SOURCE: Spinrad, Phoebe S. “James Shirley: Decadent or Realist?” English Language Notes 25, no. 4 (June 1988): 24-32.

In the following essay, Spinrad argues that Shirley was not merely an imitator of well-established Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic conventions.

The scholar attempting to do a critical examination of James Shirley's tragedies will find the preliminary research both frustrating and unusually easy. Almost nothing has been written. Biographic and bibliographic speculation abounds, to be sure, and attention has been paid to the comedies,¹ but the tragedies are usually relegated to final chapters in book-length surveys of Renaissance drama—chapters whose titles or introductions generally include the word “decline” or “decadence.” Indeed, most critics seem content to view Shirley as a derivative slave to the plots and stage conventions of Shakespeare, Fletcher, Tourneur, and Massinger—and a poor one at that.

What I would like to suggest is that Shirley's use of convention in...