In 1646, when the London theatres were closed, James Shirley published a collection titled Poems &c. Shirley’s et cetera included “Prologues and Epilogues Written to severall Playes Presented in this Kingdom, and else-where.” While the paratexts in this volume are for plays that had already been performed, Shirley’s Poems offers the first or only known publication for some prologues, for instance, for Shirley’s The Doubtful Heir (first published in 1652; also included in Six New Plays, 1653). This chapter explores how the dramatic epitexts in Shirley’s Poems make meaning without the full text of their play. Shirley reveals himself to be Ben Jonson’s heir and a poet-playwright in the classical tradition. These paratexts no longer frame plays; rather, they act as a threshold that opens into Shirley’s dramatic oeuvre and makes it the centerpiece of, to use Richard Helgerson’s term, Shirley’s “self-crowned laureateship.”

Unlike some ofthe poetic forms discussed in subsequent chapters, which have a discernible ‘vogue’ and then fall out of fashion, the 'moralizing lyric'was consistently popular throughout the whole of the period covered by this book, and several are among the most widely circulated poems of early modernity. Key examples, composed between the 1530s and the early eighteenth century, from Wyatt to Watts (and indeed well beyond that, far beyond the scope of this book), recognizably belong together. But this most ostensibly English of forms has its roots in the translation and imitation of classical poetry, and emerged in the sixteenth century in both Latin and English, with influence moving in both directions. As a starting point for this book, it demonstrates what can be learnt by a serious attention to literary bilingualism: repeatedly, it is the Latin versions , including translations of the best-known English examples into Latin, which point to the classical texts (especially Horace, Seneca and Boethius) that underpin these poems, and the (broadly) Latin lyric context to which they were understood to belong by contemporary readers.

Alison Searle examines the formal procedures connected to compassion in James Shirley’s The Sisters (licensed 26 April 1642). She focuses on the problems posed by outsiders: the compassion of bandits dwelling as an anti-society in the woodlands, the recurring trope of the vagrant/beggar/gypsy/actor used to interrogate histrionic techniques deployed to evoke compassion and the complexities of policing the performance of compassion within the early modern Protestant state. Shirley’s play elucidates the ways in which compassion could create new, dangerous communities, as well as exposing the limits of existing groups. By postulating the ruler as a potential object of compassion, the play proleptically examines one of the most pressing political questions of the English Civil War: can the monarch be an object of compassion? The play’s invitation to feel pity for the plight of the king creates a political space for subversive action. If one can empathise with the king, is he a potential peer?