A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of Warwick Permanent WRAP URL: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/ 97559 Copyright and reuse: This thesis is made available online and is protected by original copyright. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item for information to help you to cite it. Our policy information is available from the repository home page. For more information, please contact the WRAP Team at: [email protected] warwick.ac.uk/lib-publications James Shirley and the Restoration Stage By Stefania Crowther A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Renaissance Studies University of Warwick, Centre for Renaissance Studies June 2017 2 3 Acknowledgements This thesis was supported by the James Shirley Complete Works Project, and funded by the AHRC, and Centre for Renaissance Studies, University of Warwick. I would like to thank these organisations, and in particular Jayne Browne, Ingrid de Smett, David Lines, Jayne Brown, Heather Pilbin, Paul Botley, and especially Elizabeth Clarke and Paul Prescott for their very helpful guidance during the upgrade process. Special thanks are due to Hannah Davis, whose URSS project on Restoration Shirley, supervised by Teresa Grant, provided the starting point for this thesis. I am also enormously grateful to the colleagues, friends and tutors who have inspired and supported my work: Daniel Ashman, Thomasin Bailey, Stephen Clucas, Michael Dobson, Peter Foreshaw, Douglas Hawes, Simon Jackson, Victoria Jones, Griff Jameson, Peter Kirwan, Chris Main, Gerry McAlpine, Zois Pigadas, Catherine Smith, Lee White, Susan Wiseman. My most particular and humble thanks are due to Lois and Simon Reynolds, for their unwavering belief in my ability to do this, and for tirelessly proof read every page. Any mistakes that remain are mine alone. I am grateful to Steven Purcell and Lucy Munro for their extremely helpful and encouraging feedback, and for a giving me the opportunity to defend my thesis in a very supportive and enjoyable viva voce. I would like to the thank the staff at the I have visited to consult resources, the British Library; UCL Library; Senate House Library, University of London; Harvard Library; Library of Congress, Washington DC; the Brotherton Library, Leeds; the Bodleian and Worcester College Libraries, Oxford. ‘Congratulations’, ‘How far along are you?’ ‘ ‘When is the big day?’ ‘Are You Nervous?’ These were questions I regularly heard as my submission deadline approached. Seldom were these questions about my thesis, however, but the two pregnancies I enjoyed along the way. I am incredibly lucky to have had such an understanding supervisor, Teresa Grant, who willingly held 4 supervision meetings across a table from a sleeping baby, generously passed on baby clothes and accessories, and offered the support that made it possible to combine academia and new motherhood. I equally could not have completed this without the support of my wonderful parents, Rosanna and Alan Crowther, who have cared for me and my children while I concentrated on this. Finally, I thank Ryan, for his endless patience, and for asking me ‘why?’ twenty times a day for a year, until I started to ask myself the same question, and I started to ask it of my research. And Orson, for teaching me that above all, we like to play. This thesis would not exist without them and the man who cares for them and me and brightens my world, Joshua Gilvary. 5 For my uncle Mark, who set me off down this road. I will always be grateful. 6 7 Contents Acknowledgements 3 Table of Contents 7 List of Illustrations and tables 8 List of Abbreviations 8 Abstract 9 Section I: Chapter 1: Was James Shirley a Part of Restoration Theatre? 11 Section II: Stage to Page Chapter 2: Restoration Editions of Shirley’s Plays 47 Chapter 3: Case Study The Grateful Servant 80 Chapter 4: Case Study The Constant Maid 124 Section III: Metatext and Intertext Chapter 5: The Court Secret in manuscript and print 161 Chapter 6: Before the fourth Wall: Performers and Prologues 199 Section IV: Page to Stage Chapter 7: Restoration Promptbooks 209 Chapter 8: ‘My Soule is Full of Shame and Tears’: Love’s Cruelty and The Sisters 247 Chapter 9: Malone 253 The Ball and The Witty Fair One 290 Section V Chapter 10: Gresham’s Law 314 Bibliography 338 8 List of Illustrations and tables Figure 1: Performances of Shirley’s Plays 1659 – 1675 29 Figure 2: Library of Congress promptbook of The Grateful Servant 122 Figure 3: Cover pages of The City Night Cap and Love Will Find Out the Way, 1661 127 Figure 4: The Witty Fair One: Scene plot 295 Figure 5: The Ball: Scene plot 296 Figure 6: The Witty Fair One: Backshutter / relieve change diagram 301 Figure 7: The Ball: Backshutter / relieve change diagram 302 Figure 8: From Bodleian Malone 253 [9] The Ball 303 List of Abbreviations BDA Biographical Dictionary of Actors ESTC English Short Title Catalogue ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Note on the Text While old spellings have been reserved in quotations, the letters i/j and u/v have been silently amended. 9 Abstract James Shirley is a distinctly Caroline playwright: his first play was performed in the year of Charles I’s coronation, 1625, and his last the year of the outbreak of civil war in 1642. Yet his importance extends beyond the era in which he worked as a professional playwright. As one among a handful of dramatists whose work was staged regularly by the new playing companies after the theatres reopened in 1660, he is an important figure in the development of new modes of theatre. Despite having had more of his plays produced on the Restoration stage than Shakespeare did, scholarship on his significance to Restoration drama has been remarkably scant. This thesis investigates the significance of Shirley in the Carolean period, tracing the adaptations of Shirley throughout the reign of Charles II. It uses Shirley as a case study to investigate transitions in theatrical practice before 1642 and after 1660, paying attention also to the continuities. This thesis asks why Shirley’s plays were considered suitable by the managers of the Restoration theatre companies who staged them: the King’s Company under Sir Thomas Killigrew, the Duke’s Company under Sir William Davenant, George Jolly’s ‘Nursery’ group, performing at Hatton Garden, and the Red Bull Players, an illegal, pre- Restoration group. It also explores the ways in which Shirley’s plays were adapted in response to the changed social and political climate after 1660, including textual amendments made and the addition of new prologues. It concludes by asking why Shirley’s reputation declined so sharply in the long eighteenth century while Shakespeare’s came to pre-eminence, by comparing the Restoration treatment of his plays with those of Shakespeare. 10 11 Section I: Chapter 1: Was James Shirley a Part of Restoration Theatre? JAMES SHIRLEY the most noted drammatick Poet of his time … When the rebellion broke out, and he thereupon forced to leave London, ... After the King’s cause declined he retired obscurely to London, where, among other of his noted friends, he found Tho. Stanley Esq. who exhibited to him for the present. Afterwards following his old trade of teaching School, which was mostly in the White Fryers, he not only gained a comfortable subsistence (for the acting of plays was then silenced) but educated many ingenious youths, who afterwards proved most eminent in divers faculties. After his Majesties return to his Kingdoms, several of his plays which he before had made, were acted with good applause, but what office or employ he had confer'd upon him after all his sufferings, I cannot now justly tell.1 He afterwards returned to London, where he resumed his old profession as a [schoolteacher] to this he adhered for the remainder of his life … even after the Restoration.2 [U]pon the decline of the King’s cause Shirley crept back quietly to England, … to eke out a livelihood he had to take up the old distasteful 1 Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxonienses: An Exact History of All the Writers and Bishops who Have Had Their Education in the University of Oxford, 4 vols (London: F. C. & J. Rivington, 1813), vol. 3, p. 737. First published 1691-2. 2 Adolphus William Ward, A History of English Dramatic Literature to the Death of Queen Anne, (London: MacMillan & Co, 1875), pp. 310-11. 12 business of a schoolmaster… At the Restoration Shirley’s plays were once more set upon the stage, but they were found to be old-fashioned.3 AFTER eighteen brilliant years as dramatist to court and public, Shirley, at the age of forty-six, entered upon the closing period of his career --a quarter century of anticlimax: cavalier, schoolmaster, literary drudge.4 Following Anthony Wood’s account, biographers of Shirley have made a habit of assuming that Shirley’s life after the closure of the theatres in 1642 was one of obscurity, with no connection to the theatrical community of which he had once been an intrinsic part. Arthur Huntington Nason, in particular, implies that after the civil war Shirley led a life of quiet retirement, as a schoolteacher, without a continued relationship with the theatre. He describes the period from 1642-1666 as Shirley’s ‘post-dramatic period’.5 Alexander Dyce claims ‘there is every reason to believe that he pursued this honourable employment [teaching], in easy though not affluent circumstances, till the termination of his life.6 Forsythe dismisses the suggestion made by Charles Kingsley that Shirley was active as ‘a court poet of Charles II’.7 G.