Editing James Shirley’s Poems

A prolific and successful writer for the stage, James Shirley (1596–1666) also composed over a hundred lyric poems and songs. This essay considers the challenges of editing these texts, with a particular focus on the media of their transmission: manuscript miscellanies and songbooks, a single authorial manuscript, and an authorized print edition, Poems &c. (1646). It argues that an editor can best approach Shirley’s poems as instances of what Harold Love has called “serial composition”: an ongoing process of recasting and revision arising from the material conditions of early modern literary culture.