James Shirley Critical Essay | Critical Essay by E. M. Yearling

Critical Essay by E. M. Yearling

SOURCE: Yearling, E. M. Introduction to The Cardinal, by James Shirley, pp. 1-42. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986.

In the following excerpt, Yearling emphasizes Shirley's simple style in The Cardinal, but cautions against reading the play as a stripped-down revenge tragedy. Though Yearling discounts a strong connection to Archbishop Laud in the character of the Cardinal, she asserts that the key themes of the play are political.

The sources suggested bear out R. S. Forsythe's description of Shirley as unoriginal in his materials but original in his organisation of those materials (p. 149). No play appears to be the single source of The Cardinal's action. Plot-devices come from the obscurest and from the greatest of Shirley's predecessors. He was a literary playwright whose plays bulge with memories of other men's words and of his own, with incidents and characters drawn, like the masque properties of III.ii, from stock.¹ Yet it...
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