THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Triumph of Peace, a particularly lavish masque written for the Inns of Court in 1634, shows him as an adept flatterer
of the ‘great king and queen, whose smile | Doth scatter blessings through this isle, | To make it best | And wonder of
the rest’. By contrast, Shirley’s most notable tragedies, The Traitor (1631, printed 1635) and The Cardinal (1641,
printed 1652), both show courts troubled by dissent, lust, pride, and ambition. The murky Florence of The Traitor is
ruled by a debauched Duke who is finally disposed of by his ambitious and scheming kinsman, Lorenzo. The Navarre
of The Cardinal is more blessed in its ruler. It is, however, a kingdom destabilized by untrustworthy and self seeking
counsellors, notably the unscrupulous Cardinal of the title (in whom some commentators have seen elements of both
Richelieu and Archbishop Laud). If, as is possible, Shirley was reflecting on the example of Shakespeare’s Henry
VIII, he would probably also have acknowledged a parallel between the ultimate authority of his King of Navarre
[p. 185]
and the English King who frees himself from the oppressive influence of yet another proud and political Cardinal,
Wolsey. ‘How much are kings abused by those they take to royal grace’, Navarre muses, before adding a final
emphatic maxim: ‘None have more need of perspectives than kings.’
The Cardinal is a royalist play which may, in part, be seen as a late, flickering contribution to the larger
Renaissance humanist discourse on the principles of good government. It is also, in its somewhat stodgy way, the last
of the revenge plays, if one largely shorn of Jacobean extravagance and Jacobean verve. When the theatres were shut
by an Order of Parliament in 1642, Shirley was obliged to return to school-teaching and to the printing of his now
unperformable playscripts. As an avowed royalist he was also later impeached and fined. Although he provided a
relatively modest and tactful masque, entitled Cupid and Death, for Cromwell’s official reception of the Portuguese
ambassador in 1653, Shirley’s career effectively belonged in the past. The writing of plays in the 1640s had become
an intensely fraught political activity. If some contemporaries viewed the closure of the public theatres in 1642 as a
temporary measure and as an expedient sop to Puritan opinion, it must have been obvious that the English state had
declared itself antipathetic to the stage, when, five years later, a further parliamentary ordinance against acting was
enforced. The traditions of acting and production evolved in the Shakespearian theatre had come to an abrupt end.
Until London theatres reopened in 1660, plays were to be literature read, but not literature performed. By 1660,
however, though old play-texts remained constant, plays in performance were subject to new theatrical fashions, new
styles of acting, and new canons of taste which demanded often drastic revisions, additions, and excisions.
The English Renaissance, which had begun as an opening up to new European learning and to new European
styles, ended as a restrictive puritanical assertion of national independence from European norms of government and
aesthetics. The English Reformation, which had begun as an assertion of English nationhood under a monarch who
saw himself as head, protector, and arbiter of a national Church, ended as a challenge to the idea of monarchy itself.
In England the principles on which the Renaissance and the Reformation were based, and by means of which both
developed, were, as its literature serves to demonstrate, inextricably intertwined.
[end of Chapter 3]
[Andrew SANDERS: The Short Oxford History of English Literature, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1994]
[p. 186]
4
Revolution and Restoration: Literature 1620-1690
ON the feast of the Epiphany (6 January) 1620, the year in which the Pilgrim Fathers set sail for America, Ben
Jonson’s masque News from the New World Discovered in the Moon was presented at court before King James I. The
masque formed the climax to the celebration of the twelve days of Christmas and it offered to the King a fantastically
contrived vision of his own greatness. Moon creatures, formed in the image of man, and ‘animated, lightned, and
heightened’ by a rapt contemplation of royal virtues, descended from a frosty stage heaven, shook off their icicles,
sang of the King’s perfection, and danced to represent the harmony of his rule. Chief amongst the dancers was the
King’s heir, Charles, Prince of Wales. The contrast between the extravagant courtly theatre of the masque and the
determined refugees from James’s religious policies who were to establish Plymouth Plantation could not be more
extreme. Those extremes characterize both the politics and the literature of the seventeenth century. The masque
celebrated an ideal monarch whose merits could be studied, like the Bible, as ‘the booke of all perfection’; the narrow