A Contention For Honor and Riches

A Contention for Honor and Riches is a Caroline era stage play, a short drama or interlude written by James Shirley and first published in 1633. Generally classed as a morality play, it illustrates the continuing influence of archaic forms of drama on the relatively "sophisticated" or even "decadent" theatre of the Caroline era.

The play was entered into the Stationers' Register on November 9, 1632 and was published the following year in quarto by the bookseller William Cooke, who issued many of Shirley's plays in the 1630s, either alone or in partnership with Andrew Crooke. Shirley dedicated the volume to Edward Golding, of Colston, Northamptonshire, a personal friend. No data on the play's theatrical history has survived; it is not known when, or even if, the work was ever staged. The most likely date for the play's authorship may be 1630. The existing play, "A moral masque in three scenes," was later reworked and expanded by the author into a full five-act drama, and eventually published in 1659 under the title Honoria and Mammon.

1630 was relatively late in the history of English Renaissance theatre for a morality play — though the form, while unfashionable, was not entirely extinct in Shirley's era. Late examples include Four Plays in One (c. 1608–13), from the canon of John Fletcher, and The Sun's Darling (1624), a collaboration between Thomas Dekker and John Ford. As is often the case in the morality form, the characters in Shirley's Contention are known by generic titles more than personal names: Lady Honor, Lady Riches, Ingenuity, Gettings, the Courtier, the Soldier, the Vice, etc. (In the later expansion, Honoria and Mammon, the same characters are given personal names.)