The Lady of Pleasure

by James Shirley

One of Shirley's most well-known works, The Lady of Pleasure is an enjoyable and worthwhile read that will prove itself worthy of the time invested.

Genres: Plays

208 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1980

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Shirley's The Lady of Pleasure (1635) is a comic achievement equal to Shirley's tragic achievement in The Cardinal. The play looks forward to many of the pleasures of the Restoration comedy (sexual intrigue, a close scrutiny of manners, an abundance of fops and fools) while preserving the moral seriousness and depth of Renaissance drama.

I must admit I have never been a lover of Restoration drama. Its poetry is either non-existent (comedy) or inferior (tragedy)--oh those ponderous heroic couplets!--and, worse, its moral range is far too narrow. God—if he does indeed exist—is respected as the author of an excellent book of etiquette rather than as the author of our being, and the greatest evil one can experience—depending on whether it be tragedy or comedy—is either to lose one's public honor or to be proved a fool.

The Renaissance dramatist was not nearly so secular, and—as T.S. Eliot wrote of Webster—he “saw the skull beneath the skin.” He concerns himself not only with death, but with what comes after, and the greatest evil he can imagine for his characters—the evil that Nashe's Cutwulf perpetrates on his tormentor and that Shakespeare's Hamlet desires for Claudius—is to die in the depths of mortal sin and be damned.

Aretina—the protagonist of The Lady of Pleasure, appropriately named after the celebrated Renaissance pornographer--is a headstrong country lady enamored of the city, eager to experience its fashions and flirtations. When she loses control, squandering both her husband's fortune and her favors, she puts herself in danger of foolishly losing both her public honor and her soul. Then a conversation she has with her casual “lover” reveals to her, as if in a mirror, the creature she has become, and it is this glimpse into the darkness of her own soul that leads her to redemption.

The reader not only gets to experience Aretina's movement from shallowness to depth, a progression worthy of a Jacobean tragi-comedy, but he also gets the smarmy jokes and smart social criticism of a worldly Restoration drama—all of this expressed in an easy, flowing blank verse that is a pleasure in itself.

[Natalie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I slogged through this play because it contains a good comic audition monologue, but YIKES. I love classical theatre, but if all Carolinian plays were like this, I can almost see why Cromwell outlawed theatres. o_O