more unjust than that of the ribald ‘Session of the Poets’ (see Poems on State Affairs, ed. 1697, p. 208), implying that after the Restoration Shirley engaged in futile attempts to equal the performances of younger men; while nothing is known as to the truth or falsehood of the assertion in the same ‘poem,’ that he ‘owned’ a play printed under the name of Edward Howard (fl. 1669) [q. v.]
Shirley was one of the most prominent of the group of literary survivors of the Commonwealth period whom Masson (Life of Milton, 1880, vi. 293) aptly calls the ‘sexagenarians,’ and his reputation probably gained rather than suffered from his consciousness of the fact. The circumstance mentioned by Langbaine that he left behind him several plays in manuscript does not necessarily indicate that they were of late composition. But though he showed wisdom in confining his publications at all events to the sphere of his daily labours, it proved unfortunate for his more immediate reputation that he remained in such close association with the bookmaking Ogilby. According to Wood, Shirley drudged for him in his translations of both ‘Iliad’ (1660) and ‘Odyssey,’ as well as of parts of Virgil (enlarged in 1657 and 1658 from the original edition of 1649), and wrote annotations for his use. No acknowledgment of this assistance, if it were given, was made by Ogilby, although, in return for Shirley's commendatory lines in his ‘Æsop,’ he wrote some on Shirley's ‘Via ad Latinam Linguam.’
To Wood again is owing all the information extant as to Shirley's end. During the great fire of London in September 1666 he and his wife were driven from their habitation near Fleet Street (i.e. Whitefriars) into the parish of St. Giles, then actually in the fields, where less than two months afterwards they died on the same day, ‘being in a manner overcome with affrightments, disconsolations, and other miseries occasion'd by that fire and their losses.’ They were buried in St. Giles's churchyard on 29 Oct. From Shirley's will at Doctors' Commons it appears that he left behind him three sons and a married daughter; another daughter, ‘Lawrinda,’ married to Edward Fountain, predeceased him (Hunter, Chorus Vatum, u.s.). One of his sons, according to Wood, was afterwards butler at Furnival's Inn. The miscellaneous writer, John Shirley, who flourished during the last two decades of the seventeenth century, may be another son [see under Shirley, John, (1648–1679)].
Shirley's portrait in the Bodleian Library, which is engraved as the frontispiece of Dyce's edition of his ‘Works,’ represents him as of dark complexion and a rather full habit of body.
After Shirley's death several more of his plays were revived on the London stage. Pepys saw five of these, and Langbaine, who speaks of Shirley in 1691 as ‘one of such Incomparable parts that he was the Chief of the Second-rate Poets,’ mentions having seen four of his plays in his own ‘remembrance.’ In Edward Phillips's ‘Theatrum Poetarum’ (1675), Shirley is mentioned with respect, and said to be accounted ‘little inferior to Fletcher himself.’ But in 1682 Dryden, in his ‘Mac Flecknoe,’ not only loosely coupled Shirley with Heywood as ‘prophets of tautology,’ but recklessly associated their names with that of a dramatist of an altogether inferior type, as well as with that of Ogilby:
Much Heywood, Shirley, Ogilby there lay,
But loads of Shadwell almost chok'd the way.
Oldham, in the ‘Satire’ where he introduces Spenser as dissuading from the practice of poetry, which must have been written soon after the publication of ‘Mac Flecknoe,’ less contemptuously speaks of Shirley's works as ‘moulding’ with Sylvester's in Duck Lane shops. A third satirist of the period, Robert Gould [q. v.], who is stated to have stolen from Shirley the plot of a play to which D'Urfey wrote prologue and epilogue, ingeniously combined his recognition of these debts by saluting Shirley as
The scandal of the ancient stage,
Shirley, the very D'Urfey of his age.
Pope, happily, seems to have forgotten Shirley, perhaps intentionally, for the sake of their common creed. Although some of his plays were from time to time adapted by later hands, the revival of his reputation as a dramatist was probably due, in the first instance, to Richard Farmer [q. v.], and after him to Charles Lamb, who in his ‘Specimens’ speaks of Shirley as ‘the last of a great race, all of whom spoke nearly the same language, and had a set of moral feelings and actions in common.’ The editorial labours of Gifford and Dyce definitively restored him to the place thus indicated in the history of our dramatic literature.
The fertility of Shirley as a dramatist and the deference paid by him to his great predecessors have obscured his claims to recognition as a dramatic poet of rare original power. Chance, however, is partly responsible for the preservation of his plays in a number relatively so large; and it is to his honour that, besides being fond of reminiscences of Shakespeare (see Ward, English Dramatic Literature, ii. 311 n.), he should
