The Politician

The Politician is a Caroline era stage play, a tragedy written by James Shirley, and first published in 1655. Publication The Politician, along with another Shirley play, The Gentleman of Venice, was published by the bookseller Humphrey Moseley in 1655 in alternative quarto and octavo formats. The quarto was a solo-play edition; the octavo paired The Politician with The Gentleman of Venice, in an edition meant to match the Shirley collection titled Six New Plays that Moseley had issued two years earlier, in 1653. Buyers could have had the two new plays bound together with the earlier collection if they so chose. Date The play is thought to date from c. 1639, though firm information of its stage history is lacking; it may have been staged in Dublin, where the author was working at the Werburgh Street Theatre in the later 1630s, before it appeared in London. No license from the Master of the Revels has been found for The Politician, though the May 26 1641 license for The Politic Father, an otherwise-unknown play, may apply to it. The title page of the first edition states that the play was acted by Queen Henrietta's Men at the Salisbury Court Theatre, the venue that the company occupied in the 1637–42 period. Sources According to 17th-century commentator Gerard Langbaine, Shirley's source for his plot was the tale of the King of Romania, the prince Antissus, and his mother-in-law, from the Urania of the Countess of Montgomery (1621). Thomas Killigrew borrowed plot elements from The Politician for his tragedy The Pilgrim.