The Ball is a Caroline comedy by James Shirley, first performed in 1632 and first published in 1639.
The Ball was licensed for performance by Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, on 16 November 1632. Herbert, however, was not happy with the play: in a note in his office book dated two days later, 18 November, he complained that the play showed "diverse personated so naturally, both of lords and others of the Court, that I took it ill, and would have forbidden the play" – but impresario Christopher Beeston promised Herbert that everything that Herbert disliked in the play would be fixed before the performance.[1] The desired changes must have been made satisfactorily since the play was acted by Queen Henrietta's Men at the Cockpit Theatre.
The 1639 quarto publication of the play, printed by Thomas Cotes for the booksellers Andrew Crooke and William Cooke, confused subsequent generations of critics since the title page attributes the play to both Shirley and George Chapman. The play, a light comedy of manners, is entirely like the style of Shirley, and nothing like the style of Chapman. Most scholars now think that the dual attribution is simply a mistake, a point of confusion by the publishers: The Tragedy of Chabot, Admiral of France, a Chapman play that had been revised by Shirley, was printed in the same year by the same house.[2]
Traditional critics sometimes complained about the frothy amorality of The Ball – judging it to display a "coarseness...unflattering" to the social set depicted.[3] Yet Herbert's adverse reaction to the accuracy of the play suggests that even the revised version may have a certain journalistic quality, showing what the Court of Charles I was actually like.