James Shirley (1596-1666) wrote The Politician, a Tragedy in 1639 when he was the principal dramatist at the Werburgh Street Theatre in Dublin; it was published in 1655 by the London bookseller Humphrey Moseley. Shirley declared in the Epistle Dedicatory that this would be the last of his plays “which is like to salute the public view”.
The Politician was printed at the same time as The Gentleman of Venice, and two years earlier Moseley had issued a collection of six other hitherto unpublished plays by Shirley. Shirley (1596-1666) is arguably the most significant dramatic writer of the late English Renaissance, but the last scholarly collections of his plays appeared in the nineteenth century and this Oxford edition is the first to provide a complete works. Shirley was a quintessentially Caroline writer whose work echoes and builds upon the art of his Elizabethan and Jacobean predecessors. Caroline drama would be unthinkable without Shirley, who enjoyed a great reputation as a playwright both at court and in the theatres. This comprehensive scholarly edition provides well-annotated modernized texts of the full range of Shirley's remarkable output, not just of his favourite plays. Each work is introduced by an essay examining dating and background, sources, context and performance, and by one which discusses the textual situation and production of the early editions.
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