Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 52.djvu/143

 play. ‘Like to Like, or a Match well made up’ (1723), was probably an adaptation of this (, iii. 142). 34. ‘The Court Secret,’ romantic comedy, written for performance but not acted, before the civil wars; printed in the ‘Six New Plays’ (1653). It was revived after the Restoration (, i. 351). 35. ‘Cupid and Death,’ masque, acted before the Portuguese ambassador, printed in 1653 and 1659. 36. ‘The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses,’ a dramatic entertainment, printed in 1659 as privately acted. Mr. Fleay thinks that it was composed about the same time as ‘The Triumph of Beauty’ (c. 1640). It contains the famous dirge, commencing ‘The glories of our mortal state,’ the recital of which is said to have terrified Oliver Cromwell. It was afterwards printed as Butler's in a volume of ‘Posthumous Works.’

To these may be added another dramatic entertainment or masque, ‘Honoria and Mammon,’ printed with the last-named, an enlargement of ‘The Contention of Honour and Riches.’ In addition to the above, Fletcher's ‘Night Walker’ was licensed on 11 May 1633, as ‘corrected’ by Shirley, and acted in 1634. It remained, however, to all intents and purposes Fletcher's (see, English Drama, i. 197). The case is not quite the same with Chapman's ‘Chabot, Admiral of France,’ licensed on 29 April 1635, and printed in 1639 as by Chapman and Shirley. But although Shirley may have made some not immaterial additions to this fine tragedy, which Chapman may have left incomplete at his death in 1634, there can be little doubt but that in substance it is to be reckoned among Chapman's works, to some of the most characteristic of which it exhibits an undoubted affinity.

Unless the hypotheses already noticed as to ‘The Duke’ (licensed on 17 May 1631), and as to ‘The Beauties’ (licensed on 21 Jan. 1643), be accepted, these must be regarded as lost plays of Shirley's. Other lost plays, if they were actually written, are the tragedy ‘St. Albans’ and the comedy ‘Looke to the Ladies,’ both of which were entered on the ‘Stationers' Register’ in 1639. To him have also been attributed the tragedy ‘Andromana, or the Merchant's Wife’ (1660, founded on Sidney's ‘Arcadia’), apparently for no better reason than that it purported to be written by ‘J. S.,’ and the tragic comedy, ‘The Double Falsehood,’ which in 1728 Theobald, on the strength of its being similarly ascribed to ‘Sh.,’ published as a work of Shakespeare revised by himself, but of which no copy has been preserved in its original form. Farmer's supposition that this was one of the plays which Langbaine stated Shirley to have left behind him in manuscript commended itself to the judgment of Dyce. Finally, Mr. A. H. Bullen somewhat doubtfully assigns to Shirley the disagreeable comedy ‘Captain Underwit,’ reprinted by him in vol. ii. of his ‘Old English Plays’ (1883); internal evidence fixes the date between 1640 and 1642.

[The Dramatic Works and Poems of James Shirley, with notes by William Gifford, and additional notes, and some account of Shirley and his Writings, by Alexander Dyce, 6 vols. 1833. Our knowledge of Shirley's personal life rests almost entirely on Wood's account of him in Athenæ Oxonienses, ed. Bliss, 1817, iii. 737–44. See also: Genest's Account of the English Stage, ix. 541–63, et al.; Langbaine's Account of the English Dramatick Poets, 1691, pp. 474–85; The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, by Mr. Cibber and other hands, 1753, ii. 26–32; T. G. Fleay's Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama, 1891, ii. 233–47; A. W. Ward's History of English Dramatic Literature, 1875, ii. 309–37. A very interesting essay on Shirley appeared in the Quarterly Review, vol. xlix., April and July 1833.]

 SHIRLEY, JOHN (1366?–1456), translator and transcriber, born about 1366, is said to have been the son of a squire who had travelled widely in foreign countries. He has not been identified with any of the numerous Shirleys recorded in the ‘Stemmata Shirleiana’ (cf. pp. 39–40), but he was ‘a great traveller in divers countries,’ and on the monumental brass to his memory in St. Bartholomew-the-Less both he and his wife are pictured in the habit of pilgrims. He speaks of his own ‘symple understondynge,’ and, according to Professor Skeat, he was ‘an amateur rather than a professional scribe;’ but Richard Sellyng [q. v.] sent Shirley his poem to revise (Harl. MS. 7333, f. 36). In 1440 he was living ‘att the full noble, honourable, and renomed cité of London’ ‘in his great and last age’ (Addit. MS. 5467, f. 97). He died on 21 Oct. 1456, and was buried with his wife Margaret—by whom he had eight sons and four daughters—in the church of St. Bartholomew-the-Less, London, where an inscription to his memory is preserved by Stow (Survey, ed. Strype, 1720, bk. iii. pp. 232–3).

Shirley translated from the Latin into English: 1. ‘A full lamentable Cronycle of the dethe and false murdure of James Stewarde, late kynge of Scotys, nought long agone prisoner yn Englande yn the tymes of the kynges Henrye the fift and Henrye the sixte;’ the manuscript belonged to Ralph Thoresby (, Cat. MS. Angliæ, p. 230, No. 7592, art. 6); it passed from him