rley has a right to his
place; as he most unquestionably has also by date. He was born in London in
1596, was educated at Merchant Tailors' School, and was a member of both
universities, belonging to St. John's College at Oxford, and to Catherine
Hall at Cambridge. Like other dramatists he vacillated in religion, with
such sincerity as to give up a living to which, having been ordained, he
had been presented. He was a schoolmaster for a time, began to write plays
about the date of the accession of Charles I., continued to do so till the
closing of the theatres, then returned to schoolmastering, and survived the
Restoration nearly seven years, being buried at St. Giles's in 1666. He
appears to have visited Ireland, and at least one monument of his visit
remains in the eccentric play of _St. Patrick for Ireland_. He is usually
credited with thirty-nine plays, to which it is understood that others, now
in MS., have to be added, while he may also have had a hand in some that
are printed but not attributed to him. 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, an appearance as of a highly competent and gifted pupil
in a school, not as of a master and leader in a movement. The palm is
perhaps generally and rightly assigned to _The Lady of Pleasure_, 1635, a
play bearing some faint resemblances to Massinger's _City Madam_, and
Fletcher's _Noble Gentleman_ (Shirley is known to have finished one or two
plays of Fletcher's), and in its turn the original, or at least the
forerunner of a long line of late seventeenth and eighteenth century plays
on the extravagance and haughtiness and caprice of fine ladies. Shirley
indeed was much acted after the Restoration, and exhibits, though on the
better side, the transition of the older into the newer school very well.
Of his tragedies _The Traitor_ has the general suffrage, and perhaps
justly. One of Shirl