ABSTRACT
In the 1647 Folio of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Comedies and Tragedies, James Shirley extols the virtues of the volume in his letter “To the Reader”:
Shirley favorably compares the education a playgoer would receive in the theater to the education young men gained in traveling the continent or toiling in the classroom. As an alternative to the expense and danger of travel or the drudgery of being “severely employed Students,” the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher teach in the most palatable ways, providing “digestible” lessons to the young men who would acquire “good credit” in social interactions. For Shirley, the theater was a place of edification with the power to “fashion a gentleman.”2 The success of this endeavor is evinced in the creation of “wits,” who, like Holofernes the schoolmaster and Nathaniel the curate in Love’s Labor’s Lost, “have been at a great feast of languages and stolen the scraps.”3 With scraps of Beaumont and Fletcher at their disposal, the young elite male theatregoers developed social skills with more ease than they would have within the traditional humanist program that Shirley alludes to in his depiction of “severely employed” students. In making these claims, he engages in contemporary debates about humanist educational practices-the severity of schoolmasters and tutors, the efficacy of strict and tedious lessons, and the politics of tutors teaching social graces to noblemen. Not surprisingly, Shirley presents the theater as a viable alternative to academies of learning.
