BULLETIN OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS NO. 371 ISSUED SIX TIMES A MONTH HUMANISTIC SERIES NO. 17 NOVEMBER 15, 1914 STUDIES IN ENGLISH NO. 2 A Study in Shirley's Comedies of London Life . BY HANSON T. PARLIN PUBLISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS, AUSTIN, TEXAS Entered as second class matter at the postoffice at Austin, Texas 532-714-700-6063 BULLETIN OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS NO. 371 ISSUED SIX TIM ES A MONTH HUMANISTIC SERIES NO. 17 NOVEMBER 15, 1914 STUDIES IN ENGLISH NO. 2 A Study in Shirley's Comedies of London Life BY HANSON T. PARLIN PUBLISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS, AUSTIN, TEXAS Entered as second class matter at the postoffice at Austin, Texas PREFACE The present study in Shirley's comedies of London life orig­inally formed the introduction to a complete edition of the play entitled The Ball, a work presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor. of Philosophy. The entire work was to have appeared shortly as a Bulletin of the University of Texas; and was already in press, when a new edition of The Ball made its appearance in a collection of Chapman's comedies*· lately edited by Professor Parrott of Princeton University. In view of a recent and satisfactory edition of The Ball, it hardly seemed adviaable to duplicate work on so unimportant a play, and for this reason the text and accompanying notes of the present writer's edition have been suppressed, and the introductory matter allowed to issue in what must necessarily seem a fragmentary form. It is to be hoped that what is here printed may not seem superfluous. Professor Parrott and I have covered much the same ground in discussing the authorship of the play and have arrived at the same conclusions; my study has been made, however, from the point of view of Shirley rather than from that of Chapman, which is Pro­fessor Parrott's line of approach. The unusual form of the present study, due as above noted to a change of purpose in the course of printing, deserves some brief comment. A few facts are, therefore, given here, in explanation of what may seem a partial and ununified treatment of Shirley and his play The Ball. James Shirley is well known to special students of the Eliza­bethan drama, and with the increasing study of the literature of his time has become familiar to many general readers. With Mas­singer he shares the reputation of having left the longest and most creditable list of plays written by one man during the reign of the first Charles. Among these plays is The Ball, a light com­edy in defense of a fashionable fad, written by Shirley at a time when he "MIS more familiar with London's exclusive social circles *The Plays and Poems of George Chapman: The Comedies, ed. by T. M. Parrott, London, 1914. JI Preface than was any other dramatist then writing for the public stage. Although The Brill has the interest of an authentic picture of con­temporary manners, it has not a high intrinsic value, nor is it one of Shirley's best plays. It is mainly interesting to the lover of our old drama from the fact that on the title-page of the first edition Shirley's name is linked with that of George Chapman. The question of the authorship of The Ball is given added impor­tance by the further fact that the two dramatists are again joined as collaborators on the title-page of Chaliot, Admiral of France, a tragedy quite as much in the ponderous style of Chapman as The Ball is in the lighter vein of Shirley's comedy of manners. In 1632, when The Ball was first presented, Chapman, a noble old poet of Elizabeth's day long past his active career, had come to comparative obscurity. Shirley, on the other hand, was a rising young playwright just brightening into full professional fame. The suggestion of colla\"Joration between these two men at once stimulates the curiosity of a student of the Elizabethan drama, and must form an, important problem in any considerntion of The Ball or the tragedy of Chabot. In investigating the facts concerning the comedy entitled The Ball preparatory to an edition of the play, I soon reached the con­clusion that the main point upon which any new light could be shed was that of the authorship 0£ the play, although there was always a tentative hope that in the course of general reading some corrob­orative account of the ~o-called "ball" might be discovered. As the play was founded upon a bit of contemporary social scandal, the question of sources proved negligible; and the dates of compo­sition and publication are seemingly indisputable. The problem of the text is greatly simplified by the fact that there is only one original edition. To these matters, then, I have only given inci­dental treatment in the following monograph; and have endeav­ored to exclude all matter that does not in some way contribute to a settlement of the authorship, with the exception of a few pages of conjecture as to the nature of the amusement called the "ball." As it now stands, my work upon Shirley and the play of The Ball is composed of three parts: a section on Shirley as a poet and playwright, with a special inquiry into his comedies on London life; a section on Chapman's practice in comedy; and a section devoted almost exclusively to a discussion of the authorship of the Preface iii play. Any settlement of the question of the collaboration of Shir­ley and Chapman must depend upon internal Pvidence. For this reason I have placed the results of my study of the two poets before the argument in regard to their collaboration in The Ball. The sec­tion on Shirley is longer and more comprehensive than that of Chap­man. My reason for this is twofold: in the first place, Shirley is according to my view sole author of The Ball, and would thus war­rant ampler treatment; in the second place, his contemporary and historical importance seemed to require a lengthened discussion of his work and talents. Shirley is not so favorably known as he should be. In nearly every treatment of the Caroline period, Mas­singer and Ford are mentioned as the representative dramatists. My study has led me to believe that, while Massinger may equal Shirley as a dramatic craftsman, he does not rank with him as a poet; and that Ford, while excelling Shirley at times in tragic power and lyrical beauty, falls short of him in comprehensive practice; and that neither Massinger nor Ford has a better claim than Shirley to be ranked as the representative dramatist of the time. In the preparation of this slight monograph and the vicissi­tudes incident to its publication, I am deeply indebted to the help­ful criticism and the patient kindness of Professor Felix E. Schelling of the Uni~:rsity of Pennsylvania. In the work of get­ting it through the press, it would be hard for me to express what I owe to my friends Professor Killis Campbell and Mr. R. W. Fowler of the University of Texas. H. T. P. June, 1914. SHIRLEY AS A POET AND PLAYWRIGHT Since Anthony a Wood gathered together the few surviving facts of Shirley's life, little has been discovered to add to his meagre account.1 A diligent search of contemporary documents and a careful culling of the dedications and prologues of his plays have yielded nothing that would give more than a deeper color of truth to what was first brought together by the author of Athenae Oxonienses. But we know Shirley's story in its main and im­portant points. We know that he rose rapidly from an obscure position as master of a small school at St. Albans to a conspicuous place as a London playwright, and that chance having brushed away his nearest competitors, he succeeded finally to the premier­ship of his profession. He took his place at the head of the im­portant company of the King's men about 1640. He was then in the very prime of his manhood, and his art had been chastened and developed by a long and prolific practice. A bright future seemed to lie before him, but in less than two years the theaters were closed by order of a Puritan parliament. In the case of Shirley, however, we are not troubled by the regret that we feel in the case of some other poets of unfulfill'ed renown. It is clear to a student of his work that, variously and genuinely gifted as Shir­ley was, he had brought his art to full development in the plays that he has bequeathed to us. And any speculation as to what he might have accomplished in his maturer years is finally closed in retrospect by the fact that the end of a great age was at hand, and the birth of a new in all the toils and calamities of civil strife had put a sudden end to the traditions of the past and closed for­ever the playhouse~ of the Elizabethan dramatists. Shirley moved among his contemporaries so modestly and quietly that he failed in any peculiar manner to impress himself upon his age. He had no quarrel with the life of his times nor with the methods of his art. He accepted both as he found them, and for fifteen years worked with eminent success and perfect good temper among his fellow dramatists. He may have failed to obtrude a peculiar point of view or a dominant personality upon his time, 1 Athenae Oxonil'nses, ed. Bliss, III, pp. 737.44. but his centemporaries were none the less a.ware of the qualities upon which his fame, as justified by later criticism, rests. Mas­sing&, Ford, Randolph, and May wrote in praise of his gentle muse, and found it to his commendation that in an age that ran to "forced expressions" and "rack'd phrase" his Helicon ran smooth. In all the commendatory poems written for his various playsJ the leading thought is a recognition of the fact that Shirley relied for his success upon the older methods, and refused to cater to popular approval by the exaggerated and decadent art of many of his lesser contemporaries. The pit delighted in the obscenities of Brome and Killigrew, and the gallants of the time, as Shirley himself has remarked, censured plays that were not ''bawdy."1 But Shirley could win a public without practicing such arts. To the fashionable audience at the Cockpit he gave "No Babel compositions, to amaze The tortur'd reader, no believ'd defence To strengthen the bold atheist's insolence, No obscene syllable, that may compel A blush from a chaste maid; but all so well Express'd and order'd, as wise men must say, It is a grateful poem, a good play."2 His contemporaries praised his discreet though fully adequate style; the good Master of the Revels noted in his office-book "for a patterne to other poets" "the beneficial and cleanly way of poetry" of Mr. Shirley; and to him was accorded at last the place at the head of the King's Company to which the best playwrights of his time aspired. Such in brief was the contemporary estimate of Shirley. With the closing of the theatres in 1642, he returned to his old profession of teaching.3 When the drama was revived at the Restoration, the leadership among playwrights passed un­fortunately to the younger and inferior poet, Davenant. Shirley lived on several years into the Restoration period, and continued to work, though not in the drama. But it must not be •Shirley, Dra,matic Works, IV, p. 12. 'Ibid., I, p. lxxix; poem by Massinger on The "Grateful Servant. 'Mr. QQsse sugge.sts that after the di.saster at Marston Moor, Shirley retired to France with the Duke of Newcastle. Best Plays of Shirley Mermaid Ser., p. xxvi. ' inferred that he was immediately forgotten in his old capacity. Pepys recordfl having seen The Traitor in 1660, and from his Diary we learn that he saw no less than nineteen performances of eight different plays by Shirley between that date and 1669.1 Langbaine, writing as late as 1691, mention~ having seen four of Shirley's plays within his remembrance.2 These are all included :in the list of those seen by Pepys. But besides these we know that The Young Admiral.. 3 The Brothers,4 The Witty Fa;i,r 0'1J-e, The Example, and The Opportunity" were acted sometimes between 1663 and 1682. Malone complains that "such was the lamentable taste of those times that the plays of Fletcher, Jonson and Shir­ley were much oftener exhibited than those of our author [Shake­speare] ."6 Not only was there a continued interest in Shirley's plays on the part of the public, but the early writers on English poetry echoed to some extent the estimate of Shirley held by his contemporaries. Edward Phillips, in his Theatrum Poetarum (1675), has acknowledged Shirley's talents in a statement that he was "little inferior to Fletcher himself." Winstanley (1687) and Langbaine (1691), while following Phillips more or less per­functorily, must not be deprived of all originality in their critical judgments. The latter is especially warm, and, let it be said, very just in his short account of Shirley's merits as a poet and dramatist. He says of him that he was "a gentleman" and "one of such incomparable parts, that he was the chief of the second­rate poets" and "in all his writings shews a modesty unusual, seldom found in our age."7 It would be only fair to the poet and his crific to think that Dryden knew littie about Shirley when in Mac Flecknoe he loosely joined him with Heywood as a type of Shadwell, the "last great prophet of tautology."8 This criticism coming from Dryden could not but have affected the public mind, 'Diary, ed. Wheatley. The plays were The Traitor; The Changes; The Court Secret; The Grateful Servant; Hyde Park; The Cardinal; f;ove's Cruelty; Love Tricks. 2An Account of the English Drarnatick Poets, Oxford, 1691, p. 475. • Evelyn, Diary, ed. Bray, p. 290. 'Malone by Boswell, III, p. 276. 'Genest, Account of the English Stage, I, pp. 79, 339, 340. • Malone by Boswell, III, p. 273. 1An Account of the English Dr." The charge of unoriginality has commonly been lodged against him with some. show of truth; 'Dramatic Works, IIJ, p. 467: "Princes are here The copies of eternity, and create, When they but will, our happiness." •The Traitor is an interesting example of Shirley's intimacy with his predecessors. Act I, 2 recalls the traitor scene in Henry V · Act III 1 reca_ll~ a famous scene in Henry IV; and the masque in Act III 2' is remm1scent of Hamlet. ' but even unoriginality does not preclude success. His use of old themes and familiar motives may have been one element in his success, especially as he was able to use over and over again old dramatic devices, and yet maintain a novelty of combination and a charm of poetical phrase that delighted and surprised. Not only had his predecessors bequeathed him substance for his drama, but he had evidently studied their methods with discrimination, for in a purely technical sense he rarely fell into any of their special sins. Combined with a wide knowledge of the older drama was Shir­ley's own native sense of what was truly dramatic. It is hardly fair to him to say that "he avoids over-emphasis, as much from exhaustion as from good taste.ni It robs the man of a distin­guishing virtue. To have used material that had done service upon the stage for over fifty years with so much freshness and dramatic mastery was no mean accomplishment. His art was eclectic, to be sure, but his eclecticism was guided by a discerning judgment only possible in one gifted with real dramatic insight. And be it remembered that he was prescribed by the greatest masters; and to so intimate a student of them, and modest withal, an unaware­ness of this limitation was impossible. Let us not deprive Shirley of the virtue of moderation, when we have before us the excesses of his Ie~ser contemporaries and the doubtful experiments of the greater poet, Ford. It has been seen under what favorable circumstances Shirley found a place waiting for his special talents; how he was unem­barrassed by any close competition; and how his personal qualities made him acceptable to the audience for which he wrote. To his profession he brought a mind fi:miliar with the practice of his greater predecessors and trained in their methods; and to this he added, as we shall see, his native talents of a true dramatic sense, no mean vein of poetry, and a fecundity of production that put all rivalry without b~mnds. Some of Shirley's best work is to be found in his comedies of London life. In this field, as in the whole province of his work, he has attempted a surprising number of themes and varying types. One, curiously enough, is a moral interlude with ab;;:trad 'Garnett and Gosse, English Literature, II, p. 359. characters; several are pure comedy with just the suggestion of a serious background; two at least are distinctly serious with comic secondary plots or comic episodes; while three on fashionable Lon­don life are pure comedies of manners. There are in all some ten or eleven of these comedies.1 In his first play, Love Tricks, or the School of Compliment, Shirley betra.ys very plainly where he has fed. It is a crude example of eclecticism in which the art of the dramatist has not been sufficiently developed to cover palpable borrowings. The play is heterogeneous, combining several forms of drama, and recalling in different places specific scenes from Shakespeare, Jamon, and Fletcher.2 It is interesting as a juve­nile exercise in methods that were later to assume artistic poise. A Contention for 11on or and Riches Langbaine was at a loss to classify, being in doubt whether to call it an "Interlude" or an "Entertainment." It was merely Shirley's attempt to apply the older methods of the morality to the life of his times, and illus­trates the poet's comprehensive range. The play is well worth reading for the graphic pictures of London types, in which Shirley appears in a more clearly marked satirical vein than usual, but does not call for detailed remarks here. Perhaps the best of Shirley's earlier comedies is The Witty Fafr One. It is especially remarkable for the constructive ability and dramatic discernment shown in the clever plotting of its merry intrigue. It is a play in which the old theme of the outwitting of a father by a daughter in her attempt to marry against his wishes is treated with surprising ingenuity. The great interest of this play is its revelation of the master dramatist in Shirley at so early a date as 1628. The use of the ambiguous message of Vio­letta in the first act; the still more exciting exchange of letters which later on carries the action to its culmination with absorb­ing interest; the novelty of the sub-plot, in which Master Fowler is fooled into believing himself dead ;-all are strikingly dramatic, and give rise to no end of witty dialogue. Complete unity is maintained in a strict subordination of the secondary action and a skillful economy in the characters. Sensible, though seemingly lf,ove Tricks, The Wedding, The Brothers, The Witty Fair One, The Changes, Hyde Park, The Ball, The Gamester, The Example, The Lady of Pleasure, The Constant' Maid. · 'C"f. Schelling, Elizabethan Drama, II, p. 287. dirn1issed from the scene at one time, appears at the end as an instrument of retributive justice. The Tutor, who has given us some good fooling in the early part of the play, takes a leading pa1 t in the gulling of the almost infallible Brains, a consumma­tion that brings the action to its closing scenes. 'l'he play remains a triumphant example of Shirley's constructive skill, and in the handling of the intrigue it follows methods at the other end of the art from such plays, for instance, as the All Fools of Chapman. In The Witty Fair One the comic element all but overshadows the serious interest in the love affair of Violetta and Aimwell. We now turn to a type of comedy, probably more characteristic of Shirley, in which the serious interest predominates. The Wed­ding c~mes very near to tragedy, but is relieved by comic scenes in which Shirley shows a marked allvance over his earliest at­tempts in Love Tricks. But a play of this type that is more com­pletely representative of Shirley is The Example. It offers in both its main and secondary actions dramatic themes of which he seems never to have tired. The illicit pursuit of Lady Peregrine by Fitzavarice, and his final regeneration under the spell of her virtue and womanliness, is, as we shall see, the poet's favorite sit­uation. The secondary plot, in which Jacinta gulls a pair of fool­ish lovers, was no less attractive to him as a tneans of comic effect. A continuous thread of fun is kept up in the entrances and exits of Sir Solitary Plot, a direct imitation of Jon son's "humours." Shirley's eye for the dramatic is nowhere more fit­tingly illustrated than in the complication that arises out of the arrest of Peregrine for his debt to Fitzavarice. What could con­vince the jealous husband more strongly of the guilt and mean­ness of his enemy? Yet Fitzavarice is innocent in the matter of the arrest. It gives him, however, a chance to show his real colors, to open the eyes of Peregrine to the real situation. Com­ing as the play does after the "wicked" play of The Gamester, the enforcement of the moral may seem more apparent. It can be oafely said, however, that Shirley never takes the moral point of view, but invariably the dramatic and artistic. It is with renewed interest that we turn to a ~erics of plays in which Shirley has mastered his medium, and, no longer depending on books, drew his characters from the fashionable life about him. In Hyife Park~, The Ball, and The Lady of Pleasure, he has done his most original and characteristic work in the pure comedy of manners. The first two plays follow one another in quick succes­sion, showing the poet ready to follow up a popular "hit" and give his audience a bit of fun on their own foibles. It would be too much to expect more than the lightest comedy on the subjects under treatment; and both of these plays depend for their effect rather upon the gaiety and sprightliness of scene and dialogue than upon any full portrayal of comic character. From the bustle and ex­citement of races in Hyde Park, we pass to the more exclusive in­door amusements in The Ball, the novelty of which had inspired the rumor that "strange words" were bandied and strange "revels kept." Thus in the reign of Charles I we get an intimate glimpse of London society at pastimes to which succeeding generations have unfailingly given enthusiastic approval. After the two come­dies of Hi32, Shirley allowed several years to elapse before present­ing his public with another in a similar vein. In 1635, his .Lady of Pleasure was presented for the first time. Swinburne has said that this comedy "but for a single ugly incongruity would be one of the few finest examples of pure high comedy in verse that our stage could show against that of Moliere." This is full praise enough, but warranted in the face of criticism that passes Shir­ley's art as unoriginal or exhausted. In no comedy of manners that I can call to mind have we so intimate and delightful a pic­ture of any phase of London life. It is impossible for us to think that Shirley is satirizing the life of the leisure classes in this play. He was too much in sympathy with this life himself. What he has done is to accentuate the facts for comic purposes; or at most he is merely laughing at social excesses. The Lady of Pleasure has persuaded her husband to sell his holdings in the country and take a house in the Strand. She is soon led into follies and extravagances in which her husband fears for her fame and his purse. Remonstrating in vain, Lord Bornwell hits upon the plan of curing her by indulging in equal extravagance. Hav­ing chided her not long before for her excesses, he comes in an assumed mood of having seen the folly of his thrift, and prom­ises to "repent in sack and prodigality" to her heart's content. The ruse works, and to the wife's eyes is revealed the danger to the family exchequer at this furious rate of spending. Subor­dinated to the main action is a characteristic sub-plot in which the chief figure is the rich yo.ung widow, Celestina. 'l'he charming quality of this character is her perfect good sense and good humor. Beautiful in person, she is indulging in all the social pastimes to the extent, perhaps, of impeaching her good name. But accept­ing for what they are worth the censures and attentions of the needy young gallants who flock about her, she maintains her course, the perfect mistress of her heart and her demeanor. Her character receives its full vindication in the scene whHe Lord A.­makes dishonorable advances. Even in this extremity her self­command does not desert her, and we have the beautiful scene in which she reprimands his Lordship with cleverness and dignity. Another point worth remarking in this play is the variety of con­temporary types that are handled. Besides the Lady of Pleasure, who is completely carried away by the gaiety of the Strand, there is the charming character of Celestina; and what we would all too gladly have foregone, the courtesan Decoy, with a side glance into the darker ways of fashionable life. Among the men is to be dis­tinguished the thrifty knight, Sir Thomas Bornwell, who has no intention of losing either his head or his money in the social whirl. Clearly marked from the crew of needy gallants is the higher type of titled aristocracy, Lord A-, who is represented as a man of lineage and influence. Perhaps the closest that Shirley comes to satire in this play is the character of Frederick, through whom, in one of the most deli/!htful of scenes, we obtain n vivid picture of the attitude of the stage toward the university scholar. In these three plays we meet more or le£s the same people, and the only novelty is that we see them under varying circumstances. Through all of these plays trips the witty, free-spoken young woman of fashion, Carol in Hyde Park-, Lucina in The Ball, and Celestina in The Lady of Ple&ure. In each we find a lord, and the character is so much alike in the three plaYs that it is impos­sible to believe that Shirley did 1;10t have some contemporary fig­ure in mind. It is interesting to note that this character, now Lord Bonville, now Lord Rainbow, and in The Lady of Pleasure more anonymously Lord A-, is found in Shirley's favorite situa­tion of making questionable advances to a lady by whom he is later redeemed to more virtuous conduct. Then we have a lot of impecunious men about town, who play the races, hover about the ladies at a fashionable ball, or pay assiduous attentions to the mis­ lG Shirley's Comedies of London Life tress of an exclusive salon. In these comedies of a more or less realistic type, we get glimpses into a side of social life which none of Shirley's contemporaries has treated with the same easy famili­arity and intimacy. Enough has been said regarding the comedies most character­istic of Shirley's practice to permit conclusions to be drawn as to his powers as a dramatic artist. In reading his plays on London life, one becomes familiar through frequent repetition with certain types of character and certain situations. Especially in his earlier comedies he has a tendency to emphasize types of character that have appeared before in the plays of Fletcher and Jonson. This tendency toward types has been pointed out in the discussion of the three comedies on fashionable life noticed above; but it must be acknowledged that in these later works he shows a closer reliance upon a.ctual personages and. occurremes for his dramatic material. Even more marked than this tendency of his characters to fall into types, is his constant recurrence to certain situations.1 His favorite theme in the plays on London life is that of a man suddenly restored to his nobler self by the repulse of a virtuous woman whom he is pursuing illicitly. The situation growjng out of a strange compound of noble and rakish qualities in a man, recurs in no less than five plays, assuming in one the importance of the main action.2 A situation that seemed to be of great comic interest to him is that of the witty woman who gulls a number of troublesome suitors, as in The Ball and the sub­plot of The Example.3 But Shirley's peculiar merit as a play­wright lies conspicuously in his constructive skill and his sure sense of the dramatic. This is strikingly manifest in such early plays as The Wedding and The Witty Fair One, the latter being an almost perfect model of construction. His plays are always sustained throughout, while his preference for running a second plot parallel with, yet subordinate to. the main plot has the great advantage of hazarding less the unity of the whole than a com­plicated interweaving of the various actions. There is also at­tained by this method a greater simplictiy of plot: at least, the 'See Schelling, EUzabethan Drama, II, p. 296. 'The Example. 'Shirley~s delight in this kind of love intrigue finds full vent in The Humorous Courtier. apparent complirntion of the earlier comedies of intrigue is plainly wanting in these plays of Shirley. It is also pleasant to find that the dialogue never lags. As an example of repartee and cleverly conducted dialogue, the Lady of Pleasure, for instance, is an irre­proachable example. For the purposes of comic expression, Shir­ley's blank verse is peculiarly fitted. It is frequently very close to prose, and seldom labors under heavy imagery or classical allusion. As a medium for comedy, it is not to be deplored that Shirley's style has not risen to superlative passion or beauty; it is eminently more important to be clear and direct in the lighter vein of comedy. In his profession Shirley acknowledges Jonson as his master, but in actual practice he is the direct descendant of Beaumont and Fletcher. His comedy is never of the judicial type, and is strik­ingly free from satire. 'l'here is, furthermore, a graceful and "airy conventionality" about his work that raises it in his treatment of manners above the danger of gross realism. If we except the dis­parity in poetic genius, we will find Shirley's attitude toward life ~md art to be largely that of Shakespeare, though, of course, much more conventional. It is the spirit of broad sympathy; the look­ing at life from the point of view of a happy participant rather than that of a critical spectator. It is largely this that marks Shirley of the old romantic line, and gives an original interest to his work. Having read through much in Elizabethan drama that is only historicaliy interesting or merely beautiful in detail, the critic would hardly be just if he withheld a grateful admiration :from Shirley, who, in a declining age, maintained a steady excel­lence in style and execution, and gave to old material new life and fresh charm. Shirley's gifts as a poet are not commensurate with his abilities as a practical playwright. His imagination seldom does more than play about the deep and searching emotions of the human heart, and rather runs in even, delicate tracery through all that he wrote. It is perhaps for this reason that his genuine qualit:v as a poet is frequently neglected,-this coupled with the fact that he did not hold the secret to that mine from which the earlier maste:rs drew with exhaustless prodigality. His lines are never crowded with thought or too abundant imagery, and his striking pa:>sages frequently owe their quality to one or two deeply poetic lines, as in this short one quoted by ~Ir. Gosse :1 "Yes, Felisarda, he is gone, that in The morning promis'd many years; but death Hath in a few hours made him as stiff, as all The winds 0£ winter had thrown cold upon him, And whi,spe'f"d hini to ma.rble."2 In the following passage, the simple fidelity and effective move­ment of the last line creates the poetic value of the whole figure: "What a brave armour is An innocent soul! How like a rock it bids Defiance to a storm, aga.inst whose ribs The insolent waves but dash themselves in pieces, And fall and hide their heads in passionate foam !"8 And in a eomewhat bolder and more lurid vein, the following lines from The Cardinal: "I come To shew the man you have provok'd, and lost, And tell you what remains of my revenge.­Live, but never presume again to marry; I'll kill the next at the altar, and qnencZi all The smiling tapers with his blood."4 While the beauty of his poetry in many cases becomes a beauty of line, the plays are not without numerous passages of sustained and even elaborate poetry, as in the lines which Dr. Farmer con­sidered in imagination "fine to an extraordinary degree." 'Best ·Plays of Shfrley, Mermaid ser., p. xiii. ' Shirley, Dramatic Works, I, p. 249. 'Ibid.., IV, p. 181. 'Ibid., V, p. 320. Cf. also the following· from Beaumont and ]<']etcher, PhilMter, Act V, Sc: 3, Mermaid Ser., p. 175. "I'll provide A masque shnll make your Hymen turn his saffron Into a sullen coat, and sing sad requiems To your departing souls; Ulood shall put out your torches," etc. "Her eye did seem to labour with a tear, Which suddenly took birth, but, overweigh'd With its own swelling, dropp'd upon her bosom, Whioh, by reflection of her light, appear'd As nature meant her sorrow for an ornament; After, her looks grew cheerful, and I saw A smile shoot graceful upward from her eyes, As if they had gain'd a victory o'er grief; And with it many beams twisted themselves, Upon whose golden threads the angels walk To and again from heaven."1 Shirley was very happy in his treatment of gentle sorrow, and in the following lines we meet again a beautiful description nf a grief that has all but spent itself: "Sorrow and I Are taking leave, I hope, and these are only Some drops after the cloud has wept his violence."a Shirley's poetry is very even in quality. For this reason it is difficult to pick superior passages. It will be interesting, how­ever, to illustrate the poetic quality which he sustains with ease throughout his plays. The following is fairly representative: "But what story Mention'd his name, that had his prince's bosom, Without the people's hate? 'tis sin enough, In some men, to be great; the throng of stars, The rout and common people of the sky, Move still another way than the sun does, That gilds the creature: take your honours back, And, if you can, that purple of my veins, Which flows in your's, and you shall leave me in A state I shall not fear the great ones' envy, Nor common peoRle's rage."8 'Dramatic Works, I, p. 202. 2Ibid., III, p. 206. •/bid., II, p. 107. Another passage from the same play will illustrate the quality of much of the dialogue of Shirley's serious dramas: "To one whom you have heard talk of,, Your fathers knew him well: one, who will never Give cause I should suspect him to forsake me; A constant lover, one whose lips, though cold, Distil chaste kisses : though our bridal bed Be not adorn'd with roses, 'twill be green; We shall have virgin laurel, cypress, yew, To make us garlands; though no pine do burn, Our nuptial shall have torches, and our chamber Shall be cut out of marble, where we'll sleep, Free from all care for ever: Death, my lord, I hope, shall be my husband."1 The passages quoted above are not necessarily examples of Shir­ley's best poetry; but they will give a very good idea of the poetic character. of his plays as a whole. The figures are neither strik­ing nor rare, but the speeches are carried off with ease and grace and an air of refinement and good breeding that recalls the poetry of the Cavalier song-writers. 'fhe delicate conventionality and re­strained artistry of such speeches fails somehow to carry the con­viction of passion springing out of human experience. The poetry does not seem to come inevitably from the character and situa­tion: there is something extra-ornamental about it. Lowell touches the point closely in the following comment: "The sorrows of Beaumont and Fletcher's personages have almost as much charm as sadness in them, and we think of the poet more than of the sufferer. Yet his emotion is genuine, and we feel it to be so even while we feel also that it leaves his mind free to think about it.''2 Notwithstanding the great advance made by the later Elizabethans in the technical handling of plot and in a sure sense for dramatic situation, they were never able to raise the speeches of their char­acters to the level of poetry and still retain the verisimilitude to human passion and art.ion that characterizes the work of the earlier masters. This is to my mind the outstanding weakness of the 1Dra.ma.tic Works, II, p. 165. 'Old English. Dramatists, p. 106. James Shirley plays of Shirley, as well as of the work of :Massinger and Beaumont and Fletcher. Dr. Ward has said that "in very few of our dramatists shall we meet with so many passages of a poetic beauty, elaborate indeed, but at the same time genuine, and finding its expression in imagery at once original and appropriate. Shirley was en­dowed with a sense of the picturesque, which would render many of these passages admirable themes for a painter who would allow them to linger in his mind; the hues and shades of the seasons of the year, and of the changes of day and night, and the world of flowers in particular, left their delicate impression upon the re­ceptive fancy of this true poet." 1 Of longer lyrics Shirley has not left us many that are perfect. It was not his common practice to scatter songs throughout his plays. Mr. Gosse has selected one of the most beautiful, the open­ing lines of which are: "You virgins, that did late despair To keep your wealth from cruel men, Tie up in silk your careless hair, Soft peace has come again."2 We know that he could write a fine lyric. In the noble lines that King Charles lo>ed to hear from old Bowman, we haYe one of the finest lyrics in our language. The thought of death as the "leYeler" is common in the poetry of all periods, but it has rarely found quite such simple and inevitable expression. "It is a nobly simple piece of >erse," sa~·s J.owell, "with the slow and solemn cadence of a funeral march. The hint of it seems to have been taken from a passage in that droningl~· dreary book, the ')firror for )Ja,Q"istrate~.' '!'his little poem is one of the best instances of the good fortune of the men of that age in the unconscious sim­plicity and gladness (I know not what else to call it) of their rncabulary. The language, so to speak, had just learned to go alone, and found a joy in its own mere motion, which it lost as it ?"ew older, and to walk was no longer a mar>el."3 Though eom­ 1H·istory of E11glish Dramatic I,i.feratttre, III, p. 123. •Dramatic Works, V, p. 189. 'Old English Dramatists, p. 11. monly known, it should be quoted as the last word on Shirley as a poet. "The glories of our blood and state Are shadows, not substantial things; 'l'here is no armour against fate; Death lays his icy hand on kings : Scepter and crown, Must tumble down, And in the dust be equal made With the poor crooked scythe and spade. "Some men with swords may reap the field, And plant fresh laurels where they kill; But their strong nerves at last must yield ; They tame but one another still : Early or late, They stoop to fate, And must give up their murmuring breath, When they, pale captives, creep to death. The garlands wither on your brow, Then boast no more your mighty deeds; Upon Death's purple altar now, See, where the victor-victim bleeds: Your heads must come To the cold tomb, Only the actions of the just Smell sweet, and blossom in their dust."' It may be well at the expense of some repetition to summarize briefly the investigation of Shirley's methods in dramatic art. The most conspicuous merit of his plays is their constructive excel­lence. As a playwright he is not excelled by any of the Eliza­bethan dramatists. He is eclectic in practice, but his eclecticism is not blind following. It is guided by a native sense for the dramatic, and is discriminating and constructive. And it by no means follows that he is unoriginal. It was impossible for him not to be conscious of the vast amount of literary production that 'Dramatic Works, VI, p. 396. had preceded him, but in spite of this h~ has succeeded in show­ing a real inventive power and a sure seme of what is, dramatically speaking, the best. In plotting his plays he has shown a greater simplicity than his predecessors, and is rarely guilty of produc­ing a poorly motived or a disorganized play. The dialogue in his comedies is bright and spontaneous, never involved or obscure. 'l'his, combined with a real sense of hnmor and a perspicuous action, gi¥es the great quality that leads to practical success, namely, interest. Mr. G-Osse holds that Shirley Jf all the Eliza­bethans could most ea~ily be restored to the modern stage.1 In his treatment of character, he is slightly conventional and frequently prone to run into types. When we have read through his comedy of manners, we have become well acquainted with the typical Lon­doner. We have laughed at the rich young countryman who has come up to London to spend his money; we have seen the ins and outs of the needy gallant who wears his own hair, knows how to make a leg, and not infrequently lives by his wits. Then there is the young widow who gulls a brace of lovers _; and the poor uni­versity scholar whose black clothes and modest manners are sadly out of fashion in the gay metropolis. We pass through many lively scenes: now at a game of dice in an uproarious tavern; now at Hyde Park, playing the races; and more interesting still, at a fashionable ball, which some good Londoners had whispered was t'lomething w:orse than the Family of Love, but which turns out to be nothing more than the :fi.rEtt subscription dance. While the characters seldom have that living touch that holds Falstaff so vitally and imperishably in our memory, they ha,·e a universality that makes them interesting to-day. Shirley has avoided the main evil incident to a study of contemporary life, that is, a too close realif!m. He has given us a vivid and sprightly picture of the London of his time, not exactly and minutely, but rather in its essential human spirit. In connection with all this, it must be re­membered that Shirley maintained a purely literary drama, writ­ing for the most part in verse. His poetry, as we have seen, is adequate and sincere, characterized by a delicate fancy and sus­ceptibility rather than by depth of passion or philosophical utter­ ance. 'Gosse, Best Plays of Shirley, Mermaid ser., p. xxx. A brief comment upon Shirley's relative standing among his contemporaries will complete my critical estimate of him. Shirley readily falls into the best company of his time, namely, that of Massinger and Ford. While it may be frankly admitted that Shirley does not present a striking individuality as a poet or a dramatist, we should be careful not to deny this admirable man his chief merit by refusing to recognize the high value of a mod­erate and sustained literary excellence. Shirley was evidently a man whose mooest and cultivated taste would not permit him to indulge in excesses to gain an audience, and his artistic practice is fairly justified by contemporary success. His work, for in­stance, is not marked by such persistent traits as the moral earn­estness and rhetorical vein of Massinger, two qualities that have made a strong appeal to English people at all times. Indeed, it is upon a moral appeal, by no means concealed by the greatest art, that Massinger has so definitely impressed himself upon his readers. Special students of Massinger admit this. Lowell con­fesses his delight in him to be "not so much for his passion or power, though at times he reaches both, as for the love he shows for those things that are lovely and of good report in human nature, for his sympathy with what is generous and high-minded and honorable."1 Now Shirley is neither moral nor rhetorical; yet, if we put the matter upon an artistic basis, he sufficiently holds his own with :Massinger as a dramatist, while as a poet he as easily surpasses him. To me Massinger just missed poetry in most of what he wrote. As a special instance of his poetic insuffi­ciency we may take The Guardian, in which not a line rises to the level of genuine poetry. 2 The following passage from Believe as Yon List is typical of much of his work. To appreciate fully the failure of the author here, one should have more of the context, but the quotation illustrates dearly the difference between rhetoric and poetry. "There, in an arbour, Of itself supported o'er a bubbling spring, With purple hyacinths and roses covered, We will enjoy the sweets of life, nor shall 'The Old English Dramatists, p. 122. 'C'f. Symons, "Introduction" to Best Plays of Massinger, Mermaid Ser. Arithmetic sum up the varieties of Our amorous dalliance; our viands such, As not alone shall nourish appetite, But strengthen our performance; and, when called for, The quiristers of the air shall give us music; And, when we slumber, in a pleasant dream You shall behold the mountains of vexations Which you have heaped upon the Roman tyrants In your free resignation of your kingdom, And smile at their aftlictions."1 Here is an opportunity for fine sensuous poetry which the older poets would scarcely have missed. 'l'he following passage from Shirley offers a suffident parallel to the foregoing lines of Mas­singer. Though the two quotations are antithetical in tone, they are similar in that both are descriptive passages serving the same purpose in the respective plays for which they were written. To me the lines from Shirley carry a truer poetic quality : there is an atmosphere about them that recalls the happy intuition of the earlier masters, especially in the last three lines, which are quite inevitable and finely suggestive. "This is the place, by his commands, to meet in; It has a sad and fatal invitation: A hermit that forsakes the world for prayer And rnlitude, would be timorous to live here. There's not a spray for birds to perch upon; For every tree that overlooks the vale, Carries the mark of lightning, and is blasted. The day, wh1ch smil'd as I came forth, and spread Fair beams about, has taken a deep melancholy, That sits more ominous in her face than night: All darkness is less horrid than half light. Never was such a ~cene for death presented; And there's a ragged mountain peeping over, With many heads, seeming to crowd themselves Spectators of some tragedy."2 'Believe As You bist, Act IV, Sc. 2, Mermaid Ser. •Dramatic Works, V, p. 486. With his other great contemporary, t:ihirley's comparative stand­ing is more difficult to decide. Ford has dug deeper but more narrowly in his art. He has a penetrating analysis of character almost unbearable at times, but compelling in its fascination; and in his relentless probing of human sorrows and human wrongs he has struck a deeper, sadder note in poetry than any other of his contemporaries. In this song from The Broken Heart, there is a poignant beauty frequent in Ford, but seldom reached by Shirley. "0, no more, no more, too late Sighs are spent; the burning tapers Of a life as chaste as fate, Pure as are unwritten papers, Are burnt out: no beat, no light Now remains; 'tis ever night. "Love is dead; let lovers' eyes, Locked in endless dreams, Th' extremes of all extremes, Ope no more, for now Love dies, Now Love dies,-implying Love's martyrs must be ever ever dying."1 Shirley's verse seldom shows the rare quality of Ford's lyric strain; nor do his tragedies ever present the intensity or subtle analysis of Ford's studies in forbidden experience. But if Shirley was not capable of a "grief deeper than language," nor the master of "brief mysterious words, which well up from the depths of des­pair," he had other gifts which, taken all in all, probably give him a more significant place in the history of o'ur drama than Ford. In the variety and fecundity of his production; in the uniformly high poetic quality of his verse; in his adherence to the best tra­ditions of the past; and in his complete sympathy with the life of his times, Shirley came nearer to sustaining a national drama than any other man of the Caroline period. There is one point which probably concerns Shirley more as a man and an Elizabethan than as a playwright and poet. It has been frequently pointed out in the foregoing pages that Shirley rarely, if ever, took a moral point of view. For the most part, 1The Broken Heart, Act IV, Sc. 3, Mermaid Ser., p. 264. his plays are free from any impropriety of subject, and his atti­ture on broad lines of conduct is dignified and noble. Sor does he fail to utter noble sentiment. "When our souls shall leave this dwelling, The glory of one fair and virtuous action Is above all the scutcheons on our tomb, Or silken banners over us.'" And this from The Lad;y of Pleasure: "Something might here be spar'd, with safety of Your birth and honour, since the truest wealth Shines from the soul, and draws up just admirers."2 It is to be regretted that in several of his plays he should have introduced certain "ugly incongruities." I have alluded to one in The Lady of Pleasure, and a similar thing disfigures his noble tragedy, The Cardinal. But it is perfectly reasonable to explain these as pure conventions. In the case of The Gamester, it would seem that he had actually deserted his art to catch the ground­lings. Charles Kingsley is quite justified when he says that we could never put such plays in the hands of our children; but in the full length of his strictures on our author he is somewhat per­vers~.3 In the first place, it is eminently unfair to neglec:t Shir­ley's average practice, and consider The Gamester as typical of all he wrote.4 In the second place, it is important to keep in mind the times in which he lived. In the case of The Gamester, the King gave Shirley the plot, and later approved the play ;5 and the worst enemies of Charles were never able to cast the slightest shadow upon his morals as a man. Conventions which today re­strict the relatiom: of the sexes did not prevail then ; and coarse­ness and broad jesting sometimes ran to extremes. As Miss Woodbridge has pertinently pointed out in the case of one of )fas­ 'Dramatic Works, II, p. 174. 'Ibid., IV, p. 8. •Plays and Puritans. See also Gardiner, History of England, VII. Gardiner is hardly fair in his strictures on The Witty Fair Orie. •see Schelling, Elizabetkan Drama, II, p. 293. 'Malone by Boswell, III, p. 236. See Neilson, W. A., Cambridge History of English Literature, VI, pp. ~27·8. >inger's plays, we must not take the seeming licenses too seriously, "~ave as an indication of the state of the comic sense in Mas­singer's time."1 Infidelity and adultery, even madness, were at once the most comic and most tragic of themes to the Elizabethan mind. In none of his relations in life was Shirley ever other than a gentleman, and it is evident from his plays that he was upon intimate and fiiendly terms with the best people of his day. There is a marked spirit of delicacy and refinement in all his work that would oppose any gross immorality. As for this treat­ ment of the common moral problems, it is interesting to com­pare him with a poet o.f an earlier generation. It is not so easy to think of the learned and dignified Chapman as immoral. Yet if we examine his plays, we shall find that adultery is a common theme, used even for purely comic purposes. So much is this the case that the results of his several comedies might seem a real in­dictment of the constancy and chastity of all women. Happily this construction is seldom put upon his plays, and any seeming immorality is assigned to the conventions of the age. Shirley never uses adultery as a purely comic theme, and to woman he has not only given a noble purity, but to her virtue and chastity he has given again and again the power of red~ming a man from the sins of illicit passion. Again in the case of Chapman, . it is a questio~ whether he has any other than an artistic end in view when he introduces into his comedies the immoral influences of the court upon the citizen. Shirley "is no disciple of the social heresy that the pleasures of one class have a right to pollute the morals of another."2 In fact, his comedies mark a great advance in refinement and feeling over those of the preceding reign, and bear the stamp of a man who had mingled freely and familiarly with the best classes. As Dr. Wa.rd says, "Not one of our pre­Restoration dramatists, save Shakespere and again good Thomas Heywood, deserves less than Shirley to be singled out for con­demnation as an offender against principles which in his genera­tion and with his lights he sought to honour and uphold."3 'Studies in Jonson's Cornedy, p. 45. The most satisfactory treatment of this matter of the morality of the playwrights will be found in Leslie Stephen's essay on Massinger, Hours in a Libmry, Lond., 1899, II, p. 141. 'Ward, English Dramatic Literature, III, p. 125. 'Ibid. CHAPMAN'S PRAC'l'ICE IN COMEDY The thought of a collaboration between two such men as Shir­ley and Chapman in such a play as The Ball is at once stimulat­ing to inquiry. The disparity in the personality and the practice of the two men would at first thought almost prompt a denial of their professional union upon so slight an authority as a title­page by a London printer. The placid and elegant talent of Shir­ley, first and foremost a dramatist, is sharply at odds with the lofty and ponderous genius of Chapman, to whom the drama ap­pealed largely as a means of popular expression, but whose special gifts found a more congenial activity in the realms of translation and pure poetry. As a mere assertion of this antithesis, however, would hardly seem sufficient for argumentative purposes, a few pages are here devoted to the chief results of a careful study of Chapman's comedies, with the ultimate intention of later apply­ing them results to some settlement of his share in the author­ship of The Ball. As a writer of plays, Chapman is better known by his tragedies than by his comedies. The reason for this is not difficult to dis­cover. He labored faithfully on his serious plays to make them wt)rthily represent his art. The result is that they are more con­sistently excellent than his comedies, in which he took less interest. Not only are his tragedies better as a whole than his comedies, but in such plays as Busy D'Ambios and Byron, Chapman is most essentially himself, for on serious themes he could best display his fine reflective powers and his normally dignified attitude toward life. In so far, then, as Chapman's tragedies represent him most characteristically as an artist and a man, they have rightfully re­ceived more complete critical study than his less serious work in the drama. But while we may accept his tragedies as more rep­resentative of Chapman's dramatic art, there is a general reserva­tion to be made. For when every respect has been paid to the effort that went to the writing of these works, and generous ac­count taken of the "full sail" of the rare passages, it must, never­theless, be admitted that the tragedies are dull reading and as plays unsuccessful. In comparison with such plays as Shirley's Cardinal and Ford's Broken Heart, Chapman's tragedies suffer seriously in i:€chnical excellence, revealing plainly his inability to adapt his style to the subtle and wayward exigencies of dialogue, or to give the action of his plays movement and verisimilitude to life. An acquaintance with Byron makes it easy to accept the common criticism that Chapman's genius is after all epic rather than dramatic, and that his dialogue, while sometimes reaching .a noble beauty of utterance, is not infrequently inspired by nothing more than his scholar's zeal. 'l'he ready recognition of Chapman's characteristic bent in hiA tragedies, and the larger critical emphasis laid upon these plays, has somewhat obscured his gift in comedy. With all due respects to the merits of his tragedies, and with full recognition of their SUp€riority as a whole, the interesting fact remains that Chap­man's best individual work in the drama is to be found among his comedies. The play of All Fools could with full justice be taken as his dramatic masterpiece. With characteristic lack of dramatic criticalness, however, Chapman has called this best example of his playwriting "the least allow'd birth of" his "shaken brain.'" It is evident that he never gave himself seriously to comedy. He considered only two of his comedies worthy of a dedication; and in the dedication to these plays, there is a note of disparagement wholly wanting in the addresses prefixed to his tragedies. He probably wrote most of his comedies as a means of revenue, with­out any high artistic end in view. The want of a serious aim would partially account for the defects as well as the merits of these plays. Structurally his comedies are very unequal. If we were to judge from his practice in comedy, it would hardly seem that he knew when he was writing well and when he was writing ill. In the plays of All Fools and Monsieur D'Olive he reached a high measure of success; but he is very blind and bungling on the slightly different theme of The Gentleman Usher. When working without the steadying hand of a collaborator, he often hurried, and failed to sustain his plots. 'I'his carelessness of form is especially noticeable in the final scenes of his plays, where he has a tendency to get lost or overcome in the complication and to lose the best points of the resolution of his comic entanglement. With this loss in dramatic structure, however, there went a gain. Freed 'Dedication to All Fools. from the trammels of a conscious ideal, Chapman improved in style. Swinburne has noted the "merit of pure and lucid style which distinguishes the best comedies of Chapman from the bulk of his other writings,''1 and accounts for it in that Chapman "felt himself no longer bound to talk big or stalk stiffly, and in conse­quence was not too high-minded to move easily anrl speak grace­fully."2 At least once Chapman rose to a happy combination of style and structure in comedy. In All Fools he has given us an ex­ample of a well developed play, masterly in the handling of an intricate intrigue and inspiriting in the sprightliness and sureness of the dialogue. To this play, it would seem, he had given more than his usual attention, for he has told us that "Lest by others stealth it be imprest Without my passport, patch'd by other's wit,' he had given it to the press himself. But while it cannot be de­nied that in All Fools Chapman has shown a fund of real humor and a competent mastery of comic situation, his usual practice both in tragedy and in comedy proves him to have been deficient in dramatic sense, and to have been neither versatile nor prolific. Scholarly by nature, and coming late to the stage, he was never able to gain the skill, nor develop the Easy grace and sweet human­ity which we find so delightful, for instance, in the less ambitions Shirley. Notwithstanding the inequalities in Chapman's comedies, his dramatic affiliations are fairly clear. He belonged to the classical school as opposed to the comic practice of the more popular ro­mantic playwrights. He did not commit himself definitely to a propaganda, as Jonson did ; but he was close!y related to the lat­ter both professionally and by temperament. He believed with Jonson that the end of art is moral,3 and, as a rule, he main­tained in his comedies the structural principles of Roman comedy. But while Chapman kept on the whole to the comedy of intrigue, and introduced into his plays the stock characters of the Latin 1Poems and Minor Translations, "Introduction," pp. xxv-xxvi. 'Ibid., p. xxvi. •Dedication to Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois. writers, his classic form was by no means pure. Romantic ele­ments crept in, possibly under the influence of the Italian novels and plays that served as the sources of some of his material. Monsieur D'Olive has a strong romantic tinge, and the same is true of certain scenes in The Widow's Tears. In The GenHeman Usher, the romantic plot so completely usurps the interest that it has been taken as a possible experiment of Chapman's in Fletcher­ian comedy.1 We might expect an irregular production from an author whose career extended over so long a period as Chapman's did. But Chapman's difficulties probably arose from other sources. lt is easier to believe that he failed to develop a more settled and perfect manner through the fact that he began late and that his true talents lay in other fields. In this respect it is interesting to compare him with Jonson. The professional careers of the two men run parallel, with apparently the same opportunities. While Chapman was in the field with the classic model, and even with its specialized form of the humors, as early as Jonson, he· never brought his practice to critical perfection, and hence relinquished any possible leadership in the classical school to his sturdy and more able contemporary. Before entering into an examination of Chapman's comedies, I wish to eliminate from the discussion one that would seem to con­tribute little to a fair estimation of his general practice. This is the play of The GeJntleman Usher. It is a new departure for Chapman into tragi-comedy, but so bungling and purposeless that it can hardly be considered more than an experiment. The play is full of dramatic possibilities; but the poet has missed them all, and after starting in light comedy gropes his way into serious drama. In the six remaining comedies, however, certain common characteristics are so well defined as to give a more or less fixed caste to his work. At :first sight, these plays have a very complex character; and the complexity is real in the plots and counter-plots of such plays as All Fools and May Day. But the intricacy of the intrigue excepted, the general plan of construction of the plays is comparatively simple. There are generally two or three charac­ters whose vices or virtues the dramatist wishes to exploit. To carry out this plan, there is :t third character, a "dynamic person­ 'Parrott, ed. All Fools, Belles-Lettres Ser., p. xiv. ality," whose business is to set all of the rest by the ears. The remaining characters merely furnish additional humorous touches, and are incidental to the main action. Another principle of con­struction is a parallelism in the action, often resulting in, or em­phasized by, the contrast in the leading characters. A Humorous Day's Mirth consists of a series of tricks played upon a jealous old husband and a doting old wife. Lemot, the king's minion, car­ries on the action. In All Fools the same form prefails. Two fathers are played one against the other by the disreputable Re­naldo. Monsieur D'Olive, while quite different in tone and treat­ment from the plays just mentioned, has, nevertheless, the same arrangement. The chivalrous Van dome, returning home after some years of absence, finds woe and mourning on all sides. To him the following problem is presented for solution. Marcellina, to whom he is bound in ties of gallantry, has secluded herself on account of the jealousy of her husband, and vowed never to leave her curious retirell).ent. On the other hand, Vandome's sister has died, and her husband, St. Anne, inconsolable in his grief, refuses to consign the body to the grave. The parallelism is very clearly marked here. Marcellina and St. Anne have, so to speak, been deflected from their usual course of life. To restore them to their normal orbit is the object of the action, and Vandome becomes the moving personality. The Widow's Tears, the last of Chapman's comedies, is a striking and daring play, yet unsatisfactory b:v very nature.1 Eudora, a widow, and Cynthia have professed a fidelity to their husbands that shall outlast death. Thersalio breaks the vowed constancy of the former by winning her to a seconrl mar­riage; while his brother, husband to Cynthia, tests the fidelity of the latter in a scene that runs a very narrow way between farce and tragedy. The parallelism iR no less marked here than in the other plays just mentioned. Thersalio is the one who propels the play in this case. Besides simplicity and a common constructive principle, the comedies of Chapman have similar comic themes or motifs. To this may be attached more than ordinary importance when we come to consider his collaboration with another author. Either 'I have omitted May Day, which seems in construction nearer to his early work in The Blind Beggar of Aleaiandria, before he had reached his more settled form. Cf. Fleay, Biographical Ohronicle, I, p. 57. Chapman's stock of comic material was especially limited. or he had a peculiar interest in using again and again the same theme. He nerer tired of recurring to the incontinence of women, and its c-omplementary motif of the jea.lous husband, to whom "suspicion is the deepest wisdom." In The Blind Beggar of Alexandria the unpleasant series of adulteries practiced by the hero would seem to involve a real indictment of women. But this must not be too hastily accepted as Chapman's attitude toward the sex. In A Humorous Day's Mirth the old husband is at once the victim of his too great jealousy and his doting belief in his wife's con­::.tancy. In All Fools the jealous husband theme forms the in­terest of the sub-plot, and it appears as a contributory cause of the complication in Monsieur D'Olive. In the "unchivalrous comedy" of The ·widow's Tears, Chapman's version of the Ephesian )fatron, the constancy of women receives an apparent, if not an intended, attack. The question at once arise~, What was Chap­man's attitude toward the opposite sex? Swinburne in discussing this comedy has suggested that "a speculative commentator might throw out some conjecture to the effect that the poet at fifty-three ma:y have been bent on revenge for a slight offered to some un­seasonable courtship of his own"; and we might inquire whether "this keen onslaught on the pretensions of the whole sex to con­tinence or constancy were or were not instigated by an individual rancour." Apparently Swinburne is not looking for a serious an­swer. To be sure, the passages upon women in most of Chap­man's plays are not complimentary ;1 and his constant return to a theme so offensive to our present moral conceptions would seem to indicate a cynical attitude upon Chapman's part. But on the other hand, we have the fine scene between Vincentio and Margaret in The Gentleman Usher;<& the pretty defense of Gazetta by the page in All Fools ;3 the romantic devotion of St. Anne in Monsieur D'Olire ; while the incontinence of the Puritan in A. Humorous Day's Mirth and Franceschina in .May Da:y is not rn much the sin at question as the jealousy of old Labervele and the unseasonable amour of r~renzo. As to the moral phase of the matter, it has 'See All Fools, Gosta.nzo's ndvice to Cornelio, Act V, Sc. 2. "Nay, Cornelio, I tell you agnin." etc. Parrott edition, Lond., 1914. 'Act IV, Sc. 2. •Act III, Sc. 1. already been considered above. It should be remembered, how­ever, that Chapman is giving a comic view of life, in a comic form that is highly conventional and equally opposed to any idealistic or realistic interpretation. Professor Schelling, commenting upon Chapman, has said that he "never passed much beyond the intrigue of Terence and Plau­tus, the vivacious repartee of Lyly, and the more wayward 'humors' of his friend J onson."1 Of character study in the real sense of a living comic personality he has given us nothing. Monsieur D'Olive, Thersalio, and perhaps Bassiolo, are the only characters that we would remember individually for their humor. In read­ing his comedies, we are constantly referring to the dramatis per.., sonae to keep the characters straight in our minds. 'rhis lack of vital characterization is a criticism commonly lodged against Ben Jonson, but can be more justly urged against his fellow artist, Chapman. It is the loss that comes from presenting character as it is rather than as it is becoming. The Latin method presup­poses this neglect of development in character when it relies upon incident and intrigue for its comic effects. The art of Chapman and Jonson differs in this respect from that of Shakespeare. 2 'l'heir methomlon citizen and court­ier. It is evidenet from his plays that his observation has fallen largely among the middle classees; and it is doubtful from his come­dies whether Chapman really knew in an intimate sense the strictly fashionable and exclusive circles of the London of his times. He is at his best when dealing with the citizen class, as in All Fools, A Humorous Day's Mirth, and May Day. Though high-sounding names and even titles of honor are giYen to the characters in these plays, they are distinctly burgeoi8. Count Labervele in A Humorous Day's Mirth is nothing but a variation of Corneiio in All Fools, and both of them find their prototype in Old Security in the purely realistic comedy of Eastward Hoe. The courtier when introduced is generally some "thirty-pound" knight, more or less disreputable and impecunious. The gulling of the citizen by this clas~, and the demoralizing-influence of the court upon the citizen is a. frequent theme in Chapman's comedies. It must be recognized that the best society in J ames's reign was neither very moral nor very refined; but it cannot fail to be as easily recog­nized that n()where in the comdies most characteristic of Chap­man's hand can we £eel that we are above the substantial mer­chant class. In brie£ summary of his comic practice, we find that Chapman used the Latin form, deriving much of his material from Italian novels and comedies of intrigue.1 This was all in harmony with his intellectual conception of the C()mic spirit and his intimate acquaintance with classical literary art. In point of dramatic construction he is frequently weak. It seemed difficult for him to sustain an action through five acts with any of the interest tbat we are led to expect in the beginning. Monsieur D~Olive is ad­mirably opened as a play, but comes to an end very ajmlessly; and it is not infrequent that Chapman gets lost in the maze of his com­plication, as in A Humorous Day's Mirth. While inventive and re­sourceful in many instances, he is generally limited both in the plan of his plots and in comic situation. His plays are frequently built upon parallel lines of action and contrast, and he seems never to tire of certain stock themes, as the gulling of a jealous husband and the corrupting influence of the court upon citizen life. His limitations are adequately marked in his play of The Gentleman Usher, where he made a bungling attempt at romantic comedy. From his theories of dramatic art and his own intel­lectual and removed point of view, one would expect little in the way·of enduring character drawing. Not only is he restricted in the field of his observation, but his scholarly and thoughtful mood makes anything in the highest sense of comic character impossible for him. His mind, from its natural bent and training, could hardly have been otherwise than "judicial": and comedy, much more than tragedy, requires the detached point of view, a com­prehensive sympathy of insight and delineation. From the foregoing examination of Chapmair's traits l\S a writer of comedy, certain conclusions are clear. He docs not seem to ha,·e had the easy fecundity that is a distinguishing trait of the earlier Elizabethan dramatists. And whether from con­scious purpose or the want of a ready ac'laptability, he wa~ not 'Sche1Jing, Elizabethan Drama, I, p. 459. as 8hirley's Comedie~ of London Life successfal in catching the demands of a rapidly changing public taste. On the other hand, he did not attain to an established type of comedy peculiarly his own, notwithstanding he had col­laborated with Jonson, the one man of the period whom he most re~embled in talents and temperament, and who brought to artistic perfection a form of comedy to which Chapman seemed generally inclined. Such plays as Ea.stward Ho, and possibly The Ball, in which he may have served as joint author, would seem to indicate that he submitted to the guidance of his collaborators, if his share possibly did not consist merely in the suggestion of incident and other plot material. As an independent writer of comedy, Chap­man's gifts were few; although we should not forget, in conclud­ing, such an exceptional play as All Fools, which in point of style, unity of design, bright and witty invention, has been surpassed only by the greatest work of the period. 1'HE PLAY CALLED "THE BALL." On November 18', 1632, the following entry was made in the office-book of Sir Henry Herbert: "In the play of The Ball, written by Sherley, and acted oy the Queens players, ther were divers personated so naturally, both of lords and others of the court, that I took it ill, and would have forbidden the play, but that Biston [Christopher Beeston] promiste many things which I found faulte withall should be left out, and that he would not suf­fer it to be done by the poett any more, who deserves to be punisht; and the first that offends in this kind, of poets or play­ers, shall be sure of publique punishment."1 The play was not printed until 1639, when it appeared in quarto with the following title-page: "The Ball / A / Comedy, / As it was presented by her/ Majesties Servants, at the private / House in Drury Lane. / Written by George Chapman and James Shirly. / London, / Printed by Tho. Cotes, for Andrew Crooke, / and William Cooke, 1639." The notice by Herbert, the title-page, and a slight men­tion of the play in Shirley's Lady of Pleasure, constitute the only facts of contemporary evidence that I have been able to find in reference to The Ball. As the relative merits of the play in re­gard to Shirley's other comedies of London life have been suffici­ently· considered, the present discussion will center about ques­tions arising within the play itself. The establishing of an au­thoritative text is simplified by the fact that there is only one early quarto, and the first well-known reprint2 was not made until 18'33, when it appeared in the complete works of Shirley edited by Gifford and Dyee. While any question of an authentic text is thus eliminated, there remains the corruptly printed quarto, which has baffiied not only the patience, but the ingenuity, of the inde­fatigable Gifford. From the character of the text, the title-page of the original copy, and the external notices of the play, several very interesting questions arise. The corruption of the printed quarto of 1639, and the lack of a dedir.ation, suggest that Shirley did not supervise the printing of the play. Is it possible that Shirley was 'Malone by Boswell, III, pp. 231-232. 'The play is reprinted in The Old English Drama, 1825, Vol. l. For complete list of r Pprinh ~e:> Bibliograph~-. in Ireland at the time? 'l'he title-page raises the question of authorship, and is the only external evidenr.e to support the claim of Chapman to a hand in the comedy. From the notice of the play in the memorandum of Sir Henry Herbert, and the imputa­tion of scandal in The Lady of Pleasure, our interest is aroused in the contemporary bearings of the play, and especially in the nature of the so-called ''ball." Since these problems involve much that is interesting that would not suggest itself except in this. particular connection, and cover, as I see it, the historical interest of the play, I shall consider them in the order given above. It was not Shirley's custom, or perhaps even his tight, to pub­lish his plays immediately after they had been presented on the stage. 'l'he managers were as completely vested with all rights in the plays as they had been in the days of Elizabeth.1 It hap­pened, then, that The Ball, which had been licensed in November, 1632, was not given to the press until 1639. In this year it ap­peared with two other plays, one of which was Chabot, also ascribed to Chapntan and Shirley. Between the years 1637 and 1640, some eleven plays of Shirley had appeared in print ;2 all but three from the same publishers, all without dedications, and many of them very corrupt in text. 'l'he lack of a dedication and any care for the integrity of the text has led Fleay to believe that Shirley was not in England during the years 1637 and 1640, and that these plays were not prepared by him for the press. 8 After examining the plays themselves, and considering the restrictions due to the plague at the time, and the change in the status of the various companies, I am inclined to accept Fleay's theory as at least probable. In the spring of 1636, the plague having broken out with un­usual violence, it was found necessary to prohibit large assemblies of people, and the theaters were consequently closed on May twelfth.' The restriction continued until the twenty-third of Feb­ruary, when "the bill of the plague made the number at forty 'See Collier, English Dramatic Poetry, II, footnote, pp. 83, 91. •The Ea;a;mple, The Garn.ester, The Duke's Mistress, ·chabot, The Ball, The Nightwalker, Love's Cruelty, The Coronation, Arcad-ia, St. Patrick, The Constant Maid. •Biographica;l Chronical, II, pp. 235, 243. 'Malone by Boswell, III, p. 239. foure, upon which decrease the king gave the players their liberty, and they began the 24 February 1636 [1636-7]."1 But this lib­erty lasted only for a few days, for Collier, quoting an entry in the Privy Council Register, tells us that the order of suppression was resumed on the first of March, " 'and playes, dancing on the ropes,' etc., were no longer allowed." 2 From Malone we learn that "the plague increasinge, the players laye still untile the 2 of October, when they had leave to play." 3 'fhe public theaters had thus been closed with the exception of a few days from May, 1636, to Oc­tober, 1637. The King, however, kept the holidays at Hampton Court, and commanded the attendance of his own players.* Sir Henry Herbert gives a list of twelve plays given at Court during Christmas and Shrovetide. It is a significant fact that none of Shirley's plays are given in this list, and the Queen's men are not mentioned as having performed before the sovereign. The play­ers at the Cockpit were idle in London, for there is no account of their having acted in the provinces.~ Shirley had always been popular at Court, and it is highly probable that if he had been in London during this "long silence" of the stage, he and the Queen's men would have a.ppeared at Court. It is certain that Shirley was in Ireland during the year and a half that the theaters were closed, and it would be entirely consistent with the facts as we have them to conclude that he had gone to Ireland shortly after the closing of the thITTlters in the spring of 1636. The Royal Master was entered in the Stationers' Register for publi­cation on March 13, 1638. The dedication was written, at latest, before October, 1637, when the restriction on the theaters was re­moved, and the long suppre~sion of plays, lasting a year and a half, was ended. The dedication is as follows: "It was my happiness, being a stranger in this kingdom, to kiss your lordship's hands, to which your noblenes~, and my own ambi­tion encouraged me; nor was it without justice to your name, to tender the first fruits of my observance to your lordship, whom this island admowledgeth her first native ornament and top branch 'Malone by Boswell, III, p. 239. •English Dramatic Poett-y, II, p. 81. •Malone by Boswell, III, p. 239. • collier, English Dramatic Poetry, II, p. 76. • Murray, English Dramatic Companies, I, p. 267. of honour. Be pleased now, my most honourable lord, since my affairs in England hasten my departure, and prevent my personal 11ttendance, that something of me may be honoured to wait upon you in my absence; this poem; 'tis new, and never yet personated; but expected with the first, when the English stage shall be recov­ered from her long silence, and her now languishing scene changed into a welcome return of wits and men. And when, by the favour of the winds and sea, I salute my country again, I shall report a story of the Irish honour, and hold myself not meanly fortunate to have been written and received," etc.1 From this dedication we learn that 1'he Royal Master is the first of his plays that Shirley thought worthy of offering to a patron in Ireland; we also learn that the theaters are still closed, and that Shirley's affairs are calling him to England before the play has been presented. It cannot be said with certainty just when he went to England, but I can see no reason for disagreeing with Fleay's opinion that it was about the time when the restriction on plays was removed in February of 1637.2 Upon arriving in Eng­land, Shirley found that the plague had abated only temporarily, and, as there seemed no immediate prospect of the theaters being opened, he prepared the plays Hyde Park, The You,ng Admiral. and The Laity of Pleasure for the press.a. I have only one criti­cism to make of Fleay in regard to his conjecture of Shirley's visit to Ireland, aud that is that he is, as usual, a little too dog­matic in his statements. He assumes, to begin with, that Shirley never gave a play to the press without a dedication, and when any fact varies from this assumption, it is entirely rejected. The whole of this matter is involved in obscurity, and the best that we can do is to draw conclusions that do not violate the few facts that we have. Fleay was the first to make a careful examination -of these facts, and his conclusions are in the main correct. When Shirley found that there was to be a long suppression of plays, "'In 1637 Shirley went to Ireland, under the patronage of George Earl of Kildare, to whom he dedicated his Royal Master." Letter fro:n Oc­tavius Gilchrist, in Wilson's History of the M6rchant Tayfor's School pt. II, p. 673. This ~s cited by D.yce as the probab~e date of Shirley'~ going to Ireland. (Shirley, Dramatic Works, I, p. xxx1v.) But what was Gilchrist's authority? •Biographical Chronicle, II, p. 244. 'These plays were entered in the Stationers' Regist6r, IV, p. 355, April 13, 1637, for A. Crooke and W. Cooke. All are dedicated. he left for Ireland. Whether he left The Royal Maste1· in the hands of the publisher, or sent it over later, the fact remains that this play was not entered for publication in England until March 13, 1638. We know from the title-page of the first copy that it had been acted in Ireland before the Lord Deputy in the castle, as well as at the Dublin Theater. It was licensed April 23, 1638, for performance in England, and was probably given by the Queen's men at Salisbury Court.1 Shirley himself has told us in a prologue written for Ogilby's theater that he was at least two years in Ireland : "I'll tell you what a poet says; two year He has liv'd in Dublin"/ but, as we do not know the exact date of this prologue, it contrib­utes little as to the limits of Shirley's visit. Robert Hitchcock, writing on the Irish stage, says that "in 1638, three years after their commencement, they produced a new play, called the Royal Master, written by Shirley, an intmia.te friend of the manager."3 It is possible that Hitchcock had recourse to some authority un­known to later scholarship, but it is more probable that he drew a hasty inference from the date on the printed title-page. Although we know that plays were given at the public theaters, Sir Henry Herbert, unfortunately, has only mentioned Massinger's King and Subject between October 2, 1637, and April 9, 1640.• It is quite certain that Saint Patrick for Ireland, The Constant Maid, The Politician, The Gentleman of Venice, and Rosania were all given in Ireland. The first two plays were not licensed, and were probably not reproduced in England. Th e Politician and The Gentlema'rt of Venice were given by the Queen's men at Salis­bury Court, while the last-named play, Rosania, marks Shirley's return from Ireland, when he began writing for the King's men. His recent return is established in the prologue to The Imposture (which was licensed for the King's men X ovember 10, 1640), where we read that "he has been stranger long to the English tSee Collier, English Dramatic Poetry, III, p. 331; and Fleay, Biograph· ioal Chronicle, II, p. 242. •Dramatic Works, VI, p. 493. •Hitchcock, Hilltorical View of the Irish Stage, I, p. 12. 'See Malone by Boswell, III, p. 240. scene." Tl1ere is continuous evidence in The Royal Master, Rosania (published as The Doiibtful Heir), and The Imposture to credit the theory that Shirley had resided in Ireland in the interrnl between 1636 and lG'lO. The Polituian and The Gentle­man of Venice, which we do not know to have been given in Ire­land, could eMily have been sent over to the Queen's men as Fleay implies ;1 and when we add to these St. Patrick for Ireland and The Constant JV!aid, of the performance of which in England there is no mention) we are only crediting Shirley with an activity which would bear out the fecundity of his previous career. Dur­ing the time that Shirley was away, thirteen of his plays had been published, only two of which bore dedications. While I am not willing to go so far as Fleay and say that Shirley never published a play without a dedication, it is not probable that so large a num­ber would have issued from the press consecutively without dedica" tion, if Shirley had supervised the publication. Besides the corrupt text of sever11l of these plays, which would corroborate this view, there is good reason to believe that during the years 1637, 1638, 1639 the Queen's players had been selling Shirley's plays surrep­titiously to the publishers Cooke and Crooke. When Shirley first aEsociated himself with the Cockpit theater. it was held to be inferior to the Bla.ckfriars. In 1630, T. Carew (in some lines prefixed to Davenant's Jttst Italian, acted at the Blackfriars) puts the Cockpit on a par with the Red Bull. Two lines in F. Lenton's Young Gallant's Whirligig, 1!)29, would indi­cnte that the performances at the Drury Lane house were inferior to those given by the Kings men: "The Cockpit heretofore would serve his wit, But now upon the Friars stage he'll sit." But Shirley gradually eliminah~d this disparity in the two houses, and from 1630 on we find the Queen's men playing often at Court, and even drawing compliments from the sovereign, who seems to have kept in close touch with the stage.2 Shirley w:is called upon to write the masque given by the Inns of 'Biographical Chronicle, II, p. 245. 2Sir Henry Herbert notes in regard to The Gamester: "The King .sayd it was the best play he had seen for seven years;" Malone by Boswell, III, p. 236. The Ball 45 Court in February, 1633, the most sumptuous theatrical perform­a-1cc given during the two Stuart reigns; and by 1635 the Queen's men were scoring success upon success in the plays from the pen of their graceful and prolific poet. In :Niay, 1636, the theaters were closed on account of the plague, and after the final resump­tion of plays in October, 1637, the Queen's men do not seem to have maintained their former prestige. They play less often at Court,1 and are finally supplanted in their old stand in Drury Lane by a company of boys under the leadership of Beeston. Just what caused this loss of reputation it is hard to tell, but it may be ascribed to the hardships of the long period of closed houses and the loss of their popular poet, who had probably retired to lreland. 'l'he King's men had been tided over by attendance at Court2 and by the fact that they still held the services of Mas­singer. Malone gives an undated entry to the effect that "Mr. Beeston was commimded to ma.ke a company of boyes, and began to play at the Cockpitt with them the same day" ;3 and directly fo'.low­ing this the entry: "I disposed of Perkins, Sumner, Sherlock and Turner, to Salisbury Court, and joynd them with the best of that company." These boys are mentioned by Sir Henry Herbert as giving the plays Cupides Revenge, February 7, and Wit Without fMoney, Feb111ary 14, 1636 [1636-71-4 Collier has identified them with the company which, in the MS. office-book in the depart­ment of the Lord Chamberlain, is called on the tenth of May, 1637, "the New Company."~ The exact date for the transfer of the Queen's men to Salisbury Court is fixed by two plays, The Bride and The Antipodes.. 'rhe former, a comedy by Thomas Nabbes, was according to the title-page acted in the year 1638 at the Cockpit by "their Majestic Servants." The Antipodes, by Brome, was acted in 1638 by the Queen's men at Salisbury Court. It was evidently between these two plays that the transfer men­tioned by Herbert, when he joined Turner and the other Queen's· men with the best of the company in Fleet Street, took place. Collier has quoted the following note at the end of the The Anti-· 1 See Murray, English Dramatic Companies, I, pp. 177, 269. 2/bid., p. 168. •Malone by Boswell, III, p. 240. 'Ibid., p. 239. •English Dramatic Poetry, II, p. 78. podes: "Courteous Reader, you shall find in this book more than was presented upon the stage, and left out of the presentation for superfluous length (as some of the players pretended): I thought good it should be inserted according to the allowed original, and as it was at first intended for the Cockpit stage, in the right of my most deserving friend, Mr. William Beeston,1 unto whom .it properly appertained; and so I leave it to thy perusal, a$ it wll's generally applauded and well acted at Salisbury Court."2 When the Queen's Company gave up the Cockpit theater, the plays that had previously been given at that play-house evidently passed into the hands of William Beeston; for in August; 1639, the Lord Chamberlain issued an order establishing Beeston in his claims to the end that "any other company of actors, in or about London, shall not presume to act any of them to the prejudice of him."3 In ihe list of plays given in this document there are many of Shirley's; and it is quite clear that in this break-up of the Queen's Company many of the plays belonging to the Cockpit had passed into the hands of the publishers. But surreptitious copies of plays had long before this found their way to the press. Collier notes that "the MS. in the office of the Lord Chamberlain under date of the 10th of June, 1637, contains an instrument, for which we have hitherto seen no precedent-against the printing of plays, to the prejudice of the companies to whom they belonged, and by whom they had been bought from the authors. During the suspension of the stage in consequence of the number of deaths, in order to gratify the theatrical avidity of the public, certain printers, who had surreptitiously got manuscript plays into their hands, began to print and publish them."4 It is not an unwarranted inference that during the plague the Queen's men had been selling the plays belonging to the Cockpit theater; and when the company was reorganized with the best of the Salisbury Court men, it is highly probable that a number of pla,s again found their way into the hands of the publishers.~ In this con­ 'William Beeston succeeded his brother Christopher (father according to Fleay, London Stage, p. 348.) 'English Dramatic Poetry, III, p. 332. 'Ibid., .II, p. 92. 'Ibid., II, p. 82. •See Fleay, Biographical Ohronicle, II, p. 243; also Murray, Engli8h Dramatic Oompa111ies, I, p. 169n. Printers were getting hold of plays dis­ nection it becomes significant that of the thirteen plays of Shirley printed between October, 1637, and April, 1640, only two were dedicated by him. Of these two plays, The Royal Master had been prepared by Shirley for the press, and was entered in the Station­ers' Begi.~ter before it was licensed for the stage. It was prob­ably left in the publishers' hands when Shirley paid his flying visit to England in 1637. Of the other exception, The Maid's Revenge, we are not certain as to the circumstances.1 Many of the plays printed without dedications are corrupt in text; and two appeared under peculiar circumstances. Love's Cruelty was en­tered twice in the Stationers' Regi.'!ter, once on April 25, 1639, for Master Crooke and William Cooke,2 and later for John Wil­liams and Francis Egglesfield.8 The Oor8nation was published as by John Fletcher, but was later claimed by Shirley.4 In view of the facts as stated above, the matter would seem to have been as follows. During the long suppression of the theaters (from May, 1636, to October, 1637), plays belonging to various theaters were being surreptitiously printed. To such an extent had this been going on that the Lord Chamberlain issued an un­usual order to protect the various managers. After the resump­tion of plays in October, 1637, the Queen's men seem to have lost in prestige, and were finally in 1638 reorganized with the com­pany at Salisbury Court. A little later we :find William Beeston protected by an order from the Lord Chamberlain in his rights to the plays which had fallen to him when he became the manager of the company known as "Beeston's Boys," and which would SP.em to indicate tha.t there had been dispute as to the ownership of these plays due to the transfer of the Queen's Company to the house in Fleet Street. During this period and the following year, we have every reason to believe that Shirley was not in England; and our- honestly; that they should have procured them through the actors is the most plausible theory. Fleay,. perhaps, goes too far in stating that the actors sold plays that they had picked up at special court perform­ ances, and in otherwise amplifying his theory. But in the main points of his theory he is right. 1Fleay thinks that this play "being entered for W. Cooke only, had probably been in the publisher's hands since 1634, before A. Crooke joined him in these publications.'' Biographical Ohroniicle, II, p. 243. •EJtatione-rs' Register by Arber, IV, p. 438. •Ibid., p. 465. Nov. 29, 1639. 'In a list of plays appended to The Cardinal, printed 1652. ing this time a number of his plays had appeared without dedica­tions and corrupt in text. It is further interesting to note that these plays, were, with one exception/ published by W. Cooke and A. Crooke, who do not appear as publishers to any other leading dramatist of the time. Of the plays above mentioned, one was later sold to another publisher, and one wrongly ascribed to Fletcher. With such facts before us, it would not seem a hasty <.>onclusion to infer that duri~g Shirley's absence in Ireland his plays had been appearing, without his supervision, from play­home texts furnished by some of the actors; and we have good grounds for doubting the integrity of the title-pages of these plays where they are not supported by other contemporary evidence. Flcay is of the opinion that when Shirley returned to England and found what the Queen's men had been doing with his plays, he offered his services to the King's men. It seems to me more . probable that the loss of prestige by the Queen's Company, and the death of Massinger, leaving Shirley by far the most consider­able playwright of his time, would account more naturally for his acces~on to the more important post at thll Blackfriars. Among the eleven plays of Shirley that issued from the press without the author's sanction or supervision, during the years 1636 to 1640, were two bearing upon their title-pages the name of Chapman as well as that of Shirley. They were a comedy, The Ball, and a tragedy called Chabot, Admiral of France. The former is entered for license November 18, 1632, by Sir Henry Herbert as by Shirley ;2' and the la.tter, April 2H, 1635.3 The entry of these plays for publication reads as follows: "24. Octobris 1638. Master Crooke and William Cooke. Entred for their Copie vnder the hands of Master Wykes and Master Rothwell warden a Booke called Phillip Chalbott Admirall of Ffrance and the Ball. by James Shirley"4 Here again there is no mention of Chapman as joint author. The title-pages of these two plays are the only external evidence of the collaboration of Shirley and Chapman; 1The Arcadia, published by J. Willia.ms and F. Egglesfeild. Stationers' Register, IV, p. 465. 'Malone by Boswell, III, p. 231 (November 16, on p. 232). •/bid., p. 232. Malone in this case has merely given the date of li­ censing in a list of Shirley's plays registered by Sir Henry Herbert. 'Stationers' Register by Arber, IV, p. 415. evidence that may be gravely suspected when we consider the cir­cumstances under which The Ball and Chabot were printed. Everything would seem to be against this "incongruous union" of Shirley and Chapman. In 1632, Chapman was seventy-three years old, and had not been seen upon the stage in twenty years; while Shirley wati one of the leading dramatists of the younger genera­tion, in the first flush of his genius and popularity. When the Chabot was licensed in 1635, Chapman had been dead over a year. The subject of authorship in both of these plays must be deter­mined by internal evidence. The subject matter and style of Chabot could suggest no other author than Chapman; and as the question of Chapman's part in this play has been adequately treated in another place,1 it will be unnecessary to enter into it here. Criticism is unanimous in ascribing the play to Chapman. Mr. Lehman, in the monograph above referred to, says that "after a careful comparative study of Chapman's and Shirley's styles and methods I have reached the conclusion that the play was orig­inally written by Chapman and subsequently revised by Shirley. There is scarcely a page upon which the peculiarities of the former's style are not discernible. The principal of these peculi­arities are: involved sentences, tortuous thought, and the tendency to philosophize. On the other hand the evidence of revision is to be found in many places. The angular grammatical constructions are not so numerous as in the other plays of Chapman, the thought is somewhat clarified, and there is a greater degree of dramatic unity than is common in Chapman's plays." If the changes named in the last sentence be ascribed to revision, it must have taken more than a hasty revision to accomplish the feat.2 To smooth out angular grammatical constructions and to clarify the thought to any degree, would necessitate a laborious overhauling of the original play. But the revision of the play does not estab­lish a personal relation, and, as Chabot was licensed nearly a year after Chapman's death, we must look elsewhere for substan­tial facts. The Ball would seem to support the claim of collabora• tion in Chabot. But in this case the sole external proof rests in the title-page. Against this stands the entry in Sir Henry Her­ 1Lehman, Pub. Univ. of Penn. Philology and Literature, X, pp. 24·28. 'Ibid., p. 26. See alS-O Fleay in Anglia, VIII, p. 408. bert's office-book, which ascribes it to Shirley with no mention of joint authorship; and in his play, The Lady of Pleasure, Shirley makes a definite claim to this play as his own.1 The disparity in the age, character, and position of the two men would seem to offer radical opposition to any thought of collaboration. At the time of the licensing of The Ball, Chapman was a man of seventy­three years, who had outlived most of the men of his own genera­tion, a playwright who had not been seen in comedy in twenty years, the venerable outpost of the Elizabethan age, who had come in his last days to comparative neglect and obscurity. Scholarly and thoughtful in mood, he followed the classical tradition in his plays; and while a lofty dignity pervades his serious work and a pleasant ingenuity his comedy, he is seriously restricted both in the quantity and the q1iality of his work. In direct antithesis to all this stands the young and popular poet of the reign of Charles; Shirley, a man of the world, but gentlemanly by very instinct; well-read, but not scholarly; graceful and elegant in utterance; prolific and versatile, turn.ing with equal ease from tragedy to rnmedy, the pastoral, and the masque. While greatness of thought and a certain lofty morality char­acterizes the serious playf! of Chapman, there is an evident rude­ness about many of his characters, a lack of fine polish which was not absent from the best society of Elizabeth's and James's reigng. This, of course, is especially noticeable in his comedy. When we turn to Shirley's comedies of London life, we are at once sensible of a change; we are among a class of people very different from those of whom Chapman wrote. If they are no sounder morally, they are better mannered ; there is a marked refinement and ele­~nce about them. Thfa is all the historian Hallam found remark­able in Shirley's plays. "The Ball, and also some more among the comedies of Shirley, are so far remarkable and worthy of being read. that they bear witness to a more polished elegance of man­ners, and a more free intercourse in the higher class, than we find in the comedies of the preceding reign. A queen from France, and that queen Henrietta Maria, was better fitted to give this tone than Anne of Denmark."2 The people whom we meet in 'Drama.tic Works, IV, p. 9. 'Literary History of Europe, III, p. 331. The Ball, Tke Lady of Pleasure, and Hyde Park, are not the peo­ple among whom Chapman spent his active life. With the suc­cession of Charles to the throne and the coming of the French queen, there is perceptible among the better classes a distinct tendency to greater refinement of feeling and manner. The sov­ereign, po11sessed of an the finer instincts of a gentleman, became the patron of poetry, painting, and music; while the Queen, fresh from the tutelage of Madame de Rambouillet, initiated that move­ment in England which had for its immediate aim the refinement of social intercourse. The Court was purged of much of the gross immorality that had stained the lives of many whom James had drawn about his person; and it is certain that any such moral debauchery as waa openly acted in the intrigue of Somerset and Lady Frances Howard would have been impossible under Charles. That there was much that was frivolous and silly in the pastimes of the better classes must be admitted; and the precieuse move­ment, which the Queen introduced with good intent, soon showed its vain and dangerous side. But, as Mrs. Lucy Hutchinson ob­serves, "the nobility and courtiers who did not quite abandon their debaucheries, yet so reverenced the king as to retire into corners to practice them." But the point here is that it is not reasonable to believe that Chapm1m could have entered into the spirit of such a play as The Ball. Not only is its structure contrary to all of his practice, but the problem and people with which it deals are without the hounds of his immediate observation and sympathy. Jonson and Chap­man, linked together by the same tastes and training, seem, curi­ously enough, to have cast their observation among the lower and middle classes. The comedies of the former all have the coarse and homely quality of the people of whom they treat; and while this quality is not so apparent in the work of Chapman, it is Emffi­eiently predominant to warrant the assertion that he ha.d not even associated or entered into sympathy with the fashionable society of the London of his day. I do not wish to detract from the worth of Jonson or Chapman. Both men were true poets and eminently dignified and moral; but there is a laek in both of these men of the broader sympathy and finer elegance of worldly cul­ture; both want the unbending grace of spirit that would tolerate a trivial subject in anything but a ~atiricaJ light. In The Ball, Shirley's Comedies of London Life a contemporary social pastime is taken up and vindicated in its moral character in a light and conventional vein of comedy. The people with whom it deals are from among the courty circle, and of sufficient rank to warrant the censor in staying the play on ac­count of direct reference to them. In this play, dealing nat­urally and intimately with court society, full of local "hits" on the monopolies, theaters, and so forth, is it at all probable that Chapman, old and neglected, could have contributed anything of value? As we have seen, Chapman never produced a real co1i1edy of London life. Not one of his comedies has London for its scene. 'l'o be sure, his knowledge of human nature is founded upon the life he saw about him; but he has cast it all in a con­ventional form, the comic interest of which does not rest in char­acter and local allusion, but wholly in trickery and incident. No one can read his comedies without being impressed with their similarity in spirit and structure. Restricted as he was to the Latin comedy of intrigue during all of his active career, it does not seem probable that he would have seriously joined Shirley in the play of The Ball, so different in spirit and form from any­thing that he had done before. On the other hand, the play is. just the thing that Shirley had been doing in Hyde Park, and went on to do infinitely better in The Lady of Pleasure. A consideration of the play itself remains the last resort in the search for evidence to support the collaboration of the two men as given on the title-page. Gifford, the first editor to comment on this play, says of this joint product of Chapman and Shirley that "the largest portion of it seems to be from the pen of the former."1 As Gifford died be­fore the edition of 1833 was published, we are without any ex­plimation or reasons for this curious judgment. Dyce, who. took up the work where Gifford had left it, says in hii'! introduction to the published work "that The Ball was almost entirely the compo­sition of Shirley."2 Baker says, "Chapman assisted Shirley in this comedy" ;3 but he is probably relying merely on the title-page. Swinburne in his eRsay on Chapman's Poetical and Drromatic Works says in regard to The Ball and Cha.bot: "These two plays 'Shirley, Dramatic Works, III, p. 3. •[bid., I, p. xix. 'Bivgrapkica Dramatica, II, p. 46. we1 e issued by the same printer in the same year for the same pub­lishers, both bearing the names of Chapman and Shirley linked to­gether in the bonds of a most incongruous union: but I know not if there be any further ground for belief in this singular associa­tion. The mere difference in age would make the rumour of a collaboration between the eldest of the old English dramatists and the latest disciple of their school so improbable as to demand the corroboration of some trustworthier authority than a bookseller's title-page bearing date five years after the death of Chapman."1 Dr. Ward believes that "Chapman is a priori unlikely to have taken any share in the composition of comic scenes at so late a ·date as 1632, and it cannot be supposed that those in question were written at an earlier date. If, as the title-page of the quarto as­serted, he gave assistance at all to Shirley in this play, it must have been of the slightest description."2• Fleay accepts the theory 0f joint authorship, and is quite ready to replace the parts objected to by Sir Henry Herbert with passages of Chapman's writing, which he thinks are "easily traceable in IV. 3 and V. 1, where T...ionel, Stephen, and Loveall replace Travers, Lamount, and Rain­bow. Jn the Chapman part a comedy called Ba.rtheme (read Bartleme) is mentioned as acted at the Bear Garden. Of course this is Bartholomew Fair, acted at the Hope, the rebuilt Paris Garden, in 1614."3 As the passages to which Fleay refers do not bear any marks of composition peculiar to Chapman, it is hardly necessary to go so far in explaining the replacing of the names Travers, Lamount, and Rainbow by Lionel, Stephen, and Loveall. Gifford in despair over the text writes: "If it were not a mere loss of time to strive to account for the errors of a piece so 'cursedly printed,' we might conjecture that Chapman and Shir­ley had not compared their list of characters."4 The matter is not so difficult to understand. We have good reaeon to belieYe that the text was surreptitiom,ly obtained by the publishers, and printe