ABSTRACT
“This is the piece made up of all performance” (II.i. 406): the duke’s description of Rolliardo, the disguised Philenzo, also encapsulates The Bird in a Cage. Shirley’s play is a remarkable survey of early modern performance culture. First printed and staged at the Phoenix, or Cockpit, in Drury Lane in 1633, it showcases the diversity of early modern theatricality inside and outside the playhouses. A pastiche of theatrical tropes and performance modes, its action consists of disguise, magic, spectacular props, and tricks played on both characters and audience. Its characters—male and female—live by performance, whether they are courtiers seeking edification or entertainment or those who, like Bonamico disguised as the mountebank Altomaro, scrabble for a living. This is not the bitter metatheatricality of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays like Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (1585) or Thomas Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy (1606); Shirley’s comedy is an altogether lighter meditation on a culture saturated with performance, and it shows early modern theater in all its vitality.
