Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 52.djvu/140

 have hailed Jonson as ‘an acknowledged master’ (see dedication of ‘The Grateful Servant’), and have so enthusiastically extolled the merits of Beaumont and Fletcher, of some ‘sketches’ by whom an unauthenticated tradition (cf., u.s. p. 12) declares him to have been possessed. Fletcher, and still more perhaps Webster and Massinger, greatly influenced him; but in the invention of his plots, both tragic and comic, he seems frequently to have been original; while Langbaine is within the mark in asserting that ‘whatever he borrows from novels loses nothing in his hands.’ 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 tragi-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 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. Nor should it remain unnoticed that, whether he tells a story of passion or depicts a phase of folly, Shirley, while anything but severe in thought or strait-laced in expression, on the whole, though not uniformly, shows himself averse to licentiousness for its own sake, and conscious of the respect which a dramatic poet owes both to himself and to his true public.

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.

The chief non-dramatic contributions of Shirley have been cited above, together with the dates of publication. Dyce, in vol. vi. of his edition of Shirley's ‘Works,’ supplemented the poetical pieces previously printed by the hitherto unprinted poems which proved part of a manuscript collection of ‘Verses and Poems by James Shirley’ preserved in the Bodleian. The following is a list of his dramatic works, arranged in what seems to be their probable chronological order of composition: 1. ‘Love Tricks with Complements,’ comedy, licensed 10 Feb. 1625; printed as ‘The Schoole of Complement,’ 1631, 1637, and 1667 (the year in which it was seen on the stage by Pepys, 5 Aug.). Out of this was taken Kirkman's droll, ‘Jenkins' Love-Course and Perambulation,’ printed 1673 in ‘The Wits, or Sport upon Sport.’ 2. ‘The Maid's Revenge,’ tragedy, licensed 9 Feb. 1626, printed 1639. The plot of this effective early work is taken from John Reynolds's ‘Triumphs of God's Revenge against Murder’ (of which the first instalment was printed in 1621), bk. ii. hist. 7 (cf., ii. 74, as to Gould's dramatic version of the same story, 1696). 3. ‘The Wedding,’ comedy, licensed 9 Feb. 1626 (see the clue as to date ingeniously pointed out by, English Drama, ii. 236), printed 1629 and 1633. 4. ‘The Brothers,’ comedy, licensed 4 Nov. 1626, printed as one of ‘Six New Plays’ by Shirley, 1653. Fleay supposes the play licensed in 1626 to have been ‘Dick of Devonshire,’ and that printed in 1653 to have been a different play. See, however, A. H. Bullen's Introduction to ‘Dick of Devonshire,’ printed in vol. ii. of ‘Old English Plays’ (1883), and attributed by him, with much probability, to Thomas Heywood. 5. ‘The Witty Fair One,’ comedy, licensed 3 Oct. 1628, printed 1633. Revived on the stage 1667. 6. ‘The Grateful Servant,’ comedy, licensed under the title of ‘The Faithful Servant,’ 3 Nov. 1629; printed 1630, 1637, and 1660 (?). Not less than eleven sets of commendatory verses, including one by Massinger, accompanied the publication of this play. It was revived on the stage in 1667. 7. ‘The Traitor,’ tragedy, licensed 4 May 1631, printed 1635, with a dedication to Newcastle. It was revived on the Restoration, and seen not less than four times by Pepys; on being again revived it was printed, with a dedication stating it to have been originally written by the jesuit Antony Rivers [q. v.], but this statement, supported by Motteux, is discredited. It was again revived in 1718, with alterations by Christopher Bullock [q. v.], and it furnished the basis of