Deception and Social Dislocation: An Aspect of James Shirley's Drama
[In the following essay, Morton contends that scholarly interpretations of Shirley's plays have been limited by the tendency to focus on the playwright as a transitional figure between the Renaissance and the Restoration. Morton examines Shirley's use of deception or trickery—especially disguise and mistaken identity—in several plays, finding that this plot motif successfully dramatizes particular social issues of the Caroline era.]
The temptation to classify minor literary figures as transitional can hardly be resisted in the case of James Shirley, who was born in 1596, the year of the second volume of The Faerie Queene, and died exactly 300 years ago, in 1666, Dryden's Annus Mirabilis. As a comic dramatist, he has frequently been identified as a link between Jonson and the Restoration playwrights, between the comedy of humours and the comedy of manners. There is much to support such a view. Forsythe's thorough documentation1 has revealed Shirley's indebtedness to the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. The regular appearance in his plays of courtly fashion and the Truewit-Witwoud-Witless ritual of outwitting,2 so popular in the reign of Charles II, counters Dryden's celebrated rejection of his works as meaningless to the new age:
Heywood and Shirley were but types of thee,
Thou last great prophet of tautology.(3)
Pepys, for example, seems to have had some warm responses to his plays, which were among the more popular of the old dramas at the Restoration court.4
To concentrate on the transitional aspects of a playwright's works has some disadvantages; it tends to shatter the integrity of the individual pieces, to label one scene or character an echo of the past, another a prefiguration of the future. Shirley's plays have perhaps suffered too much from such scholastic mayhem. Ashley H. Thorndike typifies this approach in his generally admirable and perceptive pages:
No earlier dramatist presents so many reminiscences of Shakespeare … and he often imitates Jonson. … But his plays in their main characteristics naturally adapt themselves to the models of Fletcher and Massinger. … He is almost as close to the heroic play, the tragicomedy and the comedy of manners of the Restoration as to the romances and comedies of Fletcher.5
Shirley's plays are doubtless conventional, but they are independent works of art, achieving their effects by their intrinsic qualities rather than by their position in literary history. My purpose here is to notice one of those aspects of Shirley's plays which give them coherence and effectiveness.
I
The direction of comedy in general is toward reconciliation of discordant elements, and its method in Renaissance drama is most commonly the intrigue, in which, typically, the young outwit the old. The Jonsonian comedy of humours may show the reformation of the eccentric individual; the Restoration comedy of manners frequently shows the resolution of conflicting ways of life—a whole element of society is eccentric. Shirley's comic method has elements of both: he has many “humours” characters, and in his best plays he draws on the fluid and rapidly changing world of Caroline London to produce a comedy of conflicting social elements which seems, perhaps because of its source in a world of genuine social conflict, to have unique urgency and validity. Characteristically, the plot of a play by Shirley depends on a trick or a misunderstanding. As with Renaissance drama in general, the deception of husband by wife, father by daughter, suitor by witty mistress, and foolish citizen by elegant courtier is commonplace and easily anticipated. When, for example, in the delightful comedy The Lady of Pleasure we see Aretina fashionably kicking her heels in courtly London, flaunting her noble connections and wasting the estates of her husband, Bornwell, we may well expect him to expostulate fruitlessly in Act I and then, in Act II, to attempt subterfuge. Aretina's appropriate reformation, in Act V, is both timely and inevitable:
Already
I feel a cure upon my soul, and promise
My after life to virtue.(6)
As Father Curry has neatly observed: “On the Elizabethan stage the race of dupes, both native and exotic, flourished in a prolific variety of breeds, and the hunting was both merry and determined.”7
With Shirley's best plays the irony implicit in the deception situation, where one character misunderstands another or is deliberately duped, serves as more than a source of laughter at the foolishness of the gull. It illuminates the contrast between the viewpoints of the trickster and the tricked, reveals their difficulties of communication, and, when the differences are at a social level, demonstrates the conflicts within the society portrayed.
Shirley's plays show him to have been particularly aware of these conflicts. The well-known tensions between the servant and the master, the countryman and the townsman, the tradesman and the fop, are as staple to his plays as to those of his contemporaries, but he is unusually sophisticated in his perception of conflicts among the various groups of leisured city-dwellers.8 The famous comedy, The Ball, devotes so much attention to documentation of distinctions between the higher levels of London life that the plot, for want of weeding, is confused and neglected. The Constant Maid puts on stage a neat abstract of the dramatist's London. Hartwell is a young descendant of the minor gentry, unwilling to hold the office by which his father had eked out an archaic, hospitable squire's existence. Playfair is a courtly gallant of elegant phrase and considerable means, which he devotes to the pursuit of intrigue. He is the nephew of Sir Clement, the somewhat old-fashioned justice in whose house the action takes place. Startup is a foolish rustic who inevitably becomes the rival suitor. A farcical plot, involving swapping of clothes and misidentification, puts into opposition these three typical figures of a fluctuating society. Decayed gentry, prosperous courtier, and nouveau riche farmer meet on approximately equal social terms but differ markedly in interests, attitudes, and behavior. Naturally, then, they live side by side but do not really understand or trust one another. Confusions, the basis for comedy, arise. Shirley's world of fashion is exclusive, intricate, formal, and slightly debauched; his gentry and mercantile classes are commonsensical, but they are frequently bewildered by the elaborate courtiers. So Julietta, in Hyde Park, a perfectly respectable gentlewoman of leisure, is explicit when she must entertain the courtly Lord Bonvile:
TRIER
—Sweet lady, pray
Assure his lordship he is welcome.
JULIETTA
I want words.
LORD Bonvile
Oh, sweet lady, your lip in silence
Speaks the best language.
JULIETTA
Your lordship's welcome to this humble roof.
(II.iii; Gifford and Dyce, II, 481)
It is this failure to communicate easily across the bounds of social class which forms the basis for the tricks or misunderstandings so frequently found in the plays.
Conventionally, of course, the honest woman tempted by her superior reveals or feigns a modest failure to communicate or understand. So, in The Traitor, Sciarrha tests the honor of his sister, Amidea, by telling her of the Duke's lusts:
SCIARRHA
You must to court. Oh happiness!
AMIDEA
For what?
SCIARRHA
What do great ladies do at court, I pray?
Enjoy the pleasures of the world, dance, kiss
The amorous lords, and change court breath, sing loose
Belief of other heaven, tell wanton dreams,
Rehearse your sprightly bed scenes, and boast which
Hath most idolators, accuse all faces
That trust to the simplicity of nature,
Talk witty blasphemy,
Discourse their gaudy wardrobes, plot new pride,
Jest upon courtiers' legs, laugh at the wagging
Of their own feathers, and a thousand more
Delights which private ladies never think of.
.....
AMIDEA
You make me wonder.
Pray speak that I may understand.
SCIARRHA
Why will you
Appear so ignorant? I speak the dialect
Of Florence to you.(9)
In this passage, as elsewhere in Shirley's plays, we have a richly documented description of the life of a certain social group. The influence of formal satire and the character books is clearly at work; the society Shirley draws requires a fine discrimination which would no doubt be appreciated by the leisured classes in his audience. In Hyde Park and The Traitor the contest is not between rich and poor, powerful and impotent; rather it is between the apparently closer levels of courtier and gentry. Shirley is not dealing with the extravagant and unlikely union of Fair 'Em and King William but with possible and plausible affairs such as that between Kenelm Digby and Venetia Stanley, which Professor Harbage feels may be dealt with explicitly in The Wedding.10 The dramatic situation is rooted in the life of London and made particularly relevant to a court audience, for whom these matters of class relationships in the upper levels of society would inevitably be of major import.
The failure of comprehension between different groups is sometimes deliberately exploited in a trick, sometimes it grows spontaneously from the dramatic interplay of character. But in Shirley's plays it normally produces uncertainty, discomfiture, and, at last, when the misunderstanding is clarified, discovery and increased self-awareness. Aretina realizes that she cannot really understand or live in the extravagant fashionable world and so, at the end, returns to a proper and decent position of subservience to her husband and the ideals of the minor gentry.
Shirley's devotion to the trick as a dramatic device is demonstrated by his best-known play, The Cardinal, which, while a revenge tragedy, opens with a deception more nearly allied to the comic. Although the action begins with a scene of ominous political discussion, stressing for the audience the solemnity of the play, the trick played on the stern soldier Columbo comes from the comedy of manners. In the lively chatter between Rosaura and her maids, he is castigated as uncourtly and uncouth. On stage he confirms this impression, using, as Professor Forker has aptly noted, “military metaphor for court etiquette”11 in a way calculated to display his personality. The ladies in waiting, Valeria and Celinda, discourse of Columbo's valorous and noble figure in the language of Fletcher's court maidens; their witty dialogue, toying conceitedly with the concept of a soldier as a lover, neatly stimulates the audience's awareness of the distinction between the stiff general and the brilliant court.
When Columbo receives the Duchess' letter, his impatience with the messenger's romantic dialect stresses again the gulf between his manners and those of the Duchess. He interrupts the flood of eloquence with a curt “No Poetry” (II.i.124). His failure to understand the purpose of the letter arises from his incompetent attempt to think in the unaccustomed vein of a lover:
[Aside] I have found it out, the Dutchess loves me dearly,
She exprest a trouble in her when I took
My leave, and chid me with a sullen ey;
'Tis a device to hasten my return;
Love has a thousand arts; I'l answer it,
Beyond her expectation.
(II.i.128-133)
His instinctive response—to reject the letter with fury—was the right one. He falls into Rosaura's trap because he tries to affect a habit of mind he does not possess. Thus this episode, the first step in a dark and bloody tragedy, is a variation of the gulling of the Witwoud, whose affectations lead him into pitfalls which his native good sense would have avoided.
Columbo's revenge for his injury is quite deliberately based on his awareness of the difference between his manners and those of the modish court. The murder of D'Alvarez in the midst of festivities and before royalty is, for the court as for the audience, above all else a shocking breach of decorum. It is his insulting and arrogant disregard of etiquette which the King finds most distressing:
This contempt
Of Majesty transcends my power to pardon,
And you shall feel my anger Sir.
(III.ii.229-231)
Professor Forker comments: “Note here the shabbiness of the King's motive, the selfishness implied by his capacity to look upon sudden murder (in the presence of the bereaved) as primarily a breach of court etiquette” (p. 63 n.). It may rather be thought that the focus on manners is inevitable in a play which marries tragedy and comedy of intrigue. Inevitably, the deception and the misunderstanding have comic overtones, but their principal purpose within the drama is surely to focus attention on the incompatibility of the characters and to stress the tension between the modes of life which they represent.
If the ritual of deception can be central to an effective tragedy, it is not surprising that Shirley can use it to a significant degree in his comedies, to lend clarity and coherence to their structure. Examples from some of Shirley's less well-known plays may show how he develops and refines the use of misunderstanding. In the early Love Tricks the conflicts and deceptions are farcical and entertaining but lack any coherence. In The Gamester the deceptions are more meaningfully related to character, and the plot has a genuine direction. In The Example and The Opportunity we can see the deceptions related significantly to character and to the patterns of society; these plays are consistent and valid analyses of social life, cast in the mode of comic drama.
II
Love Tricks, or The School of Compliment has a plot constructed around a complex series of deceits, which take various forms of gulling, disguise, masquerade, and self-deception. Much of the interest of the play comes from Shirley's skillful maintenance of a wide and dizzy range of confusions. The grotesque tricks played by Gorgon and Gasparo on the aged Rufaldo are conventionally farcical. The temporary irrationality of the beautiful Selina, who believes that she wishes to marry the old man, is a stranger love trick. Both Rufaldo and Selina realize that they have been deceived. Rufaldo rages at his tricksters, while Selina wonders at her folly and exiles herself to life in a pastoral landscape. But at the play's end they both come to self-awareness and accept their proper places. Rufaldo abandons his lusts and welcomes his daughter's wedding, and Selina marries her beloved Infortunio.
A series of similar episodes shows this basic pattern in the adventures of other characters: a movement from deception and blindness to anger or distress and then to eventual self-awareness. But Shirley seems to have no single theme in the play; it wanders amiably and loosely from episode to episode. The scenes at the School of Compliment, a witty series of parodies on books of polite instruction, do, however, show some social awareness. In this School, where the clownish come to learn sophistication, the fluid society of the 1620's reveals its many problems of behavior and communication for the new rich. The desire of Aretina in The Lady of Pleasure to make a great figure in the fashionable world is foreshadowed in the Oaf, who is brought to the School to receive polish and progresses so well that he can soon make a convincing imitation of the speech of a cynical fop:
A younger brother, sir; born at the latter end of the week, and wane of the moon; put into the world to seek my own fortune; got a great estate of wealth by gaming and wenching, and so purchas'd unhappily this state of damnation you see me in.
(III.v; Gifford and Dyce, I, 54)
The School scenes demonstrate Shirley's interest in social affectation—an affectation which is the up-to-date form of the humour and consists of the improper and mistaken decision to behave in a way at odds with one's genuine personality. Rufaldo and Selina are basically sensible; temporarily they affect the lover and the martyr. Aretina and the Oaf affect a social class not properly theirs; the dramatic function of their eccentricities is not different from that of Rufaldo and Selina. Carol, the socially affected and flighty heroine of Hyde Park, is similar to the egregious Sir Gervase Simple in Love in a Maze, a Jonsonian rustic who is either dumb or incoherent in company. Carol flirts vivaciously and nervously; Sir Gervase loosens his tongue with alcohol. They both affect a competence they do not naturally have. The affected person inevitably falls into confusion and is ripe for deception.
The plot of intrigue and the rather static School scenes are not integrated in Love Tricks, but they show, side by side, Shirley's skill in manipulating affectations and portraying fashionable London. In his best comedies these elements come together.
The Gamester rapidly sets on stage the irreconcilable views of life which clash throughout the play, giving it a focus sharper than that of Love Tricks. Men of overnice honor devoted to the dangers and romance of swordplay are introduced; a wounded duelist, Delamore, is carried on, and his high-minded opponent and sometime friend, Beaumont, is arrested. Meanwhile, Wilding, who is so lacking in honor as to ask his wife's help in debauching his ward, cynically discusses dueling with Hazard, the gamester:
Is't not a great deal safer, now, to skirmish
With a petticoat, and touze a handsome wench
In private, than be valiant in the streets,
And kiss the gallows for't? Hang, hang this foolery!
(I.i; Gifford and Dyce, III, 194)
The audience is assured of a sharp contrast between the two groups shown on stage.
Throughout the play Shirley maintains consistently the tension between the romance of Delamore and Beaumont—in a subplot of supposed death and tearful reconciliation—and the cynicism of Wilding or, to a lesser degree, Hazard. As usual, the plot develops through a trick, but the deception practiced on Wilding is not a conventional device. It is exactly and shrewdly chosen to suit his personality—first to batten on his libertinism, then to force him to discover his own unworthiness and actively struggle to regain a way of life that is honorable in the Delamore sense. Believing himself to be cuckolded, he analyzes, in two involved soliloquies, his supposed position, attempts to work a way out, perceives his own villainy, and realizes the full implications of his predicament:
I am justly punish'd now for all my tricks,
And pride o' the flesh. I had ambition
To make men cuckolds; now the devil has paid me.
.....
And spight of [all] these tricks, am a Cornelius.
(V.i,ii; Gifford and Dyce, III, 260, 272)
The libertine is reformed by jealousy, the vice of the man of honor, but logically irrelevant and meaningless to a Wilding. He is led into the trap, not because he is ambitious, lustful, or foolish; indeed, he is shown from the beginning of the play as sympathetic in some ways. Rather, his view of life is the result of an affection. Unable to sustain consistently the part he has chosen to play, he falls into self-contradiction and confusion. Wilding is not stupid; his mind, under the influence of the affection, just does not work in the same way as that of Mrs. Wilding, and consequently he cannot understand or communicate with her. The trick is designed to force an adjustment back to his proper view of life; the romantic subplot provides a symbol of the appropriate direction in which to move.
The Gamester is a neat and actable play, with some good scenes of London life, particularly those connected with the gambling tables; but the passages of realistic social comment are not meaningfully integrated into the main plot, and the play, while less diffuse than Love Tricks, is by no means completely unified.
The Gamester is built around conflicts between views of life. The Example, an excellent, fast-moving comedy, unfairly neglected, is built around the conflict between two different ways of life—that of the noble courtier and that of the old-fashioned gentry. Shirley is here able to incorporate his social awareness into the comic structure. The court is represented by Lord Fitzavarice, who mixes shrewd business dealing with arrogant libertinism and provides himself with a scrivener and a poetaster, Confident Rapture, to manage the two sides of his destructive activities. The honest and upright gentry are represented by the Lady Peregrine, whose husband, Sir Walter, has been forced into exile as a debtor, and her uncle, Sir Solitary Plot, so paranoiac that he watches nervously through the night, convinced of the dangers of the modern world and dreaming of plots in everything. The servants, what with waiting on Lady Peregrine through the day and Sir Solitary through the night, are chronically incompetent from lack of sleep. The expected trick played on Sir Solitary has the effect of shaking him from his humour; Lord Fitzavarice is persuaded by Lady Peregrine's honesty and purity to reject his vicious way of life.
Significant is the way in which these two key characters, in their tensions and their eventual return to decent behavior, consistently speak of themselves and their manners in terms of their social status. The action occurs because of the problems created by the interaction of the different classes. Sir Solitary's fears arise from his terror of bravoes in the streets, with their lascivious intent, and from his distrust of the high, fashionable life of gambling and the ball. Fitzavarice's assaults on Lady Peregrine seem to him perfectly proper, in view of his nobility and her genteel penury. His page, we may notice, defines her scruples as uncourtly:
You are the first
Lady within my observation,
That has took time to ask her conscience
The meaning of a jewel, sent by a lord,
A young and handsome lord too; 'tis a thing
At court is not in fashion, and 'twere pity
One with so good a face should be the precedent
Of such superfluous modesty.
(I.i; Gifford and Dyce, III, 291)
The actual courtship, whether by the proxy wit of Confident Rapture or by Fitzavarice himself, stresses the nobility of the wooer and assumes that his status deserves her submission.
Moreover, he is convinced that he can purchase her love by his promise to repair her husband's fortunes. This is the typical misunderstanding of a Wilding—an assumption that one's own desires (in this case, cupidity) are generally shared, in other words, an affection of consensus. But the courtship of Fitzavarice is more than the conventional nobleman's lust. He is governed by a sense of his own position, which forces him into continuing even after he regrets his precipitation:
I must have
Some way to enjoy her body for my credit;
The world takes notice I have courted her,
And if I mount her not, I lose my honour.
(I.i; Gifford and Dyce, III, 296-297)
Most invincible; no temptation
Can fasten on her: would I had ne'er laid siege to her!
The taking of her province will not be
So much advantage to me, as the bare
Removing of my siege will lose me credit.
(II.i; Gifford and Dyce, III, 302)
Later he is forced into dueling with Sir Walter, against his wishes but impelled by a sense of his honor, which, he claims, is precarious in a world of malice. Lord Fitzavarice is indeed the courtier, dependent on the maintenance of a fragile reputation—as much a prisoner of his honor as Sir Solitary is of his timidity. Sir Walter's valid question, “Can lords / Be cowards?” (IV.iii; Gifford and Dyce, III, 344) is apt. It is the Lord's way of life, even his social status, that forces him into an intolerable position. Neither he nor Sir Solitary can comprehend the environment into which they fall; their actions are repugnant to common sense yet seem essential to them. Both are restored to society by a general rejection of their follies, and, as has been made clear throughout, both are in essence decent and sensible. The relief with which Lord Fitzavarice' wicked ways are abandoned is neatly suggested in a scene which shows his page returning to Lady Peregrine, this time on a proper errand:
I meet
Honest employments with more cheerfulness.
..... When I go upon
Lascivious errands, madam, I take money
There is no other benefit belongs to 'em;
But good ones pay themselves.
(III.i; Gifford and Dyce, III, 320)
By stressing a failure of understanding rather than of morality, by relating the failure to understand to the social environment, and by showing the eccentric behavior as a temporary affectation, Shirley has made convincing and even moving the reformation and reconciliation scenes at the end of the play. We do not suddenly see a rake turning angel in Act V; rather we have the discovery, by a basically sympathetic character, that his way of life has been misdirected. This is perhaps more clearly seen in an admirable passage in The Witty Fair One. Fowler has been attempting to trick Penelope by feigning sickness. She organizes an elaborate series of deceptions to confront him with his supposed death and funeral. At first the jest is lighthearted and witty; then Fowler gradually realizes the solemnity implicit in the device and laments his loose ways.
The problems inherent when one social group comes into contact with another are skillfully and imaginatively revealed in the romantic comedy The Opportunity. The theme of mistaken identification is ancient and conventional, though we might expect the love affairs which arise from the comedy of errors to be permanent. That the transient soldiers, Aurelio and Pisauro, leave Urbino unattached, that their influence in the city is a temporary aberration, is made to seem inevitable as a result of the social contrast between their characters, as straightforward military men, and the intricate courtly environment into which they fall. Always in the background of the Duchess' affairs is the significance of her lofty political status. Lucio, a courtier, observes:
Although I honour Borgia [Aurelio],
And wish him heartily advanced, I would
Not kneel to him; my voice is for Ferrara,
He is a prince; I would not for my state
This should break off his treaty.
(II.ii; Gifford and Dyce, III, 393)
Pisauro becomes delighted with the prospect of power, and Aurelio himself is shown unromantically balancing political and amorous success:
Betwixt the duchess and Cornelia
My soul divides: I must not be a fool,
And for the fable of [mere] amorous love
Leave state that courts me with a glorious title.
(II.iii; Gifford and Dyce, III, 400)
The audience is not allowed to forget the implications of the action, nor does Shirley ignore the distinctions between the heroes and the courtiers around them. He uses the device of a trick to demonstrate this distinction. The Duchess has encouraged the diffident Aurelio by dictating a love letter which includes a broadly hinted assignation. Aurelio, uncertain if this is the opportunity he must grasp, happens on the Duke of Ferrara, who quotes what he had overheard on a previous occasion and persuades the unhappy soldier that the letter belongs in nobler hands. The Duke's trick works because Aurelio is out of his depth, confused in the courtly atmosphere around him. The nature of the deception and the Duke's easy and fluent dissimulation convince the audience that the traveling soldiers, while they may make a brief impression in Urbino, have really no proper place there. Aurelio's high hopes are an affectation, which the Duke's trick exposes.
A somewhat similar situation is found in The Humorous Courtier, where the ambitious courtier Contarini imagines that the Duchess is in love with him. He attributes his confusion, not entirely without reason, to the allusive nature of royal conversation:
'Tis great pity custom should make princes
So reserv'd in wooing.
(V.iii; Gifford and Dyce, IV, 606)
Typically, the Jacobean or Caroline romantic drama tends to be distant from reality; artifice and a fairy-tale atmosphere seem to deny any opportunity for social comment. Conversely, the realistic dramas of the day tend to submerge any general purpose beneath the details of everyday behavior and life in the London streets. Shirley's continuing interest in social status marks both romantic plays such as The Opportunity and realistic pieces such as Hyde Park, giving to the one a relevance and to the other a consistent theme. Romantic comedy with valid social comment, and realistic comedy with a firm dramatic focus, are Shirley's particular gifts to the theater of his time.
III
The failure of understanding, revealing the different modes of thought in differing social groups and forcing the rejection of affectation, is seen at its clearest and most sophisticated in the celebrated comedy The Lady of Pleasure. The central deception has an ironic inversion: Aretina is never found out by the fop she tricks. The comic movement toward understanding and reformation works here through a trick, but it is the successful trickster who undergoes the change. Aretina, who has ambitions to step into fashionable life, is unable to cope with the ways of that life. But her change of heart comes from the spontaneous collapse of her affectation following her moment of insight. Doubtless, Shirley's recognition of the essentially introspective nature of the self-discovery makes him have her withdraw from the stage to recover her composure behind the scenes.
The usual dramatic purpose of the comic trick is to reveal the character of the gull; in the case of Wilding and the others, the revelation is to themselves. In The Lady of Pleasure the trick reveals the true character of the fops to Aretina. The gull's character, as well as her own, is made plain; it is the trickster who, shocked at what she sees, reforms her behavior. The gull, Kickshaw, never learns the truth.
Critics have tended to be severe on Aretina. As Professor Knowland comments: “Aretina … having enjoyed her sin is ‘converted’ and left unpunished; but the awakened sense of guilt is just another theatrical trick.”12 But it is possible that a dramatist can show a convincing reformation without the external urges of public scorn or poetic justice. Aretina does indeed fall victim to the deception played by her husband, who pretends to be as devoted as she to a life of fashionable luxury and feigns riot to the point of apparent ruin. His miming of her affectations and extravagance acts as a comic mirror to show her the flaws in her own life, which she first sees vaguely and then, as his deception continues and bankruptcy threatens, perceives in full degree (V.i; Gifford and Dyce, IV, 82, 85).
Aretina's realization that the fashionable life is dangerous and inappropriate is illustrated by a number of excellent comic devices. The effect of her ambitions on her nephew, Frederick, is well shown. He first appears as a mild-mannered if rather oafish student, fresh from college in his sub-fusc. Determining to civilize him, she gives him over to her steward for tuition. Frederick proves a most apt pupil, becoming a fashion-obsessed buffoon and drunkard. When he attempts to court his aunt, she finally realizes the disastrous results of her educational experiment and packs him off again to the university. She is less able to undo the effects of her infatuation on her steward. He has first appeared as a typical old-fashioned retainer, and his greeting of Frederick shows him as a genuine friend of the family: “Welcome home, sweet master Frederick!” (II.i; Gifford and Dyce, IV, 24). But he rapidly sinks into the dissolute urban life, and the last we hear of him is Frederick's comment:
Your steward has some pretty notions too,
In moral mischief.
(IV.ii; Gifford and Dyce, IV, 71)
Through The Lady of Pleasure the audience is shown the true significance of the life of fashion. Throughout they are aware that Kickshaw and Littleworth are, as their names tell us, of no account. The portrait of the elegant Celestina, a more polished and witty figure, though scorned by Aretina and the fops, shows some of the true value of the high life.
Several passages explicitly contrast the life of fashion and the ideal life of the past, which Aretina has rejected. The play opens with her vivacious description of the country life she hates; while intentionally a rejection, the speech develops into an elaborate and splendid image of the old world, which conflicts with the similarly ornate invective against city luxury delivered by her husband. As their dialogue progresses, the imagery stresses the essentially destructive impact of luxury:
BORNWELL
I could accuse the gaiety of your wardrobe,
And prodigal embroideries, under which
Rich satins, plushes, cloth of silver, dare
Not shew their own complexions; your jewels,
Able to burn out the spectators' eyes,
And shew like bonfires on you by the tapers.
(I.i; Gifford and Dyce, IV, 8)
Such passages underline the falsity of Aretina's position in general moral terms. Elsewhere the dramatist skillfully shows the incompatibility of the lives of the gentry and the fops. In Act I, scene i, Kickshaw and Littleworth visit Aretina and are briefly entertained by Bornwell. All three try to be pleasant. Kickshaw and Littleworth are not arrogant Restoration beaux, Bornwell is no clownish squire. But they do not succeed in communicating with each other; their small talk dissolves into misunderstood compliment and unanswered question:
KICKSHAW and Littleworth
Save you, sir Thomas!
BORNWELL
Save you, gentlemen!
KICKSHAW
I kiss your hand.
BORNWELL
What day is it abroad?
LITTLEWORTH
The morning rises from your lady's eye:
If she look clear, we take the happy omen
Of a fair day.
BORNWELL
She'll instantly appear,
To the discredit of your complement;
But you express your wit thus.
KICKSHAW
And you modesty,
Not to affect the praises of your own.
BORNWELL
Leaving this subject, what game's now on foot?
What exercise carries the general vote
O' the town, now? nothing moves without your knowledge.
KICKSHAW
The cocking now has all the noise; I'll have
A hundred pieces on one battle.—Oh,
These birds of Mars!
LITTLEWORTH
Venus is Mars' bird too.
KICKSHAW
Why, and the pretty doves are Venus's,
To shew that kisses draw the chariot.
LITTLEWORTH
I am for that skirmish.
BORNWELL
When shall we have
More booths and bagpipes upon Bansted downs?
No mighty race is expected?—But my lady
Returns!
(I.i; Gifford and Dyce, IV, 12-13)
The passage is worth quoting at length to illustrate Shirley's skill in documenting embarrassment. Bornwell's simple questions, about the weather or about local news, attract witty extravagance and private jokes instead of replies. His final question about Banstead Downs elicits only stunned silence. Happily, Aretina appears, to set effective conversation again in motion. In this scene Shirley gives an abstract of his comic subject: the two levels of society exist, but they cannot meaningfully dwell together. The wealth and attractions of an Aretina may link the two groups for a time in courtship or intrigue, but, as discovered in The Opportunity, the liaison is temporary. A trick may recoil, a character may reconsider, and the persons in the play must return to their original, unaffected ways of life.
The comedy of intrigue generally suffers from the excessive virtuosity of its practitioners. Manipulation of a complex plot is more important than a single-minded dramatic purpose. Shirley's effective linking of the deception episode with a consistent view of English life permits him uniquely to turn the scampering plots of Renaissance theater into meaningful social commentaries.
Professor Knights quotes from a source in 1622:
For nowadays most men live above their callings, and promiscuously step forth vice-versa into one another's ranks. The countryman's eye is upon the citizen: the citizen's upon the gentleman: the gentleman's upon the nobleman.13
In a period of rapid social change, inevitably a sense of dislocation will be felt by many individuals. The uncertainty of their position will be reflected in confused behavior, affectation, or an exaggerated awareness of status. The satirist and the comic writer will work effectively with the materials of snobbery and the stupidity of social ambition. James Shirley's contacts with the polite world of London and with the gentry of the provinces provided for him a rich experience of the uncertainties and foolishness of much contemporary society. His range is perhaps more limited than that of his predecessors, his wit less incisive than that of his successors; he may, to speak of him again as transitional, lack the variety of Jonson and the modish glitter of Etherege. But he is admirable in his grasp of the conflicts in the middle range of society and fruitful in his development and manipulation of the conventional intrigues. His use of the trick and the deception to illustrate the social situation of his comedy gives to his best pieces a consistency of purpose and a unity of plot not often met with in English comedy of the Jacobean and Caroline periods.
Notes
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R. S. Forsythe, The Relations of Shirley's Plays to the Elizabethan Drama (New York, 1914).
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Described in T. H. Fujimura, The Restoration Comedy of Wit (Princeton, 1952), pp. 65-66.
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“MacFlecknoe,” ll. 29-30.
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See Eleanore Boswell, The Restoration Court Stage (Cambridge, 1932), pp. 105-106.
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Ashley H. Thorndike, English Comedy (New York, 1929), p. 236.
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Act V, scene i; James Shirley, The Dramatic Works and Poems, ed. William Gifford and Alexander Dyce (London, 1833), IV, 99. With the exception of passages from The Traitor and The Cardinal, which have recently been well edited, quotations are from the Gifford-Dyce edition, now available in a photographic reprint (New York: Russell & Russell, 1966).
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John V. Curry, Deception in Elizabethan Comedy (Chicago, 1955), p. 6.
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The best treatment of this aspect—indeed one of the best discussions of Shirley's art in general—is in Kathleen M. Lynch, The Social Mode of Restoration Comedy (New York, 1926), pp. 34-42.
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James Shirley, The Traitor, ed. John Stewart Carter (Lincoln, 1965), II.i.182-194, 204-207.
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Alfred Harbage, “James Shirley's The Wedding and the Marriage of Sir Kenelm Digby,” PQ, XVI (January, 1937), 35-40.
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James Shirley, The Cardinal, ed. Charles R. Forker (Bloomington, 1964), p. 18 n.
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Six Caroline Plays, ed. A. S. Knowland (London, 1962), p. x.
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L. C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (London, 1937), p. 108.
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