Wilson, Edwin. “Shirley and Shakespeare.” The Wall Street Journal (13 July 1987): 20.

In the following review, Wilson admires the Swan Theatre production of Hyde Park for its intimate character and for its resurrection of a lost comedy of manners.

James Shirley, a 17th-century British dramatist whom no one except English professors ever heard of, would continue to be unknown, and certainly unproduced, were it not for the policy of the Swan Theater, the new venture of the Royal Shakespeare Company here in Stratford. The theater, one of the most attractive to open in recent memory, is dedicated to presenting not only rarely produced Shakespearean plays, but plays in “Shakespeare's context,” that is, works by his contemporaries as well as those who came before and after him.

The theater itself is an accident of English weather, of which this June, the rainiest on record, was an excellent example. Spectators at the...