Named after the poet and playwright James Shirley (1596-1666), once a member of St. Catharine’s College, the Shirley Society is Cambridge’s oldest literary society and has a long tradition of attracting a variety of prestigious speakers on poetry, prose, drama, journalism and film; from C S Lewis and Hugh Trevor-Roper to Jeremy Paxman and Sam Mendes.
James Shirley was born in London and educated at Merchant Taylor’s School, St. John’s College, Oxford, and Katharine Hall, Cambridge (now St. Catharine’s College). After joining the Anglican clergy he served in St. Alban’s and taught at the town’s grammar school from 1623 until 1625, when he lost his position after converting to Catholicism. Returning to London he began his career as a dramatist with The School of Complaint (later Love Tricks; 1625). This was the first of thirty-six plays he wrote, many for the Cockpit Theatre, until 1640, when he succeeded Phillip Massinger as principal dramatist for the King’s Men.
Shirley’s plays were largely comedies and tragic-comedies in the style of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, and dramatized patriotic debates such as The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses for the Armour of Achilles (1658), but Shirley also composed masques such as The Triumph of Peace, commissioned by the Inns of Court in 1634, and poetry. As a Royalist and Catholic, Shirley was fortunate in finding employment as a school teacher during Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth, but his luck did not long outlast it; he died of exposure during the Great Fire of London. His most famous poem, Dirge (“The Glories of Our Blood and State”, below) comes from The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses for the Armour of Achilles. Other examples of his verse survive in Poems (1646), which contains Narcissus, a revision of what is probably his first composition, of 1618, then entitled Echo.
Dirge
From ‘The The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses for the Armour of Achilles’
The glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things;
There is no armour against fate;
Death lays his icy hand on kings.
Sceptre and crown
Must tumble down
And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crooked scythe and spade.
Some men with swords may reap the field
And plant fresh laurels where they kill,
But their strong nerves at last must yield;
They tame but one another still.
Early or late
They stoop to fate,
And must give up their murmuring breath,
When they, pale captives, creep to death.
The garlands wither on your brow,
Then boast no more your mighty deeds;
Upon death’s purple altar now
See where the victor-victim bleeds.
Your heads must come
To the cold tomb;
Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in their dust.