The Court Secret
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The Court Secret is a Caroline era stage play, a tragicomedy written by James Shirley, and first published in 1653. It is generally regarded as the final play Shirley wrote as a professional dramatist.
Though The Court Secret can seem, to a modern taste, a confection of romantic fluff, exaggerated and wildly unrealistic (see the Synopsis below), it has been read as an index of the social anxieties and stresses of England at the crisis point of 1642, suggesting the conflict "between royalty and the rest," between the demands of royalist absolutism and the urges of ordinary humanity at the start of the English Civil War.[1]
The play's title page in its first edition states that The Court Secret was never acted, but was intended to be produced at the Blackfriars Theatre. This identifies the play as belonging to the final phase of Shirley's professional career: he wrote regularly for the King's Men at the Blackfriars in the 1640–42 era, after he had returned from Ireland and the Werburgh Street Theatre. The implication is that The Court Secret would have followed The Sisters on the Blackfriars stage, but was forestalled when the theatres closed in September 1642.[2]
The play, however, was staged during the Restoration era, by the King's Company at their Bridge Street theatre. Samuel Pepys recorded in his Diary that his wife saw the play the afternoon of 18 August 1664. (She didn't like it: "My wife says the play...is the worst that ever she saw in her life.")[3] "The Court Secret stands almost alone as a play composed for the Caroline, but produced first on the Restoration, stage."[4] Another production occurred in 1682, again by the King's Company, at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.
Publication
The play was published in 1653 in the octavo collection Six New Plays, issued by the booksellers Humphrey Robinson and Humphrey Moseley. The other five Shirley plays in that collection are The Sisters, The Brothers, The Cardinal, The Doubtful Heir, and The Imposture. Each play has a separate title page[5] and (except for the first) a separate dedication; Shirley dedicated The Court Secret to William Wentworth, the son of the executed Earl of Strafford, whom Shirley had praised in the Epilogue to his The Royal Master (1638).
The manuscript
The play also exists in a manuscript text, probably created in 1642, that displays significant differences from the later printed version. The manuscript shows the play in an early stage of its development; it is in the hand of a professional scribe, but contains corrections and additions in Shirley's handwriting. The MS. "contains scenes and portions of scenes" not in the 1653 printed text; "there are several characters...that were afterwards dropped."[6] The MS. also shows signs of preparation for production, so that it is uncertain which version of the play, the MS. or the printed text, was acted onstage in 1664.