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The Gray's Inn Circle and the Professional Dramatists

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SOURCE: Burner, Sandra A. “The Gray's Inn Circle and the Professional Dramatists.” In James Shirley: A Study of Literary Coteries and Patronage in Seventeenth-Century England, pp. 41-84. Lanham, Md: University Press of America, 1988.

[In the following excerpt, Burner discusses the relationship between theater and audience in the development of new plays, noting that Shirley was among a select coterie of playwrights writing for private theaters and upper-class audiences.]

The interrelationships among the people who comprised the Gray's Inn circle are apparent through the verses written for members who published within the group—poetry, drama, essays. Within this larger circle are the friends who also made up part of another group, the Catholic Court coterie. One of the contributors to Shirley's published plays who bridges the two circles was Robert Stapleton, who arrived in London some time after 1625 when he left the Benedictine monastery at Douay, renounced his religion, and returned to England. Much of his known dramatic activity takes place after the Restoration, but he published several translations during the Caroline years, such as The fourth booke of Virgils Aeneis, entered for publication by a Shirley publisher, W. Cooke, in November 1634 with commendatory verses not surprisingly by a fellow Catholic, William Habington. Stapleton wrote verses not only for Shirley but also for the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647.1

Like Shirley's The Grateful Servant when it was published in 1630, Massinger's The Roman Actor on its publication in 1629 contained no less than six sets of commendatory verses, including two written by their mutual friends Ford and May. Some of these supporters were connected with the theatre as actors or playwrights; others, among them Shirley's friend Robert Harvey, were with the Inns of Court. In 1630 Massinger dedicated The Picture “To my Honored, and selected friends of the Noble society of the Inner Temple.”2

By 1630, then, the larger literary group known as the Gray's Inn Circle was taking clear direction, and minor figures allied themselves with established writers and prominent courtiers in that group. What developed during these years was a fairly well knit circle of friends, familiar with each other's literary work and presumably serving as critics and advocates for one another. The Gray's Inn circle worked much like a merchant guild, functioning to protect and support its members, seeking to advance their careers. Certain members, such as Habington, undoubtedly opened the way to the courtier patrons connected with the Court and the Catholic coterie for Shirley and other dramatists, including Davenant. Ford and Massinger gave Shirley access to the established writers and their patrons, becoming the means by which he entered another group, the smaller coterie of professional dramatists. Many of Shirley's acquaintances during this time were simply young men studying at the Inns of Court and developing their interests in drama and playgoing. One such person, for example, probably was Will Atkins “of Gray's Inn” who wrote the only lines commending Shirley's The Traitor when it was published in 1635. Atkins had been admitted to the Inn in 1631 and before that had probably lived in the parish of St. Dunstan's in the West, next to Holborn, of which the Scavenger's Rate Assessments list his name along with those of the Catholic courtier Tobie Mathew and the author Izaac Walton for the years 1628-30.3

Writers with associations in the Inns of Court addressed a more exclusive audience than earlier authors had known. Expensive private theatres were attracting playgoers of the well-to-do middle class, the gentry, and the nobility, while for most of the year the general London citizenry frequented the public theatres. The Cockpit Theatre, for which Shirley wrote, stood near the town houses of the gentry on Drury Lane and drew much of its audience from the upperclass ladies and gentlemen who lived nearby as well as the Inns of Court students and lawyers.4 Gerald Eades Bentley classifies the Cockpit as a coterie theatre along with the Salisbury Court Theatre, for which Richard Brome was the principal playwright.5 The private theatre audience might also include gamesters, military men, city wives, and country gentlemen. All had special seating within the theatre, the exact position being dependent on the ability to pay a fee of sixpence for a seat in the top gallery to half a crown for a private box. A devotee could attend the theatre several times a week and see a different play every night. Most obnoxious to both playwright and players were the courtiers who paid 2/6d. to sit on a stool on stage, doing so simply to distract the audience, call attention to their dress, and make critical comments about the play being performed. Many of the Caroline gentry and aristocracy looked for resemblances between play characters and well known Londoners, whether intended by the playwright or not, and satirical references to specific well-to-do people were frequent.6 Increasingly, the audience came to shape the subjects and styles of the drama; because it was a self-selected group, the private theatre audience could dictate what sorts of plays were produced and, by extension, who wrote them. Associations and affiliations became ever more important to professional dramatists.

By the early 1630's many playwrights were beginning to concentrate on writing comedies centering on familiar London scenes and situations in an attempt to appeal to the tastes of this audience. In 1632 Shirley's Hyde Park and The Ball and Brome's The Weeding of Covent Garden were staged, to be followed by other comedies set in familiar and popular areas frequented by the wits and gentry in the audience. Trading on the earlier city comedies of Jonson, Middleton, and Marston that illustrated a city changing economically from public market place to private shop, these dramatists continued the commercial theme, using terms having to do with exchange, buying and selling, and accumulation. Some city comedies raise serious questions about new wealth. Criticism most often is expressed in the exploration of relations between sex and money.7 The theme of the commercialization of social life indicates the dramatists' dependence on London's mixed audiences; and the increased number of prologues and addresses to the reader of published dramas points to the uncertainty playwrights felt about the reception of plays that had to please patrons as well as courtiers, merchants as well as apprentices. Even for the relatively select audience of the private theatres, dramatists wrote plays which reflect the dual character of the city, if only to appeal to the gentry in the audience. Sharp commentary on the nouveaux riches could be taken as expressing the mind of courtiers of old family in the audience. Yet though such people could have their haughty amusement at the recent arrivals, their Court was dependent on new money. The prologue to Shirley's The Doubtful Heir, which first was staged in Ireland as Rosania, or Love's Victory and later performed in the London public theatre, the Globe,8 makes it clear that the play was intended for the private Blackfriars stage:

… No shews, no dance,
… here's no target-fighting
Upon the stage, all work for cutlers barr'd
No bawdry, nor no ballads; …
But language clean; and, what affects you not,
Without impossibilities the plot:
No clown, no squibs, no devil in't. …

(IV,279)

But there were vacation periods, usually beginning in July and lasting through September, when the Inns of Court men were not around and the gentry and nobility returned to their country estates. At this time, the private theatres depended on the city merchants, tradesmen, clerks, even apprentices—the “cits.” And there is evidence that in every audience there was this element. Davenant in his prologue to The Platonic Lovers (1635) produced at the private Blackfriars Theatre and Brome in The Court Beggar (1639) performed at the private Cockpit Theatre refer to the city audience.9 References to citizens and the mercantile class in Shirley's plays and those of many of his fellow dramatists restrict their satiric comment generally to Puritan merchants and to newly successful social climbers, separating the old, established guild citizenry from the newer group.

Dramatists liked to write for the private audience, for though it was developing a taste for lavish pageantry, it also was interested in logical plots and clever dialogue more than in the clowning and physical combat that appealed to many of the apprentices and citizens who frequented the public theatres. The witty dialogue in Hyde Park, for example, and in Shirley's other London comedies defines the taste of his audience. Dialogue that is more important than action and that depicts character is possible only with a sophisticated clientele, such as might also include playgoers trained in debate and casuistry as the Inns of Court men were. In the relative ease of his relationship with his audience, Shirley's London comedies anticipate the audience participation in analyzing a play; criticism had become a topic of polite conversation.10

But what serious playwrights had to say to this audience was not necessarily what it thought it was hearing. A useful division of the playgoers would be between old nobility and gentry and a composite London class made up of recent social arrivals: prosperous commercial citizens, some of them with purchased titles, along with a number of country gentlefolk trying to adjust to sophisticated urban life. A knowledgeable Carolinian, of course, could break down those categories into fine pieces. The rough dividing line is between people who were socially secure, and therefore tempted to be supercilious toward newcomers, and insecure people eager to take on the manners of the old families—an ancient and modern phenomenon particularly well marked in the elegant Court and theatre world of the seventeenth century. Attending a play critical of the gaucheries and the opportunism of the wealthy merchants or the naivete of country ladies and gentlemen, both the established set and the new were doubtless confident of being squarely of the same opinion as the playwright and enjoying his favor. Merchants and their wives basking in the friendliness of a Court that needed and sought new money could believe that they had fully arrived and were not at all like their cruder social cousins who merely thought that they had arrived; courtiers of old lineage could believe that they were sharing with the dramatist a private joke on the nouveaux in the audience.

But Shirley can be numbered among playwrights who were in fact commenting on all or much of Carolinian upper class behavior. Most obvious is the scolding of the newcomers for greed and pretension. But such a play as The Humorous Courtier or The Lady of Pleasure carries another message that should not have pleased the haughtier of the old families: that their claims and manners are not worth copying, that an honest citizen has all the nobility the human race can acquire. Moralist playwrights were also lecturing the monarchy, to which they were staunchly loyal, against its practice of selling titles and its dependence on quick money. The professional dramatists Philip Massinger, Richard Brome, and Shirley, then, wrote from somewhere just outside the current contented certainties even when their elegance and elevation of language gratified the taste that attended those certainties.11

The clearest indication of this ambivalence on the part of the professional playwrights toward their audience and its taste is seen in the prologues written for many plays. The prologue to Shirley's The Example (1634) complains about people who set themselves up as arbiters of taste:

… the praise
Of wit and judgment is not, now a days,
Owing to them that write; but he that can
Talk loud, and high, is held the witty man,
And censures finely, rules the box, and strikes
With his court nod consent to what he likes.
… Nay, he that in the parish never was
Thought fit to be o' the jury, has a place
Here, on the Bench, for sixpence; and dares sit,
And boast himself commissioner of wit:
Which though he want, he can condemn with oaths …
… This is a destiny to which we bow,
For all are innocent but the poets now;
Who suffer from their guilt of truth and arts, …
If any meet here, as some men i' the age
Who understand no sense, but from one stage,
And over partial, will entail, like land,
Upon heirs-male, all action, and command
Of voice and gesture, upon whom they love;
These, though call'd judges, may delinquents prove.

(III,282-83)

Shirley refers to the courtiers who sit on the stage, commenting loudly on the play, but he also seems to be referring to those who prefer only the type of performance that pleased the Court taste and, perhaps, only one particular theatre. Courtiers were becoming interested in developing the accomplishments admired in an elite society—dance, horsemanship, poetry, and drama. Encouraged by the queen, they began to write and produce their own plays. This encroachment on the craft, along with a genuine liking for the audience, moved playwrights to seek an exclusive relationship with discerning patrons. That the relationship was precarious is illustrated by the number of prologues and commendatory verses that complain about the audience and critics or defend them. Some of the complaints no doubt were part of a recognized convention. Dedications to groups of people, such as the dedication by Ford of The Lover's Melancholy to the “Noble Society of Gray's Inn,” is one illustration of a special relationship with a large segment of an audience.12 And in a prologue written to The Imposture six years later Shirley again comments on the prevailing taste—“A Prologue must have more wit than the play”—but then praises the gentlemen and reassures the ladies:

… You, gentlemen, that sit
Our judges, great commissioners of wit,
… for the author's sake,
I' the progress of his play, not to be such
Who'll understand too little, or too much;
But choose your way to judge.—To the ladies..
In all his poems you have been his care,
… no fright
Shall strike chaste ears …
No innocence shall bleed in any scene …

(V,189)

Shirley's prologue to The Duke's Mistress, which was performed before the Court at St. James on February 22, 1636,13 perhaps describes best the difficulty of pleasing the audience:

So various are the palates of our age,
That nothing is presented on the stage,
Though ne'er so square, and apted to the laws
Of poesy, that can win full applause.
This likes a story, that a cunning plot;
This wit, that lines; here one, he knows not what.
But after all this looking several ways,
We do observe the general guests to plays
Must in opinion of two strains, that please,
Satire and wantonness; the last of these,
Though old, if in new dressing it appear,
Will move a smile from all,—but shall not here.
… For satire, they do know best what it means,
That dare apply; and if a poet's pen,
Aiming at general errors, note the men,
'Tis not his fault: …
But here we quit your fear of satire too, …

(IV,191)

Though Shirley here indirectly censures current taste for its satire and its “wantonness,” he amply employs both in his plays, most notably his London comedies, Hyde Park and The Lady of Pleasure.

The plays of Shirley, Massinger, and Brome show a striking similarity in the preoccupation with the changing society and the values of various classes within it. These three professional dramatists illustrate the complexity of the larger Inns of Court circle, forming a small coterie within that circle, commenting on the interests, attitudes and manners of the Inns of Court itself, the larger London bourgeoisie, and the elite Court coterie.

Surely the dramatist who influenced Shirley most directly was Philip Massinger. Massinger had a long playwriting career, collaborating notably with Fletcher and, at Fletcher's death in 1625, becoming chief playwright for the Blackfriars Theatre. That Shirley found Massinger's acquaintance important to his own work is evident from the commendatory verses each wrote for the other. Massinger, prior to assuming the position of chief dramatist for Blackfriars, wrote a number of tragicomedies and comedies for Beeston's company at the Cockpit before and after Shirley began his long alliance with that theatre. Sometime between 1621 and 1625 A New Way to Pay Old Debts, perhaps Massinger's most scathing indictment of the new middle class, was produced by Beeston's players, and in 1627 they presented his The Great Duke of Florence.14 The influence of the older dramatist on the younger playwright seeking to establish a working relationship with the Cockpit company is suggested by a number of similarities between them in dramatic technique and ideology.

Like Shirley, Massinger was fond of expressing his moral convictions in his plays and often weakened his plot by departing from the narrative to adapt the action to his moral theme. Massinger's moral commentary is more direct than Shirley's; he concentrated his views on politics, religion, and the relationship between the sexes. Despite his criticism of evil rulers in his plays, Massinger holds to a belief in the divine right of kings as in The Roman Actor and to the need of rulers to listen to frank advisers such as is depicted in The Great Duke of Florence. Frequent allusions to court affairs of his times always make some moral point. Some critics believe that George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, is the model for Fulgentio, the king's favorite in The Maid of Honour, and again for the admiral of the Carthaginian fleet in The Bondman. In The Emperor of the East, the playwright suggests through the character of Theodosius the prodigality of Charles I and his lack of grip. The Picture takes a sidelong glance at the court of Charles I; a king neglects his duties because he so dotes on his queen, and Massinger makes the point that a wife should not intrude her will or attitude on her husband's business. Massinger was concerned primarily with the changing society of London as a microcosm of the whole country. His criticism of the Court's nepotism, favoritism, and extravagance in such things as expensive masques goes with his concern about the country's unpreparedness for war and the poor treatment of former military men. He came close to equating heredity with virtue, believing the social integrity of the nobility threatened by the financial power of the wealthier tradesmen, and more than one play has this as its centering moral preoccupation.15

Massinger's indictment of a changing society is best expressed in A New Way to Pay Old Debts, probably written before 1625. The play's main character, Sir Giles Overreach, is generally agreed to be modeled on the character and career of Sir Giles Mompesson. Having received a patent from King James for the sole manufacture of gold and silver thread, Mompesson used copper instead, which resulted in laming, blindness, and death. Massinger's Overreach is struck down for betraying his obligations in a trust given him by the King and for trying to rise above his social position; he becomes the projection of the evil that will later be identified with capitalism. The character of Welborne embodies ancient right and rank; Timothy Tapwell represents the new accession of prestige without tradition.16 The play argues that efforts to cross class barriers are dangerous and destructive of society as a whole.17

Lady Frugal and her daughters in The City Madam (1632) are additions to the argument. These women are made to look ridiculous in their attempts to act in dress and manner as the nobility; at the same time, Mr. Plenty as a representative of the nouveau riche remarks that he pays his tailor for his clothes when they are delivered, unlike men of title. But in the end title is all to Massinger; people are worthy only if they keep to their social place. In the same play he gently satirizes the activities of fashionable ladies who want to be affiliated with the Court. Massinger contends that city women should move in their own spheres.18

Massinger undoubtedly influenced Shirley's more delicate treatment of the shift in social power. The Lady of Pleasure (1635), centering on London customs and places, illustrates Shirley's ambivalence toward country and city gentry and nobility. A wealthy couple representing the landed gentry comes to London to acquire the affectations and culture the city offers. Lord Bornwell speaks for the simple virtues of the landed gentry. It was more fashionable to cast slurs on the pastoral life as does Lady Bornwell, who represents a new monied class in its attempts to merge into the nobility of birth and breeding. Yet Shirley also comments on the sophistication of the aristocracy, superficial but hard and impenetrable to an outsider such as Lord Bornwell. He fares best in the outcome because he knows his place. Lady Bornwell, unfaithful to her marriage, is Shirley's gravest examination of the newly monied class in its quest for status and title. Shirley exhorts his audience to look not to social position but to the true nobility that comes from within. In The Lady of Pleasure as in other work that is most typical of him, Shirley's didacticism and correctional satire address more than one social class.19 In The Ball (1632) Shirley takes a look at the pastimes of rising courtiers and their affectations. There are references to Sir Marmaduke's “patent for making vinegar” and his involvement in various citizens' projects—draining fens, operating iron mills, making buttons. The character of Bostock in the play serves as Shirley's critical and strongly partisan comment on those who claim honor through noble relatives or connections: “… for we inherit nothing truly / But what our actions make us worthy of” (III,63).

At times Massinger's plays, like Shirley's, were censored by Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, for making obvious dramatic allusions to Court figures and for incorporating current events into their plots. At a time when England and Spain were at peace, Massinger's Believe as You List (1631) was denied licensing because its plot referred to the deposing of the King of Portugal by the King of Spain. The play had to be rewritten, the setting changed to ancient Rome. King Charles read Massinger's now lost play, The King and the Subject, and in 1638 Herbert censored it at the King's direction since certain lines referred to the various methods the King used to raise taxes.20

Shirley had similar trouble. The Master of the Revels required him to revise The Ball and remove certain parts because “there were divers personated so naturally, both of lords and others of the Court. …”21 What people at court the characters represent is mere conjecture, but Barker and Bostock perhaps were modeled on real people; so possibly was Lord Rainbow, the “May Lord” and “bubble of Nobility” whose actions with the ladies are inconsistent with his words to Bostock on honor (III,63). Although Jack Freshwater is a stereotype, it may be that Monsieur le Frisk, the French dancing master, derives from one of Henrietta Maria's servants. Scholars have generally agreed that, although the printing of The Ball designates Chapman as co-author, the play is largely Shirley's creation, Chapman having been called in for revision of those offensive parts to which the Master of the Revels objected, and set to diffusing the identities of characters who were clearly parodies of court figures. If Chapman did revise and change names (Lord Loveall becomes Rainbow, Sir Lionel is changed to Marmaduke), he may have inserted the brief masque that defends the chaste activities of the balls. The revision is careful to use very few “noble” people in the altered cast but it is clear that all are of the upper class.22

Massinger and Shirley wished to instruct as well as entertain. But the courtly audience of the late 1620's and the 1630's, when it did not turn to mere show, was interested in the wit and humor afforded by the social pretensions of the changing middle class rather than in the effects of a strong merchant class on the economic and social future of the nation. Shirley took a middle course, commenting on the manners and morals of the various classes that made up the world of London, and perhaps more successfully than Massinger or Brome managing to establish with his theatre audience a spirit of cooperation in poking fun at those outside of its circle and coterie, allowing the audience to believe itself above and separate from the targets of the wit and humor, yet implicitly remarking on social climbing in a serious way.

Brome's plays, like Shirley's London comedies, are occupied with court abuses, political and social. They provided their fastidious and sophisticated but somewhat shallow audience with domineering women, intricate plots culminating in one big, sensational scene, and the use of names and places well known to their fashionable audiences. Brome is more critical of the Court and its indulgences than are Massinger and Shirley and has a more narrow and perhaps less philosophic view of London society.23 More than Massinger and Shirley, he places his comedies in London, using an almost reportorial colloquial dialogue, and his plays capitalize on current events and places. Shirley's Hyde Park (1635), for example, offers without much critical comment an intimate glimpse of the interests and pleasures of a monied, leisure class. The debate between Fairfield and Carol is a piece of showmanship, designed to display wittily the typical pastimes of a young woman in that stratum: playing “gleek” (cards), attending plays, going to the foot races and horse races, being seen at Springgarden and the “Sparagus” (II,490). The independence that is desirable to a woman, a topic that would be of great interest to Restoration audiences,24 Carol defines when she advises the widow Bonavent to keep her freedom: her pets, jewels, private tailor and doctor might be taken away if she remarries, and now she can talk as she likes at the table, dance, and go to bed when she pleases (II,475). The dominating woman in A Mad Couple Well Matched (1636), which has been described as Brome's closest anticipation of the Restoration comedy, is a subtle satire on the puritanic, strait-laced wife who is a conniving hypocrite; the friendship plot in the play can be viewed as a satire on the court's fad of the precieuse. Brome criticizes pretense, social climbing, and coterie affectation, the last in his “roaring boy” clubs, a lower-class parallel to a court coterie.25 Both elements appear as well in Shirley. The Humorous Courtier (1631) is Shirley's most consistent attack on courtiers. Shirley's ridiculous courtier is a comment on the singleminded greed for power or status. Hypocrisy is played by the villain Orseolo, who affects misogyny. Greed appears in four variations through Volterre, Contarini, Comachio, and Depazzi. The theme smacks of Jonson's Volpone.

In 1629 Shirley's The Wedding was issued with a list of the cast naming parts for fourteen actors. In that same year, Massinger's The Roman Actor and Lodowick Carlell's The Deserving Favourite also published cast lists, and Ford's Lover's Melancholy included an actor list. Three of the four plays were presented by the King's Men at the Blackfriars Theatre; Shirley's play was acted by the Queen's Men at the Cockpit. Actor lists appeared in two more of Massinger's plays printed in 1630: The Picture, produced by the King's Men, and The Renegado, written for the Queen's Men. As Bentley points out, printing the actors' names and their roles with a play edition was a noteworthy departure from custom. He suggests that the inclusion of cast lists may have resulted from cooperation among the playwrights. That each was deeply interested in the works of his colleagues is evident from the verses that Ford, Massinger, and Shirley wrote for one another in the years 1629 and 1630.26 The cooperation indicates a need to establish solidarity against attack. Another possibility is that the inclusion of actors' lists was a requirement imposed by the companies, who became the owners of the playwright's work.27 In either case, professional playwrights were entering a defensive league with one another and with actors, for both were now under assault.

On the one side, the Puritans were denouncing them. The protection acting companies earned when King James I placed them under royal patronage in 1603 had raised their status. But Parliament in 1625 had been presented with A Shorte Treatise against Stage-Playes; Massinger's The Roman Actor, played in late 1626, is generally thought to be the profession's reply to this attack. Publishing cast lists was one way of legitimating the professions of dramatist and actor. Meanwhile the professional authors, in their solicitation of audiences of wealth and rank, were facing competition from amateur courtier dramatists writing at the urging of the queen. A theatre war between the two sets of authors put under siege the reputations of playwrights, theatre houses, and actors. Shirley's friends who wrote commendatory poems for the publication of The Grateful Servant all refer to literary attacks on the playwright. The number of verses is unusual, particularly for Shirley, whose publications seldom include any commendatory pieces.28

The differences between the two factions, both of which had members within the larger Gray's Inn circle, represent a growing division among playwrights and writers and their attitudes toward their craft, brought about in part by the changing tastes and interests of a Cavalier court. The private audience connected with the Court viewed attendance at plays as an opportunity to display the cultural refinement it cultivated as well as a diversion from the growing political unrest around it. While upper-class taste could find gratification in sophisticated plot and dialogue, and did so to Shirley's advantage, masque and pageantry were becoming the fashion. Courtiers began to write somewhat vapid but visually spectacular dramas that appealed to Queen Henrietta Maria. Davenant was most attuned to this taste, and his appointments of servant to the Queen and later of poet laureate confirm his ability to please.29 Massinger's biographer T. A. Dunn writes of courtly authors, followers of Ben Jonson, who called themselves the Tribe of Ben.30 Not all of the Tribe joined the courtier faction: Randolph was part of that group, and he allied himself with Shirley against his critics. After he suffered a stroke in 1628, Jonson was no longer the assertive influence on the drama he had been, but his followers, such as Davenant, Carew, and Suckling, carried on his critical tradition albeit with less experience and knowledge. Through their own works and their attacks on the established professional dramatists' plays produced at the leading private theatres, they attempted to make the drama conform to the fashionable masque-like presentations admired by the Court.31 The uneasy relations between Ben Jonson and the architect and masque designer Inigo Jones as they collaborated in a series of court masques bespeak the clash in sensibility between serious writers—for both Jonson and Jones were serious—and the courtly audience for whom they wrote, responsive to the graceful word or movement rather than to genuine feeling or ideas.32 The professionals disdained, even when they had to accommodate, the prettiness of Court and Cavalier taste, the contrived elevation of language, the expensive masques, the Platonic love fashion. And while partisans in both camps could look with hostility or with humorous condescension on the social climbing of new wealth, it was the professionals—more inclined to moral statement in any event—who were the more explicit in their condemnation, for the Court was drawing on new money for the dramatic presentations that offended the professional playwrights. In remarking about the professional dramatists' reaction to their audience, Clifford Leech refers to the “emotional refinement of Ford and Shirley, the compromises of Davenant, the sense of unease in Massinger, the constant impatience of Brome.”33 The rivalry among acting companies expressed these clashes in social attitudes and in concepts of craft. In the end the King's Men at Blackfriars was supreme after a brief period from 1628 to 1630 when the Cockpit and Red Bull enjoyed considerable popularity. Until 1636 when the theatres were closed once again by outbreaks of the plague and Shirley left for Ireland, the Cockpit stood second only to the Blackfriars in reputation, in part because of Shirley's productivity.34

Verses written by Thomas Carew for William Davenant's publication of The Just Italian contributed to the dispute. Carew wrote to praise Davenant's play, presented at Blackfriars in November of 1629 and printed very quickly in January 1630. It had not been well received on the stage. Shirley's Grateful Servant, presented in December of 1629 and printed in February of 1630, had been a resounding success. Carew's poem alludes to the Cockpit and Red Bull theatres, “where not a tong / Of th'untun'd Kennell, can a line repeat / Of serious sense: but like lips, meet like meat; Whilst the true brood of Actors, that alone / Keepe naturall vnstrayn'd Action in her throne …” at Blackfriars play to empty audiences.35 It was a broadside attack on the actors, implicating playwrights and theatres as well and blaming audiences for poor judgment.

Georges Bas, in his study of Carew's verses and those written for Shirley, has noted that Thomas Craford's verses to Shirley for The Grateful Servant were a direct rebuttal to Carew's poem:36

I doe not praise thy straines, in hope to see
My verses read before thy Comedy;
But for it selfe—that cunning I remit
To the new tribe, and Mountebanks of wit
That martyre ingenuity …
And had that stage no other play, it might
Have made the critticke blush at cock-pit flight,
Who not discouering what pitch it flies
His wit came down in pitty to his eyes
And lent him a discourse of cocke and bull
To make his other commendations full:
But let such Momi pause, and give applause
Among the brood of actors, in whose cause,
As Champion he hath sweat …
Let 'em vnkennell malice, yet thy praise
Shall mount secure, hell cannot blast thy bayes.

(I,1xxx)

John Fox begins, “Present thy work unto the wiser few, / That can discern and judge; … be therefore boldly wise, / And scorn malicious censurers; … Because thou dost not swell with mighty rhymes, / Audacious metaphors; like verse, like times. / Let others bark; keep thou poetic laws, …” “Jo. Hall” remarks, “Who would write well for the abused stage, / When only swelling words do please the age, / And malice is thought wit? To make't appear / They judge, they mis-interpret what they hear … Thee and thy strains I vindicate, whose pen / Wisely disdains to injure lines, or men: … Let purblind critics still endure this curse, / To see good plays, and ever like the worse.” Referring perhaps to the Blackfriars' predominance, Charles Aleyn opens his verses, “Tush, I will not believe that judgment's light / Is fix'd but in one sphere, and that dull night / Muffles the rest; …” Thomas Randolph's poem begins with a stanza of grandiose verbiage, mocking the style of the critics of Shirley: “I cannot fulminate or tonitruate words, / To puzzle intellects …” and goes on: “… others with disturbed channels go, / And headlong, like Nile-cataracts, do fall / With a huge noise, and yet not heard at all. …” Robert Stapleton refers to flowery language and obfuscation: “… thy Muse … doth not use / To wear a mask or veil, which now a days / Is grown a fashion, …” Shirley's friend Habington hints that the playwright's adversaries lean on influential and prestigious supporters: “My name is free, and my rich clothes commend / No deform'd bounty of a looser friend, / Nor am I warm i' th'sunshine of great men, / By gilding their dark sins; …” Along with Randolph, Habington refers to the Cockpit specifically: “… thou'st given a name / To the English Phoenix, which by thy great flame / Will live in spite of malice to delight / Our nation, doing art and nature right. …” Massinger joins in the attack on the style of the opposing camp: “… I dare not raise / Giant hyperboles unto thy praise, / Or hope it can find credit in this age, … Here are no forc'd expressions, no rack'd phrase, / No Babel compositions, to amaze / The tortur'd reader, no believ'd defense / To strengthen the bold atheist's insolence, / No obscene syllable, that may compel / A blush from a chaste maid; …”37

Such a crowd of indignant defenses of Shirley undoubtedly had more to occasion it than Carew's remarks, which refer to the theatres and actors at the Cockpit and the Red Bull and their audiences' lack of taste rather than to a specific play or playwright. Bas suggests that the conflict was primarily over the contention that the King's Men were superior to the actors at the Cockpit and Red Bull.38 Shirley's preface to The Grateful Servant defends the actors:

I dare not owne their character of my selfe,
or play, but I must ioyne with them that have
written, to doe the Comedians iustice, among whom,
some are held comparable with the best that are, and
have beene in the world, and the most of them
deseruing a name in the file of those that are eminent
for gracefull and vnaffected action. Thus much Reader
I thought meet to declare in this place, and if
thou beest ingenuous, thou wilt accuse with me,
their bold seuerity, who for the offence of being modest
and not iustling others for the wall haue most
iniuriously thrust so many actors into the
Kennell—now—

Panduntur portae, I uvat ire—(II,5)

But Bas believes that the virtues of the playwrights were at issue as well. Davenant had his champions, Carew and Suckling, working as an advance guard to prepare the way for his success, while he aspired perhaps to replace Massinger at the Blackfriars. Yet his own play performed there was not liked and his earlier work, Albovine (1628), which he had printed in 1629, had never been performed.39 Commendatory verses printed with The Emperor of the East in 1632 offer evidence that Massinger was receiving unfavorable commentary from the Blackfriars critics. Massinger's friends John Clavell, William Singleton, and Henry Parker defend him against “the gallants” in the audience who disliked the play.40

Shirley never developed a literary association with Davenant so far as is known. Perhaps each questioned the other's originality; Shirley was older than Davenant by about ten years, and might naturally resent rather than be complimented by a younger man eager to supplant him. The elevated verbiage that Shirley's friends attributed to his opponents is characteristic of Davenant's work.41 His dialogue shifts from everyday conversational speech to stately and ornate hyperbole, particularly when he is attempting to depict the Platonic love cult popularized by Queen Henrietta Maria. More than most authors, Davenant aimed to please and to entertain. His News from Plymouth (1635) includes a conventional quarrel between masculine liberty and the female search for equality and freedom in marriage; a brief threat of tragic possibilities is soon dispelled in a lively and cheerful picture of seventeenth-century life. Whether he sincerely embraced the ideals of Platonic love (his malady, which ended in embarrassing disfigurement to his nose, announces that he did not practice them), Davenant became the leader of the fad, writing some six plays about it between 1634 and 1642.42

Both of Davenant's biographers describe him as a consummate opportunist. In a chapter entitled “The Search for Patrons,” Arthur H. Nethercot writes: “His whole method of campaign, in fact, lay in this plan: to publicize himself; to become known to all the great people who could help him upward; to fight, to write, to carouse and discourse, to flatter and compliment, until he was accepted and welcomed in that bright world above him, which was so unlike that in which he had been reared.”43 What eventually paid off for Davenant was the support of two powerful patrons in the Court, Endymion Porter and Henry Jermyn. Alfred Harbage pictures Davenant as a young man “strongly attracted by the glamour of fashionable circles, sincerely devoted to poetry, but alert to find achievement whether as a poet, a soldier, or a courtier. Affable and vivacious, he was finding popularity in a widening circle of friends. Most of these friends were young men of his own age, better connected than he, but as yet of no more importance in the world. Unfortunately for him, they were inclined to set up as bon vivants as well as wits, and he shared their pleasures.”44

Prominent among these new friends was John Suckling, who had been admitted to Gray's Inn in 1627.45 Suckling was the supreme courtier; Harbage refers to him as “almost a symbol of the Cavalier legend.”46 He combined wealth (an inheritance he spent extravagantly), wit, a love of gambling and socializing, and a tendency toward ostentatious display tantamount to pageantry, particularly in demonstrating loyalty to his king. Best known of his exploits was his contribution to King Charles' cause in the Bishops' Wars of a troop of one hundred men, attired in white silk and mounted on splendid horses. Yet many of his contemporaries saw him as a coxcomb with little valor or virtue. And Suckling had produced slight literary work by 1630, although he was to have an elaborate production of his play, Aglaura, presented at Blackfriars in 1638. For the fifth act the company could choose between a tragic and a happy ending. Suckling spent several hundred pounds on costumes for the players and then gave them to the actors, a highly unusual and an extravagant gesture. This display occurred long after the appearance of the verses in The Grateful Servant that chronicle the controversy between cavalier critics and professional playwrights. Suckling's reputation had preceded his production by many years.47

Although he was not the gallant Suckling was, Davenant rode the coattails of the Sucklings and Carews and thus continued to be associated with the Court coterie. Such an association yielded him the poet laureateship in 1637. The following year, Brome in his prologue to The Antipodes announced:

Opinion, which our Author cannot court,
          … has, of late,
From the old way of Playes possest a Sort
Only to run to those, that carry state
In Scene magnificent and language high;
And Cloathes worth all the rest, except the Action,
And such are only good those Leaders cry;
And into that beleefs draw on a Faction,
That must despise all sportive, merry Wit,
Because some such great Play had none in it.(48)

It is clear that Davenant was angling for the control of a theatre and had for some time been interested in writing for one of the major acting companies. He wrote plays for the Blackfriars while Massinger was still principal playwright there in 1633 and 1634; Brome's last play for that company can be dated 1632 or 1633. Davenant also was writing for the Cockpit in 1640 and 1641 when Brome returned to the Salisbury Court Theatre, although in May 1641 the Cockpit produced Brome's Jovial Crew.49 The ever ambitious Davenant had adeptly used his position of poet laureate to secure permission to build a theatre, posing a direct threat to all of the established acting companies and the professional playwrights under contract with those companies. By October of 1639 Davenant had agreed to forego the privileges of his patent, probably because he saw a way to become manager of one of the established playhouses with the help of his powerful court friends. His failure to establish a new theatre could also be explained in part by probable opposition from the Lord Chamberlain, who held financial interests in the Salisbury Theatre, and from Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, who owned a share in the same theatre and presumably appealed to his kin, Philip Herbert, Lord Chamberlain to the King.50

In May 1640, Davenant seized upon his advantage. William Beeston, who had become manager of the Cockpit in 1638 after his father Christopher Beeston died, was in prison for having presented an unlicensed play which referred to political activities of the King regarding a journey he had made to the north. The management of the company was turned over to Davenant.51 Now that he was in charge of a theatre, he could emphasize courtly interests and fashions on the stage, including the courtly love fad. And he could effectively control the jockeying for positions of principal playwright for one of the three major acting companies.

These events placed Brome in a difficult situation. He had been under contract as principal dramatist to the Salisbury Court Theatre but also furnished plays to the Cockpit company. Indeed, the offending play was likely Brome's The Court Beggar, acted at the Cockpit. It refers not only to the King's trip north but also to courtiers who contrive to secure patents or acquire monopolies or estates to be dissolved.52 Brome was particularly antagonistic to Davenant's and Suckling's tendency to incorporate the interests of Platonic court ladies and Cavalier mannerisms into the theatre, and the play offers a sweeping blow at the courtier Davenant aspired to represent. It features a character named Court-Wit, who writes a masque for a lady of the Court and attempts as well to secure a patent to be instructor to all actors. A reference to building a theatre on barges on the Thames presumably refers to Davenant and his royal patent of March 1639, allowing him to build a theatre in Fleet Street. The location of that proposed theatre would have been painfully near both the Salisbury and the Cockpit theatres. All this, along with references to his diseased nose, confirms that Court-Wit is modeled on Davenant. Finally, a character named Sir Ferdinando appears to be a caricature of Suckling; he is depicted as a ladies' man, coward, gambler, and would-be soldier who gains unearned success at court.53 Ten years after the first war of the theatres, Brome had scored his final coup in the intermittent and prolonged dispute between the courtiers and the professional dramatists. By 1640, when he finished The Court Beggar, the skirmishes had been joined by a more prevalent anti-Cavalier sentiment, a precursor to the coming Civil Wars.

Though Shirley's plays have their similarities with Brome's and with Massinger's, and all wrote primarily for private and select audiences in closed theatres, they differ in their attitudes toward the mercantile class and the aristocracy. Massinger had little tolerance for social newcomers. Brome, the pragmatist, is something of a muckraker of noble folk and merchants and dealt with political practices such as the abusive monopolies. Shirley is a critical commentator on both classes, concerned with universal values of honor and friendship, love and loyalty. He never fully dissociated himself from the mercantile class, yet he moved among the ruling classes. He satirized the merchants through his comments on city government increasingly dominated by wealthy Puritan merchants, and he ridiculed the social pretension of the wives and daughters of the merchants. His was the bias of the old established merchant guilds as they confronted the new individual tradesmen.

Shirley was able, unlike Massinger and Brome, to establish a form of drama that involved cooperation between author and audience, and the product of this cooperation anticipates the later comedy of manners. In a successful comedy of manners, there must be one group representing fashionable life and another composed of pretenders; the difficulty for Caroline playwrights, according to one critic, is that they could not count on a fixed status and makeup of either group or situation, for the society was continually changing.54 Shirley's formal schooling and his intimate knowledge of the court gave him an advantage over both Brome and Massinger; manners and place were well established and formal at court, and pretenders could be clearly distinguished and could play their intrigues within conventions easily recognizable to them and to an audience. But this son of a draper, this curate and schoolteacher who twice married daughters of merchants and had two barber-surgeon sons, was gentler on commercial society than were his playwright colleagues. And he could be sharp with the upper classes. His comedies of manners are distinctive for the initial detachment he shows towards his characters. The impartiality of his observations makes his work in a way more pessimistic than that of either Massinger or Brome. And it is inseparable from his harshest characteristic: an appearance almost of disdainful aloofness from the concerns and interests of those who patronized him.

Notes

  1. “Dido and Aeneas,” Virgilius Maro Publius. Film 8018, Reel 1044, BM; Arber, Stationers, IV, 304; Williams, Dedications, p. 177; Bentley, JCS, V, 1186-87; Hugh Aveling, Northern Catholics: The Catholic Recusants of the North Riding of Yorkshire, 1558-1700 (London, 1966), p. 251.

  2. The Plays and Poems of Philip Massinger, ed. Philip Edwards and Colin Gibson (Oxford, 1976), I, xxi. Neither play was entered in the Stationer's Register, but The Roman Actor was licensed for the stage by Herbert in October 1626 and The Picture was licensed in June 1627. Herbert, Dramatic Records, pp. 31, 32. See also Bentley, JCS, IV, 815-16; T. A. Dunn, Philip Massinger: The Man and the Playwright (London, 1957), pp. 219-21.

  3. Dyce, Works, I, lxxxii; “Scavenger's Rate Asessments 1628-1630,” Parish Rate Assessments, St. Dunstan's West, Guildhall MS. 3783. According to Wood's Fasti, Will Atkins was created doctor of civil law in November 1642. Part II (1820), IV, col. 43; fol. 872, p. 192.

  4. William A. Armstrong, “The Audience of the Elizabethan Private Theatres,” RES, NS 10, No. 39 (1959), 234-38.

  5. Bentley, JCS, III, 52-4; IV, 47-49, 61-62; VI, 192-93.

  6. Armstrong, “The Audience of the Elizabethan Private Theatres,” pp. 238-43, 245-47.

  7. Herbert, Dramatic Records, p. 34; [Susan] Wells, “Jacobean City Comedy and the Ideology of the City,” [ELH, 48, No. 2 (Spring 1981)] pp. 37-38, 48-50; Kathleen McLuskie, “Caroline Professionals: Brome and Shirley” in The Revels History of Drama in English, ed. Philip Edwards et al. (New York, 1981), IV (1613-1660), pp. 241-46, 252-55.

  8. Bentley, JCS, V, 105-06; Dyce, Works, IV, 278-79. Quotations from Shirley's works in the text are generally from Dyce and are followed by a reference to volume and page. When later preferred editions of individual plays are used, footnotes contain the proper citations.

  9. Kenneth Richards, “Theatre Audiences in Caroline and Early Restoration London: Continuity and Change,” Das Theater und Sein Publikum (Vienna, 1977), pp. 167-70, 173, 175; see also [Andrew] Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage [Cambridge, 1970], p. 148.

  10. Michael Neill, “‘Wits most accomplished Senate’: The Audience of the Caroline Private Theaters,” SEL, 18 (1978), 342, 346, 351, 354.

  11. Clifford Leech, “The Caroline Audience,” Shakespeare's Tragedies and Other Studies in Seventeenth Century Drama (1950; rpt. London, 1961), pp. 161, 163-64, 170-73.

  12. Neill, “‘Wits most accomplished Senate’ …,” pp. 342-47; Armstrong, “The Audience of the Elizabethan Private Theatres,” pp. 242-43.

  13. Herbert: Dramatic Records, pp. 37, 56.

  14. Bentley argues that both dates are too late for Massinger to be writing for the Cockpit theatre. See JCS, IV, 781-88, 801-02. Earlier productions of these plays would place them during Shirley's years in St. Albans. Because Shirley makes no mention of Massinger in his introduction to the Beaumont and Fletcher folio, Massinger's biographer, T. A. Dunn, assumes they were not very close friends. Massinger, pp. 27-29.

  15. Dunn, Massinger, pp. 147, 166-76. On Massinger's portrayal of women in his plays and his own religious beliefs, see Dunn, pp. 114-31, 176-91. See also Edwards, Plays and Poems of Massinger, I, xvi-xvii.

  16. Edwards, Plays and Poems of Massinger, III, 517, n. 2; Michael Neill, “Massinger's Patriarchy: The Social Vision of A New Way to Pay Old Debts,” Renaissance Drama, 10 (1979), 187-89, 197.

  17. S. Gorley Putt, “The Complacency of Philip Massinger, Gent,” English, 30 (Summer 1981), 107.

  18. Edwards, Plays and Poems of Massinger, IV, cf. Acts I, ii, iv; IV, iv; V, iii.

  19. Richard Morton, “Deception and Social Dislocation: An Aspect of James Shirley's Drama,” Renaissance Drama, 9 (1966), 242-44; A Critical Edition of James Shirley's ‘The Lady of Pleasure,’ ed. Marilyn J. Thorssen, Garland Series (New York, 1980), pp. 40-41, 45-47, 57-59, 63; Edgar L. Chapman, “The Comic Art of James Shirley: A Modern Evaluation of His Comedies,” Diss. Brown University 1964, pp. 139-44, 148, 155-59, 162-63; Thomas Marc Parrott and Robert H. Ball, A Short View of Elizabethan Drama (New York, 1943), pp. 274-75; Kathleen M. Lynch, The Social Mode of Restoration Comedy (New York, 1926), pp. 36-40; Joe Lee Davis, The Sons of Ben: Jonsonian Comedy in Caroline England (Detroit, 1967), 87-90 and passim.

  20. Herbert, Dramatic Records, pp. 19, 22, 33; Dunn, Massinger, pp. 43-44; [Gerald Eades] Bentley, The Profession of Dramatist [in Shakespeare's Time (Princeton, 1971], pp. 155, 167-68, 172-73.

  21. Herbert, Dramatic Records, p. 19.

  22. [Roberts.] Forsythe in The Relation of Shirley's Plays to the Elizabethan Drama [New York, 1914] (pp. 407-09) discusses the various critics and their theories. See also The Ball, ed. Thomas Marc Parrott in The Plays and Poems of George Chapman: The Comedies (London, 1914), pp. 869-87; F. G. Fleay, A Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama, 1559-1642 (London, 1891), II, 238-39; Bentley, JCS, V, 1077-79; Dyce, Works, III, 3; Hunter, Chorus Vatum, V, 62; Dana McKinnon, “The Ball by George Chapman and James Shirley: A Critical Edition,” Diss. Univ. of Illinois at Urbana 1965, Introduction, pp. ix-xl.

    Shirley presumably did not know, for instance, the Earl of Newcastle at this time (the dedication of The Traitor in 1635 to him states that Shirley is ambitious to be known to Newcastle), but the character of Lord Bonvile in Hyde Park is suggestive: “Next to a woman, / He loves a running horse.—” See later references to Newcastle's interest in women and horses in Mercurius Britannicus, No. 13, 16 Nov.—23 Nov. 1643, p. 103, Thomason Tracts, BM E 75; Cal. SP Ven., 23 (1632-36), No. 129, March 25, 1633, p. 87. See also F. S. Boas, An Introduction to Stuart Drama (London, 1946), pp. 356-57; Hanson T. Parlin, A Study in Shirley's Comedies of London Life, Bulletin of the University of Texas, No. 371 (Nov. 15, 1914), pp. 59, 62, 64.

  23. R. J. Kaufman, Richard Brome: Caroline Playwright (New York, 1961), pp. 10-11, 13-15. See also C. E. Andrews, “Richard Brome,” Yale Studies in English, 56 (1913), 55-64.

  24. Dyce, Works, II, 457-541; Dale Underwood, Etherege and the Seventeenth-Century Comedy of Manners (New Haven, 1957), pp. 152-53; Theodore Miles, “Place Realism in a Group of Caroline Plays,” RES, 18 (1942), 431-38.

  25. Richard Jefferson, “Some Aspects of Richard Brome's Comedies of Manners: A Re-Interpretation,” Diss. University of Wisconsin 1955, p. 164; Kaufman, Richard Brome, pp. 13-16. Kaufman asserts that Brome argues that one should not attempt to rise above his place in society (p. 15, n.20). See also Catherine Shaw, Richard Brome, (Boston, 1980), pp. 17, 31.

  26. Bentley, JCS, I, 223-25, 246; III, 116, 449-50; IV, 809-10, 813-14, 816-17; V, 1165.

  27. Stephen Orgel, “The Royal Theatre and the Role of King,” Patronage in the Renaissance, ed. Guy F. Lytle and Stephen Orgel (Princeton, 1981), pp. 267, 270; Bentley, The Profession of Dramatist, pp. 82, 143, 264, 269-71; Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, pp. 140-41.

  28. Dyce, Works, I, lxxiii-lxxxi; Bentley, JCS, IV, 816; V, 115-18. Jack R. Ramsey gives the fullest and most convincing argument concerning the competition among professional playwrights. His detailed discussion shows that Shirley and Davenant carried on a ten-year rivalry, each seeking the favor of the prestigious private theatregoers and of the influential members of the Court coterie. That Davenant “won” is demonstrated by his appointment as poet laureate and his considerable success after the Restoration. See “A Critical Edition of James Shirley's The Grateful Servant,” Diss. University of Michigan 1971, pp. 102-30.

  29. [Alfred Harbage, Sir William Davenant: Poet Venturer (1935; rpt. New York, 1971)], pp. 49-50, 64-65; Neill, “‘Wits most accomplished Senate,’” pp. 344-47 and passim; [Arthur H. Nethercot, Sir William Davenant: Poet Laureate and Playwright-Manager (New York, 1938)], pp. 149-50, 166; Bentley, JCS, III, 194-95, 211-12, 216-18.

  30. Dunn, Massinger, pp. 37-40; see also Davis, The Sons of Ben, pp. 8, 29-30.

  31. Harbage, Cavalier Drama, pp. 156-57.

  32. Roy Strong, “A Royalist Arcadia: Charles I,” Splendor at Court: Renaissance Spectacle and the Theater of Power (Boston, 1973), pp. 213-18; D. J. Gordon, “Poet and Architect: the Intellectual Setting of the Quarrel between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 12 (1949), 152-55, 157-58, 160-63, 165-67, 170-71, 175-76.

  33. Clifford Leech, “The Caroline Audience,” Shakespeare's Tragedies, p. 161; see also pp. 163, 172-74.

  34. Bentley, JCS, I, 223-26.

  35. Herbert, Dramatic Records, p. 33; Arber, Stationers, IV, 190; Greg, Bibliography, I, #429, pp. 579-80; Nethercot, Davenant, pp. 80-81, 84-85; Bentley, JCS, I, 224-25; III, 204-05; V, 1115-18.

  36. Georges Bas, “James Shirley et ‘Th' Untun'd Kennell’ une petite guerre des theatres vers 1630,” EA, 16 (1963), 11-14.

  37. Dyce, Works, I, 1xxxiii-1xxxi.

  38. Bas, “James Shirley … guerre des theatres vers 1630,” pp. 20-22.

  39. Bas, “James Shirley … guerre des theatres vers 1630,” pp. 15-21.

  40. Edwards, Plays and Poems of Massinger, I, Introduction, pp. xl-xli; Dunn, Massinger, pp. 31-33.

  41. Yet these works show similarities. The role of Fredeline in Davenant's The Temple of Love (1635) is close to that of Lord A in Shirley's Lady of Pleasure (1635), and her questionable ethics compare to those of Confident Rapture in The Example (1634). Lady Ample in The Wits (1634) by Davenant brings to mind Shirley's witty women in his realistic London comedies, such as The Witty Fair One (1628) and Hyde Park (1632). And Alteza in The Just Italian (1629) commits an indiscretion similar to that of Lady Bornwell in The Lady of Pleasure. See also Charles Squier, “The Comic Spirit of Sir William Davenant: A Critical Study of His Caroline Comedies,” Diss. University of Michigan 1963, pp. 26, 49-50, 65, 87-90, 111, 123n.

  42. Nethercot, Davenant, pp. 127-29.

  43. Nethercot, Davenant, pp. 75-76.

  44. Harbage, Davenant, p. 43; Ramsey, “A Critical Edition of James Shirley's The Grateful Servant,” pp. 121-22.

  45. Foster, Register: Gray's Inn, p. 180.

  46. Harbage, Cavalier Drama, p. 109.

  47. Harbage, pp. 109-10; Bentley, JCS, I, 58; V, 1198.

  48. The Dramatic Works of Richard Brome: Containing Fifteen Comedies Now First Collected in Three Volumes, ed. John Pearson (1873; rpt. New York, 1966), III; Kaufman, Richard Brome, p. 151; Edmund K. Broadus, The Laureateship (Oxford, 1921), p. 225.

  49. John Freehafer, “Brome, Suckling, and Davenant's Theater Project of 1639,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 10 (Fall, 1968), 370, 380-81; Bentley, JCS, III, 52, 71-72.

  50. Kaufman, Richard Brome, pp. 151-52; Bentley, JCS, II, 421; Freehafer, “Brome, Suckling, and Davenant's Theater Project of 1639,” p. 377.

  51. Kaufman, Richard Brome, pp. 152-53.

  52. Freehafer, “Brome, Suckling, and Davenant's Theater Project of 1639,” pp. 367, 370, 374.

  53. Kaufman, “Suckling and Davenant Satirized by Brome,” MLR, 55 (1960), 335-44; Bentley, JCS, III, 61-65. See also Act IV. i, ii of Brome's The Court Beggar in The Dramatic Works of Richard Brome, I, ed. Pearson.

  54. William H. Hickerson, “The Significance of Shirley's Realistic Plays in the History of English Comedy,” Diss. University of Michigan 1932, p. 22; see also Kaufman, Richard Brome, pp. 10-15; Underwood, Etherege, pp. 152-53.

List of Works Frequently Cited

Arber, Stationers A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London: 1554-1640, ed. Edward Arber, 5 vols., 1875-94; rpt. New York, 1950.

Bentley, JCS Gerald Eades Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols., Princeton, 1941-68. [I, II (1941); III, IV, V (1956); VI, VII (1968)]

Cal. SP Ven. Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, ed. Rawdon Brown, G. C. Bentinck, H. F. Brown, and A. B. Hinds, 35 vols., London, 1864-1935.

Dyce, Works The Dramatic Works and Poems of James Shirley, eds. William Gifford and Alexander Dyce, 6 vols., 1833; rpt. New York, 1966.

Foster, Register: Gray's Inn The Register of Admissions to Gray's Inn, 1521-1889, ed. Joseph Foster, London, 1889.

Greg, Bibliography W. W. Greg, A Bibliography of the Engish Printed Drama to the Restoration, Bibliographical Society, 4 vols., Oxford, 1939-59. [II (1951), Plays 1617-1689, #350-836]

Herbert, Dramatic Records The Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert, ed. Joseph Quincy Adams, New Haven, 1917.

Howarth, “Poems” Robert G. Howarth, “An Edition of the Poems of James Shirley,” Non-Collegiate Thesis, 2 vols., Oxford, 1931.

Hunter, Chorus Vatum Joseph Hunter, Chorus Vatum Anglicanorum, 6 vols., BM Addl. MS. 24487 (I, 1838); 24488 (II, 1843); 24489 (III, 1845); 24490 (IV, 1848); 24491 (V, 1851); 24492 (VI, 1854).

Wood, Fasti Anthony à Wood, Fasti Oxonienses or Annals of the University of Oxford, ed. Philip Bliss, 3rd ed., 4 vols., Part I, London, 1815; Part II, London, 1820.

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