The Royall Master by James Shirley: A Digital Scholarly Edition

This edition was completed by the students of EN6138: Digital Scholarly Editing at the National University of Ireland Galway in May 2022, under the supervision of Dr Lindsay Ann Reid and Dr Justin Tonra.

Editors: Órla Carr, Aron Daly Jones, Isabel Dwyer, Leilani Garcia, Megan Johnson, Liam Maguire, Enejda Nasaj, Clodagh O'Donnell, Sheridan Peña, Barbara Petrovcic, Julia Pinka, Sonja Reinke, Yashika Gulshan Sharma.

Introduction to The Royall Master

About the Author

Born in London in September 1596, James Shirley was a seventeenth-century English playwright and poet. Regarded as one of the most significant writers in the era preceding the Civil War, he has to his name more than 30 works and is sometimes described as the successor to Shakespeare. Shirley wrote in various genres, producing stage comedies and tragedies, masques, and poetry. Notable for his unique use of blank verse, he captivated the royal court with his “understated elegance” (Ravelhofer 2017).

In 1618, James Shirley married his first wife, Elizabeth Gilmet. Gilmet was the daughter of Richard Gilmet, the Mayor of St. Albans at the time to whom Shirley posted a surety of £100 (Shirley Family Association 2022). They had six children together: Marie, Grace, Mathias, Thomas, John, and Mary. After Elizabeth’s death, Shirley remarried Frances Blackburne; however, he did not have any more children. Prior to his first marriage, Shirley attended Merchant Taylor’s School from 1608 to 1612 before spending time at St. John’s College, Oxford. In 1615, he enrolled in St. Catherine’s Hall at the University of Cambridge, receiving both a BA and MA. After graduating, Shirley undertook ministerial work under the headmaster at Edward VI’s Grammar School at St. Albans in 1623. However, his conversion to Catholicism in 1625 led him to be removed from this position. At this time, Shirley moved back to London and began his journey towards becoming the great playwright and poet of the English Renaissance that we remember him as today.

In 1625, Shirley’s first play, The Schoole of Complement, was performed at the Phoenix, a theatre in Drury Lane. A year later, Shirley’s tragedy The Maid’s Revenge established him as a remarkably diverse playwright for the company. The succession of Charles I to the throne heightened the profile of his work, as he was closely associated with the newly established Queen Henrietta’s Men. However, in May of 1636, theatres across London were closed to help stop the spread of the impending plague. As will be discussed below, these closures certainly played a role in Shirley’s decision to move to Ireland. Shirley moved to Dublin in November of 1636 and spent four years writing for the Irish stage under the patronage of the lord deputy of Ireland, Sir Thomas Wentworth. In Dublin, John Ogilby had established the first English theatre outside London and the first public theatre in Ireland, the Werburgh Street Theatre, for which Shirley served as pioneering playwright.

Context for The Royall Master

Shirley’s Blank Verse

Shirley’s use of blank verse is unusual. Typically, blank verse follows the pattern of weak, strong | weak, strong | weak, strong | weak, strong | weak, strong. However, Shirley’s blank verse in The Royall Master, despite being described as unrhymed iambic pentameter, has much irregularity. George Saintsbury remarked a “special degeneration” of blank verse evident in Shirley’s use of this metre: although it may appear at a glance as verse form, often lines are “not verse at all; nor yet prose, but an awkward hybrid”, causing ambiguity (Saintsbury 1919).

Other critics, such as Hanson T. Parlin, have commented on the playfulness of Shirley’s blank verse; he refuses to believe this could be regarded as verse due to the varying feet and light endings, which he deems as “nothing more than prose” (Parlin 1914). Regardless, this technique gained popularity with Shirley’s contemporaries and helped define the playwright’s unique style.

Shirley in Dublin

The tragicomedy of The Royall Master, performed on New Year’s Day in 1637, was Shirley’s first production in Dublin. This play was dedicated to the Earl of Kildare (George Fitzgerald) and is known to have been written for performance in the Werburgh Street Theatre. Other plays written for this context include The Doubtful Heir, The Constant Maid, St. Patrick of Ireland. The Werburgh Street Theatre was described by John Aubrey as “a pretty little theatre” situated beside Christchurch Cathedral in Dublin and was said to be modelled after London’s Blackfriars or the Cockpit (Lublin 2017). The Royall Master was performed by English actors such as Edward Armiger and William Perry, Thomas Jordan from Salisbury Court, and William Cooke who had become unemployed due to the plague back in Britain (Lublin 2017).

The Royall Master demonstrates Shirley’s gift for writing dynamic plots, strong female roles, and dramatic humour with a twist of romance. He wrote what he thought would please and entertain Irish audiences by combining politics with comic relief. There was great optimism upon the arrival of Shirley to Ireland, as he was considered one of the finest playwrights of his time and his works had been performed for the court of Charles and Henrietta Maria. Shirley’s skills were praised by Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels (the Caroline court’s entertainment supervisor). Herbert commended the playwright’s righteous and respectable work, “being free from oaths, profaness, or obsceanes, [it] may serve for a patterne to other poetts, not only for the bettring of maners and language but for the improvement of the quality, which hath received some brushings of late” (Poetry Foundation).

Criticism

Not all critics held Shirley in the same reverence as Herbert. Although a leading playwright of his generation, his work is sometimes critiqued as being neither particularly experimental nor innovative. Rather, it has been dismissed as “cleverly risqué but fundamentally conservative” (Poetry Foundation). Despite the royal praise he received from the court of Charles I, his work does not appear to have been well received in Ireland, and at times he has been regarded as simply an imitator of the greats, lacking originality. When the Werburgh Street Theatre was unable to fill its theatre seats sufficiently, Shirley attacked the Irish audiences for their lack of taste, stating:

So sickly are the Palats now a-dayes,

Of men that come to see and taste our Playes,

That when a Poet hath, to please some few,

Spent his most precious sweat, Minerva’s dew,

And after many throwes, a piece brought forth,

Ligitimate in Art, in nature, birth.

(qtd. in Lublin 2017)

As already acknowledged, however, not all critics disliked Shirley’s work. To quote the poet and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne, “The Royall Master is a fair example of Shirley’s ingenious and fertile talent; there is a somewhat faded and conventional grace in the style of it which seems not unsuitable to a rather slight and artificial but neither ill-conceived nor ill-conducted plot” (Swinburne 1890).

Shirley after Dublin

In 1640, Shirley returned to London, becoming the dramatist for the King’s Men at the Blackfriars theatre. At the end of the Civil War, he began teaching again from 1642 to 1651. James Shirley and his second wife, Frances, died on 29th October 1666 due to exposure and fright following the Great Fire of London.

Theatre in Ireland

Theatre in Ireland has come a long way since Shirley’s time and is now thoroughly intertwined with national identity and politics. Academics like Lionel Pilkington have described Ireland as “possessing a core of being that is inherently theatrical” (Pilkington 2010). Modern critics tend to recognise the establishment of the Abbey Theatre in 1904 as the true birth of Irish theatre. Lady Gregory, Synge, and Martyne established the theatre as a warning to colonial powers; by initiating a new form of theatre intrinsically linked with an independent Irishness, national feelings could be reinforced, and colonial frameworks could be challenged (Kitishat 2012). To fully understand the importance and development of Irish theatre, however, drama around (and before) Shirley’s time must be considered. Though Irish theatre in the twentieth century came from a place of division, it could be argued that the Anglo-Irish roots of theatre in the seventeenth century, to an extent, valued unity among the many pockets of Irish society. Though there was certainly a level of religious unrest in the early 1600s, which would eventually lead to the 1641 rebellion (mere years after the first production of The Royall Master), this period was said to be mostly peaceful in the grand scheme of Irish history. According to historians like Mark Empey, both native people and settlers were said to regularly interact with one another through forms of culture (Empey 2013). Records of dramatic literature from Celtic times are said to be sparse (Gwynn 1939); therefore, the study of theatre at Shirley’s time – despite his own lack of Irishness – is highly valuable in analysing the evolution of theatre in Ireland.

What Brought Shirley to Ireland?

There is some uncertainty surrounding the exact motivations behind Shirley’s move to Dublin. However, a couple of the existing assumptions are more plausible than others. Literary patronage was an extremely important aspect of creative life for playwrights like Shirley and it is likely that his primary patron, Sir Thomas Wentworth, played a significant role in Shirley’s moving to Dublin. At the time, Wentworth was tasked with “civilising” Dublin and establishing a fashionable culture there for the elite. He felt that introducing a theatre-going culture, similar to that of London, would enlighten the masses – to do so, however, he would need a playwright. Some critics and historians have argued that Shirley made for the perfect candidate due to the themes of instilling civility which existed in his work: The Politician  and The Gentleman of Venice, for example, both dealt with themes of social etiquette. Moreover, it is possible that Shirley welcomed the opportunity to move his work to Ireland because of censorship in the London theatre scene at the time – censorship was less strict in Ireland at the time. Beyond censorship, it has been hypothesised that Shirley may have been interested in Dublin audiences as an untapped market that did not expect grand special effects like the audiences in London were beginning to value. It is completely possible, however, that Shirley’s move was simply dictated by the impact of the London plague on the city’s theatre scene (Williams 2010).

The Importance of Studying Shirley and The Royall Master

When considering the continued importance of The Royall Master today, there are a number of factors that cause this play to stand out in Ireland’s dramatic history. Firstly, one might take into account the unique publication history of the play, which appeared simultaneously in both London and Dublin in 1638 with distinct title pages tailored for each market. Justine Isabella Williams argues that the printing location and subsequent distribution of the first edition of The Royall Master in the 1640s marked the beginning of a new era of “intra-national branches of book-selling” (Williams 2010). Secondly, there is the issue of a prediction made in one of the prefatory verses to The Royall Master, which proclaimed that Shirley would take over from Ben Jonson as poet laureate. The post, however, instead went to Sir William Davenant, leaving Shirley publicly humiliated (Hadfield 2018). Beyond that, criticism of Shirley as a supporter of the aristocracy may be considered. It has been suggested that Shirley may have been an apologist for the aristocracy; however, critics like Andrew Hadfield argue that this may not have been as accurate as the wider Irish public believed. Hadfield implies that Shirley may have concealed commentary on aristocratic and elite figures in his nuanced depictions of such characters in his work. Furthermore, Williams points to Shirley’s desire to appeal to all members of Irish society; she points out that, by dedicating a play to the Earl of Kildare, Shirley was acknowledging and appealing to the Old English community in Ireland. Therefore, he saw value in spreading his work beyond audiences filled with the New English elite. By looking at Shirley in this light, his role in the history of theatre in Ireland takes on a new tone.

Prefatory Poems

At the beginning of the 1638 printed edition of The Royall Master, there is a collection of laudatory poems congratulating Shirley on the play’s success. These commendatory verses are unusual to see in a printed quarto play of the period, and the editors of this 2022 edition felt, therefore, that they were worth retaining in our digital edition.

Documentary and Critical Approach

The editorial team behind this edition has adopted a mixed documentary and critical approach. In scholarly editions, the documentary approach “aims to reproduce a manuscript or printed text as a historical artefact” (Williams and Abbott 1999). It maintains the text as it was published in the past, therefore allowing for a more limited level of editorial intervention. This edition, however, has incorporated a number of critical features, namely the inclusion of annotations and the amendment of old-fashioned letter use. The below sections on editorial policy and process provide further detail on the intentions behind this combined documentary and critical approach.

Annotations

For textual purposes, the annotations that featured in the 1833 version of The Royall Master found in The Dramatic Works and Poems of James Shirley have been included in this edition. Clarity and ease of navigation were taken into account in the presentation of the annotations. All annotations have been colour coded to indicate the category of each note allowing the user to easily identify and understand each notation:

Blue = Annotations 1833

Orange = Etymological

Green = Contextual

Yellow = Textual

Grey = Intertextual

Encoding

As part of the encoding process, several decisions were made that affected the textual details of the 1638 edition. Firstly, line and page numbers have been added and the running head has been altered to include the act and scene of the respective page. This will aid the reader in situating themselves within the play. All catchwords that were included in the 1638 edition have also been kept as they were, and they have all been aligned to the right. Furthermore, obvious spelling mistakes in titles, headings, and names have been corrected. Initially, there was hesitation towards this, as spellings are often a by-product of their time and therefore important in the effort to be true to the historical upkeep and representation of the play. However, it was agreed that spelling mistakes such as ‘fisrt’ instead of ‘first’ in the heading of ‘THE FIRST ACT’ do not hold historical value and simply represent printing mistakes. Therefore, correcting spelling mistakes in the previously mentioned categories will not undermine the original text but simply improve reading flow.

All punctuation changes were conservative, and the edition indicates where they have been made. For example, on page 39 where the King originally said, “He will.”, his speech was clearly being interrupted by the next speaker, Domitilla. Therefore, we changed “He will.” to “He will-”. Instances of ſ (long or medial s) have been changed to a modern s. The letter v has been substituted with the letter u where necessary, and ï has been substituted with i. Occasionally, vv has been changed to w. In this 2022 edition, ligatures that appear in the 1638 edition are not preserved. Finally, in accordance with the 1638 edition, names and place names have been italicised within the text, while the prefatory poems have been maintained entirely italicised.

Moreover, stage directions as found in the 1833 version have been included. Oftentimes, the 1638 version includes people and details in the speeches that are not found to have entered or exited the stage; the additional stage directions clear any confusion, making it easier to follow the story and visualise the stage. These stage directions will be presented according to their function:

Centre = Entrance, Setting

Right = Exit, Business, Delivery

Inline/Left = Other

Presentation and Publication

Since physical copies of the 1638 play, The Royall Master are quite rare today, with the English Short Title Catalogue listing only 35 copies, each page of this digital edition is accompanied by an image of the original volume as printed by T. Cotes and sold by John Crooke, and Richard Serger at the Grayhound in Pauls Church-yard in 1638.

To ensure the clarity and ease of access of this digital edition, a table of contents has been included, allowing the user to easily navigate specific acts, scenes, and pages throughout the play.

Bibliography