HAUT MONDE
HYDE PARK JAMES SHIRLEY Edited by Eugene Giddens 200pp. Manchester University Press. Paperback, £20.
T he playwright James Shirley (1596–1666) has always had mixed reviews. Samuel Pepys was unimpressed by Shirley’s comedy Hyde Park, for example, when he saw it 1668: “horses [were] brought upon the stage”, but the play was “very moderate”. Lois Potter had little reason to challenge such a view when, for the TLS, she reviewed a revival (by the Royal Shakespeare Company) in 1987: “it remains an example rather than a critique of triviality”. Alexander Dyce, belatedly huffing over Pepys in the early nineteenth century, thought Hyde Park “very lively and elegant”.
In his new edition of this play Eugene Giddens acknowledges the criticisms. Shirley’s tripartite plot follows three women and their male partners, who range from the comic cad to the faithful husband. As Giddens admits, the three narrative strands cross, but do not affect one another. Yet he defends the play as “a more sophisticated take on courtship than most of Shakespeare’s comedies”. (This would be in keeping with what has been called the best of Shirley’s comedies, The Lady of Pleasure.) Hyde Park boasts characters who are “alive with idiosyncratic speech, witty comebacks and the latest slang”; a “tickle” is deployed here, predating the first citation given in the OED. There are, meanwhile, “(comparatively) few jokes about sexual organs”.
As the title makes plain, Hyde Park may interest some readers, if not audiences, for its “place realism”. (This was one of Caroline London’s most conspicuous theatrical trends – other examples include Covent Garden by Thomas Nabbes and Holland’s Leaguer by Shackerley Marmion.) Licensed for performance in 1632, Hyde Park distinguishes itself by its focus on one of London’s more exclusive locales: a former royal hunting ground, the park was not, at the time, open to the general public. When the action gets to Hyde Park itself, in the third act, Shirley goes to town, unleashing park keepers to be tipped, a jockey preparing for his next race, the gambling gentry – and birdsong with amorous associations (“to married men / Cuckoo [cuckold] is no delightful note”). If there is “place realism” at work here, it is certainly the realism of the hautmonde variety.
Hyde Park was published in 1637; Giddens says it is “by coincidence” that this was also the year of the park’s opening to the public. His introduction gives a detailed textual account of the play, contextualizing it in a run of three Shirleys (the others being The Lady of Pleasure and The Young Admiral) printed that year by the same publishing partnership. It seems likely that the Hyde Park was printed from “polished authorial papers”, and its text is “exceptionally clean for a work of printed drama”. Giddens adopts, nonetheless, helpful st
