The Oxford University Press, The Complete Works of James Shirley
Editorial Board
- Martin Butler
- Andrew Hadfield
- Peter Holland
- Lucy Munro
- Alison Searle
- Brett Greatley-Hirsch
General Editors
- Eugene Giddens (Anglia Ruskin)
- Teresa Grant (Warwick)
- Barbara Ravelhofer (Durham)
Scope
The Oxford Complete Works of James Shirley presents a corpus of around 50 works, including plays, poems, and prose. James Shirley is arguably the most significant dramatic writer of the late English Renaissance, and his complete works have never been edited. The most recent edition of his plays is the 1888 Methuen collection, and his plays and poems last appeared together in the Gifford/Dyce edition of 1833. Our edition will be based on current editorial standards and theory, with close attention paid to accuracy and bibliographical understanding of the copy-texts.
Project Update
The Complete Works of James Shirley. Volume 7: The Constant Maid, The Doubtful Heir, The
Gentleman of Venice and The Politician was published by Oxford UP in 2022, edited by Eugene Giddens and Teresa Grant; associate editor Emil Rybczak.
From 2018-19, Dr Emil Rybczak, who had previously contributed to the electronic and print editions, held the post of MHRA Research Associateship based in the CSR. This postdoctoral researcher worked closely with Dr Teresa Grant and Professor Eugene Giddens (Anglia Ruskin) who are responsible for three quarters of the print volumes, and he was fundamental to the success of the published volume. Under the guidance of Dr Grant and Professor Giddens, the RA helped usher forth our first two printed volumes, each containing four plays. The principal duties of the RA were fourfold:
a) checking the modernised texts and collation of variants against the copytexts;
b) performing stop-press collations on copies in the UK that project members had not seen;
c) co-authoring the Shirley chronologies for the volume introductions; and
d) fact-checking the textual and critical introductions to each play.
In 2018/9, we were also successful in funding applications with the Society of Renaissance Studies for a public engagement award and with the Bibliographical Society for travel money. The former provided support for a very exciting event: a staged reading of James Shirley’s The Politician (1639) in Dublin. In a joint venture with UCD and Sussex, the James Shirley Project took The Politician back to Dublin to engage with Irish spectators once again, in a staged reading at Smock Alley Theatre on 4 April 2019. It was acted by students from University College Dublin and professionally directed. As a public engagement event, it was special because it staged a play written for the Irish stage in a theatre nearly as old as the play (Smock Alley dates from 1662). We sought feedback from modern Dubliners about a play written for their fellow citizens nearly 400 years earlier, when The Politician was staged in the new Werburgh Street Theatre in Dublin during Shirley’s long visit (c. 1636–40). There was rich, hitherto untapped potential for impact and public engagement, which this event helped to realise.
The British Academy Mid‑Career Fellowship (2020-1) awarded to Dr Teresa Grant was intended to support a year of focused research into the printing and publishing of James Shirley’s plays between 1629 and 1659. The project centred on the bibliographical analysis of an exceptional concentration of early Shirley exemplars held in Cambridge University Library and the college libraries, enabling a systematic visual survey, collation, and documentation of printing variants across 113 surviving copies. This research forms a core evidential base for several volumes of The Oxford University Press Complete Works of James Shirley, for which Professor Grant serves as a general editor.
A key component of the fellowship was the creation of a public‑facing digital resource, designed to present the Cambridge Shirley holdings through a TEI‑XML database and, ultimately, an open‑access website. Working with Warwick Academic Technology, the project developed a beta version of this database and established the technical framework for future public dissemination.
Progress on several aspects of the project was severely disrupted by COVID‑19, particularly through the prolonged closure of rare book rooms and the suspension of physical exhibition planning. Nonetheless, remote analysis, structured data‑development, and continued liaison with Cambridge librarians ensured that the central aims of the fellowship were advanced and its long‑term public‑engagement outcomes preserved.
