Shirley is not
often at this high tragic level. His supposed first play, _Love Tricks_,
though it appeared nearly forty years before the Restoration, has a curious
touch of post-Restoration comedy in its lively, extravagant, easy farce.
Sometimes, as in _The Witty Fair One_, he fell in with the growing habit of
writing a play mainly in prose, but dropping into verse here and there,
though he was quite as ready to write, as in _The Wedding_, a play in verse
with a little prose. Once he dramatised the _Arcadia_ bodily and by name.
At another time he would match a downright interlude like the _Contention
for Honour and Riches_ with a thinly-veiled morality like _Honoria and
Mammon_. He was a proficient at masques. _The Grateful Servant_, _The Royal
Master_, _The Duke's Mistress_, _The Doubtful Heir_, _The Constant Maid_,
_The Humorous Courtier_, are plays whose very titles speak them, though the
first is much the best. _The Changes_ or _Love in a Maze_ was slightly
borrowed from by Dryden in _The Maiden Queen_, and _Hyde Park_, a very
lively piece, set a fashion of direct comedy of manners which was largely
followed, while _The Brothers_ and _The Gamester_ are other good examples
of different styles. Generally Shirley seems to have been a man of amiable
character, and the worst thing on record about him is his very ungenerous
gibing dedication of _The Bird in a Cage_ to Prynne, then in prison, for
his well-known attack on the stage, a piece of retaliation which, if the
enemy had not been "down," would have been fair enough.

Perhaps Shirley's comedy deserves as a whole to be better spoken of than
his tragedy. It is a later variety of the same kind of comedy which we
noted as written so largely by Middleton,--a comedy of mingled manners,
intrigue, and humours, improved a good deal in coherence and in stage
management, but destitute of the greater and more romantic touches which
emerge from the chaos of the earlier style. Nearly all the writers whom I
shall now proceed to mention practised this comedy, some better, some
worse; but no one with quite such success as Shirley at his best, and no
one with anything like his industry, versatility, and generally high level
of accomplishment. It should perhaps be said that the above-mentioned song,
the one piece of Shirley's generally known, is not from one of his more
characteristic pieces, but from _The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses_, a
work of quite the author's latest days.

Tho