Shirley, John

(ca. 1366–1456)

   Remembered mainly as a scribe whose manuscript attributions are important for establishing the authorship of some of CHAUCER’s shorter poems, John Shirley was also important for his manuscript copies of many of LYDGATE’s poems and for his translations of some French and Latin texts into English.

   Though he was born as early as 1366, possibly in Worcestershire, virtually nothing is known of Shirley’s early life until he appears in 1403, in the retinue of Richard Beauchamp, the earl of Warwick. Shirley became Warwick’s secretary, and apparently accompanied the earl to Wales during Henry IV’s Welsh wars and to France under Henry V.Warwick is known to have traveled widely, to Jerusalem on pilgrimage, through Lithuania, Prussia, and Germany, and to the Council of Constance in 1414. It is unknown whether his secretary accompanied him on any of these journeys, but Shirley did have the reputation of traveling to various countries. Eventually Shirley became undersheriff of Worcestershire. By the late 1420s, however, Shirley had married his second wife, a woman from a London family, and was living in London himself, apparently no longer in Warwick’s service. It is likely that he copied most of his manuscripts during his time in London. He died in 1456, and his tomb in London says that he had 12 children and that he died in his 90th year. Some 20 surviving manuscripts are associated with Shirley, but three are particularly important: in London, British Library MS. Additional 16165; in Cambridge, Trinity College Library MS. R.3.20; and in Oxford, Bodleian Ashmole MS. 59. These are large anthologies of vernacular poetry, mainly in English, but with a few texts in French or Latin. Important for the transmission of some of the work of Lydgate and Chaucer, these manuscripts help to establish Chaucer’s authorship of poems like his Complaint unto Pity, the Complaint to His Lady, Adam Scriveyn, the Complaint of Mars, the Complaint of Venus, and Lak of Stedfastnesse. Indeed in the case of Adam Scriveyn, Shirley’s is the only extant manuscript copy. In addition Shirley often included rubrics with the poems he copied, explaining something of the context in which the poem was written, at least from what he had heard. Recent scholars have been interested in how these comments contributed to the construction of Chaucer’s reputation as a “social poet” of the court. Of course many of Shirley’s guesses are simply wrong: He thought that TRUTH was a deathbed poem, and that Chaucer had sent Lak of Stedfastnesse to RICHARD II during his last years, both of which are almost certainly false. Shirley says, too, that Chaucer’s Complaint of Mars concerns the affair between the king’s half brother, John Holland, and Isabel of York (sister-in-law of JOHN OF GAUNT), and that the Complaint of Venus was written as an answer to Mars. Again neither of these speculations seems likely; thus many of the stories Shirley passed along seem to have been popular— but unfounded—rumors attached to the poems. At one time it was thought that Shirley was a book dealer who copied his manuscripts to sell. Modern scholars see no evidence of this. It seems likely that Shirley copied his manuscripts mainly for his own use, but was certainly generous in loaning his books widely to friends and acquaintances. He even composed what is known as his “bookplate poem”—a single RHYME ROYAL stanza appearing at the beginning of two of his large manuscripts, in which Shirley claims ownership of the books and admonishes the reader to return the book to its proper owner. In addition he composed two “Verse Prefixes” that appeared at the beginnings of his manuscripts, each of which is 104 lines of rhymed couplets and acts as a kind of table of contents and short commentary on the poems contained in each volume.

   Shirley’s translations included The Boke of Gode Maners (translated from Jacques Legrand’s French Le livre de bons meurs), Le secret des secres (The secrecy of secrecies, a book of moral axioms, also from the French), and A full lamentable Cronycle of the dethe and false murdure of James Stearde, lat kynge of Scotys, a translation of a Latin chronicle on the death of the Scottish king James I. The original of the latter is not extant, so Shirley’s text is the only witness to this contemporary account of the king’s murder.

   Bibliography

   ■ Boffey, Julia, and A. S. G. Edwards. “ ‘Chaucer’s Chronicle,’ John Shirley, and the Canon of Chaucer’s Shorter Poems,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 20 (1998): 201–218.

   ■ Connolly, Margaret. John Shirley: Book Production and the Noble Household in Fifteenth-Century England. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 1998.

   ■ Lerer, Seth. Chaucer and his Readers: Imagining the Author in Late Medieval England. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993.