Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/153

Rh an Irish theatre. He published poems and printed several of his plays during the years that the theatres were closed, as well as assisting Ogilby in his translations, and died in the year of the great fire.

Shirley's plays include tragedies; comedies of the usual novella type, moving between what would most strictly be called tragi-comedy and lighter comedy of manners; and some experiments in the direction of mystery (St Patrick for Ireland), morality (A Contention for Honour and Riches), and pastoral, his Arcadia (1640) being a dramatisation of Sidney's romance.

Shirley's tragedies—of which the best are probably The Traitor (1635) and The Cardinal (1652)—are of the artificial type of Massinger's and Ford's, but he has neither the moral eloquence of the former nor the intense, if hectic, feeling of the latter. He seems to me a slighter Fletcher, with much of the same ease and naturalness of style, and the same penchant for romantic pathos, and gay, often licentious, comedy of incident and manners. There are scenes and speeches of indubitable pathos and poetry in his tragedies and in the serious scenes of tragi-comedies like The Wedding (1629), The Example (1637), The Grateful Servant (1630), and The Royal Master (1638); and Shirley's comedy—of which good examples are The Witty Fair One (1632), The Lady of Pleasure (1635), and Hyde Park (1637)—has the air of good breeding which distinguishes Fletcher's from that of Middleton and Dekker, though to Pepys it appeared sadly old-fashioned.

Of minor men—followers in different ways of