Beginning about 1625 and extending to the Civil War, Shirley's dramatic career overlapped and continued Massinger's as Massinger's did Fletcher's. After leaving the university he took orders, but shortly became converted to Catholicism, and then, after a volume of poems, turned to the public theatres for employment. The last of the brilliant series of poets who made the London stage the home of poesy and contributed to the great period of the English drama, at the closing of the theatres he was the dean of his profession. His thirty odd plays, while naturally continuing the methods and types of Massinger and of Fletcher, his avowed master, and while reminiscent of much in earlier writers, especially Webster and Shakespeare, also reflect about all the characteristics manifest in the drama during the reign of Charles I. Shirley's remarkable talents challenge comparison with his predecessors. He had a share of Massinger's seriousness of purpose and painstaking art, and of Fletcher's freshness of fancy and sprightliness of style. In invention he is hardly less ingenious than either, and in careful construction and theatrical craftsmanship he approaches Massinger's undoubted mastership. His verse seems modeled on Fletcher's, but it often has a spontaneity of movement and a richness of decoration that recall Elizabethan style in its early flights. Little of early aphorism, however, or of the later obscurity and confusion remains; these are replaced, sometimes indeed by a hackneyed declamation, but often by natural and fluent dialogue. Yet, in spite of his talents, Shirley's own position and his contribution to the drama are difficult of definition, because he is so constantly reminiscent of his predecessors and so constantly approaching, though never quite equaling, their preëminent models. His plays, like Massinger's, seem to the reader of to-day repetitions of one another. Each coalesces in the mind with other comedies of manners, or other tragedies of blood, or with the tragicomedies of Massinger and Fletcher. Whatever the species, love is the theme, lust is pursuing, chastity is tried by intrigue and by declamation; but the real interest is in the plot, the tricks, disguises, subterfuges, villains, and surprises that end--as the case may be--in the discomfiture of the fools, or the marriage of the lovers, or the downfall of a dynasty.