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Henry Shirley's ‘The Martyred Soldier’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Extract
There is such a paucity of information about Henry Shirley and his one extant play that one hesitates to add anything to the present state of our knowledge lest one be accused of abusing Bullen's confession that ‘Henry Shirley's claim to attention is not a very pressing one’. Bullen's apologia for presenting Henry Shirley's work in that ‘yet there is a certain dignity of language in this old play’ must be my excuse, too, for this attempt to redeem something of the play from ‘utter oblivion’ and my more specific warrant hales from the last words of Bullen's introduction—‘the songs, too, are smoothly written’.
The songs do in fact constitute the major part of the play's quite extensive use of thematic music connected with the supernatural ascent and descent of angels to comfort and exhort the much beleaguered Christians.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1959
References
1 Cf. Bentley, G. E., The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1941-56)Google Scholar, v, 1056-10(54; Bullen, A. H., ed., A Collection of Old English Plays, 4 vols. (London, 1882-85)Google Scholar, 1, 165-256; Fleay, F. G., ‘Annals of the Careers of James and Henry Shirley’, Anglia, 1885, VIII, 405–414 Google Scholar; Clark, A. M., Thomas Heywood, Playwright and Miscellanist (Oxford, 1931), pp. 295–300 Google Scholar.
2 Op. cit., 1,167. s Preface.
4 Op. cit., 1,247; v,i. 5 Bullen pointed out, op. tit., p. 172, that the initials ‘I.K.’ at the end of the Preface on the copy he was editing had been expanded to ‘John Kirke’ on some copies. Cf. tide page: ‘As it was sundry times Acted with a | generall applause at the Private | house in Drury lane, and at | other publicke Theaters.’
6 Cf. John P. Cutts, ‘A Bodleian Song-Book, Don.c.57’, Music & Letters, XXXIV (July 1953), 192-212; item 29 (45).