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.