biography of James shirley
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James Shirley (or Sherley) (September 1596 – October 1666) was an English dramatist.He belonged to the great period of English dramatic literature, but, in Charles Lamb's words, he "claims a place among the worthies of this period, not so much for any transcendent genius in himself, as that he was the last of a great race, all of whom spoke nearly the same language and had a set of moral feelings and notions in common." His career of play writing extended from 1625 to the suppression of stage plays by Parliament in 1642.
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✒✒James Shirley was born in London, probably on September 3, 1596, and baptized on September 7 in St. Mary Woolchurch. On October 4, 1608, he entered the Merchant Taylors’ School, which offered the standard classical curriculum, and studied there until 1612. His activities in the next three years are uncertain, though he may have gone to St. John’s College, Oxford, while also being apprenticed to a scrivener, Thomas Frith, in London. He was matriculatedat St. Catherine’s College, Cambridge, in 1615, received the bachelor of arts degree in 1617, and was ordained. Between 1617 and 1625, he worked for his master of arts at Cambridge; married Elizabeth Gilmet; accepted a curacy in Lincolnshire; published his first work, a narrative poem, Eccho: Or, The Infortunate Lover(1618), which is believed to be the same poem as Narcissus: Or, The Self-Lover; had two daughters and a son; vacated his living to become headmaster of a St. Albans grammar school; and may have converted to Catholicism.
✒✒In 1624, Shirley went to London to become a playwright, and his play The School of Compliment was “The first fruits of a muse that before this/ Never saluted audience. . . .” A satiric comedy with a pastoral element that recalls Shakespeare’s As You Like It (pr. c. 1599-1600), it was revived in the Restoration to Samuel Pepys’sdelight. During the next decade, Shirley averaged two plays per year, mainly produced for the Phoenix, and became a favorite of Queen Henrietta Maria. When the theaters were closed in 1636 because of the plague, Shirley went to Dublin, where he stayed until 1640, writing plays for John Ogilby’s company at the Warburgh Street Theatre. This sojourn in Ireland may have cost him the post of poet laureate, which fell vacant on Jonson’s death in 1637 and was awarded the next year to SirWilliam Davenant. Shirley returned to London in April, 1640, to succeed Philip Massinger as chief dramatist for the King’s Men at Blackfriars, but when the Puritans closed the theaters in September, 1642, only three of his plays for the company had been produced; a fourth, The Court Secret, was not performed until the Restoration.
✒✒Shirley’s career as a playwright ended with the Puritan rebellion, at the start of which he reportedly fled London with his patron William Cavendish, later duke of Newcastle, “to join him in the wars.” He came back to the city about 1645 and returned to teaching, mainly in the Whitefriars section of London, where he lived. Over the next twenty years he published poetry, masques, a collection of plays, and grammar texts. During the Great Fire of London in October, 1666, Shirley and his second wife, Frances, fled to St. Giles in the Fields, Middlesex, where they died on the same day, October 29 ,1666
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