11 - Dublin Tragicomedy and London Stages

Summary

Every Writer must gouerne his Penne according to the Capacitie of the Stage he writes too, both in the Actor and the Auditor.

I wish you had kept better form. I like form as much as matter.

JAMES SHIRLEY'S narrative poem, Narcissus, or the Self-Lover, was accompanied on its publication in 1646 by a selection of ‘PROLOGVES AND EPILOGVES; Written to severall Playes Presented in this Kingdom, and elsewhere’. These include a series of prologues written in Dublin between late 1636 and spring 1640: ‘A Prologue to Mr. Fletcher's Play in IRELAND’; ‘A Prologue to the ALCHIMIST Acted there’; ‘A Prologue there to the Irish Gent.’; ‘A Prologue to a Play there; Call'd, No wit to a Womans’; ‘A Prologue to another of Master Fletcher's Playes there’; ‘A Prologue to a play there; Call'd, THE TOY’; ‘To another Play there’; ‘To a Play there, called the Generall’; ‘To his own Comedy there, called Rosania, or Loves Victory’. The playhouse for which Shirley wrote these prologues was built around 1635 on Werburgh Street, Dublin, by John Ogilby, a member of the household of Sir Thomas Wentworth, Lord Deputy in Ireland from July 1633 to March 1640. As Alan J. Fletcher suggests, Wentworth saw theatre as an important part of his ‘general program for Dublin's social upgrading’. The playhouse was located in a fashionable area of the city, and the building of an indoor playhouse rather than an outdoor amphitheatre also hints at the relatively sophisticated tone that Wentworth and Ogilby hoped to establish.