Jacobean England had its own royal catastrophe when, in 1612, the heir to the throne, Prince Henry, died of typhoid at the age of 18. It even had its lost princess when, in the next year, his sister Elizabeth, afterwards known as the Queen of Hearts, married Frederick V, the Elector Palatine, and disappeared into a long and fairly inglorious future. Both events linger on in the shadowy background to Shakespeare's very late play The Two Noble Kinsmen. This makes it not irrelevant to ask how the dramatist's career might have looked if he too had succumbed, just as chancily, to typhoid or plague in early January four centuries ago. What would we have lost?

LRB 22 March 2007 | PDF Download