Manuel. Happy ending. The play's "extraordinary complexity of plot" has been noted by critics; Arthur Nason maintained that "Rarely among the complicated plots of Shirley is the complication at once more elaborate and more finely knit...Shirley, in The Court Secret, shows his greatest mastery." Notes Sources Forsythe, Robert Stanley. The Relations of Shirley's Plays to the Elizabethan Drama. New York, Columbia University Press, 1914. Howarth, R. G. "A Manuscript of James Shirley's The Court Secret," Review of English Studies 7 (1931), pp. 302–13. Milling, Jane, and Peter Thomson, eds. The Cambridge History of British Theatre, Vol. 1. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004. Nason, Arthur Huntington. James Shirley, Dramatist: A Biographical and Critical Study. New York, 1915; reprinted New York, Benjamin Blom, 1967. Randall, Dale B. J. Winter Fruit: English Drama 1642–1660. Lexington, KY, University Press of Kentucky, 1996. English Renaissance plays 1642 plays Plays by James Shirley