SOURCE: Robins, Nicholas. “Thou Flattering World, Farewell!” Times Literary Supplement no. 4880 (11 October 1996): 20-1.

In the essay below, Robins provides an overview of Shirley's life and literary career.

There is something piteous and theatrical in the deaths of James and Frances Shirley as they were recorded by the Oxford biographer and irascible don, Anthony à Wood:

At length, after Mr Shirley had lived in various conditions, and had seen much of the world, he with his second wife Frances were driven by the dismal conflagration that happened in London an. 1666, from their habitation near to Fleet Street, into the Parish of St Giles-in-the-Fields in Middlesex, where being in a manner overcome with affrightments, disconsolations, and other miseries occasion'd by that fire and their losses, they both died within the compass of a natural day: whereupon their bodies were buried in one grave in the yard belonging to the said church...