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Excerpt from The Relations of Shirley's Plays to the Elizabethan Drama
The treatment of Shirley's dramas with regard to their sources - chiefly those in the works of the Elizabethan dramatists - is the task which I have attempted to accomplish in The Relations of Shirley's Plays to the Elizabethan Drama. I have dealt with the sources of Shirley's plays in a manner radically differing from that of other similar pieces of research in modern English literature. The influence of the component parts of a literary form upon a modern writer has never before received anything like adequate consideration. I have aimed in the following pages to show that Shirley's true sources were, in perhaps the majority of cases, not single plays, incidents, or characters, but the aggregate, the sum total, of the similar plays, incidents, or characters, of earlier and contemporary playwrights. In other words, I have emphasized particularly the influence upon the plays of Shirley of the stock or conventional elements in Elizabethan dramatic literature. By reason of his chronological position and his unquestionable habit of studying the works of the other Elizabethans, Shirley is one of the best possible subjects for such an essay in historical dramatic criticism, but the method may be applied, I believe, with at least some degree of success to the works of many other modern authors.
Aside from whatever light this book may throw upon the sources of Shirley's plays, it may be used to fill, partially, at least, another need.
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