This section contains 6,195 words (approx. 21 pages at 300 words per page) |
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Dictionary of Literary Biography on James Shirley
James Shirley dominated the last generation of English Renaissance drama with an industrious fluency unapproached by any other playwright during the reign of Charles I. Others, notably John Ford, wrote plays of greater power and more enduring interest; Shirley's taste was too sure to attempt anything as memorable or extreme as 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. His instinct for experiment and innovation was slight, and the general ethos of his plays is the official gentility of the Caroline court: cleverly risqué but fundamentally conservative in its sophisticated decorum. But by the same token, none of Shirley's thirty-odd plays fall below a high level of artful competence. The capable heir to greater predecessors, he absorbed their lessons into a skillful conventionality that showed how natural a certain kind of theatrical deftness had become for the English stage.
He was probably the "James the sonne of James Sharlie" who...
This section contains 6,195 words (approx. 21 pages at 300 words per page) |
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