Born, in London, 18 Sept. 1596. At Merchant Taylors’ School, Oct. 1608 to June 1612. Matric., St. John’s Coll., Oxford, 1612. Removed to Catherine Hall, Cambridge. B.A., 1617. Ordained Curate of parish near St. Albans. Resigned Curacy on becoming a Roman Catholic. Kept a Grammar school at St. Albans, 1623–24. This failing, he removed to London; devoted himself to literature. Mem. of Gray’s Inn, 1634. Wrote many plays till 1640. Valet of Chamber to Queen Henrietta Maria. Kept a school in White Friars, 1640–46. Resumed career of dramatist, 1646. Died, in London, Oct. 1666. Buried in church of St. Giles’-in-the-Fields, 29 Oct. Works: “Eccho” (no copy known), 1618 (another edn., called:“Narcissus, or the Self-Lover,” 1646); “The Wedding,” 1629; “The Greatful Servant,” 1630; “The School of Complement” (also known as “Love Tricks”), 1631; “Changes,” 1632; “The Wittie Fair One,” 1633; “A Contention for Honour and Riches,” 1633; “The Bird in a Cage,” 1633; “The triumph of Peace,” 1633; “The Traytor,” 1635; “Hide Park,” 1637; “The Young Admirall,” 1637; “The Gamester,” 1637; “The Example,” 1637; “The Lady of Pleasure,” 1637; “The Royall Master,” 1638; “The Duke’s Mistris,” 1638; “The Maide’s Revenge,” 1639; “The Ball” (with Chapman), 1639; “Chabot, Admiral of France” (with Chapman), 1639; “The Opportunitie,” 1640; “The Coronation” (pubd. under Fletcher’s name), 1640; “St. Patrick for Ireland,” 1640; “The Constant Maid,” 1640 (another edn., called: “Love will finde out the Way,” 1661); “The Humorous Courtier,” 1640; “The Arcadia,” 1640; “Poems,” 1646; “The Triumph of Beautie,” 1646; “The Way made Plain to the Latin Tongue,” 1649; “Grammatica Anglo-Latina,” 1651; “The Cardinal,” 1652; “Six New Playes,” 1653 [1652]; “Cupid and Death” (under initials: J. S.), 1653; “The Gentleman of Venise,” 1655; “The Polititian,” 1655; “The Rudiments of Grammar,” 1656; “Ἐισαγωγη,” 1656; “Honour and Mammon; and, the Contention of Ajax and Ulysses,” 1659; “Andromana” (under initials: J. S.), 1660. Posthumous: “An Essay towards an Universal and Rational Grammar,” ed. by J. T. Phillipps, 1726; “Double Falsehood” (pubd. under Shakespeare’s name; probably by Shirley), 1728; “Jenkin of Wales,” ed. by J. O. Halliwell, 1861. Collected Works: “Dramatic Works and Poems,” ed., with memoir, by A. Dyce (6 vols.), 1833.

Personal

  He was educated at St. John’s College, in Oxford, where he was taken great notice of by Dr. Laud, then president of that house. He entered into holy orders; though he was much discouraged from it, by his friend the president, on account of a large mole on his left cheek; and was some time a parish priest in Hertfordshire. He afterward turned Roman Catholic, and kept a school at St. Alban’s, but soon grew tired of that employment, and going to London commenced poet. He wrote no less than thirty dramatic pieces, some of which were acted with great applause. In the Interregnum, he was necessitated to return to his former profession of schoolmaster; in which he became eminent, and wrote several grammatical books for the use of his scholars.

General

  In the play of the Ball written by Shirley and acted by the Queen’s players there were divers personated so naturally both of lords and others in the Court that I took it ill and would have forbidden the play but that Beeston promised many things which I found fault withall should be left out, and that he would not suffer it to be done by the poet any more, who deserves to be punished: and the first who offends in this kind of poets or players shall be sure of public punishment.

  One of such Incomparable parts, that he was the Chief of the Second-rate Poets: and by some has been thought even equal to Fletcher himself…. I need not take pains to shew his Intimacy, not only with the Poets of his Time; but even the Value and Admiration that Persons of the first Rank had for him; since the Verses before several of his Works, and his Epistles Dedicatory sufficiently shew it. He has writ several Dramatick Pieces, to the Number of 37, which are in print: besides others which are in Manuscript.

  Claims a place amongst the worthies of this period, not so much for any transcendent talent in himself, as that he was the last of a great race, all of whom spoke nearly the same language, and had a set of moral feelings and notions in common. A new language, and quite a new turn of tragic and comic interest, came in with the Restoration.

  Shirley was the last of our good old dramatists. When his works shall be given to the public, they will undoubtedly enrich our popular literature. His language sparkles with the most exquisite images. Keeping some occasional pruriences apart, the fault of his age rather than of himself, he speaks the most polished and refined dialect of the stage; and even some of his over-heightened scenes of voluptuousness are meant, though with a very mistaken judgment, to inculcate morality. I consider his genius, indeed, as rather brilliant and elegant than strong or lofty. His tragedies are defective in fire, grandeur, and passion; and we must select his comedies, to have any favourable idea of his humour. His finest poetry comes forth in situations rather more familiar than tragedy and more grave than comedy, which I should call sentimental comedy, if the name were not associated with ideas of modern insipidity. That he was capable, however, of pure and excellent comedy will be felt by those who have yet in reserve the amusement of reading his “Gamester,” “Hyde-park,” and “Lady of Pleasure.” In the first and last of these there is a subtle ingenuity in producing comic effect and surprise, which might be termed Attic, if it did not surpass any thing that is left us in Athenian comedy. I shall leave to others the more special enumeration of his faults, only observing, that the airy touches of his expression, the delicacy of his sentiments, and the beauty of his similes, are often found where the poet survives the dramatist, and where he has not power to transfuse life and strong individuality through the numerous characters of his voluminous drama.

  Shirley’s facility in composition is proved by the number of his plays; and doubtless they would have swelled into an ampler catalogue, had not the antipoetic spirit of Puritanism suppressed the stage, while the vigour of his genius was yet unimpaired. No single writer, among the early English dramatists, with the exception of Shakespeare, has bequeathed so many regular five-act pieces to posterity…. His fine moral feeling rejected those unhallowed themes, on which some of his contemporaries boldly ventured; he offends us by no glowing pictures of incestuous love. His writings are soiled, in a certain degree, by gross and immodest allusions; but whoever is conversant with our ancient drama will admit that the Muse of Shirley is comparatively chaste…. He abounds in brilliant thoughts, in noble and majestic sentiments, yet exhibits little of profound reflexion. His imagination seldom takes a lofty flight: he loves to crowd his dramas with events of romantic beauty; but he shews no fondness for the ideal world, its ghosts, and magic wonders.

  Shirley has no originality, no force in conceiving or delineating character, little of pathos, and less perhaps of wit: his dramas produce no deep impression in reading, and of course can leave none in the memory. But his mind was poetical; his better characters, especially females, express pure thoughts in pure language; he is never tumid or affected, and seldom obscure; the incidents succeed rapidly; the personages are numerous; and there is a general animation in the scenes, which causes us to read him with some pleasure. No very good play, nor possibly any very good scene, could be found in Shirley; but he has many lines of considerable beauty. Among his comedies, the “Gamesters” may be reckoned the best. Charles I. is said to have declared, that it was “the best play he had seen these seven years;” and it has even been added, that the story was of his royal suggestion. It certainly deserves praise both for language and construction of the plot, and it has the advantage of exposing vice to ridicule; but the ladies of that court, the fair forms whom Vandyke has immortalized, must have been very different indeed from their posterity if they could sit it through.

  An inferior writer, though touched, to our fancy, with something, of a finer ray and closing, in worthy purple, the procession of the Elizabethan men.

  He has not much pathos, it is true, nor much knowledge of the heart; but there are few dramatists whose works give a more agreeable and unforced transcript of the ordinary scenes of life, conveyed in more graceful language. His humour, though not very profound, is true and fanciful, and his plays may always be read with pleasure, and often with profit.

  Of the group of play-writers belonging more properly to Charles’s own reign, the most important was James Shirley.

  He was the last of a race of giants…. Vigour and variety of expression, and richness of imagery are amongst his conspicuous merits; and, making reasonable allowance for occasional confusion in the “imbroglio” of his more complicated fables, arising, no doubt, from hasty composition, the action of his dramas is generally contrived and evolved with considerable skill.

  He was not a great man in himself, but an essentially small man inspired by the creations of great men. Fletcher was his master and exemplar, as Shakespeare was Massinger’s; but he imitated much more closely, was much more completely carried away by this model than Massinger was. And although his language and moral feelings and notions (even as regards female types and kings) are Fletcher’s, and he had most ambition to emulate Fletcher’s dashing and brilliant manner, yet Shirley’s plays contain frequent echoes of other dramatists. One great interest in reading him is that he reminds us so often of the situations and characters of his predecessors. It is good for the critic, if for nobody else, to read Shirley, because there he finds emphasised all that told most effectively on the playgoers of the period. We read Greene and Marlowe to know what the Elizabethan drama was in its powerful but awkward youth; Shirley to know what it was in its declining but facile and still powerful old age.

  In Shirley, last of the great race, the fire and passion of the grand old era passes away. Imagination is driven from its last asylum. The sword is drawn, and the theatres are closed. Dramatists are stigmatized, actors are arrested; and when, after the lapse of a few years, they return to their old haunts, it is as roisterers under a foreign yoke.

  Shirley, with more of genial inspiration and a richer vein, follows the same track as Massinger.

  Shirley was neither a very great nor a very strong man; and without originals to follow it is probable that he would have done nothing. But with Fletcher and Jonson before him he was able to strike out a certain line of half-humorous, half-romantic drama, and to follow it with curious equality through his long list of plays, hardly one of which is very much better than any other, hardly one of which falls below a very respectable standard. He has few or no single scenes or passages of such high and sustained excellence as to be specially quotable; and there is throughout him an indefinable flavour as of study of his elders and betters, and appearance as of a highly competent and gifted pupil in a school, not as of a master and leader in a movement.

  Shirley is in complete contrast with Ford in that he neither sought for overstrained and unnatural situations as a stimulus for his tragedy, nor allowed his comedy to degenerate into coarse buffoonery. Writing at the close of an extraordinarily prolific dramatic period, and at a time when the works of the great dramatists of that period were being made accessible in collected form, he drew freely from them for characters, situations, and ideas. But though there is little originality in his dramas, he shews great dexterity in the management of his material, and a facility of poetic expression which is pleasing until it grows monotonous. The plots of many of his plays are ingenious and interesting, and, as in the case of Massinger, a healthy moral tone underlies his occasional grossness. Shirley’s masques are of considerable literary value, and the few lyrics he wrote show him to be a lyric poet of no mean power.

  Remarkably alive to the danger of distracting the spectator’s interest from the main plot of the action of a play, he displayed in tragic as well as in comic actions a curious presentiment of the modern theatrical principle that everything depends on the success of one great scene (la scène à faire). His tragedies of “The Traitor” and “The Cardinal,” his tragic-comedy of “The Royal Master,” and his comedy of “The Gamester,” may be instanced as signal examples of his constructive skill. His excellence seems to lie less in the depiction of the comic than in that of serious scenes and characters; but, as is shown in all his comedies from the earliest onwards, but more especially by his “Hyde Park” and by the less attractive comedy of “The Ball,” in which he collaborated with Chapman, he was an acute observer and at times a humorous delineator of the vagaries of contemporary manners, whether in town or country…. But what chiefly entitles Shirley to hold the place to which he has been restored among our great dramatists is the spirit of poetry which adorns and elevates so many of his plays. He was one of the last of our seventeenth-century playwrights who interspersed their dialogue with passages of poetic beauty, at once appropriate to the sentiment of the situation and capable of carrying their audience to a higher imaginative level. Nor was he merely the last of the group; few members of it, besides Shakespeare himself, have surpassed Shirley in the exercise of the rare power of ennobling his dramatic diction by images which, while they “would surpass the life,” spring without effort from the infinitude of the suggestions offered by it to creative fancy.