all the Caroline professional playwrights, most definitively severs his plays and their privileged audience from the despised crowd who came to demand the blameworthy plays which deserved the 1642 ban: “Though the severity of the times took away those dramatic recreations, (whose language so much glorified the English scene,) and perhaps looking at some abuses of the common theatres, which were not so happily purged from scurrility and under-wit, (the only entertainment of vulgar capacities,) they have outed the more noble and ingenious actions of the eminent stages.” The “many lovers of this exiled poesy left, who are great masters of reason, and that dare conscientiously own this musical part of human learning, when it is presented without the stains of impudence and profanation” include the honorable Walter Moyle, esq., to whom Shirley dedicated The Politician (1639?) in 1655. In retirement Shirley continued to seek the elite patronage he had courted from the beginning of his dramatic career, that courtship which Abraham Wright astutely discerned. And their traditional sociopolitical values he, most like Ford among the Caroline professionals, extolled in his plays.

DEGREE'S PREROGATIVES, ABUSES, AND STANDARDS

Rendering tribute in his introduction of the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher folio, Shirley identified his social ends with those of fellow playwrights who valued drama for teaching by pleasing. Primarily he shows a predilection for modeling behavior. First he commends the social perspicacity of any dramatist, “there being required in him a Soule miraculously knowing, and conversing with all mankind, inabling him to expresse not onely the Phlegme and folly of thick-skin'd men, but the strength and maturity of the wise, the Aire and insinuations of the Court, the discipline and Resolution of the Soldier, the Vertues and passions of every noble condition, nay the councells and characters of the greatest Princes.”¹² Praising the dramatist for universal empathy, Shirley acknowledges a task of correction but emphasizes the task of exemplification. So he spotlights the model behavior of the elite who most deserve to be imitated: the prudent members of martial, courtly, noble, and regal circles. The renowned dramatic collaborators are monumental for all ages and supreme among all literatures because “the Authentick witt that made Blackfriars an Academy, where the three howers spectacle, while Beaumont and Fletcher were presented, were usually of more advantage to the hopefull young Heire then a costly, dangerous forraigne Travell.”

Shirley concludes this paragraph by combining his two primary concerns—drama's pleasurable presentation of exemplary noble behavior and drama's didactic potency: “it cannot be denied but that the young spirits of the Time, whose birth & quality made them impatient of the sowrer wayes of education, have from the attentive hearing these pieces, got ground in point of wit and carriage of the most severely-employed Students, while these Recreations were digested into Rules, and the very Pleasure did edifie. How many passable discoursing dining witts stand yet in good credit upon the bare stock of two or three of these single Scenes.” Drama provides an alluring conduct book for gentlemen and ladies. Its crucial task is to represent effectively and so teach the elite how to model their behavior on courtly values and roles.

Only Shirley among the Caroline professional playwrights claims to mentor his privileged audience by delightful examples. His prologue to the Irish Rosania promises that “Not the least rude uncivill Language shall / Approach your ear, or make one cheek look pale” (27-28), a promise of “clean wit” he reiterates before The Doubtfull Heire, the play's London title. The prologue to The Imposture (1640, printed 1653) likewise pledges that no ladies will have to “wrinckle now that fair / Smooth Alablaster of your brow, no fright / Shall strike chast eares, or dye the harmless white / Of any cheek with blushes” (24-27). In this characteristically gentle satire he abides by the promise he made before the rougher The Duke's Mistress (1636, printed 1638), to chasten general errors and to cure. Rarely did Shirley commit himself so explicitly as when he labeled The Example (1634, printed 1637), a traditional didactic drama that presents genteel social behavior; yet his prologues imply and his plays reflect just such a commitment.

Shirley's contemporary reputation indicates that his declarations reflect a career-long goal of teaching civility. When Thomas May commended The Wedding for exalted passions and harmless mirth, delight for the soul as well as the eye, he recognized Shirley's commitment to a drama that depicts courtly manners. Commending the same play, William Habington initiates a virtual refrain about the chasteness of Shirley's Muse; the innocence and devotion of his verse oppose the “Atheisticke Rimes” of the rude contingent of courtiers. In honoring The Grateful Servant John Hall sings anew about Shirley's chaste Muse on a stage and in a society abused by malicious art. Maybe the most telling, surely the most memorable, testimony is Massinger's commendation of The Grateful Servant. Protesting his own reasoned moderation, Massinger honors Shirley's clear verse and social responsibility. In the play can be found

                                                                      no beleeu'd defence
          To strengthen the bold atheists insolence,
No obscene sillable, that may compell
          A blush from a chast maide, but all so well
Exprest and orderd, as wise men must say
          It is a gratefull Poem, a good play.

[17-22]

Grace and goodness seem to describe Shirley's civic didacticism and his civil style.

Perhaps a commitment to present the exemplars of his elite society caused Shirley to set over half his comedies, and only his comedies, in England but generally to place his troubled tragicomedies and tragedies in Italy. For comedies can especially reflect models for gentry and nobility while they criticize the flawed and the fraud. Perhaps such a commitment helps explain why in his comedies Shirley is prone to present the social institutions of the English elite, The School of Compliment, The Ball, the spring races at Hyde Park. Surely his commitment is largely responsible for the conventional sociopolitical stances he presents. Like Ford he promotes hierarchical status empowered by ascription, but he does not display the rigid idealism that typifies Ford's characteristic tragedy. Rather Shirley's plays present felicitous adaptations of strictly defined, privileged roles within a virtually unchallengeable elite hierarchy that exalts royalism, ascribed sociopolitical status, paternalism, and male dominion. His plays further exemplify social responsibilities as well as prerogatives within that structure, so that two groups fall to his censure: upstarts incapable of meeting his standard and failures unwilling to abide by it. At their most interesting his plays present elite role models that incorporate admirable variations on strict norms of noble behavior; they thereby allow adaptations in incidental matters as they ridicule the failures of adherence to polite norms.

Shirley affirmed absolute royal will as law. His military service for the king, his steadfast loyalty to the Wentworths and Stanley, and his risk of the 1646 publication of “On a black Ribband,” which proclaims royalist loyalty and exhorts support of a forlorn Charles, seem incontrovertible evidence. His assumption of monarchical absolutism so pervades his plays and diction as to be unquestionable.¹³ His first monarch is a Duke of Savoy whom all the exemplary society of The Grateful Servant strive to please. The self-sacrificing love of the title character, who disappears so his lady can marry their prince, is gauged by the rule that a prince commands all the allegiance and all the love of all his subjects. From Love's Cruelty (1631) to The Court Secret (unacted) statements reaffirm the divine right of monarchs; monarchs command fidelity because a loyalty to hierarchy appears as the only alternative to sociopolitical disarray. The principle holds despite weak and vacillating rulers, like the yielding king in the tragicomic The Young Admiral, or rulers misled by machiavels, like princes in the tragedies, The Traitor and The Politician, or the tragicomedies, The Royal Master and The Imposture. Usually Shirley's corrupted monarchs get rehabilitated while their magistrates get blamed. The pattern of aberration followed by restoration is exemplified in The Duke's Mistress. In this tragicomedy a monarch forsakes his faithful wife to pursue an infatuation until, before its consummation, he is reconverted.¹⁴

While Shirley's support of the right of royal will is unimpeachable, his works can suggest a melioration of absolutism that might seem like Massinger's reforming accommodation. An instance of the questioning they invite is evident in interpretations of The Triumph of Peace. Charles attested to his pleasure with the masque when he made the rare command for its second performance. Yet Bulstrode Whitelocke provides a historical foundation for a different evaluation. So Orgel can judge that the masque is “diplomatically but unequivocally critical of royal policy” that elevated rex over lex, and Sharpe can decide that the entertainment is “‘a successful vehicle for critical opinion’” about court practices. Their inferences follow from the masque's setting (a peace piazza), its presentation of the king's commoners in the antimasques, and its explanation of the necessity of Eunomia (Law) for Irene (Peace). Only after the union of Eunomia and Irene does Dice (Justice) join them: since “The world shall give prerogative to neither. / We cannot flourish but together” (560-61).¹⁵ But there remains evidence for the contrary view, that the masque concludes favorably for Charles. The peace celebrated is attributed to Charles. Moreover, allusions in the antimasques promote Charles's policies of prohibiting the gentry from residing in London and of limiting their control over local affairs; the allusions also lend support to his grants of monopolies. So Lawrence Venuti can conclude, primarily from references in the antimasques, that the masque favors rex over lex and that it approves Charles's isolation and alarmist repression of political disgruntlement among some of the elite.¹⁶

These opposed stances of critique and approval of Charles's policies allow the opportunity to suggest mediation. So Martin Butler can deduce, mostly from the sociopolitical context of the performance, that the masque lauds Charles's reforms and finds common ground for agreement between Charles's advisers and the disaffected elite, mainly on Charles's turf.¹⁷ Contention over The Triumph of Peace forms an interpretive paradigm of Shirley's political stance: he stands steadfast, foremost and finally, in favor of the prerogatives of royal will; but in between he shuffles so as to permit limited alleviation and to warn against the abuse of power. Sometimes a critic may discover in Shirley a reminder that kingship is based on upholding justice.¹⁸ But Shirley's monarchs rarely need reminding; generally they are just by definition. Shirley's plays often reaffirm monarchical rights, along with the prerogatives of degree, when they reveal the concealed royal and noble bloodlines of characters whose behavior has confirmed rightful, i.e. inherited or ascribed, status.

The popular Caroline motif that bloodlines, like murder, will out recurs prominently through Shirley's plays. Pervasive in his later dramatic career, this theme first appears as a central motif in The Coronation (1635). This tragicomedy juxtaposes a machiavellian guardian's wrongful attempt to usurp an adolescent queen's power and a born prince's inalienable right to seize absolute rule despite his apparently lower station. All the characters, honoring Sophia's rights as God's representative, are preoccupied with attending to the well-being of their queen and thus of the body politic. But the discovery of the inherent regal rights of others establishes irresistible new allegiances. Since royalty will unto royalty, when Sophia chooses a noble husband she instinctively picks one of her unrecognized brothers, Demetrius. Then Seleucus's overweening rebellion is legitimized as he turns out to be the prime prince of the realm, Leonatus. He expounds to his newfound siblings,

                                                                                                              there were seeds
Scattered upon my heart, that made it swell
With thought of Empire, Princes, I see cannot
Be totally eclipst, but wherefore stayes
Demetrius, and Sophia, at whose names
A gentle spirit walk'd upon my blood.
.....Nature has rectifi'd in me Demetrius,
The wandrings of ambition.

[V.iii/537-38]

Shirley's ascription of absolute royal prerogatives to nature, here through Seleucus/Leonatus, recurs emphatically. Years before the start of his prince-and-pauper tale, The Gentleman of Venice, a wetnurse to the duke of Venice exchanged her son and the prince. Her Thomazo remains a lecherous, debauched rebel by nature despite his palatial nurture whereas Roberto proves regal by making the palace garden a court and by fighting nobly. The subplot confirms the importance of blood degree; it presents an impotent noble desperately trying to compel a paragon of courtiers to beget an heir for him so he can save his family line from the polluting succession of a dissolute nephew.¹⁹ Characters from late in Shirley's career are often revealed by their deeds as either noble or peasant by birth well before their origins are corroborated by testimony: such include the regal presence of Ferdinand in The Doubtful Heir, the comeuppance of the vain, boorish “older sister” in The Sisters (1642), and the royal match of the discernible albeit concealed prince in The Court Secret (unperformed).

While the assumption of absolute royal prerogatives pervades his plays and the theme of bloodlines telling recurs throughout them, Shirley's plays pay special heed to the manners that identify the elite and degrade the presumptuous. Although all the Caroline professional playwrights are noteworthy for their attentiveness to manners and social codes, the degree of Shirley's preoccupation distinguishes him. Nor can such an interest be easily dismissed as an index of shallow decadence. Martin Butler has recently pressed the minority opinion advanced by such earlier scholars as Douglas Sedge and Richard Morton: significant political comments are embedded in social codes.²⁰ Moreover, social scientists have increasingly set forth the ways by which political and moral principles are created, enforced, and modified by social behavior. The roles played by Shirley's characters create their personalities, social types praiseworthy and blameworthy on the basis of moral and political principles that sustain and are sustained by types and society.

Shirley's plays exhibit a particular preoccupation with interactions between members of different estates, a preoccupation bracketed by a brief morality he wrote early in his dramatic career and expanded much later, perhaps after his dramatic career was over. A Contention for Honour and Riches was published in 1633; the augmented Mammon and Honoria appeared in 1658. In A Contention two pairs of suitors, representing estates and professions, vie for two ladies, Honour and Riches. Clod, a country gentleman whose native resources and bluff loyalty lay a foundation for the body politic, and Gettings, a citizen merchant whose business builds on that foundation, pursue Lady Riches; meanwhile a Courtier and a Soldier court Lady Honour. After self-promotions that eulogize the ideals and scoffs that satirize the failings of society's strata, Gettings wins Riches; but Ingenuity, a scholar, gains Lady Honour because she believes that he unites martial valor and courtly polish. In this interlude the betrothals seem to reconcile the strife between rival estates.

Mammon and Honoria expands A Contention by presenting a vision of what the commonweal might become if members of the estates played their given roles to perfection. Shirley's revisions emphasize citizen and country cowardice, isolate and banish other destructive elements in the society, and idealize the potential of the courtier, the officer, and the scholar. The didact's fantasy still grants Lady Honoria to the scholar, Alworth. But the merchant, Fulbank, surrenders Lady Mammon to Colonel Conquest. The problems Citizen Fulbank stores for the nation appear as well in his country counterpart, Maslin. The word maslin, a medley of grains, suggests the country gentleman's push toward strife over differences as well as his pull toward generous community. Martial braggadochio and waste are now laid to a Captain Squanderbag. Two other new characters show how a commonwealth can be damaged by self-ishness. Phantasm, Lady Mammon's gentleman usher, creates false expectations for the representative of each estate, disabuses him, then vanishes. Traverse, a lawyer, exacerbates and manages others' contentions for his own ends before he repents at having caused strife and promotes justice. In contrast, Lady Honoria praises Alamode's potential as a statesman who considers only the nation's prosperity, Conquest's promise as a guardian who defends the nation's achievements, and Alworth's achievement as a self-sacrificing if affected visionary who proclaims an ideal body politic in which each estate plays its part dutifully. Shirley's second version follows his typical resolution whereby military valor and courtly manner put upstarts in their proper places. In the comic plot of The Doubtful Heir, for example, a captain abuses and disciplines citizens as a courtier explains their rightful roles.

Shirley's principle—that the hierarchy's stratified roles, prerogatives, and duties deserve reverence—can be misconstrued as Massinger's accommodation. For it allows some variation, criticizes abuses, and sounds genial. But Shirley permits scant individuality within a rigid structure; characters who counter the system get marked as climbers. The Ball (1632) provides an instructive example, since it is cited to support claims that Shirley became critical of the Caroline court.²¹ At one time this social satire identified some courtiers recognizably enough to earn Henry Herbert's censorship: “In the play of The Ball, written by Sherley, and acted by the Queens players, ther were divers personated so naturally, both of lords and others of the court, that I took it ill, and would have forbidden the play, but that Biston promiste many things which I found faulte withall should be left out.”²²The Ball roused enough interest that in The Lady of Pleasure Sir Thomas Bornwell can chastise his wife for so indulging in this faddish, reputedly promiscuous “subscription dance” that its playwright had to be “brib'd to a modest / Expression of your Anticke gambolls in't, / [lest] Some darkes had beene discover'd, and the deeds too” (I.i.124-26).²³

This comedy defends the innocence of balls. It portrays a coterie who enjoy the pleasures of chaste love as celebrated in a final masque in honor of Diana with Venus. Moreover, this comedy explains away the ill repute of balls as envious slander-mongering, represented by the play's principal satirist. The aptly named Barker, masqued as a Satyr, decides to “traduce / Your Ball” when he gets rejected by Lady Honoria for thinking that she is loose-hilted instead of “loose-witted” (flirtatious). The play satirizes, in interlinked sets of fortune hunters, common stage butts adapted to the aspiring gentry who swirled round the Caroline court. One set, knights and relatives of nobility, quest after the fortune of the brilliant widow Lady Lucina; once rejected, they next seek acclaim and worldly goods, Ladies Honoria and Rosamond. The venturers: Sir Ambrose Lamount, who tries to mount any prize, Sir Marmaduke Travers, who traverses all terrain, and Colonel Winfield, who wins the battle of the sexes. All seem kin to the last suitor, Bostock, who lives up to his name by bragging about his noble lineage, excusing his palpable cowardice as guaranteeing future generation, and dropping names. The second set, Honoria and Rosamond, compete for a pot of gold, Lord Rainbow, who supports Bostock and sponsors subscription balls. The scene is filled out by two affectations. A French dancing master, Monsieur Le Frisk, caricatures shallow, bawdy mimicry of the entourage, fashions, and demeanor imported by Queen Henrietta Maria. And an English traveler whose peregrinations are limited to his moniker, Freshwater, displays a motley of national stereotypes and mangled references to continental commonplaces. Typically, he sells his family estate to invest in capital markets, ineptly sharks exorbitant loans to the play's pretenders to privilege, then ends bankrupt at Gravesend.

The Ball ridicules the failings of social and economic climbers whose success might verify their pretensions to ascribed privilege. In a private conference with each of her suitors Lucina appears to have elected him; but she jeers when he reveals his complicity in some practice that drew contemporary complaints about marginal gentry. Her criticism is most relevant when she asks Travers about alleged projects to drain fens, construct iron mills, establish a foundry for brass buttons, or get a patent for vinegar during this “age / For men to look about them” (II.iii/28). Puzzled over how to respond, Travers follows a hunch about her “appetite” for commercial wealth and declares such ventures. Likely she has caught Travers managing business affairs a nobleman would despise; perhaps, though, she points to his decay resulting from neglect of the increasingly dominant cash commerce that a prudent nobleman would eye to improve his estate.²⁴ Lucina attacks Lamount for displaying his dancing legs and giving locks of his hair as love tokens, two lures when fishing for a marriage to an estate and increased status. She makes Bostock confess the spuriousness of his claim to the bloodlines he trades on. And she sneers at Winfield for campaigning for a petticoat fortune instead of waging war for maintenance.

At the same time that The Ball exposes social climbers, it presents an imitable privileged style. Shirley thereby admits the ease with which master impersonators could mime the manners of their betters while he disallows the legitimacy of their claims to higher rank. His critique holds true for cits, like the Barnacles who trade on the cycle of merchants aspiring to land and landholders seeking cash, and it holds for wits, like the Will Hazards who hunt rich widows and heiresses, through such plays as The Gamester (1633). It holds true for the greater gentry who come to town seeking entry into courtly circles, like Lady Aretina Bornwell, and it holds for the gallants who surround her in The Lady of Pleasure (1635). It holds for such lesser courtiers as the trio in The Bird in a Cage (1633) who aver that all anyone needs for success at court is wit plentiful enough to invent mischief and memory scant enough to forget debts, and for the greater councillors whom the Duchess of Mantua tests for the foolish and knavish ambition of trying to ascend to monarchy by way of her bed in The Humorous Courtier (1631). It holds just as truly for upwardly mobile gentlemen, like Aurelio Andreozzi, granted The Opportunity (1634), by a mistake, to marry into monarchy, as it does for servants, like his Pimponio who mistakes himself for a bully “natural prince.” As Lucow observes, Shirley insists “that individual identity is best determined by birth and status. Individual fulfillment arises not from seizing opportunities to advance oneself beyond one's station, but from working faithfully and steadily within the limitations of one's class.” Yet Lucow admits that Shirley shows how the imitation of elite styles can be effective for short periods.²⁵ Shirley seems aware of the problems that can be created by master mimics of privileged role models, but he keeps faith with the safeguards presumably transmitted by blood.

Shirley's awareness of such problems has led some critics to point to his dissatisfaction with individual Caroline courtiers and incidents.²⁶ They quote the familiar designs of the steward Jacomo in The Grateful Servant (1629): “Mee thinkes I talke, like a peremptorie Statesman already, I shall quickly learne to forget my selfe when I am in great office, I will oppresse the Subiect, flatter the Prince, take bribes a both sides, doe right to neyther, serue Heauen as farre as my profit will giue mee leaue, and tremble, only at the Summons of a Parliament” (II.i/25). And they describe the play's satire on sleazy, sycophantic climbers when Grimundo imitates them to cure the Duke of Savoy's wild brother. But critics are wrong to conclude from Shirley's satire of isolated instances of unworthy representatives of the caste system that he was inclined, like Massinger, to be disaffected with an absolute hierarchy based on heredity. Rather, like Ford, he supported it. His presentations are generally reassuring about the failure of threats by the ambitious machiavellian favorites who mislead or supplant princes: Lorenzo and his fidgety accomplice Depazzi in The Traitor (1631), Valerio in The Duke's Mistress (1636), Montalto in The Royal Master (1637), Gotharus in The Politician (1639?), Flaviano in The Imposture (1640), and Columbo's churchman brother in The Cardinal (1641). While the increasing incidence of such villains might indicate a growing uneasiness about heredity or alarm at the power of impersonation, Shirley's target is the perversion of posts not held by the right of bloodlines. The very failure of his villains to gain their unworthy ambitions signals the ultimate insufficiency of the subversive imitation of forms. It signals, too, Shirley's courtly stance.

Another way to rescue Shirley from absolute royalism and reverence for degree is ventured by Butler: “I shall later argue … that an upholding of ‘place’ and decorum was characteristic of ‘gentry’ attitudes to politics and was a very effective form of criticism when directed from those lower down in the hierarchy against those exceeding their ‘place’ above them (for example, in Shirley's own city comedies).” The thesis that some interrelated gentry and city families were poised as mediators between “court” and “country” is important. “But clearly,” Butler acknowledges a problem, “this idea is not the same when advanced from above, in a court context, against critics from below, when it becomes merely a justification of the freedom of action of the constituted powers.”²⁷The Lady of Pleasure, The Example, and Hyde Park do not likely speak for mediation. These plays can, like The Triumph of Peace, be interpreted as critical of the court, but in the context of all of Shirley's works they seem finally to support it. Furthermore, to satirize those who abuse a system is one thing, to attack the inadequacies of a system is something altogether different. Shirley's corpus shows that, willing to allow some adaptation, he represented a hierarchy which permitted only a few eccentricities.

Much more than the tenet of a hierarchy based on degree, even more than the tenet of absolute monarchy, Shirley's tenet of patriarchy appears to form a fundamental assumption. The moderation suggested by a chastened and thus concerned father in his earliest known comedy, Love Tricks, and by a disastrously rigid father in his earliest known tragedy, The Maid's Revenge, disappears with The Wedding (1626-29). This comedy first presents his pattern in which patriarchs rightly employ their powers in seemingly obstructive but truly provident ways in such plays as The Brothers (a misnomer for the late The Politic Father?); such powers are also exercised by an occasional “lady mother,” as in The Constant Maid.²⁸ More typically, when Shirley's fathers impede their children, the children, as in The Witty Fair One (1628), seek paternal blessings. Shirley honors filial piety from the gratified Gratiana of The Wedding to the martyred Haraldas in The Politician. Demands on children are often made so that interlocking authorities reinforce each other. The Duke of Mantua, for example, incarcerates princess Eugenia; thus The Bird in a Cage applies to her as well as to her disguised suitor. And the patriotism of the hero's father in The Young Admiral fosters his son's loyalty in spite of the wrongs done him by his prince. Shirley's portrayal of fathers virtually prohibits anything more than nonessential variations of his culture's patriarchal hierarchies.

Beyond that, Shirley's presentation of male superiority consistently reinforces and interlocks with his other hierarchical views. In The Sisters Angellina proves her nobility when her quiet manner, humility, and obedience win a prince; meanwhile her changeling sister, Paulina, reveals her commonness as her display, vanity, and social climbing earn her misalliance with a bandit. Shirley, less often and less forcefully than Massinger, criticizes the double standard, limits male prodigality, and allows women to speak up. So his presentation of traditional male dominion could be seen as melioration. But Shirley's women, more like Ford's, must acquiesce. As a wealthy widow, The Ball's Lucina begins in the most independent status available to a Caroline woman. Falling for Winfield's ploy of inciting rival suitors to chastise her so he can make a chivalrous rescue, she ambushes the veteran campaigner by her condition for marriage: he must have been “honest of [his] body.” Yet he, his stage society, and presumably his audience agree that no one could reasonably expect a gentleman of his breeding, parts, and profession to be so constrained. Since, then, she must pardon anything beyond his oath of freedom from infection, he cavalierly reciprocates. But his gesture is so empty that she lies transparently about a dozen dependent children; a lady is, of course, wealthy, landed, degreed, heirless—and chaste. His offer of equivalent sexual forgiveness is predicated on the inconceivability of her needing it. Shirley does not permit equivalent sexual activity to any lady other than the critically infamous Aretina Bornwell. And she repents mightily and is disciplined to traditional feminine virtue. “Tis a false glass,” she moans while facing her mirror, “sure I am more deformed. / What have I done? My soule is miserable” (V.i. 287-88). Filled with self-loathing, she submits her higher station to her husband. For receiving a gigolo anonymously one time Lady Aretina suffers far greater remorse than Shirley's whole crowd of lecherous male prodigals who are forgiven—some scarcely repentant, few reformed.²⁹

There has been conjecture that Charles and Henrietta Maria's celebrated fidelity promoted more equitable marital relations than heretofore. But Charles gave Shirley the plot for a blatantly male chauvinist play, The Gamester.³⁰ If the play is representative, Charles's and Shirley's interest in reforming social behavior is limited to curbing the double standard—after marriage—just as the prodigally lustful husband, aptly named Wilding, is tamed by his obediently faithful wife and her chaste ward, notably named Penelope. Motivated more by ego than by lust, Wilding arranges to bed Penelope and marry her off so as to conceal their liaison: he can be titillated by adultery; he can bully his obedient wife into abetting it; he can enjoy clever villainy; “mainly” he can revel in making a cuckold, “The only pleasure o' the world” “Which sweetens the rest” (III.i/225). But he is horrified to hear afterward that the night he, wanting to go on gambling, hired Hazard as his substitute at the assignation, his wife replaced Penelope. Imagining his humiliation popping out in a pair of horns, desperately covering his shame, and accusing his wife of being a whore, the cuckold maker suffers the anguish of being cuckolded until he arranges a wedding settlement profitable for Hazard and Penelope. Then the women and Hazard convert the situation, Wilding, and the audience; they reveal that they recognized the bed trick in time to save everyone's virtue. Chastely faithful, obediently loving feminine virtue forgives the contrite transgressor so that the play reaffirms an old marriage and promises a new one. Charles and Shirley's plot remains strictly inside convention.³¹ Wilding and virtue depend on women, yet he retains dominion. Early in the play he describes the lines of his power to Penelope: “my wife, I allow / Your kinswoman far off, to whom, a widow, / Your father left you, with a handsome fortune, / Which, by marriage, I have in possession, / And you too” (I.i/187). Late in the play he still controls Penelope's dowry and he presides over her marriage pact. Never mind his likely reversion or Hazard's occupation, gigolo.

In The Example (1634) Shirley, without royal prompting, proffered another version of his paradigm that features the conversion of a prodigal man by a chaste subordinate woman. While Shirley, as Nathan Cogan has recognized, was concerned about libertinage,³² his solution depends on a premarital double standard and on the woman's responsibility for chastity despite enticement and duress. The rapacious Lord Fitzavarice seduces women for his “credit”: “The world takes notice I have courted her, / And if I mount her not, I lose my honour” (I.i/297). Driven by ego, “honour,” he lusts to “mould” each “wench” “into a wanton shape, / And quicken her to air by my own art … till she become / A glorified spirit, and acknowledge / She took her exaltation from me.” The transformational techniques of the sexual alchemical master are scarcely mysteries: he offers a woman the honor of his station, bribes her with jewels, pledges his love to her, discounts her allegiance to a husband who is absent, accepts the blame (and the credit). Since Peregrine, the officer husband, wanders abroad to pay off his debts, Fitzavarice promises to cancel these on the sweetly lovable Bellamia's first surrender and to pay exorbitantly for each subsequent compliance. Spurned, he starts to force Bellamia until, recognizing her virtue, he converts. Or does he, realizing that force confesses failure, avoid shame? Whatever, the redeemed prodigal is granted Bellamia's younger sister, who has saved her chastity for a match that affords wealth, status, and honor (issuing in part from Fitzavarice's sexual repute). Shirley habitually retains this hierarchical gender status. Typically, the imitation of male sexual prerogatives by a Clariana leads to the tragic outcome of Love's Cruelty (1631). Habitually, maiden Penelopes, beginning with the heroine of The Witty Fair One, live up to her name by way of fabrications that save their Fowlers; and wives remain redeemingly loyal to actual philanderers (Astella to Lodwick in The Grateful Servant) or to would-be ones (the Duchess Euphemia to Farnese in The Duke's Mistress). Often, as in these instances, wives are abetted by their husbands' supposedly loose but actually chaste prey.

Finally, though the independent wit of many of Shirley's heroines might suggest their enhanced status, that inference is delusive because women's free speech is restricted to minor adaptations of rigid role norms. The illusion of frankness by a Lucina in The Ball or a Violetta in The Witty Fair One can be seen in Shirley's most popular heroine, the heavenly, loveworthy Celestina, Lady Bellamour of The Lady of Pleasure. Butler argues that this rich, independent widow makes a sociopolitical contrast to Lady Aretina Bornwell, who is a caricature of the debasement, extravagance, and promiscuity among citified “country” gentry who imitate the corrupted pretensions, opulence, and license at court. In her assured behavior, liberal expenditures, and free talk Celestina exemplifies a “town” magnanimity proportioned from country, city, and court. She holds privileges that she inherited, but she must maintain them.³³ From this perspective she teaches two novices the “becomming fortitude” of virtuous acts and satiric wit aimed so as to “not lose my priviledge” of independence (II.ii.11, 21). But from another vantage she tutors them in every unattached woman's dependence on a marriage mart wherein birth and rich widowhood virtally supplant her personal attributes. This market Celestina plays by maintaining “thrift” in her “reward” to keep men devoted and to “preserve / Our selves in stocke” (II.ii.72-73), whereas less calculating ladies waste “prodigal” favors. By this barter economy she converts the lord of the play from two prominent love fashions: early, from an old-fashioned abstinent neoplatonic devotion to his dead lady and later from a libertine “now court Platonic way.” The lord's courtship is doubly flawed. Celestina's economic exemplum confirms that the honor he would have her sacrifice is as precious to a lady and her family as a coat of arms is to him and his. And the lord's need for the gigolo “Scentlove” corroborates Littleworth's description of a debasement that depends on two ever-present attendants: a fool on a ship of fools and a pimp on a ladder descending from monarch through gentlemen. So Celestina, with shrewd wit, conforms to his “fair opinion” as he serves her. She plays another of Shirley's converting Penelopes. Moreover, she does not question but wholeheartedly trusts the court position and the vacillating lord on whom her worth now depends. The Lady of Pleasure's resolution typifies Shirley's allegiance to courtly attitudes about manners and prerogatives.

Shirley's show of adaptability in political rights, in meritorious advancement, and in more independence for women and children might seem to resemble Massinger's accommodation. But Shirley, like Ford, restricts the viable options to rigid monarchical absolutism, position by blood degree, and the maintenance of traditional patriarchal status and family norms. His criticisms, which might seem to resemble Massinger's reforms, attack the debasement and abuse of traditional standards; so, like Ford's, they support a courtly value system. Shirley's works appeal, like his women, by using clever language to shape roles in slightly asymmetrical conformity to dominant social patterns. Celestina proves attractive when she one-ups Aretina's court French and puts down the gallants' sneers, when she exemplifies courtly conceits and employs “linsey-woolsey” against fatuous, licentious conceits. Likewise, Shirley makes a winning appeal through a witty style that mainly displays role-constituting language, manners, and social occasions in support of the privileges, powers, and customs of the Caroline court as it apparently liked to be considered.

Notes

1. For Shirley's dedications I quote the original printed edition. Whenever a scholarly edition of a Shirley play is available I cite and quote it. When there is none I quote the original printed edition but cite the textually inadequate act.scene/page of The Dramatic Works and Poems, ed. William Gifford and Alexander Dyce. For poems, including prologues and epilogues to the plays, I cite and quote The Poems, ed. Ray Livingstone Armstrong. For dates of the plays and most bibliography I rely on Albert Wertheim's essay in Logan and Smith, Later Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists, 152-71.

2. See Marvin Morillo, “Shirley's ‘Preferment’ and the Court of Charles I.”

3. Biographical data from Arthur Huntington Nason's doublecheck of Anthony à Wood's Athenæ Oxoniensis in James Shirley, Dramatist: A Biographical and Critical Study, 3-163, Albert C. Baugh's “Some New Facts about Shirley,” Georges Bas's essays, particularly “Two Misrepresented Biographical Documents Concerning James Shirley,” and William D. Wolf's “Some New Facts and Conclusions about James Shirley: Residences and Religion” have been comprehensively reviewed and extended in Sandra A. Burner's James Shirley: A Study of Literary Coteries and Patronage in Seventeenth-Century England. I am not persuaded by her presupposition of Shirley's Roman Catholic conversion and her hedged construal of what might then have happened. I agree with Bas and Wolf, who find this old hypothesis implausible, particularly since Shirley's children were baptized as Anglicans.

4. See Arthur C. Kirsch's full text of “A Caroline Commentary on the Drama,” 257, as well as James G. McManaway's announcement and digest of the text in “Excerpta Quaedam per A. W. Adolescentem,” 124.

5. For Wright, see Kirsch, “Caroline Commentary,” 258. For Herbert I quote and cite The Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, 1623-1673, 19-20, 53.

6. Herbert, Dramatic Records, 54-55.

7. I draw information, quotations, and citations involving this masque from Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong's monumental Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court 2: 537-65.

8. For assessments in relation to Jonson see Anne Barton's Ben Jonson, Dramatist, 300-320 passim and David Rigg's Ben Jonson: A Life, 301-37 passim. For a view of Cavendish related to Brome, see my sketch of Brome's audience, below.

9. Wood, Athenæ Oxoniensis, 3:739. For an assessment of Shirley's possible contributions to Cavendish's The Country Captain see Harbage's Cavalier Drama, 74-77.

10. For speculation see Gerald Eades Bentley's “James Shirley and a Group of Unnoted Poems on the Wedding of Thomas Stanley”; for the poems with literary and biographical annotations, see Armstrong's edition.

11. For the text see Armstrong, 13; for R. G. Howarth's as well as Armstrong's full commentary see Armstrong, 66-67.

12. For all citations and quotations of the 1647 folio, where the text is available I use the ongoing The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, ed. Fredson Bowers. Where it is not I use The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, ed. Arnold Glover and A. R. Waller. For this preface I quote the latter, 1:xi.

13. The political theme of Ben Lucow's James Shirley is Shirley's presentation of monarchical absolutism and a hierarchy by ascription. Note especially Lucow's argument, 18-20, and his impressive collection of Shirley's habitual political diction, 148-50.

14. For an interesting but implausible and unverifiable political placement of this play in Charles's court see Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 42-44.

15. See Orgel, Illusion of Power, 77-83 (the quotation is from 79) and Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment, 211-22 (the quotation is from 222). Sharpe here as elsewhere counters an undiscriminating broadside characteristic of Graham Parry's otherwise useful study of the era's noble patronage, The Golden Age Restor'd: The Culture of the Stuart Court, 1603-42.

16. Venuti, “The Politics of Allusion: The Gentry and Shirley's The Triumph of Peace.”

17. Butler, “Politics and the Masque: The Triumph of Peace.”

18. See Sedge, for example, on Alinda's speech in the middle of The Doubtful Heir, “Social and Ethical Concerns,” 61-63.

19. Nason, James Shirley, 304-7 provides a typical example of critical moral disgust over the Cornari episodes; while Nason's maneuvers facilitate appreciation of Shirley's formal integration of plots, they deny access to Shirley's thematic parallels.

20. All Butler's work emphasizes this thesis; on Shirley see Theatre and Crisis, 158-59. Though he does not cite these earlier critics, he modifies and extends tendencies in Sedge's identification of passages and in Morton's “Deception and Social Dislocation: An Aspect of Shirley's Drama,” a consideration of caste structure and conflict.

21. The most credible claimant is Morillo.

22. Herbert, Dramatic Records, 19. I follow Harbage in Cavalier Drama, 78, and especially Bentley in Profession of Dramatist, 190-91, in distributing Herbert's blame to the players as well as the playwright.

23. For The Lady of Pleasure I quote the critical edition by Marilyn J. Thorssen. For the circumstances of The Ball see Hanson T. Parlin, A Study in Shirley's Comedies of London Life, 59.

24. See Stone's Crisis of the Aristocracy, chapters six and seven, “Estate Management” and “Business.”

25. Lucow, James Shirley, 93-94.

26. See Sedge, “Social and Ethical Concerns,” 317ff. Besides Morillo's essay, see his introduction to The Humorous Courtier, especially 64-79.

27. Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 44. Butler's extended argument runs 166-80.

28. See Nason, James Shirley, 54-68.

29. For a listing of Shirley's prodigals, see the tabulations of Robert Stanley Forsythe in The Relations of Shirley's Plays to the Elizabethan Drama, 100-101. Only two ladies appear: besides Lady Aretina there is Lady Plot, an adulterous philanderer and treacherous go-between in The Example.

30. See Herbert, Dramatic Records, 54-55.

31. Although in Criticism and Compliment (44-47) Sharpe catalogs the rough satire in The Gamester, he elides my main issue: Shirley targets blatant abuses that draw attention away from some problems that were becoming evident in his traditional hierarchy; rather than defending it with Ford, testing it with Brome, or reforming it with Massinger, he assumes its righteousness.

32. See Cogan, “James Shirley's The Example: Some Reconsiderations,” 317-31.

33. The persuasive center of Butler's discussion appears in Theatre and Crisis, 166-70; the concessions my argument builds on appear on 172-75, especially 174-75.

Works Cited

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Bas, Georges. “James Shirley et ‘Th' Untun'd Kennel’: Une petite guerre des théâtres vers 1630.” Etudes Anglaises 16 (1963): 11-22.

———. “Two Misrepresented Biographical Documents Concerning James Shirley.” Review of English Studies n.s. 27 (1976): 303-10.

Baugh, Albert C. “Some New Facts about Shirley.” Modern Language Review 17 (1922): 228-35.

Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher. The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon. Ed. Fredson Bowers. 6 vols. to date. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1966-.

———. The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. Ed. Arnold Glover and A.R. Waller. 10 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1905-12.

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Butler, Martin. “Politics and the Masque: The Triumph of Peace.” Seventeenth Century 2 (1987): 117-41.

———. Theatre and Crisis, 1632-1642. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984.

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Harbage, Alfred. Cavalier Drama. New York: Modern Language Association, 1936.

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Orgel, Stephen. The Illusion of Power: Political Theatre in the English Renaissance. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975.

———, and Roy Strong. Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court. 2 vols. London and Berkeley: Sotheby Parke Bernet and Univ. of California Press, 1973.

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Riggs, David. Ben Jonson: A Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989.

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———. The Humourous Courtier. Ed. Marvin Morillo. New York: Garland, 1979.

———. The Lady of Pleasure. Ed. Marilyn J. Thorssen. New York: Garland, 1980.

———. The Poems. Ed. Ray Livingstone Armstrong. Morningside Heights, N.Y.: King's Crown Press, 1941.

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Venuti, Lawrence. “The Politics of Allusion: The Gentry and Shirley's The Triumph of Peace.” English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 182-205.

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Wood, Anthony à. Athenæ Oxoniensis. Ed. Philip Bliss. 4 vols. London, 1813-20.