SOURCE: Burner, Sandra A. “The Gray's Inn Circle and the Professional Dramatists.” In James Shirley: A Study of Literary Coteries and Patronage in Seventeenth-Century England, pp. 41-84. Lanham, Md: University Press of America, 1988.

In the following excerpt, Burner discusses the relationship between theater and audience in the development of new plays, noting that Shirley was among a select coterie of playwrights writing for private theaters and upper-class audiences.

The interrelationships among the people who comprised the Gray's Inn circle are apparent through the verses written for members who published within the group—poetry, drama, essays. Within this larger circle are the friends who also made up part of another group, the Catholic Court coterie. One of the contributors to Shirley's published plays who bridges the two circles was Robert Stapleton, who arrived in London some time after 1625 when he left the Benedictine monastery at Douay, renounced his religion...